Tag Archives: ethics

Ashamed of our Heritage

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The Democratic Party of Connecticut is that. They’ve voted to strip the names of two of our Founders from their annual fund-raising dinner. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were slave holders, and so are unfit to be…what…Founders? Never mind that most of our Founders were slave holders—that was the norm of the time—or had feet of other serious clay.

What’s next, Washington’s Birthday will exclude George Washington, slave owner?

This was Party Chairman Nick Balletto’s “brainstorm.”

Democrats are the party of inclusion. And in my opinion, the time has come to reevaluate the name of the JJB [the dinner] to reflect the diverse makeup and forward-looking vision of our party[.]

Sure. The party of inclusion via the KKK. The party of inclusion via Jim Crow. The party of inclusion of racist, sexist affirmative action that excludes groups of Americans because they don’t have the preferred—dare I say privileged?—skin color or gender.

This is the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the Democratic Party made manifest.

School Choice and Unions

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There’s a contradiction in terms.

In January parents filed a petition to convert Palm Lane Elementary in Anaheim into a charter under California’s 2010 parent-trigger law, which allows a majority of parents in any failing school to force changes.

Naturally, the school’s district officials and teachers union demurred. Never mind that

Palm Lane had made the state Department of Education’s list of underperforming schools since 2003. Fewer than 40% of students scored proficient in English in 2013. About 85% are Hispanic, and most are low-income.

(Where is the Obama DoJ and disparate impact? Oh, wait…).

The officials and the unions went so far as to disregard California law as they dragged their feet and openly obstructed the conversion—and loss of union jobs and of income for the district officials’ use.

[U]nion even complained that signature gatherers were bribing parents with free iPads, a false allegation that the district superintendent repeated in a cautionary letter to parents.

Though more than 60% of parents signed the petition, the district threw out dozens of signatures that could not be “verified.” That is, the parents could not be reached between the hours of 8:30 am and 4:30 pm to confirm that they signed the petition. Maybe that’s because they were working.

Fortunately, and once again, a judge got one right.

Last Thursday Orange County Superior Court Judge Andrew Banks ruled in favor of the parents on all counts and rebuked the district’s conduct as “unreasonable, arbitrary, capricious and unfair.” He also scored district officials for violating their obligation under the trigger law to work in good faith with parents….

Judge Banks has ordered the district to accept the petition and allow parents to immediately begin soliciting charter school proposals.

Been all right, too, if the Judge also had ordered the district officials and the union to compensate the petitioners for their time wasted fighting these frivolous delays. Such an order might have given these officials pause as they plan their inevitable, time-wasting, delaying tactic of appeals.

Still, it’s a good ruling.

Hillary Clinton’s Emails

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It just gets better and better. Hillary Clinton has released a “FAQ” about her emails and her destruction of a significant fraction of them. Byron York, writing in The Washington Examiner, had some thoughts about them.

One of the FAQ questions Clinton posed concerned whether any of her emails were under subpoena at the time they were destroyed.

The emails that Clinton chose not to keep were personal emails—they were not federal records or even work-related—and therefore were not subject to any preservation obligation under the Federal Records Act or any request. Nor would they have been subject to the subpoena—which did not exist at the time….

Except that

The subpoena to which Clinton referred was issued March 4, 2015, after the committee learned that Clinton kept her emails on a separate, secret server. Clinton seems to be confirming that she destroyed her email records (and all backups, according to her attorney) in early December, which would be three months before the Benghazi committee subpoena. So Clinton’s argument is: there’s no way I was subject to a subpoena because I destroyed everything before the subpoena was issued.

Putting aside the question of whether Clinton’s emails were already covered by an earlier subpoena—Benghazi committee chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy [R, SC] maintains they were—there is still the question of whether Clinton, all along, had a legal obligation to preserve her emails and hand them over to Congress. And on that question, there seems no doubt Clinton was legally required to do just that—and despite that obligation destroyed the emails anyway.

On September 20, 2012, nine days after the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, the House Oversight Committee’s Subcommittee on National Security, Homeland Defense and Foreign Operations sent a letter to then-Secretary of State Clinton asking for “all information…related to the attack on the consulate.” The letter told Clinton, “In complying with this request, you are required to produce all responsive documents that are in your possession, custody, or control, whether held by you or your past or present agents, employees, and representatives acting on your behalf.” The letter specified emails as documents covered by the request.

