A Pox on..

The American Spectator

• A Pox on Progressive Virtue-Signalling!

“Do you have white teenage sons? Listen up.” So begins Joanna Schroeder’s viral tweet thread from last August in which she argues that “alt-right” vloggers are brainwashing white boys across America into embracing white supremacy and that parents must ensure that their boys do not descend into wrongthink by carefully monitoring their social media use. The thread became so popular that it garnered attention from CNN, NPR, and even People. Schroeder adapted the series of tweets into an essaythat was subsequently published in the New York Times. In the article, ominously titled “Racists Are Recruiting. Watch Your White Sons,” she begins by relating the story of how her sons’ use of the word “triggered” (a word she describes as “the calling card of the alt-right”) alerted her to the pernicious influence of racists on her boys.

From this story, Schroeder moves with remarkable celerity to recent instances of white-supremacist terrorism, including the New Zealand mosque shooter, as if a handful of paragraphs and some references to Jordan Peterson and PragerU might reasonably bridge the distance between using a naughty word and gunning down innocents. When Schroeder remarks that “it’s not just that we want to prevent our sons from becoming perpetrators of mass shootings,” it is with all the nonchalance that, until yesterday, parents might have used in expressing a concern about their child developing a smoking habit. At the top of the article is an illustration of a small blond boy climbing through the screen of an iPhone into writhing mass of white, red-eyed snakes (to become one himself, I assume is the implication).

In response, Schroeder was praised for both her wisdom and her virtue. But how much virtue does it truly require to present your own children before an online mob and stoke the hysterical anxieties about young, white males — that if they buck against a cultural narrative that often frames them as the villains of human history then they are well on their way to becoming monsters? Didn’t a similar kind of hysteria facilitate the demonization of a group of teens from Covington Catholic High Schoollast January?

Certainly parents have always spoken both privately and publicly about the difficulties of raising children, but surely there is a distinction to be made here. Notwithstanding its histrionic tenor, behind the act one senses the parents’ desire to “see and be seen,” to be esteemed by an audience or to confirm group loyalties — to “virtue signal.”

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Though there is some dispute, the use of the term “virtue signalling” to describe such behavior is most often attributed to British journalist James Bartholomew in his 2015 article “The Awful Rise of Virtue Signalling.” He describes a range of behaviors, all united under the purpose of showing off the moral superiority of the speaker. While the obnoxious, self-serving nature of the act was always obvious, what may have been less obvious in 2015 was how far and wide — and quickly — it would spread.

Suzie Mulesky recently wrote on what she termed the “Virtue Economy,” revealing how human rights NGOs rely on “selling” perceived virtue to their donors in order to be successful. Altruistic behavior, she says, has “evolved to communicate an individual’s underlying socially attractive qualities, such as wealth and abundance of resources, compassion and empathy,” and, therefore, it can therefore be personally beneficial to be seen as altruistic.

The virtue economy Mulesky describes extends even beyond the heady world of human rights NGOs into our social media and political discourse, where there is a cottage industry for the manufacture and trading of virtue. Whereas donors to a charitable cause must actually sacrifice something, online altruism is considerably less demanding.

But that’s not to say it’s without a cost. Take, for instance, those who most loudly advocate for unrestricted immigration and open borders for the country. They are often embedded in fields or careers that are not immediately vulnerable to a large influx of unskilled or semi-skilled labor and are not likely to have their job security threatened by recent immigrants to the country, particularly those for whom English is not a first language. They may even benefit from it through lowered prices on goods and services. But others may not be so lucky. Others may find themselves competing for jobs and housing and the use of government services that they have paid for with their taxes against those who have not. Others will find their wages and competitiveness in the job market stagnating or shrinking amid a growing pool of available labor. It is a simple economic reality that if one increases the supply of labor, one also decreases its value, and Harvard University economist George Borjas has written extensively on the ways in which immigration benefits high-skill labor at the expense of low-skill labor. But there is no consideration of any of these details. In fact, to even proffer them is to invite accusations of xenophobia and white nationalism. Instead, people who stand to lose little are able to bully working-class Americans into bankrolling their (for them) costless moral posturing.

Or consider those who are not female athletes but who object vociferously to the idea of excluding trans-women from women’s sports, where they enjoy considerable physical advantages over their biologically female competitors and have already secured numerous records when they have been allowed to compete and label those who object as “transphobes.” In a recent interview with Joe Rogan (of the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast), Adam Conover (from Adam Ruins Everything) explains that the sports world that he is more “interested in” is one in which athletes could compete as the gender they identify as and that “we should find a way to make that happen.”

Conover immediately goes on to explain sympathetically that he knows the process will be “complicated,” “messy,” and “uncomfortable.” But the choice has been made for biologically female athletes, and any discomfort experienced in moving forward into the world he is more interested in is going to be on their part. Despite sacrificing nothing personally, Conover and the many who echo his sentiments are able to cloak themselves in the language of altruism and brand those who disagree as bigots.

