Tag Archives: responsibilities

Divisive Tolerance

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Jim Webb, Navy Secretary Virginia Senator (R, then D), wrote of a monument in Arlington National Cemetery that the Left wants to tear down. It’s unpardonable sin is honoring Confederate soldiers who fell in our Civil War. It was commissioned by President William McKinley, who had fought \four years in that war as a Union soldier, and it was designed by Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran and the first Jewish graduate of the Virginia Military Institute.

One face of the monument’s pedestal bears an inscription:

Not for fame or reward, not for place or for rank; not lured by ambition or goaded by necessity; but in simple obedience to duty as they understood it; these men suffered all, sacrificed all, dared all, and died.

The opposite face bears this inscription, in part:

Victorix Causa Diis Placuit Sed Victis Catoni [The victorious cause pleased the gods, but vanquished Cato]

But no, down it must come, as the Left demands to erase important traces of our history, most especially those things we did in reconciliation of grievous divide.

Webb closed his piece with this:

If it is taken apart and removed, leaving behind a concrete slab, the burial marker of its creator, and a small circle of graves, it would send a different message, one of a deteriorating society willing to erase the generosity of its past, in favor of bitterness and misunderstanding conjured up by those who do not understand the history they seem bent on destroying.

It doesn’t matter to those oh-so-tolerant Leftists. They’d rather destroy than recover. To Hell with reconciliation and unity.

Collusion

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Or worse. The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are on the right track to criticize the sham nature of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to appoint David Weiss as Special Counsel (an illegal appointment, as illustrated nearby) in the Hunter Biden (and possibly et al.) investigation.

Those editors, though, are surprisingly naïve in one regard. On the matter of DoJ’s (Garland’s and Weiss’) move to formally withdraw the plea deal that Federal District Judge Maryellen Noreika had rejected the day it was presented to her, the editors suggested,

He may now end up facing some felony tax charges, as two investigating IRS whistleblowers told Congress they had recommended, or perhaps other charges.

The Editors can’t possibly be this naive. There are only two likely outcomes to this. One is that Weiss drops the charges altogether and walks away. The other is that Weiss proceeds with the present case, and charges Hunter Biden with precisely the charges to which Hunter had agreed to plead guilty.

As to Weiss’ sweetheart “Special” Counsel role, that in no way blocks either of the above moves; his new title is just a mechanism to drag out his new sham investigation for another five years, following which he’ll write a report that shakes his finger very firmly at Biden.

The fix has been made manifest, and Garland has shown that he’s far more deeply embedded than Eric Holder was in his wingman role; Garland is Joe Biden’s made man.

The Problems with David Weiss’ Appointment

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Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed Delaware Federal Prosecutor David Weiss as Special Counsel overseeing the Huner Biden collection of investigations. You all know this already. There are problems with Garland’s appointment and with Weiss’ being in that position.

Here is what 28 CFR § 600.3 – Qualifications of the Special Counsel says about who’s allowed to be appointed to the position and who’s allowed to occupy the position.

  • 600.3 Qualifications of the Special Counsel.
    (a) An individual named as Special Counsel shall be a lawyer with a reputation for integrity and impartial decisionmaking, and with appropriate experience to ensure both that the investigation will be conducted ably, expeditiously and thoroughly, and that investigative and prosecutorial decisions will be supported by an informed understanding of the criminal law and Department of Justice policies. The Special Counsel shall be selected from outside the United States Government. Special Counsels shall agree that their responsibilities as Special Counsel shall take first precedence in their professional lives, and that it may be necessary to devote their full time to the investigation, depending on its complexity and the stage of the investigation.
    (b) The Attorney General shall consult with the Assistant Attorney General for Administration to ensure an appropriate method of appointment, and to ensure that a Special Counsel undergoes an appropriate background investigation and a detailed review of ethics and conflicts of interest issues. A Special Counsel shall be appointed as a “confidential employee” as defined in 5 U.S.C. 7511(b)(2)(C).

The problems begin with Special Counsel shall be a lawyer with a reputation for integrity and impartial decisionmaking. Both of these criteria are open questions as they apply to Weiss. Weiss, recall, is the Delaware Federal Prosecutor who agreed to a plea deal regarding Hunter Biden’s tax and gun possession misbehaviors that was so dishonest—he even tried to slide a permanent immunity clause into a rehab program requirement and didn’t present that clause to the presiding judge until the day he, in collusion with Biden’s lawyers, hoped she would bless the deal—that the presiding judge rejected the deal the day it was laid in front of her. The lack of impartiality of Weiss’ decision making is exemplified by that same dishonest plea deal: his judgment was such that he thought he could railroad, or con, the judge with his stampede effort.

