Category Archives: ethics

“Sufficient Evidence”

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Regarding the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s (R) Mar-a-Lago home,

some legal experts echoed Pelosi, arguing there had to be sufficient evidence to secure a federal search warrant against a former president.

Sounds nice in theory. In practice, it’s not so true. One has only to look at the falsified “evidence” the FBI used to gin up some FISA warrants applications and con FISA judges into granting them.

It’s hard to believe “some legal experts” are so naïve. In fact, I don’t believe those folks, who are so awesomely intelligent, for whom words are their stock in trade, and who are steeped in the mechanics of our legal system, are naïve. Not at all.

There’s this, too, from Attorney Paul Calli:

A prosecutor “can write anything she wishes to convince the court to sign the warrant,” he explained, “and the judge reviewing it has to assume the prosecutor is telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Sadly, that is not always the case, and thus it is really the prosecutor who secretly controls the basis on which a warrant is issued.”

Not entirely. When the judge discovers he cannot trust the agent or prosecutor who’s presenting the material in a warrant application, he doesn’t have to sign off on the warrant. An untrustworthy agent is incapable of demonstrating probable cause. Sadly, those FISA judges, even after openly saying they couldn’t trust the FBI agents, continued issuing their Star Chamber warrants.

Judges, including magistrate judges, can be just as complicit as the agents before them in issuing…unjustified…warrants.

On Governor Newsom’s Plan to Produce Insulin

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Regarding that idea, a letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Tuesday Letters section offered this after suggesting that Newsom’s effort would have the salutary outcome of demonstrating the foolishness of such a move:

Targeted subsidies for at-risk populations cost a fraction of the investment needed to bring “affordable” medications to the people….

That’s true enough, could Government actually do that and, further, keep it limited to the truly at-risk. However, actual competition in the market is free, and that brings down costs for everyone. Additionally, that competition allows far better and more accurate identification of those remaining few at-risk who still can’t afford their meds and would be legitimate targets of largesse. That also would facilitate more effective use of sources of largesse, beginning in order with family and friends first, followed by church and local charity, local community, county, then state governments, with the Feds last on the list, rather than the default source.

More Government Overreach

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This time by President Joe Biden’s (D) Attorney General, Merrick Garland (D). Garland has decided to sue Idaho over that State’s abortion law because, Garland claims, that law might put doctors at hospitals that accept Medicare, and those hospitals, at risk of Federal law violation if they follow Idaho’s law.

That Federal law

requires hospitals accepting Medicare to provide emergency treatments, which can sometimes include abortion.

Idaho’s law, on the other hand,

has exceptions allowing doctors to perform abortions to save the life of a pregnant woman or in cases of rape or incest that have been reported to law enforcement.

That satisfies the Fed’s Medicare law, and the administration’s suit demonstrates the overreach—and demonstrates the Biden administration’s utter disregard for the Supreme Court.

“Call Russia’s Bluff”

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Zalmay Khalilzad has a rather fanciful op-ed in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. Russian President Vladimir Putin is claiming to want a diplomatic solution to his invasion of Ukraine, a claim he’s making with the voice of his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and the latter’s tour of Africa. Khalilzad suggested that Putin’s “bluff” should be answered with a number of steps.

First…. One step that may force Moscow to recalculate is for senior US officials to clearly convey that Russian escalation will be met by an accompanying escalation of American support for Ukraine.

Yeah, that really deterred Putin from invading Ukraine in the first place. Neither should we meet escalation with “accompanying escalation.” That just continues surrendering the initiative to the barbarian. We need to escalate faster than the barbarian can respond; we need to be well inside the barbarian’s recognition and decision loops, not the other way around.

Second, improve the chances that Ukraine’s planned offensive operations succeed by ensuring that their plans are realistic and thoroughly evaluating their assets.

Because we Know Better what the folks actually engaged need. That’s why we’re sending them deliberately stunted HIMARS, for instance—we Know Better—instead of sending them fully capable systems, in the numbers they need, and promptly so.

Third, make a better case for other countries to support Ukraine.

Certainly, but we shouldn’t wait to act while we beg for consensus, and shouldn’t act as though we’re unable to act on our own initiative. In the case of Europe, especially, Germany is a lost cause; we should simply write them off and move on. If that means NATO qua NATO doesn’t act, oh well. The member nations don’t need NATO’s permission to act on their own initiatives.

Khalilzad should know better.

A Need Satisfied

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That’s one outcome of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA) visit to the Republic of China, which included meetings with, among others, RoC President Tsai Ing-wen. As The Wall Street Journal put it,

The visit by Mrs Pelosi angered China and cast a pall over US-China relations.

That’s a net good. We need a pall over our relations with the enemy state. We need to take further action against the state that commits genocide, seizes other nations’ territory (however much control over that territory might be disputed among those other nations), and threatens to “incorporate” the RoC into the body of the People’s Republic of China.

We need to go further and stop doing economic business with the PRC, and we need to act more aggressively about pulling our supply chain—including raw materials—out of the PRC.

There’s this, too:

Beijing is also concerned that its decades-old consensus with the US about Taiwan is breaking down amid growing tensions between the two powers.

It needs to break down, completely, and be consigned to history’s trash can, where it belongs. We never should have betrayed the Republic of China like we did all those years ago, and it’s not too late to correct that. It is, though, expensive to correct after all this time, and it’ll only get more expensive the more we delay.

It’s too bad that the Biden administration is too timid to do any of that beyond lip service, and it won’t even do lip service to correcting the betrayal. And neither did Pelosi.