Republican Distress Self-Inflicted

 

The Republicans appear to be in disarray and acting as if they are completely unaware of the fact that they control both houses of Congress and the White House and are in the catbird seat exactly as the Democrats were the first two years of President Obama’s two terms. They are capable of setting the rules in the Senate such that they would have sufficient votes to ensure cloture by requiring a mere fifty-two votes ending any filibuster. The Democrat use of the so-called nuclear option set the precedent for adjusting cloture to fit your needs when you have the majority in the Senate. Yes, doing so would allow for the Democrats to do similarly when they gain fifty-one seats in the Senate and who does not believe they would do exactly as such anyway. The Republicans instead are fighting with the White House declaring the President’s budget dead on arrival. This is a party in need of better leadership as currently they are wasting their first and possibly only opportunity to prove they are the better option by acting as a whole to enact their vision for the United States.

 

I hear people demanding what we would propose if we think we have the answer. Well, perhaps they could actually get everybody on the same page instead of having a different set of priorities for every twenty or thirty Republicans. They need to have the Senate choose ten Senators and the House of Representatives choose twenty-five or thirty Representatives and have these people meet with the President and each Cabinet member in a series of meetings taking a week out of their schedules. Initially the President on the first day along with his preferred advisors should meet with the delegations and set a general structure for the ensuing week or even two and have the President and everyone else at the meeting express their preferences and ideas and have them discussed in a general sense setting up a framework. Then they should have meetings with cabinet members and the President each morning and then return and meet with the Republicans in the House of Representatives and Senate each with their own chosen delegates such that everybody has some input and in the end they reach a consensus which is acceptable to the President and his Cabinet and advisors. Once this framework has been set, then the House of Representatives and the Senate can begin to work on the enactment of these ideas putting them into action. These agreed upon initiatives should be enacted through the House of Representatives and the Senate in quick order and signed by the President getting a basic set of accomplishments enacted and presented to the public as actual accomplishments in the next election cycle. If their ideas actually capture the minds and match the ideas of the population in the majority of the nation, then the Republicans can reap the rewards and press forward with even more action and accomplish what they promised in the first place.

 

President Trump National Security Advisor McMaster
Speaker of the House of Representatives Ryan
President Pro Tempore of the United States Senate Hatch

 

The first thing they need do is revamp healthcare. An idea we would like to suggest is to keep the choice parts of the current system adjusted to make them include competition between the many insurance companies. Much of healthcare need be taken from the employers and returned to the people such that their demand for the most and best options and the insurance companies need meet their hopes at an acceptable price, this will bring healthcare costs back down within reason. Further, the government need remove most of the regulations, reporting requirements and other unnecessary paperwork which has completely destroyed the concept of a single doctor working from their home in the neighborhood where their patients reside as had been the case before the government needlessly intervened and destroyed affordable healthcare. The government should only require that insurance policies cover major medical allowing people to decide to pay for any minor care out of their own pockets. The one idea which the government should make illegal would be controversial but in the long run would produce lower medical costs, and that is to make group policies illegal such that companies, unions, and other groups such as retirement groups or social groups from offering insurance to their workers or members. Make individual policies the sole type of health insurance allowed and only require minimal coverages. We suggest only what used to be considered major medical which would include emergency rooms treatment with a deductible, surgical procedures, any hospital or clinical procedures again with a deductible, and hospital stays with a deductible. The deductibles would depend on the cost of the coverage with the less expensive coverage having a higher deductible while there could be specialty additional coverages which would cover these deductibles but this should be banned from health insurers offering. Such a system would produce insurance affordable at any level such that younger and healthier people could take the risk of higher deductibles and with people paying for most of their own healthcare we would see prices become lower for most standard healthcare needs. The main way to cut healthcare costs would be to put a cap on rewards for malpractice suits and make one vital change, the lawyers losing any malpractice suit would be responsible for both sides’ court costs and lawyers’ fees within set limits. This would lead to fewer malpractice suits as lawyers would be very careful to only take such cases which they felt quite sure of their case and winning the case, period.

 

There are probably many other means for lowering court costs which we have not included which the Congress could enact. Removing regulations and paperwork would be one of the greatest means to relieve the burden on physicians who have had to form groups to defray the clerical costs imposed by both government and insurance companies who often are demanding additional paperwork simply because the government demands they file paperwork. Government is once again the greatest contributor to the costs of a commodity which they also demand everybody purchase. This is simply something the people’s need should have to accommodate and not employers or government as that is the current system which the people declared broken and becoming overly expensive with far too many forms. The government should never have the power to add costs beyond reason to an industry and then require the people purchase said product. As happened with car insurance, whenever the government demands people to purchase a commodity the price of such commodity will naturally skyrocket reaching the limit of what the people are capable to pay, not the actual required cost of the commodity. Simply ask yourself what would you charge for widgets if the government required every person to purchase one widget every month? You would price them set the highest price the market would bear rather than a competitive price because every other widget salesperson would be doing the same. The highest probability is all widget salespersons would agree to set an inflated price where all would become wealthy beyond what any normal competition would prevail had the government not required people to purchase your product. That is simple reality of life and not rocket science, or advanced economics. The proof of this theory has been the cost of health insurance since Obamacare hit the market. This is why competition must be returned to the health insurance markets and as much government involvement must be removed back to bare bones or less. No government involvement would be the most preferred state of healthcare. But first the Republicans need to unify and find some leadership which can work well with President Trump, both by leading when necessary and following when Trump is leading constructively. We can only hope.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

President Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser General Michael Flynn Resigns

 

President Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has resigned, the White House said late Monday after week of hounding by leftists insane to destroy anybody associated with President Trump. Their first target was the attacks on now Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos after which was Attorney General Jeff Sessions which was as much as it went for President Trump’s appointments before each was accepted. Had similar complete idiocy and rejectivism been shown to President Obama’s appointments, especially minority appointments whose actual resumes left some room for improvement, if we may be polite about their qualifications, the media would have been in twenty-four hour a day, non-stop, over the top screeching about racism and hatefulness of the Republicans for actually questioning the candidates instead of being the rubber stamp they are supposed to be for Presidential nominations because the President, when it was Barack Hussein Obama, is so above reproach that his appointments must be blessed by the Highest Sources, the ACLU. Now every Presidential appointment must go through the trial by fire and ice, water and air, above and below and any other opposites which must mean they can never measure up to what the Leftist Democrats demand of them. General Michael Flynn’s great sin was actually preparing to do the job he was being appointed to before the Senate piranhas got their pound of flesh. He will become the celebrated sacrificial lamb which will be proof that all of Trump’s appointments were soiled and dirty and do not deserve to hold positions in the anointed realm of leftist government supremacism. Only the Elizabeth Warren fake identity politics wunderkind that hold esteemed resumes filled with academic accomplishment and complete devoid of real world accomplishment as such a realm they never dared to set foot as such is unclean and would soil them with reality, something our elitists avoid more than death itself. General Michael Flynn was a man of letters and real world experience on the hardest of all test grounds, the battlefield where lives and real gains and losses are measured in actual yardsticks. It was in this world where reality costs lives and political gains are figments of the imagination coming from Washington from the likes of Ms. Warren but are measured in inches and foxholes and the men who man those foxholes. His world was far from the antiseptic discussions in the Congress where everything becomes numbers on sheets of paper held aloft to prove points they often have no relevance held between. In the world of General Michael Flynn those pieces of paper represent real Dog-Tags of real men and women who have mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, wives and families and children, fiancés, boyfriends and girlfriends and every one of those people need to receive a letter written with the emotions, tenderness, understandings and consolations which will make each loss all the more bearable and to sooth them while conveying that you actually had personal knowledge and attachment with their beloved. With General Michael Flynn such knowledge of his men was a definite possibility as he did more than most to know each person under his command, a Herculean task beyond the imagination of most in Congress who now celebrate this man’s surrender to vindictive and mean-spirited victimization.

 

General Michael Flynn

 

The media will cover this as a great weeding out of the unfit from President Trump’s Cabinet and advisors and claim that there should be a long list of additional resignees and when the Democrats regain the Senate, as is proper and the natural order of things, then there will be blood in the water and a feeding frenzy will begin and President Trump’s Cabinet will be emptied and the President impeached once they gain all of Congress, also part of the natural order according to the mainstream media. Watching the tantrums from the Senate Democrats and the outraged diatribes by the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, Al Franken and sundry other elitists whose lives and reality seldom have met has actually served to make many a reluctant Trump supporter become an active Trump supporter. The unbridled hatred and demeaning of the entire half of the nation which voted for, as the Democrats (or should we call them DemonRats) describe Trump, the Devil incarnate about to spread brimstone upon the Earth in the form of overt pollution allowed when the entirety of EPA restrictions have been swept aside in an effort to please his masters in industry making the United States and even worse polluter than China. We need remember that China had to close down three-quarters of the manufacturing and limit electrical power use in Beijing before the Olympic Games so as not to poison the lungs of the competitors or those coming to view the games and see modern China for the first time. Tell us if your city has pollution so bad it could inflict lung damage to a Nigerian sprinter just because he ran the hundred meter dash without breathing equipment. Even at its worst, Pittsburgh or Denver or Los Angeles were never that bad, and these were the worst of the worst back in the day (the 1960s through 1980s). The United States has met more pollution targets than even the Europeans have done and the United States met them without approving the Kyoto Protocols because in the United States technology was not hindered by restriction on experimentation and risks which some paid dividends and others proved to be the wrong direction; the thing is by allowing trials we learned and improved faster than those restricted to taking the most cautious of routes. This is the same as can be said of the Cabinet as they all have real world experience where trying something unproven is permitted, not condemned out of hand as such has been condemned by Congress often in the past. There is a lot to be said for working where there are real consequences over those whose career has been politics where the consequences are paid by the public, never the politicians.

