The NLMSM and the Left, and too many virtue signaling Republicans are decrying President Donald Trump for his castigation of both sides for the violence inflicted during the Charlottesville protest riots last weekend. The image below, though, gives the lie to that false crying and that demand to call out only the white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and Nazi wannabes for their part in the violence.
Charlottesville, VA, Mayor Mike Signer (D):
I’m not going to make any bones about it. I place the blame for a lot of what you’re seeing in America today right at the doorstep of the White House and the people around the president.
True enough; that is where last weekend’s sorry events began. The identity politics of the last eight years by the White House of ex-President Barack Obama (D) and by his mentee, Democratic Party White House hopeful Hillary Clinton, and those associated with the two created the conditions that caused the rioting in Charlottesville last Friday and Saturday.
Recall how Google, last week, outed a Conservative employee and his critique of Google personnel practices, then bullied him with public opprobrium, then fired him.
Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai was going to have an all-hands town hall this week to address the matter, but then, after employees expressed concerns
about their safety and worried they may be “outed” publicly for asking a question in the Town Hall[,]
he cancelled the whole affair. The company put the original teapot tempest into the public’s eye, but when allegedly faced with the same outcome for themselves, they skittered back into their baseboard holes in the walls.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted 2-1 Tuesday to restart and resurrect the licensing process for the controversial Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site project.
The decision gives the go ahead for the “information gathering” stage that will eventually allow the Department of Energy to secure the license to build a nuclear waste facility more than 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Finally. We need a repository for our accumulating nuclear waste, and the bottom of a salt mine is one of the best places extant: given the easy solubility of salt, the existence of this much salt in one place strongly implies a geologically stable area that’s also stable over geologically long time periods.
Recall the now ex-employee who wrote a lengthy and thought-out memo for internal distribution via one of what Google is pleased to call its open communication channels. A summary of the ex-employee’s case is in the Sunday Wall Street Journal; my comments on the situation, based on that summary, are below.
…critics saying the company squelched free speech by firing a male employee who wrote a divisive memo denouncing its diversity push, while others said his views showed that the company’s diversity policies were needed.
Senator Jeff Flake (R, AZ) thinks the Republican Party should have put the kibosh on then-citizen Donald Trump’s birtherism regarding then-candidate and later then-President Barack Obama, and he’s right about that. The birtherism bit was just a bit of trolling and head gamesmanship, but it spread and became a distraction for Republicans.
But on the matter of Hillary Clinton and Trump-supported and occasionally -led chants of “lock her up,” Flake misunderstands.
We shouldn’t be the party for jailing your political opponents[.]
These data are from the Kaiser Family Foundation. There was such hope by the health care coverage providers at the start; then the realities of the “market” place hit, and hit hard. Following the early expansion of coverage providers into ObamaMart, the drop-off in companies between 2016 and 2017, and the resulting collapse of choice—in too many counties, even of any availability at all—is stark. It’s expected to get worse in 2018 and 2019, too.
The State-by-State drop off is presented in the table below, constructed from KFF‘s table at the link. The average drop-off across all States is nearly 23%.
The DC Circuit Court stacked by President Barack Obama (D) seems to be iffy on the thing. In an appeal concerning whether the monies the Federal government pays to health care plan providers as subsidies so the plan providers will hold down premiums and deductibles can actually be paid—the funds never were appropriated by Congress, so the payments aren’t legitimate, ruled the trial court—the Circuit Court ruled in part:
The States have shown a substantial risk that an injunction requiring termination of the payments at issue here…would lead directly and imminently to an increase in insurance prices, which in turn will increase the number of uninsured individuals for whom the States will have to provide health care[.]
Quite a lot, actually, and the Left has this right—even if they’re on the wrong side of the naming question. DoJ has begun referring to those who’ve entered the US illegally as “illegal aliens,” and the Left has gotten its collective panties in a twist over it.
Here’s Chicago Tribune journalist Todd Slowik:
The phrase “illegal alien” plays into assumptions that immigrants living in this country without proper documentation are criminals[.]
Senator Susan Collins (R, ME) is worried about health care plan availability to our poor, which she thinks would be endangered were President Donald Trump to act on his thoughts regarding cutting off the funds the Feds pay to health coverage plan providers to get them to charge (artificially) lower deductibles and copays from the poor.
It really would be detrimental to some of the most vulnerable citizens if those payments were cut off. They’re paid to the insurance companies, but the people that they benefit are people who make between 100% and 250% of the poverty rate.