NO. NEXT QUESTION? Should Universities Be Sanctuaries For Illegal Immigrants?
Archive for 2016
December 5, 2016
GOOD LORD: 4 Quit After OK Veteran Dies With Maggots in Wound.
Four staff at the Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs resigned after maggots were found in the wound of a Vietnam veteran who died in October. Another VA staff member insisted that the maggots did not cause his death.
Raymie Parker identified the man as his father, 73-year-old Owen Reese Peterson. “During the 21 days I was there … I pled with the medical staff, the senior medical staff, to increase his meds so his bandages could be changed,” Parker told the Tulsa World. “I was met with a stonewall for much of that time.”
Executive Director Myles Deering explained the maggots were discovered while Peterson was alive, but did not cause his death. Rather, the man came into the VA hospital with an infection and died “as a result of the sepsis,” complications from that infection. Nevertheless, Deering must have hated saying the words, “He did not succumb as a result of the parasites.”
That there were any parasites involved is a disgrace, and the staff members who resigned must have known it.
Abolish the VA and give vets vouchers for the private health coverage of their choice.
Read the whole thing, but let’s just broaden our view a bit to look at what Trump has done so far:
(1) Killed off dynastic politics, at least for now. If Hillary had won, 4 of the last 5 presidents would have come from two families. That’s not healthy.
(2) Kept Hillary out of the White House. She’s amazingly crooked even by DC standards, and amazingly inept even by DC standards as well. Debacles galore have been prevented by keeping her out. Plus, a Clinton presidency would have allowed the completion of the Obama Administration’s weaponization of the federal government and possibly ensured one-party rule for decades. And at the very least, it would have allowed the sorry gang that Obama and Clinton brought in (go read the Podesta emails!) to bore in for four to eight more years.
Those two reasons were reason enough to back Trump. But now let’s look at what’s happened since election night:
(3) The Mattis appointment. In one swoop, a big start toward fixing the military that Obama turned from warriors into social-justice warriors. Plus, a big blow to PC culture in general.
(4) The Carrier deal. Sure, everybody hates it — except for the voters. But it’s a promise kept, and one that makes American working-class folks feel like, finally, somebody cares. And it’s rich to see people who didn’t bat an eye at Solyndra going ballistic about $7 million over 10 years.
(5) Crushing the media’s sense of self-importance: They thought they were going to hand this election to Hillary. Now they’re realizing just how few people like or trust them, while Trump bypasses them using Twitter and YouTube. As I’ve said before, in the post-World War II era, the press has enjoyed certain institutional privileges based on two assumptions: (1) That it’s very powerful; and (2) That it will exercise that power responsibly, for the most part. Both assumptions have been proven false in this election cycle. Like many of the postwar institutional accommodations, this one will be renegotiated under Trump. It’s past time. After getting spanked in 2004 over RatherGate, the press realized with Katrina that if they all converged on the same lies they could still move the needle. Now they can’t.
(6) China. Obama’s foreign policy has been disastrous. Trump has served notice to China that we’re not abandoning our allies on the Pacific Rim. That will be noticed elsewhere, too.
(7) The transition. It was supposed to be “chaos,” but it’s been smooth and obviously well-planned. This bodes well and, among those willing to pay attention beyond SNL sketches, is changing minds.
Don’t get cocky, because he could still blow it and the press will be looking for anything they can use to destroy him, as they do with every Republican president. But for a guy less than 4 weeks out from the election, he’s doing awfully well.
STIMULUS: Forget Ghost Cities, China Builds 10-Billion-Yuan Replica Titanic.
According to Google Translate, it’s part of a Chengdu tourism project which “will also present the first giant man-made sky waterway commercial street, the world’s first interactive high-tech three-dimensional theater cinema, the largest salt brine hot springs in Asia and other products.”
This Titanic appears to be land-based and at very little risk of sinking — unlike many of China’s state-directed investments.
SALENA ZITO: Democrats dancing with insanity.
That is how many of Nancy Pelosi’s colleagues it took to vote her back into power despite having lost her third consecutive chance at winning back the majority from the Republicans.
Her win over Youngstown Ohio Democrat Tim Ryan for Minority Leader proved two-thirds of those House Democrats have more interest in someone who is a deep-pocket fundraiser than someone who perhaps could have made the party more competitive in swing districts or more cohesive in their message to the voters.
Or perhaps both.
Their decision was arrogant, tone deaf and a smack in the face to the voters who once proudly supported this party and were waiting to see if someone would lead them back out of the progressive wilderness.
Kevin Lawson, 22, is one young Democrat who would have preferred Ryan over Pelosi, “We need a message that resonates not only with young people, but a much broader swath of the country,” he said. “Ryan talked about the economy in his local race, but the overall message from the party was flat and uninspiring.”
It was a joyless campaign, but that kind of tone starts at the top.
OF COURSE IT IS: The war on ‘fake news’ is all about censoring real news. The excuse is different every time, but the goal — silencing political opponents — is always the same.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: More On The California Bar Exam Carnage.
AT AMAZON, 70% off or more on Men’s Fleece Jackets.
DAVID HARSANYI: You Opposed Donald Trump, So Why Aren’t You Freaking Out?
If you’re genuinely interesting in being an effective critic of the next president, acting like Adolf Hitler is pounding at your doorstep every time Trump tweets something might not be the most effective plan in the long run.
