Category Archives: culture

Censorship

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Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D, AZ) seems to have failed her Progressive-Democratic Party’s purity test.  She votes for what she views as right rather than knee-jerkishly IAW Party diktat.  As a result, she

may face a censure vote by Arizona’s Democratic Party because she votes too often in favor of President Trump’s agenda
…
Since joining the Senate in January, Sinema has opposed Trump 81% of the time, The Arizona Republic reported, citing data from the FiveThirtyEight Trump Tracker.
That’s apparently not often enough to satisfy many of her fellow Democrats in the Grand Canyon State.

Here’s Dan O’Neal, Progressive Democrats of America (a Progressive-Democrat PAC) National Field Team Director and Arizona State Coordinator:

[T]he way she is voting is really disappointing. We want Democrats to vote like Democrats and not Republicans.

Think about that.

Sinema was elected to the Senate by her constituents, the good citizens of her Arizona district, not by the Progressive-Democratic Party.  She, like all elected politicians in an ideal world, was elected to do her best to carry out her constituents’ instructions, and where those instructions are unclear—where there is no consensus among her constituents—to carry out her best judgment.  The quality of that performance, and the consequences of unsatisfactory performance, are up to her constituents to decide.  They’re not up to Party.

This is what bipartisanship looks like for the Progressive-Democratic Party.  This is what free speech looks like for the Progressive-Democratic Party.  Remember this in the fall of 2020.

Judgment, Again

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Recall the New York Times‘ publication of an article slandering Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh with an unfounded accusation of sexual misbehavior toward a young woman decades ago at a college party.  Recall further that the NYT later “corrected” its claim with an “Editor’s Note” buried in the original smear piece instead of placing its Note prominently.

There’s more to this story.  The smear piece, excerpted from a forthcoming book as part of a marketing effort for that book, was written by the authors of the book.  They excerpted their own book.

They omitted the key information themselves.

Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, the authors of the book and the authors of the excerpted smear, claim they had the substance of the Note in the draft of their article, and that “editors” cut it out.

This, of course, is, to put it politely, utter nonsense. It’s entirely plausible that editors cut the critical information (and what does that say about the underlying integrity of the NYT?), but Pogrebin and Kelly did not have to agree to the censoring.  They chose to accept it; they chose to publish a blatant, dishonest smear.

But wait—mightn’t the editors have made the cut and gone to press without a faretheewell to Pogrebin and Kelly?  Maybe.  In that case, though, the two would have been all over the media hours after publication squawking to high Heaven about the cut and how the cut utterly changed the meaning of what they wrote. If they disapproved of the cut.  But they weren’t, because they approved the cut. Whether they did the cut or the editors did it, Pogrebin and Kelly fully approved of the cut and the smear that resulted from the cut.

When asked about that bit of editing and the Note during an interview on MSNBC, Pogrebin offered this:

We discussed it. We felt like there was so much heat, there’s so much– everyone has been has been [sic] seizing on various aspects of this that we certainly didn’t want it to be an issue anymore and we certainly never intended to mislead in any way. We wanted to give as full of a story as possible.

As full a story as possible.

Right. I might know of some beachfront property for sale north of Santa Fe, too.

Judgment

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Recall that the New York Times, just a very few days ago, reprinted an excerpt from a Clinton lawyer’s book that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh had inflicted an obscene act on a young woman while he was a college student at a “drunken dorm party.”

Immediately on publication, Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidates and sitting Senators Kamala Harris (CA), Elizabeth Warren (MA), Bernie Sanders (VT), Cory Booker (NJ), along with fellow candidates ex-Congressman Robert Francis O’Rourke, and ex-HUD Secretary Julian Castro all demanded Kavanaugh’s immediate impeachment.

Then the NYT, having been caught in its lie, had to print a “correction” in the form of an…Editor’s Note…buried in the article:

An earlier version of this article, which was adapted from a forthcoming book, did not include one element of the book’s account regarding an assertion by a Yale classmate that friends of Brett Kavanaugh pushed his penis into the hand of a female student at a drunken dorm party. The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident. That information has been added to the article.

Nor, apparently, did the NYT bother to ask the person in question to be interviewed for its article containing the excerpt. The NYT also has offered not even a single syllable of apology to Kavanaugh for its smear.

We expect that out of tabloids.  What’s particularly disgusting, though, is that not a single one of those Presidential candidates have offered a smidgeon of apology to Kavanaugh for their role in expanding the smear. Instead, with their silence they stand by their claims.  That’s a lack of integrity, an absence of morality, that’s wholly unacceptable.

