Tag Archives: morality

Walls and Negotiation

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Last Friday, President Donald Trump hosted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY), House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R, CA), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY), and a few others for another round of attempted negotiation over the border wall we so badly need.

The outcome?  Pelosi and Schumer continued their refusal to negotiate at all.  They demanded the government’s partial shutdown be ended before they’ll say a word about funding for a wall.  Never mind that, as they’ve made clear since last month, that word, their only word, is “No,” anyway.

Trump may be responsible for the partial shutdown’s initiation (that’s arguable, though, given Pelosi’s and Schumer’s opening position, even before Trump said he’d officially take the fall), but it’s plain that Pelosi and Schumer are responsible for keeping the partial shutdown going—they’re the ones refusing even to discuss funding for a wall, much less negotiate the matter.  This is the same pair that voted for a wall under both Clinton and Obama, and this is the same pair that supported $25 billion for a wall in return for protections not for just 800 thousand DACA persons, but for those 800 thousand DACAs plus a million more who are similarly situated, just a bit over a year ago.  Until Schumer welched on the deal.

Just after that meeting, we had this spectacle: on Fox News‘ Outnumbered Overtime program Progressive-Democratic strategist and ex-Hillary Clinton campaign advisor Antjuan Seawright disparaged Trump’s “shutdown” over his keeping a campaign promise (scroll ahead to about 2:48).

How is it possible to negotiate with those who refuse to negotiate?  How is it possible to negotiate with those who consider promises to be empty words?  Even were the former overcome, no agreement with Progressive-Democrats could be trusted—their agreement is only too likely to be just another ploy.

Bloomberg, Democrats, and Rehabilitation

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In a Fox News piece about billionaires contemplating running for President in 2020, one comment jumped out at me.  Adrienne Elrod, erstwhile Hillary Clinton senior advisor and current Progressive-Democrat strategist, made this remark about Michael Bloomberg’s chances in particular, were he to enter the primary contest for the Progressive-Democrat Party’s nomination.

[T]he biggest thing that’s going to hurt him more than his personal wealth is the fact that he used to be a Republican.

Fox News cited her as continuing:

She said that would be a “far bigger liability” competing in “a very left-leaning progressive grassroots primary.”

This is what the Progressive-Democratic Party—at the least what a major wing of the Party fighting for control of it—thinks of rehabilitation, of redemption.  The Party—or its potentially controlling wing—does not believe a man can rehabilitate himself, does not consider a man redeemable from his sins.

Keep this in mind over the coming couple of years.

Racism and Naming Schools

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Jason Willick had an op-ed in Friday’s Wall Street Journal that recounted a failed effort to rename a Palo Alto, CA, middle school in honor of an American WWII war hero. That hero was PFC and Silver Star recipient Fred Minoru Yamamoto of the US Army’s 442nd Regimental Combat Team; he was killed in action in 1944 in the Vosges, in eastern France, by German artillery.

Chinese-Americans [sic] raised a huge hue and cry over the proposal—because Isoroku Yamamoto was an admiral of some…fame…in the Japanese navy from 1939-1943.  Fred and Isoroku shared a last name, and even though there was no relationship, familial or otherwise, whatsoever between the two, that similarity of sound in last names was enough, in those Chinese-American minds, to brand Fred with the same evil as Isoroku. No school would be named after Fred as a result of this uproar.

This is an example of identity politics in its full, racist bloom.  It goes further.

“Are we racist?” one Taiwanese-American mother asks incredulously. “Look at the history in Asia,” she adds, while preferring not to be quoted by name. “Taiwan was colonized by Japan for 50 years.”

Yeah. You are racist. The Republic of China [sic—it’s interesting you insist on using your misnomer] was not colonized by anyone related to Fred Yamamoto. Your insistence that all Yamamotos look alike—your refusal to see any difference among them—and your manufacture of hurt feelings over a partial name mark you racist, indeed. No wonder you hide in anonymity.

Do you agree, Madam, with Progressive-Democrat FD Roosevelt’s locking up of Americans with Japanese heritage in “internment” camps solely on the basis of that heritage?  Two of which incarcerated our Yamamoto before his enlistment?  Think about this entry from Fred’s diary, written while he was in the Heart Mountain “internment” camp. He made this entry on the occasion of his decision to enlist in the United States Army:

Because faith to me is a positive thing, I’m putting all my blue chips on the U.S.A. … In short, I’ve volunteered.

 

Separately, the identity politics obsession of Willick is equally evident: Taiwanese-American? Not American with Taiwanese [RoC] heritage? Really?

What We Can Look Forward To

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Former Acting ICE Director Tom Homan called out California’s sanctuary laws after the murder of a Newman police officer by a suspect who is in the US illegally.

