Category Archives: ethics

Obstruction and Understanding

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We’ve seen an example of how the Democrats of the Senate intend to obstruct everything Republican.

Now we get the Democrats’ intension to be knee jerk obstructive in the House.  The New York Times had a piece over the weekend concerning Congressman Keith Ellison’s (D, MN) desire to be both a Congressman and the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.  In making his argument that he could do both together, Ellison said this about the nature of being in the minority party in Congress:

All there is to do is to vote “no.”

There they are, two things in a single nutshell (yes, pun intended).  The Democratic Party has no intension of participating in Congressional deliberations.  All they’re going to do—no Democrat has objected to Ellison’s attitude—is just knee jerk obstruct.

The other thing? The Democratic Party now views representing their constituents as strictly a part time job, unworthy of their full focus.  It seems to me that the minority party would want to work harder, not less, so they could…stop being the minority party.

The men and women of the Democratic Party, with their decision to “misunderstand” their roles and duties in Congress, do their constituents and our nation a grave disservice.  The Democratic Party is unworthy of America.

Does Trump Want a War with the Press?

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That’s the thrust of a Howard Kurtz piece on FoxNews Monday morning.  Then he asked

[D]oes Trump want both sides on a permanently hostile footing?

Kurtz needs to come out of his press bubble and poke around in the world some.  The press has been hostile to anything non-Left for years.  The press has been openly hostile and deliberately biased against President-Elect Donald Trump ever since Trump announced his candidacy.

Kurtz has even acknowledged the press’ war against Trump—and this is post-election.

Donald Trump, they say, should not be normalized.

There is, also, this bit of Kurtz’ own disingenuousity:

Trump has shown he has numerous ways to circumvent the media. He hasn’t held a news conference since July (after all those months of castigating Hillary Clinton for avoiding such encounters).

What’s the purpose of a news conference, though?  During all that time since July, Hillary Clinton not only wasn’t talking to the press, she wasn’t talking to the American people, either, except through a very occasional rally or the debates.  Trump, while not talking to the press, held innumerable rallies—with people numbering in the thousands attending—and was very active on social media.  In all of this, Trump was talking directly to the citizens of the United States.  Even in the frequent interviews he had with individual…journalists…he wasn’t so much talking to the interviewer as he was talking to the viewers of and listeners to the interviews; he was talking to us Americans.

Us voters have said in so many ballots that we no longer want, no longer need, no longer are interested in the press filtering (or censoring) our communications with those we’re considering representing us in government, and Trump has demonstrated that he doesn’t need the press to hold up his end of those communications.  Of course Kurtz knows all of this.

Plainly, it’s not that Trump wants a war with the press.  It’s that the press demands war with Trump.

Teaching Opportunity Successfully Avoided

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Because safe spaces are more important than education spaces.

A Virginia school district has “temporarily” banned the classics, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, after a parent complained that her high school-aged son was traumatized by racial slurs used in the books.

Would a trigger warning have helped this snowflake masquerading as a Mom to do her job as a parent?  Probably not:

I keep hearing, “This is a classic, this is a classic[.]”  …  I understand this is a literature classic.  But at some point, I feel that children will not—or do not—truly get the classic part—the literature part, which I’m not disputing.  This is great literature.  But there are racial slurs in there and offensive wording that you can’t get past that.

No, the children can’t.  Not when their parents won’t let them learn how to do so.  And: I read Huck Finn in junior high and Mockingbird as a high school sophomore.  The slurs, aside from being part of the stories—they were, after all, tales of their times, another aspect of this teaching opportunity away from which this school, this “parent,” slunk away—they were minor incidents in the tales.

And: if these minor parts of the tales really are that important to today’s youth, to today’s infantile parents, then how better to teach these children how to deal with the slurs, the racism, the ugliness that still exists, for all the progress we’ve made since those days when I read this stuff without a hazmat suit to protect me, than to do it in a controlled environment where such words can be put in the contexts of their times and then in the context of our times?

The alternative, after all, is that these children will eventually leave their safe space homes and their safe space schools and encounter such behaviors out in the world without having had a chance to learn how to deal with them.  Then these children will learn how badly cheated they’ve been by those whom they thought they could trust because those homes and schools were not even close to safe because of “safe” space shielding.

Obstruction

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With full control of Congress and the White House, Republicans have anticipated being able to repeal the law using a special budget maneuver that would allow them to get around a filibuster by Democrats in the Senate.

Yes and no.  The budget maneuver is reconciliation, and it’s usable only on budget matters.  That means that Obamacare will be defunded pretty straightforwardly, but the law itself still will be on the books—for a future Progressive-Democratic Party-controlled Congress to re-fund using the same budget reconciliation maneuver.  The law itself needs to be fully repealed, too; defunding it can only be a stop-gap measure.

Eight honest Progressive-Democrats are going to have to find the moral courage to step up and support actual repeal.

And there’s this.

[T]o replace it, they likely would need the support from eight Democrats and all 52 Republicans in the Senate (if Republican John Kennedy wins a December 10 runoff in Louisiana) to reach the 60 votes needed to clear the chamber’s procedural hurdles.

That procedural hurdle is the filibuster.  For this, too, eight honest Progressive-Democrats are going to have to find the moral courage to step up and support replacement with legitimate health insurance market paradigms.

Fat chance, but the fight needs to be carried out loudly, with no room for Senate Progressive-Democrats to hide behind their excuses and their crocodile tears over Americans being too stupid to take care of themselves and so need these Know Betters to do for them.

Senate Minority Whip Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, predicts Republicans will have difficulty passing a replacement health law.

Yup.  Look for continuation of Progressive-Democrats’ past six years of obstructionism into the next two or more years.

Nominations for HHS and CMMS

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President-Elect Donald Trump has nominated Congressman Tom Price (R, GA) to be Secretary of Health and Human Services and Seema Verma to be Administrator of HHS’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.  The two are well positioned and experienced to spearhead the effort to repeal Obamacare and replace it with a health insurance environment that actually will provide low-cost, broad-ranging health insurance in a competitive market.

Senate Democrats already are digging in their heels, though.

The incoming Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, said he’s urging his Democratic colleagues to give Mr Price “a thorough, thorough vetting,” and said Mr Price’s Medicare proposals are tantamount to privatizing the program.

Here comes another Democrat effort at Borking a nominee.

And about that bit concerning privatizing Medicare: Schumer and his colleagues loudly object to that (recall their dishonesty about pushing Grandma off a cliff), but they also very carefully decline to say either what is so bad about Americans exercising their own judgment concerning their money and their health care (instead of Democrats’ judgment) or what a Democrat solution would look like—except to continue throwing money at the problem even though their prior 40 years of throwing money at it has produced nothing but wasted dollars.