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MAY
2014
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and (See 1 below.)
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Commentary on the growing tragedy in academia and the ill-liberalness happening on college campuses. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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This is a letter I wrote to the Publisher (Michael Traynor) and Editor of The Editorial Page (Tom Barton) of the local paper::
"Now that the primaries are behind us I would hope you will use your influence to endorse candidates that are not running because of their belief that they are entitled and also who have a history of self dealing actions.
Jolene Byrnes has the temperament and educational background and deserves to be supported by your editorial page. Her opponent, whom I serve with on the board of a local company, is to be congratulated for his military service but he does not have the temperament, in my humble opinion, to meld a disparate board into a cohesive unit. Jolene does. She is very feminine but tough as nails as evidenced from her come from behind run.
I also urge you to endorse Bob Johnson. I was in Eataly when he misspoke and your paper sought to vilify him in cartoons and commentary. Bob Johnson is a fighter, learned from his inappropriate phraseology but is clean as a whistle and represents the Jeffersonian model of citizenship participation. He is a practicing physician with a long and honorable military service, unlike his opponent, unlike his opponent who claims, by reason of being a pharmacist, he understand health care.
Carter like Simon are joined at the hip and Carter also has a record of proposing self-dealing legislation and other questionable behaviour.
I have sent and will be sending more money to help these candidates so I have a bias but as you know from my many letters I am an independent thinker with a rational conservative DNA.and I despise liars and candidates who believe they should be chosen simply because they breathe
Thanks in advance for any consideration given this plea.
It is time to break the moldy molds of good ole boy politics!
Me."
Yesterday's primaries indicated the influence of the more extreme Tea Party members was not effective andt, overall, Republicans are beginning to learn what it takes to win. That does not mean the more rational conservative values of the Tea Party will not continue to exercise a large influence as they should.
In the last election extreme members of The Tea Party defeated themselves with many of their candidate choices but now a balanced approach and a return to the fold seems to be taking place and this should strengthen Republican chances of capturing the Senate so that Obama's desire to operate ex parte will be brought under control, our AWOL president will be held more accountable and his extreme leftist ideology has a better chance of being blocked. (See 3 below.)
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From time to time I make market comments and it seems to me the domestic market is fairly valued.
First quarter earnings were acceptable but, in many instances, analyst estimates had been lowered so the barrier of meeting expectations was easier.. Obviously unusual weather had a lot to do with earnings.
Second, many corporate managers made subdued forecasts in the hope of keeping expectations in check.
Third, the world political scene continues tenuous. Ukraine, Iran, and a president who is totally ineffectual and even dangerous continues to be worrisome matters.
Fourth, The Fed appears on course to reduce bond purchases, inflation remains subdued , for the most part, but it is inevitable it will rise if the economy show any signs of improving.
Fifth, employment remains a sticky matter and thus, the consumer's ability to purchase is less than buoyant. Household debt has been reduced and that is a plus.
Sixth, the mood in the country is unsettled. This president has accomplished his goal of setting Americans against themselves through demonizing so he can act with impunity as he spends money on programs and policies designed to build dependent constituents beholden to Democrats.
Obama has also reduced military spending and cut other subsidies (Medicare) in order to spend on his radical ideas and the diminution of America's world foot print.
Finally, housing demand seems to have tapered and household formations remains far below historical levels and post economic decline recovery experience.
On the brighter side, every time the market takes a swoon investors step up to the plate because returns on conservative investment alternatives remain very low. This was the intention of Bernanke's policy of flooding the market with money and reducing interest rates. - Increase the benefits accruing from stock market wealth effects.
Now the question becomes what the response will be once The Fed unhooks itself from Bernanke's policies?
Finding compelling investments,with below market multiples and higher than market returns is challenging.
Personally, I continue to focus on low multiple technology companies, a defined number of energy limited partnerships and a few health care stocks with promising backlogs of drugs in late stage development.
Such would be AT&T, Intel, IBM, Apple, Cisco, Kinder Morgan, Merck for example.
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A response from a dear friend and fellow memo reader regarding my comments about "Blackwater."
He and his family fled Cuba, so he knows about such matters. (See 4 below.)
and watch:Click here to see the explosive video.
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This from a dear friend, someone active in the field of health care and a fellow memo reader regarding what is wrong with big government and its inability to control medical costs and the idea of one size fits all mentality.
My God, it has to be evident that big government is mostly a failure at everything it undertakes. What more blatant evidence than what is happening to veteran care? (See 5 below.)
I know we need government and I know we have problems that government can solve but the best way to solve these problems is through intelligent approaches, more local involvement and as far outside politics as possible.
Reagan was right when he said government is the problem not the solution and I defy anyone to show me this is not the case in most every endeavor government undertakes.
