politics « A Brief History…

Archive for the ‘politics’ Category

Some thoughts on what reform in healthcare would look like.

Monday, April 1st, 2019

I have previously posted some articles on the French healthcare system, which is the best in Europe.

Here is an article on the French system.

The French citizen or resident joins Caisse Nationale d’Assurance Maladie deTravailleurs Salariés (CNAMTS)—health insurance organisation for salaried workers. That covers about 80% of the population now and it pays 80% (often more like 70%) of a fee schedule for the doctor visit although specialists are allowed to charge more. French doctors are divided for payment and fee schedule purposes into three “sectors” after 1980. Sector 1 doctors agreed to abide by the fee schedule established in 1960, modified for inflaton and technological changes. They are mostly primary care doctors although some had waivers from the fee schedule prior to 1971 because they were more experienced or had great reputations. Few are still practicing. Sector 2 doctors could set their own fees but reimbursement was still determined by the fee schedule. These two categories correspond roughly to Medicare assignment in the US. If you accept assignment, you agree to accept Medicare payment as the full payment (or 80% of it plus the Medi-Gap payment).

The French have private insurance companies that provide what we call “Medi-Gap policies for Medicare. Theirs cover everyone.

It seems unlikely to me that Democrats would accept a health plan that allowed balance billing, which is the only way to control costs, short of pure rationing. The French basically provide a fee schedule that is the same for everyone but which allows doctors to charge more if the patient is willing to pay. For example, I called the office of a new internist last week to schedule an appointment. The clerk required that I submit all my insurance information, not my health status, and the doctor would decide if he would see me. If he is that busy, perhaps he could justify charging more.

Here is another article from that series explaining the French system.

French primary care physicians are paid less than American but medical school in France does not require a college degree and is free. I suspect that system might be more attractive in the US than many realize.

Unfortunately, such a radical reform is unlikely. There are other options under consideration.

(more…)

Tags:health care, politics
Posted in health reform, medicine, politics, technology | Comments Closed

California agonistes.

Tuesday, February 26th, 2019

I moved to California in 1956 to attend college. Los Angeles was a paradise. The weather was great. The traffic was no problem. I learned that the LAPD did not take bribes and was not amused at attempts to offer them. After growing up in Chicago, I had learned to put a ten dollar bill behind my drivers’ license in case I was stopped. In Los Angeles, I did so and was lectured about the consequences of offering a bribe by a stern LAPD officer.

I lived in the fraternity house and one year slept on an outside second floor porch. I had four blankets on my bed but no problem, with flies or mosquitoes. I remember flying back to Los Angeles one New Years Eve from Christmas vacation in Chicago. The palm trees told me I was home. There was a brush fire in the hills but it was nice to be back. I would sometimes drive up to Sunset Boulevard just to see the city at night. The TV show, “77 Sunset Strip” showed just what it looked like. We would drive into Hollywood and sometimes eat at Villa Frescati. We had a lot of fun. Too much fun as I lost my scholarship.

The first sign of trouble was described in Victor Davis Hanson’s book, “Mexifornia.” There was trouble before that as the Watts Riot in 1965 began the endless pandering to the angry mobs.

The Rodney King riot in 1992 was another harbinger of trouble. The LAPD officers who saved Rodney King’s life by taking him down without significant injury before Melanie Singer shot him, as she planned to do before they arrived, were rewarded with prison sentences from the second trial. Double Jeopardy was not outlawed in the Clinton Administration. By that time, I was nearing retirement as my back injury was affecting me.

I had lived in Orange County for 20 years at that point and it was still a great place to live. After my back surgery, I spent a year in New Hampshire. Had my grant come through, I might have stayed, at least for a few years. I returned thinking I might have a second career in administrative medicine. I did work part-time reviewing workers comp claims but the career in measuring medical quality never got started.

The decline of California has become more and more apparent. Even the hospital in Orange County where I had practiced for 20 years has entered a period of decline.

