Category Archives: culture

Child Molestation and Bankruptcy Escapes

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Ironically, it’s the Catholic Church that has invented this ruse.

The Archdiocese of Portland was the first to do it. Three months later the Roman Catholic Diocese in Tucson, AZ, followed suit and three months after that the diocese in Spokane, WA, did it, too.
They all filed for bankruptcy and since then more than 15 other Catholic dioceses and religious orders have filed for bankruptcy to seek protection from lawsuits by sexual-assault victims, resulting in about 4,000 claims seeking compensation for past wrongdoing. This year, three more Catholic dioceses announced intentions to file.

Escaping debt—escaping court ordered financial penalties for the Church’s abuse of children and women—through bankruptcy.

But, of course. The outcome of this ruse is

[T]he legal strategy uses the law that protects companies from creditors to help preserve its mission and shield assets from claims made by victims of sexual abuse. Filing for chapter 11 freezes lawsuits and provides breathing room to work out a plan to compensate abuse victims.

Never mind that there already are plans for compensating the children and women: the courts’ judgments and assigned penalties from those cynically frozen suits.  There’s nothing to work out.  Aside from that, I’m not sure that a mission that includes condoning officials’ abuse of the most helpless of their flock is a mission worth preserving.  Condoning? See the Pope’s response to attempts to punish priests who are found abusive. See his attempts to absolve higher officials—bishops and cardinals—of their responsibility for the abuses.

And the strategy is spreading.  USA Gymnastics and the Boy Scouts of America are both in or looking to bankruptcy as a way to escape judgment.  Condoning?  See USAG’s—and USOC’s, come to that—covering up of a doctor/trainer’s decades long abuse.

This stinks.

I’m not much enamored of Federal laws, but we need one here: bankruptcy must be legally barred as a means of avoiding financial responsibility for this sort of abuse.  We even have a precedent: college students can’t duck their student debt through bankruptcy, albeit that bar is newly in flux.

Churches (not just Catholic), and any other organizations whose leadership teams or individuals are found culpable of child abuse or sexual abuse of women, cannot be allowed to run away from their fiscal responsibility (criminal courts work the crimes here, already; although I’d certainly like to see the employing institution punished, also).  No debt “reorganization” through bankruptcy should be allowed.  Pay the judgment in full or cease to exist.  With one exception: the guilty ones must be permanently barred from taking any role other than parishioner or line employee in any religious institution, regardless of religion, or in any company in the originating industry.  If the bankruptcy court is empowered to require that, then any fiscal penalties could legitimately undergo some adjustment once publicly available proof has been provided that all the named individuals—and all of the individuals responsible must be named—have been so barred.

Sadly, this bar will have to be done civilly, since the Church, of which the Catholic Church and USAG have shown themselves the canonical examples for all institutions—have chosen not to.

The Party of Expansionist, Acquisitive Government

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That’s what we can see made plain in the incoming Congress’ House of Representatives.  Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman (D, NJ) had this on her Progressive-Democratic Party’s plans:

There are dozens of measures…that have been languishing with Republicans at the helm for years, and I expect to see many of them finally come to the floor under Democratic leadership[.]

Plans like rolling back the just enacted tax cuts and preventing the individual income tax cuts from becoming permanent.  Because the Progressive-Democrats know more about how to spend our money than we do.

Plans like Medicare for all, free education for all—paid for by raising those taxes.  So much for “free.”

Guaranteed jobs, especially, “green” jobs—at the Progressive-Democrat’s mandated minimum wage because, like all workers, “green” workers are just too stupid to be trusted with freely negotiating their own compensation package.  And hired by whom?  Not so much a free economy employer; “greenery” isn’t competitive, so the Progressive-Democrats intend to centrally plan our energy economy and require greenery along with subsidizing it.  That can be expected to work as well as the Progressive-Democrats’ centrally planned health economy.

Oh, and they want to deepen the central planning on that: as part of their “Medicare for all” bit, they intend for Uncle Sugar to be sole dispenser of and sole payer for each citizen’s (and illegal alien’s) health care.

Block border security by blocking any wall and by eliminating Immigration and Customs Enforcement.  And hamstringing US Customs & Border Protection generally.

