“We are among the biggest fools in history if we keep on paying people to make us hate each other.  Whether it is called by pretty names like ‘multiculturalism,’ ‘diversity’ or ‘gender awareness,’ that is what it boils down to.”

…Thomas Sowell

Gillette has recently come out with an ad that is either supposed to make me more woke, or offend my conservative sensibilities.  Before I knew how I was supposed to feel about the ad my reaction was that it was encouraging men to stand up for the little guy or the woman put in an uncomfortable position.  These are things I have always believed in and I am glad to see them get support. 

But then some conservative commentary helped me to realize that…..what? 

I have long believed that racism is amplified and made worse by those minorities who look for racism.  And sexism it amplified and made worse by women who look for an excuse to call a man, or men sexist.  This is tribalism.  Is there anything in that Gillette commercial that is offensive?  Do conservatives have to defend bullying and gauche behavior because progressives cheer a commercial that defends values we hold in common?  Do we have so few enemies in the world that we have to defend the indefensible because the “other side” got there first?

Am I supposed to be offended because in the opening lines of the commercial there are fleeting references to “Me too” and “toxic masculinity”?  Just as Rush Limbaugh used to refer to “feminazis”  there is such a thing as taking “masculinity” to a unhealthy extreme.  Should I be defending bullying or sexual harassment because the left is also opposed to those things?  Or is it a better strategy to agree where there is any opportunity for common ground and make the world a better place when and where we can, then negotiate on how to make things better were our strategies diverge.

I am struck and disappointed every time I see a conservative commentary that ridicules the left.  That is a form of bullying too.  And rather than serving any useful purpose, it makes making any kind of progress more difficult.

Would I have done the Gillette commercial in exactly the same way Gillette did?  No, but close enough.  Do conservatives have so little to work for that we have to create contention where none needs to exist? 

So, every conservative that is in favor of the bullies and inappropriate sexual behavior depicted in that commercial, stand up and be counted.  If you are still in your seat, stop looking for excuses to be offended.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

…Thomas Jefferson

Why did I vote for Trump and why am I likely to vote for him again?  It is not because I trust him.  I am disappointed and surprised when I see so many who I believed to have had principles of decency and consistency of political philosophy, enthusiastically support this man.  He is a bad example and appears to be running the administration like a corrupt New York union dock yard.  The reason I voted for him and may vote for him again is because the alternative further jeopardizes the Republic.

During the American revolution the cry went up, “no taxation without representation”.  When the constitution was drafted it was designed with the knowledge that "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely".  So, it pit conflicting interests against each other.  There is the House of Representatives that is elected by the people for two-year terms.  The Senate is elected by the states for 6-year terms.  The Presidency is elected nationwide by a weighted average so as to limit the threat of tyranny by the majority.  The Supreme Court is appointed by the President but confirmed by the Senate.  Supreme Court justices serve for life, and therefore do not need to campaign or curry favor.  The Federal government was given limited law-making power and all other law making power was reserved to the states and the people.  Each branch had its area of authority and they were to have to work together to get things done.  

That's the way it was designed.

That is not the way it has been working, and because that is not the way it has been working the Republic has been being diminished and a bureaucratic state run by special interests and the power hungry has been gaining ground.  It has been gradual, and we the people, are the proverbial frog in the pan of hot water.  

The best check against that is a Supreme Court that reads and applies the Constitution to the cases brought before it.  But when the court applies a "living constitution" interpretation to its deliberations, it invalidates the Constitution that was actually written.  The Supreme Court then, substitutes its judgement for that of the Presidency and the Congress.  There is a provision in the Constitution for amending it.  It is cumbersome and hard to do by design, but we have done so several times in our history.  Living Constitution justices amend it from the bench using their own judgement and values.  Originalist justices look at the Constitution, as written, and apply to it the meaning that it was understood to have at the time of writing.  It is those originalist justices that have some hope of slowing, and ideally reversing the devolution of our republic into just another nation ruled from the top down instead of the bottom up.