In 2008, we began to see the anticipation of Obamacare. Hospitals began to expect tighter margins and, being the most incompetently managed large organizations in the US, they decided to reorganize with little idea of how to do so. They expected that vertical integration would increase their profits (Which are as large in non-profits and in for-profits) so they spent millions to buy the medical practices of doctors on the staff. This put the doctors on salary and bonus systems but there was a natural conflict of interest. Doctors had for many years been the object of frustration and even hatred from hospital administrators. We don’t take orders well and many resisted the efforts of the hospital to make us order either more tests,

Doctors in urban areas, or even deeply populated suburban areas, are employees. The days of independent practice are mostly gone.
In 2017, we left California for Arizona where I had had a weekend home for years. I still subscribe to the local Orange County newspaper where I can read stories like this one, and this one.

I used to take my medical students to homeless shelters in downtown Los Angeles to see how County patients lived. Now “the homeless” are everywhere, defecating on the streets of San Francisco. A medical group, probably the American College of Surgeons, cancelled their San Francisco convention last year.

The neighborhood’s open drug use and tent encampments, among other issues, are what allegedly prompted the unidentified medical group to call it quits with SF, even though the city spends approximately $300 million to help the continuing crisis.

“It’s the first time that we have had an out-and-out cancellation over the issue, and this is a group that has been coming here every three or four years since the 1980s,” Joe D’Alessandro, president and CEO of S.F. Travel, tells San Francisco Chronicle’s Matier and Ross.

The ACS Clinical Congress has been there every three years since the 1960s. No more.

Then the neglect of infrastructure was emphasized by the 2017 Oroville Dam failure.

In February 2017, Oroville Dam’s main and emergency spillways were damaged, prompting the evacuation of more than 180,000 people living downstream along the Feather River and the relocation of a fish hatchery.

Heavy rainfall during the 2017 California floods damaged the main spillway on February 7, so the California Department of Water Resources stopped the spillway flow to assess the damage and contemplate its next steps. The rain eventually raised the lake level until it flowed over the emergency spillway, even after the damaged main spillway was reopened. As water flowed over the emergency spillway, headward erosion threatened to undermine and collapse the concrete weir, which could have sent a 30-foot (10 m) wall of water into the Feather River below and flooded communities downstream. No collapse occurred, but the water further damaged the main spillway and eroded the bare slope of the emergency spillway.

This year is another wet winter and the dam has probably not been repaired. Nothing is fixed as the state declines into decrepitude.

Victor Davis Hanson sums it up.

California ranks first among the states in the percentage of residents over 25 who have never finished the ninth grade— 9.7 percent of California residents, or about 4 million Californians. It also rates 49th in the number of state residents who never graduated from high school — or about 18 percent of the current population.

In other words, about 7 million Californians do not possess a high-school diploma, about equal to the size of the nine counties of California’s Bay Area, roughly from Napa to Silicon Valley. In some sense, inside California, there is a shadow state consisting of high-school dropouts that’s larger than 38 other U.S. states.

A large share, if not the majority, are illegal aliens.

What is going on?

Three concurrent — and yet antithetical — trends explain the malaise, though they’re rarely talked about. Indeed, one of the landmarks of the new California mentality is denial and self-righteousness that assume it is illiberal to notice that a quarter of the nation’s homeless population sleeps on California streets, or that violent crime is 20 percent higher in California than the national median, or that San Francisco ranks No. 1 in per capita property crime rates of all the nation’s largest cities.

The result ?

The Grapes of Wrath — in Reverse

Second, in the last decade and a half, about 6 million Californians over the age of 25 left the state; in the last 30 years, perhaps 10 million fled. There are no accurate statistics on the political ideologies of the departed or even their actual numbers. But most studies suggest that the reasons for radical outmigration were quality-of-life complaints, soaring home prices and taxes, poor state services, failing infrastructure and schools, and rising crime.

Joel Kotkin has a new piece in City Journal That should worry California politicians.

a new Brookings study shows, millennials are not moving en masse to metros with dense big cities, but away from them. According to demographer Bill Frey, the 2013–2017 American Community Survey shows that New York now suffers the largest net annual outmigration of post-college millennials (ages 25–34) of any metro area—some 38,000 annually—followed by Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Diego. New York’s losses are 75 percent higher than during the previous five-year period.

