Category Archives: politics

Wasting Money

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Or continuing the failed, but durable, Progressive-Democrat policy of paying governments in Mexico and nations south to pretend to curb their citizens from heading north to enter our nation illegally. Which is a waste of our taxpayer money, also.

The Biden-Harris administration is shipping another $20 million to Mexico and Central America

in aid for the hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees in the region—including money for healthcare, shelter, and legal aid.

But to whom is all that money going, really? It isn’t Brandon. And it isn’t any of those migrants and refugees—who aren’t all migrants or refugees, anyway, those not having left their nations. (Only those in Mexico might—might—fit either of those categories. Two things about that, though. The Mexican government doesn’t have to let them into Mexico, and to the extent Mexico has not granted permission, they’re not migrants or refugees there, either. They’re illegal aliens in Mexico.)

No, the money is going to the crooked officials of those governments. It’s going to them because the money is paid, for the most part, to those governments rather than directly to actual aid groups or to the “migrants” or “refugees.” The men and women of those governments then siphon off most of the money, whether as the middle man’s cut or as outright graft. Even money going directly to those aid groups gets siphoned off by those government persons as the vig, in various forms, those groups must pay in order to be allowed to exist.

If our government is going to spend those millions, they should be committed in large part to resealing our southern border: finishing the wall, reinvigorating our ICE and CBP agencies and immigration judges, reinstating our Remain in Mexico and related policies (not just yapping about them), reaccelerating our illegal alien deportation policies and mechanisms.

The rest of those dollars should be spent on legal immigration procedures: making it easier to enter our nation legally, making the process of getting permission to enter (or being denied permission) much faster, improving our vetting processes so those other two can be achieved safely.

Scapegoat

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Holman Jenkins had a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he described the indictment of Boeing’s 737 MAX Chief Technical Pilot, Mark Forkner, as not necessarily the end of the investigation into Boeing’s MAX failures that led to two fatal MAX crashes.

Jenkins didn’t come right out and say it, so I will. I will also add a couple of questions that Jenkins didn’t ask in his piece.

Straight out: Forkner looks more like Boeing’s scapegoat than he does a major contributor to Boeing’s MAX failures, for all of Forkner’s serious involvement in those failures.

Additional questions: as a test director for a major Defense contractor in my former life, I ask who tested this stuff? Where are they in the investigative/indictment phase of this charade?

Where is Boeing management, who permitted—created—the corporate culture where such shoddiness, if not outright lazy negligence, could exist?

The Green-Eyed Monster of Hypocrisy

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Like the man said, you can’t make this stuff up.

Donald Clark (no flags, no hashtags)
@DonaldClark
COP [UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26)] coming to Glasgow. Leaders staying at Gleneagles Hotel & 20Tesla cars (£100K each) bought to ferry them 75km back & forth. Gleneagles has 1 Tesla charging station, so Malcolm Plant Hire contracted to supply Diesel Generators to recharge Tesla’s overnight. Couldn’t make it up.

Wow.

Intrusive Government

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President Joe Biden (D) wants to make climate change a matter of government regulation in our nation’s financial sector.

Calling climate change a systemic risk to the financial system, the White House will release a report Friday outlining its strategy for new rules that could affect investment disclosures, insurance policies and home loans.

And

[T]he US needs “a road map for measuring, disclosing, managing, and mitigating climate-related financial risk across the economy.”

No. To the extent global warming (let’s stop hiding behind euphemisms) is a risk to our nation’s financial system, it’s a risk best handled by those who are actually expert in handling risk and the impact of risk to us citizens: our financial institutions operating in a free market, and us citizens making our own decisions regarding the risks each of us individually choose to run or not run and the impact of those risks on our individual lives.

Government can only make one-size-fits-all moves, whether nationally or regionally—it cannot tailor its moves down to the level of individual businesses, much less down to the individual.

Gina McCarthy, White House National Climate Advisor, rationalized:

This road map isn’t about protecting our financial system. It’s about protecting people, their paychecks, and their prosperity[.]

Again, no. This “road map” has nothing to do with that. In the first place, we don’t need protection beyond what we can, and should, do for ourselves in a free market. In the second place, it isn’t Government’s role to protect us from the vagaries of free markets; Government’s role is only to provide a stable economic environment in which our free market can operate. Government does that best with minimal regulation, minimal intrusion, into our markets.

What’s the Problem?

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It turns out that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has been on maternity leave since mid-August.

Some, including the New York Post, are dismayed with his being absent while things like the supply chain crisis, driven in large part by clogged ports, full warehouses, and a lack of freight trucks, truck drivers, and freight trains—i.e., transportation matters—in between.

I ask what the big deal is. It’s not like the supply chain crisis is going anywhere. It’ll still be here when he comes back to the job.