That murdered cop, by the way, was himself an immigrant—a legal one from Fiji.

I’ve mentioned before that House Speaker-to-Be Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) refuse at all to negotiate.

Here’s another example.  Congressman Jim McGovern (D, MA), rather than making a reasoned argument for his claimed bipartisan proposal, rather than offering a rational explanation for President Donald Trump’s rejection of it (if McGovern’s proposal existed), simply said that Trump had gone off his meds.  Not only do Progressive-Democrats refuse to negotiate the wall, they refuse any sort of serious discourse about it—preferring, instead, their tactic of ad hominem smear.

Are they incapable of forming coherent arguments on the matter, or are they simply refusing to do so?  Your call.

Here’s another example.  Trump, apart from a trip to visit the troops in Iraq, has been in DC all along.  The Progressive-Democrats, though, went home to enjoy their Christmas vacation.  They’re home enjoying their vacation instead of staying in DC to negotiate a deal.  They’re home enjoying their vacation even as they shed copious crocodile tears over the Federal workers whose paychecks will be delayed as a result of this Schumer Shutdown Redux.

In any event, increasing violence and murders by illegal aliens can only be an inevitable outcome of the Progressive-Democrats’ no border barriers, no open borders, disband ICE and curtail CBP position.

It’s absolutely true, as the Progressive-Democrats constantly assert, that only a small minority of aliens who enter our country illegally are violent and will continue their violence.

But what those Progressive-Democrats also know full well but carefully, deliberately omit as they wail and rip their bodices is that that small minority is capable of massive destruction.  Just look at the butchery inflicted by MS-13 and M-18—who represent only a small number of the aliens who entered our country illegally.  Individual examples abound, too, from Kate Steinle’s murder by an illegal alien to that just committed murder of a northern California cop by an illegal alien and gang member.

Child Molestation and Bankruptcy Escapes

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Ironically, it’s the Catholic Church that has invented this ruse.

The Archdiocese of Portland was the first to do it. Three months later the Roman Catholic Diocese in Tucson, AZ, followed suit and three months after that the diocese in Spokane, WA, did it, too.
They all filed for bankruptcy and since then more than 15 other Catholic dioceses and religious orders have filed for bankruptcy to seek protection from lawsuits by sexual-assault victims, resulting in about 4,000 claims seeking compensation for past wrongdoing. This year, three more Catholic dioceses announced intentions to file.

Escaping debt—escaping court ordered financial penalties for the Church’s abuse of children and women—through bankruptcy.

But, of course. The outcome of this ruse is

[T]he legal strategy uses the law that protects companies from creditors to help preserve its mission and shield assets from claims made by victims of sexual abuse. Filing for chapter 11 freezes lawsuits and provides breathing room to work out a plan to compensate abuse victims.

Never mind that there already are plans for compensating the children and women: the courts’ judgments and assigned penalties from those cynically frozen suits.  There’s nothing to work out.  Aside from that, I’m not sure that a mission that includes condoning officials’ abuse of the most helpless of their flock is a mission worth preserving.  Condoning? See the Pope’s response to attempts to punish priests who are found abusive. See his attempts to absolve higher officials—bishops and cardinals—of their responsibility for the abuses.

And the strategy is spreading.  USA Gymnastics and the Boy Scouts of America are both in or looking to bankruptcy as a way to escape judgment.  Condoning?  See USAG’s—and USOC’s, come to that—covering up of a doctor/trainer’s decades long abuse.

This stinks.

I’m not much enamored of Federal laws, but we need one here: bankruptcy must be legally barred as a means of avoiding financial responsibility for this sort of abuse.  We even have a precedent: college students can’t duck their student debt through bankruptcy, albeit that bar is newly in flux.

Churches (not just Catholic), and any other organizations whose leadership teams or individuals are found culpable of child abuse or sexual abuse of women, cannot be allowed to run away from their fiscal responsibility (criminal courts work the crimes here, already; although I’d certainly like to see the employing institution punished, also).  No debt “reorganization” through bankruptcy should be allowed.  Pay the judgment in full or cease to exist.  With one exception: the guilty ones must be permanently barred from taking any role other than parishioner or line employee in any religious institution, regardless of religion, or in any company in the originating industry.  If the bankruptcy court is empowered to require that, then any fiscal penalties could legitimately undergo some adjustment once publicly available proof has been provided that all the named individuals—and all of the individuals responsible must be named—have been so barred.

Sadly, this bar will have to be done civilly, since the Church, of which the Catholic Church and USAG have shown themselves the canonical examples for all institutions—have chosen not to.