The Democrats in the Senate and the left wing throughout the country announced it was going to oppose, by any means necessary, whoever Donald Trump nominated to the Supreme Court.  I won't go into the fine details here, but the attack on Brett Kavanaugh appeared to be timed to delay the confirmation vote until after the mid-term elections, it was based on an accusation of something that had supposedly happened when he was a teenager and was unsupported by outside evidence.  With no evidence to support the claim every Democrat, but one, voted not to confirm him.  The way in which the left moved as a monolith to oppose an originalist judge was nothing but an attempt to control the court which, in turn, would allow the left to concentrate more power.  

Does Donald Trump want power?  Boy howdy does he.  But no more so than the Democrats.  He is just less artful about it.  Did everybody in the country who opposed Brett Kavanaugh's appointment do so because they had bad motivations.  Of course not.  Was Kavanaugh guilty of the accusation?  Probably not.  There was not only no evidence to substantiate the claim but there were several who testified or swore of knowledge that he was not the perpetrator, but I was not there and cannot say with certainty.  

When we elect Senators, Representatives, and the President, we are putting men and women in a position of great power and great opportunity to make decisions in their own self-interest that we will, often, never know about, but decisions that will impact the rest of us for the rest of our lives as well as the lives of our children and grandchildren.  Then they tell us what to think and believe and it is often difficult to know how much of what they are telling us is the truth.  Our best protection against that is an originalist Supreme Court.  

So, I don't like or trust Trump.  But as long as he appoints Supreme Court Justices who will uphold the Constitution that was written, and not some imaginary Constitution that the Court thinks should have been written, it is a bargain I have to make.  

Why We Are Angry

Why are conservatives so upset about the Obama health-care bill? Don’t they want medical care for the uninsured? Don’t they want to control the escalating costs of health insurance? Don’t they want people to be able to count on their insurance to be there when it is needed? Well, I am a conservative, by some definitions at least, and I want all those things. And it is pretty close to home for me. I have just undergone a very expensive medical procedure which is supposed to keep me alive. That is a pretty big deal and I didn’t have the money in my checking account to pay for this procedure. I will be paying a small fraction of the cost because I have a good health insurance plan. But I was and am bitterly opposed to the newly passed legislation. Am I a hypocrite? I don’t think so. Let me explain my opposition.

The United States is, more than anything else, an idea. Men sat down and talked about how a nation ought to be run. As they hashed out their ideas, they realized that this nonsense of governments ruling people was a false concept perpetuated by those in power. People are born with an inherent right to live their own lives. There are legitimate reasons to band together and form governments, but the power of that government comes from the people. The corollary is that people can’t legitimately give government power they do not have themselves. That idea created the most powerful and wealthiest nation in history. It also created a nation that evolved to eliminate slavery, insist on civil rights for all people, regardless of race, religion or sex and has been the most magnanimous toward conquered foes of any the world has ever seen. That idea has enabled power, wealth and compassion to spring up from the raw material of a new land and the hearts of a free people in a short period of time, in historical terms.

An integral part of that formula that has worked so well is a free market economy. Men and women have been able to utilize their resources to invent and create. It is a free wheeling process that produces some winners, some losers, and some incredible jackpots of success. There are medical treatments available today because people have been able to invest money in an idea, the idea has worked and made them fabulously wealthy while saving and improving the lives of countless others. That kind of thing can’t work without the possibility of profit to match the risk. Philanthropists can’t do it alone. When you invest money in a mutual fund that invests in a biomedical firm you are part of that process. The risks are high. More drugs fail the screening process than succeed, and each failure is incredibly costly. You invest your $100, or $1,000, or $10,000 because there is a possibility of a medical breakthrough that will cure cancer, or diabetes, or enable the paralyzed to walk again. And if it works, your investment will be returned to you several times over. You are contributing a small fraction of the cost, but your small fraction is pooled with thousands of others and that enables medical breakthroughs to happen. It is expensive, but the payoff is incredible. In the new health-care bill, this is going to be harder to do. The government is going to levy taxes on medical device makers that will make those devices more expensive and less available and therefore less profitable. They are going to have more control on what insurance can cover and how much it will pay. That will negatively impact the cash flow that allows medical breakthroughs. That is one problem.