The problem of big government has also been made worse by a president who is totally unqualified to be one and whose radical solutions have cost us dearly in money, respect and social tranquility.. (See 5a [Lieberman on Leadership], 5b and 5c below.)
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Our second oldest grandson, the Little Rock TV Reporter, is coming Thursday with his red headed Cheyenne, Wyoming girl friend and our daughter and son in law with Dagny and Blake are coming up from Orlando, so memos will be non existent and we leave again next week for St Louis for a family affair.
In truth, I have said all I feel compelled to write so, once again, those who read these missives will have another luxury of a reprieve.
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Dick
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1) A New Plan for Peace in Palestine
Dismantle the security barrier in the West Bank. Let most Palestinians who live there govern themselves.
On May 14 U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in London to discuss the "unity government" that Mr. Abbas announced unexpectedly last month. Mr. Abbas's decision to establish a national government in coalition with Hamas is the latest example in a long line of Palestinian intransigence.
Hamas is a terrorist organization dedicated to Israel's destruction. The group has killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings and missile attacks. That is the organization's very mission: The Hamas charter calls for perpetual jihad against the Jewish State while forever rejecting peace negotiations or compromise. Israel will not negotiate with a Palestinian government that includes Hamas.
So how should Israel respond to Mr. Abbas's announced plan for such a government? I propose what I call the Stability Plan, which I will promote throughout Israel's new Knesset legislative session.
Palestinians living in certain portions of the West Bank (known as Area A and Area B) should govern themselves. They should hold their own elections, run their own schools, issue their own building permits and manage their own health-care system. In short, they should run their own lives. Israel should not interfere in day-to-day governance.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas Associated Press
To achieve this, Israel must allow Palestinians complete freedom of movement, which requires removing all roadblocks and checkpoints in the West Bank. In particular, Israel should dismantle the security barrier erected throughout the last decade to defend against Palestinian terror attacks during the Second Intifada.
Many Israelis credit the barrier with the dramatic increase in security over the past decade. Not a single Israeli was killed by terror in the West Bank in 2012, making it the first year without bloodshed since 1973. Yet this was not solely due to the barrier. The remarkable drop in terror happened thanks to high-quality intelligence coupled with Israel's ability to conduct targeted military operations in the West Bank. The number of Israeli operations in the West Bank has dropped significantly because the military now only carries out pinpointed operations based on reliable intelligence.
Israel can now stay reasonably secure without the barrier. This will prove especially true if the Israeli government works with the international community to promote Palestinian economic development in Areas A and B. There's no perfect solution to the conflict, and the wait for one has allowed the Palestinian economy to languish. The hope of independence and statehood has delayed crucial economic investments.
So, during the past few months, Israel's Ministry of Economy, which I lead, has reviewed different options for helping the Palestinian economy grow. We have looked at the export and import systems, work permits, the climate for international investment and more.
One promising idea is to encourage multinational corporations to invest in Palestinian areas by offering economic incentives such as insurance guarantees and tax breaks. There are also ways to streamline the export process for Palestinian manufacturers so products can reach their destination quickly and in perfect condition. Israel has become known as the "Startup Nation," but now it is time to build a "Startup Region."
The other part of the Stability Plan deals with the remaining portion of the West Bank, known as Area C, where 400,000 Israelis and 70,000 Palestinians live. Under my plan, Israel would annex this territory, much as it exercised sovereignty over East Jerusalem in 1967 and the Golan Heights in 1981. The Palestinians who live in Area C would be offered full Israeli citizenship.
East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights still aren't recognized by the international community as part of Israel. But it is impossible to imagine a state of Israel without the Western Wall. Israel could not withdraw from the Golan Heights while the Syrian civil war rages nearby. East Jerusalem and the Golan are Israeli territory, and the same should be true of Area C.
Annexing Area C would limit conflict by reducing the size of the territory in dispute, which would make it easier to one day reach a long-term peace agreement. Annexation would also allow Israel to secure vital interests: providing security for Jerusalem and the Gush Dan region along Israel's central coast, protecting Israeli communities within Area C, and applying Israeli sovereignty over national heritage sites such as the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, the burial place of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
This arrangement might not be the utopian peace Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat imagined when they shook hands in the White House Rose Garden in 1993. But it offers Palestinians independent government and prosperity, while ensuring Israeli security and stability. That would improve lives and foster a much healthier coexistence, major progress for a region that has known conflict for decades.
Mr. Bennett is Israel's minister of economy and leader of the Jewish Home Party.
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2)Bonfire of the Humanities
Christine Lagarde is the latest ritualistic burning of a college-commencement heretic
By Daniel Heninger
It's been a long time coming, but America's colleges and universities have finally descended into lunacy.
