Tag Archives: politics

A Gordian Knot Solution

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I have called, often, for the dissolution of the Department of Veterans Affairs on the basis of that agency’s, and now department’s, poor-to-nonexistent quality-level care for our nation’s veterans.

Now we get this. It’s from the end of the Biden administration, but this sort of thing is not unique to that one.

The inspector general report published Thursday confirms that a $2.9 billion supplemental request went unused because the agency failed to account for “prior-year recoveries” in its budget planning. Had the agency taken into account those recovered funds, the inspector general found, its projections “would have shown a reduced risk of a shortfall by year-end.”

And this, more generally:

The OIG review team found that Veteran’s Benefits Administration wasn’t consistently overspending in FY 2024 for either compensation and pension or readjustment benefits accounts, which were the subject of the budget request. “Realized prior-year recoveries,” which are “unspent deobligated funds,” weren’t included in the agency’s calculations, which contributed to the erroneous predictions.
“Had the realized prior-year recoveries been included in the calculations throughout the year, the monthly funding status reports would have shown a reduced risk of a shortfall by the end of the fiscal year,” the watchdog concluded.

Current VA Secretary Doug Collins has inherited this situation and the permeating VA internal culture; he has this:

It’s just a very, a department that is so bureaucratically bogged down that it has trouble doing its main mission, and that is taking care of veterans, and that’s why we’re actually working very hard to streamline processes, to get better help in place, and to have budgets and numbers that we can be accurate

To an extent, I disagree with Collins. It’s not worth the time, effort, money, or other resources to try to untangle this financial mess. It’s time for the Gordian Knot solution. Just get rid of the VA altogether, and convert the department’s current and putative future budgets to vouchers which our veterans can use to visit the doctors, clinics, and hospitals they choose and from which they’ll be able routinely to get timely care. Transfer the VA’s veteran housing mortgage facilities to HUD for execution.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

What the President’s Staff Thinks about our Allies

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial panties are at it again. Now the undergarments are in an uproar over the Signal chat wherein some aspects of an attack on Houthis were discussed just before the attacks went in. The discussion certainly presents bad optics for the administration, and maybe it shouldn’t have been done on Signal.

However.

A real security scandal is that the Signal chat apparently included Steve Witkoff, Mr Trump’s envoy to wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. Press reports say Mr Witkoff was receiving these messages on the commercial app while in Moscow. This is security malpractice. Russian intelligence services must be listening to Mr Witkoff’s every eyebrow flutter.

What the editors chose to omit in their hysteria is that Signal is reputed to a very secure means of group communication; it’s also one explicitly approved for secure communications by the Biden administration. To the extent that Signal is that secure—the editors elide mention of any investigation of this—the Russians could listen in to their heart’s content, but they wouldn’t learn anything, unless they had an agent looking over Witkoff’s shoulder at his phone or laptop.

One more item the editors chose to elide, which came out in so many words in Wednesday’s noon o’clock presser hosted by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: Witkoff had no personal communication devices with him on his trip to Mocow. He had only a Federal government-provided secure cell phone provided to him explicitly for the trip. I’m frankly up in the air between these editors being that ignorant of the facts or if, given my nearby post, they’re simply that dishonest in blithely repeating the disinformation of “press reports.”

There’s this overreaction, especially:

Yet Vice President JD Vance second-guessed the President’s strikes on the chat because he said only “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez [sic]” canal, while “40 percent of European trade does.” That understates the US interest in freedom of navigation. Mr Vance even suggested his boss didn’t understand that striking the Houthis was at odds with Mr Trump’s “message on Europe right now.” He added that “I just hate bailing Europe out again.” So the Vice President is willing to let the Houthis shut down shipping to spite the Europeans?

This really is a cynically offered overreaction. For one thing, which the editors omit to mention here, that conversation occurred shortly before Trump made his decision and ordered the strikes to go in. This is staff—Vance—doing its job of devil’s advocating a decision that’s still only potential, even arguing seriously against it while it’s only potential. The editors also omitted to mention that, in that same chat session, Vance said he supported the President’s decision to go ahead: once the boss’s decision was made, argument stopped, and it became everyone’s duty to get behind it and make it work.

