Tag Archives: morality

Democratic Party Principle

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A couple days ago, one of Obamacare’s primary architects, Jonathan Gruber, said this about the need for the tactics used in order to get the thing passed.

This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in—you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed…. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass…. Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.

Despicable as that is, though, what really bothers me are two other things.

In a subsequent interview with MSNBC‘s Ronan Farrow, Gruber had this exchange with Farrow regarding those remarks:

“Do you stand by the comments in that video?,” MSNBC host Ronan Farrow asked Gruber, referring to a video of Gruber explaining how a lack of transparency helped Obamacare pass into law.

“The comments in the video were made at an academic conference,” Gruber said. “I was speaking off the cuff and I basically spoke inappropriately and I regret having made those comments.”

Notice that: Gruber regrets the remarks, but he does not at all regret the underlying principle he espoused. He stands by his claim that Americans are too stupid to understand the issues at hand, and he stands by his claim that it’s entirely appropriate to lie to us in order to get his way.

The other thing that bothers me is the lack of senior Democratic Party officials’ repudiation of Gruber’s underlying principle. I’ve not seen even any rank and file Democrat repudiating it. Apparently, this is a principle of the Democratic Party at large—we’re dumb, and it’s OK to lie to us to get past the impediment to their policy enactment that our dumbness presents.

Anything to Avoid Controversy

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The Montgomery County school board voted Tuesday to eliminate all references to religious holidays on school calendars, beginning in the 2015-16 school year. That includes Christmas and Easter, as well as Jewish holidays like Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah.

Their excuse? The board superintendent, Joshua Starr, said the board should remove all religious holiday references because local Muslim leaders had requested equal billing for Eid al-Adha.

The Muslim leaders’ request might hold water were there a significant number of Muslim students in the district. However, in response to these leaders’ own request that “families…keep students home on Eid al-Adha,” the absentee rate on the appointed day wasn’t different from any other day’s absentee rate.

Aside from that, though, this board simply chose to surrender the community’s Judeo-Christian heritage in order to avoid controversy.

What lesson is these folks’ timidity teaching those children?

Teachers Union Misbehavior

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In a case before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ten teachers say the California Teachers Association, an affiliate of the National Education Association, forces them to participate in collective bargaining, whether they’re union members or not; pressures teachers to campaign for selected political candidates, whether the teachers actually support the candidate or not; and collects union dues, whether the collectee is a union member or not.

Under California state law, a union that is recognized as the exclusive bargaining representative for a school district, such as the CTA, can enter into an organizational security or “agency shop agreement which, in lay terms, means that while it is not mandatory for a teacher in the district to become a member of the local union, they must pay fees to the union for it to negotiate on their behalf. The rule is a condition of employment for all teachers.

Financially, this doesn’t involve chump change, either:

CTA members and non-members alike pay the full annual dues, which total around $1,000, with non-members only able to request reimbursement of the portion deemed separate from bargaining expenses.

The union does the deeming, too.

This is an affront to dignity, to individual liberty. This caps individual freedom of opportunity by taking the fruits of an individual’s labor for another’s purpose without the taken-from’s permission. This denies the individual his opportunity to cut his own deal with his employer. This demands an individual perform tasks to which he has not agreed, which are not part of his contract, and for which he is not paid.

This is a denial of opportunity by making even the chance of that labor conditioned on the power to take or to compel.

It’s union abuse.

Another Assault on Privacy

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This time by a major cellular telephone company: Verizon.

…it has emerged that Verizon Wireless has been silently tracking around 100 million mobile customers using a supercookie that can’t be opted out of.

This is an especially nefarious invasion: the “cookie” lets Verizon track your movements on the Web—every page. And they then peddle that information to any advertiser willing to pay up.

Indeed, “supercookie” is a bit of a misnomer. Cookies store stuff on your computer that Web sites that you visit use when you revisit them. Often, it’s useful and beneficial information: how you like that Web site presented, for instance, or login information (beneficial only if it’s a convenience to read an article, and not giving access to your financial or other personal information to that site), and so on.

This thing, instead, enters the stream of information being exchanged between your browser and the Web site and

injects a new HTTP header every time you visit a website. Not just Verizon websites—any web resource that is accessed via Verizon’s network (i.e. everything). This header, called X-UIDH, contains a unique identifier that’s tied to your Verizon account. Your web browser (or any other app on your phone that uses HTTP) always receives this header with your unique ID—there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

Three things make this even worse than it sounds.

  • they didn’t tell you about it
  • you can’t block it or even opt out
  • not only Verizon can use the resulting information—any third party can access it

Verizon says it’s only on their cellular network, only using your Web accesses via your cell phone. So far.

It’s unconscionable that a major company would pull such a stunt; although it’s sadly common. It’s unlikely that Verizon will stop this invasion. It’s necessary, then, to get onto your newly elected and minted Congressman and…encourage…him or her to look into this and to legislate to protect our privacy.

What Emails?

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They can’t be there, because I didn’t look for them. If they had been there, I’d have looked.

Attorneys for the IRS have told a federal court that they have not searched various “other sources” for the missing emails of former agency official Lois Lerner, claiming that doing so would be fruitless.

… The IRS has said that potentially thousands of emails belonging to Lerner, a central figure in the agency’s targeting of conservative groups, were lost in a hard drive crash in 2011.
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[T]he IRS said that it did not search the agency’s servers for the emails because it determined doing so “would not result in the recovery of any information.”

So there.

And

In addition, the IRS said did not search the agency’s disaster recovery tapes because the tapes are reused or destroyed every six months, therefore rendering them useless in the hunt for Lerner’s emails from or before 2011.

It’s time to impound the servers and conduct a forensic search. Time, also, to arrest the IRS officials involved. This willful destruction is a violation of the Federal Records Act, which

requires executive branch departments and agencies to collect, retain, and preserve federal records, which provide the Administration, Congress, and the public with a history of public policy execution and its results..

It’s also evidence tampering.