Tag Archives: ethics

Do We Really Need Four More Years?

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Here’s what nearly eight years of Progressivism, accomplished by President Barack Obama (D) and his Progressive-Democrat acolytes in the Democratic Party, have done.  As The Wall Street Journal put it:

  • largest stimulus spending bill in decades
  • Obamacare
  • nationalized the student-loan industry
  • turned the banks into public utilities answerable first to government

All of these have created the slowest recession recovery since WWII.  The nominally low unemployment rate that has been achieved is measured against the backdrop of the lowest labor participation rate in 40 years—in two generations.  Banks as government-managed public utilities, no longer responsive exclusive to the banks’ owners and creditors—which includes us individual savings and checking account holders?  That’s just another means for government to collect revenue.

Progressivism has been bypassing our republican democracy form of representative government for the last several years, too.  Obama has ruled by Executive diktat Executive Order, Executive Action, Department/Agency rulemaking to achieve

  • climate change
  • organizing

Then there’s foreign affairs.

  • deals with adversaries—the nuclear weapons deal with Iran, for instance, and acceptance of Russian partitions of Georgia and Ukraine
  • distanced us from our allies—denigrating Israel over their efforts to defend themselves against Palestinian terrorism, for instance
  • with Progressivism’s cynical budget maneuvering there’s less ability to support military spending—to the tune of defense spending falling to 3% of GDP and less—down from 4.6% those eight years ago

All of this is Progressivism’s pell-mell retreat from our responsibilities on the global stage, and that world is far more unstable and dangerous to us and to those friends and allies than it was eight years ago.

Then there’s Progressivism’s attitude toward us plebeian Americans.  They’ve plied the politics of identity to divide us by ideology, age, race, class, gender, and any other cleverly defined separation they could create, and then they’ve played these artificial distinctions (we used to be all Americans, after all, who happened to be of one gender or the other, have one skin color or another, one ethnic heritage or another) against each other in Progressives’ cynical effort to maximize their personal power.

Do we really need—can our nation really afford—four more years of the same?

Progressive Democrats

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Senator Tim Kaine (D, VA) is Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s running mate.  Clinton said in her speech introducing him that he as a good Progressive candidate, and in a later speech, Kaine agreed with that characterization.

OK.  Let’s accept his Progressivism, even though the Leftists don’t entirely agree.

Kaine makes a big deal about his work as a missionary in Honduras.  Kudos to him for his contributions to Hondurans.

But we should ask him: what has he done for Americans, say in Appalachia, where his running mate has promised to destroy Applachians’ jobs and make them dependents of government, or in the Ozarks, where jobs are similarly scarce and opportunity similarly limited?

We should ask him, too, whether he supports his fellow Progressive Democrat’s—New York Governor Mario Cuomo—active obstruction of New Yorkers’ opportunities while simultaneously jacking up the cost of heating their homes in those northeastern winters with his ban fracking.

Does he care only about foreign poverty–a legitimate concern, to be sure–and not about poverty and opportunity in his own country?  We do, after all, have an AmeriCorps VISTA program that’s alive and well, and Teach for America that focuses on education for poverty-ridden children, and Teaching Fellows that also focuses on the poor and otherwise disadvantaged, and on and on.  What has he done to support domestic programs like these?

And there’s this bit about Clinton’s and Kaine’s Progressivism, which goes back to the early 20th Century. Here’s what Herb Croly, one of the founders of the Progressive Movement during that early 20th Century period (a movement that was carried forward by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, and pushed enthusiastically today by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton), had to say about us Americans and about democracy in his The Promise of American Life:

To be sure, any increase in centralized power and responsibility, expedient or inexpedient, is injurious to certain aspects of traditional American democracy. But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition; and the erroneous and misleading tradition must yield before the march of constructive national democracy.

And

…the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.

Do we really want folks with this level of contempt for Americans and for America in our Federal government?

Some More Thoughts on Climate

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…via Watts Up With That?

On the matter of Earth suffering the fate of Venus [boldface emphasis in the original, italics emphasis added]:

  • Venus is closer to the Sun. Venus is aprox 0.72 AU distant from the sun (72% of Earth’s), with a total solar irradiance (TSI) almost 2x that of Earth.
  • Venus has a denser atmosphere. The pressure on Venus is 93x that of Earth, the equivalent of almost 1 kilometer under the ocean. This is probably the largest factor causing its high temperature.
  • The clouds of Venus are mostly sulphuric acid (not water vapor)—a powerful greenhouse agent.
  • The atmosphere of Venus has nearly 3000x more CO2 than Earth’s atmosphere. Venus is 96.5% CO2 by volume vs 380 [parts] per million for Earth (0.038%). Goldblatt el al say that with CO2 at 30,000 ppm Earth would have “no stable temperate climate.” That would require burning 10x more than Earth’s estimated fossil fuel resources.

