Tag Archives: responsibilities

Distractions

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Recall the hoo-raw the NLMSM is raising because President Donald Trump, in a brief press opportunity, used a dated map of Hurricane Dorian’s path.  The map also had been modified with a hand-drawn additional line that forecast Dorian’s progress into lower Alabama.

Howard Kurtz, Fox News‘ journalism critic, was on the case Friday, and as he often does, he exaggerated some and he missed some.

The exaggeration:

Now there’s obviously a legitimate story here. Who wielded the now-infamous Sharpie?

You bet there is. For grocery store tabloids like National Enquirer, Globe, Star.

The miss:

…the constant back-and-forth over a black squiggle feels like a giant distraction.

Sadly, Kurtz should know better than this, being a maven of the industry, and all. The only ones distracted are he and his fellow pseudo-journalists who’ve made the conscious, deliberate editorial decision to obsess over this, to distract themselves with this non-story.

The rest of us have better things to do, and better focus with which to deal with them.

For Cheating on College Admission

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Prosecutors want a whole month in jail for Felicity Huffman, who’s pled out for trying to buy her daughter’s way into college.  That seems light to me, for what amounts to a bribery beef.

On the other hand, her attorneys

pleaded with a Boston federal judge Friday to spare her jail time after she pleaded guilty in connection with the college admissions bribery scandal and instead give her probation, community service and a fine.

This is an even lighter sentence than the prosecutors are requesting.  Apparently, what amounts to a crime of bribery is no big deal.  Furthermore, the “fine” of $20,000 is an insult.  That’s pocket money for someone of Huffman’s means and income.

On the other hand, I don’t entirely disagree that a year’s probation and community service for a first-time offender make a good framework for suitable punishment.

Let’s have her serve the terms of her punishment, though, like she means it.  Take Huffman out of the environment in which she was led astray, put her under probation in Baltimore, not Los Angeles.

Instead of the 250 hours of community service with at-risk youth that the defense “offered”—a bare six weeks of 8-hour days, although no calendar interval was suggested for those hours—have Huffman do some serious community service with those youth: spend the entire year’s probation working with Baltimore’s at-risk youth, 2080 hours (because she hasn’t earned two weeks for vacation). No dilletantism to fill a court-ordered square; do 52 weeks of full-time work.

And to be sure she understands and faces the environment of that youth population as well as the youths themselves, have her live in an apartment in one of those at-risk neighborhoods, to be verified aperiodically and on a no-notice basis by her parole officer.

Those 20 stacks for the fine? Double it to take some of the sting out of the insult, and have her pay the money to a couple of the NGOs in Baltimore that work with at-risk youth.

Regarding her daughter’s learning disability situation, her husband, who’s not charged with anything, can deal with that.

“Journalists,” Redux

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Recall the kerfuffle over an idle tweet in which a George Washington University Associate Professor, in a mildly snarky tweet, likened New York Times Precious Columnist Bret Stephens to a bedbug.  The Prof was riffing off a headline announcing that the NYT building was infested with bedbugs.

Stephens chose to take offense, and not only did he email the Prof about it, he CCed the Prof’s Provost in a clear attempt to intimidate the professor into silence.  Or into something.  In the meantime, Stephens has earned for himself a new nickname: #BedbugBret.

But there’s something far more important here, and it goes back to the (lack of) integrity in the journalistic industry.

The Prof makes a closely related best in his op-ed in Esquire:

Bret Stephens seems to think that his social status should render him immune from criticism from people like me. …
Stephens…reached out believing my university would chastise me for provoking the ire of a writer at The New York Times. That’s an abuse of his social station.

But it’s much more than an abuse of station—a station that does not exist, properly, in the United States of America, where all and each of us are equal under law and before God.

This is an abuse of the industry of what used to be journalism.  This is a naked claim that journalism and journalists are too high and mighty for the petty rules of ordinary Americans, and we commoners have no business—no right—to tease, much less criticize, any member of the aristocracy of the press, our Betters.

The professor’s university also responded, directly to Stephens:

Stephens, though, as far as I can determine, has not reached out to the Provost or otherwise responded to his invitation to face the objects of his contempt on their turf. He seems willing only to face a single man in the comfort and safety of his own.

Stephens exemplifies the fundamental dishonesty of the press, and of the NYT in particular.  And, apparently, the cowardice of the bullying industry.

Student Loans and Scams

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Folks are growing concerned about the magnitude of, and problems associated with, the massive student loan situation, and the some are even calling it a scam.

Defaults have fallen for most forms of consumer debt as the economic expansion continues. Mortgage delinquencies last quarter hit a historic low. But severely delinquent student loans have soared since 2012 and are now 35% of “severe derogatories”—more than credit cards (23%), auto loans (21%), and mortgages (11%).

This “scam” is laid at the feet of the CBO during the Obama administration.  It’s certainly true that the CBO misread the situation, perhaps even negligently so.

Here’s the short and sweet of it, though.

The student loan overhang is a serious problem.  However, the real scam is that of so many Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidates who want to forgive all those loans—transferring the loan problem directly onto the backs of taxpayers, instead of leaving it where it belongs: the responsibility of the students and parents who borrowed so foolishly and of the lenders who so foolishly loaned.

Pawns

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Charles Hurt was unimpressed—as have been many of us—with Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib’s (D, MI) political posturing at the expense of her grandmother.

Who uses their aging grandmother as a pawn to make a political point in what is really kind of a stupid political kerfuffle to begin with?
There’s something really wrong with someone that does that….

This is what Progressive-Democrats do, though. They see real, live people merely as tools to be used for Party or their own benefit.  These aren’t human beings in Progressive-Democrat eyes..

Progressive-Democrats only offer Blacks empty promises of benefits to come, with no interest or action in delivering exits from those welfare cages.  Blacks are nothing more than crops of votes to be harvested.

Progressive-Democrats only offer Hispanics empty rhetoric regarding immigration and routes to citizenship.  Here, too, they take no action other than to obstruct others’ efforts regarding immigration and asylum laws and legal immigration.  Hispanics are nothing more than crops of votes to be harvested.

Here, now, is Grandma, also reduced to a mechanical tool, this one to be used to carve a tablet holding a personal political agenda aimed at personal gain.  That her sity appears to be a willing participant in a shameful charade in no way lessens the depth of Tlaib’s depravity.