Category Archives: culture

Chuck Schumer’s Coarse Misbehavior

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Does Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) condone the sexual abuse of children?

A snowshoe racer from India whose entry into the US to compete was made possible by Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer was being held Friday in a New York jail on a sex charge.

It seems that after Indian snowshoe competitor, Tanveer Hussain, was denied a visa to come to the US to compete in the World Snowshoe Championship in upstate New York, Senators Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand (D, NY) intervened with the US embassy in India and got Hussain his entry visa.

Now Hussain is in jail, accused of molesting a 12-year-old girl, passionately kissing her and “touching her over her clothing in an ‘intimate area.'”

That’s pretty damning of Schumer’s morals and his fitness to continue as United States Senator.  Maybe he should resign.

Or not.  Does Schumer condone sexual abuse of children?  No, but by the logic he’s applying in his slander of Attorney General Jeff Sessions over a poorly phrased confirmation hearing question and a misunderstood (some might say cynically distorted) answer to that question, he does.

A Key Point

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…from George Friedman’s piece in RealClear World, Nationalism and Liberal Democracy.  Friedman was writing about a different, if related matter, the relationship between liberalism (in the classic sense) and nationalism.  The point I’m calling out bears on our own immigration debate.

A nation is a group of people who share history, culture, language, and other attributes. It is the existence of a common identity, a coherent sense of self and nationhood that make self-government possible, because it is that sense of self that permits self-government.

Notice that: shared history.  This is not the same thing as possessing the same history.  Assimilation is what bridges the gap; assimilation is what brings people with widely differing histories—as widely different as English from Germans from Russians from Chinese from Japanese from…—into the jurisdictional boundary of a polity to become part of the nation that exists there.  Assimilation is what lets those folks with and from those differing histories obtain a shared history, the common history of the nation to which they’ve come and of which so many of them wish to become a part.

Assimilation is critical to nationhood because

a random collection of people without a core set of shared values cannot form a coherent regime, because nothing would hold the regime together or prevent internal chaos.

Equal or Not?

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Are Americans equal under law, or are we to be divided and categorized even further in order to apply even more special treatments to Government-favored special groups?  The Census Bureau is opting for the latter.

In a report suggesting changes to 2020 Census forms, the bureau called for adding a new “Middle Eastern or North African” category designed to count those in the US who identify as one of about 19 nationalities, including Iranian, Syrian, Lebanese, Egyptian, and Israeli. Currently such people declare themselves as “white” on the surveys.

And

The Census Bureau also called for creating a new scheme that counts Hispanics as a broad category in line with races like white and black. The agency noted that research showed nearly half of Hispanic respondents hadn’t identified within any of the current federal race categories.

Which only points up the foolishness of the divisions.  But here’s the nub of the Census Bureau’s move:

Such changes are significant because they shape how the US tracks demographic change and can influence federal funding.

Can’t treat special groups specially until Government creates the groups, don’t you know.

The VA…Continues

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Now it’s the Veterans Administration hospital in Durham, NC, that’s come to light.

Hanna and Stephen McMenamin posted photos of two aging veterans in the hospital’s waiting room who were in obvious pain and getting no help, for hours.  One man was having trouble staying in his wheel chair, and another wound up lying on the floor because he kept asking for a place to lie down and getting no response.  The second veteran finally got a response—to make him get back in his waiting room chair.

Medical Center Director DeAnne Seekins finally reacted, after the McMenamins posted their photos:

It is an honor to serve America’s heroes and actions that do not align with our core values will not be tolerated. We pride ourselves on providing the highest quality care to the Veterans we serve and being responsive to our patient’s needs. Veterans deserve nothing less.

Really? When are you going to start living up to these pretty words?  When was the last time you left your office and actually walked the floor to see how things were going?  You would have seen this.

 

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Call Them on Their Obstructionism

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Heather Higgins, CEO of Independent Women’s Voice, says go big or go home regarding Obamacare.  Republicans in Congress should quit dithering, should not play reconciliation games, and should simply put an Obamacare repeal and replace package up for vote.  This would force the Democrat obstructionists—especially those #NeverTrumpNoHow and #NeverRepublicanNotEver Progressive-Democrats in the Senate on the record as by-name blocking reform of the Obama program that is in its death spiral, the endpoint of which will leave millions of Americans without health coverage and without even coverage providers to which to appeal.  Especially put those 10 Progressive-Democrats pretending to moderacy in order to protect their precarious reelection chances in 2018 on the spot.

Now that insurers are acknowledging the death spiral, there’s an opportunity for bolder action. The House could use regular order, not reconciliation, to pass a bill that not only fully repeals ObamaCare—returning control of the private market to the states—but simultaneously puts into effect at least the core components of reform while including grandfathering and other provisions to smooth the transition to lower-priced options on the free market.

Such a bill could easily pass the House, putting pressure on the Senate. Would Minority Leader Chuck Schumer allow proper consideration of much-needed health-care reform? And with all the evidence that ObamaCare has been a disaster and—untouched by Republicans—is quickly unraveling, would Democrats, 25 of whom are up for re-election next year, vote to defend the status quo?

And

There would be two Senate filibuster points—the first, to allow consideration; the second, to allow a vote. Thinking through what would happen, the American public and Trump administration would be well served by this exercise of transparent democracy.
…
If Democrats blocked consideration of the bill, they would do President Trump a favor by showing the public the parliamentary shenanigans of the anti-deliberation filibuster—call it the “Senatorial Full Employment Through Avoiding Tough Votes” maneuver.

And

If Democrats refuse to allow debate, Republicans should kill the filibuster against deliberation (as distinct from the filibuster to end debate and hold a vote). They can do so by simple majority vote, as Harry Reid showed when he ended the filibuster against most nominations in 2013. Either way, the Senate can actually have a vote on repealing the Affordable Care Act and reforming health care.

Republicans should heed this advice, and go for it.  If it fails, Republicans can always go the reconciliation route.