Insurance companies have been demonized during this process because the Democrats needed an adversary to rally the troops. But the villain is not the insurance companies. It is power. Outsized power is always the problem. The ironic thing is that it has been a powerful government that has been persuading people to give them more power in order to remedy an inequity. That doesn’t work, because power is the problem. Power concentrated anywhere is a problem. But power concentrated in government is, perhaps, the worst kind, because it is so hard to take power away from government once it has it, and government already has the power of law and vast resources of institutions to enforce that power, and to do so violently. What the government should have done was not to take more power upon itself, but to give more power to the people to overrule the insurance companies.

One of the biggest problems with the current system is that it removes the patient from the cost equation. So employers, insurance companies, and drug companies are the only players with a significant financial stake in medical decisions, but the patients are the ones that are utilizing the benefits. There is a disconnect here. The government could have given the power back to the people, by allowing anybody who pays a health insurance premium to deduct it from their taxes, and encourage the use of high deductible medical insurance plans in conjunction with health savings accounts. Remove barriers to cross state purchase of insurance (a version of this is in the bill) and implement tort reform to minimize the incentive for doctors to perform defensive medicine.

The bill requires everybody to buy medical insurance. As I have written before, that is an understandable requirement if you are going to mandate that insurance companies take all applicants regardless of health. But this is the government in charge approach, not the freedom of choice approach. What if we incentivized people to buy high deductable medical plans with health savings accounts? What if instead of fining people who do not, or can’t afford to, comply, we provided a tax incentive to those who do comply by buying an inexpensive form of insurance that makes them more aware of the cost of their care? Why does the government opt for compulsion and control instead of freedom and incentive?

Then there is the cost. Any government entitlement has an inherently unknowable cost. The bill, as passed, utilizes some tricks to control the costs as scored by the Congressional Budget Office. One such trick is that the bill includes a takeover of student loans from the private sector. This has nothing at all to do with health-care, but because it is part of the bill, the profit from student loans is included in the accounting. The bill does not address the “doctor fix”, which is an annual dance congress goes through because Medicare & Medicaid underpay severely for medical care. In the case of primary care the underpayments are so drastic that physicians often lose money on Medicare patients. As a result congress regularly makes an adjustment to the built-in reimbursement cuts to primary care physicians. It is still not profitable for them to treat elderly patients, but the “doctor fix” keeps the losses at a more modest level. Because this routine practice is not addressed in the bill, it is using inaccurate revenue savings to come up with its numbers. These are two of several sleights of hand the bill uses to give the impression it can be fiscally responsible. We have a national unemployment rate of 10%, we are clawing our way out of a long and painful recession, and the Democrats have added to our economic burden.

Conservatives aren’t and have never been opposed to health-care reform. We have been opposed to government taking more control of our lives. Several individual bills that addressed the shortcomings in the existing system could have made a significant difference without undermining a system that has worked well for most Americans and damaging an already damaged economy.

Criminals & Terrorists

Is a terrorist a criminal or is he an enemy of the state. The answer to that question depends. Timothy McVeigh, William Ayers and Ted Kaczynski were and are criminals. They committed acts of terrorism, but they either acted alone or as a part of a small, domestic group. We may want the world to see the American spirit of fair play and civility, but there are other issues at play when we deal with Islamic terrorists.

Osama bin Laden has declared war on the United States. It is a bit absurd that a religious fanatic in the wastelands of Afghanistan and Pakistan (apparently depending on the day) can declare war on the world’s only superpower and be taken seriously. He doesn’t represent a government, so on whose behalf is he declaring war? It helps to understand that you and I think in terms of national identity. I am American. My grandparents came to this country from Italy, so it appears that Italy considers me to be Italian (it’s complicated). That is how I think of myself, as an American who is proud of his Italian heritage. My religion, family and political beliefs describe some of my characteristics; but I identify myself as an American.