They are too dense and too arrogant in their ignorance to notice.

We left and are happy in Arizona. We are close enough to drive over for birthday parties. Our home in Tucson would be more than a million dollars in Orange County if we could even find a one acre lot. Christmas lights

Tucson has an Opera and the University of Arizona is here. I am sad to see what has become of California. It was a wonderful place when I was going to college and for decades after. The insanity that has gripped the state seems to be a development of the past 25 years. Jerry Brown and his obsession with global warming is part of it. The massive influx of illegal aliens is another part. I doubt it can be salvaged in my lifetime.

Posted in corruption, immigration, personal, politics | 3 Comments »

The Attempted Coup is Collapsing.

Monday, February 18th, 2019

Victor Davis Hanson thinks the attempted coup d’etat is dead.

The illegal effort to destroy the 2016 Trump campaign by Hillary Clinton campaign’s use of funds to create, disseminate among court media, and then salt among high Obama administration officials, a fabricated, opposition smear dossier failed.

So has the second special prosecutor phase of the coup to abort the Trump presidency failed.

The conspiracy is certainly collapsing. Where did Andrew McCabe come from ?

He was a lawyer but not a sworn agent of the FBI until 1996..

McCabe began his FBI career in the New York Field Office[18] in 1996.[20] While there, he was on the SWAT team.[21] In 2003, he began work as a supervisory special agent at the Eurasian Organized Crime Task Force.[22] Later, McCabe held management positions in the FBI Counterterrorism Division,[18] the FBI National Security Branch[23] and the FBI’s Washington Field Office.

I see no evidence of any administrative roll, such as SAC or ASAC.

McCabe did not oversee the Clinton email server probe while his wife was running for office and he was excluded from FBI investigations into public corruption cases in Virginia.

Was he involved in the Clinton Foundation scandals BEFORE his wife ran for office with the assistance of Terry McAuliffe and his $700,000 ? I learned that Virginia has no rules about the use of campaign funds for personal use. She lost and and the remainder of the donation was hers.

Conservative Tree House has some more on McCabe.

Mark Penn, former Clinton campaign aide, agrees that it was an attempted coup.

The most egregious anti-democratic actions ever taken by the what can now fairly be called the Deep State are confirmed with the publication of fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s new book detailing how the FBI and Justice Department plotted to remove President Trump from office for firing FBI Director James Comey.

Justice Department and FBI officials spied on U.S. citizens with false warrants, gave a pass to one presidential campaign with a predetermined investigation, investigated another political campaign on the basis of no verified evidence, and illegally leaked information on investigations. They discussed wiretapping and using the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to remove President Trump, and appointed a special counsel as a retaliatory move for Comey’s firing.

This is a bigger scandal than the successful Nixon coup d’etat.

The differences are two. One, Trump has no skeleton like Nixon’s aid for the burglars which opened him to accusations of coverup. Two, unlike Nixon, Trump does not care what his enemies think.

Posted in corruption, politics | Comments Closed

The very bad Continuing Resolution and how we got here.

Friday, February 15th, 2019

We now have a a terrible non-compromise Continuing Resolution on border security. The Appropriations committee reported out HR31, the Continuing Resolution.

The Homeland Security division of this bill upholds Democratic values and funds smart and effective border security including construction and screening technology at ports of entry, where most drugs illegally enter the country.

The $1.375 billion it provides for border barriers is 76% less than the President demanded for a concrete wall, and critical protections are put in place for environmentally sensitive areas.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans got everything they wanted, yet every Democrat and nearly every Republican who served on the conference committee to write this bill has signed it in support.

Boilerplate. The real story is what was inserted in conference.

two poison pills that I hope the Republican committee members either didn’t know about or didn’t understand.

1. the bill allows the fencing to be built only in the Rio Grande Valley Sector in South Texas. It’s surely needed there, but real barriers are also needed elsewhere, such as the parts of the Arizona or New Mexico borders where there’s only vehicle fencing.

