Tag Archives: culture

66 Porch Dogs

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66* Democrats (and counting?) have chosen to boycott the inauguration of our next President.  Here’s a partial list.  So much for unity on the one day where the country comes together to celebrate a rarity in the world and the world’s history, the peaceful and routine transfer of power.

Arizona (2)
Rep. Ruben Gallego (AZ)
Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (AZ)

California (15)
Rep. Karen Bass (CA)
Rep. Tony Cardenas (CA)
Rep. Judy Chu (CA)
Rep. Mark DeSaulnier (CA)
Rep. Jared Huffman (CA)
Rep. Barbara Lee (CA)
Rep. Ted Lieu (CA)
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (CA)
Rep. Jerry McNerney (CA)
Rep. Grace Napolitano (CA)
Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (CA)
Rep. Raul Ruiz (CA)
Rep. Mark Takano (CA)
Rep. Juan Vargas (CA)
Rep. Maxine Waters (CA)

Florida (3)
Rep. Darren Soto
Rep. Frederica S. Wilson
Rep. Alcee Hastings

Georgia (1)
Rep. John Lewis (GA)

Illinois (5)
Rep. Luis V. Gutiérrez (IL)
Rep. Dan Lipinski (IL)
Rep. Mike Quigley (IL)
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (IL)
**Rep. Bobby Rush (IL) – said he is not attending the inauguration due to his wife’s hospitalization

Kentucky (1)
Rep. John Yarmuth (KY)

Maine (1)
Rep. Chellie Pingree

Maryland (2)
Rep. Anthony Brown
Rep. Jamie Raskin (MD)

Massachusetts (1)
Rep. Katherine Clark

Michigan (1)
Rep. John Conyers

Minnesota (1)
Rep. Keith Ellison

Mississippi (1)
Rep. Bennie Thompson

Missouri (1)
Rep. William Lacy Clay

New Hampshire (1)
Rep. Carol Shea-Porter (NH)

New Jersey (2)
Rep. Donald Payne Jr. (NJ)
Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ)

New York (6)
Rep. Yvette Clarke (NY)
Rep. Adriano Espaillat (NY)
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (NY)
Rep. José E. Serrano (NY)
Rep. Nydia Velazquez (NY)
Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (NY)

North Carolina (2)
Rep. Alma Adams (NC)
Rep. G.K. Butterfield (NC)

Ohio (1)
Rep. Marcia L. Fudge (OH)

Oregon (3)
Rep. Earl Blumenauer (OR)
**Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (OR) – he usually skips the “pomp and circumstance events in Washington”
Rep. Kurt Schrader (OR)

Pennsylvania (4)
Rep. Brendan Boyle (PA)
Rep. Robert Brady (PA)
Rep. Mike Doyle (PA)
Rep. Dwight Evans (PA)

Tennessee (1)
Rep. Steve Cohen (TN)

Texas (3)
Rep. Joaquin Castro (TX)
Rep. Lloyd Doggett (TX)
Rep. Al Green (TX)

Virginia (1)
Rep. Don Beyer (VA)

Washington (2)
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (WA)
Rep. Adam Smith (WA)

Wisconsin (1)
Rep. Mark Pocan (WI

Porch dogs yapping instead of working to end their years of divisive identity politics while deriding those who disagree with them.

*There are 62 Democrats in the partial list provided; two get a pass for the reasons stated.  However, one of them appears to put more emphasis on the “pomp and circumstance” while misunderstanding what this particular ceremony represents: the office and the uniqueness in the world of peaceful and routine transfer of power.  (For the record, I also disdain pomp done for its own sake.  The Inauguration ceremonies, though, are not that.)

Gatekeeper

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Howard Kurtz decried the loss by the press of its gatekeeper status, exemplified by the response to CNN‘s recent smear by innuendo piece against President-Elect Donald Trump and Buzzfeed‘s immediately following overt smear piece that enumerated the carefully unsubstantiated salacious rumors about Trump which CNN had preciously withheld in its innuendo.

And with that dismay, Kurtz displayed for all to see the self-important arrogance of the press.

But with distrust of the media at record highs, the game is increasingly being played without an umpire to call balls and strikes.

