Monthly Archives: February 2014

Due Process, Progressive Style

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During a confab at the University of Virginia concerning college students and sexual misconduct, the following remarks were made in all seriousness:

Amanda Childress, Sexual Assault Awareness Program coordinator at Dartmouth College, a position newly created just for her:

Why could we not expel a student based on an allegation? If we know that a person is reasonably a threat to our community, why are we not removing them and protecting the safety of our students?  It seems to me that we value fair and equitable processes more than we value the safety of our students.  And higher education is not a right.  Safety is a right. Higher education is a privilege.

Childress went on to claim that 90%-95% of sexual…misconducts…are unreported, committed by repeat offenders, and intentional.  She seems not to have disclosed how she knows the per cents of unreporteds, despite their not having been, you know, reported.  She also seems not to care that due process is a fundamental right, acknowledged in the 5th Amendment—which Amendment, as well as the Constitution as a whole, most assuredly are not waived at the campus gate.

But wait—there’s more!  Linda Fairstein, Senior Advisor for the Sexual Misconduct Consulting Group at K2 Intelligence, told the panel that criminal acts

should only be handled in the criminal justice system.

But only if the criminal justice system gets it right.  If not, the college administrators must step in and administer justice.  After all, a prosecutor might decide there isn’t enough of a case from which to get a conviction.  Properly administered justice, then, must depend not on an actual crime’s beyond reasonable doubt, but on the much more conveniently squishy “preponderance of the evidence;” just 50.1% of certainty.  Because

If there’s no other forum, now it’s a matter of getting it right.

Never mind that it was done right in the first place, by the criminal justice system.  If there’s no case, there’s no case.  Americans, even students on a college campus, remain innocent until proven guilty—not until a college administrator gets the outcome he wants.

There’s nothing more naked, more despotic, more anti-American than guilt by accusation.

Obama’s Stimulus Promise Revisited

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James Pethokoukis at AEIdeas did the visit, and this graph is the highlight of it.

The red dots on the right axis reveal the Obama tale.  It’s an especially humorous, if simultaneously mendacious, one, given that in this auspicious quarter we were supposed to be in the same prosperous state with or without Obama’s promised stimulus benefit.  The benefit, after all, only was supposed to ameliorate the pain of the last five years.

Instead, those red dots demonstrate, not just the failure of Obama’s stimulus, but the active damage that “stimulus,” in concert with the rest of Obama’s economic and jobs policies, have done and still are doing to our economy.

In case the dots’ captions are hard to read, here they are, from highest dot to lowest, all for December 2013:

  • unemployment rate based on the 2009 Labor Force Participation Rate: 11.8%
  • unemployment rate based on CBO’s then forecast for 2013’s LFPR: 10.1%
  • unemployment rate based on 2012’s LPFR: 7.9%
  • unemployment rate, actual: 6.7%

These compare with Obama’s promised rate of 5%, or roughly full employment.

Can we really afford another five years of these destructive Progressive policies?  Or even two more years?

Global Warming

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Here is how global warming is working out, as described by Tom Harris and Dr Madhav Khandekar at PJMedia:

  • CONUS: third-coldest Decembers and Januaries (that’s 2013 and 2014) in 30 years averaged over the contiguous 48 States; temperatures plummeting to −10°C in Atlanta, −26°C in Chicago, for instance
  • CONUS again: 59% of the contiguous 48 States was snow-covered, first time in 10 years, on 17 Dec
  • North East India: unusually severe snow and −10°C temperatures without home heating
  • Most of India, generally: 2°C-5°C colder than usual
  • Cairo: first snowfall in over a century
  • Jerusalem: fiercest snowstorm in 20 years
  • Berlin: March 2013 was the coldest in 100 years. In the same month, low temperature records were set UK generally: March 2013 had record lows throughout

Even the cold areas of the planet were colder:

  • Antarctica:
    • Record low temperatures
    • Sea ice more extensive than at any time in the modern-day record
  • Arctic:
    • summer sea ice increased by 2.4 million square km in 2013 compared to 2012
    • largest year-to-year increase since satellite records began

Orwellian warming, maybe….

Another Obamacare Health Plan

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Senators Mark Begich (D, AK), whose reelection race this fall is in real trouble, and Mark Warner (D, VA), whose reelection race is much tighter than it should be, are pushing a new Health Plan for Obamacare.

…individuals and small businesses can buy so-called copper plans.  The plans likely would have lower premiums, but purchasers would pay more of their ordinary health costs upfront.

Copper plans would cover, on average, 50% of medical costs, and while consumers’ out-of-pocket expenses would still be capped, that limit likely would be higher than the $6,350 maximum for individuals and $12,700 for families currently set by the law.

What’s the value of a health plan that requires extensive costs to be paid up front by the sick person before the plan starts covering—just a part of—those costs?

Even the CMS is having trouble seeing the sense of this.

A spokesperson for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services says there is not much more to say beyond what Jay Angoff, head of the Department of Health and Human Services office, told the WSJ about the plan: “I’m not sure that requiring people who have insurance to nevertheless pay for 50% of their costs themselves can reasonably be defined as decent coverage.”

I’m not sure, either.

Not a Change of Heart

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President Barack Obama, speaking to a crowd of House Democrats at a party retreat in Maryland, touted his executive order powers on Friday….

While saying he’s willing to work with Congress, he added, “I’m not going to wait, because there’s too much to do.”

But in an earlier time, when it was President George Bush the Younger, then-Senator Barack Obama (D, IL) was saying this:

The biggest problems that we’re facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the Executive Branch and not go through Congress at all, and that’s what I intend to reverse when I’m president of the United States of America.

He just lied the first time.