Category Archives: culture

Jail Works

Posted on by
Reply

Liberal shenanigans in New York during the week before this week’s midterm elections:

Laura Ebert, an economics professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz, was charged with misdemeanor larceny for stealing signs supporting Republican candidates….

She’s making excuses and spinning her misbehavior.

Ebert said she was caught in a moment of weakness and high emotion and meant no harm to McGovern nor did she know she lived there.
“I have family I love that support Trump, so I was after the sign, not the person.  I have apologized and feel bad, but clearly the GOP is putting a big deal [of] spin on this.”

Caught up in the emotion of the moment?  Republicans are doing the spinning?  This is typical Liberal excuse making and blame shifting.  This woman is a professor at a college.  She’s a highly intelligent, well-educated, fully rational woman; she knew full well what she was doing at the time she did it.  She knew what she was doing when she formulated her plan and stopped her pickup to do the theft.

She apologized.  Nonsense; her words are empty rhetoric.  She spoke from the heart at the time she did her stealing.  Her “apology,” now, is solely because she’s in trouble and hoping to get out of it. Will she argue at her court date next week that had Willie Sutton only apologized, he should have been excused?

This looks like a Class A misdemeanor under New York law, for which the maximum penalty is a $1,000 fine and a year in jail.  That works, for someone as talented and rational as a college professor, a woman who plainly knows better.

CNN Strikes Again

Posted on by
Reply

That’s fairly literal, this time.  CNN‘s “star” reporter on the White House beat, Jim Acosta, struck a White House intern who was trying to do her job.  Since then, CNN has denied—and it’s actually serious about it—that the strike ever occurred.

“She [White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders] provided fraudulent accusations and cited an incident that never happened,” CNN said.

The blow was delivered during a presser President Donald Trump was holding and near the end of a contentious exchange between Trump and Acosta.  During such pressers and as a normal part of presser procedure, reporters wishing to ask questions are called on by the President and handed a microphone so that the President, all the other reporters in the room, and especially all of us in TV-land watching can hear the reporter’s question.  The intern, as was her job, had approached Acosta to take the microphone that had been handed him on being called on so that, his turn having ended, she could pass it to the next reporter, that person having just been called on.

Acosta refused to give up the microphone, and when the intern tried to grab it anyway, he chopped down on her arm with his free hand.  That’s clear in the video Fox News has included in its piece (the link above) on the incident.  The intern’s approach and Acosta’s hitting her begins at about 0:22 of the video.

That video clearly shows Acosta striking the intern as she tried to do her job. Not a hard blow, certainly, but Acosta striking the woman at all is unacceptable. Bad as that is, though, CNN‘s pride in and open lie about Acosta’s misbehavior is worse—CNN seems to be validating its reporters getting physical with anyone who gets in their way, including others trying to do their job.

Race and College Admission

Posted on by
Reply

During final arguments in the civil suit against Harvard over its use of race in its admission decisions, Harvard’s lawyers insisted that

plaintiffs had to prove admissions officers were motivated by racial animus….

This is a disingenuous argument, though. Racial animus isn’t necessary to get a disparate impact ruling.  With disparate impact established in the courts, for the time being, it’s clear that racial animus doesn’t have to be proved in Harvard’s bias case, either.

The Harvard lawyers weren’t through, though.

Harvard’s lawyers said race is only used as a preference among the most competitive applicants, in the same way exceptional musical talent can make a difference in admissions.

Here is the lie of the Harvard personnel. They deny race plays a role, yet they admit using race to play a role.

Beyond that, applicants’ musical talent (for instance) is entirely under those applicants’ control to acquire. Their race, however, is an accident of birth over which they have no control.  It’s an entirely irrelevant and valueless characteristic in determining merit.

The Debate Over Birthright Citizenship

Posted on by
Reply

President Donald Trump is thinking about signing an Executive Order that would end the birthright citizenship that many say is encoded in the 14th Amendment of our Constitution.  Whether Trump has the authority for such an EO is an open debate, but the more important debate is another one such a move has triggered: whether we should have birthright citizenship, in particular for the children of illegal aliens.

Nor is this question as cut and dried as many would like it to be.  Josh Blackman, South Texas College of Law Houston, has argued

More than 150 years after the amendment’s ratification, this “gloss” on the Constitution cannot be trumped by disputed definitions of “jurisdiction…,”

This, though, is a very Brandeis-ian view of justice—that it’s better that the law be settled than that it be settled right. Of course, this is…suboptimal…since all it does is perpetuate the injustice and spread it far and wide.  Blackman further argued that

…with outlier statements (sometimes misconstrued) during the ratification debates.

There are a couple of things about this bit. One is the arrogance of one man deciding what (inconvenient) arguments are irrelevant because they’re “outliers.” The other, larger thing is the general irrelevance of the ratification debates themselves, including putative outliers. The text of what was ratified already includes the thrust of those debates—for, against, and outlier—and so all that matters here is the text of the Constitution, and not those now OBE pre-ratification debates.

Even the Supreme Court’s primary ruling on one birthright citizenship question isn’t dispositive here.  As Matthew Spalding, Hillsdale College Associate Vice President and Educational Programs Dean, pointed out, the Supreme Court in its 1898, but now-often cited, US v Wong Kim Ark ruling conferred automatic citizenship to babies born to legally resident aliens, not to those born to illegal aliens.

[The Court] held only that the children of legal permanent residents were automatically citizens. The high court has never held that the clause confers automatic citizenship on the children of temporary visitors, much less of aliens in the country illegally.

In the end, the nature of birthright citizenship, the legitimacy of citizenship based on the location of a birth, hinges on the nature of jurisdiction in the 14th Amendment’s phrase subject to the jurisdiction thereof.

Americans’ ability to speak in public hinges on the 1st Amendment’s Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech phrasing and on the nature of abridging.  Americans’ ability to go armed in public hinges on the 2nd Amendment’s right of the people to keep and bear Arms[] shall not be infringed phrasing, the nature of bearing, and the relationship of this clause with a capable militia.

Yet, we carefully regulate both speech and keeping and bearing arms.  So it is that we can—and must—regulate the application of jurisdiction to the geographic and political surroundings of being born.

One additional thought on the nature of jurisdiction, beyond its regulability. Jurisdiction is a two-way street. Our polity can impose its jurisdiction on those physically within our borders. But those who enter our nation illegally are withholding themselves from our jurisdiction–by breaking our entry laws, illegal aliens actively refuse to submit to our polity’s jurisdiction. They do not, therefore, satisfy the 14th Amendment’s subject to the jurisdiction thereof requirement. And so the children of illegal aliens, born here, cannot satisfy the requirement on two grounds: from their illegal presence and by the fact that they cannot submit themselves; they are bound by their parents’ decision.

In the end, whatever the phrasing of Trump’s Executive Order turns out to be, whether it survives the inevitable legal challenges, whatever occurs in Congress, the proposal of an EO intended to address directly and explicitly birthright citizenship has triggered the necessary debate about that and about its applicability to children born of illegal aliens.