 

The media and the left are consumed by rabid hatred of President Trump and everything he might do and anyone he might appoint. Their rioting in many major cities and on campuses across the nation with paid specialists who come in at the high point of such demonstrations when emotions are most stoked wearing their ninja black outfits replete with masks hiding their identity and then proceed to lead those they can instigate or inspire in destroying property, breaking store windows, overturning cars, setting them on fire and even stealing merchandise from the stores whose windows they smashed and if they come across an unfortunate individual wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat, they will harass and possibly actually attack and mug that individual for having the temerity to trespass on their assigned route of destruction. The problem is that these instigators are paid and not grassroots inspired protesters. They are sent with the intention of causing as much damage as they are able and thusfar they have been granted free range to do as they desire. The fact that the police have been instructed to stand down and allow this violence is indicative of the disease rotting away America’s major cities. The fact that police are told not to prevent or even interfere with violent and destructive demonstrators, ones who are obviously organized and paid to perform this task, makes one suspect that the backing for these rioters are well connected and have the means and influence to get the political leadership of these cities and the administrators of the colleges and universities to permit and all but encourage such violence as if there is a concerted effort to radicalize as much of the population as possible. This was part of what gave way to our fears that this is a movement designed to take control of the government through violent threat and the promise to bring order back to the nation by a coming future savior, possibly such running for President in 2020 and having Congress declare Martial Law and after that the die is cast and all that needs be accomplished to overthrow the Republic will have been accomplished. This fear is what caused us to write the article The Fascist Playbook is Being Repeated Now covering the end result of these protests if they should continue to grow and become an undercurrent type of movement which can be cast as subversive by an actual radicalist popularist leader using such for their own political goals and gains. If this sounds confusing or you are unclear on this, please read the article and possibly do some research and the pattern becomes clearer the more you know. This pattern begins by undermining government and making the current leadership appear unpopular, unable to actually govern and inept. This is used by a savior who runs on a platform of restoration of the ways things are supposed to be and how they were when all was well with the nation. After four years of cities slowly growing more disrupted until they are burning come the 2020 election cycle and President Trump is opposed by every mayor and thus unable to quell the violence and the Democrat candidate claims they warned that Trump would ruin the nation and if you just give them the power to do what needs be done, then order will return. Order returns, but not as one would expect or desire, it becomes an absolute order replete with oppression of all freedoms, fascism.

 

But the victimizing of National Security Adviser General Michael Flynn is a sad day and something which should be mourned, not celebrated. But the message which will be played is that he was being subversive and breaking all the rules of decorum by meeting with the Russian Ambassador’s aides to discuss possibilities once President Trump took office. On one side the media is condemning Trump for taking over ten days to place all his advisors and Cabinet into place as well as the near two-hundred Ambassadors while all the time demanding more vetting of every appointee and attempting to reject any of his appointments on the smallest of discrepancies which can be uncovered. About the only question not asked has been the famous trick question of, “When will you stop beating your wife, a date, that is all we need, just a date.” The Democrats and their friends in the media and entertainment will laud them for chasing this disreputable scoundrel from office ignoring the fact that the man they are smearing is so far above their petty crap and such a superior individual with more respect and love of the nation than many of them could imagine having that any comparison between them and General Michael Flynn is laughable if what they have sewn was not so sad. President Trump has already brought forward General Keith Kellogg to be acting National Security Adviser and we would love for this to be his actual nominee. There will likely be rumors about why this honorable man is also not worthy of such trust and high office. Perhaps he was within five miles of a Russian Consulate during his last vacation and they will demand to know what he was doing in such vicinity of a Russian institution. The rabid and vile accusatorial nature of the media and Democrats, nay, DemonRats as it is not all the Democrats but a select and vicious groups of attack pit bulls who are to be scorned for their misrepresentation of their responsibility to advise and consent, they instead are attack and dissent. These DemonRats are committing the exact crime they accused any Republican Senator of committing should they even have gone so far as asking a question of any appointee by President Obama calling such acts to be stonewalling and impeding the due process of advise and consent which they were charged with performing. Oh how quick the story changes with a change of administrations, both in the media and in the definition of the powers of the Senate where advise and consent goes from simple consent to critical inspection. On that alone is the definition of hypocrisy.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Judge Neil Gorsuch Deserves Honest Validation

 