Not all cultures think in those same terms, and we are ill served by insisting that they do. For Muslims in the Middle East, that identity is reversed. Their primary identification is with their religion or tribe first and their country is the modifier. So for us to say that radical Muslims can’t legitimately declare war on us is to insist that they see themselves as we see ourselves. But national boundaries in the Middle East are largely arbitrary, it is tribe &/or religion that is primary. As long as radical Islam has leaders who are willing to wage war on us, and followers and resources enough to carry out that threat, we are at war. At a time when the only entities capable of waging war were nations, it made sense to brush aside such a self-important claim. But when the world changes, if you don’t change with it, you get run over.

What about the rule of law and the justifiable U.S. pride in protecting civil liberties? Both President Obama and Eric Holder have made comments that sounded an awful lot like the conviction and execution of terrorists was a certainty. Those comments themselves go a long way toward harming the image we want to present to the world. Governments that know the outcome of trials before they take place are generally described as totalitarian. Apart from the P.R. harm that kind of rhetoric causes, it is inaccurate. Our system of justice is based on the theory expressed in the 1760s by William Blackstone, that, “it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”. Hence our judicial mandate that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty (does that negate my earlier inclusion of Bill Ayers as a terrorist?). That principle frustrates justice and us at times, but there is a reason so much effort is made in our judicial system to protect the rights of the innocent, even if that means some guilty are protected as well. Government, by nature, will tend to be abusive. It was such abuse that motivated 13 colonies to reluctantly declare their independence from Great Britain. Most of us know of examples of people who have committed crimes but were never convicted. Our law enforcement officials are even required to warn people upon their arrest not to say anything that would incriminate themselves. In matters of criminal behavior, those safeguards are important. Criminals typically harm individuals or finite groups of people. War is focused on the submission of the enemy. As such the international community recognizes that different rules apply to war.

In war the need is not to get a conviction in a court of law, but to gather intelligence about the enemy’s plans and strategies. Miranda rights don’t apply here. In war the point is to keep enemy combatants out of the fray so they can’t continue to fight you. Bail, and potential acquittal, don’t apply here. The rules are different. We are not dealing with citizens that may or may not be guilty. We are dealing with an enemy caught in the act of waging war.

There are, admittedly problems with treating the war on terror as a true war. Because of the nature of the enemy, this war can go on for decades. That is a long time to maintain a state of war. Particularly when enemy attacks are intermittent and often comparatively small in scope. We need to figure out a way to be the best of what America is and still protect ourselves from organized attack by religious zealots. We need to be vigilant that we only apply warlike standards to those who are actually waging war on us. But we need to make sure that we take them seriously enough to put an end to their grandiose visions of toppling us. If we don’t, as ridiculous as it may seem, they may succeed.

Health-care in 3,200 Words or Less

The Democrats still have the upper hand. If they don’t support a bill it can’t pass, but their total control over the legislative process has been broken by the election of a Republican senator from Massachusetts. So those we elect to represent us now have a choice. What we have had for the last year was World Wide Wrestling. Now it is time for chess. My question is, are the Democrats and Republicans going to play politics or statesmanship?

Both parties acknowledge we need health-care reform. There is a legitimate issue as to whether now is the time to pursue it. We have an unprecedented budget deficit, severe unemployment and a shaky economic recovery to deal with. All three of which are arguably more urgent than health-care reform, unless you don’t have health insurance and are or become sick. On the other hand, health-care is on everybody’s mind now. This may be the time to pass a reasonable plan to improve the health-care environment. But are the members of either party willing to set aside extreme positions and pass something reasonable, at the risk of giving the other party a partial victory? I have a few suggestions.

First of all, there needs to be some kind of tort reform. Between malpractice insurance premiums and the need, whether perceived or real, to practice defensive medicine, the cost of litigation drives up the cost of health-care. Actual damages certainly need to be covered, but there ought to be a limit on punitive damages.

