Category Archives: morality

Dishonest Journalism

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Kyle Smith is too polite to call it that, but he comes very close in his National Review piece about an interview Robin Pogrebin gave to WMAL back on the 17th.

Some excerpts:

[Pogrebin’s and Kelly’s story [sic]] failed to mention that a woman who, according to a man named Max Stier, had Kavanaugh’s penis pressed into her hand at a campus party by multiple friends of his has said she recalls no such incident. That woman has also declined to talk about the matter with reporters or officials. Why even publish Stier’s claim, which was discounted by Washington Post reporters who heard about it a year ago, that he witnessed such an incident during a Yale party in the 1980s? Because of the narrative, Pogrebin says. “We decided to go with it because obviously it is of a piece with a kind of behavior,” she said on WMAL.

“Behavior” that has already been shown nonexistent, repeatedly.  Of what piece, exactly?  And what incident? The principle doesn’t remember it, and the principle witness refused to be interviewed.

Even if she were the victim of sexual misconduct, the [New York] Times would ordinarily take steps to protect her identity. Yet she has made no claim along these lines, and Pogrebin and Kelly outed her anyway. Is there no respect for a woman’s privacy?

Not when she needs to be outed in order to tell a tale.

[Emphasis in the original]:

Pogrebin repeatedly refers to the woman as a “victim.” This word choice is instructive about Pogrebin’s thought process. … She has made no claim to be a victim, yet Pogrebin describes her as one anyway. This is a case of a reporter overriding her reporting with her opinion.

And [emphasis in the original]:

If this is true, it means Max Stier was also drunk and his memories also can’t be trusted. (Someone should ask Pogrebin whether she was present at this party about which she knows so much.) By what journalistic standard does a reporter discount what is said by the person with the most direct and relevant experience of a matter—the woman in question at the Yale party—in favor of a drunken bystander? If both the woman and Stier were drunk, why is his memory more credible than hers? If something like this had actually happened to her, wouldn’t she be more likely than anyone else to remember it? Maybe Stier is remembering a different party. Maybe he’s remembering a different guy. Maybe he made it up.

And the kicker:

Of the woman at the party, she says, “Remember that she was incredibly drunk at that party as was everyone. And so I think we’re talking about memory here as really kind of a questionable issue. There are plenty of things that are conceivable that could happen when people are too drunk to remember them.” So the standard here is not whether something is true, it’s whether it’s “conceivable.” If a story is “of a piece with a kind of behavior,” even if such behavior is itself not established, and if a story is “conceivable” when filtered through that confirmation bias, and even if it’s undercut by the person the story supposedly happened to, and even if the person telling the story was “incredibly drunk,” you just go with it anyway.

That’s not gross journalistic malpractice, as Smith put it.  That’s blatantly, deliberately dishonest reporting.

RTWT.

Judgment

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Recall that the New York Times, just a very few days ago, reprinted an excerpt from a Clinton lawyer’s book that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh had inflicted an obscene act on a young woman while he was a college student at a “drunken dorm party.”

Immediately on publication, Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidates and sitting Senators Kamala Harris (CA), Elizabeth Warren (MA), Bernie Sanders (VT), Cory Booker (NJ), along with fellow candidates ex-Congressman Robert Francis O’Rourke, and ex-HUD Secretary Julian Castro all demanded Kavanaugh’s immediate impeachment.

Then the NYT, having been caught in its lie, had to print a “correction” in the form of an…Editor’s Note…buried in the article:

An earlier version of this article, which was adapted from a forthcoming book, did not include one element of the book’s account regarding an assertion by a Yale classmate that friends of Brett Kavanaugh pushed his penis into the hand of a female student at a drunken dorm party. The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident. That information has been added to the article.

Nor, apparently, did the NYT bother to ask the person in question to be interviewed for its article containing the excerpt. The NYT also has offered not even a single syllable of apology to Kavanaugh for its smear.

We expect that out of tabloids.  What’s particularly disgusting, though, is that not a single one of those Presidential candidates have offered a smidgeon of apology to Kavanaugh for their role in expanding the smear. Instead, with their silence they stand by their claims.  That’s a lack of integrity, an absence of morality, that’s wholly unacceptable.

Impeach on the basis of a newspaper article, rather than actual evidence.  That’s not the quality of judgment we need in the White House.  Nor is it the level of integrity needed there.

The VA Strikes Again

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Several times.

First up is this petty (and more) move by the Veterans Administration.

Congressman Brian Mast (R, FL)a retired Army Ranger, spoke out on Thursday after he was evicted from his congressional office space in the West Palm Beach Veteran Affairs Medical Center.
The move came after Mast, who lost his legs in an explosion in Afghanistan in 2010, grilled a Department of Veteran Affairs official at a hearing earlier this year.

After a spate of veteran suicides in VA facilities, Mast questioned a number of VA officials last April.  Now the VA wants him out of that office space:

The department will use the space previously dedicated to 6 members of congress for the provision of medical care services.

Which might actually be plausible, except for the timing of the move. And the fact that, were the office space actually needed, the facility could have declined to lease the space to Mast in the first place.

