Tag Archives: culture

Hostage Takers

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As Florida state and local officials scramble to contain a Zika virus outbreak in Miami Beach—a serious threat to the region’s $24 billion-a-year tourism industry—congressional lawmakers from both parties continue to be locked in battle over a billion dollars in vital funding that experts say is needed to keep the virus from breaking out across America.

This is a misleading opening paragraph in the Fox News article.  Congress isn’t deadlocked.  The House already has passed a Zika funding bill.  Democrats in the Senate are blocking the bill over wholly unrelated matters: Planned Parenthood funding, which the Zika bill cuts off, and birth control funding in bankrupt Puerto Rico, which the Zika bill provides.

No, Democrats are holding the welfare of the citizens of Florida and Puerto Rico, and our citizens in the other States at risk, hostage both over Democrats’ fight to have Federally funded abortions and their hypocrisy in demanding health coverage providers provide premium-free birth control coverage while denying access to birth control in one of our territories.

SEC and Boardroom Diversity

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The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking to reach inside corporate governance some more because it Knows Better how to run a company than do the leaders and managers of that company.  The latest travesty is a new rule requiring disclosure of the diversity—by which the SEC means ethnic and gender diversity—of a public company’s board of directors.  This would be an expansion of the SEC’s existing 2009 rule requiring companies to disclose their plans for diversity.

Berkshire Hathaway took the correct position in its SEC disclosure regarding those plans:

Berkshire does not have a policy regarding the consideration of diversity in identifying nominees for director. In identifying director nominees, the Governance Committee does not seek diversity, however defined. Instead, as previously discussed, the Governance Committee looks for individuals who have very high integrity, business savvy, an owner-oriented attitude and a deep genuine interest in the Company.

This, though, isn’t politically correct enough to suit the SEC; hence the new rule under consideration.  It isn’t enough that a company should seek actual talent and skill, it must seek the government-directed correct balance of gender and ethnicity.

This raises a question in my mind: would that be biological ethnicity and gender or self-identified ethnicity and gender?

For the record, I self-identify my ethnicity as American, and I self-identify my gender as The US Male.

Is This Felony Perjury?

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The perjury case officially has been referred to the US attorney for the District of Columbia by the House of Representatives.  In their letter to the DA, House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R, UT) and Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R, VA) pointed out that

[Then-]Secretary [now Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary] Clinton stated “there was nothing marked classified on my emails, either sent or received.”

But

FBI Director James Comey said July 5 that a “very small number of the emails containing classified information bore the markings indicating the presence of classified information.”  At least three emails had a (C) for Confidential which is the lowest level of classification. Fox News first reported in June that classified markings existed, despite Clinton’s public claims.

And

Clinton told [Benghazi Select Committee member Jim (R, OH)] Jordan that her team “went through every single email.”

But

The FBI Director said his investigators found that Clinton’s lawyers did not read all the emails, and relied on a narrow set of search terms to identify which emails were work-related.

“The lawyers doing the sorting for Secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content of all her e-emails,” Comey said July 5. Instead, they “relied on header information and used search terms.”

And

Clinton also testified to Congress there was only one server.

But

[T]he FBI Director said investigators found “Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department and used numerous mobile devices to review and send e-mail on that personal domain.”

And

“I provided you, with all my work related emails, all that I had.  Approximately 55,000 pages. And they are being publicly released,” Clinton testified.

But

FBI investigators found “several thousand work related emails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014.”

Keep in mind that Clinton’s claims made before those two committees were made under oath.

Second question: will President Barack Obama’s (D) DoJ, which owns the DC District Attorney and the James Comey FBI, do a more thorough job of investigating this than the DoJ and the FBI did of Clinton’s classified email handling gross negligence (which Comey was pleased to call “extreme carelessness”) with her private email server, which she used for official State Department business? Steven Pomerantz, “a retired assistant FBI director and 28-year-veteran of the bureau,” said that

…a perjury review is generally straightforward for agents.

“They look at the transcript of the testimony they provided in light of what they know to be, suspect to be the truth. They investigate both sides and take the aggregate and turn it over to the prosecuting authority for a decision.