Last month, Brandeis University banned Somali-born feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali as its commencement speaker, purporting that "Ms. Hirsi Ali's record of anti-Islam statements" violates Brandeis's "core values."
This week higher education's ritualistic burning of college-commencement heretics spread to Smith College and Haverford College.
On Monday, Smith announced the withdrawal of Christine Lagarde, the French head of the International Monetary Fund. And what might the problem be with Madame Lagarde, considered one of the world's most accomplished women? An online petition signed by some 480 offended Smithies said the IMF is associated with "imperialistic and patriarchal systems that oppress and abuse women worldwide." With unmistakable French irony, Ms. Lagarde withdrew "to preserve the celebratory spirit" of Smith's commencement.
On Tuesday, Haverford College's graduating intellectuals forced commencement speaker Robert J. Birgeneau to withdraw. Get this: Mr. Birgeneau is the former chancellor of UC Berkeley, the big bang of political correctness. It gets better.
Chad Crowe
Berkeley's Mr. Birgeneau is famous as an ardent defender of minority students, the LGBT community and undocumented illegal immigrants. What could possibly be wrong with this guy speaking at Haverford??? Haverfordians were upset that in 2011 the Berkeley police used "force" against Occupy protesters in Sproul Plaza. They said Mr. Birgeneau could speak at Haverford if he agreed to nine conditions, including his support for reparations for the victims of Berkeley's violence.
In a letter, Mr. Birgeneau replied, "As a longtime civil rights activist and firm supporter of nonviolence, I do not respond to untruthful, violent verbal attacks."
Smith president Kathleen McCartney felt obliged to assert that she is "committed to leading a college where differing views can be heard and debated with respect." And Haverford's president, Daniel Weiss, wrote to the students that their demands "read more like a jury issuing a verdict than as an invitation to a discussion or a request for shared learning."
Mr. Birgeneau, Ms. McCartney, Mr. Weiss and indeed many others in American academe must wonder what is happening to their world this chilled spring.
Here's the short explanation: You're all conservatives now.
Years ago, when the academic left began to ostracize professors identified as "conservative," university administrators stood aside or were complicit. The academic left adopted a notion espoused back then by a "New Left" German philosopher—who taught at Brandeis, not coincidentally—that many conservative ideas were immoral and deserved to be suppressed. And so they were.
This shunning and isolation of "conservative" teachers by their left-wing colleagues (with many liberals silent in acquiescence) weakened the foundational ideas of American universities—freedom of inquiry and the speech rights in the First Amendment.
No matter. University presidents, deans, department heads and boards of trustees watched or approved the erosion of their original intellectual framework. The ability of aggrieved professors and their students to concoct behavior, ideas and words that violated political correctness got so loopy that the phrase itself became satirical—though not so funny to profs denied tenure on suspicion of incorrectness. Offensive books were banned and history texts rewritten to conform.
No one could possibly count the compromises of intellectual honesty made on American campuses to reach this point. It is fantastic that the liberal former head of Berkeley should have to sign a Maoist self-criticism to be able to speak at Haverford. Meet America's Red Guards.
These students at Brandeis, Smith, Haverford and hundreds of other U.S. colleges didn't discover illiberal intolerance on their own. It is fed to them three times a week by professors of mental conformity. After Brandeis banned Ms. Hirsi Ali, the Harvard Crimson's editors wrote a rationalizing editorial, "A Rightful Revocation." The legendary liberal Louis Brandeis (Harvard Law, First Amendment icon) must be spinning in his grave.
Years ago, today's middle-aged liberals embraced in good faith ideas such as that the Western canon in literature or history should be expanded to include Africa, Asia, Native Americans and such. Fair enough. The activist academic left then grabbed the liberals' good faith and wrecked it, allowing the nuttiest professors to dumb down courses and even whole disciplines into tendentious gibberish.
The slow disintegration of the humanities into what is virtually agitprop on many campuses is no secret. Professors of economics and the hard sciences roll their eyes in embarrassment at what has happened to once respectable liberal-arts departments at their institutions. Like some Gresham's Law for Ph.D.s, the bad professors drove out many good, untenured professors, and that includes smart young liberals. Most conservatives were wiped out long ago.
One might conclude: Who cares? Parents are beginning to see that this is a $65,000-a-year scam that won't get their kids a job in an economy that wants quantification skills. Parents and students increasingly will flee the politicized nut-houses for apolitical MOOCs—massive open online courses.
Still, it's a tragedy. The loonies are becoming the public face of some once-revered repositories of the humanities. Sic transit whatever.
2a)To the Class of 2014
Students who demand emotional pampering deserve intellectual derision.
By Bret Stephens
Dear Class of 2014:
Allow me to be the first to offend you, baldly and unapologetically. Here you are, 22 or so years on planet Earth, and your entire lives have been one long episode of offense-avoidance. This spotless record has now culminated in your refusals to listen to commencement speakers whose mature convictions and experiences might offend your convictions and experiences, or what passes for them.
