Category Archives: culture

Confusion

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There is some concerning Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ moves at DoJ concerning local police forces and local policing.  An example is provided in the lede to a recent Wall Street Journal article:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision this week to review concessions by local police departments accused of misconduct is part of a seismic shift at the Justice Department, which has quickly changed its emphasis under the Trump administration from protecting civil rights to promoting law and order.

Of course, there is no dichotomy between protecting civil rights and promoting law and order.  Indeed, the two are inseparable: it isn’t possible to protect civil rights without promoting law and order: it’s those laws and the order they engender that are at the foundation of civil rights—which themselves are matters of those laws and that order.

The confusion extends to the Federal government’s role in overseeing local police institutions, including particularly “consent” decrees concluded or in progress involving Federal demands for police department reforms satisfactory to the Federal government.  Sessions has ordered a review of these and has taken steps to begin rescission of some.  However,

Officials in Baltimore and Chicago say they remain committed to overhauling police forces….

These officials say they’ll proceed within the parameters of existing consent decrees, but the illustration remains: local officials are fully capable both legally and morally to overhaul, to reform, without Federal involvement, and that’s as it should be.  Each locale is different, and each local police force will need its unique and locally oriented reform.  Federal involvement might be needed to clear away impediments to reform, but it is not needed to mandate the nature or structure of reform.

In the end, reasonable men can debate the methods of law and order, and reasonable men can argue whether current law is sufficient for civil rights (beyond that, the question of current law’s adequacy in implementing inalienable rights has been debated since the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, and before).  The immutable fact remains, though, that there are no civil rights, no matter what laws might assert, without laws being enforced—law and order.  And that is, of necessity, a local matter.

YGTBSM

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This episode is from Newark Mayor Ras Baraka (D).  He claimed last Sunday, with a straight face that

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is “targeting” mayors like himself, and intimidating them into being “fugitive slave catchers that run around and do their bidding in our cities.”

Milwaukee County, WI, Sheriff David Clarke was more polite than I:

I’ve heard a lot of stupid things [but] comparing fugitive slaves to illegal immigrants is the gold standard of stupidity[.]

I say, rather, that Baraka’s TDS has turned him into an irrational election-denier.

Republican Gadflies

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Karl Rove talked about health care coverage prospects in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, and that triggered a thought in my pea brain.

Senator Tom Cotton (R, AR) has announced that the House plan on offer, a plan designed to be passable through reconciliation, with later phases of repeal and replace for completing the task, is dead on arrival, and the House shoe start over and produce a more comprehensive plan in this first phase.  But Cotton has chosen to not offer a plan of his own, or outline what a plan acceptable to him would look like other than to address taxes and to more fully repeal right damn now Obamacare, or even to offer the tactics he’d use to get the new plan—which could not be done through reconciliation—past a Progressive-Democrat filibuster.

Congressman Jim Jordan (R, OH) similarly demands a broader bill right damn now, but he, too, has chosen to offer no tactics for getting his bill past a Senate Progressive-Democrat filibuster.  He’s just using the copout excuse that that’s the Senate’s problem.  Oh, and Jordan also declines to identify the value of a bill that can’t be passed.

Senator Rand Paul (R, KY) at least has offered an actual plan, but he, too, has declined to identify how he expects to get his plan past a Progressive-Democrat filibuster.

These gadflies keep demanding that everyone else put up (these three’s demands) or shut up.  It’s time these three put up; otherwise, they’re just porch dogs, yapping from the safety of their stoops.

Appalling

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Students at an Iowa high school have apologized to a neighboring school for wearing red, white and blue to a recent basketball game.

The Valley High School students’ USA-themed attire was seen as offensive because some of the rival school’s players were from refugee families.

Because we shouldn’t celebrate the nation that gives these refugees succor.

No.  The administration members of West Des Moines’ Valley High are behaving in a despicably offensive manner, and they should apologize to our great nation at large, and then they should be terminated for cause.  Calling national colors racist is itself stinkingly racist.

Full stop.

Empty Rhetoric

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A Progressive-Democrat attacked a journalist who was covering the latest CPAC convention…for his hairstyle.  Samantha Bee, the host of Full Frontal on TBS, took one look at the journalist and ran a segment in her show that included imagery of the journalist, who had a hairdo that might have been called a high-top fade in other circumstances (imagery at the link) and the remark

This year, the bow ties were gone, replaced by Nazi hair, Nazi hair, Nazi hair[.]

Never mind that the man is fighting an aggressive brain cancer, stage 4 glioblastoma.  That didn’t matter to Bee.

Not until the man’s sister call Bee out, anyway.  Then she tweeted that mealy-mouth pseudo-apology with its risible excuse.  There are two things about that “apology.”  One is that she did know because like any responsible adult Hollywood denizen, Bee had her intern check on the journalist and his hairstyle before putting her segment together, and then she ran it anyway.

The other thing is that, in her haste to demonize anyone not of the Left, she didn’t bother to check any facts related to the matter; she just ran with her segment.

But wait—there’s more.  The journalist she attacked turns out to be a registered Democrat.

The paranoia of the Left has gone so far out of control they even attack their own in their knee-jerk lashouts.