It’s going to be an ugly, wasted two years with no serious legislation coming out of the House—only the Party’s nakedly socialist claptrap.  Socialist and Government-run because, these worthies insist, the average American is inadequate to the task of his democratic duty.

Foolish Misunderstanding

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CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria is dismayed with our Constitution and the concept of a republican democracy.

[T]he Constitutional concept of equal representation in the U.S. Senate [is] a “structural problem.”

And

…”new dividing line in Western politics,” which [Zakaria] describes is the “less-educated rural populations” he calls “Outsiders” who “feel ignored or looked down upon” and “feel deep resentment towards metropolitan elites.”

And

…30% of America is now electing 70% of the Senate.  All those states with—you think of Wyoming. It has roughly a million people. It has two senators. California with 70 million people has two senators as well. So we have a kind of structural problem here where the land is being overrepresented. The people are being underrepresented. So both sides feel deeply wronged.

However.

That alleged imbalance is a designed-in feature, not a problem; it’s what makes us a republican democracy of some durability, not a popular democracy doomed to the failure of tyranny at the hands of a few—Zakaria’s metro elites, for instance.

The need to balance the large- and small-population States in one house of our Congress is just as important today as it was those 230 years ago.  For the same reason and for another: the political divide between the populous coastal States and less populous flyover country—illustrated by that very term of the Left’s and by Zakaria’s plain contempt for the less-educated (as we must be, because rural)—is even deeper than the political divide between the populous and rural States of those original thirteen.

Wyoming needs to be able to defend itself from an overweening California.

It’s sad that Zakaria slept through his 8th grade civics class.

What He Said

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Alphabet’s Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, testified before the House Judiciary Committee last Tuesday, and he declined to justify his company’s decision to use the Southern Poverty Law Center as what the company calls a “trusted flagger,” a facility whereby these Trusted Ones can identify speech of which they personally disapprove as hate speech and thereby have it censored from Google’s products.  Pichai also was unable to explain why Google predominantly censored Conservative speech.  This prompted Congressman Louie Gohmert (R, TX) to take official notice of Pichai’s own bias.

You’re so surrounded by liberality that hates conservatism, hates people that really love our Constitution and the freedom it’s afforded people like you, that you don’t even recognize it.  It’s like a blind man not even knowing what light looks like, because you’re surrounded by darkness.

Sadly, the same can be said of Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey and his management team and of Facebook’s Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg; Director, Ads, Business Integrity Rob Leathern; and the rest of Zuckerberg’s management team, as well.

Not Throwing a Party is Exclusionary

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According to Howard Kurtz, self-styled news media “critic,” not having a party for members of the NLMSM is exclusionary.  President Donald Trump has decided not to throw a White House holiday party for the media this year.

the president’s decision to exclude the media establishment, at least for this year.

There it is, right from the jump.  Not having a big, expensive party is exclusionary.  Right up there with the actual bigotry of excluding blacks, or women, or… from access to a government facility or public business.

It gets really petty, too: not having this party is particularly terrible, Kurtz says.

The annual Christmas-season gathering was a significant perk for those covering the White House….

But it’s terrible that this perk won’t happen this year.

Journalists who attended the events, which featured a catered buffet of lamb chops, crab claws and elaborate desserts, got to roam the decorated mansion with a spouse or other family member, a friend or a colleague, adding to the invitation’s allure.

But it’s terrible that this right perk won’t be granted this year.

But the biggest fringe-benefit was the picture-taking sessions, in which the president and first lady would patiently pose with guests…copies of which were invariably sent home to mom.

Now Mom is being left out.  Heinous.

Aside from Kurtz’ whining over not getting his shiny, glittering toy this year, he gave his game away with his spin on his claimed motive for Trump’s decision.

President Trump has canceled the White House holiday party…a victim of his increasingly contentious relationship with major news organizations.

Here’s Kurtz insisting that it couldn’t possibly be because of the press’ increasingly contentious relationship with the President and First Lady—a hostility that the NLMSM has evinced in full throat from the very beginning of the Republican primaries.

How precious, how childish, can the NLMSM get?