Tag Archives: ethics

Blame Ducking

Posted on by
Reply

It’s not blame shifting or blame casting, even though it might seem so. Those are just tools, though, employed in the cause of ducking blame. Pennsylvania’s Progressive-Democrat governor, Josh Shapiro, has provided the latest version.

Electricity rates are spiking in the State over which he rules. PJM Interconnection, the State’s largest power provider, has approved 38 GW of new generation, but the generators are not being built: high interest rates and inflation, not Shapiro’s fault but demonstratively that of his party’s actions at the Federal level, have made the building too costly, even with the plethora of green subsidies.

Shapiro has, though,

pitched an energy plan to fast-track the construction of renewables and a cap-and-trade program that would effectively subsidize them by punishing fossil fuels. Such policies would likely lead to the retirement of more base-load fossil fuel generators….

And that restriction on energy supply can only further drive up energy prices for Pennsylvanians. This sort of thing already has done so, in fact, hence the present spike for the State’s citizens.

Now Shapiro is blaming PJM for those rising prices while ducking away from his own green policies, and his party’s national-level policies, that are the actual cause of the straits in which Pennsylvania’s citizens find themselves.

This is the Progressive-Democrat mantra: it’s not their fault; it’s never their policies. It’s always and everywhere someone else’s fault.

Eliminating DoEd, or Not

Posted on by
Reply

As part of the ongoing…discussions…regarding the elimination or broad curtailment of the Department of Education, even news writers are getting in on the gaslighting. One such example:

It [the Department of Education] has released guidance saying it would evaluate claims of sex discrimination based on the “objective immutable characteristic of being born male or female” as opposed to gender identity. This effectively ended Biden-era protections for gay and transgender people in education.

Of course, it ended no such thing. What the guidance did—all that it did—was restore protections for boys and young men and for girls and young women, especially the latter, in spaces that must be reserved for girls and young women: restrooms, locker rooms, girls and women athletics. The Biden-era actions actively attacked with intent to destroy precisely these protections for girls and young women.

Protections for gay and transgender students remain in place where moves against discrimination matter: the selection or non-selection based on sexual orientation in the classroom, in discipline, in in- or after-school job opportunities, and on and on.

Progressive-Democrat Obstructionism

Posted on by
Reply

The Trump administration, this time in the form of CIA Director John Ratcliffe, has extended an 8-month buyout offer to the CIA. Typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s insistence on Federal government power, Senator Tim Kaine (D, VA) had this objection:

There’s no statutory authority that I can see for the president making this offer[.]

That’s the Party position on government: nothing is permitted unless Government explicitly permits it. Of course, that’s not how our government works in the structure laid out by our Constitution. Quite the opposite, in fact: the lack of explicit statutory authority is no bar at all against the President—or the CIA Director in the present case—making such an offer.

For Kaine’s benefit, though like his Party cronies, it’s doubtful he’ll read it, here are the 9th and 10th Amendments to our Constitution:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

And

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Of course, Trump, and Ratcliffe, would need statutory authority to require those folks to take the buyout offers, but no such requirement exists—only the offer. Which is a better severance package than most any private sector organization has ever offered. The CIA personnel, and those other Federal civilian personnel, under the offer even get to keep their current insurance benefits; they won’t even be forced onto the horribly expensive COBRA plans for the eight months.

Lots of Angst

Posted on by
Reply

DOGE personnel have been granted, by newly seated Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, access to Treasury’s payment system that distributes trillions of dollars in entitlement benefits, grants and tax refunds. The bodice-ripping from the Left, from Progressive-Democratic Party Congressmen, and from too many Republicans is awesome in its loud anxiety. No small part of that hysteria centers on those personnel’s ability to cut off all payments to everyone—including Social Security payments! Except that the access is read only; there is no ability to change anything, only to see and then to report.

The need for the seeing and reporting centers on this: the payment system is one that is run by career civil servants. It’s certainly true that allowing an entity not itself subject to oversight except by the President is fraught with danger. More than the privacy aspect of the access, though, I suspect the danger primarily is to Party and those career civil servants’ prerogatives.

We’ve already seen the extent, depth, and expense in dollars and liberty the danger already realized from so much of Federal government being run by career civil servants, bureaucrats entrenched in their long-term incumbency. It’s useful to have a group not beholden to the Bureaucratic State take a hard look at the doings and spendings of Treasury’s payment system and the “career civil servants” running it.

Stipulate that the vast majority of those personnel are entirely on the up and up and do their work diligently and with honest dedication. It would only take a few to do vast damage through misspending or stealing funds. A Treasury inspection, or an inspection run by civil servants from elsewhere in the administration, leaves too much room for papering over gross mistakes, for covering up outright wrong-doing.

The gains from largely unaccountable DOGE personnel doing this inspection is worth the risks involved, especially given the size of the realized risk from current practice.

Government Moving at the Speed of Business

Posted on by
Reply

This is what the Trump administration has done in the first couple of weeks, much less its first 100 days.

  • offered buyouts to 2 million civilian full-time federal workers. Remains to be seen how many will take the offer, but the offer was paired with warnings of being fired if the offer isn’t taken
  • more on Federal employment:
    • ordered federal workers back to the office full-time and agencies to take steps to halt remote work arrangements
    • freeze on federal hiring, except for military, immigration enforcement, national security, and public safety jobs
    • reinstated first-term Schedule F Executive Order, stripping potentially hundreds of thousands of government workers of government employment protections, making them easier to fire
    • acting director OMB memo: agency heads told to identify employees on probationary periods, or who have served less than two years
    • 160 NSC staff members “sent home”
  • outright fired some folks
    • 1,000 officials appointed by Joe Biden
    • heads of Coast Guard and TSA, and “other officials” fired
  • 20 senior career attorneys at the Justice Department, including environmental, criminal, national security, civil rights lawyers, and some immigration court staff, have been reassigned, some to newly formed Sanctuary Cities Enforcement Working Group
  • issued memo pausing potentially trillions of dollars in federal aid…. The freeze was blocked by a Federal district judge, but the review/audit and requirements for substantive recommendations for cutting remains in place
  • freeze on new civil rights litigation, halted all pending environmental litigation
  • ordered a 90-day pause in foreign development assistance pending assessments of efficiencies and consistency with his foreign policy
  • review of FEMA with a view to reform or close down
  • eliminated government diversity programs, including closing all federal offices, eliminating DEI-related jobs. Workers in those positions put on paid leave. Ordered hiring to be based on merit, with no racial, sex, religious discrimination allowed
  • reinstatement of thousands of troops involuntarily discharged for refusing Wuhan Virus vaccines during the Situation

Whodathunk a government could move that fast?