Tag Archives: ethics

Republicans Created Harris’ Title of Border Czar?

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That’s the claim of The Wall Street Journal news room writers.

Republicans exaggerated her role to label the vice president as “border czar,” though her initiative was much narrower.

They also claim that Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ DOC was working with Northern Triangle nations to reduce the illegal alien flood. That last, not so much. Here’s Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s own statement announcing his appointment of Harris to the post:

I’ve asked her, the VP, today—because she’s the most qualified person to do it—to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help—are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border.

Not just the Triangle nations—included in Harris’ portfolio are Mexico, which is our southern border and those “countries…going to need help,” which are the aggregated origin of all of the illegal aliens flooding across our southern border.

Regarding the title—label if you prefer—Border Czar, Andrew Arthur, writing shortly after Harris’ appointment in a piece for the Center for Immigration Studies, noted

the executive branch has used the term loosely for almost 60 years to describe an official with a portfolio that includes the duties of other officials.

That’s hardly a current, Republican, creation. Instead, here’s the press, specifically, the New York Post, just two weeks after her appointment. First, the headline:

Where is Kamala? Two weeks since being named border czar, Harris still hasn’t visited

And in the body:

Instead, in her first two weeks as czar, she has traveled….

And NBC News, referring to Harris’ immediate predecessor:

In a statement Friday announcing that Roberta Jacobson, Biden’s border czar who has played a key role….

And so on.

Maybe the WSJ needs to get a new crop of interns for its newsroom research function. Or more accurate writers.

Fact “Checking”

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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

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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

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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

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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.