Category Archives: ethics

Change the Subject

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At the Federal level, Republicans in Congress are attempting to take national-level steps to curb union abuses of members and nonmembers. The particular abuse is union use of dues to fund a particular party’s candidates, whether the union members support that party or candidate or not for now, at least, the Congress is ignoring union states’ practice of collecting dues from non-union members—which the employees are required to pay as a condition of keeping their jobs—and using those coerced dues also for political work rather than union activities related to work).

The Employee Rights Act, introduced Monday by Senator Orrin Hatch (R, UT) and Congressman Tom Price (R, GA), would allow union members to tell their bosses they don’t want their share of dues going to certain candidates or causes, without fear of retaliation.

The response?

…Democratic strategists are accusing Republicans of ignoring the needs of hardworking union members, and instead just trying to re-route sizable campaign contributions.

Don’t address the subject of the bill. Talk about “rerouting.” Never mind that the bill doesn’t reroute a penny of union money.

Never mind, too, that the bill takes care of the “needs of hardworking union members,” particularly those hard workers who don’t want their dues to go to political causes they don’t support.

Yet More Dishonesty Regarding the Iran Nuclear Weapons Deal

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John Kerry is at it again. Kerry was speaking to Council on Foreign Relations in New York when he said this:

I fear that what could happen is, if Congress were to overturn it [Kerry’s just concluded deal with Iran], our friends in Israel could actually end up being more isolated and more blamed….

Of course, Kerry knows, and so does his boss, President Barack Obama, that such isolation is entirely this administration’s decision. All the US would need to do is openly stand with Israel on the matter. Kerry is projecting his and Obama’s own behavior.

Kerry also said this to the CFR:

And we would lose Europe and China and Russia with respect to whatever military action we might have to take.

We’ve already lost the PRC and Russia; it’s hard for me to believe Kerry is unaware of that. Europe, in this context, is France and Germany. France publicly wanted a stronger, more measurable, more stringent deal that actually would have required Iran to agree to 24/7 (that’s 24 hour, 7 days per week, not 24 days’ notice with 7 appeals steps in the sequence) inspections and to verifiably completely dismantle its nuclear weapons program. Germany might have demurred, but that’s all. And if German intransigence killed the deal, that would have been better than what we got.

The Republicans are right on this travesty. The Democrats need to figure out whether they’re on the side of us and of Israel or on the side of Obama.

Ashamed of our Heritage

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The Democratic Party of Connecticut is that. They’ve voted to strip the names of two of our Founders from their annual fund-raising dinner. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were slave holders, and so are unfit to be…what…Founders? Never mind that most of our Founders were slave holders—that was the norm of the time—or had feet of other serious clay.

What’s next, Washington’s Birthday will exclude George Washington, slave owner?

This was Party Chairman Nick Balletto’s “brainstorm.”

Democrats are the party of inclusion. And in my opinion, the time has come to reevaluate the name of the JJB [the dinner] to reflect the diverse makeup and forward-looking vision of our party[.]

Sure. The party of inclusion via the KKK. The party of inclusion via Jim Crow. The party of inclusion of racist, sexist affirmative action that excludes groups of Americans because they don’t have the preferred—dare I say privileged?—skin color or gender.

This is the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the Democratic Party made manifest.

School Choice and Unions

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There’s a contradiction in terms.

In January parents filed a petition to convert Palm Lane Elementary in Anaheim into a charter under California’s 2010 parent-trigger law, which allows a majority of parents in any failing school to force changes.

Naturally, the school’s district officials and teachers union demurred. Never mind that

Palm Lane had made the state Department of Education’s list of underperforming schools since 2003. Fewer than 40% of students scored proficient in English in 2013. About 85% are Hispanic, and most are low-income.

(Where is the Obama DoJ and disparate impact? Oh, wait…).

The officials and the unions went so far as to disregard California law as they dragged their feet and openly obstructed the conversion—and loss of union jobs and of income for the district officials’ use.

[U]nion even complained that signature gatherers were bribing parents with free iPads, a false allegation that the district superintendent repeated in a cautionary letter to parents.

Though more than 60% of parents signed the petition, the district threw out dozens of signatures that could not be “verified.” That is, the parents could not be reached between the hours of 8:30 am and 4:30 pm to confirm that they signed the petition. Maybe that’s because they were working.

Fortunately, and once again, a judge got one right.

Last Thursday Orange County Superior Court Judge Andrew Banks ruled in favor of the parents on all counts and rebuked the district’s conduct as “unreasonable, arbitrary, capricious and unfair.” He also scored district officials for violating their obligation under the trigger law to work in good faith with parents….

Judge Banks has ordered the district to accept the petition and allow parents to immediately begin soliciting charter school proposals.

Been all right, too, if the Judge also had ordered the district officials and the union to compensate the petitioners for their time wasted fighting these frivolous delays. Such an order might have given these officials pause as they plan their inevitable, time-wasting, delaying tactic of appeals.

Still, it’s a good ruling.

Hillary Clinton’s Emails

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It just gets better and better. Hillary Clinton has released a “FAQ” about her emails and her destruction of a significant fraction of them. Byron York, writing in The Washington Examiner, had some thoughts about them.

One of the FAQ questions Clinton posed concerned whether any of her emails were under subpoena at the time they were destroyed.

The emails that Clinton chose not to keep were personal emails—they were not federal records or even work-related—and therefore were not subject to any preservation obligation under the Federal Records Act or any request. Nor would they have been subject to the subpoena—which did not exist at the time….

Except that

The subpoena to which Clinton referred was issued March 4, 2015, after the committee learned that Clinton kept her emails on a separate, secret server. Clinton seems to be confirming that she destroyed her email records (and all backups, according to her attorney) in early December, which would be three months before the Benghazi committee subpoena. So Clinton’s argument is: there’s no way I was subject to a subpoena because I destroyed everything before the subpoena was issued.

Putting aside the question of whether Clinton’s emails were already covered by an earlier subpoena—Benghazi committee chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy [R, SC] maintains they were—there is still the question of whether Clinton, all along, had a legal obligation to preserve her emails and hand them over to Congress. And on that question, there seems no doubt Clinton was legally required to do just that—and despite that obligation destroyed the emails anyway.

On September 20, 2012, nine days after the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, the House Oversight Committee’s Subcommittee on National Security, Homeland Defense and Foreign Operations sent a letter to then-Secretary of State Clinton asking for “all information…related to the attack on the consulate.” The letter told Clinton, “In complying with this request, you are required to produce all responsive documents that are in your possession, custody, or control, whether held by you or your past or present agents, employees, and representatives acting on your behalf.” The letter specified emails as documents covered by the request.

The letter was clear. In response, the State Department produced not a single email to or from Clinton. The world now knows, of course, that Clinton did in fact possess emails covered by the request and did not turn them over.

Even if Clinton’s argument that her personal emails were somehow not covered by the Letter, the subpoena, or the Federal Records Act and related legislation holds water, how can we know Clinton destroyed only personal correspondence, correspondence that “were not federal records or even work-related” as she claims? We can’t know. Clinton destroyed the evidence.

It’s all the more important that Congress lay hands on her servers, hard drives, and other storage media, and do a proper forensic investigation.