Category Archives: ethics

Disingenuosity

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This from Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign.

A new batch of emails released Thursday allegedly shows a top Clinton Foundation official asking Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin for help obtaining diplomatic passports—though Clinton officials say the request was related to the effort to secure the release of two American journalists held in North Korea.

Never mind that Federal law is quite clear on this: diplomatic passports can be issued only to diplomats and Foreign Service officers, no matter the purpose of the trip.  Even so, Clinton is arguing through her campaign spokesman Josh Schwerin that

Judicial Watch is now attacking State Department officials and the 42nd President of the United States for rescuing two American journalists from North Korea.  This is a new low even for this right-wing organization that has been going after the Clintons since the 1990s.

No, Judicial Watch is concerned about the Hillary Clinton State Department willfully and willingly agreeing to flout Federal law for her Clinton Foundation leadership’s benefit.  The excuse that her State Department used—that it was for the children journalists—is cynically disingenuous.  The low is Clinton’s distortion of that concern, and no, it’s not a new low; it’s all too typical of Clinton’s and Clinton’s staff’s behavior.

Obamatalk

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Here’s an example, through President Barack Obama’s (D) former advisor, Dan Pfeiffer, from a podcast he does with Jon Favreau, Obama’s former speech writer, via The Wall Street Journal‘s Notable & Quotable.

Pfeiffer: The press gets bored of writing the same story over and over again, and they almost start to feel guilty about writing s—ty stories about the same person all the time, and they want to do something different. So it’s a classic move to do two things: One, fire someone. Press doesn’t even care who, right?  …  “Huge problem in the VA, oh, someone got fired? OK, that’s fine then, we don’t worry about that anymore.”

Or, stand in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue, wave your arms in the air and say “we’re pivoting.” It’s a total bulls—t thing. You and I have been a part of many bulls—t pivots.

Remind you of anything?

The Courts’ Role in Law

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The New York Court of Appeals, the State’s Supreme Court, has inserted itself into the political debate concerning who is a parent.  It’s entered the moral debate, too, but its ruling is a legal and political one:

New York’s highest court Tuesday upended how the state legally defines parenthood, reversing course on a 25-year-old ruling that had blocked many same-sex couples from seeking the court’s help in custody disputes.

Until now, New York only recognized as parents those with a clear adoptive or biological tie to a child, shutting out those who otherwise may have played a key role in a child’s upbringing.
…
The court ruled that going forward, a partner can seek visitation and custody if it is shown “by clear and convincing evidence that the parties agreed to conceive a child and to raise the child together.” The court recognized that some people could even deserve custody if they came into a child’s life after the birth, but said now isn’t the time to set a rule for such situations.

The Court justified its ruling in this way:

Tuesday’s decision by the New York Court of Appeals said society has changed in recent decades and that families formed by gay couples need to be protected.

And there’s this by Susan Sommer, an attorney at Lambda Legal:

Finally, New York is bringing its law in line with the reality of thousands of children who need protection for their relationships[.]

No, even if society has changed, this is a political decision that legitimately can be made only by that society—the citizens of New York, themselves or through their elected representatives.  The courts have no proper role to play in the political arena; they have only in a judicial one—which is to apply the law as it’s written (or strike it altogether if they can make the case that the law in question is unconstitutional).  The courts’ role does not include making law from the bench.

Pay to Play Variant

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Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her husband aren’t the only Democrats engaged in this.  Here’s a variant being employed by Democrat Attorneys General, as described in The Wall Street Journal, by Andy Koenig, a senior policy adviser at Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce.

The administration’s multiyear campaign against the banking industry has quietly steered money to organizations and politicians who are working to ensure liberal policy and political victories at every level of government. The conduit for this funding is the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group, a coalition of federal and state regulators and prosecutors created in 2012 to “identify, investigate, and prosecute instances of wrongdoing” in the residential mortgage-backed securities market. In conjunction with the Justice Department, the RMBS Working Group has reached multibillion-dollar settlements with essentially every major bank in America.

Three guesses where those billions of dollars are going.  The first two guesses don’t count.

Yup.

[A] substantial portion is allocated to private, nonprofit organizations drawn from a federally approved list.

These government-favored organizations include Catholic Charities, La Raza, the National Urban League, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, and so on.  Catholic Charities is completely apolitical and entirely decent, but they’re on the list solely to give cover to the presence of the others, which are blatantly political—and have entirely pro-Liberal agendas.

[T]hese groups engage in voter registration, community organizing, and lobbying on liberal policy priorities at every level of government. They also provide grants to other liberal groups not eligible for payouts under the settlements. Thanks to the Obama administration, and the fungibility of money, the settlements’ beneficiaries can now devote hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to these activities.

RTWT, there’s much more.  To emphasize: those settlements are little more than vig extracted for Obama administration causes as a price of being allowed to do business.

Construction Union Vig

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In California last week, legislators and interest groups declared dead a measure…to allow certain apartments with some low-income units to sidestep the state’s environmental review process. That followed a failed effort by state lawmakers in New York earlier this year to renew a widely used tax break for rental housing in New York City….

For both measures, construction unions were key to the defeat, as they won over key allies with their argument that the government shouldn’t be aiding apartment development without also guaranteeing union-level wages.

Let’s see, low income housing, union wages.  Union wages, low income housing.

Union wages add some 20% to the cost of residential construction in California and New York.  Low income folks—who have the lowest ability to pay up; even union leadership understands that tautology—are being gouged by these unions.

That 20% is the vig low income folks must pay to have housing.  Alternatively, that 20% is the vig others must pay to subsidize low income housing.

Nice construction project you got there, really cool that it’s for the less fortunate.  Be too bad if something were to happen to it.