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Social media is a massive influence in the virtue economy, not only in the way that it has expanded political discourse but also in the way that it has altered the language of that discourse. In a recent article for Scientific American, Ana P. Gantman, William J. Brady, and Jay Van Bavel explain why moral and emotional language is more likely to connect with audiences and go viral on social media. As people are presented with an ever-increasing amount of data to reckon with, it becomes more and more difficult to cut through the noise. To that end, moral or emotional language has been found to capture attention far more effectively than neutral language. This has a predictable effect, creating a demand for such language in the attention economy, which dovetails nicely with social media’s narcissistic inclinations.

With almost any recent political fracas, one can witness a frenzy amongst journalists and pundits to distill the given political subject to the most comically inadequate terms for the purpose of contriving some cheap, Manichean dichotomy. Politicians and influencers can benefit from this in predictable ways, but so can the audience when it gives them an opportunity to affirm their virtue.

This dynamic was obvious both times that issues at the southern border made headlines in 2018 and 2019. All nuanced consideration of the complications of closing a known loophole in our system of border control and the way such a policy change would interact with other policies (such as the processing of asylum claims and the Flores Agreement) was smothered by the emotionally laden rhetoric of “families being separated,” “kids in cages,” and, most egregiously of all, “concentration camps.” Obviously, such catastrophic, emotional, and otherwise distorted reasoning should be discouraged in any sane society, but in ours it has been incentivized, leaving little room for the reasonable discourse that is so necessary to a functioning democracy.

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It would seem that we are, as a society, suffering from an unfortunate misapprehension of what it means to be virtuous. Virtue is not the willingness to give away that which is not yours or to misinterpret some political subject as quickly and horrendously as possible in the mad rush to sanctify yourself and demonize your opponents. Virtue is also not the offering of uncritical sympathy and support to one group of people and not another for the simple reason that one group’s suffering has been made visible while the other’s has not. And it certainly does not mean accepting praise for what has cost you nothing.

Perhaps the most striking example of this misconception in recent memory occurred when Jim Carrey appeared on Real Time with Bill Maherand showed off his newly purchased Nike’s in support of Colin Kaepernick’s campaign with the company. Lately, Carrey imagines himself as something of a painter, but he’s never managed to craft an image as complex or thematically layered as the one of himself with his legs thrown up on Maher’s table, his Don C Nike Air Jordan Legacy 312s (a shoe that originally retailed for $150) proudly displayed to thunderous audience applause (I admit that it would be difficult to capture the applause bit). These are shoes made by people on the other side of the world who are paid less than a living wage, working 10 hours a day, six days a week, in poor conditions, for a company that finds this business model preferable to paying American workers American wages. The slogan from Nike and Kaepernick’s ad was “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” And what did Nike sacrifice for their belief? Nothing. In fact, a year later, their sales have jumped by 31 percent and the brand’s value has increased by $6 billion.

I often wonder what will be written about this time, when parents denigrate their children to receive a pat on the head from crowds of braying ideologues. I think of Ovid’s tale of Pentheus and his mother, Agave, who brutally tears off her son’s arms and head for the glory of the new god, Bacchus. It does seem that American culture appears to have embraced a new religion, and there is little use in denying that it has spread far and wide on the back of the virtue economy facilitated by social media. This could be the predictable endpoint of lives lived as performance, in which the ability to posture in front of online strangers can mean more to parents than the private knowledge that they have done right by their child. It could also be the outcome of a morally bankrupt consumer culture in which even the sybarites must be made to feel holy. But what is clear is that a country cannot succeed when guided by such a dim light as the dopamine bump of the “like” button.

How?

Lisa Smith: IS recruit arrested after arriving back in Ireland

An Irish citizen who became an Islamic State bride has been arrested after arriving back in Dublin.

Lisa Smith and her daughter travelled from Turkey after being deported, arriving in Ireland on Sunday.
She was arrested on arrival and it is expected she will now be interviewed by police about suspected terrorist offences.
Plans have also been made for the care of her two-year-old daughter, who was born in Syria, but is an Irish citizen.
Miss Smith is a former member of the Irish Defence Forces.

In a statement, Irish Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan said: "This is a sensitive case and I want to reassure people that all relevant state agencies are closely involved."
Irish state broadcaster RTÉ has posted footage on social media of her being escorted by gardaí (Irish police) on the runway in Dublin.

She said was not involved in fighting and did not train girls to become fighters.
She also claimed she had been visited more than once by the FBI for questioning, and agents had taken her fingerprints and DNA.
 Ms Smith had been living with her daughter in a Syrian refugee camp.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50619857

Who Are the Racists

Frontpage Magazine

Who Are the Racists?

Black people can't afford to remain fodder for the leftist agenda.

Fri Nov 29, 2019

Former presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke said that racism in America is "foundational" and that people of color were under "mortal threat" from the "white supremacist in the White House." Pete Buttigieg chimed in to explain that "systemic racism" will "be with us" no matter who is in the White House. Senator Cory Booker called for "attacking systemic racism" in the "racially biased" criminal justice system.