But the Democrats had a reason for this limitation. The bill states:

Prior to use of any funds made available by this Act for the construction of physical barriers within the city limits of any city or census designated place…Department of Homeland Security and the local elected officials of such a city or census designated place shall confer and seek to reach mutual agreement regarding the design and alignment of physical barriers within that city or the census designated place.

In other words, local governments would have an effective veto over whether barriers would be constructed. And which party controls all local government in South Texas?

2. The second poison pill is even worse. Section 224 states:

None of the funds provided by this act…may be used by the Secretary of Homeland Security to place in detention, remove, refer for a decision whether to initiate removal proceedings, or initiate removal proceedings against a sponsor, potential sponsor, or member of a household of a sponsor or potential sponsor of an unaccompanied alien child.

In other words, this would mean that ICE cannot detain or remove anyone who has effectively any relationship with an “unaccompanied” minor — either because they’re sponsors, in the same household as sponsors, or even just “potential sponsors” (or in the household of potential sponsors!) of such a child.

Why would Republicans let the wool be pulled over their eyes like this ? Maybe they did it on purpose.

You know, a long time ago, I knew a guy who was a senior legislative staffer for a Republican congressman.

He told me that Democrats routinely build traps and poison pills into bills. Sometimes, for example, they’ll pretend to concede a legal point to Republicans, but then they’ll deliberately write the law in such an aggressive way that they know a liberal interest group will challenge it as unconstitutional and easily win, because it was written to be unconstitutional.

And thus, the “concession” granted by the Democrats disappears like morning mist, but the concessions granted by Republicans — usually about money — remain.

The Democrats win it all.

But you probably knew that. And that’s not the point I’m making.

Here’s the point I’m making:

I asked him why Republicans don’t take this crap out of bills — are they incompetent?

“No,” he told me. “They know they’re in there. They want them there. They want the credit for having gotten what appears to be a conservative victory, but they’re actually liberal-leaning (or at least they fear a liberal backlash at home) and they want Democrats to ‘steal’ their victory away.”

So anyway, this guy was always trying to take this garbage out of bills, and his Republican colleagues were fighting to keep this shit in.

He told me this like 12, 13 years ago. He is who he says he is (his resume is genuine) and he never gave me reason to think he wasn’t generally honest.

Nothing got done, aside from the tax cut, during the two years the GOP had a House majority. Why ?

Rush Limbaugh thinks they expected Trump to be impeached and wanted to have nothing to do with him.

I prefer Angelo Codevilla’s theory.

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job.

Rush Limbaugh, as I write this, says he has not seen a report that Trump signed the CR. Hmmm.

Posted in immigration, politics | Comments Closed

al Qeada in Congress.

Thursday, February 14th, 2019

Minnesota has elected a Somali Muslim Brotherhood representative to Congress.

She is on the Foreign Relations Committee of the House and should not be.

First of all, she committed an immigration felony by “marrying” her brother to get him into the country.

As many candidates do, Omar has made her personal background an integral part of her campaign. But neither the candidate nor the reporters who covered her have shown much interest in exploring one aspect of her personal story that recently came to public attention: the fact that she is not legally married to the man she advertises as the husband and the father of her three children. In fact, she is legally married to another man—who may be her brother.

It will be interesting to watch her progress through the Democratic Party which is more anti-American every year,

Posted in corruption, politics | Comments Closed

The Covington story and hatred of Catholics.

Sunday, January 27th, 2019

The past week has been occupied with the story of the boys from Covington Catholic high school in Kentucky. These boys came to DC in a bus to attend the 2019 March for Life, an event in which hundreds to thousands demonstrate against abortion in the streets of Washington DC. This event is usually ignored by the American press. This year,. two small activist groups planned to demonstrate. One was called The Black Hebrew Israelites, A small fringe group.

groups of Black Americans who believe that they are descendants of the ancient Israelites. Black Hebrews adhere in varying degrees to the religious beliefs and practices of both Christianity and Judaism. With the exception of a small number of individuals who have formally converted to Judaism, they are not recognized as Jews by the greater Jewish community. Many choose to identify themselves as Hebrew Israelites or Black Hebrews rather than Jews in order to indicate their claimed historic connections.

