Tag Archives: political parties

The Feds Want to be in your Child’s School Bathroom

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…right along with anyone else confused about who should or should not be there.

The Obama administration will send a letter to every public school district in the country telling them to allow transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that match their chosen gender identity, as opposed to their birth certificate.

President Barack Obama (D) threatened in his letter to withhold Federal funding for those school districts impertinent enough to not comply with his decree.  South Dakota v Dole might have an impact on his threat, but Obama has never let legitimacy get in the way of his edicts, and this is another lame duck/what’re-you-gonna-do-about-it-in-my-last-8-months example.

The Obama letter includes this gem:

As is consistently recognized in civil rights cases, the desire to accommodate others’ discomfort cannot justify a policy that singles out and disadvantages a particular class of students[.]

The class of students that consists of straight boys and girls don’t matter, though.  They need to check their privilege at the bathroom door.

An Arms Race

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And we should welcome it.

Russia is creating three new divisions to counter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s planned expansion along its eastern flank, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Wednesday, in a move that comes amid rising tensions in the region.

Moscow has threatened it will respond to NATO plans to boost its troops’ presence along its border with Russia.  Western officials said last week the alliance will send four battalions—about 4,000 troops—to Poland and the ex-Soviet Baltic countries.

These three divisions are being created, in part, by adding men and equipment, and they’re being created, in part, by reassigning men and equipment from existing units.  It’s the latter that’s instructive.

With the Russian economy in shambles—among other shortfalls, it needs oil priced above $100, remember, the ruble still is in the tank, and inflation remains high and growing—it can ill-afford the expansion on which it’s embarking.  In addition to these “new” divisions, Russia is spending its money on modernizing its military, developing and deploying nuclear weapons near the Baltics and Poland (since before it began creating these three divisions), supporting its occupation forces in Georgia and Ukraine, and on and on.  Although Russia certainly can sustain its buildup for a time, it can’t go on indefinitely.

We should welcome this arms race.  We should accelerate our technological developments and production.  We should answer those three divisions with further deployments into eastern Europe, with an expansion of our Baltic fleet (which we should move deeper into the eastern reaches of the Baltic Sea), and with arms transfers and sales to Ukraine and Georgia.  Every buildup by Russia should be answered with a bigger, more technologically capable one by us.

The Soviet Union couldn’t sustain its arms race; neither can Russia.  It will take an administration different from the current one or its potential Progressive-Democratic successor to engage, though.

Obamacare Strikes Yet Again

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Insurers will seek significant premium hikes under President Barack Obama’s health care law this summer….
…
For example, in Virginia, a state that reports early, nine insurers returning to the HealthCare.gov marketplace are seeking average premium increases that range from 9.4% to 37.1%.

And

The health law’s nagging problems center on lower-than-hoped-for enrollment, sicker-than-expected customers, and a balky internal stabilization system that didn’t deliver as advertised and was already scheduled to be pared back next year.

Who is truly surprised by this?  Oh, yeah….

Minimum Wage Laws and Special Groups Impact

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Fast-food workers and civil rights groups in Birmingham, AL, are mounting a constitutional challenge to a recent state law that bars cities from setting their own higher minimum wages, alleging the law violates the workers civil rights.

The plaintiffs filed a federal lawsuit Thursday against the state’s Republican Gov Robert Bentley, claiming the bill he signed into law in February was tainted with “racial animus” toward the predominantly African-American city.

One of the lawsuit’s main claims is that the state law disproportionately impacts minority residents who live and work in Birmingham, many in low-wage, fast-food industry jobs that leave them impoverished and on public assistance.

Using their own logic, minimum wage laws, having as they do a disproportionate impact on minorities, on single mothers, and on teens (especially minority teens, but teens generally) are themselves tainted with “racial animus,” “gender animus,” yes, even “age animus.”

Hmm….

Minimum Wage Revisited

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Kevin Williamson, at National Review, had a thought that’s only now percolating to the surface of thinking Americans and that still is avoided by the American Left.

Properly understood, raising the minimum wage—and having a minimum wage at all—is camouflage, something to talk about and fight about while we’re not talking about and fighting about the more important underlying issue.  Declaring that all American workers shall be paid at least $15 an hour is not the same as ensuring that all American workers produce $15 an hour worth of value, and, eventually, the disconnect between those two considerations must make itself felt.

That part is well understood, and that’s a part that is deliberately ignored by the Left.  But there’s this, too.

Krugman, Clinton, Sanders, et al., have a backward and primitive view of government.  For them and for their fellow Hobbesians, the Middle Ages never really ended, and the role of the sovereign is to distribute benefices and issue decrees.  Unhappy with your wages?  Petition the prince to decree that they shall be otherwise, and dare any gimlet-eyed economist to point out that the imperial tailor is skimping on the ermine.

Yeah.  Minimum wage mandates are just an excuse for governing by fiat, for substituting rule by law for rule of law.

Williamson took a more gentle position on that; he suggested that it’s a lack of understanding by minimum wage proponents of the facts of economics and of human complexity.

I don’t think the leadership of the Left is that ignorant, or that naïve.  They know full well the facts of economics and of human complexity.  That’s why they carefully elide those things enroute to their rule by (Left’s) law: minimum wage mandates are a tool, not a goal.