Let's follow up by examining Booker's concern about a "racially biased" criminal justice system. To do that, we can turn to a recent article by Heather Mac Donald, who is a senior fellow at the New York-based Manhattan Institute. She is a contributing editor of City Journal, and a New York Times bestselling author. Her most recent article, "A Platform of Urban Decline," which appeared in Manhattan Institute's publication Eye On The News, addresses race and crime. She reveals government statistics you've never read before.

According to leftist rhetoric, whites pose a severe, if not mortal, threat to blacks. Mac Donald says that may have once been true, but it is no longer so today. To make her case, she uses the latest Bureau of Justice Statistics 2018 survey of criminal victimization. Mac Donald writes: "According to the study, there were 593,598 interracial violent victimizations (excluding homicide) between blacks and whites last year, including white-on-black and black-on-white attacks. Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies, or 90 percent, and whites committed 56,394 of them, or less than 10 percent. That ratio is becoming more skewed, despite the Democratic claim of Trump-inspired white violence. In 2012-13, blacks committed 85 percent of all interracial victimizations between blacks and whites; whites committed 15 percent. From 2015 to 2018, the total number of white victims and the incidence of white victimization have grown as well."

There are other stark figures not talked about often. According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting for 2018, of the homicide victims for whom race was known, 53.3% were black, 43.8% were white and 2.8% were of other races. In cases where the race of the offender was known, 54.9% were black, 42.4% were white, and 2.7% were of other races.

White and black liberals, who claim that blacks face a "mortal threat" from the "white supremacist in the White House" are perpetuating a cruel hoax. The primary victims of that hoax are black people. We face the difficult, and sometimes embarrassing, task of confronting reality.

Mac Donald says that Barack Obama's 2008 Father's Day speech in Chicago would be seen today as an "unforgivable outburst of white supremacy." Here's what Obama told his predominantly black audience in a South Side church: "If we are honest with ourselves," too many fathers are "missing — missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men." Then-Senator Obama went on to say, "Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison."

White liberals deem that any speaker's references to personal responsibility brands the speaker as bigoted. Black people cannot afford to buy into the white liberal agenda. White liberals don't pay the same price. They don't live in neighborhoods where their children can get shot simply sitting on their porches. White liberals don't go to bed with the sounds of gunshots. White liberals don't live in neighborhoods that have become economic wastelands. Their children don't attend violent schools where they have to enter through metal detectors. White liberals help the Democratic Party maintain political control over cities, where many black residents live in despair, such as Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago.

Black people cannot afford to remain fodder for the liberal agenda. With that in mind, we should not be a one-party people in a two-party system.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/american-society/fake-news-inc-propaganda/

Propaganda, Inc.

November 26, 2019

According to 33-year-old Tara McGowan, Democrats have a big problem: The political media landscape isn’t liberal enough.

The mainstream press just cannot get the job done for Democrats anymore. They focus on “a relatively homogenous segment of white educated people in urban areas,” McGowan notes. Local news is dead or dying and cannot fill the void. “Misinformation,” she claims, “runs rampant” and is “condoned” by social media platforms. The antidote—one for which she’s raised tens of millions of dollars—is to fight fire with fire. If Republicans are going to benefit from a media environment characterized by propagandistic disinformation, Democrats must adopt those same tactics.

Toward that end, McGowan is building a national network of local media outlets designed to look and feel like objective newsgathering organizations but which are designed to disseminate information and narratives favorable to Democrats. As Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Joshua Green notes in his profile of the operation, casual readers of “Courier Newsroom” publications will find no cues that might alert them to the fact that these “aren’t actually traditional hometown newspapers but political instruments designed to get them to vote for Democrats.” That is the whole point of this enterprise, and it has attracted the support of Democratic donors and prominent political professionals, including Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, David Plouffe.

According to Green, the proprietor of Courier Newsroom insists there will be a “firewall” between this conglomeration of media outlets and the nonprofit Democratic strategy group that operates them, ensuring “editorial independence.” But if that policy were strictly adhered to, it would defeat the project’s stated purpose. “[W]e’re losing the information war to verified liars pouring millions of dollars into Facebook,” McGowan insists. If you consider news gathering and analysis a “war,” then the media outlets that engage in that pursuit are combatants. And what commander would tolerate “independence” amid such an existential conflict?

The philosophy that informs this project should be familiar to conservatives. It is based on an overly broad and often self-pitying assumption about how media operates. Conservatives correctly note that news and political media professionals lean left, but they make a mistake when they attribute this condition to a conspiracy rather than the similar backgrounds and shared cultural affinities of the people who gravitate toward newsrooms. Likewise, an activist Democrat might assume that the popularity of conservative narratives on social media platforms like Facebook couldn’t possibly be attributable to their resonance. It must be some grand intrigue. And how else could such a nefarious plot be countered but with another nefarious plot?