Drop the barriers to cross-state purchasing of medical insurance. Let the money flow to where the best coverage, services and prices are. The market will reward those who do well and punish those who don’t.

Make all health insurance premiums tax deductible to the payer of those premiums.

Make it illegal for an insurance company to drop somebody for other than non-payment of premiums, or to deny coverage.

People need help in paying for medical care, but if they are responsible for the cost of care, they will make better health-care decisions. Therefore, make it easier for anybody to buy a high deductible health insurance policy in conjunction with a Health Savings Account (HSA). For those below a certain income level have the government make an annual deposit into their Health Savings Account equal to the premiums plus a portion of the annual deductible. As their income increases above a certain threshold phase out the government paid deposit into their HSA at the rate of $1 lost for every $4 earned over the threshold. Mandate that health-care providers accept payments at low or no interest from patients below some specified income level. These provisions will address the adverse selection problem posed by the mandate to take all comers, as well as eliminate the need to force people to buy insurance that is in the current bill.

Allow insurance companies a reasonable and generous profit, but require that they pay out a certain percentage of revenue in benefits in order to participate in the cross-state sale of their products.

Get rid of the absurd taxes that have been proposed on health-care devices and insurance plans. If you want to hold the cost of something down, you need to lower the cost, not increase it.

There you go. In less than 3,200 words I have just written a comprehensive health-care plan that addresses cost and availability. It does not put the government in the health-care business and it does not gut a system that has produced many of the greatest advances in health-care anywhere in the world. I don’t know what the cost of this would be. It is possible that it could not be implemented until we get the economy rolling better, but it is a whole lot better than what has been proposed to date.

Politically Correct Racism

In January, 1988, Jimmy the Greek Snyder said, "The black is the better athlete. …and he's bred to be the better athlete because this goes way back to the slave period. The slave owner would breed this big black with this big black woman so he could have a big black kid. That's where it all started." The comment, which was supposed to have been off the record, stirred up a great deal of controversy and got Jimmy the Greek fired from CBS.

In December 2002 then incoming Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, speaking at Strom Thurmond’s 100^th birthday party said that the United States would have avoided "all these problems" if Thurmond had been elected president in 1948. Thurmond had been a supporter of segregation, though that was clearly not one of the problems Lott was assuming would have been avoided. Despite Lott’s apologies to Jesse Jackson and the black community, and the fact that few people, if any, really thought that Lott was referring to racial issues when he made the statement, his career was effectively ended because of a kind remark to an old man.

In 2003, Rush Limbaugh worked briefly for ESPN on their NFL pregame show. He gave his opinion that Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was overrated. He expressed his belief that McNabb’s status was due to the fact that there were those in the NFL and the media who wanted to see a black quarterback succeed. An uproar developed and, under pressure, Limbaugh resigned his position with ESPN. Last year Limbaugh was part of a group seeking to buy the Rams, and was swiftly chased out of the hunt.

In February, 2007 Joe Biden said, “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy, I mean, that's a storybook, man.” The statement was labeled as racist because Biden, it was argued, meant that it was unexpected for an African-American to be articulate. Biden was forced to apologize for the insensitivity of his statement.

In 2008 we learned that for the past 20 years Barak Obama had been attending the church of a racist minister who has uttered innumerable anti-American and anti-white sermons. Obama told us that his minister, Jeremiah Wright, was a close friend and like a member of his own family. When confronted with the views of his pastor, Obama told us that he never heard those things said. Wright sells video tapes of his sermons in which, among other things, he blames white Americans for committing acts of terrorism and of creating the AIDS virus to kill off blacks. Obama continued to support and defend him until Wright accused Obama, on national television, of doing what he has to do as a politician; At that point, Obama severed ties with Wright. Obama was elected President later that year.

A few days ago we learned that Senator Harry Reid has written that among Barak Obama’s political strengths are the facts that he is a “light skinned “African-American who does not speak with a “Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Senator Reid’s remarks are being characterized as racist and some, particularly on the right, are asking for his head on a platter.