On the matter of Earth’s own history.  From our Eocene period (56 million to 34 million years ago, the age when mammals began taking over from the dinosaurs):

  • With the solar constant 1% less than today and a few thousand ppmv CO2, the mean temperature was 10oK (roughly 20oF) warmer than today. With CO2 and temperature both higher then than we expect in the foreseeable future, this implies that an anthropogenic runaway greenhouse is unlikely.
  • We expect a runaway greenhouse on Earth 1.5 billion years hence if water is the only greenhouse gas, or sooner if there are others.

That last, especially, would seem to be a period beyond the useful timeframe of even the most hubristic climatista’s policy demands.

Another Judicial Misbehavior

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The Fifth Circuit, in a 9-6 ruling, has said that Texas’ Voter ID law violates the Federal Voting Rights Act and returned it to the trial court to…fix…it.

[The appellate court] instructed a lower court to come up with an “interim remedy” before the November election.

Therein lies a major part of the problem.  Regardless of what one might think of the particular law, any alteration to it is a political matter, to be done by the people and their elected representatives.  The courts have no authority whatsoever to write law or to rewrite an extant one; indeed, our Constitution explicitly bars the courts from such things.

There’s more.  Writing for the majority, Judge Catharina Haynes wrote this, having already acknowledged that there is no direct evidence of discriminatory intent.

In this day and age we rarely have legislators announcing an intent to discriminate based upon race, whether in public speeches or private correspondence. To require direct evidence of intent would essentially give legislatures free reign to racially discriminate so long as they do not overtly state discrimination as their purpose and so long as they proffer a seemingly neutral reason for their actions.  This approach would ignore the reality that neutral reasons can and do mask racial intent….

In other words, whenever legislators disagree with judges, judges must proceed from a presumption of dishonesty on the part of the legislators.  Direct evidence be damned.

[C]ourts may consider both circumstantial and direct evidence of intent as may be available.

Because circumstantial evidence, especially in the absence of direct evidence, can be interpreted in any way convenient to the judge’s predisposition—or to a litigant’s narrative.  That’s why circumstantial evidence is so sketchy in the first place.

The dissent, written by Judge Edith Jones, makes the majority’s shameful behavior plain.

No one doubts our unwavering duty to enforce antidiscrimination law. But in this media-driven and hyperbolic era, the discharge of that duty requires the courage to distinguish between invidious motivation and shadows. The ill-conceived, misguided, and unsupported majority opinion shuns discernment. Because of definitive Supreme Court authority, no comparable federal court precedent in over forty years has found a state legislative act motivated by purposeful racial discrimination.

All of that represents a very serious bit of judicial misbehavior, and it puts a premium on getting this 2016 election right.  A Progressive-Democrat in the White House, together with a Democrat-owned [sic] Senate, will have damaging effects far beyond the Supreme Court damage I’ve been on about in other articles: they’ll have their impact on lower courts, too, and throughout our judicial system.

The ruling can be seen here.

Welcome to the Bigs

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…and to the way the People’s Republic of China treats its foes, Mr President,

Recall that the PRC was resoundingly crushed in a case brought by the Philippines concerning the PRC’s violations of Philippine waters in the South China Sea, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague having ruled, sharply, in favor of the Philippines on all but the most trivial of the charges.

Recall, also, that newly elected Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte had said—repeatedly—that he wanted bilateral talks with the PRC regarding the South China Sea and the items in dispute.

At a cabinet meeting in progress when word of the ruling arrived, one of Duterte’s Ministers said he’d had dinner the night before with the PRC’s ambassador, and that ambassador—before the ruling had been announced—had provided a list of things the PRC required Duterte to say and not say in any press release he might release about the then-forthcoming ruling.  Earlier that same day of the dinner, too, Duterte had met with that same ambassador to assure him that no embarrassing remarks would be forthcoming.  Duterte’s response to that list?

 Didn’t he trust what I told him?

Welcome, indeed, to the contempt with which the Center of Heaven views its foes.