The group that collected near the Lincoln Memorial, was a particularly obnoxious group that shouted slurs at the teenagers waiting for the bus to take them home.

“They called us ‘racists,’ ‘bigots,’ ‘white crackers,’ ‘faggots’ and ‘incest kids.’ They also taunted an African-American student from my school by telling him that we would ‘harvest his organs.’ I have no idea what that insult means, but it was startling to hear,” Sandmann wrote.
The remark about harvesting organs may reference Jordan Peele’s horror-satire “Get Out,” a 2017 movie in which the black boyfriend of a white girl discovers her family is harvesting the organs of blacks.

The other “activist” group present was The “Indigenous Peoples March” made up of American Indian protestors.

We stand together to bring awareness to the injustices affecting Indigenous men, women and children as Indigenous peoples and lands from North, Central and South America, Canada, Pacific Islands, Oceania, Asia, Africa as well as the Caribbean diaspora are a target of genocide.

“We are lagging far behind comparable countries in overcoming the disadvantages Indigenous people face.” – Malcolm Fraser

This is certainly true of those who live on reservations and maintain the primitive practices of pre-Columbian aboriginals.

That certainly was not true of Ely S Parker, who was the Colonel on US Grant’s staff who wrote out the surrender documents at Appomattox Courthouse which ended the Civil War.

Parker was born in 1828 as the sixth of seven children to Elizabeth and William Parker, of prominent Seneca families, at Indian Falls, New York (then part of the Tonawanda Reservation).[1] He was named Ha-sa-no-an-da and later baptized Ely Samuel Parker. His father was a miller and a Baptist minister.[2] The Seneca are one of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy). Ely had a classical education at a missionary school, was fully bilingual speaking Seneca as well as English, and went on to college. He spent his life bridging his identities as Seneca and a resident of the United States.

The confrontation between Indian activist Nathan Phillips and Nick Sandmann was staged with a cameraperson behind Phillips recording Phillips’ version of the incident. The result was a national uproar that has not settled down yet.

Fortunately for the boys, the Black Israelites had been recording their own video for an hour. It showed that Phillips approached the boys and precipitated the confrontation, which was peaceful.

The blogosphere has been correcting the record while the MSM spreads lies. That may change as the boy’s family has hired a libel attorney. Apologies are starting to roll in. I expect there will be quite a few although some media sources are doubling down.

Part of this story is the media’s war on Catholics. It might just be related to the next Supreme Court nomination.

An excellent discussion this incident has appeared today and makes some additional good points.

Mark Steyn has anatomized with his customary insight.

There is, Steyn noted, a “strange need of the right to virtue-signal to their detractors—as in the stampede of congressional Republicans to distance themselves from their colleague Steve King over an infelicitous interview with The New York Times.” Just so. And here is the kicker: “Democrats never do this; Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam declare that the Jews are pushing defective marijuana on black men in order to turn them gay—which would appear to be a prima facie slur on at least four Democrat constituencies: blacks, gays, Jews and potheads. Yet Clinton, Obama et al speak not a word against Calypso Louie.”

What is it with the cringing right ?

How is the shutdown going ?

Friday, January 11th, 2019

We are now in week three of the partial government “shutdown” over the refusal of Democrats to fund any of Trump’s wall. They see this as another “Read My Lips” situation which, if they can make Trump back down, it will kill his re-election campaign just as it did to Bush in 1992.

But Trump’s base takes the wall itself seriously, and, like George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign pledge on taxes, the wall has become the president’s “read my lips” albatross. His supporters may not abandon him over it, but Trump’s re-election hinges entirely on their enthusiasm. Yes, they will vote for him, but will they engage in the get-out-the-vote activities that drive to the polls enough additional voters to put Trump over the top?

How is that going ? Even Texas Monthly, no friend of Republicans agrees.

Jet skis dropping off pregnant women. Chinese border crossers in fancy workout attire. A park full of could-be spies. These sights of the Rio Grande are almost hallucinatory, but they don’t seem to alarm Spratte. They seem to fatigue him. Not long ago, he says, agents’ mouths would drop open when they’d hear about a group of fifty immigrants getting caught. Now, he says, “if you tell me, I’ve got a group of fifty, I need help, I would laugh at you. If you said, I’ve got a group of three hundred, now that would be cool, because that would be a new record. And the records are only going to keep increasing.” (According to Spratte, agents in the Valley have had a single pickup of around 280 immigrants.)