We see an interesting pattern here. Except for the behavior of black men, each example here is not actually racist. Senator Lott said nothing about race whatsoever, but because he said a kind thing while talking about a man who had had racist ideas a generation earlier, he was accused of being racist himself. Jimmy the Greek, Rush Limbaugh, Joe Biden and Harry Reid were merely acknowledging the elephant in the room.

Jimmy the Greek was commenting on the obvious fact that slave owners had treated their black slaves like animals. He was not condoning this despicable practice, but acknowledging that it existed and expressing his, not illogical, view that those practices of slave owners a century earlier resulted in certain physical characteristics in the decedents of their slaves.  Rush Limbaugh acknowledged that there are those who want to see black people succeed. Is there something racist about noticing that? Wasn’t that what affirmative action was all about?

If somebody refers to me as articulate, I assume I have been paid a complement. Characterizing Joe Biden’s comment as racist is racist in and of itself, because it presumes that we need to be sensitive to the lack of good speech present in the African-American community. Well, some black people speak well and some don’t. Much like every other group of people. Calling Ronald Reagan the “Great Communicator” was a compliment. What is the difference? The difference is that Barak Obama is ½ black and we have to pretend not to notice, except in the most glowing and least stereotypical terms.

Senator Reid was guilty of three things. One was to notice that Obama is a lighter skinned black man and to further notice that that will make a difference in the way some people see him. Do we not know that to be true? Is it racist to notice? Second was to notice that Obama does not, generally, speak like a black urban man from the streets. Third was to use a term that is no longer in use. When I was growing up, calling a black man a Negro was the polite way to refer to him. There are plenty of reasons Harry Reid should be replaced in the Senate, but his remarks, if dated, don’t sink to the level of racism.


 How careful do we have to be? Are we not allowed to notice what we all see and know? How does that help anybody? Why does it offend anybody? I am overweight and I stutter. I neither pretend nor assume that people don’t notice those things about me. If they are pertinent to a conversation about me, I expect them to be brought up.

Now the example of Jeremiah Wright and Barak Obama is another matter. We have previously looked at overreactions by the hypersensitive to innocent remarks or factual comments about a state of affairs. Wright, on the other hand, repeatedly made inflammatory remarks apparently designed at class warfare, while a future President used him as a spiritual leader. I was asked a while ago if I thought Obama was racist. I don’t know what is in the man’s heart, but when I see the people he surrounds himself with and the policies he espouses, and his rhetoric, it doesn’t look good.

In a climate when a white man can’t observe that some people might want to see a black man succeed in the NFL, how in the world did we elect a President who has so thoroughly immersed himself in a sea of racial divisiveness? Has political correctness brought us to the level of fulfilling George Orwell’s prophecies in “1984”?

Muslim Protesters

A group of Muslims gathered outside the federal courthouse in Detroit Friday to demonstrate as the Christmas day airline bomber was arraigned. They were there to demonstrate against radical Islam. They carried signs saying that Islam is a religion of love not hate. One demonstrator went on camera for a national news organization to say if the terrorists want to kill him, he is there and available.

Every news outlet in the country needs to make note of these brave Americans. They know, maybe better than most, the risk they take to speak out against the desecration of their religion by jihadists. The silence from Muslims has been a concern to me and a source of condemnation of the entire religion among many. If they haven’t been silent, if it has been the lack of news coverage that has made us unaware of their protestations, then the news media is largely to blame for much of the anti-Muslim sentiment in the country. Nobody thinks that white supremacists represent Christianity. We all know enough about the teachings of Christianity, and we know enough Christians (if we aren’t Christian ourselves) to know that the ideals of white supremacy are anathema to Christians. But that same distinction isn’t as clear for Muslims. It is people like these demonstrators that will isolate radical Islam from Islam as much as white supremacists are isolated from Christianity.

These brave people should be heralded and encouraged. Their being there to proclaim to the world their opposition to the use of their faith to promote hatred and murder will give others the courage to stand up and be counted. I thank them for letting me know they are out there.