The letter was clear. In response, the State Department produced not a single email to or from Clinton. The world now knows, of course, that Clinton did in fact possess emails covered by the request and did not turn them over.

Even if Clinton’s argument that her personal emails were somehow not covered by the Letter, the subpoena, or the Federal Records Act and related legislation holds water, how can we know Clinton destroyed only personal correspondence, correspondence that “were not federal records or even work-related” as she claims? We can’t know. Clinton destroyed the evidence.

It’s all the more important that Congress lay hands on her servers, hard drives, and other storage media, and do a proper forensic investigation.

More of the Dishonesty of Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Deal

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First, this lie from President Barack Obama, spoken through his Guy Who Sits in the State Department’s Chair, John Kerry:

Iran had 12,000 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, and that’s enough if they enriched it further for 10 to 12 bombs. They had it. That’s what Barack Obama was dealt as a hand when he came in: 19,000 centrifuges already spinning….

The facts, via Omri Ceren:

The Iranians didn’t have 12,000 kg of highly enriched uranium (HEU) when Obama took office they had 0 kg of HEU. Kerry might have been thinking of the 12,000 kg of low enriched uranium (LEU) they had by 2014, but that doesn’t work either because the Iranians stockpiled most of that under Obama: as of February 2009 they only had 1,010 kg of LEU. They also didn’t have “19,000 centrifuges already spinning” they had 3,936 centrifuges spinning. And they were not 2 months away from breakout but instead were just getting around to stockpiling enough uranium for a single bomb.

Obama claimed, this time through his Energy Secretary, Ernest Moniz, in response to the question of why he welched on his promise to us fellow Americans that he would end Iran’s program:

Well, first of all, the issue of Iran having a nuclear program was already established in the previous administration.

He said that with a straight face, too, as though he actually were serious. Never mind that, being an existing program, there was, indeed, something to end—something which he had promised to end, and which he chose not to.

 

h/t Power Line and Omri Ceren, who corresponds with Power Line

A Court Gets it Right

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This time a State Supreme Court, in particular, Wisconsin’s. Recall that some rogue Democratic Party prosecutors in Wisconsin have been persecuting a number of Wisconsin citizens for the dastardly crime of supporting Scott Walker. Recall further, that the law under which this victims were being persecuted was claimed by those prosecutors as allowing them to silence their victims, even to the point of preventing those victims from speaking publicly about their persecution. Hence the term “John Doe statute.”

The Wisconsin Supreme Court took a dim view of such…shenanigans. Last part first: the Court ruled that the prosecutors must

cease all activities related to the investigation, return all property seized in the investigation from any individual or organization and permanently destroy all copies of information and other materials obtained through the investigation.

If it had been me, I’d have required the prosecutors to post a substantial all cash bond against their performance of this requirement, and for 10 years thereafter against their continued performance, but I’ll take this. Still, I’d like the bond in light of the Court’s evident disdain for the prosecutor’s behavior:

…the special prosecutor relies upon, leads us to the unsettling conclusion that it is left to government bureaucrats and/or individual prosecutors to determine how much coordination between campaign committees and independent groups is “too much” coordination. In essence, under his theory, every candidate, in every campaign in which an issue advocacy group participates, would get their own John Doe proceeding and their own special prosecutor to determine the extent of any coordination. This is not, and cannot, be the law in a democracy…

The special prosecutor has disregarded the vital principle that in our nation and our state political speech is a fundamental right and is afforded the highest level of protection. The special prosecutor’s theories…would assure that such political speech will be investigated with paramilitary-style home invasions conducted in the pre-dawn hours and then prosecuted and punished. In short, the special prosecutor completely ignores the command that, when seeking to regulate issue advocacy groups, such regulation must be done with “narrow specificity.”

And

It is utterly clear that the special prosecutor has employed theories of law that do not exist in order to investigate citizens who were wholly innocent of any wrongdoing. In other words, the special prosecutor was the instigator of a “perfect storm” of wrongs that was visited upon the innocent Unnamed Movants and those who dared to associate with them.

Another problem, though, is that this disregard for the law and for the speech of others isn’t limited to the Wisconsin branch of the Democratic Party.

The Court’s decision can be seen here.