Tag Archives: government

A Referendum

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Catalonia is trying to have one (had one as you read this) on whether the Autonomous Community should completely separate from Spain.  It’s turning violent as the Spanish military organization with police duties, the Guardia Civil, and the more civilian Policía Nacional, are using hammers and other such tools to break into locked buildings within which voting is occurring and truncheons and rubber bullets to try to block Catalans from entering and voting.

Nearly 850 civilian casualties had been inflicted by late Sunday, Dallas time.

This is counterproductive.  Like the Quebecois separation referenda, Madrid should let the Catalan referendum go forward without interference.  Most Catalans want the referendum, and most would vote to stay in Spain.

That vote would defuse the separation movement for a good long time.

The violent suppression is not going to work in the long run.

As Catalan President Carles Puigdemont is putting it,

The unjustified, unchecked, irresponsible violence by the Spanish state today didn’t just fail to stop Catalans’ will to peacefully and democratically vote….” It also made clear “what is at stake for us.”

It’s true enough that Puigdemont is playing politics with his characterization, but the characterization itself and its outcome isn’t far wrong.  Marc Quintana, a 34-year-old carpenter who was forcibly removed by police in Sant Julià before he could vote:

The only thing this will do is make those undecided people vote “yes” to independence[.]

It’s also true that the referendum is illegal under Spanish law.  However, if Madrid really thought it needed to arrest the referendum leaders, they could do that a lot more easily after a failed referendum.

On Catalonia’s Drive for Independence

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The Wall Street Journal argued against it Wednesday.  I disagree ( a surprise, I know).

Nor is such a referendum permitted by international law….

This is a domestic Spanish affair; dragging international law into the matter is just cynical.

…they [Catalonians] fail to acknowledge the price all Spain pays for the national defense and diplomacy that keep Catalonia secure.

This is a cost that Spain no longer would have to bear if Catalonia succeeds in secession. As the Spanish, Catalonians, and Tunku Varadarajan, who wrote the piece at the link, well know.

The separatists also do not mention that they would have to assume around 20% of Spain’s national debt were they ever to secede, and surmount a Spanish veto to be readmitted to the EU.

The one isn’t demonstrated; it’s only a claim by Spain. The other assumes they would want to join the EU; this is not a foregone conclusion, either.

Those who oppose Catalan independence are not going to show up to vote on Sunday.

That would be their choice in a democracy.

The only real argument against the referendum is its illegality under the Spanish constitution and a top Spanish court’s ruling. But, then, so was our own gunpoint revolution against the Crown illegal at the time.

Discrimination

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Now FEMA is doing it, and it’s religious discrimination.  Churches, bastions of succor in times of disaster—like Hurricanes Harvey and Irma—suffer their own damages in those disasters, as they did in Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.  However, unlike other charitable organizations in similar straits, churches are being denied FEMA assistance to recover.

Law on this is not clear because separation of church and state, New York University Law Professor Burt Neuborne is claiming.

The difficulty is that the Constitution has two provisions in it. It has a freedom of religion, but it also has kind of a freedom from religion which prevents government money from being used for religious purposes, worship purposes.

No, it doesn’t.  This is, at best, mistaken.  The two relevant 1st Amendment clauses are the Free Exercise Clause—Congress shall make no law…prohibiting the free exercise thereof [of religion]—and the Establishment Clause—Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.  There’s nothing in there about freedom from religion; that’s just the distortionate drivel used by crowds like the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the like.

The Federal government cannot favor one religion over another or favor religion over atheism; there’s nothing in there that prohibits the Feds from providing disaster recovery help to religious organizations along with the same sort of help for secular non-profit organizations.  In fact, refusing to do so violates the Establishment Clause by actively disfavoring religion rather than acting neutrally toward it—as the Clause requires.

Neuborne wasn’t finished.

The question is: can they get the money and rebuild their worship facilities? Because then the money would be going towards worship, not to help people from not getting skinned knees on the playground, or being able to get food at the food bank.

This is just disingenuous.  No, the money would not be going toward worship, it would be going toward restoring a building.  A building that comes in critically handy for sheltering those displaced by disasters, natural or otherwise.  Regardless of the religions (or lack) of the sheltered or the shelter.

The attacks on religion from continues.

Nonsense

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The National Park Service is handing $100,000 to UC Berkeley in a “research” grant to “to ‘honor the legacy’ of the Marxist revolutionary group the Black Panther Party.”  Worse, it did so without following its usual competitive bidding process for research grant money.

This cooperative research project between the National Park Service (NPS) and the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) on the Black Panther Party (BPP) is anchored in historical methods, visual culture, and the preservation of sites and voices.  The project will discover new links between the historical events concerning race that occurred in Richmond during World War II and the subsequent emergence of the BPP in the San Francisco Bay Area two decades later through research, oral history, and interpretation.

Committed to truthfully honoring the legacy of BPP activists and the San Francisco Bay Area communities they served, the project seeks to document the lives of activists and elders and the landscapes that shaped the movement[.]

This is…nonsense.  To truthfully handle the legacy of the Black Panther Party domestic terrorists, the Department of Justice should be the ones conducting this “research.”  If the NPS is serious about finding out things concerning the relationship between the Black Panthers and American society, it should claw back those $100,000 and transfer them to DoJ.

NPS’ funding announcement can be seen here.

Interagency Coordination

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Despite being dead for years, hundreds of veterans remained on the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) payroll and received nearly $38 million in benefits, according to a report from the Social Security inspector general.

The SSA says this is the fault of the VA for not supplying accurate information, and it may well be.

Unfortunately, though, this failure isn’t unique to the VA.

The SSA, Medicare, and the IRS badly coordinate routinely, so that it’s often the case that Medicare recipients get overcharged for their Medicare premiums until the IRS and CMS (which runs Medicare) catch up with each other or the recipient appeals (which actually is a pretty prompt process, but it needn’t occur in the first place).

It’s also the case that the IRS and ObamaMart don’t coordinate well, so that Obamacare subsidies either are wrongly withheld or are wrongly paid.

It’s also the case at the State level, most blatantly in our voting records where the State agencies don’t coordinate to remove ineligible or non-existent voters from the rolls, or (more rarely, but at a non-zero rate) eligible voters are absent from the rolls.

Most Cabinets and Agencies fail to share information—sometimes for good reasons, but too often from laziness or incompetence or turf imperatives.