Category Archives: rights

Another Reason We Need Regime Change in DC

Posted on by
Reply

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Ranking Member Patrick Leahy sent their third letter since June calling on the DOJ to reveal its questionable cell phone surveillance policies, after yet another whistleblower allegation of abuse.

Keep doing this, absolutely. But don’t expect any answers for another several months.

We’ll need an administration from the other party before the Eric Holder/Loretta Lynch DoJ can be expected to deliver. And with that change, extended to DoJ, the present DoJ incumbents need to be haled into court and sanctioned for their willful obstruction of these investigations.

The SEC and Judges

Posted on by
Reply

The SEC doesn’t like it when the ones it charges with miscreancy object to the cases being heard solely by SEC administrative judges. One statement in particular in the WSJ article at the link, though, jumped out at me.

The SEC accused several defendants of “judge shopping” by trying to get a case heard in a particular court and in another instance asked one of its own judges to submit a formal statement about whether he has ever felt pressure to favor the agency.

Never mind that the SEC is demanding that defendants use the SEC’s own already shopped-for judges. Never mind, either, the SEC’s cynicism in trotting out one of its employees to speak favorably about that employee’s employer.

The Fox Investigating the Hen House Leak

Posted on by
1

The Department of Transportation is investigating the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) following a FOX Business Network report, which uncovered misconduct and cheating in the air traffic controller program. The DOT released a statement on their investigation.

That FBN report exposed broad-based, institutionally directed cheating on FAA Controller selection exams and systemic bias in handling the exams’ results.

Now the fox—or the weasel, your call—is going to determine whether there was any misbehavior.

Stand by for another whitewash.

Couple Thoughts about Academic Censorship

Posted on by
Reply

The American Association of University Professors has decided to censure the University of Illinois because the school decided to withdraw it offer of employment to a “professor” who went off on an anti-Israel tirade on Twitter.

First thought: U of I Chancellor Phyllis Wise is taking the AAUP’s censorship seriously. Why? The man objected, loudly and vociferously, to Israel’s defending itself against the Palestinian Authority’s terror war that it launched from Gaza.

Second thought: the censure was done by voice vote. It was carefully anonymous. How can any action by a body like this be taken seriously by a body like a university when the voters are so timid or so ashamed of their votes that they avoid being on the record with their vote?

Third thought: Anita Levy, Associate Secretary for the AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, & Governance said that U of I’s decision

violated Professor [Steven] Salaita’s [the professor in question] academic freedom and cast a pall of uncertainty over the degree to which academic freedom is understood and respected[.]

This is facially untrue. Salaita’s rants cast a pall over his own ability to respect the academic freedom of his peers and more importantly, of his students, and to teach and to grade in an objective manner. By withdrawing their offer of employment, the U of I was acting to preserve true academic freedom, not the freedom to behave in the manner selected academics deem appropriate.

Projecting

Posted on by
Reply

The Democrats are at it again.

Projection is an unconscious defense mechanism by which a person attributes to someone else unacknowledged ideas, thoughts, feelings, and impulses that they cannot accept as their own. Or, as the Miller-Keane Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Medicine, Nursing, and Allied Health puts it,

It’s often called the “blaming” mechanism because in using it the person seeks to place the blame for personal inadequacies upon someone else.

It’s also a broader, more innocent thing: the attribution of one’s own attitudes, feelings, or suppositions to others. Which is to say, in the latter case in particular, the assumption that everyone else is just like the one making the attribution.

Here’s Hillary Clinton, with that in mind.

Clinton said that laws requiring voters to show identification at polls were part of “a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people, and young people from one end of our country to the other.”

And

Clinton even made it personal, saying potential general election foes Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Rick Perry were “deliberately trying to stop” minority voters from participating.

It takes a racist to manufacture a racism beef where there plainly is no racism involved (for the particular record, black voter turnout is the same or higher in those states with relatively stringent voter-ID laws than in those states without, and it’s the same or higher in those states with them than it was before those laws were enacted in those states). But then she’s a leader in the party of the racist KKK, she’s a leader in the party of racist Jim Crow, she’s a leader in the party of racist and sexist affirmative action.

She’s projecting.