AHPs

Association Health Plans are new plans that, by regulation, allow small businesses to band together across industries and state boundaries to form health insurance buying consortiums.  Using this larger size-generated buying power, they should be able to acquire cheaper, better tailored, more flexible plans for their employees, plans that those employees actually will want.

However.

The left says association plans are junk insurance that will blow up ObamaCare.

Some AHPs likely will be; that’s a fact of life in any market, free or centrally planned. However, a free market is self-regulating and quickly so; junk plans will be few and far between.  Blow up Obamacare?  That’s win-win.

The Pope

…gets another one wrong.  If he was accurately quoted by ANSA (Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata, an Italian news agency) and by the SIR agency of the Italian bishops’ conference—or by CRUX, which claims the quotes—that is.  They quoted him as

denouncing the pre-natal tests that can result in parents choosing to terminate a pregnancy if the fetus is malformed or suffering other problems.

The Pope is aiming his fire at the wrong target.  Families intending to have the baby rather than abort it could benefit from pre-natal tests that find that the “fetus is malformed or suffering other problems.”  Such foreknowledge would give the family months in which to prepare financially, emotionally, physically, to join/generate support groups, all to increase the family’s ability to receive and nurture the baby.

Once again, the Pope is thinking with something other than his God-given rationality.

Child Abuse, Continuing

In the ongoing dispute over separating children from their illegal immigrant parents (OBE with President Donald Trump’s EO ending the practice) Progressive-Democrat Senator Bob Casey (D, PA) said this:

Infest? We’re not talking about insects, these are children!  You are talking about kids who are scared, alone and being held in cages. You have the power to stop it, do it.

Casey isn’t talking about children, though, he’s talking about weapons he and his Progressive-Democrat fellows want to use for their personal political gain. These are not children in Progressive-Democrat eyes, they’re just mechanical tools for them to use.

Casey and his colleagues have the power to stop it, do it. They need to stop blocking legislation to reform immigration, bills that would fix this and would take care of the DACA children—goals they’re only pretending to want.

Progressive-Democrats’ weaponizing of children is despicable. They have the power to stop it.  Do so.

Child Abuse

We have children being separated from their parents as those parents are detained for their illegal crossing of our border, their illegal entry—some might say break-in—into our nation.  Some point out that many of those children, the ones who arrive unaccompanied, were callously separated from their parents by their own parents in their country of origin.  Others point out that many of those allegedly accompanied children are not members of a family unit but are simply pawns of drug and human traffickers being used to facilitate those traffickers’ illegal entry.  There are, though, many children/parent family units that have parents detained for their illegal entry and the children separated from them rather than being locking up, too.

The Progressive-Democrats in Congress could help resolve this, were they interested.  However, they steadfastly refuse to negotiate with Republicans–#NeverRepublicanNoWay.  Indeed, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (R, NY) said on Tuesday that there was no Republican bill he was willing to let his members approach Republicans over.  They much prefer to use children as hostages to keep open the question of immigration reform for their personal political gains in the fall.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D, MD, and possessed of an especially apt title in this context), Senator Chris Van Hollen (D, MD, and Chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee), and Schumer all bleat about child abuse.

They’re dissembling.  Their hostage-taking and children-as-political-fodder are the child abuses.  Their behavior is disgusting.

YGTBSM

Two examples of felony stupidity.

The Putnam County, Florida, Sheriff’s Office was asked by a man to test the meth sample he brought in.  It seems he’d had a bad reaction to a batch he’d bought, and he wanted to press charges against the person who’d sold him the “wrong narcotic.”

They did, it was, and they busted him.  And no, he didn’t get to press charges; although presumably he IDed the seller to the deputies so they could “press charges” in the county’s name.

And this, also from Florida.

This guy, pulled over for driving on a suspended drivers license, drove off in mid-stop, was caught again, and proceeded to finish his beer while the cops had him at the second stop.  This with three prior DUI convictions.

Some people’s children—you just can’t take them to raise.