Tag Archives: ethics

Democrats Just Don’t Understand

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President Obama said, at a campaign stop at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia on the 12th of June,

They [voters] have pretty good instincts about what works and they’re not persuaded that an economy built on the notion that everybody here is on their own is somehow going to result in a stronger, more prosperous America.

It doesn’t get any clearer than this statement, which demonstrates an utter lack of understanding of what life is like without government intimately involved in it, without government ensuring that we’re not being too selfish to help each other out.  But with remarks like this, Democrats are only projecting their own selfishness onto the rest of us.

Americans as a whole donated over $300 billion to charity in 2009, for instance, the third year in a row we donated more than $300 billion in a single year.  In 2008, within these $300 billion, Gallup says that conservatives donated 3.5% to 4.5% of their incomes; liberals donated 1.25% to 1.5%.  Senator Joe Biden, who now considers it the patriotic thing to do to pay lots of taxes, donated 0.1% of his income in each of the years 2001-2004.  Last year, Vice President Biden bumped his giving to the lofty level of 1.5%.  It’s certainly true that Obama, and a fellow Progressive, President Bill Clinton, give significantly more, but these two are not typical Democrats, as those numbers above demonstrate.

Americans—conservative Americans, at any rate—do our duty, we help our fellows.  We don’t need government hands in our pockets to do that.  We need government hands out of our pockets so we can do that better.

Democrats assume all of America is like them.  Fortunately, we’re not.  Not by a long shot.

How is this Not a Firing Offense?

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The principal of Brooklyn’s Coney Island PS 90–the Edna Cohen School–Greta Hawkins, has cancelled her kindergarten’s scheduled performance of Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to be an American” at their moving-up ceremony.

Her excuses?

We don’t want to offend other cultures

and the lyrics are “too grown up” for five year olds.  The opening lines, the “too grown up” lines, are these:

If tomorrow all the things were gone,
I’d worked for all my life,
And I had to start again,
With just my children and my wife,
I’d thank my lucky stars,
To be livin’ here today.

But  a Justin Bieber song was “age appropriate” for these same five year olds, and they were allowed to sing this song in the their ceremony.  This song opens with

Are we an item?
Girl, quit playing.

And the President Obama approves of this.  His Department of Education agrees with Hawkins.

The lyrics are not age-appropriate.

I’d like to hear his definition of “age-appropriate,” since he thinks patriotic lines are not, but Bieber’s lines are, for these children.

And those offended cultures?  The school has a significant immigrant student population, and so the neighborhood has a significant immigrant parent population.  Those parents, many of whom are immigrants from Pakistan, Mexico, and Ecuador, to name a few, “love” the song, which used to be performed annually by the kindergartners.  When last year’s fifth graders—who seem to be old enough to handle both patriotism and Bieber on the same day—sang “Proud to be an American” at their year-end ceremony, the parents of those fifth-graders gave it a standing ovation.

Yet, even though the school does have its students recite the Pledge of Allegiance and sing a stanza or two of “God Bless America” each morning, kindergartners aren’t allowed to be patriotic at their year-end ceremony.

Because patriotism is an “age-appropriate” topic.  And American patriotism might offend other cultures.

Update:  Now Hawkins has decided to can the Bieber song, too.  She’s not reinstating “Proud to be an American,” though; patriotism remains offensive at her school.  Congressman Michael G. Grimm (R, NY), whose district includes Brooklyn and this school, had some thoughts on the matter.

I am outraged that NYC’s Department of Education is standing by the decision of PS 90’s principal to pull the song “Proud to be an American” from the upcoming kindergarten ceremony, for fear of offending other cultures.   The only thing offensive about any of this is the anti-American message being engrained in our youth.  We all should be proud to be American and we should never ever apologize for it!

And Lee Greenwald had this about Hawkins’ banning of his song:

I think [Hawkins is] confused between allegiance and worship.  I don’t think it’s a religious issue to salute the flag.  You always respect the flag.  That’s just simple for me.  A religion that says you can’t do that is out of place

Give Him a Speedy Trial and a Fast Impeachment

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Convicted serial bomber, drug trafficker, and perjuror, Brett Kimberlin, is continuing his assault on any and all who are rude enough to write about him in any way less than completely fawning of his wonderfulness.  In one such assault, done under the guise of his lawfare war, he had the rude blogger Aaron Walker arrested while in court responding to a prior Peace Order Kimberlin had managed to obtain.

But of interest here is not so much Kimberlin’s behavior, but the behavior of Maryland Judge C.J. Vaughey in that matter.  The Peace Order Kimberlin had obtained, and under which Walker was arrested in Vaughey’s court, centered on this:

Mr. Walker has tweeted on Twitter about me in alarming and annoying ways over hundreds of times in the past week and urged others to attack me.  He has generated hundreds of blog posts directly and indirectly based on false allegations that I framed him for an assault.

Mr. Walker has had many people threaten me directly with death, and told me to stop talking to the police, and not show up in court or I would die.