McGowan’s objective—the creation of a synthetic media outlet designed to publicize a partisan narrative—is a self-serving caricature of the media landscape that exposes deep and unproductive insecurities. As Gallup has shown over the course of nearly 50 years of polling, the public’s trust in mass media as an institution began to decline precipitously only in the 1990s. This decline coincided with the proliferation of media outlets, but it is not universal. Older Americans and Democrats are far more likely to trust what they read and watch. Pew has similarly confirmed that Democrats are less discerning news consumers than their Republican counterparts. McGowan seems less inclined to counter this condition than to capitalize on it.

But why are Democrats more trusting of the press? Gallup answers with no ambiguity: “Democrats may see the media as the institution primarily checking the president’s power.” Indeed, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, in the Trump era, the press has recommitted to its mission statement (while carefully avoiding retrospectives that shine a light on its failure to speak truth to power over Obama’s eight years).

Perhaps the most damning line in Green’s generally disturbing profile of the Democrats’ alternative news project exemplifies the left’s problem: “McGowan—a former journalist herself, who worked at 60 Minutes and CBS News—says she sees Courier Newsroom as a continuation of that work.” Indeed. Republicans do, too.

No, Medicare for All Won’t Save Money

 Article by Charles Silver and David A. Hyman:

When the massive new health program known as Medicare was created in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson got health care providers on board by buying their support: He promised that the government would let them decide how much to charge and which services to deliver. In many countries with single-payer health systems, governments decide how much they will pay; when adopting Medicare, the U.S. let providers make that decision. It gave doctors and hospitals the keys to the U.S. Treasury and guaranteed their profits.

Spending went through the roof as “unrestricted cost reimbursement became the modus operandi for financing American medical care.” The costs wildly exceeded the government’s expectations at the time: A 1967 estimate by the House Ways and Means Committee predicted that, in 1990, Medicare’s total cost would be $12 billion. The actual cost was $98 billion—eight times as much.

Half a century later, we are still living with the consequences of the decision to put providers in charge of the payment system. A recent study by scholars at Johns Hopkins University estimated that in 2018, fully “48 percent of the entire U.S. federal budget” was spent on health care. That isn’t a typo, and it’s not an accident either: Industry groups lobby the government around the clock to maximize the number of taxpayers’ dollars they receive.

Medicare for All’s supporters promise that this time will be different. Once a single-payer program is implemented, they argue, the government will save billions of dollars by slashing payments to drug-makers, doctors, and hospitals.

Although cuts of that magnitude would severely affect patient care, there’s no need to worry. If past is prologue, they will never occur. Time after time, providers have blunted initiatives designed to economize at their expense. There’s no reason to think this Congress will succeed when virtually every past Congress has failed to reduce the flow of Medicare dollars.

Consider how, in recent years, a few attempts to save money fared:

• In 1997, Congress tried to rein in spending increases by tying Medicare spending on physicians’ services to something called the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula. Whenever payments to doctors grew faster than GDP, the SGR was supposed to reduce them automatically. The formula triggered payment cuts in 2003 and every subsequent year—but the cuts never happened. Under pressure from physicians, Congress adopted a series of “doc fixes” that delayed them and often gave doctors a raise. Finally, in 2015, when the SGR formula required payment cuts of roughly 25 percent, Congress repealed it entirely, plowed the whole cost of doing so into the budget deficit, and guaranteed raises for doctors through (at least) 2019.
• In 2019, the industry used lawsuits to put the kibosh on three money-saving initiatives. First, the Trump administration’s attempt to require drug-makers to include list prices in consumer-directed advertisements went down in flames when a federal judge decided that the Department of Health and Human Services lacked the power to impose it. Then, the administration’s attempt to save $3 billion to $4 billion over nine years by changing the way payments to “disproportionate share” hospitals are calculated met the same fate. Finally, a lawsuit brought by the Association of American Medical Colleges, the American Hospital Association, and nearly 40 hospitals killed any hope of saving about $800 million a year by eliminating “site-of-service differentials” that pay doctors employed by hospitals more than physicians with independent practices—even when the physicians are delivering the same services in the same offices.
• 2019 was also the fifth year in which the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) failed to implement legislation enacted in 2014 which sought to save a paltry $200 million over 10 years by discouraging physicians from needlessly ordering expensive CT scans and MRIs. Regulations were supposed to take effect in 2018, but more than two dozen medical societies complained, so the Trump administration delayed them until January 2020.
• Big Pharma is currently working overtime to kill the Prescription Drug Pricing Reduction Act, which would penalize drug companies for raising prices faster than the rate of inflation. Although the bill has bipartisan support, knowledgeable observers say it has no chance of achieving the 60 votes needed to pass the Senate. Indeed, the bill may not make it out of the Senate Finance Committee, since 13 of the 15 Republican senators on the Committee oppose it.
• The health care industry has also turned back efforts to audit its charges. Medicare Advantage plans, which are paid based on how sick their enrollees are, don’t want Medicare to know whether they are exaggerating enrollees’ illnesses, so they have fought off or watered down efforts to audit their reports. CMS is already unenthusiastic about auditing the health care system: for the past four years, it has canceled Medicaid eligibility audits, and “has never taken meaningful actions to minimize improper payments from the [Medicaid] expansion.
•  

If Medicare for All’s fans are banking on a Congress dominated by Democrats to bring the industry to heel, their hopes are misplaced. Democrats voted for "doc fixes” repeatedly and stood shoulder to shoulder with Republicans when the SGR was repealed. The parties may differ on some things but judging by their actions they both believe that the government cannot possibly spend too much money on health care. Only a person who is incredibly naïve or who ignores history entirely can believe that Medicare for All will be financed on the backs of doctors, hospitals, and drug companies.

