Category Archives: ethics

A “secretive, corrupt and troubling process”

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In a Letter to the Editor in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Kristine Lucius, of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, decried the allegedly secretive, corrupt, and troubling process (Lucius’ phrase) with which the document release related to Judge Brett Kavanaugh is being handled by the Senate Judiciary Committee.  She even went so far as to compare the document release of then-nominee Elena Kagan with that of Kavanaugh:

When President Obama nominated Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, then-Chairman Patrick Leahy joined with then-Ranking Member Jeff Sessions to request and receive access to her records from the Clinton White House—a full 99% of them. But now that the shoe is on the other foot, Chairman Chuck Grassley refuses to even request the same set of records for Mr Kavanaugh from the National Archives.

Couple things about that.

That Ms Lucius succeeded in getting potsful of irrelevant documentation released for committee consideration in no way legitimizes wasting committee time on similarly irrelevant documents regarding Kavanaugh’s nomination.

Besides, the secretive, corrupt, and troubling process with the Kavanaugh nomination is solely that of the Progressive-Democrat Senators. They’re the ones who said they’d vote “No” on the Trump nomination for Kennedy’s replacement even before a nominee was named. They’re the ones who said, even louder, they’d vote “NO” on Kavanaugh’s nomination the day it was announced—before any document requests were even made.

It’s the Progressive-Democrat Senators who are being secretive and troubling by keeping million pages of documentation and 300 judicial opinions away from their own eyes, having already announced their votes, and thereby making their own process corrupt.

Of course, Lucious knows all of that.

Abuse and Disinformation

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Facebook is claiming to be adding a new tool for fighting these on its platform.

The Ad Archive API will allow researchers, journalists, publishers, and watchdog groups to efficiently analyze and search for ads to determine if anything untoward is happening.

Who, though, are going to be authorized access to the databases—which researchers, journalists, publishers, and watchdog groups, and what selection criteria will be used?  We’ve already seen how Facebook, under the guise of identifying what it’s pleased to call fake news, has selected “fact checkers” almost exclusively from the Left (a few tokens from the right have been invited)—Associated Press, Snopes.com, ABC News, and Politifact—as a mechanism for making the identification and then deleting the allegedly fake material.

We’ve also seen how, using this new capacity, Facebook censors and deletes Conservative posts and suspends Conservative accounts, and on being caught claiming “mistake” and undoing the deeds.  And continuing to make those “mistakes” apace.

Given Facebook‘s history of this, on what basis would we think this latest move has value?

Flipping Witnesses

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President Donald Trump decries it.  So have I in writing about the Manafort case and the credibility of Mueller’s prosecutors’ witnesses.

What’s interesting to me and saddening, and what’s dangerous to our system of justice—which includes justice for the accused as well as the victim—is prosecutors’ response to Trump’s decrial.

Peter Zeidenberg, a former federal prosecutor, said that Mr Trump’s comments amount to “an absolutely outrageous statement and to any prosecutor would just be shocking to hear.”

“It’s hard to overstate how fundamental” to prosecutions cooperating witnesses are, Mr Zeidenberg said.

And Stephen Gillers, a New York University School of Law professor:

Trump’s idea would effectively demolish one of the basic and valuable tools of criminal law enforcement in the US.

It’s dangerous for our prosecutors to so blatantly and avidly rely on their ability to do the testifying by using the mouths of “witnesses” they’ve either browbeaten into testifying in a certain way or who’ve sold their testimony to the prosecutors like Thursday night hookers.

If the prosecutors can’t make their case without such witnesses, they don’t have a case to make.

Voting and Respect

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I received a text message from a representative of Beto O’Rourke, Texas’ Progressive-Democratic Party US Senate candidate:

Hi Edward, this is [the rep] volunteering w/ Beto O’Rourke’s campaign for US Senate. We’re texting Texas voters today about the upcoming November election. Will you be voting for Beto O’Rourke or Ted Cruz for Senate?

I texted her back:

I’ll be voting for the one who respects our flag, our national anthem, and generations of veterans who have fought, been maimed, and killed to defend the rights of others, in the words of John Kerry, to be stupid.

You might find my blog interesting: APlebesSite.com.

Once Again

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And still: the Veterans Administration is not up to the task.

Hundreds of thousands of veterans face yearslong delays in their appeals of disability rulings because of a backlog of cases choking the Department of Veterans Affairs….

This backlog causes a number of problems…. Rushed rulings on initial claims can be riddled with errors. Veterans who appeal their cases typically wait between three and seven years for resolutions to their appeals, according to the Government Accountability Office. An inspector general report also found that one in 14 veterans dies while awaiting a decision on their disability claim appeal.

Against this backdrop, “VA officials say they have worked hard to process disability claims—and appeals to those claims—faster.”  Stipulate that.  The VA still is failing, no matter the amount of hard work.

The VA must be disbanded and its once and future budgets converted to vouchers for our veterans so they can get the care they need from the doctors they choose at the facilities they choose.

 

Veteranos Administratio delende est.