Category Archives: ethics

Unifying

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Ex-Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton says current Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) isn’t a unifier for the Progressive-Democratic Party. Clinton complained to Emily Tisch Sussman that

Unfortunately his campaign and his principal supporters were just very difficult and—really, constantly—not just attacking me but my supporters[.]

However.

Did Clinton unify the Progressive-Democratic Party? No, not with the shenanigans she and Party elite (possibly separately from her) pulled to block Sanders’ ascent in the 2015-2016 campaign season and the shenanigans being pulled now to block Sanders’ evident success—not least of which is the DNC changing the debate rules right before the next debate to enable an Evil 1%-er to buy his way onto the debate stage after he’s made a point, ever since he entered the race, of telling voters in early primary States that they’re just too trivial to matter.

Nor did Clinton unify the nation after she’d seized Party’s nomination in 2016—she moved actively to divide it.

Clinton is in no position to talk.

Of course Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D, MI) doesn’t help Sanders’ case with her booing of Clinton (her weak walk-back notwithstanding).

A Chief Justice’s Proper Presiding

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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) tried to con Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, serving as Presiding Officer in the Senate’s trial of the House’s impeachment case, into taking an active role in that trial rather than honoring his duty as impartial presider.

Schumer proposed that, should the Senate vote regarding calling witnesses end in a tie, Roberts should exercise his authority as Presiding Officer to cast a tie-breaking vote. After all, he said, Chief Justice Samuel Chase did that during the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson 150+ years ago.

I have a parliamentary inquiry. Is the chief justice aware that in the impeachment trial of President Johnson, Chief Justice Chase, as presiding officer, cast tie-breaking votes on both March 31 and April 2, 1868?

Which Roberts promptly dismissed as concerning trivial matters.

The one concerned a motion to adjourn. The other concerned a motion to close deliberations. I do not regard those isolated episodes 150 years ago as sufficient to support a general authority to break ties.

Then he closed out the matter.

If the members of this body, elected by the people and accountable to them, divide equally on a motion—the normal rule is that the motion fails.
I think it would be inappropriate for me, an unelected official from a different branch of government, to assert the power to change that result so that the motion would succeed.

An excellent shut-down of the Minority Leader cynical “inquiry.”

Nothing to See Here

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Recall that in the aftermath of an initial Flynn pushback against the charges against him, the prosecutors in his case withdrew their recommendation for a lenient sentence and demanded significant jail time.  Recall further that in response to that, Army Lt Gen (ret) Michael Flynn has moved formally to withdraw his guilty plea with an excoriating list of prosecutorial and FBI transgressions as his grounds.

Among the misbehaviors listed in Flynn’s plea withdrawal motion are

  • no actual record of Flynn’s statements to FBI agents exists
  • the original handwritten FD-302 witness report from a critical FBI interview is “missing”
  • subsequent versions of that 302 have been “edited” by allegedly anti-Trump FBI officials

In response, those same prosecutors now have withdrawn their harsher sentence demand and said they’d accept probation and no jail time.

They’ve been caught persecuting Flynn rather than prosecuting him, and they don’t want to have that exposed in open court. They’re hoping they can buy off Flynn with this latest move.

Move along.

Criminalizing Speech

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That’s what a Progressive-Democrat President Elizabeth Warren would try to do.

She would also lead a charge to criminalize the mere spreading of false information about the process of voting in US elections.
“I will push for new laws that impose tough civil and criminal penalties for knowingly disseminating this kind of information, which has the explicit purpose of undermining the basic right to vote[.]

She masquerades her initial move as a criminalization of false claims concerning when and how to vote, but she ignores the fact that it’s already illegal to interfere with an election; there’s no need for additional laws.  She also declined, as Progressive-Democrats do regarding all efforts to regulate, to identify her limiting principle.

This is just an opening move to a broader speech censorship effort by the Left.

The…foolishness…of such an effort is illustrated by commentary concerning her plan. Senator Rand Paul (R, KY):

Would this apply to the tall tales you tell and those networks allow @ewarren?

Jeff Blehar of the National Review:

Elizabeth Warren is an American Indian. Go ahead Liz, charge me.

No, this is yet another example of the utter contempt in which Progressive-Democrats hold us deplorable average Americans. We’re just too stupid to do our own sorting of accurate speech from inaccurate speech from deliberately inaccurate speech. Our Betters must do this for us.

It’s also a very short step from there to criminalizing all speech of which this or that party disapproves, and from there it’s an even shorter step to criminalizing all speech of which this or that person in power disapproves.

Poking My Nose

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…into an arena where my experience is limited and dated. But I’m gonna do it, anyway. My experience is this: I hold a private pilot license; although I haven’t had the opportunity to fly for some years: I’m non-current.  However, I do have several hundred hours in fighter aircraft simulators, accumulated when I worked as Test Director for the world class manufacturer of military aircraft simulators—which hours include extensive time flying in instrument conditions, albeit without the buffeting of real-world winds and wind gusts.

The helicopter that crashed in California killing all nine of its occupants, including the pilot, Kobe Bryant and his daughter, his daughter’s basketball coach, and those five additional unfortunates, didn’t have a warning system in its instrument suite that might have helped the pilot recognize his physical situation.  That system is a Terrain Awareness And Warning System, which could have greatly raised the pilot’s understanding of his location relative to the terrain, not just below him, but around him, as well.

It’s no big deal that the pilot didn’t have TAWS on his helicopter.  However, I would have expected that an experienced pilot would have known better than to fly in that terrain/weather without it.