Trump visited the wall yesterday and CNN’s Jim Acosta gave Trump a hand at making his case.

I know this might be hard for you to comprehend Jimbo, but the reason why all of Twitter has been mocking you today is because you were at a part of the border WITH A WALL. So yes, of course it was working. Replicate that across the border & we’ll all be safer. #RealNews #ByeBye

It did not look too good for Acosta to brag about how safe it was near a wall. OR fence, if you prefer.

The Democrat strategy was also questioned by their own side.

But that doesn’t mean the Democrats won’t blow it.

The surest way for them to do so would be to keep on their present path of emphasizing that the government must be reopened because of how the shutdown is hurting federal workers.

Government employees are not the most sympathetic figures in the present controversy. The “shutdown” has inconvenienced few citizens as the Obama tactic of trying to inflict as much pain as possible is not in use this time.

Then, of course, anything that detracts from the narrative is excluded. KUSI anchors revealed on air that CNN requested, then declined, to use their border reporter after finding out his coverage of a broadly successful San Diego border barrier didn’t match their preferred narrative.

Whoops !

The final act is yet to open but probably is related to this. The Ninth Circuit once again ruled that the injunction against deporting DACA recipients should stand. This happened before and the Supreme Court had only 8 members at the time, who tied 4 to 4. Now there are 9 Supreme Court justices.

In an opinion issued today, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit upheld a federal district court’s order requiring the government to keep the DACA program in place. Although the 9th Circuit’s ruling went against the government, the decision likely helped the government’s cause at the Supreme Court, because the justices rarely grant petitions for review before the courts of appeals have ruled; the justices prefer to have the benefit of those courts’ opinions, even if they often do not follow them.

The challengers’ response to the government’s petition is currently due on December 5. Assuming that the court does not extend that deadline, the justices could announce as soon as mid-January whether they will take up the dispute.

The last time this happened, the Democrats were negotiating with Trump. AS soon as the ruling was upheld, they stopped. Why legislate if the Courts will do it for you ? Remember, Obama himself said his DACA ruling was unconstitutional.

Tags:Obama, politics
Posted in elections, immigration, politics | Comments Closed

Trump is winning on immigration.

Friday, December 28th, 2018

UPDATE: Another Althouse post, emphasizing a new Beto O’Rourke video ad that argues that a wall would hurt the environment and animals. Since that is what middle aged white women care about (like Ann) the ad is aimed at them.

Fence

This is what the fence/wall really looks like. Beto’s ad is showing parks nowhere near the border.

We currently have a “partial government shutdown” which no one seems to notice. Most of the appropriations bills were passed and signed. The Homeland Security budget became a Continuing Resolution and is being held hostage in the Senate where Chuck Schumer has vowed “So, President Trump, you will not get your wall,”

Trump has not vetoed anything so the responsibility for the “shutdown” is not obvious. The 40,000 federal employees who are furloughed or not getting paid are over 80% Democrats. The most recent pay period will result in checks today. Then the next pay period in two weeks will be the one where the “nonessentials” will not be paid.

Schumer: “So, President Trump, you will not get your wall,” Schumer added. “Abandon your shutdown strategy. You’re not getting the wall today, next week, or on January 3 when Democrats take control of the House.”

How is this playing in the country ? Some surprises.

Ann Althouse reads the Washington Post so I don’t have to.

She notices the comments to that article on the child that died in US custody.

I’ve excerpted the parts of the article that might make a reader want to blame the father. Was the boy exploited? Was he regarded as expendable? There’s plenty else in the article that might make you want to blame the U.S. government (mainly for not giving quicker medical treatments). I would also think many readers would mostly feel sad that a boy died and bemoan poverty generally. So I was surprised at how harsh the comments were against the father. I didn’t expect this at The Washington Post. This is the most liked comment:
This child’s siblings in Guatemala are alive and well. The child was dragged to the US using money that could have paid the father’s overdue electric bill, which is not a reason to grant asylum.