“Since the Director (Comey) already established what she (Clinton) said and the investigation is complete, it would be a relatively simple matter to make a decision about perjury…given the history of this, it’s hard to say—it would seem to me a matter of weeks not months in this case.”

We’ll know soon, especially regarding the second question.

No, He Doesn’t

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Howard Kurtz has joined the frenzy in his cynical piece titled Trump fuels a media furor (again) with Second Amendment comments on Clinton, this time over Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s remark, concerning Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s naked attack on the 2nd Amendment, that 2nd Amendment supporters would exercise their considerable political power to protect this fundamental American right.

This is what Trump actually said.

If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what, that will be a horrible day.

This is the heart of Kurtz’ claim:

Donald Trump has talked himself into big trouble—and this time it’s not the fault of what he calls the “dishonest media.”

The media’s frenzied claim that Trump is inciting violence is truly breathtaking.  It also takes a truly sick mind—or a wholly dishonest one—to manufacture violence out of a prediction of strong political repercussion.

Kurtz then asked,

I don’t believe Donald Trump wants to incite violence against Hillary Clinton. But does he bear responsibility for an aside, or a joke, that many people heard that way?

And yet here is Kurtz carefully keeping exactly that distortion alive as though it were a legitimate interpretation.  This interpretation is manufactured entirely out of whole cloth by a media Kurtz himself has already called out as in the bag for Clinton.  The only people who “heard” Trump’s remark as a call for violence are Democrats who want to make personal political hay, no matter how much they have to twist facts to harvest it, and a press that has dishonestly chosen to take sides in a political contest that is for us voters alone to decide.

And as Kurtz ironically noted

This uproar is going to dominate the next few days, all but drowning out Trump’s message (and is drowning out the new controversy over emails showing favor-seeking between the Clinton Foundation and Clinton’s State Department).

Of course it is.  That’s the point of the press’ manufacture.  The decision to distort and then to hype the distortion is entirely the press’.  Just as it’s entirely the press’ choice to spike Democratic Party Ohio Senate candidate Ted Strickland’s yukking it up over how nice it was that Justice Antonin Scalia had died.  Or to conveniently forget about then-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s remark about doing things “the Chicago way,” and about bringing guns to a knife fight.  Nobody has stuck a gun in the press’ ear and made them do any of that.

Does Trump bear responsibility for the behavior of a mendacious media?

Of course not.  Apparently Kurtz doesn’t believe his own press.

No Connection

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There were no ties between Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her State Department on the one hand and the Clinton Foundation run by ex-President Bill Clinton, daughter, and…his wife Hillary.  That’s the claim by no lesser lights than Bill and Hillary.

Thus, neither

In an exchange from April 2009, a longtime aide to Mr Clinton told three of Mrs Clinton’s top advisers that it was “important to take care of” a particular person, whose name has been redacted from the document. That person had written the aide, Doug Band, under the subject line “A favor…” to thank him for the “opportunity to go on the Haiti trip,” which the person called “eye-opening.” Mr Band was a chief adviser in helping Mr Clinton launch the Clinton Foundation after leaving the White House.

nor

Huma Abedin, a longtime confidante of Mrs Clinton who is now working for her campaign, replied to Mr Band: “We have all had him on our radar. Personnel has been sending him options.” Mr Band responded: “Great.” Mr Band was an important figure in helping Mr Clinton set up his post-presidential career and has since co-founded a New York company called Teneo Holdings.

While at the State Department, Ms Abedin received a special designation that allowed her to work at the agency while also doing outside work. During that period, she held two other positions, at the Clinton Foundation and at Teneo.

nor

In a separate exchange, Mr Band asked Ms Abedin and Cheryl Mills, another top aide to Mrs Clinton, to set up a meeting between a State Department official and a top donor to the Clinton Foundation.

“We need Gilbert Chagoury to speak to the substance person re Lebanon,” Mr Band wrote in April 2009. “As you know, he’s key guy there and to us and is loved in Lebanon. Very imp.”

Mr Chagoury, a Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire, has donated between $1 million and $5 million to the foundation, according to its disclosures.

mean anything at all.

There’s no connection.  Mm, mm.  From that, of course we don’t need to wonder about the content of those meetings, or trips, or favors, nor should we worry about what Federal goodies were given to folks like these.

Nah.  Not at all.