Category Archives: ethics

Fact “Checking”

Posted on by
Reply

USA Today now is claiming that Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris has visited our southern border twice. Harris has visited US southern border twice as vice president | Fact check goes the paper’s headline. The outlet even cited the El Paso Times (it’s necessary to look to the byline under the headline to see that the article is from the live reporting of Times‘ writers).

That live reporting, though, carries only reporting of Harris’ visit to the Customs and Border Protection processing facility that sits well back from the border. Times writers do make passing references to Harris “heading to” the Paso del Norte International Bridge and her claimed intention to “tour” the border fence, but there’s no reporting by these on-scene writers that she actually arrived or toured—which surely they would have done had she done so.

My rating of USA Today‘s fact “check:” FALSE

USA Today misleads again.

O the other hand, even if she has visited the border twice, that’s still breathtakingly few times for the Border Czar to have visited it over her three-and-a-half years of being charged with dealing with her and Biden’s border crisis and the flood of illegal aliens pouring in.

The spacing of Harris’ visit(s) is illustrative of her own lackadaisical attitude toward our border. Her first visit, if it occurred, was ‘way back in June 2021. She’s been nowhere near our border (though she has successfully made it to Europe) since then until this campaign season when she made a campaign stop to visit the Arizona border (actually, this time) last September.

Naked Threats of Vengeance

Posted on by
Reply

This is what the leftist American Bar Association is tolerating in its midst—intolerance to the point of seeking destruction of those who don’t kowtow to their ideology.

[A] group called “The 65 Project” has taken to social media vowing to go after the licenses of attorneys who chose to work for former President Donald Trump.

Apparently, only the Precious Left and a section of the ABA guild are allowed to use the courts to seek election integrity.

The 65 Project isn’t troubling itself with facts in their attacks, either. Here’s Managing Director Michael Teter:

Across the country, lawyers who lent their credibility as officers of the court to Donald Trump to file factually and legally baseless claims to overturn legitimate election results have been investigated by state bar associations, been fined, had their licenses suspended, and even disbarred[.]

Not so much. The vast majority of the cases brought over election results never got to the merits, legitimate or baseless; they were dismissed on procedural or other grounds. Further, “across the country” is a cynical exaggeration. Only a very few lawyers have been sanctioned over the cases they brought.

Alan Dershowitz, still a staunch Democrat and Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus, has the correct characterization of the project’s shenanigans:

It’s pure McCarthyism. And unethical. And it’s scaring some lawyers away.

This is what wants to rule over us. Keep it in mind next month.

Intolerance and Frivolous Lawsuits

Posted on by
Reply

Jack Phillips, owner/operator of Masterpiece Cakeshop, had yet another lawsuit against him dismissed, this one by the Colorado Supreme Court. Unfortunately, it was dismissed on the trivial technicality that it wasn’t filed correctly.

The Wall Street Journal editors ask the question

[W]hen will the progressive cultural police finally leave him alone?

As long as the courts—which includes our Supreme Court, whose ruling in Phillips’ favor in an earlier lawsuit was based narrowly on the animus of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission—continue rule to timidly, the intolerant progressives will continue to persecute Phillips and the rest of us Americans who won’t bow and scrape at their intolerant feet.

What’s necessary to put an end to progressive bigotry, at least in our courts, is to sanction such legally frivolous, but morally bigoted, lawsuits. The plaintiffs in such cases should be required to pay their persecution target all legal costs, which often is already the case, and they should be required to pay the damages identified by the plaintiff. Further, the lawyers and their employing law firms—which do not have to be a party to such…frivolity—need themselves to be heavily sanctioned: the lawyer(s) fined steeply, beginning with 10% of their top line income and moving up for each subsequent frivolous suit in which they might participate, and the law firms employing them fined similarly steeply.

Courts are justifiably reluctant to find against plaintiffs and plaintiff lawyers on the basis of their frivolous cases, but it’s been made crystalline by the persecution of Phillips that courts are being too timid here.

Israel for Sovereignty

Posted on by
Reply

And against leaks. The headline and subheadline summarize the situation.