I wonder how long the Democrats will let this go on if Trump does not cave in ? He seems to have a gut instinct about what Americans think.

CNN seems to think that signing MAGA hats in Iraq is some sort of crime.

CNN Pentagon reporter Barbara Starr said “a lot of questions” have been raised following President Trump’s surprise visit to troops in Iraq where he signed ‘Make America Great Again’ hats and flags.

“There’s a lot of concern because military policy, military regulation prohibits military members in uniform from doing anything that can be construed as a political endorsement. That’s what you want from your U.S. military. They’re not a political force,” Starr reported.

“How did the red hats get there? Some people are saying, well, the troops just brought them and wanted to get them signed. But even if that is the case, the question remains, there were commanders, there were senior enlisted personnel on the scene, they know the regulation. Why did this happen?” Starr asked.

The cluelessness is almost painful. Obama signed stuff when he was president.

What will the end game look like? The new House is even farther left wing than the Senate. Could the “shutdown” go on for months ?

Look at the comments to the WaPoo article.

Thank you. I am liberal myself but I get tired of people who shut off their critical thinking when it comes to brown people. This guy made a spectacularly risky decision, and his child paid the price. It’s on his head. This is, of course, on the assumption that the U.S. wasn’t negligent in the kid’s care – which is certainly possible. Nonetheless it’s his father who endangered him.

This looks like trouble for Democrats. What if Trump stares down Democrats for months ?

Tags:Congress, Democrats, politics
Posted in immigration, politics | 1 Comment »

What is going on with the border wall?

Sunday, December 23rd, 2018

UPDATE: Here is a pretty good argument for a very long “shutdown.”

make the Trump Filibuster as ridiculously overblown and dramatic as possible. Someone somewhere will die, and they will blame it on the shutdown. They will blame global warming on the shutdown. Freezing blizzards on the shutdown. They will blame tornadoes, hurricanes, and Kevin Hart’s tweets on the shutdown. They will blame the Trump Filibuster for Michael Moore gaining weight and for Ocasio-Cortez being unable to remember whether she was elected to Congress, the Senate, or the New York State Assembly. But it all will be stuff and nonsense. None of it matters. Every three minutes on Fox, there will be a loud clang followed by “Fox News Alert.” Even Fox aficionados long ago learned to tune those out; they never amount to anything.

Nothing has changed, and nothing is going to change. The furloughed federal workers all will get their back-pay in the mail as soon as the Government reopens.

We have a “partial shutdown” of the government over an issue that was the centerpiece of Trump’s presidential campaign. The GOP Congress has finally gotten the budget process back to “Regular Order” after decades of “Continuing Resolutions” that allowed Harry Reid to hide the votes of Democrats on spending. This present fight is over the CR that funds the remaining 10% of the government , but it includes Homeland Security and that means the wall.

Democrat Chuck Schumer has said there will “never” be a wall. Why ?

In 2006, Democrats, although not then in the majority, voted for the construction of a border wall. After the 2006 election, which put the Democrats in control of Congress, they ignored the law, which still may be on the books. It included $10.4 billion. Could Trump use that law ? I don’t know.

Why the showdown now ? Remember George HW Bush’s promise ? In 1992, as he accepted the nomination at the convention, he promised “No New Taxes. Read My Lips” Of course, he violated this promise later. My theory, which I have seen him deny, is that Rostenkowski, the House Appropriations Chair, made a deal for Democrat support for the Gulf War in return for a raise in taxes. Bush accepted this and it was fatal.

The Democrats reason that it worked once. Getting a Republican President to renege on a promise essential to his election, was enough to defeat him in the next election. Schumer is determined to force Trump to back down. The news media is hysterical but I don’t think it will work. The new budget process has funded most of the government now. What is “shut down” is about 10% and most federal employees who are not getting paid are Democrat voters who hate Trump now. 96% of DC voters voted against Trump.

Tags:Congress, Democrats, politics
Posted in elections, immigration, politics | Comments Closed

Is a collapse of civilization a risk now ?