Modern education has done its work well: In you, Class of 2014, the coward soul has filled the void left by the blank mind.
When I last delivered a commencement address via column to the Class of 2012, I complained about the dismaying inverse relationship between that class's self-regard and its command of basic facts. This led to one cascade of angry letters, blog posts and college newspaper columns from the under-25 set—and another cascade of appreciative letters from their parents, professors and employers.
Former Princeton President William Bowen gets an honorary degree at Haverford—shortly before unloading on students as 'immature,' May 18. Clem Murray/Associated Press
Of the former, my favorite came from a 2012 graduate of an elite Virginia college, who wrote me to say that "America has a hefty appetite for BS, and I'm ready and willing to deliver on that demand." I gave him points for boldness and cheekily wrote back asking if we might consider his letter for publication. The bravado vanished; he demurred.
Well, Class of 2012, I did you a (small) injustice. At least the pretense of knowledgeability was important to you. For the Class of 2014, it seems that inviolable ignorance is the only true bliss.
It's not just the burgeoning list of rescinded invitations to potentially offensive commencement speakers: Ayaan Hirsi Ali at Brandeis, Condi Rice at Rutgers, Christine Lagarde at Smith and Robert Birgeneau at Haverford.
In February, students at Dartmouth issued a list of 72 demands for "transformative justice." Among them: "mandate sensitivity training"; "organize continuous external reviews of the College's structural racism, classism, ableism, sexism and heterosexism"; and "create a policy banning the Indian mascot." When the demands weren't automatically met, the students seized an administration building.
At Brown, a Facebook FB +0.09% page is devoted to the subject of "Micro/Aggressions," a growth area in the grievance industry. Example of a micro-aggression: "As a dark-skinned Black person, I feel alienated from social justice spaces or conversations about institutional racism here at Brown when non-Black people of color say things like 'let's move away from the White-Black binary.' "
And then there are "trigger warnings." In Saturday's New York Times, NYT +1.53%Jennifer Medina reports that students and like-minded faculty are demanding warnings on study material that trigger "symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder." Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" was cited by one faculty document at Oberlin as a novel that could "trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more."
Similar Tipper Gore -type efforts are under way at UC Santa Barbara, George Washington University and other second- and third-tier schools. Did I just offend some readers by saying that? Sorry, but it's true. Any student who demands—and gets—emotional pampering from his university needs to pay a commensurate price in intellectual derision. College was once about preparing boys and girls to become men and women, not least through a process of desensitization to discomfiting ideas. Now it's just a $240,000 extension of kindergarten. Maybe Oberlin can start offering courses in Sharing Is Caring. Students can read "The Gruffalo" with trigger warnings that it potentially stigmatizes people with hairy backs.
This is the bind you find yourselves in, Class of 2014: No society, not even one that cossets the young as much as ours does, can treat you as children forever. A central teaching of Genesis is that knowledge is purchased at the expense of innocence. A core teaching of the ancients is that personal dignity is obtained through habituation to virtue. And at least one basic teaching of true liberalism is that the essential right of free people is the right to offend, and an essential responsibility of free people is to learn how to cope with being offended.
I'll grant you this: It's not all your fault. The semi- and post-literates who overran the humanities departments at most universities long before I ever set foot in college are the main culprits here. Then again, it shouldn't be that hard to figure out what it takes to live in a free country. The ideological brainwashing that takes place on campus isn't (yet) coercive. Mainly, it's just onanistic.
There's good news in that. You can still take charge of your education, and of your lives. The cocoon years are over; the micro-aggressions are about to pour down.
Deal with it. Revel in it. No consequential idea ever failed to offend someone; no consequential person was ever spared great offense. Those of you who want to lead meaningful lives need to begin unlearning most of what you've been taught, starting right now.
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3)The GOP's 'Trade-Up' Election
The conservative state-reform movement picks up steam.
By Kim Strassel
Michael Quinn Sullivan is a proud Lone Star son—on his desk he keeps a map that shows "Texas" and "Not Texas." That helps explain why the conservative activist is leading a charge to use this year's election to "trade up" Texas politicians, replacing the state's already conservative majority with new Republicans, all raring to propel Texas to the front of the state-reform movement.
"Texas has things to be proud of," says Mr. Sullivan, who runs Empower Texans, a political group that is playing big in the state's primaries. "Then again, we're like the least drunk guy at the bar. California is drooling on itself, Illinois is passed out in the corner. We look good simply because we can walk a straight line. We should be leading the way."