U.S. Frustrated by Israel’s Reluctance to Share Iran Retaliation Plans
The Biden administration hopes to avoid a repeat of surprise attacks, such as the killing of Hezbollah’s leader

Israel is behaving like a sovereign nation and not at all like a province of Biden’s dreamland. That frustrates him and his.

Why, though, would Israel want to “share” its plans vis-à-vis Iran (or Hezbollah or Hamas, come to that)? Biden’s administration will only leak those plans, and Iran (and its terrorist arms) would be the better prepared. ‘Course, in my cynical mind, it might be useful for Israel to share one set of plans and then execute another. What Iran was prepared for in the realization would tell a very powerful tale about those leaks, even whether they exist.

We also have this: while the Harris-Biden administration (as Biden sometimes terms it) was trying to force onto Israel finalize a Hezbollah-Israel cease-fire, the IDF successfully killed Hezbollah’s MFWIC Hassan Nasrallah. In an initial telecon immediately after the strike, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that the strike had gone in, successfully. Then,

[d]uring a second call the same day, Austin asked Gallant if Israel was prepared to be “alone” when it came to defending itself, given the lack of notice.

This is the administration threatening Israel to kowtow and stop cutting out the US from planning Israel’s defense moves in the middle of the latter’s struggle for survival against an enemy sworn to exterminate Israel, and to do so without regard for the deaths and destruction to its own people.

“Defense officials” claim otherwise.

Austin was frustrated because the US didn’t have enough time to position its forces to potentially come to Israel’s defense or to protect nearby US troops, defense officials said.

Would these “nearby US troops” be the same US troops Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris insists aren’t there? The Navy’s fleets positioned in the Mediterranean Sea, Gulf of Aden, and the Arabian Sea can’t do the job of “coming to Israel’s defense?” “Defense officials” aren’t even trying to be serious. Austin, along with the Biden-Harris administration in general, just want to control Israel’s behavior.

It would be all right if this administration devoted as much effort to reigning in the terrorists and their arms and money supplier, Iran, as they do trying to keep one or both of Israel’s hands…restrained.

Always Someone Else’s Fault

Posted on by
Reply

Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party President candidate Kamala Harris is blaming Congress for her and Biden’s administration’s failure to control our border. 60 Minutes interviewer Bill Whitaker asked a question of Harris:

You recently visited the southern border and embraced President Biden’s recent crackdown on asylum seekers, and that crackdown produced an almost immediate and dramatic decrease in the number of border crossings. If that’s the right answer now, why didn’t your administration take those steps in 2021?

Harris’ answer, in part:

Fast forward to a moment when a bipartisan group of members of the United States Senate, including one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, got together, came up with a border security bill.

She omitted to mention that for all that Senator James Lankford (R, OK), the “most conservative” Senator in question, was part of that deal, it would have codified the entry of more than 1.4 million unvetted illegal aliens into our nation. Lankford was hoodwinked in that deal.

Harris also omitted to say, and Whitaker chose not to note in his question, that the right answer now was Joe Biden’s Executive Order, that he could have issued years ago.

Whitaker followed up:

“[T]here was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration,” and that “arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump.”
He then asked her: “Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?”

Harris’ answer, in part:

It’s a long-standing problem, and solutions are at hand, and from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions.

She omitted to mention, and Whitaker omitted to ask, how then-President Donald Trump (R) was able to implement the restrictions that so thoroughly limited illegal alien influx, restrictions that were so thoroughly loosened. Trump inveighed Congress to act on immigration law, but he didn’t wait—he delivered Executive Orders that achieved the tight restrictions. It’s true enough that Congress is needed to codify those EOs, or something like them, but the EOs, for their duration, worked.

Nothing kept Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden from issuing the EO that he did, or issuing other EOs, to tighten the border as long ago as January 2021 (or leave the Trump EOs in place), and nothing kept his Vice President from pushing him to do any of that. Instead, Harris actively supported the the rescission of the Trump EOs and the resultant loosening of our border control.

But all that is Congress’ fault. With Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, it’s always somebody else’s fault; Party is never the cause of any failure.