Medicare for All is also certain to drive up spending by generating an enormous surge in demand for medical care. The bills pending in Congress promise soup-to-nuts coverage for free. Premiums, deductibles and copays are supposed to vanish. If that happens, prodigious consumption of medical services will be inevitable.

The fundamental problem is that Medicare for All’s supporters have cause and effect reversed. They think Americans need universal comprehensive coverage because health care is expensive. In reality, we spend too much on health care because we rely so heavily on third parties—Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers—to pay our bills. In 1960, when patients paid about $1.73 out of pocket for every $1 paid by an insurer, health care spending per capita was $165. In 2010, when patients paid out 16 cents for every insurance dollar, spending per capita was $8,400. And in 2017, when the ratio was 14 cents out of pocket for every insurance dollar, spending per capita was $10,740. The more we rely on third party payers, the more we spend. Because the full-on, government-run, single-payer plans introduced by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren will reduce out of pocket costs to zero, they will drive spending to new heights.

Paying out more than it takes in

What about the various “public option” proposals, including the less-sweeping version also known as “Medicare for all who want it”? They will open the doors to the treasury wider, too. Although supporters assert that premiums will cover the public option’s costs, that’s not how government-funded health care works. Public programs are heavily subsidized with taxpayers’ dollars. A typical one-earner couple pays $70,000 in Medicare taxes during the working spouse’s lifetime and gets $427,000 in benefits in return. The premiums for Medicare Part B, which pays for doctors’ services, originally covered 50 percent of the cost, but today cover only 25 percent. Premiums for Medicare Part D (which covers prescription drugs) are so low that the program depends on general tax revenue for more than 70 percent of its funding.

A public option is sure to follow the same path, paying out far more in benefits than subscribers pay in as premiums. Proponents will want millions of people to sign up, and the easiest way to get them to do so will be by making the public option a steal. Elizabeth Warren has already said that the public option she wants to create in the course of transitioning to Medicare for All “will be immediately free for nearly half of all Americans.” Interest groups like AARP, which wants a subsidized buy-in option for near-seniors, will pressure Congress to support the program with taxpayers’ dollars too.

Like the advocates of Medicare for All, the public option’s proponents also hope to save billions of dollars by paying doctors and other providers at Medicare rates or something similar. (Medicare pays hospitals about half as much as commercial insurers, and it pays doctors about 20 percent less.) We’ve seen this movie before, however, and that’s not how it ends. If threatened with drastic payment cuts, doctors and hospitals will fight back in the public arena. They will generate widespread panic by threatening to close their doors. That’s what happened during the managed care revolution in the 1990s, and the backlash was ferocious. Americans like their doctors, and hospitals have huge traction in their communities. When providers rose up against managed care, state legislators introduced more than 1,000 bills designed to protect patients and calm consumers’ fears of losing control of their health care. The public option’s proponents are seriously underestimating the industry’s power to rally the public.

If neither Medicare for All nor the public option is an attractive means of controlling health care spending, what is? We believe that the spending crisis will disappear when Americans pay for most medical services directly, the same way they pay for everything else, and reserve insurance for catastrophes. Homeowners’ insurance kicks in when houses are destroyed by fires or other calamities that rarely occur. Homeowners pay out of pocket for predictable non-catastrophic expenses, like maintenance, remodeling and new paint. Health insurance should work the same way.

More concretely, a national health reform that truly wants to address spiraling costs should take the following steps:

Increase retail options. Let retailers like Walmart, CVS Health, Costco, and the Surgery Center of Oklahoma that operate on a cash basis offer a full range of medical services. They have demonstrated their power to make primary care, blood tests, medications, hearing aids, eyeglasses, surgeries, mental health counseling, dental cleanings and telemedicine cheaper. Lower prices will help everyone, and poor people, who are especially sensitive to costs, will benefit the most. Competition from retailers will pressure traditional providers to be more consumer-friendly, too.

End tax subsidies. Eliminate the tax exclusion for employer-provided health insurance and all coverage mandates. These steps will encourage (but not require) people to switch from expensive comprehensive insurance to much cheaper high-deductible catastrophic care insurance, and to pay for most treatments themselves. The entry of tens of millions of new cash-paying health care consumers into the market will cause the retail sector to expand, and the pressure to lower prices will grow.

