Author Archives: eehines

Harris Plans

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Ex-Vice President and former Progressive-Democratic Pary Presidential candidate Kamala Harris is expanding her midterm campaign schedule to include New Hampshire, where she’ll push for Party’s candidates for Governor and Senator.

That raises questions in my notoriously peabrained mind.

Is she going because Party is starting to get worried about its Senate majority prospects?

Is she going because Party is increasingly confident of its chances and is piling on and adding a Governor seat flip?

Is she going because Harris is desperately trying to show her relevance for her 2028 Presidential campaign?

My money is on door number three.

Progressive-Democrats’ Letter and a Medical Panel

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Seventeen Progressive-Democrat Senators wrote a letter to HHS Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr decrying the medical experts he’d appointed to a creation of the Progressive-Democratic Party, the US Preventive Services Task Force, from back when the Senate joined with the House to unilaterally pass Obamacare.

We are greatly concerned about the potentially outsized impact these members could have in pushing for services within their specialty[.]

Never mind that Kennedy’s appointees are actual medical experts in the variety of fields which the panel was designed to oversee. These specialist doctors replaced a collection of generalists wholly unqualified to oversee the plethora of specialties that need treatment recommendation oversight. After all,

Primary care doctors are less familiar with new research on diseases and screenings than specialists, which is one reason the panel is often behind the medical curve.

One example of the panel’s heretofore failures is this bit regarding PSA testing for prostate cancer in men:

[T]he panel retained its recommendation against PSA tests for men 70 and older. Why? Who knows, but some on the left argue that screening older men could result in unnecessary treatment since they may die of something else before cancer kills them.

That’s just cynical and has no basis in the practice of medicine. The specialists will be much more efficient, much more accurate, and so much more cost effective with their recommendations.

Kennedy hasn’t responded yet, at least publicly, but were I in his shoes, my response would be public, and it would be short and sweet. My responding letter would have this appearing at the top right of the body:

Reference A: [Make up of the US Preventive Services Task Force]
Reference B: [The Progressive-Democrats’ letter]

The body of my response would have consisted of this in its entirety:

Reference B noted. Reference A applies.

Nothing else need be done or said or written.

Government Rules

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James Freeman asked, in his Wednesday WSJ op-ed, how many of these are necessary.

How much government could we all do without? President Donald Trump says that red tape, when cut, becomes beautiful. Truer words were never spoken, and last week this column noted his encouraging progress in repealing misguided rules enacted by his predecessors. Now a few recent examples [not repeated here] suggest that half or more of government regulation is completely unnecessary.

I submit that we already have a nearly complete set of government rules in our Bill of Rights, backed up by the Bill’s overarching document, our Constitution.

I would add two rules to flesh the list out to completeness. One would enforce the sanctity of contracts. When two or more parties agree on a thing, that contract should be entirely enforceable as it stands, with severe sanctions applied to those who violate it. There really are only two legitimate ways to deviate from a freely done agreement. One way is if all of the parties involved agree to alter the contract or to dissolve it altogether. The other way is through the bankruptcy of one or more of the parties, making it impossible for them to uphold their parts of the bargain. Current bankruptcy law deals quite nicely with this sort of eventuality.

The other government rule centers on truth in advertising. Advertisements are contracts between the advertiser and the buyer, and so within the sanctity of that contract, not being truthful should be a felony if the distortion can be shown to have been deliberate, or a civil offense if the distortion can be shown to result from either party’s negligence.

Such a cleanup of our rules and regulations regime would result in how many pages of the Federal Register becoming obsolete and without effect. It also would virtually eliminate compliance costs and very greatly simplify our lives and our economy.

Even better it would render the vast majority of the Civil Service unnecessary, with those personnel returned to the private sector, all to the profit of a greatly downsized and so more efficient government, of the civil and now private employees, and to our economy writ large, through no longer having to compete so much for the same resources that the government had heretofore competed for.

Yes, I’m ignoring environmental and climate regulation in this. Those milieus are well enough covered by our Bill of Rights and the proposed contract sanctity rule.

Understanding our Constitution

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Professor Emeritus Michael Polelle, of the University of Illinois Chicago’s School of Law, in his letter to The Wall Street Journal, disagreed with Justice Samuel Alito’s originalist view that the words of our Constitution should be understood to mean what the public would have taken them to mean when they were adopted.

The problem is that the Constitution wasn’t adopted by an Athenian democracy where all citizens were lawmakers. … Legislatures appointed the Framers. It follows that the most relevant and practical frame of reference is what the Framers….

I disagree with Polelle. The Framers didn’t ratify the Constitution; they only wrote it. Their final draft, also, was flawed enough in the view of the population outside of and much larger than those Framers that the debates about it—the Federalist Papers and the less well organized Anti-Federalist Papers—extracted an agreement for the people to ratify that draft if a series of Amendments—the Bill of Rights—were passed by Congress and put to the people for additional ratification or rejection.

Then most of the States artificially expanded their franchise so a larger subset of We the People could vote on ratification. That ratification vote was on the basis their interpretation of the words of the Constitution, not the Framers’. And so was the subsequent ratification of the Bill of Rights.

It’s entirely appropriate for our Constitution’s words to be understood to mean what the public would have taken them to mean when they were adopted.

Another Mistaken Response

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This one from NATO’s military boss, General Alexus Grynkewich. In responding to the Russian threat to Europe, he made this remark:

NATO could “match any enemy move up the escalation ladder….”

What about, instead, getting out in front (get higher, to stick to the metaphor) in the escalation sequence and by being in front—escalating farther and faster than Russia can respond—block any further escalatory efforts by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin? Surely American military leadership learned the blood-soaked folly of tit-for-tat reactive moves, which only extend the conflict and greatly increase the friendly casualty butcher’s bill.

He had this, too:

Grynkewich laid out a “block, blunt, and break” strategy for defeating an invading force. The alliance’s superior data and sensing ability means Mr Putin wouldn’t have the luxury of surprising the West.

This is incredibly naïve for so senior a military officer. I was stationed in West Germany at the height of the Cold War, and one of things that we worried about and tried to train against was the ability of Spetznatz to infiltrate and lie low until the USSR decided to come over the fence. At that point, those infiltrated and secreted agents and small teams—4-5 agents—would act to sabotage key communications and radar nodes, interfere with Army crashout ops, blow or at least damage key bridges, and so on.

Today, the ability of Russia’s modern-day and evolved Special Operations units to infiltrate and secrete extends much farther than human agents. It includes smuggled-in and hidden until The Day drones (of which Ukraine has already demonstrated the catastrophic consequences) and malware inserted into key communications nodes and fuel, water, and electricity distribution infrastructure chokepoints not doing anything until activated on The Day.

Russia already is collecting a plethora of intelligence with its campaign of drone incursions and cyberattacks, which, far from being intimidation or warning moves, are in their essence reconnaissance probes.