Tag Archives: political parties

It Must Be Dissolved

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Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, that is. Consider this example of its egregious behavior. When one of CFPB’s internal judges decided that

a New Jersey lender [PHH Corp] took illegal “kickbacks” from mortgage insurers, boosting costs for borrowers[,]

he fined the company $6 million. PHH appealed.

Richard Cordray, Director of the CFPB, took personal charge of the case and raised the penalty to $109 million. How dare a private company dispute with the CFPB!?

This abuse of power, even a power that the Democratic Party-controlled House and Senate conferred on the CFPB, together with a budget consisting of a blank check drawn on the Federal Reserve Bank System, when they created this thing six years ago, is a clear demonstration of the need to get rid of the CFPB and everything and everyone associated with it.

PHH’s case has been appealed to the DC Circuit, but there’s no need to wait. Get rid of this abusive, unaccountable board. Put this abusive, unaccountable Boyar out of a job.

Party vs Party

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I’ve been on about a critical difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party in past posts. The difference of interest is in each Party’s belief in actual (republican) democracy: the Democrats prefer to settle deals behind closed doors and out of the public’s eye, and the Republicans are not at all timid about having their discussions out loud and out in front of their constituents and American voters generally. One Party talks democracy; the other Party lives it.

Here is that difference made manifest. Iowa Caucus‘ table lays out, side by side, the two Party’s procedures for running a caucus. It’s a long-ish table; I’ll summarize the salient points here.

Both parties use straw votes at caucus centers to identify Party voter preferences for candidates.

The Republican caucus has no minimum threshold for a candidate to get a delegate selection from the caucuses. There’s no guarantee that the succeeding conventions within Iowa will use the results of the straw poll for formal selection of delegates to the Party’s national convention, but there’s no pressure not to.

The Democrat caucus actively silences minority candidates—anyone with less than 15% of the caucus-goers’ support can kiss his role in the Iowa contest good-bye: he’s disqualified. Further, those caucus-goers who amount to that less than 15% support are actively pressured to change their allegiance to another candidate. It gets…better: that 15% threshold and active pressure to change allegiance carries through to every stage of formal Iowa delegate selection for the Democrats’ national convention.

So much for the value of the little guy’s input.

“Honest and Dishonest Socialism”

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That’s the name of a recent Wall Street Journal piece. The article centers on Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s version of socialism, fueled with her dishonest ad hominem attacks on her primary rival for the Democratic Party nomination, and Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator (D, VT) Bernie Sanders, that rival, and his purer and more honest (and deliberately ad hominem-free) version of socialism. As the piece puts it,

The difference between Mr Sanders and Mrs Clinton is political character. He’s a sincere socialist who follows his principles, however unrealistic or calamitous, to their logical conclusions. Mrs Clinton will conceal her true ambitions if that’s what it takes to win, and she’ll drop on her opponents any political anvils that happen to be handy.

And

As President, Mrs Clinton would head in Bernie’s direction only more slowly.

Socialism is, itself, wholly dishonest, though. It robs and cheats men out of their property, out of their ability to show the best that is in them, out of their right to see to the fulfillment of their opportunities. Socialism robs men of their lives.

A measure of redistribution of the outcomes from fulfilling those opportunities? Our Judeo-Christian obligations to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves and to help those who are less well off than others of us encourage us to see to that. Such obligations can only come from the instructions of God, though. These are constant and easily understood.

No government of men can pretend to impose such obligations, nor can any government of men hope to constancy. Indeed, after a very short period, government imposed obligations become so byzantine that even the men of government cannot understand what they have done, much less those of us who must live under such burdens.

Worse, very quickly government imposed redistribution obligations—government imposed obligations of any sort—will evolve to benefit, in particular, those men of government and their associates, to the detriment of the rest of us. Judeo-Christian, or not.

Thin Skins

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A new dispute flared Thursday between the Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns: whether Mr Sanders broke his promise not to air TV attack ads.

At issue was a 30-second spot [“Two Visions”] the Sanders campaign will air in Iowa and New Hampshire suggesting that Mrs Clinton’s practice of taking campaign money from Wall Street undercuts her ability to police these firms.

The ad can be seen here.

That’s not an attack ad. That’s a contrast of policies.

Talk about fragile. Haven’t we had enough of that in the White House?

Two Mistakes

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One by folks on the far right and one by The Wall Street Journal. South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley (R) gave the Republicans’ response to President Barack Obama’s vaporous SOTU.

Her conservative critics unloaded. “Trump should deport Nikki Haley” went one tweet. The next morning on Fox & Friends, Donald Trump declared that Gov Haley is “very weak on immigration.”

Of course, these are slurs and comments utterly devoid of facts, as the WSJ noted.

The woman who says “illegal immigration is not welcome in South Carolina?” Who signed a law toughening the state’s illegal immigration reform act, which requires employers to verify the immigration status of new hires? Who has fought President Obama’s bid to resettle unvetted Syrian refugees? And whose state has joined 16 others in a lawsuit against Mr Obama for what they say is his unconstitutional executive order on illegal immigration?

But then the WSJ committed its own error.

A party that rejects Nikki Haley as a spokeswoman is one that doesn’t really want to build a governing majority.

Conflating these criticizers with Republicans also is a claim devoid of fact, beyond the most narrow, literal sense.