Impeach on the basis of a newspaper article, rather than actual evidence.  That’s not the quality of judgment we need in the White House.  Nor is it the level of integrity needed there.

Strength of Consent

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The people of Hong Kong are in their 15th straight week of protest against the People’s Republic of China’s moves to intervene in Hong Kong’s internal affairs, to impose yet more PRC controls over a nominally free, “two systems” city.

People of all ages, many unmasked and some carrying children, walked more than 2 miles from a shopping district, where usually busy stores were shuttered, to downtown Hong Kong. Many chanted, “Five demands! Not one less!,” “Fight for freedom!” and “Revolution of our times!”

Those five demands, which do not add up to freedom, but are a necessary early step on the path to freedom, are these:

  • independent inquiry into allegations of police brutality
  • amnesty for arrested protesters
  • electoral reforms to allow Hong Kongers to vote for their own leaders
  • formal withdrawal of the extradition bill that would have allowed Hong Kong citizens (and anyone else arrested) to be sent to the PRC for trial and jail
  • Hong Kong Executive Carrie Lam’s resignation

Lam has “promised” to formally withdraw the extradition bill, but she has not honored her promise, and she has categorically rejected the others. Lam’s “promise” was a cynical effort to divide and weaken the protest movement.

However, as The Wall Street Journal put it in the article at the link,

The scale of the crowds Sunday evoked mass marches earlier this summer, suggesting efforts by Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam to weaken and divide the opposition movement are having little effect, and the crisis remains a challenge for the Chinese leadership in Beijing.

This protestor illustrates the matter.

The PRC’s President Xi Jinping has a golden opportunity, here, to demonstrate the strength of consenting to the citizens’ demands, but he’s overtly eschewing it. He, and his Chinese Communist Party cronies, are simply too insecure to take the step.  And not just politically: they’re personally and emotionally too insecure.

The VA Strikes Again

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Several times.

First up is this petty (and more) move by the Veterans Administration.

Congressman Brian Mast (R, FL)a retired Army Ranger, spoke out on Thursday after he was evicted from his congressional office space in the West Palm Beach Veteran Affairs Medical Center.
The move came after Mast, who lost his legs in an explosion in Afghanistan in 2010, grilled a Department of Veteran Affairs official at a hearing earlier this year.

After a spate of veteran suicides in VA facilities, Mast questioned a number of VA officials last April.  Now the VA wants him out of that office space:

The department will use the space previously dedicated to 6 members of congress for the provision of medical care services.

Which might actually be plausible, except for the timing of the move. And the fact that, were the office space actually needed, the facility could have declined to lease the space to Mast in the first place.

 

Next is this, even more egregious, item. It seems the VA has been refusing to reimburse veterans who go to an emergency medical facility that’s not a VA hospital.  Never mind the “emergency” part of that.  It took a judge’s order in a lawsuit to force the VA to pay the bills.  And this isn’t the first time on this specific matter.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has been ordered to reimburse veterans for the cost of their emergency care at non-VA hospitals—something the agency has actively told veterans they are not entitled to, an appeals court ruled this week.
The VA has wrongfully been denying veterans’ claims while also misrepresenting a regulation that entitles them to reimbursement, the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims said Monday.

The appellate court was not impressed with this deliberate misbehavior [emphasis added].

A previous regulation ended up excluding “nearly every type of expense a veteran could have incurred if he or she had insurance covering the non-emergency VA medical service at issue” from reimbursement, the court said, which violates a 2010 federal law.
“The Agency has effectively rolled back the clock and, with no transparency, essentially readopted a position we have authoritatively held inconsistent with Congress’s command,” the judges said, according to court documents. “Recognizing this is what has happened is—quite frankly—startling enough.
“It’s difficult to conceive how an agency could believe that adopting a regulation that mimics the result a federal court held to be unlawful is somehow appropriate when the statute at issue has not changed[.]”

That deliberate illegality ought to get some VA folks into jail.

 

And this, the worst of the lot.

…a Vietnam War veteran was reportedly found last week covered in ants and ant bites before he died at a Georgia VA nursing home.
Joel Marrable, who served in the Air Force, had more than 100 ant bites when his daughter visited him at the Eagle’s Nest Community Living Center in Decatur, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Laquna Moss said her father died shortly after being bitten in two incidents while battling cancer.

The VA still is actively killing through neglect our veterans.

The VA apologized, though. Like that makes everything all better.

Actions, not pretty words, and after all this time since the VA was first discovered falsifying appointment records and veterans were dying while on those fake appointment lists, nothing has changed.  Not a single item.

 

Veteranos Administratio delende est.