Category Archives: ethics

Government Sinecures

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Now extended to illegal aliens in Los Angeles County.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously with no discussion to allow the county to no longer require US citizenship for government jobs.

With no discussion. Most likely not with no discussion at all. Likely that discussion took place out of sight of the public. That sure smacks of, if it’s not dispositive of, a violation of California’s open meetings laws.

There’s this, too:

The motion was authored by Chair Hilda L. Solis….

That’s the same Hilda Solis who was Labor Secretary under ex-President Barrack Obama (D). How appropriate.

The big deal is this, though, from Los Angeles County Public Defender Ricardo García:

An immigrant’s experience will advance our vision, mission, and values to protect our clients’ legal and human rights….

It’s certainly true that an immigrant’s experience could be highly useful in the county’s governance. However, this Board of Supervisors’ new ordinance authorizes illegal aliens the sinecure of a (local) government job.

Talk about sanctuary counties….

The Manchin Tax Increase

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Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV) continues to…misunderstand…the situation that would be created by his agreement to the Manchin-Schumer Build Back Reduced bill.

People should be paying their fair share, especially the largest corporations in America that have a billion dollars of value or greater.

Manchin—along with his Progressive-Democratic Party cronies—continue to not say what anyone’s “fair share” is. That forces us to conclude that their view of “fair share” is “more.”

And

Can’t they pay at least 15%, so that we can move forward and be the leader of the world and the superpower that we are?

Umm, we became the leader of the world some while ago, well before this 15% minimum tax was dreamed up. It wasn’t necessary then, and it’s destructive to our economy now.

Press Dishonesty Made Manifest

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According to a just released Harvard study of the motivations for the 6 January 2021 riot at the Capital building, a study that looked at a bit over half of the court documents filed by the 6 January defendants, about 20% of the rioters said their motive was loyalty to former President Donald Trump (R), and about the same number said they acted because they believed Trump’s claims of a stolen election.

Fewer than 8% were interested in starting a revolution. That’s the dishonesty of Progressive-Democratic Party politicians along with the press: they’re hyping the revolution claim, and that’s the central thesis of the Jan 6 Committee’s inquisition.

Here’s the kicker, though. Only 4% of the rioters were motivated by their belief in a QAnon conspiracy theory, and that outcome prompted this reaction from one of the study’s authors, Kaylee Fagan:

The folks with QAnon T-shirts, and signs, and flags were so prominently displayed in much of the visual imagery that came out of the Capitol attack. So we expected to see more QAnon-related concepts come through in the documents.

And who so prominently displayed all that visual imagery? The journalists of the journalism guild, who were so intent on hyping anything that supported their anti-Trump narrative, that they…forgot…to report all of the facts, the whole story of the riots.

That’s to the Good

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) may be planning to visit the Republic of China next month. Some folks are worried about that.

A Taiwan trip by Mrs Pelosi (D, CA) would likely set back any nascent rapprochement and set off a new bout of tensions, US officials and international affairs specialists said.

I’m having trouble seeing the downside of not continuing a “rapprochement” with an enemy nation whose avowed goal is to supplant and control us.

And

The visit, they said, would confirm Chinese suspicions that the US is deepening support for Taiwan, allowing its democratic government to resist Beijing’s claims to the island….

As well we should be doing, on both counts.

Further making Pelosi’s putative trip imperative is the People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping’s threats of dire consequences, including military, if she actually travels. Any withdrawal of the trip now could only be taken as American abject surrender in the face of threats.

There’s this, too:

For Beijing, a trip by a politician as senior as Mrs Pelosi is seen as part of a perilous backtracking by the US on commitments limiting its relations with Taiwan.

We never should have betrayed the RoC all those decades ago in the first place. After all this time, it’ll be deucedly expensive and risky to correct that mistake, but it’s never too late to do so. All that just makes it imperative to get started; the expense and risk only grow over time.

Supreme Court Leaks

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The Wall Street Journal excerpted an article by Joan Biskupic for CNN regarding Supreme Court discussions among the Justices [emphasis added].

Chief Justice John Roberts privately lobbied fellow conservatives to save the constitutional right to abortion down to the bitter end, but May’s unprecedented leak of a draft opinion reversing Roe v Wade made the effort all but impossible, multiple sources familiar with negotiations told CNN.

Wow. Not only was a Supreme Court draft opinion leaked to the press, the Court’s private discussions about that opinion are leaked to the public.

Two things: one is that the Court has a serious problem with confidentiality, and the only way to fix it may be a complete removal and replacement of all of the Justices’ current clerks and of all of the Court’s current administrative personal. Even though the clerks are replaced annually as a matter of course, it’s clear that this crop needs to go now.

The other thing is that it’s instructive about press integrity that the press makes nearly as big a deal about the leak of the draft as it did about the draft, but it accepts this leak with utter equanimity.