Category Archives: ethics

Teachers Union Disinformation

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In response to a collection of education-related laws recently enacted in Florida, Florida Education Association President Andrew Spar said in his news release,

This new law grossly oversteps in trying to silence teachers, staff, professors, and most other public employees. We will not go quietly….

Here’s some of what those silencing laws do:

  • allow teachers to require students to hand over their phones at the beginning of class
  • ban the use of TikTok on school Wi-Fi and networks
  • does not allow students to use school internet to access social media (with some exceptions)
  • block classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity for all grades
  • bar availability of certain sexual books in school libraries
  • prevent students and teachers from being required to use certain pronouns
  • prohibit diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in state colleges
  • allow teachers to leave school unions for any reason
  • State budget provides an increase in teacher pay—fourth year in a row

Not misinformation—disinformation. Go quietly, or go noisily, but maybe Florida’s teachers unions need to go. Let the teachers themselves form new unions from the ground up, or not, at the teachers’ own discretion.

And They Accused Trump of Being Soft on Russia

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Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s Janet Yellen-run Treasury department has—once again—extended a waiver to a rule barring import of Russian oil and gas that was instituted ‘way back in March 2022. Even at the time of the rule’s institution, Treasury created a waiver to allow financial institutions to continue processing dollar-currencied payments for Russian energy in other countries.

The waiver was supposed to expire by that June, but Yellen extended it to early December. She said, through a Treasury spokeswoman,

This license [extension] will provide for an orderly transition to help our broad coalition of partners reduce their dependence on Russian energy as we work to restrict the Kremlin’s revenue sources[.]

After that she extended the waiver again, until the middle of this month.

Now Yellen is extending the waiver yet again, to November, and this time she’s not even pretending she has a reason:

Treasury didn’t respond to a request for comment Friday [5 May 23].

Biden and his cronies in Party and his supporters on the Left all zealously decried former President Donald Trump’s playing to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ego with all of Trump’s pretty words about Putin.

Here is Biden and his Treasury person actively propping Putin’s energy economy by not closing off payments for Russian energy. Any orderly transition has long since been effected, or should have been; there no longer is any reason for extending the thing beyond Biden’s concrete softness on Russia.

A Red Flag Law

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This one waiting to be signed by Michigan’s Progressive-Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

A judge would have 24 hours to decide on a temporary extreme risk protection order after a request is filed. If granted, the judge would then have 14 days to set a hearing during which the flagged person would have to prove they do not pose a significant risk. A standard order would last one year.
Lying to a court when petitioning for a protection order would be a misdemeanor punishable by up to 93 days in jail and a $500 fine.

The law starts out being unconstitutional: the flagged person would have to prove they do not pose a significant risk. No. As with all other moves to limit an individual liberty or to circumscribe an individual right, it must be on Government to prove the “flagged person” is a risk.

Then, since the matter is claimed to be urgent, the court should be required to complete its adjudication within an additional 24 hours after having granted the temporary order.

Beyond that, the sanction for dishonestly petitioning for a red flag order must not be left to the wrist slap of a misdemeanor punishment. Falsely petitioning for a red flag order should carry a jail sentence—not reducible—of one year, the same duration of the red flag sanction if a petition is upheld.

And one item not addressed in this red flag law proposal, or in any of the others: the police department that took possession of the weapons on execution of the temporary extreme risk protection order must produce them in court, and in the event Government fails to make its case of significant risk, release them to the now no longer flagged person on the spot.

There also are no protections for the rights of other members of the “flagged person’s” household regarding their lawfully possessed weapons. Those weapons also are subject to seizure under the Michigan red flag law and other such laws. That seizure is an unconstitutional infringement of the non-flagged persons’ right to keep and bear Arms.

As with all the red flag laws on the books or currently proposed, this one is fatally flawed and a deliberate attack on our Constitution’s Second Amendment.

“Dangerous and inhumane”

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That’s soon-to-be-ex-Mayor of Chicago Lori Lightfoot’s (D) plaint to Texas Governor Gregg Abbott (R) over his bussing illegal aliens to Chicago.

But I beseech you anyway: treat these individuals with the respect and dignity that they deserve. To tell them to go to Chicago or to inhumanely bus them here is an inviable and misleading choice.

She also cried, as paraphrased by Fox News, that

the city has been responsible for the care of more than 8,000 people who had no resources of their own since the first buses arrived from Texas in August—adding that the number continues to grow.

All 8,000 of them. In nine months. That’s a fraction of the number of illegal aliens that cross the Texas border every week. Lightfoot knows this. Lightfoot knows, also, that those illegal aliens volunteer to go to Chicago (or they volunteer to go to New York City, to which they’re sent at Texas taxpayer expense, or to…); they’re not forced in any way.

No, what’s dangerous and inhumane is Lightfoot’s conscious decision to make Chicago a sanctuary city and then choose, further, to do nothing to treat those illegals, or even to prepare to treat those illegals, who take her up on her invitation with the respect and dignity, and safety, that they were promised by her.

