I Have a Question

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NPR has said that if Federal funding is cut off, it may well see 180 local NPR stations forced to close due lack of funding.

NPR compiled a lengthy document in 2011 that outlined what would happen if the government cut funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the government-backed company that supports both NPR and PBS….

Neither NPR nor PBS appear to have updated that claim, or the underlying data, in the 14 years since.

Which raises my question: why have NPR and/or PBS not done anything in those 14 years to shore up their finances so as to keep those stations operational?

Bonus question: given that laziness or sloppiness or deliberate dependence on Uncle Sugar, on what basis would any rational American think Federal funding continue?

Federal and State Funding for Abortion

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There is a move afoot in Congress to remove from Medicare reimbursements for abortion, and there is a case before the Supreme Court that will impact States’ ability to remove funding for abortion from Medicaid reimbursements. The removal from Medicare, should it come to fruition, would be entirely consistent with the Court’s Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling, which rescinded Roe v Wade and put the abortion question entirely in the States’ hands. Now many States are attempting to act on their newly restored authority—hence the case before the Supreme Court.

It’s true enough that it’s a fraught decision for the mother to bring an unwanted pregnancy to term, but my concern here is for the life of the baby. From this, I see two boundary cases that are especially difficult.

One is where the health of the mother is at risk if the pregnancy continues. In this case, the mother’s health must be weighed extremely carefully against the life of the baby. This weighing may need to occur—must occur?—in open court, with competent, well-trained lawyers speaking for the baby.

The other is a mother’s pregnancy as a result of incest or rape. Carrying the baby to term here is an especially terrible choice for the mother—the pregnant child incest or rape victim may be too physically young to carry her baby to term, in which case, see above. Even where the victim mother can safely do so, it remains an especially terrible choice to carry inside her body a constant reminder of the monster who did this to her. Carrying the baby to term isn’t a matter of the mother’s inconvenience for nine months as some extremists on the right claim—the emotional damage to the mother from that is real, extreme, and often irrepairable.

Conventional wisdom is to permit abortion in the these narrowly defined, and not so often occurring compared to “ordinary” unwanted pregnancies, cases of incest or rape. Conventional wisdom here is not a completely bad bit of wisdom, but I remain concerned: why should the baby have to pay with its life for the crime of another? The baby needs competent, well-trained lawyers speaking for him or her in these cases, also.

It’s also true enough that, while Republicans are attempting to do more to provide fiscal support for those mothers during their pregnancies, in the period surrounding birth, and in the early years after birth (here including adoption options), they need to do better at specifically identifying those needs and then providing for them—and to do so publicly. That shortfall, though, shouldn’t be allowed to impact whether the baby is allowed to live at all.

Say they Did

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James Freeman, who does the Best of the Web column for The Wall Street Journal, has waxed optimistic about the Progressive-Democratic Party’s future, given a New York Times editorial he ran across over the past weekend.

It was a most pleasant surprise to see a weekend editorial in the New York Times of all places suggesting a step back from the progressive ledge. The Times is now urging Democrats to reconsider a number of the destructive ideas that party leaders embraced after reading about them in the New York Times. Let’s be optimistic and call this a great start if the newspaper wants to embark on an era of reform.

Per the Times, as Freeman quoted it:

First, they should admit that their party mishandled Mr Biden’s age. Leading Democrats insisted that he had mental acuity for a second term when most Americans believed otherwise. Party leaders even attempted to shout down anybody who raised concerns, before reversing course and pushing Mr Biden out of the race. …
Second, Democrats should recognize that the party moved too far left on social issues after Barack Obama left office in 2017. The old video clips of Ms Harris that the Trump campaign gleefully replayed last year—on decriminalizing the border and government-funded gender-transition surgery for prisoners—highlighted the problem…. [Elision in the original]
Even today, the party remains too focused on personal identity and on Americans’ differences—by race, gender, sexuality and religion—rather than our shared values.

Say Progressive-Democratic Party leadership and members do change how they talk about the issues us average Americans care about—which would include, for starters, actually talking about those issues. On what basis would we believe those persons have changed what they’d do were they restored to political power? The same persons who Freeman thinks should admit that their party mishandled Mr Biden’s age, and who he thinks should recognize that the party moved too far left, and who he says remain[] too focused on personal identity and on Americans’ differences would still be in place.

Why would any rational American believe these Wonders have suddenly shorn themselves of their most tenaciously held ideology?

Alternatively, consider these persons actually changing their core ideology. If they toss so readily and quickly that long-held central tenet in favor of a new central tenet, how could any rational American trust them not to toss equally readily and quickly their new central tenet in favor of yet another central tenet—or revert to that original, wholly divisive and otherwise dishonest centrality?

What’s really needed to restore us to a viable two-party political system is a wholly new and separate political party created out of whole cloth, difficult as that is to achieve—the last successful effort being the Republican Party in 1854. The Progressive-Democratic Party incumbents already have amply demonstrated their lack of trustworthiness.

Excellent but Insufficient

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Kristin Shapiro, of the Independent Women’s Forum, has an excellent idea for checking up on colleges’ and universities’ admissions criteria and seeing whether they’re still using race and gender in their admissions decisions, even though those plainly racist and sexist criteria are illegal.

[R]equire colleges and universities to report the average standardized test scores and grade-point averages of admitted and enrolled students by race.

This can be improved on, however. In addition to publicly reporting those averages for admitted and enrolled students, the institutions should be required to post the averages’ standard deviations, which measure the degree of dispersal of those scores around their averages, and they should be required to post as well the median scores of those distributions. Medians tend to be less heavily influenced by extreme outliers. In addition, the institutions should be required to do that for the populations of students whose applications were rejected.

Better still, would be to require the institutions to make publicly available and searchable their databases of raw scores and GPAs, redacted only of student-identifying data while leaving in the identifications of the high schools and transferred-from colleges and universities of admitted students and of students whose applications the institutions rejected.

Let independent analysts conduct their own investigations rather than requiring the public to rely on the claims of institutions whose integrity already is questionable.

Whose Property Is It?

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“Wall Street” is all in a tizzy over an entirely private deal made by the owner of all two of companies involved in the deal [emphasis added].

The valuation was surprising and so was how the companies got there. Only one set of advisers worked for both sides, when a deal of this size would normally take armies. In short, the unusual process resulted in a megadeal few public companies could get away with.

The news writers willy-nilly assume that all deals must have “armies” of advisers, just because. Why would an owner of two private enterprises need more than his own teams—or himself—to assess whether or how to merge his privately owned companies? Other than spreading fees out among a plethora of Wall Street investment advisor firms, I mean.

The news writers spent a whole section of their piece on the matter of The advisers worked both sides.

This proceeds, cynically, I claim, from a false premise: both private companies are/were owned by the same man. What “both sides?” There was only the single owner’s side.

And whence the question, in the first place? These are private enterprises, beholden to no one in the public sphere, especially the denizens of The Street. Even were the two private enterprises owned by two separate private individuals, no one on The Street has anything legitimate to say about the matter. Maybe this sort of interference-wannabe is part of the motivation for not going public and for taking public companies private.

No, the question implied, but never asked out loud, by these Wall Street Wonders is who owns the two companies—Elon Musk or “Wall Street?” The two news writers address this for themselves, but never put it to the wonders they claim to cite.