Tag Archives: ethics

Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street Speeches

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She was for releasing the transcripts before she was against it. The fact is, there could well be contractual requirements for not releasing them. However, I discount that because if such contract clauses existed, she’d cite them. Her latest weasel-worded excuse for not releasing is this, instead, in response to a George Stephanopoulos question about why she’d not yet:

Yeah, you know, here’s another thing I want to say. Let everybody who’s ever given a speech to any private group under any circumstances release them. We’ll all release them at the same time. You know, I don’t mind being the subject in Republican debates, the subject in the Democratic primary. That kind of goes with the territory.…

Couple things about this. One is the typical Clintonian (and others’) tactic of releasing the bad news within a deluge of good news, other bad news, and utterly irrelevant news. Everyone releasing at the same time would bury whatever embarrassing or outright bad stuff might be in the Clintons’ Wall Street speeches.

The other thing is this: why not show the way and be the first to release the transcripts? Because that would be taking the high road.

Gross Incompetence?

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As if we didn’t need another reason to disband the Department of Education (see its Dear Colleague letter for an example of its gross dishonesty), here’s another, of utter failure to perform. DoE isn’t taking care of its digital data.

The Education Department doesn’t hold nuclear launch codes. But its vast data trove on student-loan borrowers and their parents—and the nearly $100 billion it disburses in new loans every year—are reason enough to want the bureaucrats to prevent digital intrusions. ….
The stakes go well beyond personal privacy. Federal student loans outstanding exceed $1 trillion, and Team Obama is trying to forgive those debts. It would add injury to injury if cyber-fraudsters were able to pile on for a taxpayer plundering.

It isn’t a matter of an isolated error, even a serious one, which can happen in any large enterprise, either.

Department of Education Inspector General Kathleen Tighe reported in November that her team has been “finding the same deficiencies over and over again” regarding information security. Since 2009 independent auditors “have found persistent IT control deficiencies in key financial systems,” she said.

For six years, auditors have found persistent DoE IT failure. This is not an inability to achieve perfection in personal digital data handling; this is a conscious and deliberate refusal to bother.

We don’t need a Federal government Department of this sort. Not at all.

Respect for Borders

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In addition to what it is showing with its sea grab, the PRC is demonstrating it has no respect for land borders, either. The PRC is actively sending its government forces—non-military, so far—into other nations to kidnap persons there that the PRC wants and bringing them back within the PRC’s borders.

Among those who have disappeared or been repatriated amid President Xi Jinping’s growing crackdown on dissent, rights groups say, are five Hong Kong publishers of Chinese political gossip, including one who was in the territory and one in Thailand at the time. Others in Thailand include a journalist seeking refuge, two activists who were recognized as refugees by the United Nations, and dozens of Turkic Uighur minority members. Two in the group are European citizens.

Ultimately, the victim nations are going to have to start defending themselves against what is little distinguishable from PRC invasions, capture the invading forces, and either jail them for espionage or imprison them as POWs in the quiet war the PRC is inflicting on them.

This is another response to the vacuum President Barack Obama’s (D) retreat from the world has created.

Voter Identification

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North Carolina’s Voter ID law is before the Federal Middle District of North Carolina with closing arguments just completed. The beef centers on the NAACP’s complaint (joined by the Obama administration) that voter identification is racist. Of course. What disagrees with the Left must be racist.

North Carolina’s law requires a prospective voter to have one of six forms of photographic identification, reduces the number of days of early voting, eliminates same day registration, and allows voters to cast provisional ballots if they say (not show) that they cannot meet the requirements (if a voter meets the requirements within a generous time frame after the voting, his provisional ballot becomes official).

The NAACP and the Obama DoJ think this is too onerous, and it disproportionately affects minorities.

This, though, is simply the racism of low expectations; it says the minorities are inherently less capable than other groups who do routinely meet these requirements.

Six forms of photo ID: driver license, driver license or non-operator identification, passport, tribal enrollment card, VA ID card, US military ID card. If a voter can’t get a photo ID, he has alternatives:

Provide their date of birth and last four digits of their Social Security number, or present their current voter registration card or a copy of an acceptable document bearing their name and address. (Acceptable documents include a current utility bill, bank statement, government check, paycheck, or other government-issued document.)

Anyone who says minorities are unable to satisfy those alternatives is simply insulting that minority—and doing it on the basis of race. Of course, there will be an occasional exception who truly cannot, but these isolated occurrences do not invalidate the requirement, they simply fall into a special handling category.

Reduced early voting days: there’s no requirement to have any early voting days at all; this is nothing more than a courtesy to reduce the need for absentee ballot handling. There’s an advantage to the voter, too, to reducing the number of days for early voting: it allows the voter more time to collect information about the candidates—a late-breaking announcement of Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s criminal indictment, for instance, or of a fifth filing for bankruptcy by a company owned by Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump.

No same day registration: this is no impediment at all; it works to the voter’s advantage, especially for the voter who has not been able to get a photo ID. Aside from reducing the lines at a polling place by not having to process same day registrations, it gives both the voter and the state more time to process the information the voter provides in order to cast a provisional ballot.

The NAACP and the DoJ are making a bogus beef. There are few things more central to our freedom than the sanctity of an American’s vote, and keeping that vote from being diluted or effectively canceled by an ineligible voter is central to protecting that vote. Photo IDs—proving that the prospective voter is who he says he is—is central to that centrality.

The courts have had a good track record in those cases selected by me for commentary at reaching proper decisions. Maybe this court also will reach a proper decision. An American’s vote certainly demands it.

More, Please

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A US Navy destroyer sailed within 12 nautical miles or within the territorial waters of an island [Triton Island, part of the Paracel Islands] claimed by China in the South China Sea, in a sign of increasing tension in the region days after Secretary of State John Kerry visited Beijing attempting to settle long standing territorial disputes. Taiwan and Vietnam also have claims to the island as well.

One small correction: the destroyer, the USS Curtis Wilbur, did not sail within the territorial waters of the PRC, even though it sailed within 12 nm of Triton in the western part of the South China Sea, roughly 250 miles east of Vietnam. The Paracels are not the territory of the PRC; its claim is just part of its overall grab for the entire Sea.

That’s part of the reason such sails-by are necessary: to emphasize the illegitimacy of the PRC’s claim and of its attempts to occupy the islands. We need more of these sailings, and we need frequent flyovers, too. These are things, though, that the Obama administration is too timid to do, or is unable to understand the necessity of the doing, or both.

Captain Jeff Davis, speaking for the Pentagon (and so for President Barack Obama (D)):

This operation was about challenging excessive maritime claims that restrict the rights and freedoms of the United States and others, not about territorial claims to land features[.]

And

[Last] week in Beijing, Secretary Kerry refused to criticize his host publicly or accuse the Chinese of wrong doing in the South China Sea over the build-up of artificial islands worrying its neighbors in the region. …the United States “does not take sides on the sovereignty questions underlying the territorial disputes.”

This is what’s wrong. We should be challenging the PRC over its expansionist occupation. If we truly do not “take sides on the sovereignty questions,” then we really do need to challenge, explicitly, the PRC’s seizures; that’s the bare minimum necessary to preserve the balance among the competing claims over those islands, and of the Spratlys, and of the South China Sea as a whole, which the PRC has occupied (and of the East China Sea, which the PRC also has moved to occupy).