Tag Archives: responsibilities

The Opposite of Courage

Posted on by
Reply

In a Just the News article centered on George Washington University Law Professor, and holder of the university’s Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law, Jonathan Turley’s view that four Border Patrol agents have defamation and denial of due process cases (the four agents face administrative punishments even though the Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Professional Responsibility investigation found they’d done nothing wrong), JtN quoted National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd as saying,

…the president of the United States said that these individuals would pay, and the moment he said that, those investigators had no choice but to find some sort of fault—whether it was criminal or administrative.

On that I must disagree. There’s no doubt the “investigators” might have felt pressure to find a fault, but they also without doubt were not forced to do so. The most pressure that could have been applied would have been to cancel their jobs.

It would have taken a measure of courage to resist the pressure. Choosing their jobs, assuming such a threat was made or implied, over doing the right thing, however, took no courage.

In choosing between doing a right thing and doing a wrong thing, the opposite of courage is cowardice.

Excuses

Posted on by
Reply

On the matter of the disagreement between Elon Musk and Twitter over whether the former must buy the latter or the latter has failed to provide the data needed—for instance, to assess the level of bots doing Twitter’s tweeting—to properly assess the value of the purchase target, “data scientists” claim that the number of fake and spam accounts

isn’t easy to objectively determine.

And

Coming up with a precise, objective, and authoritative number of fake or spam accounts, where hundreds of millions of tweets are posted daily, is an impractical task.

It’s hard, so it’s impractical? And hiding behind the vagaries of “precise” (how precise? Five 9s precise? “Close enough” to illustrate the general magnitude of the number?)?

This is just “expert” fee seeking. “Not easy” means possible. It’s time for the obstructionists to stop obstructing, to stop manufacturing excuses, and to get to work.

Scofflaw Blue States

Posted on by
Reply

And guess who gets to pick up the tab. You get three, and the first two don’t count. Here are the scofflaws:

At least four Democratic-led states with budget surpluses this year have chosen not to fully repay the federal government for money borrowed to fund unemployment benefits, a move that will impose increased charges on businesses to help make up the difference.
California, Connecticut, Illinois, and New York have directed surplus funds to social programs and taxpayer rebates, among other causes, leaving unpaid debts to the federal government ranging from tens of millions of dollars to more than $15 billion.

This is the Progressive-Democratic Party at the State level treating loans as grants. Of course, that’s entirely consistent with Party’s attitude toward student loans, so we shouldn’t be surprised.

Ken Pokalsky, Business Council of New York State Vice President:

We’re going to be at elevated levels of taxes for a decade[.]

Yep.

No Quick Fixes

Posted on by
Reply

Some of you may have noticed that the “media industry”—newspapers and broadcast/cable news outlets—is losing credibility.

Only 16% of Americans said they have a “great deal or quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers in 2022, a 5% drop [or maybe, a 5 per centage point drop] compared to the 2021 findings, according to Gallup. It was the lowest number to give those answers since Gallup started asking about newspapers in 1973.
Television news has Americans even more concerned in 2022, as a dismal 11% told Gallup they have a “great deal or quite a lot” of confidence in the industry. This is down 5% […] from the 16% who were confident in TV news last year, a record-low total.

Joe Concha on the matter:

They can improve the situation by not injecting so much opinion into what should be straight reporting. And also by not automatically and blatantly taking a side on big issues such as the recent abortion ruling, or serving at the pleasure of one major political party like we saw by calling Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Instead, you might see some trust resorted, but it’s a hard bell to unring

Ben Smith, co-founder of Semafor, a global news company that is expected to launch later this year:

We’re hoping that a commitment to transparency and openness to a range of views can help close that gap over time[.]

Hope isn’t much of a solution, here, not when it’s too late even for Concha’s solution: the same crop of dishonest journalists and media outlet editors and publishers would still be in place.

No, the required solution must include—must begin with—a significant fraction, a strong majority, of journalists must be terminated, and all of the media outlet managers and their deputies, and and all of the editors and their deputies, must be terminated, their ties to media “news” outlets completely severed. These are the ones proximately responsible for the distortions and outright lies they write, the editorial decisions they make to publish those stories and to minimize others or to spike them altogether. These are the ones that engage in rewriting their past stories rather than leaving them intact and publishing corrections to them. The incumbents can never be trusted, no matter the bodice-ripping mea culpas that might spill from their lips or pens.

It will take a considerable amount of time to accomplish—the firings needn’t take any time at all, but finding replacements—both capable of reporting and honest enough to do it objectively will take time.

Still Not Ready

Posted on by
Reply

The Progressive-Democratic Party’s Biden administration has had how many months since the leak of the Supreme Court’s then-putative Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling that was going to overturn Roe v Wade (and which subsequently was published and did overturn Roe) in which to prepare a response?

This administration has had how many more months since the Supreme Court agreed to hear Dobbs in the first place in which to prepare a response?

This administration has known for how many years that the Supreme Court had had three textualist Justices appointed, Justices that would adhere to the text of our Constitution rather than rule in the activist manner, and so had a 5-3 majority (with Chief Justice John Roberts voting the way he thought legacy demanded) of textualists? Years in which this administration could have been preparing the outlines of responses to the Supreme Court’s various rulings?

And President Joe Biden (D) is only now coming up with an intrinsically fragile Executive Order with which to address the matter of abortion?

Regardless of what any of us might think about abortion or the Dobbs ruling or the overturning of Roe, this…tardiness…of response should give us all pause. This is an administration, and this is a Progressive-Democratic Party (that has had control of both houses of Congress for how long, now?), that seem incapable of planning ahead, of preparing responses (much less backup responses) to events that are coming down the pike and that are eminently visible in the distance on that pike.

A government that operates only via its rearview mirror is a government dangerous to the national weal and to the national security.