Tag Archives: ethics

Progressive-Democratic Party Payback?

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Or is it Big Tech payback? Or both?

Recall Elon Musk’s renewed commitment to buy Twitter, and recall also his commitment to free speech and to ending Twitter’s bias and censorship.

Now the Biden administration is “reviewing” the proposal for its national security implications.

US officials have grown uncomfortable over Musk’s recent threat to stop supplying the Starlink satellite service to Ukraine—he said it had cost him $80 million so far—and what they see as his increasingly Russia-friendly stance following a series of tweets that outlined peace proposals favorable to President Vladimir Putin. They are also concerned by his plans to buy Twitter with a group of foreign investors.

Of course there was no threat to stop the Ukraine-Starlink facility; Musk only said he wasn’t sure he could continue to cover the cost alone. The Biden administration objected to the idea of no longer having that freebie.

How dare Musk propose peace talks between Ukraine and Russia. That’s President Joe Biden’s (D) and SecState Antony Blinken’s (D) job. Private citizens should just sit down and shut up.

How dare Musk put together an international consortium to buy a company with global reach? Neither Progressive-Democrats nor the Precious Ones of Twitter approve.

Need to do that “security” evaluation.

Courts and (Public) Opinion

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In a letter in Thursday’s Letters section of The Wall Street Journal, Walter Smith claims to have argu[ed] several cases personally before the Supreme Court (“claims,” because unlike many Letter writers, his signature block makes no mention of his status as a lawyer, past or present), and he expressed considerable dismay over the basis of Court decisions and subsequent Court “legitimacy.”

The court’s majority has made clear that it doesn’t care about public opinion or many of the harmful consequences of its decisions.

I have to wonder how many cases Smith won before the Supreme Court, with such a breathtaking lack of understanding of the Supreme Court’s—of any American court’s—role, an understanding any first year law student gains.

The Court’s role is not to wave to and fro with the winds of public opinion, but to rule on what the Constitution and the statute(s) before the Court say.

Full stop.

That’s why judges and Justices have lifetime appointments—deliberately to insulate them from public opinion, and from politics altogether.

But Smith wasn’t done.

As Abraham Lincoln said: “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.”

Indeed. But that was Politician Lincoln, not Judge Lincoln. If Smith doesn’t like the Court’s rulings, his beef is with the political branches of our republican government, the men and women of which wrote the laws the Court must apply.

I suggest he begin his remedial training on the American legal system by writing our Constitution’s Article I, Section 1, 100 times on his blackboard.

Apologies

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Elliot Kaufman had an op-ed in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal that talked about the utility of apologies from Stanford University and the various failures of that school in its serial mistreatment of Jews along with the several machinations the school used to push that mistreatment.

I’m less interested in apologies from schools like Stanford than I am in changes in the schools’ behavior.

Such changes, though, won’t be possible without a complete turnover in school management, from the President/Chancellor/what-have-you on down through middle management, along with removal/replacement of Department Chairs and their seconds, and elimination of frivolous departments like the plethora of DEI and related claptrap.

Absent that—all of that—words of apology will only be, can only be, empty chit-chat and cynical distraction from the problem.

Election Cheating

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Pennsylvania’s legislature has made clear that undated mail-in ballots are invalid ballots and cannot be counted.

Even so, Pennsylvania’s Progressive-Democratic Party governor Tom Wolf has ordered counties to continue counting undated ballots.

His move comes even after a ruling in a related Pennsylvania case:

Last week the US Supreme Court sided with another Republican politician in the state and invalidated hundreds of mail-in ballots that the state had previously counted even though they lacked a date along with the voter signature.

As the Progressive-Democrat Wolf knows full well, he has no such authority. Here’s our Constitution’s Article I, Section 4:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof….

The State’s legislature makes that decision, not anyone in the State’s Executive Branch—or in the State’s Judicial Branch. Pennsylvania’s legislature has spoken on the matter very clearly: undated ballots are invalid and uncountable. Full stop.

Americans shouldn’t have to go into court as a matter of course to enforce any law, including an election law. The matter of course should be following the law, with resorting to court the exception.

We Americans need to remember this, and remember who thinks laws can be disregarded at convenience, in the elections coming up.

Indentured Servitude

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The Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West wants to force unionization on companies and their employees whether those employees want it or not. The SEIU-UHW’s proximate target is California’s dialysis industry. California’s Proposition 29 is the union’s latest (after two prior ballot failures in the two prior election cycles) effort targeting dialysis.

The measure, which would require dialysis clinics to have a physician, nurse practitioner or physician assistant “on-site during all patient treatment hours, would cost dialysis clinics $376,000 to $731,000 per year—per clinic. That would drive many into bankruptcy closure because they can’t afford those costs.

That’s bad enough. Here, though, is the enforcement mechanism the union has included in its ballot measure.

[T]he language of Prop 29 says it would prohibit “clinics from closing or substantially reducing services without state approval.”

That’s naked indentured servitude. That’s what unions want. Recall unions’ prior and long-standing drive to force non-union workers in any company to pay union dues under the guise that the union is working for them as well as their actual members.

Now unions want to reduce businesses and their employees to the status of serfs, permanently tied to the land/permanently tied to operation.