For another thing, how well has Pretty Please worked over the last 70 years, or so, in getting Europe to see to its own responsibilities instead of relying primarily if not solely on American blood and treasure for its economic, even political, welfare? Recall that Europe’s NATO members only started getting serious about honoring their commitments to NATO after Trump threatened to leave the organization during his first term, and today a third of Europe’s NATO members continue actively to betray their fellow members with their refusal to honor their duties to the organization. The matter of the Houthis in this conversation is only tangentially related to the overall principle of freedom of navigation.

Vance is far from the only American who’s sick of bailing out Europe. The continent needs to learn, and apparently the only way they will is if they suffer real harm from their determined dependence.

The editors’ remark about being willing to let the Houthis shut down shipping is just cynical exaggeration. The Houthis may be able to severely impact shipping to-from Europe via the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, but that shipping is easily rerouted, and has been, to go around Africa. That’s a route that only a few days longer, and those few days are significant only for shipping from India, Pakistan, or eastern Africa. From farther Asia, which is the bulk of commerce into Europe other than from the United States, the added days are an insignificant delay—and they avoid the toll Egypt charges for the use of its canal.

Money Saved or Wasted?

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Amanda Bennett, ex-previous head of USAGM, is upset with Kari Lake’s (the new head of the US Agency for Global Media) characterization of the $150 million the agency is expected to spend over the next several years on its lease of a new (relative to USAGM’s prior digs) office building.

The prior building that USAGM occupied for a very pretty penny was rundown and rapidly failing further, so Bennet negotiated a good deal for the new office building, and she’s justifiably proud of the deal she got. As far as that deal goes.

The government didn’t lose money [as Lake claimed], it saved—a lot. We estimated that savings over the 15-year lease—including the free rent and millions in cash incentives—would total more than $150 million.

But the USAGM has long been a Leftist propaganda arm, thoroughly deviated from its ROC of passing along factual information, objectively, to other nations, especially those whose governments seek to prevent such data from getting to their subjects.

My question for Bennett, then, is this: how much money would the Federal government save if those $150 million weren’t spent at all and USAGM eliminated from the government’s books?

As the kids like to say, Madam, get real.

Supreme Court Has the Louisiana Redistricting Case

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After the 2020 census, Louisiana’s Republican-controlled legislature

only drew one majority-Black congressional district when it redrew the boundaries for the state’s six seats in Congress. A group of Black voters, who make up about a third of the state’s population, sued the state in 2022, arguing that section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race, required lawmakers to add a second majority-Black congressional district.

Here’s the entirety of what that Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act actually says:

SEC. 2. No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.

Drawing voting districts explicitly to favor one group of Americans over other groups in that same district is precisely what the CRA prohibits. However the Supreme Court rules in this case, it’s imperative that the Court finally recognize the truth of our Declaration of Independence and the foundational American law that’s before them in the form of the 14th Amendment of our Constitution, which says in pertinent part,

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

One of the most basic privileges accruing to us American citizens is our right to vote, and all of us voters are equal under law—regardless of skin color, or religion, or….

In fine, as citizens, as voters, we’re all exactly alike. Gerrymandering to create districts that favor one group over any others necessarily disadvantages those others—and it denies all groups, and more importantly, every individual regardless of group equal protection of the laws, and so it is unconstitutional.

As an aside, and one of the more favorable aspects of earlier times, the entire CRA fits within seven Word® pages, and contains less than 5500 words, at least as it is presented at the link.

“Pinned”

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Pinned? Really? As universities start to pay lip service to acting concretely against the bigotries and ideological indoctrination rampant on their campuses, there’s this comment by a news writer that lies at the core of the universities’ problem.

University leaders, pinned between liberal faculty and the Trump administration, are quietly trying to make friends in Washington amid widespread concerns about research budgets, student aid, and the White House’s quest to push academia to the right.

How is it possible that university leaders can be pinned between faculty—liberal or otherwise—and the Trump—or any other—administration?

The long and short of it is that it isn’t possible for such pinning to occur. Unfortunately, the “pinning” does exist, but it’s university managers who feel pinned; there are no to almost none actual leaders in today’s university administrations.

Faculty has no business being involved in the administration of a college or university; they’re employees of the institution, nothing more—and nothing less—than that. University managers who choose not to act as if they’re in charge, which they should be enforcing, are self-selecting for termination. That includes members of the institution’s “governing” board. Faculty members who won’t act like the employees that they are also are self-selecting for termination.

Only when incumbents act within their roles can colleges and universities go back to being institutions of learning, teaching, and research instead of the institutions of limited speech, limited academic “freedom,” indoctrination, and bigotry that they are currently.