Next is the part about the investigation will be conducted ably, expeditiously and thoroughly. Weiss took five years to investigate what he considered to be misdemeanors and a minor drug habit—the charges and rehab need to which he agreed in the above plea deal. He may have been uncommonly thorough (emphasis on may) in those misdemeanor investigations, but they most assuredly were neither ably done nor expeditiously so.

Then there’s the bit about The Special Counsel shall be selected from outside the United States Government. This, by itself, should have been a deal breaker, and it demonstrates AG Merrick Garland’s own utter dishonesty and shameless participation in what can only be a coverup of Hunter Biden’s, President Joe Biden’s (D), and the Biden Family Syndicate’s criminal behaviors. Weiss, as I’ve mentioned a couple of times above, is deep inside the United States Government; he’s deep inside the United States Department of Justice; he was, until his current appointment, the United States Attorney for the District of Delaware.

That former Attorney General Bill Barr appointed United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut John Durham as Special Counsel regarding the Russia Collusion Hoax sets no precedent that clears Garland or Weiss of this deal breaker. That’s merely a prior grievous error by an Attorney General.

Right, But for a Different Reason

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors’ headline and subheadline is on a reasonable track:

Punishing Banks for Regulatory Failure
Regulators want to saddle midsize banks with new capital rules.

The editors the proceed to disparage the regulators’ move, and they’re correct about that. They’re mistaken in their lede, though, and that leads them to the erroneous aspect of their disparagement:

Silicon Valley Bank failed owing to rising interest rates and lapses by regulators, not a shortage of capital.

It’s true that a shortage of capital did not cause SVB’s failure, except as the proximate outcome of the real cause of the failure, an outcome that made the failure inevitable.

SVB did run short of capital value, and that meant it couldn’t survive the rapid outflow of cash through depositor withdrawals. But rising interest rates were only the means of that capital shortfall and bank failure, not the cause. Nor were lapses by regulators—and there were some serious ones, including their lack of oversight diligence, which should have led to better enforcement of existing rules—involved in the bank’s failure.

The bank’s managers failed in their own fiscal duties, overbalancing as they did the nature of their capital holdings in the face of those rising interest rates: those managers chose not to balance the interest rate risk related to their deposits and the rates they were paying against the interest rate risk related to their capital holdings and the way rising rates were devaluing their holdings.

Those managers could see as well as any of us, and as well as their depositors, what rising rates were doing to their bank’s capital, and those managers could see as well as any of us, and as well as their depositors, the increasing risk to the bank of the decreasing interest rate spread between what the bank paid depositors and what it earned on its loans, loans the bank was increasingly unable to make in the face of those rising interest rates. And that exacerbated the impact of the bank’s decreasing capital holdings, which those managers could see as well as any of us, and as well as their depositors.

Nor did lack of overt regulator intervention have much of anything to do with SVB’s failure. Bank managers, any enterprise managers, are paid to act on their own initiative, not to wait until they’re told what to do and then, subsequently, told to go ahead and do it.

SVB’s managers were no exception to that.

This was an SVB management failure, and Regulators have no place for writing new capital rules. It’s sufficient for the market place to apply the appropriate sanctions, even if that deprives government bureaucrats of an opportunity to feel good about themselves by Doing Something.

Dishonest Press

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The New York Times and the tabloid’s cronies in the journalism guild ran long and hard about Justice Clarence Thomas’ gift from Dallas Cowboys’ owner Jerry Jones, a gift the NYT and its parrots claimed was an authentic Cowboys Superbowl ring. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram and The Dallas Morning News are among the Texas tabloids that repeated the rumor, and joined the NYT in masquerading their rumor as fact.

Never mind two trivial, if actual, facts.

The ring Jones gave Thomas was a $12 replica.

Thomas reported even that tiny gift in his 1994 ethics form, which he filed with the Court.

Mark Paoletta, longtime friend of Thomas who worked on his 1991 confirmation:

I expect the New York Times to issue a retraction on this falsehood, and an apology to Justice Thomas[.]

And

How could New York Times reporters get this so wrong?

Good luck with that apology. The NYT made no “mistake;” this was the outlet’s, and that of its fellow rumor mongers’, deliberate smear of a Supreme Court Justice whom they view as nothing more than an uppity black man who left the Liberals’ and their press’ plantation and runs his mouth too much. Thomas, shamefully, is their 21st century Dred Scott to the press’ Chief Justice Roger Taney.