The trade-up strategy is the defining feature of this year's state races. The GOP emerged from its blowout 2010 midterm with extraordinary local power, and today boasts 23 states in which it controls both the governorship and entire state legislature (in some cases with supermajorities). Yet grass-roots activists have grown frustrated that many of the most solidly conservative parts of the country have sat out the state-reform push that has produced tax cuts, pension reform and education overhaul.
This midterm, conservatives are targeting the bottlenecks—going after lackluster Republicans in primaries, rallying around free-market gubernatorial candidates, and working to get final numbers for majorities or supermajorities in key states. One model here is Kansas, where a group of a dozen statehouse Senate Republicans balked at Gov. Sam Brownback's aggressive tax reform. Conservative groups mobilized, and in the 2012 primaries nine of the 12 were defeated in primaries by more-conservative challengers.
Texas House Speaker Joe Straus. Associated Press
"Lots of people are focused on trading up at the national level, as you've seen with all the attention to Senate primaries," says Americans for Tax Reform founder Grover Norquist. "Unnoticed has been the far more successful and ongoing [Kansas-like] trade-ups at the state level." The strength of these victories, he notes, has come from local free-market groups, mainstream taxpayer associations, chambers of commerce, and national outfits likes his or Americans for Prosperity, all banding together to let voters know the state of play, and work their will.
Empower Texans and other free-market groups have focused their ire on moderate Texas House Speaker Joe Straus and his coalition for dragging their feet on budget, social and education reforms—failing to flex powerful House and Senate GOP majorities. Facing a voter uprising, eight Straus-aligned Republicans chose not to run for re-election, leaving open seats in red districts to be filled by more conservative candidates. Another seven were routed in Texas's March primary. The grass roots also defeated one moderate Senate incumbent outright and pushed another into a May 27 runoff.
Scott Turner, a charismatic young House Republican from Frisco (north of Dallas), has meanwhile announced that he's running against Mr. Straus in January. Whatever the outcome, Mr. Sullivan argues that the flood of new conservative members, sent by unhappy voters, will dramatically raise the pressure on the Texas chamber to perform. With Republican Greg Abbott well positioned to win the governor's mansion this fall, reformers are starting to think big on spending limits, property tax reform and a charter-school agenda.
Texas is far from alone. In South Carolina, a slate of conservative candidates is challenging eight Republican House incumbents who many voters feel have failed to give aid to Gov. Nikki Haley's free-market ambitions. Oklahoma has a flood of statehouse incumbent challenges coming on its June 24 primary, a response to the glacial pace of free-market reform under Gov. Mary Fallin and Republican supermajorities. Conservatives are eyeing a handful of Florida Senate Republicans who earlier this year killed a strong pension reform bill, at the behest of labor unions.
On the flip side, free-market groups are targeting states like Arizona that sport a willing GOP legislature but have lacked leadership from the top. Retiring Gov. Jan Brewer's national headlines over immigration masked her disappointing record on fiscal reforms. Arizona's crowded GOP gubernatorial primary on August 26—no accident—includes several Republicans with business backgrounds who are running on sweeping economic platforms. They include Doug Ducey, the former CEO of Cold Stone Creamery, who in 2012 led the successful fight against a ballot initiative that would have made permanent an Arizona sales tax hike.
All this comes alongside more high-profile GOP efforts to win some important gubernatorial re-elections ( Rick Scott in Florida, Paul LePage in Maine) and to flip a few more state legislative chambers (Iowa, Nevada) their way. While the current primary activity is intense, most of the groups involved nonetheless view this trade-up midterm as one step in a longer effort to build a more sweeping state-reform movement, one that could change the terms of the national debate and put pressure back on Washington. They are off to a promising start.
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Beware Militarization Of Government
Federal Fire Power: Instead of putting a lien on the property of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, the Bureau of Land Management surrounded his ranch with 200 armed agents. It’s not the only agency with a private army.
Back in 2008, candidate Barack Obama slipped a little-noticed line in a speech, proposing a national police force reporting straight to him.
“We cannot continue to rely only on our military,” he said. “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”
As our military is slowly decimated by his policies and budget cuts — and with federal agencies arm to the teeth — we may be seeing what he had in mind at the ranch of a 67-year-old Nevadan.
Agents of a federal agency that many Americans were surprised to see so heavily armed even herded American citizens into “First Amendment zones,” another surprise to those who thought the Constitution made the entire U.S. such a zone.
“The government’s option,” said Fox News contributor and former Judge Andrew Napolitano, “is to take the amount of money (Bundy) owes them and docket it — that is, file the lien on his property. The federal government could have done that.
“Instead, they wanted this show of force. They swooped in. . . with assault rifles aimed and ready and stole this guy’s property, they stole his cattle. They didn’t have the right to do that. That’s theft, and they should have been arrested by state officials.”