Sunday, December 9th, 2018

The present political instability has given rise to several examples of pessimistic concerns about civilization, itself.

For example, The Late Bronze Age collapse is getting attention.

The Late Bronze Age collapse involved a dark-age transition period in the Near East, Asia Minor, Aegean region, North Africa, Caucasus, Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age, a transition which historians believe was violent, sudden, and culturally disruptive. The palace economy of the Aegean region and Anatolia that characterised the Late Bronze Age disintegrated, transforming into the small isolated village cultures of the Greek Dark Ages. The half-century between c.?1200 and 1150 BC saw the cultural collapse of the Mycenaean kingdoms, of the Kassite dynasty of Babylonia, o Here is one f the Hittite Empire in Anatolia and the Levant, and of the Egyptian Empire;[1] the destruction of Ugarit and the Amorite states in the Levant, the fragmentation of the Luwian states of western Asia Minor, and a period of chaos in Canaan

Why is this sort of thing getting so much interest ? Here is one opinion.

No one seems more confused about the import of the New Nationalism than the nationalists themselves. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is a coalition brought together by anger at the Merkel government’s decision to admit well over a million Middle Eastern migrants, but otherwise has no unifying characteristic. After a brief moment in the sun that included dinner with President Trump and a star slot at America’s leading conservative conference last February, Nigel Farage has fallen off America’s radar, and his most prominent admirer in the Trump White House, Steve Bannon, has left the Administration.

Bannon is a very impressive guy. His talk at the Oxford Union, in spite of the protests and hostility of most students, is impressive.

Angelo Codevilla predicted this years ago.

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets’ nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.

What’s next? France is seeing high protests by the “Deplorables.”

Why are books, and TV series, like “The Hunger Games,” so popular?

There is serious concern about collapse

One of the biggest mysteries in history is the late Bronze Age Collapse. There’s no good explanation for why an early globalized civilization should suddenly disappear at around 1177 BC. “Within a period of forty to fifty years at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the twelfth century almost every significant city in the eastern Mediterranean world was destroyed, many of them never to be occupied again.”

Modern archaeologists have advanced a number of theories to explain this catastrophe several of which will sound familiar to modern ears. Climate change — not the anthropogenic kind, since ‘fossil fuels’ had not yet been developed — might have caused drought and starvation. A technological revolution caused by the replacement of bronze with iron could have destabilized the international system. Perhaps most modern-sounding of all explanations is complexity. The interdependence fostered by trade left the linked empires open to a general systems collapse as the failure in one place unleashed a cascade of effects in others.

More important.

One mystery is why the empires never saw danger coming. What hit them seemed to come so unexpectedly they never even had a chance to take evasive action. The reason for the surprise according to the BBC article, is “what experts call nonlinearities, or sudden, unexpected changes in the world’s order, such as the 2008 economic crisis, the rise of ISIS, Brexit, or Donald Trump’s election.” The components of a crises may already be in existence unnoticed until some precipitating event connects the pieces together for the first time and makes them manifest.

The surprise outbreak of demonstrations against Emmanuel Macron are a recent example of a failure to connect the dots. Pearl Harbor, Hitler’s invasion of Russia, the fall of the USSR, 9/11, 2008, Brexit, or Hillary’s loss were alike nearly complete surprises because no one could interpret the significance of the precursor events until afterwards. The New Yorker notes that the protests now currently shaking France blindsided the press because it did not come from the usual suspects but mere motorists unable to make ends meet.

The Trump phenomenon was a Preference Cascade.

“This illustrates, in a mild way, the reason why totalitarian regimes collapse so suddenly. (Click here for a more complex analysis of this and related
issues). Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don’t realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. If the secret police and the censors are doing their job, 99% of the populace can hate the regime and be ready to revolt against it – but no revolt will occur because no one realizes that everyone else feels the same way.

Is that coming ?

I’ve read two of Kurt Schlicter’s books. They are fiction and I hope they stay that way.

Tags:economy, politics
Posted in corruption, economics, History, military, politics | 2 Comments »

A Brief History…