Tag Archives: politics

A Mistake

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Would a partitioned Iraq be a better pawn for Iran?  Or would a freed-up, independent Iraqi Kurdistan serve as a buffer to mitigate Iranian influence in the area—and an impediment to an Iranian road to Damascus and on to Latakia and Tartus on the Mediterranean Sea?  And an impediment to that road, passing as it would, right by Israel via Hezbollah?

An Iraq weakened by the partition would be easy prey for Iran?  No, that’s a wash for the weakened Iraq that’s already in Iranian sway, via all those Shiite “militias” that are funded and armed by Iran’s terror support organ, the Iranian Republican Guards Corps.

Recall two things: one is the Peshmerga and their courage and battlefield skill and tenacity in rescuing Yazidis from a mountain “island” during the initial Daesh barbarians’ rout of the Iraqi “army,” in stopping the barbarians’ rush east into Kurdish Iraq, in helping clear Mosul, and other events and campaigns.

The other thing is that all of this was done without support from Baghdad, done even with active Baghdad obstruction of US arms going to the Kurds so they could better fight the Daesh, who already were armed with American heavy weapons, courtesy of the Iraqi “army” which had abandoned all of that as they abandoned their duty and ran south before the Daesh, like grains of sand on a desert wind.

Now President Donald Trump is professing American neutrality as Baghdad, supported by Iranian forces (those “militia”) and Iranian weapons, moves into territories liberated by the Kurds from the Daesh and seeks to subjugate the Kurds, once again, to Baghdad’s diktat.

We don’t like the fact that they’re clashing.  …  We’re not taking sides.

And: what is the stability in the region before Iran’s advances with Iraq riven by civil war rather than stabilized by a settled Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan?

Where would an Iraqi Kurdistan, or even a subjugated Kurdish region, be regarding its policy toward the US were we to betray them in the present situation, as we betrayed them after the first Gulf War, implying they should revolt against a surviving Saddam Hussein government only to stand by while he gassed them into submission?

And there’s this bit from a Wall Street Journal editorial:

A central tenet of the Trump foreign policy, a work in progress, has been that the US would rebuild its relationship with America’s allies.

Who are the Kurds, if not an American ally?  Who are the Kurds, if not one of the staunchest allies we’ve had?

Health Plan Providers Are Concerned

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These providers, which surprisingly The Wall Street Journal misapprehends as insurers, are bracing for a drop in enrollment in the ongoing health plan provision program “turmoil.”  There’s this key passage in the article at the link:

[M]any firms say they expect to lose consumers who will bear the full brunt of the rate increases—those who aren’t eligible for the health law’s premium subsidies, which help enrollees with annual incomes of less than around $48,000.

Yet it’s the “health law” that exploded health plan costs—premiums and deductibles, especially—by mandating coverage for things citizens don’t need or don’t want and by mandating that many of those coverages be provided at no cost to the plan purchaser.  This has led to a burial of many of those costs into the charges made rather than listing them openly as separate line items on the charge sheet and a parallel creation of the claimed need for the subsidies.

Those costs put a premium on getting rid of Obamacare and replacing it with a private economy program of market oriented, actual health insurance policies sold by private companies not fettered by Federal government diktats.

That, in turn, requires three self-important Republican Senators to get with the program.  Senators John McCain (AZ), Lisa Murkowski (AK), and Susan Collins (ME), especially, need to hear about our dismay with their reticence—and on a national scale.  These worthies are responsible to their State constituencies, to be sure, but the US Senate is a national body; these Senators also have a national constituency to whom they’re responsible, for all that the rest of us don’t vote for them.

Colin Kaepernick’s Lawfare “Protest”

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After being unable to get a job with any team in the NFL this season, Colin Kaepernick has filed a formal grievance against the NFL, each of the 32 team owners, and President Donald Trump—who supposedly “influenced” league management and team owners into not hiring him—alleging that they colluded to not sign him at quarterback, or end-of-bench monitor, this season.

