Tag Archives: morality

It’s Time

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…to sweep the ones we can’t trust from the Republican Party of Castrati and from Congress.

When Republicans voted on the repeal-only bill in 2015, they knew Mr Obama would veto it, making their vote largely symbolic. Of the GOP senators currently in the chamber, 49 voted for it at the time.  …

Moreover, many GOP lawmakers have already acknowledged that they would vote differently now that the stakes are far higher….

Now that these persons have to take action more concrete than virtue signaling, they’re exposing themselves as porch dogs.  They’re betraying their country, and more specifically, they’re betraying their constituents, to whom they promised for the last seven years, they’d repeal Obamacare and replace it.

However,

Both [Susan, R, ME] Collins and [Shelley Moore, R, WV] Capito said Tuesday they were unlikely to support the procedural vote for a repeal-only approach.

Senators even are too timid to face debate on the floor of the Senate on so simple a measure.

Capito is being especially disingenuous.

I did not come to Washington to hurt people.  I cannot vote to repeal Obamacare without a replacement plan that addresses my concerns and the needs of West Virginians.

Yet, that’s exactly what she’s doing by supporting Obamacare’s continued existence.  That program not only is devastating the pocketbooks of Americans, including West Virginians, Americans across the country are losing their health coverage plans in droves as health plan providers abandon the market in counties after counties, even whole States.  This is happening now, and it will be increasingly so as long as repeal is blocked by Senators like Capito, with or without a replacement program in hand.  Capito knows this.

Serious reform takes courage.  These worthies don’t have it; they’re quailing, even now, at a first step of repeal.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) is suggesting he’ll call for a vote on a straight-up repeal, to take effect in two years, during which Congress could work out and pass a replacement program or set of programs.

McConnell should hold the vote, even knowing the porch dogs will vote against repeal and so defeat it (many of whom will vote even against open debate); will vote against their promise; will contradict their vote in 2015, cast as it was deep in the safety of an Obama veto.  Put the porch dogs on record with their votes.  Let them stand exposed and identified.

This is what primaries are for.

A Plan for Dealing with Northern Korea

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Ex-SecDef Robert Gates has one, as described by Gerald Seib in The Wall Street Journal.

Under the Gates approach, the US would make China the following offer: Washington is prepared to recognize the North Korean regime and forswear a policy of regime change, as it did when resolving the Cuban missile crisis with the Soviet Union; is prepared to sign a peace treaty with North Korea; and would be prepared to consider some changes in the structure of military forces in South Korea.

In return, the US would demand hard limits on the North Korean nuclear and missile program, essentially freezing it in place, enforced by the international community and by China itself.

“I think you cannot get the North to give up their nuclear weapons,” Mr Gates says. “Kim sees them as vital to survival. But you may be able to get them to keep the delivery systems to very short range.”

The stick for this?

Absent such an agreement, the US would “heavily populate Asia with missile defenses.” That would include missile-defense buildups in South Korea, Japan, and aboard additional American ships stationed in the Pacific. In addition, the US would declare that it would shoot down “anything we think looks like a launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile” from North Korea.

This is both foolish and naïve.  It’s naïve because it innocently envisions the men and women of northern Korea and the People’s Republic of China to be trustworthy in this matter, or any other regarding the Korean peninsula in particular and the western Pacific in general—and regarding us at all in the PRC’s case.  These worthies have shown their lack of reliability repeatedly, ranging from Baby Kim’s and his father’s before him, welching on agreements particularly concerning northern Korean nuclear weapons program to the PRC’s seizure and occupation of the South China Sea, attacks against other nations’ fishing and oil facilities in the Sea, and its aggressions against Japan’s Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea.

