Author Archives: eehines

Misplaced Attributions

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A couple of letter-writers in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section are worried about the the Trump administration supposedly pressuring people out of their offices. These are misplaced attributions that exaggerate the strength of “pressure.”

One opines,

Reports that political pressure from outside forces may have contributed to the resignation of UVA’s president are troubling and strike at the heart of institutional autonomy.

This writer should concern himself more with the UVA President’s lack of courage. He resigned; he was not fired. Resigning is entirely a voluntary decision, no matter the level of perceived pressure to leave. What strike[s] at the heart of institutional autonomy is not “political pressure;” it is institutional managers in leadership positions who run away rather than stay and defend their institutions and their own actions in support of those institutions.

The other letter-writer wrote,

President Trump used his political and executive powers to force an end to [Senator Thom Tillis’ (R, NC)] public service….

Leave aside the fact that Tillis had, some months before, reached his decision to not run for reelection and that Trump’s supposed pressure merely accelerated his announcement of his decision. It’s possible that this letter-writer was unaware of that fact.

What should be obvious to this person is the same thing that is so apparent in the UVA President’s case: Tillis’ decision, and his choice of timing for announcing his decision, were entirely voluntary acts entered into by Tillis himself. No amount of pressure from Trump (which were, at bottom, merely words of opprobrium) should have been sufficient to “force an end.” That’s especially true in Tillis’ case, or that of any other politician: a President has no power to force a Congressman of either house to serve or not to serve. That choice is decided entirely by the incumbent in his decision to stand for reelection or not, and in the former case, falls next to the voters of his constituency and to no one else.

Pressure can be decidedly uncomfortable, but only the faint of heart succumb to it, and we’re all better off with the faint of heart departing.

Disingenuousness of the Abortion Industry

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Planned Parenthood is the industry’s canonical example. This organization has announced that it is going to sue the Trump administration over cuts in funds to it that are contained in the just-passed reconciliation bill.

The provisions contained in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act prohibits abortion providers from receiving Medicaid funding for up to one year for any other reproductive health services they may provide.

Those “other reproductive health services” are primarily related to Planned Parenthood’s and other abortion centers’ abortion activities. Access to any government funding for these is immoral and should be prevented.

Planned Parenthood’s legal beefs, though, are two: one is Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson’s statement:

Everyone deserves access to high-quality, affordable health care.

This is absolutely true (just not by government issue, but that’s a different story), and that care can be provided by a host of facilities, government, NGO, and private. However, abortion is not health care, it’s strictly a matter of killing not yet born babies.

Planned Parenthood’s other beef is this:

Planned Parenthood said the provision puts nearly 200 centers across 24 states at risk of closure and that 90% of those closures would occur in states where abortion is still legal.

That makes explicit that Planned Parenthood puts abortion at the center of what they claim is health care. Aside from that, it’s an irrelevant beef, as is the sub-beef of those business’ locations. No business model creates a government obligation to fund it. If Planned Parenthood, or those centers, wherever they are, want to continue operating, they should change their business models to focus on actual health care provision.

The beefs are wholly irrelevant in another way: government has no obligation to send taxpayer money to any entity, whether NGO or private enterprise.

Even more cynical and disingenuous aspect of this is that nowhere in any abortion providers’ beefs about lack of government funding is there even the smallest syllable of concern for the welfare of the baby being killed by an abortion.

Insidious

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A letter-writer in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section wrote,

In the dissenters’ telling [in Mahmoud v Taylor], children can be expected to manage the complex issues of sex and gender as objective information, quite apart from the faith and morals their parents seek to instill.

What’s especially insidious here, though, is government, public school administrators, and public school teachers pushing onto their students, our children, clear disinformation and outright lies on more than just issues of sex and gender, such claims as gender being a matter of choice and not genetically, and so immutably, determined at conception, and that some races are intrinsically and irreversibly oppressed while other races are intrinsically and irreversibly oppressors.

That’s the sort of thing those…dissenters…want to see continue, whether deliberately or from the blindness of their modern liberal/monarchist ideology that insists that government, public school administrators, and public school teachers each know better than parents.

School choice, above all, would allow parents to rescue their children from such sewers. To that end, as another letter-writer in the same section wrote,

Let public-education funding follow families’ decisions.

Free Speech Climate Funding Industry Style

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The UN is at it again; this time it’s the UN arm of the Climate Funding Industry that’s attacking individual freedoms.

A United Nations climate expert is calling for people who question the goal of avoiding a climate catastrophe by rapidly eliminating fossil fuels to face criminal penalties.

Elisa Morgera, UN special rapporteur on human rights and climate change is insisting that nations have an obligation to

defossilize information systems to protect human rights in the formation of public opinion and democratic debate from undue commercial influence and from information distortions.

In order to protect human rights, our most basic, intrinsic, and inalienable right—free speech—must be circumscribed to suit Climate Funding Industry personages’ definition of proper and properly free speech.

This is just one more reason climate activists cannot be taken seriously and must be cut off from government funds, tax credits, subsidies, and so on.

Independence Day

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I posted this in 2012; it bears repeating.

On this day 235 and more years ago, a group of Americans got together and, pledging their Lives, their Fortunes, and their sacred Honor to each other while relying on the protection of divine Providence, took our country free from tyranny and set us on a new, wholly experimental course.

These men openly acknowledged both our right and our duty to throw off any government that too badly violates its moral obligations to us sovereign citizens, that for too long abuses our liberties and our individual responsibilities.  At the same time, though, they acknowledged that routinely rebelling at every small offense was equally wrong: Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.  Yet those light and transient offenses want correction along with those abuses and moral failures.

And so, while fighting (and many dying) for our newly born nation and during the immediately ensuing years of a troubled peace, these men, with others from the newly independent and united States joining them, in a second phase of our experiment invented a wholly new form of government.  They created a government that would recognize the essential sovereignty of the members of a voluntarily formed social compact over our compact’s government, and they gave that government a structure and a strictly limited set of authorities designed to maximize our control of government and our ability to maintain that control.

They also invented a wholly new mechanism for throwing off an abusive government and replacing it with one more suited to our needs and to our control: a set of elections that would let us turn all the rascals out of one house of our legislative body every two years, that would let us depose the whole of the other house of our legislative body in sequential one-third increments every two years, and that would let us fire the chief executive of this government every four years—any and all whom we found wanting during their time in office.  This invention was accompanied by another invention of these men: a judiciary that sat, neither above nor below our executive and legislative, but equal to and separate from them—a third powerful check that granted stability to the whole.

We are here today arguing amongst ourselves, usually with great passion, over a host of things, both momentous and trivial.  And we could not be without the genius and the sacrifice of those men those 235 and more years ago.

As you sit around by your barbecue, or at the beach, or wherever you may be, hamburgers and hotdogs and other meats in hand, beer nearby, children screaming and yelling in their own happinesses, take a moment to think about that.