End Medicare as we know it. Replace Medicaid, Medicare and other programs that provide in-kind benefits with a single program, modeled on Social Security, that gives poor people cash plus an insurance policy covering catastrophes. If combined, the budgets of existing social welfare programs would more than suffice to bring all Americans above the federal poverty line. Cash transfers would also enable people to pay for food, housing, education and other social determinants of health that affect wellbeing more than medical treatments do.

Will these arrangements work perfectly? Of course not. But they will vastly out-perform the existing system, which is known to waste almost $1 trillion a year. And unlike Medicare for All and the public option, these proposals will transform the health care system without raising taxes or putting the economy at risk. When consumers pay for most medical services directly—the same way they pay for nearly everything else—the health care spending crisis will disappear.

https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/no-medicare-all-wont-save-money

 

Let’s Give Red Flag ..

Townhall

Let’s Give Red Flag Laws a Try, 

with Abortion

Paul Curry

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

Source: AP Photo/Charlie Riedel

When you have to ask for a right, it ceases to be a right and becomes a privilege. And privileges, like freedom, can be taken away. The right of the people to keep and bear arms is enshrined in the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution and it cannot, constitutionally, be taken away. So-called red flag laws are an attempt to do just that, demote the “right” of the people to bear arms to a mere privilege. Championed by left-wing politicos who would prefer we view the Bill of Rights, not as a sacrosanct guarantee of individual liberty, but rather an à la carte menu of daily preferences, red flag laws are, although often well-intentioned, ill-conceived reactionary surrenders of our Constitutional liberty. It would be both curious and dangerous to see exactly how many other “rights” and liberties they truly believe are subject to such daily whims.

Red flag laws allow individual judges to issue orders allowing law enforcement to seize firearms from American citizens, not on the basis of any committed crime, but rather, based solely on the beliefs of others. Red flag laws allow for ex-parte hearings, that is, proceedings without the accused even being present to defend him or herself. Red flag laws require the accused to appear before a court, after an order has been issued, and make an argument in defense of their rights. The accused must demonstrate, to the satisfaction of a judge who may or may not be friendly to 2^nd Amendment rights, that they should be allowed to exercise their constitutional rights. Most importantly, red flag laws are ripe for abuse in any number of fashions. Red flag laws create an undue burden on citizens to prove that they are entitled to exercise their constitutional rights.

This past October, Stephen Nichols, an 84-year-old Korean War veteran, former police officer, and current school crossing guard, was the victim of the flawed fed flag law mentality. Mr. Nichols’ offense? He was overheard, and misquoted, by a waitress in an Oak Bluff, MA, diner. Mr. Nichols, speaking with a friend, complained of the local school’s security officers leaving for coffee while the school children were unattended. Mr. Nichols complained that anybody could “shoot up the school” while security officers took breaks. Subsequently, and on the word of the waitress who overheard his statement, Mr. Nichols had his licensed and registered firearms seized and was immediately fired from his position as a crossing guard. Mr. Nichols had his 2^nd, 4^th, 5^th, and 14^th Amendment rights essentially revoked.

If we assume, for the sake of argument, that Mr. Nichols’ accuser acted in good faith, what does his predicament say about the potential for people acting in bad faith? How many ex-boyfriends, ex-girlfriends, ex-husbands, or ex-wives can easily abuse red flag laws? How many constitutional rights are red flag law proponents willing to submit to arbitrary review by judges? What if red flag laws were applied to other situations of life or death, say abortion? Proponents of red flags laws regarding 2^ndAmendment rights argue, absent evidence, that without them someone may die. If we applied the same reasoning to abortion rights, absent red flag laws for abortion, someone will die.

Suppose we apply red flag laws to abortion. Should an ex-boyfriend, ex-husband, parent, or friend be able to petition a judge to halt an abortion? Clearly, the decision to have an abortion is a highly emotional one, would it be so bad for a judge to halt the procedure, just long enough to make sure that the subject woman is acting rationally? Should we allow an ex-boyfriend, ex-husband, parent, or school counselor to make the red flag abortion petition ex-parte? Would pro-choice advocates feel comfortable that a judge hearing the red flag abortion petition could keep his or her personal and political feelings out of the ruling? Would a woman seeking an abortion feel overly burdened by simply having to plead her case to a judge, or would she believe that she does not have to explain exercising her Constitutional rights to anyone? Would a woman feel, in such circumstances, that abortion was no longer a right but a privilege? 

Constitutional rights are guaranteed to all citizens. They are not privileges that can be taken away arbitrarily or capriciously. Proponents of red flag gun laws are comfortable with a judge deciding when an individual can exercise his or her 2nd Amendment rights. Would they be equally comfortable with a judge determining the same for abortion rights? Life or death may hang in the balance of both, perhaps the Supreme Court could look at them both. Red flag laws are simply an unconstitutional burden on rights and, as Benjamin Franklin put it, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Leftists Protest...

https://babylonbee.com/news/leftists-protest-new-mr-rogers-film-for-controversial-message-of-being-nice-to-everyone

Leftists Protest New Mister Rogers Film For Controversial Message Of Being Nice To Everyone

November 28th, 2019

U.S.—Screenings across the nation of the new film A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood, starring Tom Hanks in the iconic role of Mister Rogers, were immediately met by large protest groups who took issue with the film's themes of kindness triumphing over cynicism and being a friendly neighbor to all no matter what our differences may be.

