Category Archives: politics

A National Parental Leave Policy

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AEI has a piece on this; unfortunately, their piece proceeds from some false premises.

Developing a National Paid Parental Leave Policy

It’s interesting that folks of a bent proceed from such claims. They always decline to establish, for instance, that we need a national policy for parental leave. It’s such a widespread failure that I have to conclude it’s deliberately Alinsky-esque in its attempt to control the discussion.

The United States is one of two countries without a national policy providing new mothers with rights to paid leave following the birth of a child.

And then this non sequitur keeps getting dragged out as if it matters that we don’t look like the rest of the world. Never mind that, more substantively, we aren’t like the rest of the world, so there’s no reason we should look like the rest. There aren’t very many federated republics extant.

At present, we simply do not know what the ideal leave program for the US would look like.

Yes we do. It’s what each of the 50 States in our republic think one would look like–it’s what the citizens of each of those States think is best for themselves. Full stop.

The Noise of Freedom

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European Central Bank President Mario Draghi is worried.  The European is afraid of any relaxation of banking regulations in the US; it might cause some instability.  Never mind that instability is a Critical Item for innovation and growth, whether economic, political, technological, or anywhere else.  As he testified before the European Parliament Committee on Economic Affairs,

The last thing we need at this point in time is the relaxation of regulation….

The fact that we are not seeing the development of significant financial stability risk is the reward of the action that legislators and regulators and supervisors have been undertaking since the crisis erupted[.]

No, the suppressed economic growth we’ve experienced is the punishment from the action that legislators and regulators and supervisors have been undertaking.  The noise of freedom and innovation and growth is so terrifying that the punishment is better than the progress.

Or the bureaucrat simply is dismayed at the potential loss of power because the contagion from the US might spread to Europe.

Setting Up The Excuse

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Watts Up With That is reporting a Mail on Sunday piece wherein a NOAA whistleblower, Dr John Bates, a leading scientist with NOAA at the time, has given MoA irrefutable evidence that the “Pausebuster” paper that NOAA rushed to print with lots of publicity just ahead of the 2009 Paris climate agreement was based on misleading, “unverified” data.  The purpose of the rush was to influence those present, including ex-President Barack Obama (D), and con them into believing that not only did the pause in global warming that’s still ongoing, not only never existed, the warming is continuing at a faster pace than thought.

It gets worse.

Not only had [NOAA] failed to follow any of the formal procedures required to approve and archive their data, they had used a “highly experimental early run” of a programme that tried to combine two previously separate sets of records.

About that program:

[T]he…software was afflicted by serious bugs. They caused it to become so “unstable” that every time the raw temperature readings were run through the computer, it gave different results.

And this:

…failure to archive and make available fully documented data not only violated NOAA rules, but also those set down by Science [which published the “Pausebuster” paper]. Before [Dr Bates] retired last year, he continued to raise the issue internally. Then came the final bombshell. Dr Bates said: “I learned that the computer used to process the software had suffered a complete failure.”

The reason for the failure is unknown, but it means the Pausebuster paper can never be replicated or verified by other scientists.

Now, here it comes.

Dr Bates said: “How ironic it is that there is now this idea that Trump is going to trash climate data, when key decisions were earlier taken by someone whose responsibility it was to maintain its integrity—and failed.”

And NOAA’s coverup, perhaps to cover its embarrassment over its incompetence and dishonesty, perhaps to prepare the ground for its coming slur against the new administration:

After the paper was published, the US House of Representatives Science Committee launched an inquiry into its Pausebuster claims. NOAA refused to comply with subpoenas demanding internal emails from the committee chairman, the Texas Republican Lamar Smith, and falsely claimed that no one had raised concerns about the paper internally.

It’s beginning to look like NOAA needs to be abolished.  Surely, we have better uses for its $6 billion budget (requested for 2016) than to fund falsified “science.”

A Test

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The Moscow Times, one of several mouthpieces of Russian President Vladimir Putin and of his Kremlin government, sees the current flareup of shooting between government forces on the one hand and “rebels” and their Russian bosses and reinforcements in the Donbass region of Donetsk as a test.  Recall that Donbass is on the road to Black Sea coastal Mariupol, a key urbanized area on the coastal road to Russia-occupied Crimea.

The organ is right.

Moscow clearly wants Kiev to implement its vision of the Minsk agreement—a special status for the separatist controlled areas, retaining Russian-backed armies and de-facto control of the border with Russia, with only nominal oversight from Kiev.

The Kremlin wants to retain political control over separatist-held territory as a “structural veto” on Ukrainian security and foreign policy. Moscow hopes that the Trump administration alongside France and Germany will pressure Poroshenko to accept Russian demands under Minsk-2.

But the real test actually is two tests.  The first is whether President Donald Trump will, instead, recall and implement the Budapest Memorandum, which among other things requires signatory Russia to respect and honor Ukrainian territorial integrity, and begin enforcing the Memorandum by sending arms to Ukraine with which it actually can defend itself against those “rebels” and the Russian armor and artillery forces both in Donetsk and in Lukhansk.

The other test is whether Trump will do anything about Russia’s occupation of Georgia.

OK, a third test, too: whether Trump will follow through, promptly, on deploying an anti-missile shield into the eastern European nations bordering on Russia, as ex-President Barack Obama (D) had chit-chatted about doing late in his administration (and in southeastern Europe, too, against Iranian missiles).

Transparency or Government Snooping?

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Senator Ben Cardin (D, MD) had a letter to The Wall Street Journal‘s editor over the weekend.  He’s objecting to Congress’ removal of his (and Senator Richard Lugar’s (R, IN) Cardin-Lugar piece of Dodd-Frank that required public companies to disclose their payments to foreign governments.  Ostensibly, this was to track bribery actions, but like the rest of Dodd-Frank, it overstepped.

There’s nothing like a Democrat desperate to protect his legacy (Lugar was not silent on the matter; he voted for its repeal).

There is no unreasonable burden to businesses in asking them to track operating payments that should be part of the normal course of legitimate business.

Normal course of legitimate business. The Democrat Senator is oblivious to the irony of his claim. The normal course of legitimate business is no concern of Government; such things are strictly the concern of businesses, their owners, and their customers in a free market.

If Government is concerned, there is already a suitable and sufficient law: get a warrant.