The Environmental Protection Agency also has a private army. In late August 2013, armed EPA agents joined agents of the Alaska Environmental Crimes Task Force and swarmed gold mines near Chicken in the Last Frontier State.
In groups of four to eight, they even wore body armor and carried guns while investigating a supposed violation of Section 404 of the Clean Water Act.
That raid drew attention to the fact that some federal agencies, including the Library of Congress and the Federal Reserve Board, have divisions employing armed officers.
Other federal agencies participating in the operation were the Fish and Wildlife Service, Coast Guard, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Park Service and, yes, Bureau of Land Management.
That’s right: NOAA, whose dangerous job is to forecast the weather, monitor the atmosphere and keep tabs on the oceans and waterways, has its own law enforcement division.
It has a budget of $65 million and consists of 191 employees, including 96 special agents and 28 enforcement officers who carry weapons. Why does a weather service need ammunition?
We have pointed out the massive purchase of ammunition by the Department of Homeland Security that’s estimated to provide DHS a thousand more rounds per agent than soldiers in the Army.
But DHS is not alone.
Some 70 federal agencies, including those not associated with national security or crime fighting, employ about 120,000 full-time officers authorized to carry guns and make arrests, according to a June 2012 Justice Department report.
The Agriculture Department recently put in a request for 320,000 rounds.
Not long ago, the Social Security Administration put in a request for 174,000 rounds of “.357 Sig 125 grain bonded jacketed hollow-point” ammo. NOAA put in a request for 46,000 rounds.
“We’re seeing a highly unusual amount of ammunition being bought by the federal agencies over a fairly short period of time,” said Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Washington-based Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep & Bear Arms. “To be honest, I don’t understand why the federal government is buying so much at this time.”
Maybe we can ask Cliven Bundy.
Note: My fear is that the generation coming up knows nothing of our true history and the role of a Republic form of government. Their idea of patriotism may well be to follow ‘government’ orders and take up arms against a citizenry who is in strict compliance with the Constitution the country was founded upon. Interesting the above article says nothing about Harry Reid’s interest in Bundy’s land for his own personal gain. This is the crux of the matter to begin with. Zip
5a) The Veterans Scandal Is Only the Start
If the country can't meet basic needs now, wait until the looming deficit disaster finally strikes.
The recent revelations about the Department of Veterans Affairs point to serious problems. But the root of the scandal is not what self-serving bureaucrats failed to do or tried to cover up; it is a federal budget that prevents us from meeting even the national needs on which our polarized political parties can agree.
Whatever the disagreements about the long wars of the past decades, Democrats and Republicans agree that we must fully honor the debt we have incurred to the tiny fraction of the population that does the fighting for the rest of us. Yes, the budget for the VA has risen sharply since 2002. But the number of returning veterans has risen even faster. Many live with grievous wounds from which they would have succumbed in previous conflicts. Many others struggle with the multiple effects of repeated deployments. Aging Vietnam-era patients require more care, and new responsibilities such as coping with Agent Orange add to the VA's burden.
In 2002, reports the Financial Times, 46.5 million veterans made outpatient visits to VA facilities. In 2012, the number of such visits had risen to 83.6 million. Between late 2010 and the summer of 2013, average waiting times for veterans' claims soared from 100 days to 375 days.
Roughly 42%—$66 billion—of the VA's budget is subject to annual appropriations. That's the nub of the problem. Our inability to agree on a sustainable approach to long-term fiscal policy has led, by default, to a relentless squeeze on discretionary spending that will hobble us at home and abroad. Last week, for example, the House Armed Services Committee approved an appropriations bill incompatible with long-term restraints in current law. Buck McKeon (R., Calif.), the committee chairman, admitted as much. He was, he said, hoping that "some miracle happens" so that we "get money . . . next year that we don't have now." He won't.
Getty Images
The Congressional Budget Office's latest budget projections showed that between 2013 and 2024, discretionary spending—defense and nondefense—is scheduled to fall from 7.2% of GDP to 5.1%, the lowest share since at least 1962. With only five cents out of each dollar of national income, we are supposed to defend the country, care for veterans, address the needs of children and the poor—and invest in the research, education and infrastructure on which America's future depends. It can't be done.
Not so fast, say the critics: As the economy expands, even a smaller share can yield increased resources. That's true in principle, but not in current practice. Last February, the CBO calculated the cost of maintaining appropriations, adjusted for inflation, at 2014 levels over the next decade. That total exceeded currently enacted limits by $735 billion.
Ten years from now, the funds available for the military and domestic programs will buy less than they do today. Meanwhile, costs in both categories are likely to rise faster than the rate of inflation. "Doing more with less" is a catchy slogan, but it only diverts attention from the real problem: the contradiction between our needs and the resources we commit to meet them.
