Category Archives: morality

The Ground Zero Cross and Atheists

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American Atheists filed suit three years ago against having this symbol included in the National September 11 Memorial Museum, which officially opened late last month. Their suit was tossed forthwith as baseless; US District Court Judge Deborah Batts wrote

No reasonable observer would view the artifact as endorsing Christianity. [The museum curators] have not advanced religion impermissibly, and the cross does not create excessive entanglement between the state and religion.

The group appealed to the Second Circuit which responded by instructing American Atheists actually to make a case and not just bellyache, and to do so by 14 July. In so instructing, the Appellate Court cited an amicus brief provided by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty which argued among other things that

Courts should not allow people to sue just because they claim to get “dyspepsia” over a historical artifact displayed in a museum.

As Eric Baxter, Senior Counsel for Religious Liberty noted,

Taking personal offense is not an injury that warrants invoking the power of the courts to shut down everything you disagree with. The Constitution is not a personal tool for censoring everyone’s beliefs but your own.

Indeed.

IRS and Internal Emails

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Like a lot folks, I’m skeptical about the…accuracy…of the IRS’ lately claim that they can’t find Lois Lerner’s emails from before 2011.

My skepticism flows from a number of sources:

  • Why are they only now discovering the loss, a year after all that documentation was subpoenaed by House oversight committees?
  • The IRS claims a hard drive crash is at the heart of the loss—on what basis are we to believe that a single hard drive held all those documents?
  • The IRS’ hard drives—actually, the material stored on them—like all government hard drives/data, and like all such materials in the private, competitive sector, are backed up nightly: what are we to believe happened to all those backups?
  • Are we expected to believe that a professional IT crew would be so careless as to leave a single hard drive at the core of such a critical system? That they would leave all those backups at mercy of a single point of failure?

Note to those of you who believe the IRS’ claim: perhaps I can interest you in some beachfront property north of Santa Fe.

Iraqi Drama Catches US Off Guard

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That’s the headline of a Wall Street Journal article, and I stole it. It’s here, too, because the headline says it all.

The quickly unfolding drama prompted a White House meeting Wednesday of top policy makers and military leaders who were caught off guard by the swift collapse of Iraqi security forces, officials acknowledged.

And

US military leaders said they had thought that Iraqi security forces’ efforts would be enough to slow ISIS’s advance. But those assumptions were proven wrong when Iraqi troops largely abandoned their posts.

Yet it’s not just about establishing ISIS in Sunni Iraq. Having moved to within a few 10s of miles of Baghdad, ISIS has announced its intent to move on and seize Shia Karbala and Najaf, hosts of two of the holiest shrines for Shiite Muslims, for the humiliation of the Shia in Iraq. And for the added fertile agricultural territory.

Why was the US caught off guard by this Iraqi collapse in the wake of the collapse going on in next-door Syria? Because no one in this administration has any clue at all concerning what’s going on—and why—outside the little choir of “advisors” President Barack Obama maintains in his coterie.

John Kerry’s False Dichotomy

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Secretary of State John Kerry defended the trade of five top Taliban “generals” for the terrorist hostage Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl this way:

To leave an American behind, in the hands of people that torture him, cut off his head, do any number of things, and we would consciously choose to do that? That’s the other side of this equation. I don’t think anybody would think that is the appropriate thing to do.

Indeed, no one was thinking that, much less arguing it. The thrust of the criticism of the trade has centered on the trade, not on the idea of getting one of our own back; Kerry’s ascription to the contrary is facially false.

For instance, we could have worked a different deal, trading other prisoners, not from Gitmo, for the hostage Bergdahl.

We could have worked a different deal, trading something else for the hostage Bergdahl.

There’s reason to believe that we knew where Bergdahl was being held with enough specificity to just go get him.

Of course, Kerry knows that, which makes his “choice” a cynical and dishonest offering. The question is what does he gain with such claims? What can his boss, President Barack Obama do for him for this support of a bad effort? What does Kerry get directly for this?

Hmm….

A Step in the Right Direction

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[A] bill announced Thursday by Senate Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I, VT) and Senator John McCain (R, AZ) would allow veterans who wait 30 days or more for VA appointments or who live at least 40 miles from a VA hospital or clinic to use private doctors enrolled as providers for Medicare, military TRICARE or other government health care programs.

This is clearly a step in the right direction, but this bill absolutely does not complete the reform of the VA. Why should a veteran have to wait 30 days before he can see a non-VA doctor that he could see tomorrow at urgency or in a few days to a week otherwise?

Why should a veteran have to drive 39 miles to a VA facility, driving past a non-VA doctor’s office just 10 miles away?

Why should a veteran be required to see a government-designated doctor when he could see one that he prefers those 10 miles away?

No. The final way, the complete way, to reform this VA is to disband it and let our veterans see the doctors they choose to see at the medical facility they and their doctor deem appropriate, with the VA’s budget paid to the veterans as vouchers.

The Sanders-McCain bill, it’s claimed

also would let the VA immediately fire as many as 450 senior regional executives and hospital administrators for poor performance.

Again, a useful step, but this cannot be a final one. Disbanding the VA and returning all of the VA’s employees to the private sector clears this problem away, also, and with finality.