Category Archives: ethics

Some Thoughts on Security Leaks

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President Obama finds it offensive that anyone would accuse him of leaking classified information for personal political gain.

The notion that my White House would purposely release national security information is offensive[.]

Of course it is.  And President Nixon had some remarks along these lines, too.

Yet here is a partial list of the White House’s leaks:

  • A terrorist kill list, identifying persons whom Obama personally approves for remote control execution (and so leaves no terrorist to be inconveniently captured and questioned
  • reports of US spies infiltrating Al Qaeda in Yemen
  • stories about Osama bin Laden’s DNA and how the US got it
  • US involvement in the Stuxnet (and Flame) computer virus development and employment against Iranian nuclear facilities, including identification of the government lab that designed it
  • revealed a British asset who penetrated al Qaeda and stopped another bombing of a US-bound airliner

These leaks, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) correctly says, put “American lives in jeopardy,” put “our nation’s security in jeopardy.”  And every one of those leaks push an Obama agenda, or purport to paint Obama in a favorable light.

Oh, and the White House’s leaks about a supposed Israeli plan to use Azerbaijani bases to launch an attack against Iranian nuclear facilities—which plan, if it existed, became impossible for an Obama-disliked Israel to execute.

Yet Obama refuses to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the leaks; although Attorney General Eric Holder has named two DoJ attorneys to investigate.  While it’s true that the leaking that’s coming out of the White House is a present and clear danger and a special prosecutor investigation would take time—possibly years—such an appointment at least would move toward defusing the personal gain question.

Moreover, his CIA and his Department of Justice have announced they will not cooperate with Congressional investigations into the leaks.

I have to ask: why is Obama so bent on hindering investigations into these leaks?

Obama’s offended?  He’s not as offended as are honest Americans over them.

Voter ID and Hypocrisy

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We already need a photo ID for nearly anything we do: board a commercial airplane, drive our car, check into a shooting range (oh, wait—we’re not supposed to be allowed to do that, either, according to some), get into a federal building; the list goes on and on.

Oh, and get into a Big Do involving the President or First Lady.

A PHOTO ID [WAS] BE REQUIRED TO ENTER THE MASSMUTUAL CENTER [for last May’s Massachusetts Democratic Party Convention, emphasis in the original]

A photo ID will be required to enter the 2012 Democratic National Convention this September in Charlotte.

On Friday, June 8th, those wishing to attend [Mrs Obama’s book signing] must…submit their social security number and show an official photo ID (driver’s license, passport) to a Secret Service agent

No Jim Crow here.  No siree.

Yet the Progressives demand that anyone should be allowed to vote—residents, the dead, cartoon characters, illegal aliens, non-citizens; it’s all the same to them.  They’re suing states for insisting on photo IDs in order to get a ballot.

Coal and CO2

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We get over half our national electricity supply from coal.  Nevertheless, President Obama is intent on shutting down our coal-based electricity through his EPA regulations.  This has been commented on by lots of folks.

The Obama fantasy driving this is that by killing off the US’ capacity to use coal in energy production, he’ll put a serious dent in the production of CO2.

Never mind that CO2 is not a harbinger of disastrous warming (its atmospheric warming capacity is quite trivial, especially compared to, oh, say, methane, or to the atmospheric cooling capacity of water vapor through its reflection of sunlight back into space), but a confirmation of the health of the planet.  The record, for instance, from ice cores as widely disparately collected as Greenland and Antarctica demonstrate that atmospheric CO2 increases lag global warming, not precede it.  And of course the increases would lag.  The planet warms, as from a major Ice Age, or the Maunder Minimum, or…, and life flourishes.  That life exhales carbon dioxide, and as the life spreads in the warming climes, CO2 in the atmosphere increases.

But nor the Obama administration nor the pseudo-scientists of the Global Warming Funding Project want to talk about that.  Except the latter, to change their group name to the Climate Change Funding Project.

Right to Vote and DoJ

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The Federal Department of Justice has written a letter to letter to Florida’s Secretary of State, Ken Detzner, ordering him to stop trying to purge the Florida voter rolls of ineligible “voters.”  Interestingly, the order is predicated on technical, procedural grounds: five counties in Florida still are subject to the National Voting Rights Act of 1964, and Detzner didn’t say, “Mother, may I?” to DoJ before attempting the purge.

Never mind that an early inspection of the state’s rolls turned up as many as 182,000 folks registered to vote who may not be US citizens.  Never mind that, as the spokesman for the Florida Department of State, Chris Cate, said,

Bottom line is we are firmly committed to doing the right thing and preventing ineligible voters from being able to cast a ballot[.]

Never mind that the state has had in place for months a request to the Department of Homeland Security to match the state’s driver’s license records with the DHS’ databases to facilitate the assessment of citizenship and thereby of voting eligibility.  The DHS has been unresponsive.

This move comes on the heels of Attorney General Eric Holder’s racist speech which he gave to the Council of Black Churches last Wednesday concerning voter eligibility.  The Wall Street Journal had some choice words concerning those racist words from our AG; I won’t go into that here.

But such attacks, together with Advancement Project Co-director, Penda Hair’s ironic remark, which included this

We commend the attorney general of the United States Eric Holder for ensuring that the right to vote, the fundamental pillar of our democracy is protected for all American citizens

make the larger point here.  In the name of protecting the sanctity of an American voter’s ballot, Progressives are actively attacking it.  They pretend not to see that if ineligibles aren’t prevented from voting, the votes of honest Americans are diluted or outright cancelled by ineligible, false, votes.

Al Franken (D, MN), for instance, was elected to the US Senate in 2008 by 312 votes out of 2.9 million votes cast.  In 2004, President George Bush carried Florida by 537 votes out of nearly 6 million cast.  Identifying ineligible voters and getting them off the rolls matters.

I have to ask: what’s the Progressives’ real objection to an honest voter roll?

Income Inequalities

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“Income inequality is a strange obsession, at least to the extent the obsessives focus their policy responses on trying to adjust the condition of the top 1% rather than improving the opportunities of everyone else.”
–Holman Jenkins, The Wall Street Journal

As Freud put it, “Everyone must be the same and have the same.  Social justice means we deny ourselves many things so that others may have to do without them as well.”

Or we could follow an alternative.  We could worry less about equality of outcomes and more about equality of opportunity, as our Founders suggested.  Since we don’t all have an equal endowment of ability or work ethic, and more importantly, we don’t all have the same goals for our lives, equal outcomes—equal incomes, equal wealth—is necessarily impossible.

But those equal opportunities, and the ability of everyone to satisfy his own potential in the manner and to the extent each sees fit, is the stuff of rapidly increasing wealth for all of us—not only of the pecuniary variety, but of the moral, as well.