Tag Archives: morality

Democrats and the Benghazi Investigation

Posted on by
2

I’ve written elsewhere about the troubling nature of the Democrats’ reluctance to actively investigate the Benghazi failure.

Now, after weeks of publicly professed angst, the Democrats have agreed to appoint members to the House Select Committee whose express purpose is to investigate that mess.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) named her members while insisting that

Democrats’ participation was the only way to assure Americans of a “fair process.”

She also claimed that Democrats must participate in order

to make [the investigation] a “fair process” and to bring “openness and transparency” to the investigation.

Elijah Cummings (D, MD), the Ranking Democrat on the Select Committee, added this:

I believe we need someone in the room to simply defend the truth.

With the Democrats approaching this insisting that Republicans are fundamentally dishonest, though, how will it be possible to trust the Democrats’ objectivity, and their own integrity, as they pretend to carry out their responsibilities on this committee and during this investigation?

Oh, and Congressman Pelosi: you keep using this term “openness and transparency.” I do not think it means what you think it means.

Universities and “Free” Speech

Posted on by
Reply

From the Volokh Conspiracy, via The Washington Post.

In a then-latest in a long line of speech intolerance in the name of tolerance (is this what they’re teaching in these institutions of “higher” “education” these days?), ex-Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, Robert Birgeneau, chose to withdraw from giving the commencement speech at Haverford this spring (just what do these pupils think they’re commencing on receipt of their parchments of achievement?). A loud minority of pupils and putative professors objected to Birgeneau’s use of police to break up an Occupy protest while he was at Berkeley, on the odd theory that it’s somehow inappropriate to enforce laws and regulations on college campuses.

Birgeneau’s replacement speaker wasn’t shy about this PC nonsense, however.

Ex-Princeton President William Bowen had this to say on speech “correctness” during the course of his commencement address at Haverford:

I am disappointed that those who wanted to criticize Birgeneau’s handling of events at Berkeley chose to send him such an intemperate list of “demands,” said Bowen, who led Princeton from 1972 to 1988 and last year received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama. “In my view, they should have encouraged him to come and engage in a genuine discussion, not to come, tail between his legs, to respond to an indictment that a self-chosen jury had reached without hearing counter-arguments.”

And

In keeping with the views of many others in higher education, I regard this outcome [the withdrawal of Birgeneau from the commencement address] as a defeat, pure and simple, for Haverford—no victory for anyone who believes, as I think most of us do, in both openness to many points of view and mutual respect.

What he said.

Either we’re a nation whose citizens are free to speak, and where we are free to choose for ourselves to what speech we will listen, or we’re a nation whose citizens are free to speak and to hear only those messages that have been approved for us by our Betters. There is nothing in between.

A Bit of Paranoia

Posted on by
Reply

In 2010, a report from Amnesty International painted a grim picture of North Korea’s crumbling health care system, with witnesses and health care workers recounting barely-functioning hospitals, multiple medication shortages and epidemics caused by malnutrition.

And

US military officials soon grew concerned over the possibility of a lethal pathogen originating within North Korea, as the nation’s health care officials would be nearly powerless to stop the spread of infection. And if such an illness were to continue to expand, a global pandemic would likely occur.

But what if this is deliberate? Baby Kim isn’t stupid, and he is insane enough to give serious thought to such a thing. Northern Korea can’t invade with their army, so might they invade with disease? They’d infect a major fraction of their population (they’re already allowing a major fraction to become infected) and let a goodly number leak across the DMZ, which really is quite porous from the north’s side. And many of these diseases can spread via airborne vectors, against which the DMZ is no barrier at all.

A thug’s version of Napoléon’s levée en masse.

The Welfare Cliff from another Perspective

Posted on by
3

I, among a number of other folks, wrote about this a short while back.

Following is the money graph from that post, from the perspective of the present post:WelfareCliff

Here’s another perspective on the matter, the point of “present post,” from AEIdeas‘ James Pethokoukis, who cited John Merline’s article for the Richmond Fed.

Writing about the “decline in labor force participation as a result of reported illness or disability,” Merline had this [emphasis added]:

Another driving force, Autor and Duggan found, is the fact that the value of disability benefits relative to wages has risen “substantially” since the late 1970s, because of the way initial benefits are calculated. That’s particularly true at the lower end of the income spectrum. When the value of SSDI benefits and the value of the Medicare benefits that SSDI enrollees qualify for are combined, the share of income replaced by the disability program climbed from 68% in 1984 to 86% in 2002 among lower-income men aged 50-61.

That’s an enormous marginal tax rate that must be paid in order to get a better job.

Federal Immigration Hypocrisy

Posted on by
Reply

[Cateret, NJ, Mayor Daniel] Reiman said yesterday that although he assured officials from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services that the prayer would be nondenominational, the agency declined to allow the prayer.

“They refused to budge on that.”

And, on refusing to allow any prayer at all, Reiman had no choice but to not allow the Federal ceremony to use city facilities.

Ironically, the whole thing came to a head just a day after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Town of Greece v Galloway that it was entirely appropriate that a local government open a ceremony with a prayer.

A spokeswoman for the federal agency, Katie Tichacek Kaplan, told The Associated Press that the agency has a long-standing policy to ensure that naturalization ceremonies are “conducted in a meaningful manner which is welcoming and inclusive and excludes political, commercial and religious statements.”

Never mind that this is a time to welcome our new citizens into our heritage—into their new nation’s heritage—as a Judeo-Christian nation, into our society with its Judeo-Christian underpinnings, into our culture, the benefits of which are what drew these immigrants in the first place and which encouraged them to take the five-year march toward citizenship. That’s the true meaning of the manner of welcome.

It’s not a time to encourage fractionation of our culture by discouraging their assimilation.

Reiman added

The irony is it’s in the Pledge [of Allegiance] and it’s in the oath [of citizenship]. It didn’t really make sense. They acknowledge that prayer is part of many, many services.

Here is the oath of citizenship that newly naturalized immigrants take on achieving citizenship [emphasis added]:

I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.

And here is that nasty Pledge of Allegiance (which too many circles are trying to purge from our schools and public ceremonies, and too many others have simply allowed to lapse) [emphasis added]:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

But the Feds don’t want even a nondenominational prayer uttered at a ceremony celebrating the naturalization of new American citizens.

Hmm….