Who is the press—even an honest press, did we have one—to presume to decide what is a ball and what is a strike, what is fit to print, what is suitable for the tender eyes and ears of American citizens to see or to hear?

Gatekeeper.  Gatekeeper!?  NLMSM arrogance is surpassed only by its self-evident dishonesty and bias.

This Is Not Your Grandfather’s EU

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I hope, because EU, look at you now (OK, some of you following along at home might see that I’m mixing ads and old songs.  Noted.)

Mady Delvaux, a Socialist MEP from Luxembourg, thinks robots should be considered to be persons and have rights.

Delvaux authored a report that proposes giving legal status to robots and categorize them as “electronic persons.”

But we should be able to kill those robot persons solely on our say so.  They should have kill switches which we can activate when we think they’re going to cause “dangerous damages.”  And this requirement of Delvaux’:

You always have to tell people that robot is not a human and a robot will never be a human.  You must never think that a robot is a human and that he loves you.

There are persons and there are persons, so, you know, separate but maybe not so equal.  But she has a solution for that, too.  Robots should be

made with operations that comply to all applicable laws and ethical principles.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.  We’ve done such a wonderful job of programming humans to comply with all applicable laws—even those laws that conflict with each other—and we’ve done an even better job of programming our laws to comply with our ethical principles—whatever we’ve been able to determine those to be.  Sure.

Only in the EU.

It Takes One to Know One?

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Several municipalities in New Jersey have taken to painting a blue line down the middle of their Main Streets as a show of support for their police and police departments.  The image below is an example of that.

President-On-The-Way-Out Barack Obama’s (D) Department of Transportation has decided to take a dim view of this move.

There are many appropriate and fitting ways to recognize service to the public that do not involve the modification of a traffic control device, which can put the road user at risk due to misinterpretation of its meaning[.]

The Democrats are projecting again.  Only they would think Americans are so dumb that we’d misunderstand a blue line, when road markings for traffic control are yellow or white.

One can hope that DoT Secretary nominee Elaine Chao will be able to correct this departmental culture.

Failure of Hate Laws

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The failure stems from an inability to define hate, but mostly it fails from the irrelevance of hate as anything other than a motivator for committing a crime.  Motive, though, belongs solely in the jury box during the punishment phase given a conviction of a crime; it should not be foreordained by a Government’s attempt to define the hate or by Government’s more evident attempts to discriminate among groups of Americans and single some out for favorable treatment at the expense of other groups of Americans.

That’s demonstrated by Illinois and Ohio law, which comes up from case of the four blacks who attacked a white disabled man and live streamed it on Facebook, as discussed by Eugene Volokh in his Washington Post article.  For instance,

The focus, then, isn’t on “hate.” For instance, if a thief selects a physically disabled victim simply because he thinks it’s less likely that the victim will fight back, that too is covered as a hate crime under Illinois law.

And

Similarly, the Amish beard-cutting case was prosecuted as a hate crime on the theory that the targets were chosen by fellow Amish perpetrators because of the targets’ dissenting religious beliefs within the Amish community.  …  Choosing someone for attack based on his religion would be a hate crime whether the motivation is hatred, theological disagreement, or whatever else.

You see the irrelevance of hate in such crimes, yet Government, in these instances Illinois’ and Ohio’s, arbitrarily tacks it on, just because.

As Volokh put it,

But the Illinois statute and the federal statute [another of his example laws], like most other hate-crime statutes that I’ve seen, focus on discriminatory selection, not the underlying emotion behind the selection.

Indeed.  I pick you for my crime victim because I think I’m more likely to get away with it than if I’d selected someone else or because I’ve decided (legitimately or not) that you’d done me wrong, and I was determined to get you back, and I do the crime.  But if you happen to belong to a government-favored group of Americans, my crime—completely unchanged in its nature or motivation—becomes much more serious solely because of Government’s own discrimination: it has chosen to favor your group over other American groups and so to discriminate against those other American groups.

Which also is an argument for doing away with Governments favoring, for any purpose, this or that group of Americans over other groups of Americans, which Government has decided should be disadvantaged by that favoring.  That’s hate crime by Government.