"It's the current year!" yelled one leftist protestor outside a Portland screening. "If we were nice to everyone, then we would be giving a platform to lots of dangerous ideas that have no place in our society!"

"This is how Trump brought fascism to America," yelled another protestor.  "2016 happened because we were too nice and didn't shout down our racist neighbors' ideas enough!"

The crowd then began to chant in unison, "No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA!"

Portland theater manager, Burt Simmons, emerged from the ticket counter to assure everybody that the film has nothing to do with Trump and that that movie would inspire a holiday spirit of peace if they would give it a chance.

At publishing time, Burt was in grave condition at a local hospital.

WaPo laughably attacks Second Amendment sanctuaries, fails miserably

 Article by Jazz Shaw in "HotAir":

Now that Democrats have managed to seize control of both chambers of the legislature in Virginia, along with the Governor’s mansion, Second Amendment supporters there are bracing for the onslaught of gun-grabbing that is sure to follow. As such, a number of counties are moving forward with plans to establish themselves as Second Amendment sanctuaries, where new, abusive gun-control laws will not be enforced by county authorities. This is a movement that’s taken hold in Illinois and other blue states but had not previously been needed in Virginia.

As it turns out, the editorial board at the Washington Post has taken notice of these developments. In response, they published a scathing editorial this weekend, declaring such counties to be rogue actors, interested in “vigilantism” and (*gasp*) “defying the law.” Perish the thought!

VIGILANTISM, WITH its alluring tingle of defiance and frontier justice, conjures a cinematic idea of American individualism. A similar impulse is at work among advocates of the so-called Second Amendment sanctuary movement, a trend in mainly rural counties declaring they will refuse to enforce restrictive state gun laws. Both are examples of individuals who, lacking legal authority, put themselves above the law, thereby promoting chaos…
The idea — and the term itself — has gained traction in Western states and elsewhere, inspired by “sanctuary cities” that have adopted policies barring cooperation with federal immigration officials to deport unauthorized migrants.

The editors go on, with no apparent irony (at least intentionally) to declare that such efforts are “nonsense fanned by mischief-makers with an agenda.” Oh, really? I wonder how they would react to the following paragraph?

OPEN BORDERS THEORY, WITH its alluring tingle of defiance and diversity, conjures a dangerous image of a new global order where international borders are meaningless. A similar impulse is at work among advocates of so-called sanctuary cities, where local officials forbid police cooperation with immigration enforcement officials and even frustrate their efforts. These are examples of individuals, lacking any national authority, putting their priorities ahead of important federal laws that have been in effect for generations.

But enough about the obvious double standards and hypocrisy on display here. To start off, Second Amendment sanctuaries have nothing to do with vigilantism. They aren’t even related. You don’t need a firearm to engage in vigilante activities (though it certainly helps), and legally owning a firearm does not signify any tendency toward forming up vigilante squads. This is blatant hyperbole meant to fire up the gun-grabbing crowd.

The WaPo goes on to try to claim that sanctuary cities intended to act as havens for illegal aliens are nothing at all like proposed Second Amendment sanctuaries. (Again… perish the thought!) Here’s how they attempt to explain this claim.

The distinction between the two sanctuaries is basic. Localities that have passed resolutions declaring themselves Second Amendment sanctuary jurisdictions are threatening to ignore laws enacted by duly elected state legislatures and signed by governors. Immigration-focused sanctuary localities are breaking no law; rather, they are refusing purely voluntary cooperation in service to federal law enforcement. And, in practice, sanctuary cities often do — and should — fully coordinate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in cases involving violent felons such as murderers and rapists.

So laws “duly enacted by the states” must be observed at all costs. But sanctuary cities “are breaking no law?” It’s bad enough that they forbid police from cooperating and honoring detainers. That is quite arguably a case of obstruction of justice. But when they go further and try to pass laws forbidding the arrest of deportable illegal aliens at courthouses or other locations, it’s absolutely obstruction.

And don’t even get me started on sanctuary cities where the Mayor acts as an accomplice, sending out gang signals to warn illegal aliens that a raid is coming. Or even worse, when a judge sitting on the bench in a sanctuary city conspires to physically block ICE agents from her courtroom while allowing a criminal illegal alien to escape out a side door.

