A Premium on Acting

In their house editorial regarding President Donald Trump’s (R) Thursday speech and his remarks about the SAVE Act, the WSJ‘s editors cited Senator Thom Tillis (R, NC):

By his reckoning, the US has about 10,000 county clerks or municipal entities that carry out America’s decentralized elections. The midterms are barely 100 days away, early voting sooner. “The math doesn’t work,” he said. “It can’t be done.”

Leave aside the all too typical Republican timidity inherent in that “can’t.” Most Conservatives intuitively understand that “can’t” is just a copout for something that might be deucedly hard. Most of us also understand that “hard” means “doable.”

Instead, consider that the SAVE Act is necessary to secure our election system (or to further secure it, if skeptics are close to accurate and our elections already are quite secure). If implementing SAVE really would take the time the Tillises of the Republican Party think, that just makes it all the more imperative for Republicans in the Senate to screw their courage to the sticking post and pass what the House—via House Republicans—already has passed twice.

The bill wouldn’t enhance election security, as the editors claim? It won’t reduce election security, either; a worst it would have no effect. Senate Republicans need to stop hiding under their desks whenever Progressive-Democrats or their Leftist supporters say mean things to them.

“Democrats fall for Socialism Again”

That’s the headline of a WSJ op-ed, and it misconstrues the Progressive-Democratic Party’s ideology.

Party and its Democratic Party ancestor have long favored socialism, at least since Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to nationalize American factories “east of the Mississippi River,” holding onto them until the Supreme Court made him give them back. That came shortly after one of the founders of the modern Progressive movement campaigned for President on nationalizing our railroads. Government ownership of the means of production is a core tenet of socialism.

Party continued that with subsequent Democratic Party actions presuming to dictate to those producers what wages they must pay and what prices for their produce they would be allowed to charge.

The modern Progressive-Democratic Party has continued that push for Central Government to control our nation’s economy with its constant demands for private enterprises to produce what Party wants produced and attempts at curtailing production by enterprises of which Party disapproves. Capping success, determining who would be allowed a measure of success, and redistribution of the results of such success as is allowed is another core tenet.

Party is now being more open about its preference for socialism with its enthusiastic embrace of the Democratic Socialists of America and their inclusion into the center of Party.

Statesmanship

The estimable editors of The Wall Street Journal spent an entire column dunking on Vice President JD Vance (R) and his foreign policy miscues. Buried in the text, though, were a couple of nuggets.

…hedge-fund magnate Ken Griffin, a major Republican donor, said he’d favor Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a matchup between the two for the 2028 GOP presidential nomination.

Unmentioned by the editors is that Rubio has already said he won’t run for the party’s nomination for President if Vance does, the plain subtext of which is he won’t risk dividing the party with such a contest. This is an assurance Vance has so far chosen not to offer.

And these, regarding the cease fire deal he thought he’d negotiated with the civilians in the Tehran branch of Iran’s government (the other branch being the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps):

I think that they see there’s a real opportunity here to turn over a new leaf so long as they do the right thing[.]

They want to have a much brighter future….

As the editors noted, though, the regime’s vision of a brighter future entails nuclear weapons that allow it to control the region, not prosperity for its people.

Vance’s misunderstanding of whose view of “right thing” actually was in play, along with his miss regarding whose vision was operating, are not just statesmanship misses, they’re failures of political acumen.

“Black Democrats Fight for Political Survival”

The lede identifies the source of this political…confusion.

The Supreme Court’s decision to reinstate Alabama’s congressional map has split the political future for many Black Democratic voters.

Black Democratic voters. Not American voters favoring the Democratic Party who happen to be black.

And this:

In Montgomery, Democrats believe they still have a shot at keeping their seat….

Their seat. No. As Scott Brown nearly put it a few years ago, with all due respect, it’s not the black voters’ seat, it’s the voters’ seat. Nor is very much respect at all due the racist trope that the seat belongs to black voters exclusively.

Maybe these Progressive-Democrats should consider no longer running on their race, and instead run on their Party’s domestic, foreign, and economic policies instead. The rest of us, along with our courts (finally), have figured out that the critical opening phrases of our Declaration of Independence and the opening Article of the 14th Amendment to our Constitution really do mean what they say.

Who Can Afford Obamacare?

The lede:

Rates for many Affordable Care Act plans rose by double digits this year. Insurers want to do the same next year.

It’s especially bad in Progressive-Democrat-run States. For instance:

In Washington state, Centene is asking for a 28% hike, after boosting rates by 35% in 2026. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Illinois wants 15%—on top of a 28% increase this year.

Who can afford Obamacare? Nobody. Not the individual, not the nation at large. That’s what those unconscionable Federal subsidies, only recently cut back, kept hidden for so long, at the Progressive-Democratic Party government dependency pushers’ behest. Dependency is votes, as they’ve long known.

It’s time the Republican Party stopped dithering and cowering. The party needs to get rid of Obamacare and replace it with an interstate commerce-centric, lightly regulated (which would entail rescinding a double potful of regulations) free market for health insurance, one in which insurers could offer plans that customers actually want, and at competition-driven prices and deductibles, and coverages. Especially that last would drive costs down. Plans that don’t try to cover everything, unless that’s what enough customers want to make a market, plans that cover only a few things, that cover only catastrophic medical events, and every coverage level in between—whatever the customers want in sufficient aggregate to make a market.