Not to mention, the left has been such an astonishing hypocrite on so many issues related to Trump that it’s a bit difficult to move forward without pointing it out. Joining activists who’ve spent years attacking the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth and Tenth Amendments—and now the Electoral College—in a newfound veneration of the Emoluments Clause is a bit much. Of course, Trump should be held accountable for his potential conflicts of interest, and one hopes conservatives who value good government will stand up when tangible evidence emerges that they exist. But the critics on the left aren’t serious about the Constitution. They’re serious about the Democratic Party.
Who can take journalists seriously—who’ve never once uttered a word of concern over the Democratic Party’s crusade to empower government to ban political speech by overturning Citizens United—when they lose it over a tweet about flag-burning? If it were up to them over the past eight years, Trump would now be imbued with far more power to achieve the things they fear—unilaterally. There was more angst over the president-elect ditching a reporting pool to have a steak than there was over any of President Obama’s numerous executive abuses. So when you hear people say democracy needs journalism “now more than ever,” remember that they’re admitting they weren’t doing their job yesterday. We also needed journalism more than ever back then.
Those who kept telling us that Hillary Clinton’s corrupt foundation and blatant favor-trading with the world’s most illiberal regimes were merely a conspiracy theory now act as if the republic will crumble if Trump’s hotel hosts the same Bahraini princes that were buying access in the Obama administration. . . .
What’s really upset Democrats, it seems to me, is that traditional conservative policy proposals—the sorts of thing Republicans have campaigned on for years, and the policies that have helped them win over 1,000 local seats and governorships and two wave elections—will probably be moving forward.
Read the whole thing.
THE FREEDOM TO BE SHUT UP: French Court Bans ‘Disturbing’ Anti-Abortion Down Syndrome Ad.
FASCISM IS ALWAYS DESCENDING ON THE UNITED STATES, BUT IT ALWAYS LANDS… ANYWHERE ELSE: In fear after attacks, gay Bangladeshis retreat into closet and flee abroad.
Seven months after al Qaeda-linked militants hacked Bangladesh’s most prominent gay activist to death, the South Asian country’s LGBT community remains in hiding, while more than a dozen LGBT people have fled abroad.
“The whole community has been sent back to the closet,” a gay activist in exile told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on condition of anonymity because he fears for his safety.
“Any kind of work – whatever we had been doing – it has been completely shut down. There is no movement, no visibility, no work. It is a horrible situation. We have never imagined the situation would be like this.”
Bangladesh’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community was already marginalized, with gay sex being illegal, punishable by a maximum of life in prison.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: DNC Chair Hopeful Spent Past Eight Years as Podesta Group Lobbyist.
#OBAMACAREFAIL: Record-High Health Care Spending Hits $3.2 Trillion in 2015.
PROCUREMENT BLUES: LCS Program ‘Broke’ the Navy.
In an era when other major-dollar acquisition programs such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the Gerald R. Ford-class carrier have dominated headlines on account of delays and budget overruns, the sternest rebukes in Congress may be reserved for the embattled LCS program.
“The experience of LCS, it broke the Navy,” said Sean Stackley, assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition. “… We have our program managers pretty much under a microscope right now, and we’ve taken things like cost and we’ve put cost into our requirements so that you don’t get to ignore costs while you’re chasing requirement. Just like speed, range, power and payload, if you start to infringe on the cost requirement that we put into our documents, you have to report to [Research, Development and Acquisition] and [the Chief of Naval Operations] just like you do if you infringe on one of the other requirements.”
In prepared testimony for the hearing, the Pentagon’s director of Operational Test and Evaluation, J. Michael Gilmore, gave a damning accounting of where the program stands, saying neither of the two LCS variants now being built by competing contractors is expected to be survivable in combat, a fact that undermines the whole concept of operations for the ship class.
Heads should roll.
JEFFREY ROSEN: States’ Rights For The Left. “Since the 1930s, progressives have unapologetically embraced Hamiltonian big government. But in rediscovering the virtues of Jeffersonian small government, Democrats and liberals are returning to a tradition of ‘progressive federalism’ that they favored before the New Deal and the Great Society — and that they began to revive during the second Bush administration.”
Yeah, but I don’t care, because I know that the minute they get power they’ll reverse course. If they want to back a constitutional amendment limiting federal power, then we can talk. Here are a few suggestions.
WHY TRUMP WON (CONT’D): Are You Sure You’re Not Racist? Note the precious opening: “When my son was 4, we were crossing the Dartmouth campus. . . .”
MAD DUCK: Dakota Pipeline Project Halted as Obama Administration Denies Permit for Last Leg.
The Obama administration said Sunday that it had denied a permit needed to complete the last leg of an oil pipeline across the Midwest, prompting cheers from opponents but warnings that the move could be short-lived since President-elect Donald Trump supports the project.
The nearly 1,200-mile Dakota Access pipeline, extending from North Dakota across parts of South Dakota and Iowa and ending in Illinois, is nearly complete, except for a 1,100-foot crossing of a Missouri River reservoir.
And:
Pipeline experts said it was extremely rare for an administration to intervene in a permitting process typically handled by career civil servants. The advanced stage of the project’s construction made the Obama administration’s move even more unusual, and experts said they believed it could be easily overturned.
“Clearly this is being directed politically from the administration,” said Brigham McCown, a former top pipeline administrator for the Transportation Department during the George W. Bush administration. “What it says is that even if you have your permits in hand, the government might change the rules on you once construction is almost done.”
Obama has begun the last leg of his “Screw You, America” tour.
Of course, “live by the pen and phone, die by the pen and phone.” President Trump can undo Obama’s whims at will.
POLITICAL HACKS GONNA HACK: The disclosure that could end Eric Schneiderman’s career.
