Monthly Archives: April 2014

More Failed Government

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This example isn’t a demonstration of dishonesty, and it isn’t unique to this administration.

Market-sensitive information vitally important to health-insurance companies has once again reached Wall Street before the public, and this time it appears to have come from the government itself.

On Dec 3, an official with the agency in charge of Medicare spending held a conference call for industry officials.  During the call, he provided data suggesting that federal funding for private Medicare plans would likely fall more than expected.

Word soon reached Wall Street, prompting a selloff in insurance shares.  In the subsequent 10 trading days, shares of several major health insurance firms lost between 3% and 9% of their value.  Over that same period, the S&P 500 was down 0.5%.

There’s this to color that failure:

Government departments are struggling with a fundamental tension between their duty to keep the public informed and a need to keep market-moving information from reaching investors.  The tendency toward openness has helped fuel a burgeoning business of government insiders who mine Washington for information that could affect stock prices.

There’s no need for the tension to exist, though, especially in a 21st century of online investing and trading, discount brokering, and Common Man doing much of that.  There’s also no need for the tension to exist given the falseness of the premise that market-moving information should be prevented from reaching investors.

Keep us informed.  Release all the data, to all of us simultaneously.  How to do so isn’t rocket science.  It isn’t even Internet science.  And it would eliminate a class of government insiders.

Standards and Government Mendacity

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Some of you are familiar with EEOC v Kaplan, a case in which the EEOC sued Kaplan Higher Education Corporation for the crime of using background checks to screen job applicants prior to hiring them.  EEOC’s case centered on the nonsense of disparate impact: in the present case, since blacks have more bad debts than whites—for reasons wholly unrelated to the questions at issue in Kaplan—they were more often disqualified from hiring by Kaplan than were whites.

The EEOC’s case was further centered on something called multicultural, multiracial, treatment outcome research.  I can’t tell you what this thing is; it exists solely within the mind of EEOC’s “expert” witness, a person who has constructed this thing, whatever it is, out of the æther.  Interestingly, the EEOC was unable to tell the district judge what that was, either; they elided a definition altogether.

The 6th Circuit, in upholding the district court’s dismissal of the EEOC’s case, had this to say, among other things:

The EEOC brought this case on the basis of a homemade methodology, crafted by a witness with no particular expertise to craft it, administered by persons with no particular expertise to administer it, tested by no one, and accepted only by the witness himself.  The district court did not abuse its discretion in excluding Murphy’s [the “expert’s”] testimony.

This is the pseudoscience that our Progressive administration routinely brings to bear in its many wars—on religion, on women, on climate, on….

Demonstrating, perhaps accidentally, another aspect of this administration’s level of integrity, the 6th Circuit opened its opinion with this statement:

In this case the EEOC sued the defendants for using the same type of background check that the EEOC itself uses.

Going on,

The EEOC’s personnel handbook recites that “[o]verdue just debts increase temptation to commit illegal or unethical acts as a means of gaining funds to meet financial obligations.”  Because of that concern, the EEOC runs credit checks on applicants for 84 of the agency’s 97 positions.  The defendants (collectively, “Kaplan”) have the same concern; and thus Kaplan runs credit checks on applicants for positions that provide access to students’ financial-loan information, among other positions.  For that practice, the EEOC sued Kaplan.

The Circuit ruling can be read here.

Democrats Against Education

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Those of the great state of Illinois have become brazenly overt in their assault.  They’ve introduced 10 or more bills that target charter schools, seeking to restrict them severely or to shut them down altogether.

One of these bills would, effectively, cancel a law that lets charter schools to operate unhindered by state or union rules.  Imagine that.  It must be bad local control that allows a school to function without…benefit…of union oversight or absent the wisdom of the State.

Another bill would ban online classes, supported by these evil charters, that offer high schoolers things like Advanced Placement classes.  Can’t have students able to learn on their own schedules, now can we?

Yet another bill seeks to ban advertising by charters and presumes to dictate to these entities in their capacity of businesses (highly successful ones, too, from the quality of their student performances) what they’ll be allowed to pay their senior employees.  Non-union schools mustn’t be allowed to attract either customers or quality leadership.

Still another bill seeks to prevent new charters from opening in the same, or neighboring, ZIP code of a public school that closed in the last 10 years.  So much for the children of the South Side.  Where’s Eric Holder and his disparate impact?  Go figure.

The list goes on.

Will Governor Pat Quinn sign these bills?  Well, he does want to get reelected in this Blue state.

Restricting Voters?

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Ex-President Bill Clinton and the AP are at it again, this time from the venue of the Civil Rights Summit at the Lyndon B Johnson Presidential Library in Austin.

Former President Bill Clinton is using the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act to criticize efforts in several states to create new restrictions for voters, saying they threaten to roll back a half-century of progress.

Clinton and the AP, on the occasion of this auspicious anniversary, are beefing about the Supreme Court’s ruling releasing a number of states that had a history of discriminatory voting laws, now that they have accumulated a substantial and substantive history of non-discrimination, from the Federal bondage of having to plead “Mother, may I?” from the Feds before they could update any of their election procedures.  The two also are beefing about the increasing number of voter ID laws.

Of course, this is just Progressive nonsense.  The efforts “in several states” are to increase restrictions on ineligible voters, for the protection of voters.  The only “roll back” that’s going on is of the progress made in the last 50 years enabling the dead to vote, enabling non-citizens to vote, enabling “voters” to vote multiple times and in multiple districts during the same election.

Another Blow

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…in the Progressives’ war on diversity, this one struck against the concept of free speech.

Brandeis University in Massachusetts announced Tuesday that it had withdrawn the planned awarding of an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a staunch critic of Islam and its treatment of women….

Their “rationale?”

She is a compelling public figure and advocate for women’s rights, and we respect and appreciate her work to protect and defend the rights of women and girls throughout the world.  That said, we cannot overlook certain of her past statements that are inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values.

Apparently those core values don’t include the sanctity, or a recognition of the necessity to a free society, of freedom to express an opinion different from that of an authority figure, nor do they seem to include a respect for diversity of opinion.

Ali’s offensive speech?

Once [Islam]’s defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful.  It’s very difficult to even talk about peace now.  They’re not interested in peace.  I think that we are at war with Islam.  And there’s no middle ground in wars.

Even truth is offensive at Brandeis, because, according to Joseph Lumbard, Chairman of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis

This makes Muslim students feel very uneasy.  They feel unwelcome here.

Well.  There it is.  Discomfort is a crime at this place.  When it concerns the appropriate groups.