Tag Archives: ethics

Disingenuosity in Wisconsin’s Legislature

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A bill that would prevent election workers from correcting mistakes a voter makes on his absentee ballot is making its way through the State’s legislature. The bill would

would clarify that only voters or their witnesses can correct a mistake on an absentee ballot.

After all, as Congresswoman Donna Rozar (R-Marshfield) put it:

Because [absentee voting] is a privilege, there’s got to be some responsibility that the voter has to exercise that privilege. And I think that responsibility is to do it right and legally.

The disingenuosity is illustrated by Congresswoman Lisa Subek (D-Madison):

I don’t care if absentee voting is a privilege. That doesn’t mean you should have to pass a test, or make sure that you dot every I and cross every T. If someone makes an innocent, honest mistake, it is appalling that we’re not going to then let their ballot count.

Subek cynically exaggerates what the bill does. There’s no test (other than the implied one of being able to read well enough to read the ballot—but witnesses and others approved by the voter can help with that—and every uncrossed i or undotted t do not disqualify the ballot.

The biggest bit of dishonesty (here, not mere disingenuousness) is her claim of not letting the ballot count. The bill explicitly allows the voter in question, or his witness, to correct the error, thereby making the ballot count.

It’s only invalid ballots that wouldn’t count, especially were the bill to pass.

Bipartisanship and Hypocrisy

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As I write on Wednesday, President Joe Biden (D) is negotiating with Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R, WV) and some of her Republican Senate colleagues on an infrastructure bill. Or so he says.

The Republicans already have nearly doubled their surrendercounter-offer from their original $500+ billion dollar for a bill limited to actual infrastructure to more than $900 billion for a gussied up bill that is less than strictly about infrastructure. That’s some negotiation Capito and hers are doing.

The yet more serious problem, though—if that’s possible—is the behavior of Biden and his Congressional Progressive-Democrats.

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D, WA):

So why are we negotiating with Republicans for a smaller infrastructure plan? Now is the time to GO BIG.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY):

The Republican party has already shown a pattern of the fact that their vote can’t even be counted on[.]

Because too many Republicans won’t vote the way their Betters tell them to.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY):

Reconciliation is certainly a serious consideration to get that big, bold action if we can’t get it with Republicans[.]

If Republicans won’t be bipartisan the way Progressive-Democrats demand, they need to be bypassed and ignored.

There’s also the question of who’s actually in charge in the White House. Senator Roger Wicker (R, MS):

If the president gets to make the decision, he will accept this [surrender offer of the $900+ billion proposal.]

Because when Republicans go talk to Biden’s subordinates,

they’ve been frustrated by subsequent talks with his aides and other White House staffers, who they say appear to be less interested in making a deal than the president….

Of course, Biden is the one in charge; his subordinates are simply doing out of the public’s eye what he’s instructed them to do, out of the public’s eye.

“The White House,” last Tuesday:

The president is looking forward to hosting Senator Capito on Wednesday afternoon at the White House, where they will continue their bipartisan negotiations about investing in our middle class and economic growth through infrastructure.

Well of course he is. He’s enjoying his pro forma meetings.

Biden’s pseudo-negotiating is a sham, purely for eyewash and to accrue talking points for next year’s election campaigns.

Privacy—and Trust

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Parents of children in the People’s Republic of China have a new “aid.”

ByteDance is peddling a “study lamp” that lets teachers and parents constantly monitor children, ostensibly while the children are doing their schoolwork.

The lamps come equipped with two built-in cameras—one facing the child and another offering a bird’s-eye view from above—letting parents remotely monitor their children when they study. There is a smartphone-sized screen attached to each lamp, which applies artificial intelligence to offer guidance on math problems and difficult words. And parents can hire a human proctor to digitally monitor their children as they study.

What else, though, is ByteDance monitoring, what other data is ByteDance collecting about the kids, the things they’re doing, with whom they’re doing it, parents’ handling of their kids? And passing it on to the PRC’s intelligence community under that 2017 law?

