Tag Archives: morality

Coddling Scofflaws

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Alysia Finley has another of her cogent opinion pieces, this one centered on the failure of Progressives in the several government levels and at our colleges and universities to punish miscreants and how widespread those Leftist protections of misbehaviors are. One set of consequences of the coddling jumped out at me.

If they forget to pay other bills, the government has their backs. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has effectively capped all credit-card late fees at $8. The CFPB also plans to cap bank overdraft fees at a nominal amount, meaning spendthrifts needn’t worry about getting penalized for overdrawing their checking accounts. And if they don’t want to pay rent, cities including New York and Los Angeles have imposed regulations that make it prohibitively difficult to evict tenants.

Finley was writing specifically about…misbehaving…students at Columbia, but the failures generalize, as do the consequences of excusing the failures.

“Forgetting” to pay bills will have consequences with the local merchants, including the major chains, all of whose establishments are locally run.

Being “late” paying off credit card debt will lead to difficulty getting a credit card renewed and in getting another credit card: getting access to credit will be harder and more expensive. The availability for scofflaws of cards other than prepaid, and at higher rates, will become emphasized. Credit difficulty goes beyond the card, too; it’ll expand to access to mortgages and access to rent (landlords run their own credit checks), among other credit needs.

Overdrawing checking accounts as a matter of routine will lead to closed checking accounts, difficulty opening any other checking accounts, and more trouble with local merchants who will start refusing to accept checks from folks who routinely bounce them. And this: banks and merchants heretofore would treat a bounced check as a mistake rather than the kiting felony that it is, charge the fee, and everyone moved on. No more. Those who frequently bounce checks will find themselves more likely to be charged with the felony.

Making tenant eviction over nonpayment of rent will make it more difficult for renters to rent in the first place, greatly increase the initial deposits required, and reduce the amount of houses and apartments available to rent at all.

All of that, too, will increase the cost of credit and of housing for the rest of us.

The Planned Racism of the Illinois State Legislature

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An Illinois legislatively created commission established…to come up with ways to make appropriations to state universities more “equitable” has issued a report delineating how to achieve that.

…lawmakers would determine how much funding a school deserves. They would do this using a variable called the “adequacy target,” which takes into account the school’s mission and enrollment as well as the programs it offers. … Larger amounts would be set aside for groups the commission considers underenrolled—say, with a $6,000 bonus for each enrolled black student, $4,000 for each enrolled low-income student, and $2,000 for each enrolled rural student.

And

The commission pretends that universities charge different prices for different races. Specifically, the plan wants lawmakers to assume that universities will charge minority students a lower tuition rate than whites and Asians, regardless of income.

And so on.

No. This intrinsically racist plan will only codify the inability of minority students to compete in higher ed and subsequently in the work force and in the managerial teams that manage enterprise work forces.

To increase minorities’ educational opportunities and improve their education in Illinois’ colleges and universities, these legislators must lose their DEI sewage. Beyond that, they must take the currently politically unpopular steps of divesting themselves of their teachers unions yokes, and then move decisively to expand parents’ school choices by making K-12—kindergarten, elementary, junior high, and high school—charter and voucher schools, whether privately or publicly run, ubiquitous throughout the State.

And this: to the extent that Illinois insists on using its tax code for social engineering purposes, it should reallocate its existing tax collections toward having school-directed taxes follow the student rather than remaining trapped—along with minority students—in failing public schools. Beyond that, additional existing tax collections should be placed into a fund for providing education scholarships to all students whose parents wish to transfer their children out of failing schools and into different, better performing schools.

Waiting until post-high school to begin even to pretend to address educational failure is far too late to have any serious effect.

For Illinois, I’m not holding my breath.

A Plan to Protect Rafah Civilians

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Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden, and especially his Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have made plain their opposition to Israel’s military entering Rafah without a realistic plan to move civilians out of harm’s way. And this, from Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies Executive Director Tamir Hayman:

The benefits are very few, especially if you compare it to the negative effects[.]

Apparently, he thinks destroying Hamas and preventing the permanently serial occurrences of October 7s promised by Hamas leadership doesn’t outweigh the potential loss of opportunity to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia and build a regional partnership that could act as a counterweight to Iran on the line. Or he doesn’t believe Hamas’ promise to continue its campaign of destruction of Israel. On either of those alternatives, I think he’s wrong.

Thus, I propose a plan that would, if not permanently, at least for a very long time, protect those Rafah civilians, and all of the civilians of the Gaza Strip.

The IDF should go into Rafah without further delay, go in in force, and utterly destroy the remaining Hamas terrorists. That would release those civilians from being used as shields by the terrorists, and it would stop those civilians’ residences, schools, mosques, and hospitals being used by the terrorists as weapons storage sites, weapons launching facilities, and command centers.

The destruction of Hamas, removing the cause of civilian harm, is the best and most long-term effective way to move civilians out of harm’s way.

Suckers

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As the WSJ editors note, Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is so desperate in his kowtowing to his terrorist-supporting Left and to the just as enthusiastically terrorist-supporting staff in his administration, that he’s gone so far as to hold up a weapons shipment for Israel. He’s anxiously trying to force Israel to agree a cease fire right damn now.

Meanwhile, he’s ignoring the simple fact that Hamas is demanding a permanent end to the war it began last October 7 and continues to prosecute. Biden also is ignoring that Hamas has walked away from the latest round of cease fire “negotiations” because Israel can’t agree to an end to a war that Hamas can only be trusted to resume.

We’re told that Hamas hasn’t budged on its negotiating demands, which include a permanent end to the war, not merely a cease-fire.

Israel is right on that. Hamas will never honor an agreement for a permanent end to the war: Hamas has promised October 7 attacks until Israel is destroyed. This is just Hamas playing Biden—and far too many others in his administration and in administrations in Europe—for the suckers they are.

Now, as I write this, in the moment Israel has warned Rafah residents to evacuate to a set-up-for-the-purpose humanitarian aid area in al-Masawi (roughly 3-4 miles north of Rafah and within a quarter mile of the sea coast) in advance of an imminent assault on the city, comes word that Hamas claims to have agreed a framework for a cease fire. But framework only, and with no mention of any hostage releases or trades.

That’s another Hamas sucker play.

Yet Another Example…

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…of Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s disregard for our Constitution. This one comes from the supposedly independent Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of Biden’s Executive Branch (we know what the statute says; we also know who appoints EEOC commissioners). The EEOC’s latest rule

elevates gender identity as a protected class under discrimination laws like race, sex, and religion.
Prohibited harassment includes “repeated and intentional use of a name or pronoun inconsistent with the individual’s known gender identity (misgendering) or the denial of access to a bathroom or other sex-segregated facility consistent with the individual’s gender identity,” the new regulatory document declared.

This is the Federal government attempting to dictate to Americans operating private enterprises what they must say. This is a direct contradiction of our Constitution’s 1st Amendment requirement that Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech…. Of course, this limit applies to the Executive Branch, also.

Congresswoman Claudia Tenney (R, NY) emphasized the Biden administration’s hypocrisy in her own response to this…overreach:

They can’t tell you [that] you have to say the Pledge of Allegiance or stand for the flag. And so forcing someone to actually use pronouns that they don’t choose to use, and then holding your employer liable, to me, is going to have First Amendment problems.

It’s also a contradiction of our Constitution’s 10th Amendment which is even clearer:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

In our Constitution there are no powers conferred on the Federal government authorizing it to compel particular speech. Indeed, compelling speech is the same as abridging speech, since forced words take the place of barred words.

And none of this even begins to approach the idiocy of setting gender ideology above the facts of biology.