Category Archives: ethics

Free Speech Turkey-Style

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Enes Kanter, a Center for the New York Knicks, has expressed his opinion of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and a Turkish prosecutor has indicted him in absentia for this heinous crime and wants Kantor jailed for four years.  Among other things, Kantor has said that Erdogan is the “Hitler of our century,” in the aftermath of the Turkish government’s revocation of his passport and its having forced his father, still in Turkey, to disown him—and then was thrown into jail, anyway.  All because Kanter supports the equally Erdogan-hated Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen.

Here’s Kanter:

People don’t understand. They’re saying your family is still back in Turkey — why are you doing all of this? Why are you talking? I’m just trying to be the voice of all of these innocent people, man.  Because all of these innocent people are just going through really tough times. Journalists, innocent people in jail getting tortured and killed and kidnapped. And it’s pretty messed up. And (the government) hates it. They hate when I talk to you guys in front of all of these cameras, these microphones. They hate it. That’s why they’re saying, “Oh, we’re going to take his dad away, we’re going to put him in prison.”

In response to the indictment and jail threat, here’s Kanter again:

That’s it? Only four years?  All the trash I’ve been talking?

And

I have said less than that honorless (man) deserves. Add another 4 years for me, master.

Here’s to Enes Kanter.

Oh, and I say that Recep Tayyip Erdogan is an idiot and a tin despot.

Progressive-Democrats and Taxes

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The Wall Street Journal asked in their Sunday op-ed how it came to be that

the party of the Kennedy tax cuts of the 1960s and the co-writers of the Reagan reform in the 1980s [became] implacably opposed to pro-growth tax policy?

The WSJ‘s editorialists should know better.  This isn’t their (or your or my) grandfather’s Democratic Party.  This is the Progressive-Democratic Party of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and all of its rank-and-file politico members.

These politicians and their nine-year-old Progressive-Democratic Party that is the inevitable evolution of that prior entity do not want the folks who earned the money to be able to keep it and spend it IAW their own needs and wants and imperatives.  The Progressive-Democratic Party and its members need to have control over our money, and they are thoroughly dismayed over the loss to their political power that’s represented by the reduction in the amount of our money they’ll be able to control.  That’s power they’ll have much less of.

It has nothing to do with ideology.  It has nothing to do with income inequality.  It has only to do with political power.  It’s that nakedly simple.

Who Are You Going to Believe?

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White House Chief of Staff John Kelly personally told former “Apprentice” star Omarosa Manigault Newman that her White House employment had been terminated, despite her insistence to the contrary.

But disappointingly, “Fox News has learned” that Kelly terminated Omarosa in a face-to-face in the White House Situation Room where recording devices of any kind, including cameras, are banned.  However, Fox News “learned” this from the Associated Press, which only “learned” this, in turn, from two carefully unnamed sources—the AP chose not to identify them.

Meanwhile, the lady herself is saying she wasn’t fired, her departure was reasonably amicable—oh, and no, she didn’t make a scene as she was escorted off the premises, as the AP’s rumor also claims.

Here’s what else we know.  The Secret Service, which is responsible for this sort of thing among its many and varied duties, terminated Omarosa’s security clearances and other accesses when her employment ending was determined.  This is completely routine; it’s done with all employees whose employment comes to an end.  She was escorted off the premises, which also is routine; folks without clearances are required to be escorted when they’re in secured areas, and the White House most assuredly is that.  She’s being paid through January 20, even though she no longer works there?  That’s a fairly unusual severance package, but it’s not that unusual.

So: who are you going believe—rumors, some second hand, from deliberately unidentified sources (and so we have no way of knowing whether those sources even exist), or the statements of an on-the-record source, in this case the actual principal?

The Decision

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After President Donald Trump announced that the US would officially recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital—a long-standing fact away from which US administrations had been ducking away for over 20 years—global (or at least European and Middle Eastern) expressions of angst have been loud.

Out come the pop psychology analyses.

Martin Indyk, former US Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, former US Ambassador to Israel, and current Executive Vice President of the Brookings Institution:

It was an appeal to his evangelical Christian base, pure and simple[.]

Of course it was.

No, wait.  Steven Spiegel, UCLA’s Center for Middle East Development Director [paraphrased by Deutsche Welle]:

Trump’s inclination to shake things up….

That must be it.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.

It couldn’t possibly be simply because it was a right thing to do, especially after decades of failure to achieve peace while using Jerusalem as a bargaining chip.  Nor could it matter that the Palestinians aren’t interested in peace with Israel, and they’ll object—violently—to anything an American administration might do.

Mm, mm.

Feelz, especially feelz of European nations and those of the Middle East, must take precedence, must be obeyed.  Oh, the ego-driven horror of not being listened to on this.

Why Not All of Them?

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President Donald Trump wants Congress—which is to say, Republicans, since the Progressive-Democrats in Congress want nothing to do with any Trump or Republican generally proposal—to take up welfare reform as the next major Government revamp after tax reform goes through (assuming, of course, a few Republican ego-riven snowflakes don’t blow that up).  However, Louise Radnofsky, who wrote the WSJ piece at the link, seems not to understand the scope of the problem.  Commenting on a speech concerning the matter that Trump gave in Missouri a bit ago, Radnofsky wrote this:

The president didn’t offer specifics about which of the dozens of welfare programs he was seeking to change….

How about all of them, Madam?

As Trump put it in that speech,

I know people that work three jobs and they live next to somebody who doesn’t work at all.  And the person who is not working at all and has no intention of working at all is making more money and doing better than the person that’s working his and her ass off….

Now, it’s certainly true that there are welfare queens who are too lazy or too greedy to do actual work when they can get OPM for free.  They’re a small majority, though; most folks have enough self respect to want to work for their living and earn their way.  However, it far too often makes no economic sense whatsoever for them to do so.

Too many folks are trapped in the Progressive-Democrat welfare cage because they don’t have the skill sets needed to get jobs that pay as well as their aggregated welfare checks—and those that would work anyway are steadily being priced out of the low-skill jobs they would take by spreading minimum wage laws that require employers to pay more than the work available is worth.

Then there’s the welfare cliff.  Far too often, getting a job or a better job than the one currently held, or even simply accepting a pay raise, would put the person into a high(er) income bracket that would result in a cut in welfare payments greater than the value of the job, the better job, or the pay raise.  This net reduction in income would be lunacy, except for its effect on keeping folks trapped and voting for the politicians who control the handouts.

Reform all of the welfare programs, reform our welfare system as a system, and reform it extensively.  Go down, Trump and Congress, and let these people go.