There’s also the question of trust. Not trust in Big Brother—or Uncle Xi—but trust between children and parents, and the ability of children to trust at all. What message are parents sending to their own children when the parents—and other authority figures, known to the children to be there at the parents’ request—insist on being, constantly and immediately, over the kids’ shoulders to be sure those kids are behaving properly? That the kids are fundamentally untrustworthy, maybe? That they’re unworthy in some way?

And there’s the creation of dependency on instant answers.

Some Chinese media outlets and parents have also criticized the idea of placing an interactive touch screen in front of children as they study, warning that the lamp would make children accustomed to seeking easy answers from technology.

And what brave new world for us when ByteDance brings these…devices…to America?

Arrogance and Cowardice

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Texas’ Progressive-Democrat State congressmen have joined Wisconsin’s Progressive-Democrat State congressmen and Indiana’s Progressive-Democrat State congressmen in their abject cowardice, masked by their o’erweening arrogance.

In order to block legislation of which they personally disapprove, they’ve run away from the State’s House of Representatives explicitly to deny a quorum and to block a bill that would expand access to the ballot box while also expanding the sanctity of each Texas citizen’s vote.

Texas Democrats walked out of the state House’s chamber just before midnight on Sunday to deny Republicans the quorum needed to hold a final vote on a controversial bill that would tighten voting laws in the state.

This has been all too typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party over the last several years. If they can’t get their way, they block democracy—especially our republican form of democracy—altogether with their cowardly and toddler-esque temper tantrums.

Or they rule with their pen and phone. Or, when they’re in complete control, they simply ignore all others and act unilaterally. Or as President Joe Biden (D) has said, repeatedly, regarding the spendiferous and tax exploding bills Party currently is ramming through, he’d like to have Republican bipartisanship, but if they won’t come along, he and Party will act alone.

This instruction from the State’s House Minority Leader Chris Turner (D, 101st District (centered in Tarrant County) says it all.

Members, take your key and leave the chamber discreetly. Do not go to the gallery. Leave the building.

Do not go to the gallery. Slink away through the back door and alley. Do not face Texas’ citizens.

Keep in mind, too, that this isn’t the first time that Texas’ Progressive-Democrats have run away from their duties.

Yet Another Border Misapprehension

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…by a Progressive-Democrat.

This one is by Congressman Raul Ruiz (D, CA), Chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Asked whether Vice President Kamala Harris (D), appointed by President Joe Biden (D) to be responsible for and to lead solutions to our rapidly expanding illegal immigration crisis on our southern border, Ruiz gave a weasel-worded answer, but he said this much quite clearly:

I’m sure that someday she will [visit the border]. If you’re going to be strategic, right, she’s tasked with addressing the root causes of migration north. You don’t find the root causes at a CBP station at the border, you find the root causes by speaking to individuals who have fled. You speak to the leaders of local organizations, to the countries that they’re fleeing…industry leaders and UN human rights activists, and that’s exactly what she’s doing.

No, you don’t find root causes to anything without first understanding what it is that’s being caused.

And that requires speaking to individuals who have fled, yes, but at our border, when those individuals’ concerns, their outright fears, still are fresh in their minds, not after they’ve been settled in the interior and given words to say by the handlers on whom they’re dependent for their continued welfare.

That requires visits to our border, not to the personal safety of a CBP border station. Without visiting the border, a Progressive-Democrat will not observe the illegal aliens crossing our border individually and in groups, the children traveling alone or being dropped over a border fence to fend for themselves or being abandoned by their handlers once across the border.

The Progressive-Democrat Ruiz, Harris, Biden—any of them—can have no hope of understanding the “root causes” of our border crisis without first understanding those outcomes. Absent that understanding, they can have no idea for what they’re looking.

It’s instructive that one as awesomely brilliant as Ruiz chooses not to see that.