Veterans Administration Strikes Again

And once again, its blow contributes to a death. This time, it’s the VA’s Talihina, Oklahoma, facility, and this place allowed maggots to breed in the injury of a veteran.

Executive Director Myles Deering said the maggots were discovered while the patient was alive but were not the cause of his death. He said the man came into the center with an infection.

Deering tried to play down the incident:

He did not succumb as a result of the parasites.  He succumbed as a result of the sepsis.

This is the level of attention, much less actual medical care, our veterans get from the VA.  Never mind that if this facility’s imitation medical personnel had taken the infection seriously, they would have noticed the maggots and maybe done something about them.  And maybe cleaned up the flies and the flies’ eggs whence the maggots came.  And maybe cleaned up the whole facility a little bit.

Four persons, a physician’s assistant and the Talihina facility’s Director of Nursing and two other nurses, have been allowed to resign over the matter.  Never mind any accountability for these.  Never mind the allegedly attending physician responsible for this veteran’s care receiving being held accountable, so far, at least.

It’s long past time to get rid of the VA and to use its budget and what would have been its budgets in succeeding years to provide vouchers for our veterans so they can get the care they need from the doctors and hospitals they choose.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Gerrymandering, Politics, and Race

The (eight Justice) Supreme Court is going to take up the question of gerrymandering and Congressional districts in Virginia and North Carolina.  In fact, the case the Court is hearing is narrower than that:

drawing legislative districts based on race.

Never mind that the Democrats’ Voting Rights Act of 1965 mandates race-based districting: the VRA

generally prohibits reducing minority-voting power through redistricting[]

which, of course, explicitly requires race-based districting in order to “protect” that “power.”

Indeed, the whole divide[] between white and minority voters nonsense with which Jess Bravin opened his piece at the link is just a tacit summary of the Left’s racism.  We’re all Americans.  Full stop.  Any “divide” is nothing but an artificiality, fueled by the Left’s fundamental identity policies that end up masking real abuses.

Were the Left, and now the courts, serious about how bad gerrymandering is, they’d agree to its elimination altogether.  Congressional districts should be squares enclosing substantially equal sized populations, differing from those straight-line boundaries only at the borders between states, and drawn without regard to the Left’s identity politics concerning which special groups of Americans are resident in which districts.