Comments Posted By TMLutas
Displaying 11 To 20 Of 38 Comments
The problem isn't the bow. The problem is that the White House operation Obama put together can't hire a protocol expert who can find their rear with both hands. This same operation has staffed thousands of political posts, many of which you normally never hear about.
The scary part isn't the bow. It's the personnel operation. Obama's inability to put together a decent protocol operation is a marker that we actually should be combing through all the deputy assistant secretaries that normally nobody gives a hoot about. They're usually all presumed to be at least minimally competent and unlikely to blow up US policy by accident. I'm starting to think that this presumption of minimal competence might need to be suspended in this White House. That's a real problem.
Comment Posted By TMLutas On 16.11.2009 @ 03:26
MORE THAN POLITICAL CORRECTNESS OR VICTIMHOOD AT WORK IN FORT HOOD ATTACK
Richard bottoms - A very short bit of googling will find plenty of officers' careers being ruined by stuff less objectionable than Maj. Hasan's pre-shooting behavior. I think that you would be hard pressed to find any sort of generalized attitude of officer protection as you speculate. Psychiatrists, being in short supply, might have been treated differently than normal. The consequences of establishing a separate set of discipline might shed light on other proposed exceptions.
A comparison between how military psychiatrists were treated and how many on the left thought that gay arabic translators *should* be treated might leave some people with some uncomfortable parallels. The gay translator thing always seemed to me to be the weakest of the cases for discrimination against homosexuals. Now with Maj Hasan, I'm starting to see the wisdom of guarding against serpents whispering to vulnerable ears how all that islam forbidden sex would be forgiven if you just engage in a mass shooting and become a martyr.
Comment Posted By TMLutas On 13.11.2009 @ 08:39
Richard bottom - I in no way stated that christians are marginalized. I said that if a military person talks christianity instead of medicine, he would have had problems because jesus is something that was inappropriate to the time and place as a talk subject. Talking Islam should have triggered certain things and it didn't.
There have been allegations of inappropriate proselytism among US military christians and there have been disciplinary actions taken, I believe at one of the service academies most recently. I don't follow the issue enough to give you time and place. I only have followed it enough to know that it's a general problem, mostly dealing with christian proselytism largely because so many military people are also committed christians. The military has rules against proselytism that are neutral as to which faith is being advocated.
Maj Hasan by rights should have been tripped up by those regulations but they were not enforced in his case. Somebody should get his career shredded for that. The regs are the regs for all religions. They were not followed in Maj Hasan's case. Those of us who don't know about the regs can be excused for wondering why so many are jumping on the "Hasan was coddled due to PC" train so quickly. If you know about the regs and you start toting up how many he'd obviously broken, the coddling becomes obvious.
Comment Posted By TMLutas On 12.11.2009 @ 21:05
Had Hasan's religion been christian, say a Branch Davidian. Let's say he spouted off about Ruby Ridge and Waco. Let's say he did this at a medical conference where he was supposed to talk about some sort of medical issue.
The common sense rules that would have reeled in this hypothetical overenthusiastic christian are there. If you look carefully in the past, you will find times when it's happened, that proselytizers have had their careers hurt even though they were majoritarian in their faith.
Now this minority faithful comes and does all this and more and doesn't get the same treatment as overenthusiastic christians get. That's wrong and the even application of the rules might have put Maj. Hasan on a different course, one that would have saved lives.
It's very hard to do counterfactuals fairly. But it is certainly easy to spot a double standard in applying religious rules in the military and this is what happened. There is no excuse for this double standard. It is as unconstitutional to favor islam over christianity as it is to favor christianity over islam in our official governance.
So no, I don't agree that there is no set of common sense rules that could have easily prevented this. There was one, the UCMJ and the normal rules of military discipline should have sufficed. They did not and why they did not is a tragedy, likely of misapplied PC.
I hope a fair minded investigation is undertaken and the truth is fully established, wherever it leads. I suspect it leads to PC sensitivities giving Maj. Hasan a pass that would not have been given had his religion been christian. Whatever the truth ends up being, let justice be served.
Comment Posted By TMLutas On 12.11.2009 @ 17:58
A RELATIVELY SHORT FOLLOWUP TO MY PJ MEDIA ARTICLE ON BI-PARTISANSHIP
The US military has an up or out promotion scheme. If you're an officer, you get promoted or you get separated from the service. Were we to adopt this sort of system to our ongoing budget expenditures and regulations, it could be attractive to a bipartisan coalition. Small government types would rate each department and chop off, let's say, the bottom 5% of the DoT and use the lowered expenditures to reduce the deficit and justify tax cuts. Big government types would rate each department and chop off that same bottom 5% and fund more effective transportation initiatives.