Coincidentally, his filing comes after a year in which he routinely attacked our flag and national anthem and insulted our veterans by taking a knee during the pre-game playing of our national anthem.  Also coincidentally, his filing comes after a year in which he led his last employer, the San Francisco 49ers, to a 1-10 record before the team tired of losing and benched him.

Let’s set aside Kaepernick’s beef against Trump.  Aside from being utterly laughable, it casually insults the team owners as being cowards unable to run their businesses in the face of a Presidential tweet parade.  That’s a minor point.

What illustrates the risible nature of Kaepernick’s grievance is its centering on his free speech rights and his claim that he’s been blackballed as a result of his so-called protests.

Carefully elided is everyone else’s free speech right to object to his behavior, just as vociferously, including with ticket dollars and TV viewing.  This particularly includes team owners, who don’t give up their free speech rights to respond in the same forum to Kaepernick’s, et al., free speech “protests.”

Also: a private company employee’s free speech rights, within very broad limits, are matters of employment contract parameters. The 1st Amendment limits Government, not private entities.

Beyond all of that, neither a broad functional consensus—paralleling the fans’ broad consensus—of owners disliking this particular misbehavior, nor a separate broad functional consensus that employees publicly disparaging our national symbols and insulting those who fought to defend them is bad for business, even remotely approach collusion.

There is no case in this lawfare assault.

The National Association of Realtors Objects

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The NAR is objecting to the current tax reform plan’s essential doubling of the standard deduction to $12,000 for single filers and to $24,000 for married couples.

The Realtors are upset because they say this middle-class tax cut would make fewer taxpayers use the mortgage-interest deduction. The National Association of Realtors trashed the framework in a statement, saying it “would all but nullify the incentive to purchase a home for most, amounting to a de facto tax increase” and ensure “that only the top 5% of Americans have the opportunity to benefit from the mortgage interest deduction.”

This is beyond disingenuous; it’s dishonest.

Doubling the standard deduction to $24,000 leaves an extra $12,000 in that family’s take-home income. That means that that family can accumulate a 20% down payment on a $240,000 home (in well-off Plano, TX, real estate market, that works out to a roughly 2,300-2,600 sq ft, 4-bedroom home) in just four years, instead of forever. That’s a strong incentive to buy a home—and these folks, shorn of the mortgage interest deduction as the NAR bleats, are not in those 5%.  They wouldn’t need the “benefit from the mortgage interest deduction.”

Oh, wait—that family might choose to replace their beater with a new, or a newer used, car that would be cheaper to run instead of buying a house. The family could pay cash for that car, rather than borrow for it, in just two years.

NAR knows all of this.

Shortsighted

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President Donald Trump is, IMNSHO, misunderstanding the role of diplomacy in a shooting conflict. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said,

He’s (Trump) not seeking to go to war.  He has made it clear to me to continue my diplomatic efforts…until the first bomb drops.

Of course, war should be a last resort, not a never resort, and Trump understands that.  But to say that diplomacy ends when the shooting starts, is mistaken.  Diplomacy doesn’t only shape the coming battlefield during a prior period of peace and during the runup to the fight.  It also shapes the battlefield during the fight: both directly with its (however minimal) impact on the enemy belligerents, but also on the periphery and the far field surrounding the battlefield through its impact on our allies, our enemy’s allies, and on neutrals.

It’s that diplomacy that affects the fight itself and, at least as importantly, sets the stage for post-fight actions.

Tillerson, again:

Rest assured that the Chinese are not confused in any way what the American policy towards North Korea (is) or what our actions and efforts are directed at[.]

Ongoing diplomacy maintains that clarity, as well as clarity of consequences, during and after the fight, both with our enemy’s allies (the People’s Republic of China in this case) and with our own allies (the Republic of Korea and Japan, for instance), as well as with neutrals like the EU, Vietnam, et al. (and make no mistake: the EU has shown itself neutral in the present matter of northern Korea with its own timidity of action).