Tag Archives: ethics

One’s a Liar

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..but the other is not?

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is being accused of having lied to the Senate during his confirmation hearing about whether he’d had any campaign-related conversations with Russian government officials during the campaign.  Sessions said no, nothing related to the campaign, and then it came out that he had had a couple of conversations with the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in Sessions’ capacity as Senator from Alabama.  Must be a lie.  Never mind that he answered truthfully.

Then we get Senator Claire McCaskill (D, MO) tweeting out

Then other McCaskill tweets surfaced.

But she didn’t lie in her denial of ever—not ever—meeting with a Russian ambassador.  It was a Twitter character limit misunderstanding.  Sure.

Oh, wait—one’s a Progressive-Democrat, the other is a Republican.

Call Them on Their Obstructionism

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Heather Higgins, CEO of Independent Women’s Voice, says go big or go home regarding Obamacare.  Republicans in Congress should quit dithering, should not play reconciliation games, and should simply put an Obamacare repeal and replace package up for vote.  This would force the Democrat obstructionists—especially those #NeverTrumpNoHow and #NeverRepublicanNotEver Progressive-Democrats in the Senate on the record as by-name blocking reform of the Obama program that is in its death spiral, the endpoint of which will leave millions of Americans without health coverage and without even coverage providers to which to appeal.  Especially put those 10 Progressive-Democrats pretending to moderacy in order to protect their precarious reelection chances in 2018 on the spot.

Now that insurers are acknowledging the death spiral, there’s an opportunity for bolder action. The House could use regular order, not reconciliation, to pass a bill that not only fully repeals ObamaCare—returning control of the private market to the states—but simultaneously puts into effect at least the core components of reform while including grandfathering and other provisions to smooth the transition to lower-priced options on the free market.

Such a bill could easily pass the House, putting pressure on the Senate. Would Minority Leader Chuck Schumer allow proper consideration of much-needed health-care reform? And with all the evidence that ObamaCare has been a disaster and—untouched by Republicans—is quickly unraveling, would Democrats, 25 of whom are up for re-election next year, vote to defend the status quo?

And

There would be two Senate filibuster points—the first, to allow consideration; the second, to allow a vote. Thinking through what would happen, the American public and Trump administration would be well served by this exercise of transparent democracy.
…
If Democrats blocked consideration of the bill, they would do President Trump a favor by showing the public the parliamentary shenanigans of the anti-deliberation filibuster—call it the “Senatorial Full Employment Through Avoiding Tough Votes” maneuver.

And

If Democrats refuse to allow debate, Republicans should kill the filibuster against deliberation (as distinct from the filibuster to end debate and hold a vote). They can do so by simple majority vote, as Harry Reid showed when he ended the filibuster against most nominations in 2013. Either way, the Senate can actually have a vote on repealing the Affordable Care Act and reforming health care.

Republicans should heed this advice, and go for it.  If it fails, Republicans can always go the reconciliation route.

Of Course He Does

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California has an infrastructure failure problem that involves everything from its roads to its dams and other water control facilities.  Governor Jerry Brown (D) says it will cost $187 billion to fix its infrastructure, and he wants $12 billion per year of Federal funding to help with that.  In actuality, Brown doesn’t want Federal funding, he wants what Federal funding consists of: money taxed by the Federal government from the good citizens of financial straitened New York to help pay for his needs, he wants money taxed by the Federal government from the good citizens of nearly bankrupt Illinois to help pay for his needs, he wants money taxed by the Federal government from the good citizens of fiscally responsible and so flush Texas and Utah to help pay for his needs.

He doesn’t care that his State’s infrastructure is in such poor shape because he and prior administrations of both parties deferred maintenance they knew at the time was promptly needed.

When asked why California hadn’t spent more on infrastructure before, Mr Brown said it wasn’t seen as a priority before. “This is the way the world works,” he said. “The immediate takes precedence over the more fundamental.”

Leadership wouldn’t acquiesce so meekly to the immediate, though.  Leadership would push the matter and get his bosses, the citizens of California in the present case, behind the more fundamental.

Oh, and there is the “green” lobby, too.  Amid all the current plenty of water, all that’s happening is flooding (those badly maintained dams are part of this problem, to be sure), denial of that plentiful water to farmers, and routing of plentiful water that isn’t flooding straight to the sea.  For instance,

the Central Valley Project Improvement Act[] diverted 1.5 million acre-feet of water—roughly a fifth of the total water delivery—annually to wildlife and green hobbyhorses. That ultimately means flushing it out into the ocean. “Basically, they’ve now legislated a permanent drought in the San Joaquin Valley,” Mark Borba, a cotton farmer….

That’s still going on.  And this:

The San Joaquin River Restoration Program, the result of a 2006 settlement in a lawsuit over fish habitat, took away another some 225,000 acre-feet of water annually.

Progressive-Democrats are willing only to spend OPM; fiscal responsibility, discipline in spending their own money is an alien concept.

It’s certainly true that in a republican democracy all of the States are in the nation together, and all of the States need to, are bound to, support each other, as Brown and others have also claimed.  But a major part of that mutual support is each State not creating itself a burden on any of the other 49 through its own wanton profligacy.

The NLMSM’s Hurt Feelings

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The Trump administration had a press gaggle Friday.  A gaggle is a press pool that is a subset of the press who then participate in a press conference, and the members of the pool are responsible for getting the content of the conference to the rest of the press.  The Friday gaggle was an expanded one in that, in addition to the pool itself, additional members of the press were explicitly invited to participate—which of course means yet other members, the vast majority of the press, were not explicitly invited to attend.

The additional invitees included reporters from CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox Business, and Fox News. Not invited were Buzzfeed, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the New York Daily News, the Hill, and Politico.

Therein lies the problem, at least in the minds of the Precious Ones (keep in mind that there would have been no outcry had the gaggle not been expanded).  Buzzfeed, NYT, LAT, et al., have their panties in a wedgie over not having been included when the other outlets were.  They’re so special: how dare the White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, the man who made the decision to expand the gaggle for the occasion and who decided who would be the expanded invitees, not exclude (the Precious Ones’ term—”not invited in as extras” not being the same as “kept out”) those others and include themselves instead?

Indeed, they’ve spent the last several days publishing stories about how they were excluded (again, their term), while not reporting on substantive matters (and while not saying who was included in their stead).  They’ve chosen, instead, to create their special selves as the news instead of being reporters of and opiners on the news.

And they’re confused over why they’re not taken seriously by mainstream America.

Does a foreigner on foreign soil have Fourth Amendment rights?

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That’s the subtitle of a Wall Street Journal op-ed.  The answer should be obvious, too: it would be the height of jingo-ism to assert US government jurisdiction over non-citizens outside our borders—outside, for instance, the 14th Amendment’s subject to the jurisdiction of the US.

Firing into another country at a foreign national, especially one that’s a citizen of the country being fired into, could well be a violation, but that potential would be a violation of a different set of circumstances than the question before the Supremes in the present case, Hernandez v Mesa.  That other set of circumstance has to do with international relations, foreign policy, the nature of casus belli, and on and on—and all purely political matters, not legal ones, and so not only a different set of circumstances, but a matter that’s outside the reach of court jurisdiction.