Tag Archives: ethics

Another Biased Federal Judge

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US District Judge Nicholas Garaufis, of the Eastern District of New York, blatantly and zealously does not like President Donald Trump, as many folks do not.  However, the judge is hearing a case concerning whether to block Trump’s withdrawal of ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) unconstitutionally applied DACA protections, and that overt bias may well feed into his ruling on what should be an open and shut question: the DACA protections were illegally applied, and apart from that, they were applied by DHS Memorandum, and so even were Obama’s DACA legal, the protections can be removed by Memorandum or by a President’s Executive Order.

Amazingly, Garaufis is considering the weight to be given to Trump’s campaign rhetoric as though that could be relevant, and the text of the law be damned.

Judge Garaufis appeared to struggle with how much to weigh Mr Trump’s prior comments in determining whether to temporarily block the unwinding of DACA, saying he couldn’t ignore them.

“I’m not sure what the answer is,” Judge Garaufis said.

If the good judge doesn’t understand the question, he should recuse himself.  If he doesn’t understand so basic a question, he has no business being on the bench at all.

It gets worse.

In a speech to the Heritage Foundation last year, Mr [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions cited a comment from Judge Garaufis at a hearing in the same case in which he said the government “can’t come into court to espouse a position that is heartless.” Mr Sessions said comments like this are “highly offensive and disrespectful” of the legislative and executive branches.

Getting visibly angry, Judge Garaufis said of Mr Sessions, “He seems to think the courts cannot have an opinion.”

Yewbetcha.  Courts cannot have political opinions.  Not a syllable of one.  It’s appalling that a Federal judge does not understand this, or pretends not to.

In Which the New York Times and the BBC Miss Again

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It seems the women journalists in the pay of the BBC were being paid significantly less than their male colleagues, to the point that Carrie Gracie, BBC’s China Editor, resigned her position in protest (I’m citing a New York Times report about the BBC.  Why that’s important, rather than citing a BBC report directly, will come clear in a bit).  Gracie has returned to London, still a BBC journalist, but there she’ll be paid the same as her male colleagues.

And how did that equal pay come about, you might ask?

According to “the organization” (presumably a BBC mucky-muck or BBC mucky-muck’s spokesman),

The BBC has agreed to pay cuts with a number of leading BBC News presenters, and others have agreed in principle[.]

Jeremy Vine, one of the high-powered, and highly paid, journalists getting his pay cut, agreed with the move, and he did so in all seriousness.

I think it needs to be sorted out, and I support my female colleagues who have rightly said they should be paid the same when they’re doing the same job.  I think the BBC’s on it, and this story is part of it.

Wow.  Just wow.

If Gracie really is the doing substantially the same work as her colleagues, why shouldn’t she get a pay raise to get to substantially the same pay?  That’s how bad it is, folks.  This is the Left’s mindset.  It doesn’t even occur to them to raise the pay of the lower paid.  All they can think of is to cut the higher paid.

Hold back the successful.  Don’t push forward those behind.  Instead of a win-win outcome, the Left prefers the everybody loses outcome.

On second thought, the NYT, which was as silent on the pay cut/pay raise question as the BBC, and the BBC didn’t miss.  This is what progressives, the Liberal NLMSM, and the US’ Progressive-Democratic Party want.  Hold back the ones ahead, don’t help the ones behind catch up.

Withholding Evidence

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Ex-Vice President Joe Biden (D) appears to have confessed to it.

Biden said a Congressional “gang of twelve” met with Obama White House officials on the matter and laid out what they knew.

Biden’s and Obama’s reaction?

“The president and I sat there and said ‘what the hell are we going to do?'” Biden said. “You go out there and unilaterally say ‘this is what’s happening,’ you’re going to be accused of…trying to tip the election.

So they sat on the information—us uninformed voters are just too grindingly stupid to be trusted with this sort of information, the Progressive-Democrat says.

The former Delaware senator said he and Obama were concerned that describing alleged Russian involvement to a higher extent “could be used as a weapon against” nominee Hillary Clinton.

Biden added,

The die had been cast here. This was all about the political play[.]

There it is, straight from the Progressive-Democrat’s mouth.  Party politics was more important than pursuing a possible Russian interference, more important even than letting us voters know about the potential.  The withholding is the Progressive-Democratic Party’s own attempt to “tip” the election.

All for the sole reasons of protecting his BFF’s (ex-President Barack Obama (D)) reputation and of protecting their Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Remember this duplicity in the fall.

Distraction

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Top Democrats are calling on Facebook and Twitter to investigate and release information behind potential Russian-linked accounts pushing for the release of a sealed congressional memo allegedly containing details on US government surveillance abuses.

It couldn’t possibly be that there really is a broad public hue and cry to that information released.  Us uninformed voters, denizens of fly-over country, couldn’t possibly know enough to demand the release on our own.

No, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) and Congressman Adam Schiff (D, CA), the two “top Democrats” in the quote, are desperate to have a distraction.  Us uninformed might find out too much.

It’s rich coming from a Senator who released to the public, unethically, a Senate Judiciary Committee report concerning Fusion GPS and then blamed her unethical behavior on having taken cold medicines and so she wasn’t thinking clearly.  Feinstein and I are of an age, and I’ve taken cold medicines, too.  They’ve never addled my brain.

It’s also a bit much coming from a Congressman who’s not the least bit curious about the Steele dossier; he just wants that matter dropped.

PRC Economic Opening

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Liu He, head of the People’s Republic of China’s Office of the Central Leading Group for Financial and Economic Affairs, says,

We’ll open wider to the world across the board[.]

Liu promised that the PRC would

  • “substantially” open up the services industry, particularly the financial sector
  • let foreign securities firms own majority stakes in their Chinese ventures and…scrap foreign ownership limits on Chinese banks
  • reiterated past promises to relax restrictions on foreign companies in manufacturing, including in railway equipment, and to gradually lower tariffs on imported products such as automobiles

Even if they do these things (and that’s no certain thing: notice those past, unkept, promises), Liu’s—and Xi’s—rhetoric is just wind in the trees as long as the PRC demands that

  • foreign companies partner with domestic companies as a condition of doing business in the PRC
  • foreign companies are required to “share” technology and other intellectual property
  • foreign companies are required to give backdoors to the PRC government for the latter’s entry into those companies’ critical software and other proprietary information.

This not only is “legalized” theft, it’s backdoor protectionism.