Tag Archives: politics

It Already Is

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European diplomats warned Monday that Iran is preparing to abandon parts of a landmark nuclear deal in response to new US sanctions….

It’s a vapid fear, and only the EU’s foreign affairs diplomats could be so…naïve.

Iran already is violating the nuclear weapons agreement, and it has been all along.

A senior European diplomat said Iranian officials have been considering a partial withdrawal from some parts of the multination accord….

This would only publicly formalize Iran’s behavior.  Consider, for instance:

Iran’s ballistic missile tests and satellite launches explicitly allow testing nuclear warhead carriers, guidance systems, rocket engine capabilities, and a host of other capabilities related to delivery of nuclear warheads.

No one is allowed to inspect Iran’s military sites, which is where weapons development occurs.

For those sites Iran does allow to be inspected, there must be long-lead time notice given prior to any inspection, which allows Iran’s developers to clean up after themselves before the inspectors arrive.

Not that much of this matters, anyway, beyond timing.  The nuclear weapons deal only held up—supposedly—Iran’s development for a few years, after which it will be free to develop (and subsequently to employ, as it has said it would do) all the nuclear weapons it wanted.

Licensing Illegality

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The New York State Assembly wants to give drivers licenses to illegal aliens. The New York Immigration Coalition is completely on board and has begun pressuring the State’s Senate leadership to rubberstamp the Assembly on this. These Progressive-Democrats and their activist supporters rationalize the move this way:

He [NYIC Executive Director Steve Choi] said issuing licenses to immigrants would reduce hit-and-run-vehicle crashes, lower insurance costs and make it easier for immigrant laborers—including those working on farms—to get to work.

This is nonsense. Illegal aliens still will run from their accidents—they’re still illegal, and they would face arrest and deportation if they hung around.  This, in turn, means the license move will have little to no effect on insurance costs—just as, for instance, illegal aliens have little to no impact on the costs of other forms of insurance.

As to the other foolish claim, immigrant laborers already have no trouble getting to work, including to farm work. Only illegal aliens have this trouble. The illegal aliens could correct this problem, though, by (re)entering legally.

On that last, there is a valid beef: it takes entirely too long to get legal entry permission, and the caps on legal entry are far too low.  These, though, are not addressed at all by drivers licensing.

Medicare for All

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Senator and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (I [sic], VT) has the canonical version of Medicare for All; the other Progressive-Democrat candidates have only slightly varied versions of it.  Here’s Sanders on his Next Big Idea for health care provision and health care coverage:

You will have a card which has Medicare on it, you’ll go to any doctor that you want, you’ll go to any hospital that you want.

Right.  Been there, done that.  Both claims were straight up lies then, too.  There is a major difference, though, between Sanders’ two lies and ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) two lies: Sanders would make private insurance illegal—both the selling and the possessing.  That, though, only potentiates the power of Sanders’ lies.

As The Wall Street Journal mentioned on the other side of the link,

The point of Medicare for All is to cut reimbursement rates to Medicare levels, which government can now set so low only because private commercial reimbursement rates are so much higher. Cutting reimbursement rates would “probably reduce the amount of care supplied and could also reduce the quality of care,” CBO says.

Not could—would.  Reducing availability cannot help but reduce quality, if only from denying it altogether to many who need it or would merely benefit from it.  But that’s not the only pathway: that reduction in availability will flow, at least in large part, from that reduction in reimbursement rates.  As a result of that, those doctors and hospitals whose talents and skills warrant higher pay will limit their practices to the bare minimum.

That’s not out of personal greed, either: costs of care delivery go up markedly as the number of patients go up.  Absent meeting costs with fees charged, these providers would have no choice but to limit their costs by limiting their services and the numbers of potential patients served.

There’s another cost path, too: the more complex or difficult, or even merely rare, a medical problem, the more expensive it is to provide services for dealing with it.  Capped reimbursements will limit the availability of that care. And—lower reimbursement rates again—lower the quality of those providers willing to provide the care.

Disarmament

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The Progressive-Democratic Party wants to disarm us. That’s made clear by Party Presidential candidate and Senator Cory “Spartacus” Booker’s (NJ) gun control plan.  Senator Spartacus wants, among other requirements [emphasis added]:

  • prospective gun owners must prove to the FBI that they’ve completed a gun-safety course to obtain a federal gun license
  • that federal license would be required to purchase a firearm
  • a federal background check on virtually all sales
  • the federal license would be good for only five years
  • current firearm owners would have to get this federal license, also
  • limit handgun purchases limited to one per person per month

This can only be taken as an assault on the federal republican nature of our nation and a backdoor assault on our 2nd Amendment.

Background checks already are required by the feds in order to purchase a firearm.  States already require licenses—which themselves carry safety courses as part of the licensing procedure—in order to carry firearms on public property (a couple of States have Constitutional Carry capabilities, instead).

No, this expansion of background checks and federalizing the licensing requirement can only be for building a Federal database of who has weapons.

Background checks to screen prospective owners and buyers for felony records can be useful—at the State level—but when the checks are used to build a database of weapons owners, which is the only purpose for requiring existing firearms owners with their proven track records, to get federally licensed, those checks become a lethal danger to individual liberty. Such databases are too easily used by governments at all levels of jurisdictions (the Federal level is only the most powerful) to seize legally owned weapons under any guise that seems convenient—whether an “emergency” or a claimed domestic violence threat.

Even the domestic violence bit might seem legitimate, but for the process for the accused to get his weapons back and government’s demonstrated intransigence in returning other seized property after the seizure has been deemed erroneous.  One has only to look at the lengthy nature of the proceedings for getting weapons back.  One has only to look at the outright refusal of jurisdictions to return confiscated vehicles, even cash, seized under drug or money laundering claims proven erroneous.

Avoid Debate

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It might make some folks uncomfortable.  That seems to be the position of Lance Morrow, a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, in his Wall Street Journal piece.  After all, goes the subhead on his piece:

It would push the country to angrier extremes on either side, stimulating fresh antagonisms.

Morrow urged us all to “stop and think” about the implications of having a debate, here on the matter of reparations for past slavery-related transgressions.

The notion may be too volatile to indulge in a presidential-campaign year.

Leaving aside Morrow’s other major concern—

By pressing the issue they may ensure the re-election of Donald Trump….

—the question remains: if not now, when?  Apparently, “later.”

Better to keep monsters, old and new, locked in the basement, and to let the conversation upstairs in the living room be as genteel as possible—even hypocritical. In matters of race hate, candor is overrated. Hypocrisy may be the moral way to go—until, as time passes, people become more civilized.

Yeah, it’s better just to let the matter fester, building to a later, vaster explosion.

Sure.