A Noble Man

The University of Virginia’s President James Ryan has resigned his position in response to the DoJ continually pushing him and the university he sits atop to get rid of their racist and sexist DEI infrastructure. The constant push was necessitated by his and his university’s continual refusal to do so. Ryan’s rationalization of his decision:

I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job. To do so would not only be quixotic but appear selfish and self-centered to the hundreds of employees who would lose their jobs, the researchers who would lose their funding, and the hundreds of students who could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld.

How noble. How humble braggingly self-important.

Never mind that had he decided otherwise, the only ones who would have lost their jobs would have been the incumbents of those DEI facilities. On the other hand, researchers would have lost no funding, and “hundreds of students” would have lost no financial aid, nor would many have had their visas in peril. But Ryan considers that bigotry more important than those other matters.

That’s nobility in the current form of academia.

An Easier Solution

The Progressive-Democrat Governor of Delaware, Matt Meyer, and his State Health Care Commissioner, Neil Hockstein, objected, in their Wednesday letter to The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, to the Senate’s intention to cut Medicaid funding for illegal aliens. Their objection centered on the relative cost of the State funding, through Medicaid, medical care for illegal aliens compared with illegal alien care in hospital emergency rooms, with the hospital footing the entire bill.

Consider that outpatient dialysis costs about $90,000 a year, while emergency inpatient dialysis can exceed $300,000 annually. That extra cost falls on hospitals, state budgets and, ultimately, the taxpayer.

The answer to that is not to foist the medical costs of illegal aliens, who have no business being here in the first place, off onto the good citizens of the State, or by Federal transfers onto the good citizens of our nation at large. The better solution is to go ahead and treat the illegal alien the one time in the hospital’s Emergency Room, and then shortly after stabilization, discharge, and departure from the hospital, round up the functionally self-identified illegal alien and deport him so he no longer is a drain on our medical services or costs.

Hard hearted? It might seem so, but it pales in comparison to the hard heartedness of an American citizen being denied an Emergency Room hospital bed because those beds are occupied by illegal aliens. It pales in comparison to the hard heartedness of spending the tax dollars us average Americans send to the Federal government on services for illegal aliens when those dollars are better spent on making health care—especially including expensive treatments like dialysis and especially especially including preventive health care programs for Americans on the bottom rungs of our economy—more broadly available and cost effective for us citizens.

Lose the Claptrap

Bank management teams are trekking to Conservative States in an effort to get back in the good graces of State governments whose governors and legislatures disdain woke and otherwise bigoted, illegal, and discriminatory policies like redlining whole industries such as gun manufacturing and fossil-fuel extraction. These bank management teams are trying to convince the States that they’ve left off those policies and now only lend, or not, for financial, legal, and reputational reasons.

Therein lies these bank managers’ disingenuousness and cynicism. Refusing to do business over “reputational reasons” is just a weasel-worded excuse for discriminating against industries and individual companies about which someone might object. Or even about which a whole political party might object. In either of those cases, “reputational risk” would be wholly manufactured rather than something intrinsically extant in the market.

The only lending criteria for a bank, or any other financial institution lending money, should be the borrower’s likelihood of repaying and the legality of the borrower’s activity. Bank management teams must exclude the chimerical “reputational risk” and do so in a publicly provable manner. Petty political considerations must never be allowed into what is at bottom a purely market and finance question. Banks that do not achieve this should join the growing list of banks already barred from doing business with State governments over their bigoted, illegal, and discriminatory policies.

More Progressive-Democrat Disingenuosity

Brad Lander, Progressive-Democratic Party Comptroller for New York City and Party candidate for Mayor, wrote to The Wall Street Journal‘s Monday Letters section to brag about his arrest by ICE agents as those agents attempted to take into custody (ultimately successfully so) an illegal alien. Lander wrote

…Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents aggressively arrested me for the heinous act of…walking alongside a frightened asylum seeker and asking to see the warrant law enforcement was using to justify his arrest.

Lander did far more than that. Lander had his hand holding onto the illegal alien’s shoulder, impeding the ICE agents’ ability to move their charge along, and Lander actively and directly moved to block the agents themselves. He wasn’t just verbally demanding to see a warrant. Then, when the agents moved to arrest him for his obstruction, Lander strongly physically resisted his arrest.

Lander’s broad distortion of the facts of his obstruction and subsequent arrest is one more demonstration that we cannot trust the current crop of Progressive-Democratic Party politicians.

Disingenuosity Example

And one that’s typical of the Leftist objections to the Trump administration’s temerity in enforcing our nation’s immigration laws. The example is a sign that’s ubiquitous at Leftist protests and at Leftist overt interferences with ICE arrests.

It’s certainly true that no human being is illegal. The disingenuosity of the Leftist “protestors” is centered there, as they ignore the underlying principle: what human beings do often is illegal. In the context of immigration, what human beings do that’s illegal is breaking into or sneaking into our nation in violation of our immigration laws. Their illegal behavior is compounded by the next crime they commit: hiding in some way, whether directly or through anonymity, and remaining in our nation illegally.

These intrinsically non-illegal human beings need to be apprehended and held accountable for their intrinsically illegal behaviors: jailed for their immigration crimes, or more simply deported.

But of course, Leftists and the politicians of their Progressive-Democratic Party insist that the actions of illegal aliens, perpetrated by intrinsically non-illegal human beings, also are intrinsically non-illegal.