The first and foremost thing the public and the world need to know about Judge Neil Gorsuch, back in 2006 he was confirmed by the Senate without recorded opposition. Not a single Senator found reason to raise even a single doubt about his decency and qualifications to serve as a Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Denver, Colorado. Imagine this, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi had nary a complaint about confirming Judge Gorsuch and now claims he is, “very hostile appointment” and “well outside the mainstream of American legal thought.” At a CNN town hall gathering Minority Leader Pelosi further criticized Judge Gorsuch stating, “If you breathe air, drink water, eat food, take medicine or in any other way, interact with the courts, this is a very bad decision.” How in eleven years did Judge Neil Gorsuch somehow went from perfectly adequate and even unobjectionable when appointed by President George W. Bush, not exactly somebody on fantastic relations with Minority Leader Pelosi and often criticized quite severely by her, to be a Judge for the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and now is the spawn of all evils. What a transformation from unobjectionable to threat to the continuation of humanity “If you breathe air, drink water, eat food, take medicine or in any other way, interact with the courts…” What a transformation, or was the Democrats who have changed in the ensuing eleven years?

 

Supreme Court Justice Nominee Judge Neil Gorsuch and
United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Denver, Colorado

 

We are wondering when they will get to commenting he enjoys murdering innocent fish as he enjoys fly fishing. Then there is his making long tracks in virgin snow when he gets a chance because he skis. He refused to sleep nights in Howard Johnsons Inns, well, because he worked as the overnight desk clerk. We could not think of a related evil but are awaiting the Democrat blame gamers to find fault with the fact he raises horses and goats and chickens on his Colorado farm. The Democrats have claimed they will stop at nothing to prevent Judge Gorsuch from taking the ninth seat on the Supreme Court. Some claim that until there is a President who received a majority of the popular vote the Senate should not permit any new Supreme Court appointees to be placed on the bench. The Democrats have already warned of a war in the media should the Republicans do as Harry Reid did to get judges approved over any Republican filibuster and use the same filibuster busting majority vote being sufficient for cloture in Presidential appointments. Apparently what is good for the Democrat Goose is not to be allowed for the Republican gander. It is another case of do as we say, not as we do for the Democrats and the mainstream media may also jump in on the act for attempting to deny the Republicans any comfort copying the Democrat play manual.

 

The fight over Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education has been a fight done well in service of the Teacher Unions with a full time assist of the media. Betsy DeVos’ main crime was being educated in private schools and realizing that the private schools outperform the public institutionalized education system. You see, Betsy DeVos has been an advocate for private schools, parochial schools, charter schools such as the Success Academy Schools and the chain of the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) Schools for most of her professional life. Should the Department of Education begin to make parental choice more readily available for inner city and other parents through voucher systems or money follows the student programs, then the public schools might lose students to higher performing schools and perhaps even bring the entire public school systems to their knees making them shape up or be replaced by these more successful schools.

 

Secretary of Education Nominee Betsy DeVos

 

Imagine if every student carried with them a dollar outlay equal to three quarters of what the public schools in their area spend per student. How long before schools with far better results start cropping up and accepting students for this lesser amount. The local government saves money and parents get to choose where and with what emphasis their children are educated. Schools will start offering specialized courses where students can be taught a trade as well as receiving a decent basic education. The department of education could become a clearing house for information rather than an actual education provider. Schools will still need to produce quality student outcomes as the parents will not place their children in under performing schools thus eliminating the schools which do not produce well educated students. This could spell the end of the public school systems as we know them or perhaps these schools will actually find ways of weeding out poor performing teachers and a more conducive manner of teaching their students. Perhaps the education system could benefit from an overhaul where those schools which produce the best students receive the most students and succeed while poorly performing schools lose students and quickly falter and are replaced. Apparently Betsy DeVos’s error of her ways is believing that schools should produce quality educations over teacher job guarantees, what a novel concept.

 

President Donald Trump Personal Advisor Steve Bannon

 

If this becomes the standard for all government products perhaps it would be an improvement worth giving its shot. Would we be happy should the military not produce the best qualified fighting force and instead simply offer guaranteed careers for officers no matter their ability to perform their duties? We would never accept incompetence from the military any more than we would frequent a restaurant which delivered poorly prepared meals. Restaurants are not in business to guarantee the chef a job once they have worked there for two years even if they do not learn new offerings as times change. It becomes keep up or shut up and hit the road. Hospitals would not keep a surgeon who refuses to learn new techniques and allow him to use older procedures just out of loyalty, they demand that physicians learn and keep up with the times or retire. Government should operate under similar means and perhaps that could be something that Donald Trump could introduce and the United States be all the better for such. We will see and let us all hope that such is in store. Improving government services should be job one of the President and all of the many different Congresscritters. Unfortunately, this has not been the standard procedure, so perhaps bringing in Steve Bannon to shake things up a little is an idea whose time has factually been a long time coming.

 

Beyond the Cusp