Tag Archives: morality

Bad Tactics

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On the subject of removing Federal funding from Planned Parenthood, there’s no shortage of bad tactics floating about.

The conservative (note: small “c” conservative) wing of the Republican Party want to shut down the Federal government until they get the President to sign a defunding bill, whether in stand-alone or as part of the Federal budget. Never mind that they have no plan whatsoever for selling the shutdown to the public, they want to have their toddler’s temper tantrum.

On the other side of the question, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) seems excessively timid even to try.

The way you make a law in this country (is) the Congress has to pass it, and the president has to sign it.

The president’s made it very clear he’s not going to sign any bill that includes defunding of Planned Parenthood—so that’s another issue that awaits a new president hopefully with a different point of view.

It may be true that it’ll take a different President to sign a bill that defunds Planned Parenthood. One important step on the path to getting a different President is for Congress to defund Planned Parenthood and force President Barack Obama to veto it. And then use that plain, immoral obstruction to get a decent President elected.

One wing of the Republican Party needs badly to grow up. Another wing of the Republican Party needs just as badly to grow some backbone.

Values and Mottoes

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The Freedom from Religion Foundation is at it again.

It seems the Childress, TX, Chief of Police has committed the evil crime of putting the nation’s motto, In God We Trust, on the town’s police cars.

This is some sort of affront to constitutionally mandated freedom of religion, according to the FRFF—whose name gives away the game: freedom from religion, not freedom of religion. I suppose the US as a whole is an affront to freedom, what with that motto, and all.

Gary Parsons, Lee County, VA, sheriff, who did the same thing with his department’s cars, is on the right track.

It’s not only a symbol of moral values but also a symbol of patriotism[.]

Especially that first part: the motto and its presence on cop cars is an espousal of morality, not of religion.

Therein lies FRFF’s dishonesty and hypocrisy. Rather than that particular set of moral values, FRFF is seeking to impose its own moral values on all of us. It’s also seeking to impose its own religion—the religion of atheism—on all of us.

Assisting Refugees

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The surge of refugees fleeing Syria and other war-torn regions is putting immense pressure not only on Europe but also the United States, as the Obama administration faces calls to take a more active role in the humanitarian crisis.

We’re supposed to accept 65,000-ish refugees from Syria and “other war-torn regions.” Congressman Michael McCaul (R, TX), House Homeland Security Committee Chairman, is on the right track:

Despite all evidence towards our homeland’s vulnerability to foreign fighters, the administration still plans to resettle Syrian refugees into the United States. America has a proud tradition of welcoming refugees from around the world, but in this special situation the Obama administration’s Syrian refugee plan is very dangerous.

Indeed. Aside from our inability to afford the expense of the flood and our empirically demonstrated inability to properly house large influxes of refugees, too many of these are unvetted and not refugees at all.

Anne Richard, State’s Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, disagrees.

[T]hese cases are the most carefully vetted of any travelers to the United States, and nobody comes in without having a Department of Homeland Security interviewer agree that they are, in fact, bona fide refugees.

Personally vetted by a DHS interviewer. Yeah—unvetted. And that leaves aside the disingenuousness of applying that claim to a flood of 65,000. With fewer thousands of alien families on our southern border that have been cooped up on that border for months, to the point a Federal judge had to order their release (vetted or not, a problem for a separate writing), because DHS couldn’t figure out how to do that on its own.

No. If Europe, and the United States, really gave a rat’s behind about the plight of these refugees, we’d get out of our comfortable ivory towers and work the problem at its origin: the countries from which these refugees are flooding. Otherwise, the flood will continue unabated.

And refugees and those unable to leave will continue to suffer.

Dishonest, and Insulting

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Not only is Clinton dishonest, now she’s actively insulting Americans.

She’s sorry she confused us with her personal email while she was sitting in the SecState chair because we’re just too grindingly stupid to understand her explanations.

Oh, and Clinton did all her Senate business via her personal email, too, she told Andrea Mitchell in the same interview (Mitchell blithely ignored that little tidbit).

Oh, again: she says she takes responsibility for using her personal email server. But having done nothing with that responsibility, her “taking” of it is just cynically empty rhetoric.

An Excerpt

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…from a VA Office of the Inspector General report.

We substantiated the second allegation that pending ES [Enrollment System] records included entries for individuals reported to be deceased. As of September 2014, more than 307,000 pending ES records, or about 35 percent of all pending records, were for individuals reported as deceased by the Social Security Administration. However, due to data limitations, we could not determine specifically how many pending ES records represent veterans who applied for health care benefits. These conditions occurred because the enrollment program did not effectively define, collect, and manage enrollment data. In addition, VHA lacked adequate procedures to identify date of death information and implement necessary updates to the individual’s status. Unless VHA officials establish effective procedures to identify deceased individuals and accurately update their status, ES will continue to provide unreliable information on the status of applications for veterans seeking enrollment in the VA health care system.

Not only is the VA not trying to take care of our vets—307,000 of them died waiting to get treatment—they’re not even troubling themselves to keep records.

We substantiated the third allegation that employees incorrectly marked unprocessed applications as completed and possibly deleted 10,000 or more transactions from the Workload Reporting and Productivity (WRAP) tool over the past 5 years.

They do, though, go to the effort of covering up their non-performance (I hesitate to say “failure to perform;” that would suggest they’re trying).

And there’s this insulting bit of vapidity from the Under Secretary for Health in response to the IG’s report (the whole letter is at Appendix D of the report at the link. It doesn’t get any better).

We regret the inconvenience and potential hardship place on applicants for health care and we are working hard to restore Veterans’ confidence and trust in VA’s systems and staff. We have and will continue to take timely and appropriate steps to improve our services to ensure we meet the expectations of those whom we have the honor of serving.

Yeah, dying while on the VA’s who gives a patootie wait list is such a potentially inconvenient hardship.

Since the VA doesn’t care, we should honor their lack of interest. Disband the VA, and use the budget dollars that would have gone to the VA in any particular year as vouchers for our veterans which they can find, in that year, their own quality care and decent hospitals.