The California Magnet

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Newly sworn-in California governor Gavin Newsom (D) has a plan to expand on the State’s sanctuary “status” and draw even more illegal aliens into the State and into the country:

…an unprecedented new health care agenda for his state, aimed at offering dramatically more benefits to illegal immigrants….

As Newsom noted,

People’s lives, freedom, security, the water we drink, the air we breathe—they all hang in the balance

And Newsom wants to increase that risk by encouraging a flood of illegal aliens to enter the State. It’s true enough that the vast majority of those illegals are harmless beyond the economic burden they’ll inflict in Newsom’s brave new world of hugely expanded, and hugely more expensive, health care for all, citizen and illegal alike.  However, it’s also that the few who are dangerous are capable of inflicting vast damage—as the families of MS-13, et al.; the survivors of 9/11 (which terrorists entered legally, but they’re not the only terrorists entering); the victims and their families of the cartels’ drug epidemic; the families of Kate Steinle, Ronil Singh, Pierce Corcoran, Silvano Torres, and a host of others can attest.

His health care “expansion?”  He intends to implement the erstwhile Obamacare Individual Mandate at the State level.  Everyone will be required to purchase health coverage whether they need it or not, whether they want to or not.  Except those like illegal aliens, who can’t afford it.  Those coverages will be paid for by the State’s citizens and legal residents.  Somehow.  Oh, and “children?” They’ll be allowed, under Medi-Cal, to stay on mumsy’s and pop-pop’s health coverage plans until they’re 26, instead of the current age limit of 19.

Newsom has had no words on how this expansion is to be funded.  Apparently, he’s channeling Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY):

People often say, like, how are you going to pay for it, and I find the question so puzzling because “How do you pay for something that’s more affordable? How do you pay for cheaper rent?” You just pay for it.

Because vastly expanding a program makes it cheaper.  Sure.

But Newsom and his clan of Progressive-Democrats in the State’s legislature don’t care about that.  They only care about the bennies flowing from their expensive, and dangerous, virtue signaling.

A “Caravan” Participant’s Comment

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A Fox News piece centered on the refusal of some “caravan” participants’ refusal to leave a closed Tijuana warehouse and go to a better shelter facility—but a few miles farther away from our border—closed with this comment from 40-yr-old Honduran Norma Perez, who traveled with her 5-yr-old child.  She wants President Donald Trump to

personally go to Honduras so he can see with his own eyes that we simply can’t go back, that there are no jobs, no companies, nothing.

Never mind that all the foreign aid we’ve been sending to Honduras to help with precisely those conditions has been going into the pockets of Honduran authorities; very little of it has made it to folks like Perez.  Since she’s never seen any of the money or any of the economic benefits from the money, there’s no reason she would know of it in the first place.

However, it is well-known that the Mexican government has offered all of the “caravan” participants asylum and work permits.  Perhaps Perez should personally go to those Mexican authorities and accept the asylum and work permit offers.  And stop holding her child at risk.

In Which the NLMSM and Politicians

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…of both parties jumped the gun in their blind panic to disparage an actual attempt to end a war.  Recall the hooraw over President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw our forces from Syria and from a war with no coherent plan or victory conditions.

Now the facts of the withdrawal start to come out.  National Security Adviser John Bolton made these points in Jerusalem while on a diplomatic trip:

  • the safety of Kurdish allies is being considered as part of its pending withdrawal plan
  • [t]imetables or the timing of the withdrawal occurs as a result of the fulfillment of the conditions and the establishment of the circumstances that we want to see. It’s not the establishment of an arbitrary point for the withdrawal
  • Trump has told Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that withdrawal is pending assurances that Turkey will protect Kurdish fighters who have long provided the US with solid support in the campaign against Islamic State militants
  • [a]ny use of chemical weapons will be met by very strong response, as we have done twice before
  • [t]he US could leave some troops at a key military outpost in southern Syria

Patience, Grasshoppers.

Union Greed

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Teachers union style.  The Los Angeles Unified School District is so close to out of money that, under California law, the LA county is obligated to take the district into functional receivership under its own control if money gets much shorter.

It’s about to, and they’re about to.  The United Teachers Los Angeles union has said it will strike the school district, demanding more money—twice as much as it’s been offered—if it can’t get more money for its teachers and get rival, and educationally superior, charter schools capped on the State resources they receive.

In addition to putting those charter school children at risk, the union is willing to put 480,000 children in the school district in educational harm’s way, if the union can’t get its lucre.  Nor does this union care about the low-income families’ working parents—the bulk of the district’s children come from such families—who must find other means for monitoring their kids, much less educating them, which will add to those parents’ costs.

Sure, sure, the district wants to try to keep the schools open even without the union teachers. District leadership intends to employ “educational software and substitutes.” Two things about that: if the educational software actually is all that, the district will discover that it doesn’t need all of those union teachers after all.  The other is that substitute teachers are just that—useful for short term classroom monitoring and a modicum of teaching, but they’re not the real thing.

And just to drive the point home:

On the last day of class before winter break began, teacher Meg DeCoux packed six boxes of books, whiteboard markers and art supplies from her first-grade classroom. She and other teachers bought some of the supplies with their own money and don’t want them to be available to administrators or other substitutes during a strike, she said.

I bought this stuff.  It’s mine.  Mine, mine, mine.  If I can’t use it, nobody can.

That’s union selfishness on top of union greed.

Hiding Their Heads in the Sand

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Recall last Wednesday’s meeting among President Donald Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R, CA), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY), Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D, IL), Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, and others.

Nielsen was there to present the current situation on our southern border as prelude to negotiations for funding for a border wall.

Pelosi refused to listen.  As Nielsen was laying out statistics related to illegal border crossings, Pelosi interrupted (among several interruptions by her and by Schumer, as they refused to listen):

I reject your facts[.]

Never mind that facts belong to no one; they exist in their own right.

Durbin also rejected simple facts.

It was preposterous.  At a time when we have the lowest level of apprehensions at the border—stopping people from coming in illegally—the lowest level historically, she is saying that we have all these terrorists and criminals and all these people on their way in.

As if per centages of criminals or terrorists won’t change—reductions in total apprehensions must mean there are fewer criminals or terrorists, thugs with entirely different goals in gaining entry, persons who by their nature want to hide the fact of their entry must drop by the same proportion.

Durbin knows better; he’s being disingenuous with his distortion.

And, as Pelosi said that Wednesday

This is not a wall between the United States and Mexico that the President is creating here.  It’s a wall between reality and his constituents.

Progressive-Democrats really do have nothing but contempt for the hundreds of millions of Americans, including the tens of millions of eligible voters who voted Republican in 2016, who disagree with them.

How is it possible to negotiate anything with persons who run screaming from the underlying facts?  How is it possible to negotiate anything with persons who won’t accept the reality underlying the negotiations?

Keep this in mind over the next couple of years, and especially over the summer and fall of 2020.