The current structure of the federal budget makes this outcome inevitable. By 2015, federal revenues will recover from the Great Recession and stabilize at about 18% of GDP over the next decade. By 2024, however, we are on track to spend fully 17% of GDP on just two items—mandatory programs and interest on the debt—leaving almost nothing for discretionary spending. It only gets worse in the following decade.
That's a formula for endlessly increasing deficits and an ever-rising ratio of debt to GDP. After bottoming out at $469 billion next year, the CBO projects, the annual deficit will begin to rise again and will exceed $1 trillion by the early 2020s. After doubling from 35% to more than 70% during the Great Recession, debt as a share of GDP will near 80% by 2024. Although we reached a truce in the budget wars, we've only postponed the problem.
We know roughly how many veterans the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will add to the VA's rolls, and we can estimate what they will cost per capita. Non-magical thinking would budget the amount required to meet their needs. We would have an honest public debate about the size and shape of the armed forces in coming decades, and we would appropriate what is necessary to make that blueprint a reality.
We would ask ourselves how much the government should invest in areas that promote growth, and we would stop pretending that shortfalls won't have consequences. We would also stop pretending that meeting the needs of the poor would be cheaper if we transfer programs to the states, and that cutting waste, fraud and abuse would solve our problems. And then, finally, we would be forced to confront the fiscal and economic consequences of putting revenues and mandatory programs on autopilot.
5a) A Divine Lesson in Governing
The Passover holiday signifies freedom, while Shavuot shows the virtue of law and purpose.
In the Jewish religious calendar, we are now literally counting the days between two important holidays—Passover (April 14-22) and Shavuot (June 3-5). Passover is the most observed of the major Jewish holidays and Shavuot the least observed. Yet the story of Passover would be incomplete and its meaning lost without Shavuot.
Passover, as just about everyone knows, celebrates the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery. While Shavuot, as fewer people realize, commemorates the Giving of the Law on Mount Sinai, arguably one of the most important events in human history. God passed down his commandments to Moses on the smoke-covered mountain, and the people of Israel accepted those commandments on behalf of the entire human race.
Passover is about freedom and God's ability to shape history, and Shavuot is about God's gifts of law and purpose. These two holidays are united in observance by the seven weeks ("Shavuot" means weeks in Hebrew) that we count between the second day of Passover and the beginning of Shavuot. The counting symbolizes the movement from Egypt to Sinai, but the path between Passover and the Giving of the Law runs much deeper than geography. It is a path that shows civilization how to live and how to govern.
Most important, the freedom of Passover without the law of Sinai would bring chaos. A society of only freedom and no rules would have no norms for behavior, no distinctions between right and wrong, and couldn't enforce such conventions even if it had them. A society controlled by pharaoh-like, state-declared law, on the other hand, would not give citizens the freedom that Passover—and, incidentally, the Declaration of Independence—proclaim to be our birthright, an endowment each person receives from the Creator.
The great challenge in history is to strike the delicate balance between freedom and law, providing order while protecting human rights. America has found this golden mean, step by step, since the American Revolution. Most of Western Europe and Asia have built similar societies since the end of World War II, and countries in Central and Eastern Europe have enjoyed law and freedom in the post-Cold War era.
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The Arab world now faces the same challenge. The revolutions that began in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 are about achieving both freedom and the rule of law. That struggle is also at the heart of today's conflict in Ukraine, before and since the Russian invasion there.
The lessons of Passover and Shavuot, as well as the Declaration of Independence, require the U.S. to stand with those around the world who are fighting for freedom and order against modern, enslaving pharaohs and repressive regimes. This means, for example, providing military assistance to the freedom-fighting opposition in Syria and doing more to end the slaughter of innocents, including with chemical weapons, by Bashar Assad's regime. It also means imposing much stronger sanctions on Russia for its unlawful, anti-democratic seizure of Crimea and punishing the Iranian government for its brutal denial of human rights.
Together Passover and Shavuot also teach that accepting the Ten Commandments at Sinai endowed the world with a sense of purpose and destiny. That acts as a guide for how to use freedom. The Passover story makes clear that God did not liberate the Jewish people merely to free them from bondage. God emancipated the Israelites to serve God in the desert, accept the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, and then strive to live them out in their daily lives.
The exodus from Egypt and the receiving of the law at Sinai have permeated cultures well beyond Judaism for centuries. These two events are in fact cornerstones for the modern global civilization. They gave civil society a code by which to conduct personal lives and create legal systems. They motivate people to lead what Rev. Rick Warren calls a "purpose-driven life." And they may be in part what President John F. Kennedy meant in the closing words of his 1961 inaugural address: "Let us go forth to lead the land we love asking his blessing and his help but knowing here on Earth God's work must truly be our own."