The idea is that to be serious, the political class should rate their budgets, their regulations, and regularly get rid of the laggards, the counterproductive taxes, the idiotic expenditure rules, etc. If we could instill that sort of ethic, we'd still have Democrats and Republicans, big government and small government types but most of all we'd have a government that had a measurably better rate of improvement over time.
Democrats could propose this. Republicans could propose this. I am proposing it. What do you say?
Comment Posted By TMLutas On 10.11.2009 @ 13:08
SHOULD THE GOP HELP THE DEMOCRATS GOVERN?
I believe Obama's Afghanistan strategy would have been vetoed by Congress had he not had GOP votes. It's simply not true that the GOP has not lent Obama support. Now you could say that they should be doing more of it and more loudly supporting the current administration but you'd actually have a nuanced view then that conforms to the actual voting record.
Comment Posted By TMLutas On 9.11.2009 @ 19:39
THOUGHTS ON THE PASSAGE OF HEALTH CARE REFORM
busboy33 - Surely you mean comment 39. We are not the same. You can count to 39, right? Or didn't you know that you really ought to reload your browser right before you post a comment referring to a recent comment number?
Comment Posted By TMLutas On 9.11.2009 @ 08:58
"where to, conservatism?"
Small government Conservatism is dead. But don't worry, it's going to get better.
What most don't seem to consider much is that american conservatism is the impulse to conserve the liberal revolution of 1776. When that revolution dies in legislation, in government scope, the impulse to conserve dies with it. There is something left, the underlying revolutionary liberalism. I think that small government liberalism is likely to end up being a more potent force than small government conservatism ever was.
Comment Posted By TMLutas On 8.11.2009 @ 23:01
Chuck Tucson - I'm sorry to hear about your child's illness. I hope everything ended up ok. Now imagine the same battle but you're dealing with a government agent who has legal immunity while you have nowhere else to appeal to. At least with private insurance, unwarranted denials can be appealed to the government insurance boards that can pull a license if the insurance company is acting illegally.
My wife's grandmother was denied ambulance service for a broken hip based purely on age. They wouldn't even take her to the hospital and told my in-laws to just light a candle and wait for her to die. That was in Romania, a government system that was end-stage. Fortunately, private ambulance services had been legalized by then and they just paid for her transport. They also paid for her hip prosthesis because the government hospital didn't have the right plate to put in her hip. There was a pharma rep on the first floor and if you could pay for the plate, the government surgeon would put it in for you.
It took a long time for things to get that bad, 50 years. Just as I get to be an old, old man and really need my healthcare, the government system Obama/Pelosi/Reid want to put in place in the US is going to be falling apart. No thanks./
Comment Posted By TMLutas On 7.11.2009 @ 16:09
The tragedy of US education is that "My choices have been narrowed and taken away by the free market" is viewed by a large chunk of society as something other than nonsense in the context of US law in 2009.
Health insurance is a game of spreading risk over groups. The riskiest group is the individual and thus is going to be the most expensive. There are a number of enterprises, including the freelancer's union which are open for trivial membership fees and allow you to participate in their group insurance. You also can incorporate for significantly less than $1000 by using one of the incorporation firms out there. A little google goes a long way in saving money.
If you make a mistake and think that the most expensive type of insurance out there is your only choice, your own pocketbook is hurt. When the government makes the same kind of mistakes, everybody's pocketbook takes the hit. This is what we're up against and while the money issues are nasty, we also have poorer health care because of the government interference we already have.
The government has been making these kind of mistakes for decades. Primary care physicians are compensated poorly compared to specialists. This is a government problem because if a private insurer were to ever be stupid enough to buck Medicare's determination, they would get slaughtered. It's a "parliament of clocks" issue.
The result of that mistake is that most become specialists and you get expensive, uncoordinated, inferior medical care. People have trouble finding a primary care physician and the primary care doc has to see so many patients to make ends meet that care is not as good as it could be.
Pro-government insurance advocates crow about Medicare and Medicaid's low overhead rate but when my wife wanted to report a firm that was pressuring her to sign for house calls, scooters, and other covered medical services and devices that were not needed we couldn't get the time of day from anyone. A million dollar fraud just wasn't interesting enough to pursue our report, not enough anti-fraud personnel, my guess.
Comment Posted By TMLutas On 7.11.2009 @ 16:01