If Chicago is unsafe for the openly invited illegal aliens that trickle in, it’s because Lightfoot has made the parallel deliberate decision to do nothing to keep anyone in the city safe, to instead reduce the police force’s ability to act against crime, large or small, and to support Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’ decision to not bother to prosecute a broad range of crimes.

If Lightfoot were serious, she’d have set up facilities to receive that small trickle of illegal aliens. And she’d have created a safe city environment for everyone, including those illegal aliens.

Reporters’ Contempt for Ordinary Americans

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High-profile media figures gathered for their 2024 Campaign Journalism Conference at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics a week or so ago. One theme of the conference was the journalists’ concern about the perception of condescension, of looking down your nose at us Americans that we Americans have of the journalism guild and its members.

CNN journalist Jeff Zeleny was one expressing that concern.

So one thing I think the media has done incorrectly in terms of describing Trump voters as interviewing people only after Trump rallies. The vast majority of Trump voters have never gone to a Trump rally, have never, you know, stood in line for hours and hours and hours. And for those of you who’ve covered Trump rallies, you’ve seen some of the same people at rally, after rally, after rally. These are groupies. These are people who are going for the show, for the rock concert, if you will. So I think talking to voters who are interested enough and following things along, but not as obsessed with, you know, the candidate on either side that it sort of tends the view.

Some of those some of the people do attend multiple Trump rallies because they’re groupies interested in the show. An unknown number of them, even unknown by the august Zeleny. Many more, though, attend multiple Trump rallies, not because they’re obsessed, but because they are interested enough and following things along, and want to hear things straight from the horse’s mouth. And they—we–can’t trust the media to present his rallies honestly and with balance. Zeleny chose to claim the one set of frequent attendees were the whole of the frequent attendees, completely ignoring even the possibility of the other set’s existence.

And this bit by Ana Ceballos of The Miami Herald:

…DeSantis never made “small talk” with reporters….

He won’t hobnob with reporters. What a precious whine. More seriously: why would he make “small talk” when journalists are just going to print some of those off-the-record small talk remarks whenever those remarks are convenient to the journalists’ predetermined narrative, all the while attributing them to leaks by “a person familiar with the exchange” or a “high official?”

(Aside: there was a time when editors required at least two on-the-record sources to corroborate anonymous “person familiar” or “high official” claims. Editors have long since walked away from that standard. What concrete, measurable, publicly available standard of journalistic integrity do editors use today?)

Ceballos went on, on the subject of a claimed desire to build trust of the journalist by the staffer and/or politician:

They [DeSantis’ staffers] don’t often get on the phone, either, because they want everything in writing just in case they can attack you for it. So it’s really difficult to even have candid conversations with them and just an on-background, off-the-record conversation.

Yeah. It couldn’t possibly be because they need the written record so they can defend themselves or their administration when journalists leak and distort the on-background, off-the-record remarks in order to attack them. Trust goes both ways.

A canonical example of that lack of trustworthiness, that deliberate distortion, that contempt for us in thinking we’re too grindingly stupid to decide for ourselves how to interpret what we hear, is in their presentation of Trump’s Asheville, NC, speech late in his 2016 campaign. “Journalists” covering the speech, and others merely repeating what their fellows wrote, accurately quoted Trump as saying that there were “good people on both sides of the argument.” But the lie, and the contempt for us inherent in their lie, was in the “journalists'” decision to strip off the context of Trump’s remark and to claim that Trump was talking about the rioters that rioted. Even a casual perusal of the transcript of that speech—unneeded by all those who were present and heard what Trump actually said—demonstrates that far from drawing equivalence regarding the rioters, Trump was plainly talking about the debate over whether certain statues should be torn down or relocated.

The attendees at the Campaign Journalism Conference also seem to have ignored the press’ penchant for rewriting history to attempt to erase their past distortions when they’re caught out. News outlets routinely rewrite headlines when their inaccuracies are exposed, doing it on the sly without fanfare, expecting that we’re too stupid to notice. They do the same with later-exposed errors in the body of their articles, and for the same reason. This is nothing but naked revisionist history that would make any propagandist proud. The honest, the respectful, thing for these outlets to do would be to acknowledge their errors with the same prominence in which they made them and print their correction—their errata, if you will—at the head of the article in which the error was made, while leaving the article and headline otherwise intact.

One more item the conference attendees seem to have ignored: The New York Times‘ front-page announcement during Trump’s 2016 campaign that there should be no more objectivity in news reporting vis-à-vis Trump; journalists should take sides. This was followed by a broadcast news media anchor claiming in all seriousness that there are not two sides to every story. Only one side, very often, was fit to be presented.

The “news” media mavens’ contempt for us ordinary Americans is no perception. They really are contemptuous of us. Zeleny put that on clear display; so did Ceballos. These “journalists,” in their oh-so-much-smarter-than-us obliviousness, their breathtaking thin-skinned-ness, can’t even recognize the contempt they have for so many Americans in their own remarks. This is reminiscent of a politician’s claim that millions of Americans are irredeemable and deplorable. And of another politician’s claim that 15% of us are just no good.

This is what passes for journalism today. This is the actual contempt for us that journalists have.