It’s naïve because “heavily populating Asia” with missile defenses would require agreement from the RoK to plus up (heavily or otherwise) a missile defense establishment it’s already disgruntled about having in place and strongly reluctant to increase.  It would require Japan to agree to emplacement of missile defenses much beyond the token batteries already present.  It would require other nations of Asia—Vietnam, for instance, and a Philippines that already prefers the PRC to our alliance—to agree to such emplacements.  It would require a heavy buildup of our Navy to build and launch “American ships” that are missile defense capable before we could get those numbers in place.

It’s foolish because, depending on the definition of very short range, such an agreement at best would sell the Republic of Korea into hostage against our behavior in Baby Kim’s eyes and those of whomever happens to be in power in the PRC at the time they decide to take umbrage against our activities.  In the South China Sea, say, or vis-à-vis Japanese islands in the East China Sea.  Or the Republic of China.

Aside from also selling Japan, the RoC, and the nations rimming the South China Sea down the river through those indirect means, that definition could be used to put Japan directly at risk, too, as well as our own military bases in the region.

That foolishness would be the height of immorality.

Charlie Gard and the British Government

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Or, Charlie Gard and sovereignty.

Charlie Gard is the baby with a rare genetic disease that has damaged his brain, probably fatally and soon.  The baby’s parents want to be able to try alternative treatments, or in the alternative, be allowed to bring him home to die there with his parents who love him rather than encumbered by the state’s bureaucrats and representatives, his parents also by-the-way present, in an emptily sterile hospital room.

The British government has chosen to not allow any of this: the baby must die in the hospital.  The EU’s Court of Human Rights, in a breathtaking repudiation of its mission, has sided with the British government.  Understand: that the Brit government and the EU in their ruling have sided with the hospital in which Charlie is being held is neither here nor there.  Both the Brit government and the EU Court could have sided with the baby’s parents, and each chose not to.

Which, as The Wall Street Journal put it in their op-ed at the link, raises a question:

Whose baby is Charlie, anyway—his parents’ or the state’s? In this delicate case, Britain’s national care system has elevated technical expertise over parental love.

In this, the WSJ has misunderstood.  It’s the Brit government that has decided, not the bureaucrats of the NHS.  It is the government of the home of 1984 that has claimed this baby, poor Charlie Gard, as its ward.

With the British government’s ruling, it has made parents irrelevant and claimed all children to be wards of the state.  By extension, the British government has made all citizens of Great Britain, raised from early childhood as wards of the state, themselves wards of the state.

The citizens of Great Britain are not sovereign in their own nation.  Only Government is sovereign.

Medicaid-Receiving Companies Object to the Senate Bill

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The Senate is proposing an overhaul of Obamacare and an improvement to the health coverage providing industry, and one of those improvements is a rollback of the Obamacare expansion of Medicaid and an eventual capping of Federal funds transfers to the States’ Medicaid programs.  There are objections to this.

The primary objections are from insurers and hospitals, et al., who get a significant fraction of their income from the guarantees of Medicaid payments; they don’t want to have to compete in the open market.  They prefer the supposed safety of that guaranteed income, paltry though it is, especially compared to the income available from a free market, and they don’t care what that “safety” costs those who must pay for it.

The States themselves, for instance, in addition to financing their own Medicaid programs, are required to contribute to other States’ Medicaid programs through those Federal tax transfers, and by extension they’re forced to contribute to other States’ spending decisions generally.

Let Medicaid be the State-run program it was intended to be. Keeping the monies that would otherwise be transferred to other States would both leave more money for funding a State’s own program and force each State to become more fiscally responsible, instead of exercising a claim on other States’ money.  That fiscal responsibility also will contribute to the rising prosperity of freer market.

And let the health care providers and coverage providers compete for income from that much larger market.

Vandalism

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Terrorist vandalism.

Islamic State militants bombed the historic Nouri Grand Mosque in Mosul late Wednesday, Iraq’s military said, destroying the site where Islamic State’s leader first announced the creation of a self-declared caliphate straddling Iraq and Syria.

They did it purely out of petty, venal spite.  Blowing up the place served no useful purpose, not even in the twisted minds of these Daesh barbarians.