Shavuot begins after sunset on Tuesday, June 3. Let us gather together that evening with believers of all persuasions and discuss what Sinai and the Ten Commandments mean to each of us—our history, our responsibility and our destiny. Call it a Sinai Seder.
Mr. Lieberman, a former four-term U.S. senator from Connecticut, is senior counsel at Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman.
5b) "This is a perfect example of what goes wrong when you have a “single payer” trying to apply a “one size fits all” rule to the complex healthcare system. Doctors are expected to be able to see into the future and decide upon initial presentation in the ER, or following surgery, whether a patient will require hospital care for at least two midnights. That could exceed 40 hours. How much can go wrong with a medically fragile senior in 40 hours? This is what drives hospital administrators crazy. They have no control over the doctor’s ability to see into the future and little control over the patient’s health or when the patient is discharged. Yet they can receive no payment at all if the doctor doesn’t correctly predict the unknowable future."
Medicare May Be Overpaying Hospitals For Patients Who Don't Stay Long
by Susan Jaffe
The federal government may be paying hospitals $5 billion too much as a result of an 18-month moratorium on enforcement of rules that tell hospitals when patients should be admitted, says an independent Medicare auditing company.
Last September, Medicare officials announced that patients whose doctors expect them to stay in the hospital through two midnights or longer should be admitted, while those expected to stay for less time should be kept for observation. But then Medicare announced a moratorium on penalizing hospitals that violate the controversial rules. Congress has extended the moratorium through March 2015.
Dr. Ellen Evans, medical director for the auditing company, Health Data Insights, told a congressional panel Tuesday that postponing enforcement means that hospital claims for short patient visits during this time period "will never be subject to review."
The American Hospital Association later claimed that the $5 billion figure was inflated.
The hearing before the House Committee on Ways and Means subcommittee on health was the first congressional inquiry examining the consequences of the two-midnight rule.
The rule followed strong criticism from seniors and hospitals that Medicare regulations were leading to increasing numbers of seniors being classified as observation patients. Many seniors in a regular hospital room don't know they're in observation care because hospitals aren't required to tell them.
Yet, the distinction between observation care and being admitted is important for seniors. If they have not been admitted to the hospital for at least three consecutive days, they are not eligible for follow-up nursing home coverage and may have while in the hospital.
Hospitals, meanwhile, complained that the two-midnight rule was confusing since observation and admitted patients often receive similar treatment for similar health problems. Yet hospitals are paid more by Medicare for admitted patients. If Medicare auditors later decide a hospital should have billed Medicare for observation care, not for an admission, the hospital can end up with no payment at all.
"Hospitals are not doing anything wrong," said subcommittee chairman Kevin Brady, R-Texas. "No matter if a service is inpatient or outpatient, a hospital still uses the same equipment and the same medical staff to deliver care."
Sean Cavanaugh, a newly appointed deputy administrator at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, defended the two-midnight rule, telling the committee that the agency intended to balance several principles: the need for clear admissions criteria that "are consistent with sound clinical practice, reflect the beneficiaries' medical needs, respect a physician's judgment, and are consistent with the efficient delivery of care to protect" Medicare's fiscal health.
Cavanaugh said that the agency is seeking public input on how to define short hospital stays and how to design a more appropriate payment.
As the federal government continues to grapple with the problem, the number of Medicare observation patients has shot up 88 percent over the past six years, to 1.8 million in 2012, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, an independent agency.
New Jersey Democrat Rep. Bill Pascrell asked Cavanaugh to explain the sharp increase. Cavanaugh said he has heard anecdotal reports from hospital associations and individual hospitals that patients have been placed in observation, as a precaution, to minimize the hospitals' risk of losing their Medicare payments if they are audited.
Pascrell also asked Cavanaugh if anything can be done to remove Medicare's three-day hospitalization requirement for nursing home coverage. Cavanaugh said the Affordable Care Act allows the agency to waive it, which it has done in some experimental payment programs. "We will evaluate the results closely," Cavanaugh said.
Instead of reducing the number of observation patients as Medicare officials hoped, the rule has had the opposite effect, Amy Deutschendorf, senior director of clinical resource management at the Johns Hopkins Medical System in Baltimore, told the committee.
"Since Oct. 1, 2013, we have seen a three-fold increase in the number of patients our physicians cautiously predicted would only stay only one midnight, and thus began as outpatients, but later had to admit for longer stays, demonstrating the complexity of anticipating length of stay based on a patient's initial presenting symptoms," she said.
And if patients improve after receiving extensive treatment for less than two midnights, she said they are considered observation patients, and hospitals are penalized for doing a good job by earning a lower payment from Medicare than for admitted patients.
"We call it the Cinderella rule," Deutschendorf said after the hearing. "It's confusing to hospitals as well as patients, who haven't been informed that their Medicare Part A hospital benefit doesn't cover stays less than two-midnights."
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