Tag Archives: responsibilities

Consequences

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Two more prisoners who were released from the Guantanamo Bay detention center in the first six months of the year have returned to the battlefield, the White House said Wednesday.

Seventeen of the 161 prisoners released by President Barack Obama (D) have returned to the “battlefield” to continue their butchery.  This much isn’t only on Obama; President Bush the Younger released 532, of whom 113 went back to their butchery.

However, this return of prisoners to their fighting is what Obama is extending and accomplishing—even with the example of Bush’s results before him—whether he intends it or not, with his insistence on releasing all the Guantanamo prisoners so he can try, again, to close the place.

Obamacare Fail

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The headline of this Wall Street Journal piece pretty much says it all: Average Cost of Employer Health Coverage Tops $18,000 for Family in 2016.

The sub-head, with careful reading, adds clarity: Pace of cost increase slowed by accelerating shift into high-deductible plans, new survey shows.

That cost of employer coverage, buy the way, refers to the premiums employees must pay: $18,142 for a 2016 typical employer-offered family plan, and employees have to pay 30% of that, typically, up from 29%.  Like a sergeant I once worked with liked to say, sort of, “Holy cats.”

Is that cost increase rate actually slowing, though, where it matters to the individual—the employee?  Not in the deductibles.  Shifting into high-deductible plans means the policy holder—the employee—has to pay lots more out of his own pocket just to get to the point where the coverage plan begins to pay its 50%, or 60%, or maybe as high as 80% of the medical costs.  For that year.  Then the deductible has to be paid anew.

Notice another part of that sub-head: accelerating shift into high-deductible plans.  That means that in that next year, the erstwhile high-deductible plan may not be available: the employee may be stuck with purchasing a different plan, perhaps with an even higher deductible, perhaps with higher yet premiums, perhaps with coverage not as useful to the employee.

This is what Obamacare, not the employers, has wrought.  This is what needs to be tossed in its entirety into the medical waste disposal and replaced with a more honest environment within which actual insurance can be had, and competitively so.

Of Course They Are

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President Obama and his Democratic allies are seizing on the exodus of private insurers from ObamaCare markets to renew their push for a so-called “public option[.]”

Never mind that the revival of this push is a direct result of the broad, expensive failure that is those same Know Betters’ Obamacare.  No, when government fails as miserably as it has done with Obamacare, the only right answer is the Progressive answer: more government.  A bigger hammer.

We can’t have competition and private enterprise do this.  We gotta have Know Betters in Government do this; us mere citizens can’t be trusted with such weighty matters.

An Immunity Deal

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Recall that, of some 13 unsecured devices like Blackberries and iPads that Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton used, along with her unsecured private email server, to conduct official and classified official State Department business, none of those 13 devices can be found.  Not a single one of them.  Two of those cell phones were “destroyed” with a hammer or by being broken into two pieces.

In addition to those…disappearances…a computer specialist employed by Platte River Networks, which was itself employed by Clinton to manage her email network, deleted emails that all the players involved, from Clinton and her immediate staff—Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills—on down through Platte River to and including the computer specialist, knew were under Congressional subpoena and order to preserve.  Now this:

The Department of Justice reportedly gave immunity to a computer expert who deleted Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails during its investigation into her private email server despite being ordered by Congress to keep them.

Understand that granting immunity, even by the Obama/Lynch DoJ, isn’t by itself a bad thing: immunity often is granted to an individual who might otherwise come under criminal investigation himself in order to get the immunized person to talk freely in the capacity of a witness to larger wrong-doing.  I’ll come back to this point.

The New York Times has identified the immunized person of interest here as Paul Combetta.  The NYT went on to say

Republicans have called for the department to investigate the deletions, but the immunity deal with the specialist, Paul Combetta, makes it unlikely that the request will go far.

The NYT, sadly, is probably right, but for reasons wholly unrelated to immunity.  Such immunity also is occasionally granted in order to be able to compel the immunized person to answer investigator questions.  Voluntarily, or involuntarily, Combetta certainly can answer investigator questions, even can give testimony at open trial.  The immunization only protects him from prosecution based on what he says; it does not seal his lips.

That the FBI has at least many of those emails that had been deleted (unsuccessfully, as is beginning to be apparent) is clear from many of the FBI’s lately releases.  That the FBI is as aware of the Congressional order as everyone else involved also is obvious.

Comey’s decision to not proceed on his own initiative is a whitewash.  It’s every law enforcement officer’s duty to investigate criminal activity when he sees it; he doesn’t have to await a complaint from outside the agency to start, as Comey ludicrously told Senator Jason Chaffetz (R, UT).

But this is part and parcel of the Obama/Lynch DoJ’s and the Comey FBI’s whitewash of the whole Clinton email security failure.  In the one case, they’re protecting one of their own, and in the other case, he’s protecting one of their own.

And so the NYT likely is right.

Comey’s crocodile tears in his internal, ‘twarn’t me” memo to his agents notwithstanding.

Some Lives Are More Equal Than Others

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Cornell University is looking for a Dean of Diversity.  OK, they’re looking for a Dean of Students, but an important part of his DOC is his ability to promote diversity.  But the new Dean mustn’t promote diverse diversity, only the diversity of school-favored groups of students.

…one top candidate, Vijay Pendakur…held a “diversity townhall” with students to persuade them to support his candidacy.

Then he let the cat out of the bag.

If I say, “The dean’s area of focus is diversity and inclusion,” the unspoken thought in response often is, “Oh, so he’s here for only the marginalized students.”  So we need to undo that, because that is a deeply problematic framework.  If we’re going to make progress, it needs to be everyone’s conversation.

Cornell’s Vice President for Diversity of Inclusion, Julia Montejo, chose to be offended by this truth.

I’d like to hear more on how that kind of approach and philosophy still puts the concerns of minority students, students of color, underrepresented students, LGBTQ-identifying students and students with disabilities at the forefront….

Because.

Cornell favors some diversity, but not complete diversity.  Some groups of students should just proceed to the back of the Cornell bus.