Monthly Archives: August 2025

I Have a Question

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In partial response to President Donald Trump’s (R) refusal to pay Progressive-Democrats $1 billion in released foreign aid and NIH funding—variously a bribe or an extortion payment, depending on who’s talking—in order to get Party Senators to agree to speed up the nomination confirmation process that Party has been busily stonewalling, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) had this:

Sooner or later, Donald Trump—Mr “Art of the Deal,” or so he claims—is going to have to learn that he has to work with Democrats if he wants to get deals, good deals, that help the American people[.]

My question, and the answer illustrates the intrinsically partisan and obstructionist nature of Party, is this: when will “Democrats” work with Trump? When will “Democrats” work with Republicans generally? Party’s determined refusal to do so is harming us American people about whom Schumer and his Party so piously pretend to care.

There’s Straightforward Fix

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Progressive-Democrats are once again showing their monarchical and my-way-or-no-one-gets-anything attitude toward us average Americans. This time it’s the Texas branch of the Progressive-Democratic Party intending to have its State legislature politicians abscond from Texas in order to deny the State legislature the necessary quorum to conduct business. The proximate business is the legislature’s State redistricting proposal resetting the districts from which our State’s Federal Representatives would be elected.

The short term solution to this, I suggest, would be to hold the redistricting proposal as the first item on the agenda for every Special Session the governor calls and for every regular legislative session until the proposal gets a vote in each of the House and the Senate.

My wife has a longer-term solution: a Texas Constitutional Amendment that would allow the governor to declare every Representative or Senate seat whose Representative or Senator is absent for one week or more (she suggested two weeks) from an active legislative session as part of a group of Representatives or Senators who are absent, thereby denying the House or Senate (or both) a quorum—whether that’s the intent or not—vacant. The governor then must schedule a Special Election to elect a new Representative or Senator to the vacant seat, the election to be held within 30 days of the vacancy declaration.

To this, I add a couple of items. The heretofore incumbent would be ineligible to stand for immediate reelection; although he would be eligible at the next regular election following the Special Election or following the next regular election if the Special Election were to coincide with a regular election.

And this: the governor must appoint a Representative(s) or Senator(s) to fill every such vacancy in the interim between the vacancy declaration and the Special Election or regular election if the Special Election coincides with a regular election. This would allow the legislature to get on with its business without having to wait on that next election.

Failure of the VA

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The way the Department of Veterans Affairs is (mis)treating our veterans suffering from PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder—is appalling. Drug them up with a multiplicity (as many as five or more simultaneously) of psychiatric drugs and call it a day is the current protocol.

The VA’s own guidelines say no data support drug combinations to treat PTSD. The Food and Drug Administration warns that combining certain medications such as opioids and benzodiazepines can cause serious side effects, including death.
Nonetheless, prescribing cocktails of such drugs is one of the VA’s most common treatments for veterans with PTSD, and the number of veterans on multiple psychiatric drugs is a growing concern at the agency….

Aside from just drugging up these men and women who put their lives on the line for our nation, that “growing concern” is the sham of empty words unbacked by corrective action.

The VA has long been aware of the risks of overprescribing, and has internal research since at least 2016 showing the potential harms, including increased risk of suicide.
…
Studies by VA researchers link the simultaneous use of multiple psychiatric drugs to suicide risk among veterans, including a 2016 paper that found Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans taking five or more central nervous system drugs faced higher risks of overdose and suicidal behaviors.
Yet the agency has been slow to mandate changes. It has failed to implement nationwide electronic systems to alert doctors when they prescribe multiple psychiatric drugs, despite evidence from its own studies that these alerts improve care. The VA doesn’t uniformly require written informed consent for all psychiatric drugs with suicide risk, something that veterans groups and some members of Congress are urging. Some veterans who have resisted taking cocktails of drugs say they were warned by VA and military doctors that refusing them could jeopardize their eligibility for disability benefits, which can reach $4,500 a month.

Not only is the VA passively refusing to do anything about its mistreatment of our veterans, the agency and “doctors” are threatening our veterans if they don’t comply with those dangerously ineffective VA prescriptions.

Some veterans who have resisted taking cocktails of drugs say they were warned by VA and military doctors that refusing them could jeopardize their eligibility for disability benefits, which can reach $4,500 a month.

These men and women would be far better served, as would all of our veterans, if the VA were dissolved and its then-current and all future putative budgets converted to vouchers for each veteran which s/he could use to get treatment from a doctor, clinic, and hospital of his choice and on the schedule that suits him rather than the agency. Other “benefits” of the VA, viz., Home Loan Guarantee, Insurance, Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment, GI Bill, and Compensation & Pension, are far better done from within HUD and DoD.

VA Secretary Doug Collins should have the mission of achieving that dissolution, to be completed by the end of 2028. Continuing to prop up the department is worse than a waste of our taxpayer money: it’s outright destructive of our veterans, who already have sacrificed so much for our benefit.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Core Progressive-Democratic Party Policy

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Senator Cory Booker (D, NJ) made it explicit a couple days ago in a speech opposing unanimous consent passage of some bipartisan bills, including one led by his Progressive-Democrat colleague Catherine Cortez Masto (D, NV). Booker’s position, loudly and proudly stated on the Senate floor:

It’s time for Democrats to have a backbone[.]
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This is a problem with Democrats in America right now. We’re willing to be complicit to Donald Trump to let this pass through, when we have all the leverage right now. When are we going to stand up as a body and defend our work, defend our jurisdiction, defend this coequal branch of government?

Then, when challenged on this by Cortez, instead of responding with facts and logic, Booker answered in typical Progressive-Democrat fashion:

Don’t question my integrity, don’t question my motives[.]

Those Progressive-Democrat Senators who disagreed with Booker and his behavior, Senators Masto and Amy Klobuchar (D, MN), are increasingly on Party’s fringe, far from the Party center. That’s where the Bookers of Party stand.

That stance: everything against Trump and Republicans, nothing for what’s explicitly good for their constituents or for our nation as a whole.

Party’s core and only policy is naked opposition to all things originating outside of Party.

Wrong Answer

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William Galston is correct, and he’s dangerously wrong, in his Tuesday op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

He acknowledges that Hamas will never surrender. This is where he’s correct. He then concluded that Israel should

declare victory and accept a cease-fire that returns all the remaining hostages and withdraws the IDF from Gaza.

He based that on the risible thesis that Israel has ended Hamas’s ability to threaten its security.

Hamas will never release all of its remaining hostages. That would eliminate far too much non-shooting leverage that Hamas has. The IDF is going to have to go get them, and that requires the complete destruction of Hamas.

Regarding Hamas’ threat to Israel’s security, formal cease fire or not, Hamas’ firing at Israel, Hamas’ terroristic assaults on Israel, will never cease until Hamas is utterly destroyed and cannot (not chooses not to) keep up its terrorism. Israel is absolutely correct on this, and its existence as a nation, as a society, depends on it. Leaving Gaza before that’s done would only let Hamas re-expand into the areas currently held by the IDF, refit, regrow, and carry on with its anti-Israeli terrorism.

Galston goes on at length, too, about how long it would take Israel to destroy Hamas. However, he shies away from the other side of this: that the destruction of Israel, were Hamas left extant and so potentially to succeed, would be forever.

That’s the long and the short of it.