We have to admit, we didn’t really follow all this photographers and bakers and gay wedding controversies as closely as we maybe should’ve. Silly us, we thought this was a personal service case or by extension personal servitude problem, but this somehow is bound up in religion and gay rights. When you get into an argument it may go off the rails if the wrong principles in invoked. A photographer refuses to render his personal photography service to a Gay wedding on religious grounds and loses under a state anti discrimination law. Take Gay and religious freedom out of the case entirely. A asks B to provide a good or service which requires a future meeting of the minds. B refuses by saying they are not a good fit. End of story. Professionals have done this forever. For whatever reason your heart isn’t in it and you can’t provide your best product or service you bow out. That protects both A & B from shoddy or worse outcome. Professionals have always had the right to not take on a client without providing any reason. “Just not a good fit” suffices. Judges most of whom were in private practice know this and should extend this logical choice to everyone.
Year: 2015
About those DOJ Ferguson Reports…..
Like most people, we took the News of the Justice Dept. on Ferguson Mo. to have two findings: I. The officer involved in the shooting that originally brought the Justice Dept.(DOJ) to town was totally exonerated and 2. The Town was a cesspool of racism. We took solace in some justice for the officer even as we realize his life is probably ruined and people in power were shown to be the owrst kind of raciists. After all even people on the right expressed their disapproval of the City Government and police Dept. We probably wouldn’t have ever questioned the second finding if we hadn’t finally read a Washington Post article we had saved, “The 12 Key Highlights from the DOJ’s Scathing Ferguson Report ” by Mark Berman and Wesley Lowery March 4. As we read, it became apparent that the key point of the Report,was that even though the Blacks made up only 67% of the town’s population they accounted for 93% of arrests makes an open and shut case of racism. It’s been a long time since any of us took statistics but the idea that you should always compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges and and you have to account for variables has stuck with us. The 67.4% figure came from the 2010 census but the crime figures are from 2012-14. You might think wouldn’t make a big difference but you would be wrong.
THE SIMPLICITY OF DAVE’S PLAN
A common reaction we’ve received to Dave’s Plan to reform the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is that it’s just too complicated. Why mix retirement and other savings plans in with medical care reform? Actually the point was to simplify both by reestablishing the link between savings and expenditures. In the U.S. as with many other countries we don’t save as much as we should. This leads to problems as populations age. In the not too distant future entitlements for the retirees will crowd out most other Government spending. That of course will prove to be impossible. For instance, we just might need a national defense. Australia looking at a similar future has already opted for a mandatory 10% savings plan. It isn’t that we don’t have people participating in retirement plans. According to the American Benefits Council, defined contribution plans such as 401ks had 74 million active participants and that was in 2010. In that year total employment was 138,641,000. Employer health plans cover the majority of Americans. Obviously, we have a good base. All we are proposing is the accounts be held by Individuals with employers and the self-employed making the payments directly into Personal Benefits Accounts (PBA). Add a Catastrophic Health Policy to the PBA and everybody having one and we have the basics. We kept the ACA’s popular features of making the policies non-cancel able and children being able to stay on their family policy till 26. The ACA Subsidies and Medicaid payments based on age group experience would be deposited directly into qualifying PBAs by the IRS when their tax forms are processed, just as we do the Earned Income Tax Credit. With the PBA’s constant inflow of funds and growth, adding a Medical Credit Card completes the package. Continue reading
BUT ADMIRAL THE WIND CHANGED
Many stories of great sailing ship battles contain some reference to somebody telling the losing Admiral that the wind has changed but that leader just stuck to his original plan right into disaster. We don’t know if any of these are true or maybe we read these in C.S. Forester’s Hornblower Series or was it Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series but one can easily see how a wind change might offer opportunity and ignoring it bring disaster. A great wind change has occurred with the collapse of oil prices, but we may be led by an Admiral who refuses to acknowledge it. Iran and Cuba suddenly want to sit down and talk. That’s understandable. Cuba lost it’s Venezuelan oil sugar daddy while Iran mired in wars in Syria, Yemen and Iraq has lost half of it’s financial resources. They’re scurrying to get their good deals before everyone realizes the change. A Nelson would instantly recognize the wind change and tact to cut the enemy’s line and annihilate him. Apparently, we aren’t being lead by a Nelson. At a time when the sanctions on both that had once pinched now threaten to become disabling injuries, our leader acts if nothing has changed and we are negotiating from weakness. This is nonsense. Continue reading
SSSHHH! MORE MIDDLE EAST POLICY ON THE QT
For the first time in more than half of century, we have a chance to have a Middle East Policy based on the actual realities on the ground and our own interests and values. The cold war and the West’s dependence on Mideast Oil forced us to overlook the fact that underneath a thin veneer of modernity, the area was actually moving backwards towards an imagined Muslim World that never existed. To curry favor with the various states we made alliances with leaders such as Sadat and Mubarak in Egypt who were less than democratic. Monarchs from Morocco to Iran were supported. As we did elsewhere in the world, we adopted alliances based on the enemy of my enemy is my friend policy. Just like our World War II alliance with Stalin’s Russia, we chose what was perceived to be the lesser of evils. Unfortunately, this forced us to overlook things that were abhorrent to Americans and/or policies that would be dangerous to the world. Beyond the basic lack of freedoms, two areas we went along with, much to our future distress, were the endless life of the Palestinian Refugee Camps and the continuing march of Muslims towards extreme forms of their religion.
At the end the 1948 Arab-Israeli Conflict, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) was established to provide relief for 652,000 Arabs that fled the Israeli areas. Today UNRWA provides education, health care and social services to the 5 million Arab refugees in 58 registered camps. Over the same period approx. 850,000 Jews left Arab countries, the vast majority going to Israel. None of these people or their descendents live in refugee camps, even though there were cultural differences between the Jews from the middle east and Africa and other Israelis, they were welcomed and integrated in Israel. Why didn’t the Arab Nations also welcome and integrate their fellow Arabs? Only Jordan granted citizenship to the Arab refugees living there. While Palestinian refugees have worked in other Arab lands such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, Arab League instructions bar Arab States from granting citizenship. Without citizenship, the refugees have been at the mercy of a change of winds in host countries. For instance, Kuwait expelled Palestinian Refugees after the Gulf War. Why wasn’t the fate of these poor trapped people handled differently? Where was the U.S? Instead of helping these people find new homes throughout the Arab World, we were paying the biggest share for UNRWA to maintain these camps. We never put real pressure on the Arabs to do right by their brothers and sisters. And they are their brothers and sisters. Palestine was never a separate Arab Country. It was always a part of a bigger entity. Surely, Palestinian Arabs are closer culturally to others in the Arab League, than the Jewish Middle East and African Refugees that went to Israel. The Arabs other than Jordan shunned their humanitarian responsibilities and we felt it was in our interest to actually support this financially.
Detour on the Road 