Tag Archives: political parties

Legitimate Terrorism

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Because if you angrify the terrorists in a specific way, their response is justifiable anger.

That’s what the motorboat skipper who sits in the Secretary of State’s chair is saying, John Kerry, anyway.

There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of—not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that.

No, not everyone. Certainly not anyone with any capability to discriminate evil from good. Only someone blind to reality, someone like a John Kerry, would feel that.

Thirteen more months of this sewage. And of the damage this…person…will cause.

Hillary Clinton and Minority Students

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In another flip-flop evolution of belief, Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has decided she’s against charter schools, since she was for them before the unions the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers endorsed her.

Most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them. And so the public schools are often in a no-win situation[.]

Of course, this isn’t true, but hey—union endorsement. The facts, though, as noted by The Wall Street Journal at the link are these [emphasis added]:

Charters don’t exclude difficult students. Like other public schools, they aren’t allowed to discriminate. Nearly every state requires a random lottery to choose students if there are more applicants than openings. The reason some charters turn away students is that they lack the resources to accommodate every desperate family trapped in a teachers-union compound.

Charters serve some of the most troubled students, including a higher percentage in poverty than all public schools, according to Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes. In urban centers in particular, charters serve mostly minority students and include more who are learning English than do public schools as a whole.

The question arises: what has Clinton against minority students, students whose parents choose charter schools over other public schools in order to get an actual education?

The answer is clear: students don’t vote, and unions do.

Democrats and the VA

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I’ve written a number of times about the Veterans Administration and the need to get rid of this dysfunctional government entity.

Now we get Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton doubling down on this failed VA and on her desire to expand Big Government further and to extend crony capitalism to a new arena.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is offering her vision for veterans’ health care, promising to fight full-fledged privatization while proposing the government contract with private providers for a range of health services.

Government has shown its incompetence in matters of health (among others), so her answer—the typical Progressive Democrat answer—is to have more of it. Crony capitalism has shown its profitability for politicians of any stripe, so this Progress Democrat wants more of that pie for herself. She wants Big Government to stay involved in the health care of our nation’s veterans, but she wants to shift that involvement to the health providers her administration will favor.

This would be foolishness if it weren’t dishonesty.

Veteranos administratio delende est.

Troops to Eastern Europe

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Senior US military leaders have proposed sending more forces into Europe on a rotating basis to build up the American presence and are stepping up training exercises to counter potential Russian interference with troop transfers in the event of a crisis with Moscow.

In particular, the proposed moves are into eastern Europe to serve as a more blatant deterrent to Russian President Vladimir Putin. General Mark Milley, US Army Chief of Staff said over the weekend

Aggression left unanswered is likely to lead to more aggression[.]

This has been made manifest by our lack of response to seven years of growing aggression by a variety of our enemies—Russia, the PRC, in the Middle East.

Of course, such a thing takes time and money: basing and exercise agreements have to be reached with the host/receiving nations, the added rotations have to be budgeted and paid for, an administration has to find the will actually to face up to our enemies.

Two of those things, though, need to be gotten started on promptly. The third likely will have to wait on elections. In the meantime, the Russian clock is ticking.

A Look at Dodd-Frank

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Banks are having trouble peddling risky loans they’ve made in conjunction with the current (and dying down?) mergers and acquisition boom. These are loans made when one company buys another for their mutual benefit, and the buyer borrows some or most of the purchase price.

Here’s the kicker:

In past decades, banks sometimes held the loans until markets stabilized, but such warehousing became prohibitively expensive because of high capital charges required under the Dodd-Frank law that was passed in response to the 2008 financial crisis.

If it becomes too difficult or expensive to borrow—or to lend—to support a merger/acquisition, those deals won’t get done.

Often, the target of the deal is a company in trouble, and the deal would save some or all of the company by merging it with a stronger company that has better management and/or more efficient processes. The deal thereby also saves a large number of jobs (not all—that’ll be part of the improved efficiency in the acquiree). The deal also winds up being beneficial to the consumer as the acquiree’s products or services both continue to be available and often at a lower price.

If the deals aren’t done, those jobs won’t get saved, and the goods and services won’t continue to be available.

Will these lost mergers/acquisitions be a big deal for our struggling economy? I don’t know. But I am very certain that those who passed Dodd-Frank didn’t give an iota of thought to the possibility.