Category Archives: ethics

Hard to Tell the Difference

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In the aftermath of Wednesday afternoon’s events, the Progressive-Democrats already are blaming their political opponents rather than the thugs who assaulted the Capital Building. And calling for Republican heads to roll.

Ex-HUD Secretary Julian Castro:

@tedcruz is guilty of treason and must resign from the United States Senate.

Here’s Carrie Lam, Hong Kong Chief Executive:

[T]he opposition’s goal of objecting to every policy initiative of the government may fall into the category of subverting state power.

Hard to tell the difference.

So much for Progressive-Democrats’ calls for unity.

Keep in mind, too, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ (D, NY) wish (since realized) for Progressive-Democrat control of the Senate so that, with Progressive-Democrats controlling all of Congress and the White House, there’d be no need to negotiate with Republicans. To Progressive-Democrats, “unity” means “do it our way and be quiet about it.”

An Audit Commission

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A group of Senators are planning to join a (large) group of Representatives to object, tomorrow, to a few States’ Electoral College slates being accepted unless they get agreement to an audit commission, modeled on a 19th century audit commission created for the same purpose that consisted of five each of Representatives, Senators, and Supreme Court Justices, that will conduct a 10-day audit of elections in the objected-to States.

Naturally, Progressive-Democrats in both houses of Congress together with the NLMSM are up in arms, to the point of hysteria about the move.

Senator Amy Klobuchar (D, MN)…said in a statement Saturday that Mr Biden will be inaugurated January 20, “and no publicity stunt will change that.”
For a group of my Republican colleagues to claim that they want an additional federal ‘commission’ to supersede state certifications when the votes have already been counted, recounted, litigated, and state-certified, amounts to nothing more than an attempt to subvert the will of the voters.
It is undemocratic. It is un-American[.]

Progressive-Democrats should leap at the chance of an objective commission doing a serious, detailed audit. Three things would result, two of which would redound to their advantage: the commission would find nothing in sufficient amount to change the claimed outcome, but serious error and outright wrongs would be identified so miscreants could be brought to justice and weaknesses corrected in Congress—restoring faith in our election systems while confirming Biden’s election. Or nothing wrong would be identified, also restoring faith and confirming Biden.

Or, the third item: enough being found to reject enough Electoral College slates to put the election into the House of Representatives for President and the Senate for Vice President.

That Progressive-Democrats are so terrified of a commission audit is instructive.

Vaccination Shortfall

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The Trump administration promised 20 million doses of the Wuhan Virus vaccine would be delivered to the States by the end of 2020. In fact, only 12-14 million doses were delivered. That’s a significant shortfall—or it would be were it not for a far more significant shortfall that renders the lacking 6-8 million doses wholly irrelevant.

…far fewer people than expected are being immunized against Covid-19, as the process moves slower than officials had projected and has been beset by confusion and disorganization in many states.
…
Of the more than 12 million doses of vaccines from Moderna Inc and Pfizer Inc with BioNTech SE that have been shipped, only 2.8 million have been administered, according to federal figures.

Never mind that the States had been told for months that vaccines would be available and that vaccine doses would be available in those millions by the end of the year.

The States chose not to act; their administrations chose to disbelieve the Federal administration, and so they sat on their hands. Claire Hannan, Association of Immunization Managers Executive Director, offered this excuse:

There may have been an expectation from Operation Warp Speed or others that we’d give everyone the vaccine overnight.…It was a logistics equation for them. If you’ve been in vaccines for a long time, you know that’s the easy part. Getting it into actual arms is the hard part.

Indeed. And yet, knowing these folks had the hard part—getting the syringes needed, getting folks trained to give the shots in order to fill staffing shortfalls that these folks had to have known would exist—they chose to do nothing. Because they chose to not believe the ability of American business and a Trump administration to work together to deliver vaccines—multiple vaccines—within the promised time frame.

And another typical excuse:

State and local jurisdictions have been asking the federal government for more funding to support vaccine distribution than the $340 million disbursed so far.

Never mind that the State and local distributions already have plenty of money—it’s just currently misallocated.

The list of State failures goes on, yet they’re all laid off to the Federal government—in particular the Trump administration—without any regard for the federal republic nature of our governance structure.  All the Feds can do, and the Trump administration down through the CDC did every bit of it, is jawbone the States on domestic matters. The CDC issued guidelines regarding the vaccines—it cannot issue rules—yet the States in many cases chose to do something entirely different.  The Federal government cannot dictate to the States’ their internal policies, particularly including how they prepare for reception of and deliver vaccination shots to their individual citizens.

2.8 million vaccinations injected out of 12 million doses delivered is unacceptable—and the States, Republican and Progressive-Democrat alike have no one to blame but their own disbelieving and inactive selves.

It would have been a no-lose situation, too. Say the States had scrambled to be ready to handle the promised 20 million doses and the vaccines would not have been produced and deliverable until the end of 2021 as so many so-called experts insisted was the earliest possible time frame. The States would have been ready in time to receive and inject, instead of being the failures they are presently.

Diversity

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A brief thought. Joseph Epstein wrote about true diversity, as opposed to the Left’s and their Progressive-Democratic Party’s ideology of race, sex, et al., diversity before merit in his Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed.

In the main, he’s right. I want to add a little, though, to his concluding sentence.

The best way to celebrate diversity, perhaps, is to begin by celebrating diversity of thought.

Number one.

Number two is overtly recognizing the inequality of individual talent, interest, work ethic, plain luck, and a host of other inequalities intrinsic in every man that culminate in unequal outcomes flowing from the utterly necessary equality of opportunity.

That equality of opportunity is at the center of individual liberty, which includes the freedom to speak diversely—out loud and publicly—from that diversity of thought.

That ability to speak freely is a critical part of every man’s right to show the best that there is in him, a right that is truncated by demanding equality of position or of outcome.

Additionally, that demand for equality of position or of outcome insults every one of us by insisting that our best isn’t worthy of consideration or that we cannot achieve that best without Know Betters in government doing for us.

Surveillance State

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And it’s not the People’s Republic of China this time. It’s a European ally.

Spain is planning to keep a record of individuals who refuse to receive the coronavirus vaccine, said the country’s minister of health on Monday.

Worse, Salvador Illa, Spain’s Minister of Health says,

The log of people who refuse vaccination will be shared with the country’s “European partners,” but will not be shared with employers or otherwise made public….

Not even simple, ordinary doctor-patient confidentiality matters here. This medical information will be shared around so all of Europe’s governments can participate in a pan-European surveillance state, even though the putative purpose of such surveillance—so that local employers, et al., can take “appropriate” measures—will be blocked.

The contradiction is so obvious it can only be taken as a distraction from the move’s true purpose: to take an initial step in tracking the details of the daily lives of citizens.

This is the Europe Joe Biden and his ilk want us to emulate. Of course, that dovetails nicely with the administrative state he and his want to expand in our nation.