These are carefully, cynically, vague and unsubstantiated claims, yet Vaughey took them at face value, not even inquiring into evidence to support the claims.  Then we get this from Walker’s hearing before Vaughey [emphasis mine]:

VAUGHEY: –You’ve decided to battle, and he comes back.  And see, you’re—you—you’re the kind of guy, you don’t want to get into this to settle this, mano y mano.  You want to get all these friends who got nothing else to do with their time, in this judge’s opinion, because—my God, I’m a little bit older than you are, and I haven’t got enough time in the day to do all the things I want to do.  And I thought by retirement, I would have less to do.  I got more!  Because everybody knows I’m free!  So they all come to me.  But you, you are starting a—a conflagration, for lack of a better word, and you’re just letting the thing go recklessly no matter where it goes.  I mean, you get some—and I’m going to use word I (ph)—freak somewhere up Oklahoma, got nothing better to do with his time, so he does the nastiest things in the world he can do to this poor gentleman.  What right has that guy got to do it?

WALKER: He has no right to do that, Your Honor.

VAUGHEY: Well, he’s—you incited him.

WALKER: But, your honor, I did not incite him within the Brandenburg standard though.

VAUGHEY: Forget Bradenburg [sic].  Let’s go by Vaughey right now, and common sense out in the world.  But you know, where I grew up in Brooklyn, when that stuff was pulled, it was settled real quickly.

WALKER: I’m not sure what that means, your honor.

VAUGHEY: –Very quickly. And I’m not going to talk about those ways, but boy, it ended fast.  I even can tell you, when I grew up in my community, you wanted to date an Italian girl, you had to get the Italian boy’s permission.  But that was the old neighborhoods back in the city.  And it was really fair.  When someone did something up there to you, your sister, your girlfriend, you got some friends to take them for a ride in the back of the truck.

WALKER: Well, Your Honor, what–

VAUGHEY: –That ended it.  You guys have got this new mechanical stuff out here, the electronic stuff, that you can just ruin somebody without doing anything. But you started it.

As Popehat points out, the Brandenburg standard is from a Supreme Court ruling that held that speech may be banned on the theory that it is incitement only when it is intended to create, and is likely to create, a clear and present danger of imminent lawless action.

What do we have in this…judge’s…actions, then?

First we have his statement that the law is what he says it is, not what is actually written by our legislators, not what has been ruled by his superiors, the Supreme Court.

We also have this judge’s implicit recommendation that if someone offends Walker, then Walker should simply take that offender for a ride in a truck and “settle” the matter.  And by extension, he’s given that ex-con Kimberlin permission to do exactly that.

And he’s accused the victim of Kimberlin’s assault of having started the ex-con’s assault.

Vaughey is unfit to be a judge; he should be removed from the bench he’s sullying as soon as possible.

 

h/t to Grim’s Hall.

Some Thoughts on Security Leaks

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President Obama finds it offensive that anyone would accuse him of leaking classified information for personal political gain.

The notion that my White House would purposely release national security information is offensive[.]

Of course it is.  And President Nixon had some remarks along these lines, too.

Yet here is a partial list of the White House’s leaks:

  • A terrorist kill list, identifying persons whom Obama personally approves for remote control execution (and so leaves no terrorist to be inconveniently captured and questioned
  • reports of US spies infiltrating Al Qaeda in Yemen
  • stories about Osama bin Laden’s DNA and how the US got it
  • US involvement in the Stuxnet (and Flame) computer virus development and employment against Iranian nuclear facilities, including identification of the government lab that designed it
  • revealed a British asset who penetrated al Qaeda and stopped another bombing of a US-bound airliner

These leaks, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) correctly says, put “American lives in jeopardy,” put “our nation’s security in jeopardy.”  And every one of those leaks push an Obama agenda, or purport to paint Obama in a favorable light.

Oh, and the White House’s leaks about a supposed Israeli plan to use Azerbaijani bases to launch an attack against Iranian nuclear facilities—which plan, if it existed, became impossible for an Obama-disliked Israel to execute.

Yet Obama refuses to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the leaks; although Attorney General Eric Holder has named two DoJ attorneys to investigate.  While it’s true that the leaking that’s coming out of the White House is a present and clear danger and a special prosecutor investigation would take time—possibly years—such an appointment at least would move toward defusing the personal gain question.

Moreover, his CIA and his Department of Justice have announced they will not cooperate with Congressional investigations into the leaks.

I have to ask: why is Obama so bent on hindering investigations into these leaks?

Obama’s offended?  He’s not as offended as are honest Americans over them.

Voter ID and Hypocrisy

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We already need a photo ID for nearly anything we do: board a commercial airplane, drive our car, check into a shooting range (oh, wait—we’re not supposed to be allowed to do that, either, according to some), get into a federal building; the list goes on and on.

Oh, and get into a Big Do involving the President or First Lady.

A PHOTO ID [WAS] BE REQUIRED TO ENTER THE MASSMUTUAL CENTER [for last May’s Massachusetts Democratic Party Convention, emphasis in the original]

A photo ID will be required to enter the 2012 Democratic National Convention this September in Charlotte.

On Friday, June 8th, those wishing to attend [Mrs Obama’s book signing] must…submit their social security number and show an official photo ID (driver’s license, passport) to a Secret Service agent

No Jim Crow here.  No siree.

Yet the Progressives demand that anyone should be allowed to vote—residents, the dead, cartoon characters, illegal aliens, non-citizens; it’s all the same to them.  They’re suing states for insisting on photo IDs in order to get a ballot.