But that’s all fine, right? As long as it’s done in the cause of resisting the Bad Orange Man and trying to eliminate ICE or prevent more secure borders. But God forbid any locale tries to ensure the Second Amendment rights of its citizens. That’s just anarchy and chaos. The willful blindness of these editors is simply staggering at times.

https://hotair.com/archives/jazz-shaw/2019/11/30/wapo-laughably-attacks-second-amendment-sanctuaries-fails-miserably/

 

Irving Burgie: Songwriter of calypso hit Day-O dies aged 95.

US composer Irving Burgie, who helped to popularise Caribbean music with hit songs like Day-O, has died aged 95.

His death was confirmed by Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley, who called for a moment of silence for the man who wrote its national anthem.
Mr Burgie is best known for helping singer Harry Belafonte bring calypso music to the mainstream.
The 1950s song Day-O went on to be used in films, adverts and even as a wake-up call for astronauts in space.
The calypso hit, also known as The Banana Boat Song, featured in the popular film Beetlejuice and has been sampled by rapper Lil Wayne and singer Jason Derulo.

US media reports say Mr Burgie died on Friday as a result of complications from heart failure.
His website says his songs have sold more than 100 million records worldwide.
Mr Burgie wrote eight of the 11 songs on Harry Belafonte's 1956 album Calypso, which was the first album in the US to sell more than a million copies.

During his career, the composer worked with artists including Jimmy Buffett, Chuck Berry and Sam Cooke.
His other well-known songs include Island in the Sun, Jamaica Farewell and Mary's Boy Child, which he co-wrote.
Brooklyn-born Mr Burgie did not begin pursuing a career in music until he returned from serving in an all-black US Army battalion in World War Two.
He then used the benefits he received as a war veteran to fund his studies at New York's prestigious Juilliard performing arts school and went on to launch a career as a singer and guitarist before moving into writing songs for others.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50619991

After These Remarks About The Trump Impeachment Circus, Does This Mean House Democrats Are Russian Agents?

Article by Matt Vespa in "Townhall":

Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI) is one of the few Democrats who aren’t insane. Yes, that club has lost a lot of members since 2016. She’s still a liberal Democrat, but she’s not nuts. She has noted how identity politics has hijacked her party. She hates it when people generalize all Trump supporters as racist. And she warned her party in 2016 that the Clinton campaign was ignoring the Rust Belt, and her state, at their peril. Now, she’s observing that the overtly partisan public impeachment hearings are pretty much accomplishing what Russia wants with this circus: division. And it’s the Democrats leading that charge because…‘orange man, bad.’ 

Fox Business host Charles Payne interviewed Dingell where he commented on how a partisan impeachment push is accomplishing things Russia has only dreamed of concerning sowing division in Washington. 

“I think some of this has probably been caused by some of the actions that they’ve taken,” replied Dingell.

Is that a subtle shot at Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA)? Schiff is the chair of the House Intelligence Committee who held the first series of public hearings that really didn’t do much. The needle hasn’t moved in impeachment. It’s still unpopular in battleground states. No one watched it. No one cared. And the witnesses were pretty much career bureaucrats who were huffy because they disagreed with Trump on Ukraine policy. 

Yeah, the hill Democrats are willing to die on is that the president tried to shake down the Ukrainians in a July phone call, where Trump threatened to withhold military aid unless a corruption probe was opened into Hunter Biden’s position at Burisma. Aid was never withheld. In fact, Trump’s Ukraine policy has teeth unlike Obama, who refused to dole out military aid out of fear of hurting Putin’s feelings.

During these hearings, it was revealed that the president could legally put a hold on aid. This is shoddier and more pathetic than the Russian collusion narrative that turned out to be a total myth.

And at the beginning of this impeachment push, Schiff held preliminary depositions in secret. Selective transcripts were released to the press. He even directed witnesses to ignore GOP questions. And hours of testimony were summarized for GOP committee members to read, but only in the presence of a Democratic aide. Impeachment is serious political hardball. It has to be an open process and at the start, it was anything but that. We all knew the ballgame would be a clown show. This only added legitimacy to Republican criticism that what was about to transpire was akin to a North Korean kangaroo court. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) is not the most public figure in the party when it comes to access to the media or doing television hits. She has become Trump’s top defender, a key member in this linebacker corps that is calling out Schiff and his antics for the public to know. That’s how bad this all has become. 

Oh, and did we mention that this Trump-Ukraine fiasco got off the ground because some reported CIA agent, who is also a registered Democrat and a person who has worked with a 2020 candidate, filed the complaint, but not until after making contact with Schiff’s staff before officially filing the report? Schiff has bestowed an imaginary legal blanket over this person, protecting his identity. Schiff’s staff knows it. He probably does as well; he knew the contents of the complaint as he was planning the impeachment offensive against this White House. Talk about collusion, folks. 

So, yeah, maybe these actions have increased the partisan atmosphere with this production on the Hill, right? Also, if this whole impeachment clown show is doing what Russia wants, does that make Schiff and his minions Russian agents? Hey, these are the Democrats' rules.  I'm just asking for a friend.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2019/12/01/did-this-democratic-congresswoman-take-a-subtle-shot-at-adam-schiffs-trump-impea-n2557282