 

Next is this, even more egregious, item. It seems the VA has been refusing to reimburse veterans who go to an emergency medical facility that’s not a VA hospital.  Never mind the “emergency” part of that.  It took a judge’s order in a lawsuit to force the VA to pay the bills.  And this isn’t the first time on this specific matter.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has been ordered to reimburse veterans for the cost of their emergency care at non-VA hospitals—something the agency has actively told veterans they are not entitled to, an appeals court ruled this week.
The VA has wrongfully been denying veterans’ claims while also misrepresenting a regulation that entitles them to reimbursement, the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims said Monday.

The appellate court was not impressed with this deliberate misbehavior [emphasis added].

A previous regulation ended up excluding “nearly every type of expense a veteran could have incurred if he or she had insurance covering the non-emergency VA medical service at issue” from reimbursement, the court said, which violates a 2010 federal law.
“The Agency has effectively rolled back the clock and, with no transparency, essentially readopted a position we have authoritatively held inconsistent with Congress’s command,” the judges said, according to court documents. “Recognizing this is what has happened is—quite frankly—startling enough.
“It’s difficult to conceive how an agency could believe that adopting a regulation that mimics the result a federal court held to be unlawful is somehow appropriate when the statute at issue has not changed[.]”

That deliberate illegality ought to get some VA folks into jail.

 

And this, the worst of the lot.

…a Vietnam War veteran was reportedly found last week covered in ants and ant bites before he died at a Georgia VA nursing home.
Joel Marrable, who served in the Air Force, had more than 100 ant bites when his daughter visited him at the Eagle’s Nest Community Living Center in Decatur, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Laquna Moss said her father died shortly after being bitten in two incidents while battling cancer.

The VA still is actively killing through neglect our veterans.

The VA apologized, though. Like that makes everything all better.

Actions, not pretty words, and after all this time since the VA was first discovered falsifying appointment records and veterans were dying while on those fake appointment lists, nothing has changed.  Not a single item.

 

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Coaching

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Recall then-judge Aaron Persky, the judge who thought a college swimmer’s future well-being was more important than the fate of the unconscious girl he raped. Recall further that he thought the rape was so inconsequential that he functionally condoned it with a slap-on-the-wrist sentence of six whole months in jail—reduced to three months because of the rapist’s “good behavior” in jail.

Persky lost a subsequent recall election, held because of his coddling of the rapist.

This is, also, the same…judge…who tried to freeload off the public, tried to get them to pay the legal costs he incurred from the steady stream of frivolous lawsuits he instigated in an effort to block that recall election from happening.

Now Persky has been hired by San Jose, CA’s, Lynbrook High School to coach the school’s girls junior varsity tennis team.

The judge who thinks it’s OK to rape unconscious college girls is going to coach high school girls….

After I wrote this, the Fremont Union High School District, which oversees Lynbrook, and Lynbrook had a change of heart.

Lynbrook High School held a meeting Monday with the parents of JV and varsity girls’ tennis teams in response to the community’s concerns over Persky’s employment.

Then FUHSD fired Persky.

We believe this outcome is in the best interest of our students and school community. The District will begin the search for a new coach immediately….

This is a better outcome. It would have been best, though, had Persky never been hired into this position in the first place. The school and its female athletes never should have been jerked around like this.

But neither should Persky have been.  His attitude toward young women shouldn’t be used to justify treating him like he treats others. We should be better than that.

For Cheating on College Admission

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Prosecutors want a whole month in jail for Felicity Huffman, who’s pled out for trying to buy her daughter’s way into college.  That seems light to me, for what amounts to a bribery beef.

On the other hand, her attorneys

pleaded with a Boston federal judge Friday to spare her jail time after she pleaded guilty in connection with the college admissions bribery scandal and instead give her probation, community service and a fine.

This is an even lighter sentence than the prosecutors are requesting.  Apparently, what amounts to a crime of bribery is no big deal.  Furthermore, the “fine” of $20,000 is an insult.  That’s pocket money for someone of Huffman’s means and income.

On the other hand, I don’t entirely disagree that a year’s probation and community service for a first-time offender make a good framework for suitable punishment.

Let’s have her serve the terms of her punishment, though, like she means it.  Take Huffman out of the environment in which she was led astray, put her under probation in Baltimore, not Los Angeles.

Instead of the 250 hours of community service with at-risk youth that the defense “offered”—a bare six weeks of 8-hour days, although no calendar interval was suggested for those hours—have Huffman do some serious community service with those youth: spend the entire year’s probation working with Baltimore’s at-risk youth, 2080 hours (because she hasn’t earned two weeks for vacation). No dilletantism to fill a court-ordered square; do 52 weeks of full-time work.

And to be sure she understands and faces the environment of that youth population as well as the youths themselves, have her live in an apartment in one of those at-risk neighborhoods, to be verified aperiodically and on a no-notice basis by her parole officer.

Those 20 stacks for the fine? Double it to take some of the sting out of the insult, and have her pay the money to a couple of the NGOs in Baltimore that work with at-risk youth.

Regarding her daughter’s learning disability situation, her husband, who’s not charged with anything, can deal with that.