Tag Archives: ethics

Shameful

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The subheadline has the question:

Why is Joe Biden skipping Shinzo Abe’s funeral in Japan?

Never mind that Japan has been a staunch ally of ours since the middle of the last century. Never mind that Abe has been a staunch ally of ours his entire time in office and during his nominally retired years.

The other members of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—the Quad—are going to be there to pay their respects.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese are set to attend the ceremony alongside Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

Regardless of all of that, our President Joe Biden (D) stiffed Abe, and our ally Japan, at his funeral. Biden couldn’t be troubled to make the trip and attend. Instead, Biden sent Vice President Kamala Harris (D), tsar of everything in the Biden administration and doer of nothing, to take up that space.

Cashless Bail and Flight Risk

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Illinois has passed its cashless bail law, euphemistically styled the SAFE-T Act (Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today Act—how cute, how misleading). This is a law that will allow lots of suspects accused of violent crimes to walk without even needing a hearing—an Illinois magistrate can simply release the suspect, functionally, on his own word that he’ll appear in court when called to do so.

Supporters of the law, set to take effect at the beginning of next year, point out it does not prohibit detention and that anyone deemed a flight risk can be detained.

This is as cynical as it is disingenuous.

The degree of flight risk isn’t the only factor that should be used in assessing bail amounts; it isn’t even the most important. What’s central to bail consideration, or should be central, is the nature of the crime alleged and the degree of risk to the people in the local community from having the accused walking free among them.

A man accused of a violent crime needn’t flee in order to commit (further) violent crimes; indeed, most crimes (like politics) are local. And now he has a collection of targets in the local area against whom to commit further violence: witnesses against him, and their families.

Journalists Deceiving

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Project Veritas lost a case brought by Democracy Partnerships in the DC District Court, with the jury awarding $120,000 to the consultancy. The firm had been targeted by PV, and recordings made by an undercover PV operative strongly indicated that DP was engaged in efforts to incite violence at rallies for then-President Donald Trump in the final weeks of the 2016 Presidential campaign.

The DC jury, made up of residents of Washington, DC, decided that

the actions of the former operative…breached a fiduciary duty to the consulting firms and amounted to fraudulent misrepresentation….

Project Veritas has said it will appeal; founder James O’Keefe saying in part

The jury effectively ruled investigative journalists owe a fiduciary duty to the subjects they are investigating and that investigative journalists may not deceive the subjects they are investigating.

I generally agree with what Project Veritas does, discovers, and publicizes.

However.

Not here. No one should be able to deceive anyone; although in most cases, that’s a moral limit, not a legally actionable one.

There’s a fine line here regarding investigative journalism. Going undercover isn’t deception unless the operative openly lies about who he is or what he’s doing. Letting the target draw a wrong conclusion, though, is on the target: do a better job of vetting. The “fiduciary duty” is the target’s as part of its own decision to spend money.

Beyond that, though, deception is what journalists do far too routinely, especially to their readers and viewers. PV needs to do better in its defenses.

But not Protection of the Community

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It appears that Minneapolis’ Progressive-Democrat Mayor Jacob Frey, of Minneapolis’ post-Floyd murder rioting and his own disdain for letting the city’s police department deal with the rioters infamy, is ready to announce a new police chief—nine months after the Floyd era chief retired.

The new chief’s job description includes this Critical Item:

[A] visionary leader, able to communicate the need for and create long-lasting and systemic change within MPD.

Change within the police department, but no change in hizzoner‘s (non)enforcement policy or the department’s capacity for enforcement.

That’s not very reassuring for the damaged, even destroyed, neighborhoods and businesses, which were almost exclusively minority-populated and -owned.

“Pay Their Way Out of Jail”

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Illinois has a law, signed into that status by Progressive-Democrat Governor JB Pritzker, that will allow folks accused of any of a broad array of felonies, including kidnapping, armed robbery, second degree murder, drug induced homicide, aggravated DUI, threatening a public official, and aggravated fleeing and eluding to walk free pending trial under the law’s cashless bail component. This component takes effect next January.

The problem with this cashless bail foolishness of Illinois—with any jurisdiction’s cashless bail policy—is made crystalline by Pritzker’s reaction to one State’s Attorney’s lawsuit against Pritzker and his Attorney General, Kwame Raoul.

Kankakee County State’s Attorney Jim Rowe has filed a lawsuit in his county’s circuit court against the governor and state attorney general, arguing that the SAFE-T law violates the state constitution.
Pritzker’s office criticized the lawsuit, calling it a “weak attempt to protect the status quo that lets murderers and abusers pay their way out of jail.”

Pay their way out of jail. Pritzker wants to let murderers and abusers out of jail for free, instead. (And he completely ignored the premise that his policy violates the State’s constitution. Apparently, Pritzker cares not a fig for his State’s supreme law.)