Tag Archives: responsibilities

A UAW Strike

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The United Autoworkers Union sent 49,000 members and employees of GM out the door and on strike Sunday night.  The strike will hammer GM plants in Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, New York, and Texas among other areas.

Here is another case of a union saying it won’t let a business operate at all, unless and until that business’ managers surrender completely and give the union everything it wants.

Strikes are legalized extortion and a refusal to negotiate in good faith.  It’s impossible to reach an honest deal with a gun in management’s ear.

The VA Strikes Again

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Several times.

First up is this petty (and more) move by the Veterans Administration.

Congressman Brian Mast (R, FL)a retired Army Ranger, spoke out on Thursday after he was evicted from his congressional office space in the West Palm Beach Veteran Affairs Medical Center.
The move came after Mast, who lost his legs in an explosion in Afghanistan in 2010, grilled a Department of Veteran Affairs official at a hearing earlier this year.

After a spate of veteran suicides in VA facilities, Mast questioned a number of VA officials last April.  Now the VA wants him out of that office space:

The department will use the space previously dedicated to 6 members of congress for the provision of medical care services.

Which might actually be plausible, except for the timing of the move. And the fact that, were the office space actually needed, the facility could have declined to lease the space to Mast in the first place.

 

Next is this, even more egregious, item. It seems the VA has been refusing to reimburse veterans who go to an emergency medical facility that’s not a VA hospital.  Never mind the “emergency” part of that.  It took a judge’s order in a lawsuit to force the VA to pay the bills.  And this isn’t the first time on this specific matter.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has been ordered to reimburse veterans for the cost of their emergency care at non-VA hospitals—something the agency has actively told veterans they are not entitled to, an appeals court ruled this week.
The VA has wrongfully been denying veterans’ claims while also misrepresenting a regulation that entitles them to reimbursement, the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims said Monday.

The appellate court was not impressed with this deliberate misbehavior [emphasis added].

A previous regulation ended up excluding “nearly every type of expense a veteran could have incurred if he or she had insurance covering the non-emergency VA medical service at issue” from reimbursement, the court said, which violates a 2010 federal law.
“The Agency has effectively rolled back the clock and, with no transparency, essentially readopted a position we have authoritatively held inconsistent with Congress’s command,” the judges said, according to court documents. “Recognizing this is what has happened is—quite frankly—startling enough.
“It’s difficult to conceive how an agency could believe that adopting a regulation that mimics the result a federal court held to be unlawful is somehow appropriate when the statute at issue has not changed[.]”

That deliberate illegality ought to get some VA folks into jail.

 

And this, the worst of the lot.

…a Vietnam War veteran was reportedly found last week covered in ants and ant bites before he died at a Georgia VA nursing home.
Joel Marrable, who served in the Air Force, had more than 100 ant bites when his daughter visited him at the Eagle’s Nest Community Living Center in Decatur, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Laquna Moss said her father died shortly after being bitten in two incidents while battling cancer.

The VA still is actively killing through neglect our veterans.

The VA apologized, though. Like that makes everything all better.

Actions, not pretty words, and after all this time since the VA was first discovered falsifying appointment records and veterans were dying while on those fake appointment lists, nothing has changed.  Not a single item.

 

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Coaching

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Recall then-judge Aaron Persky, the judge who thought a college swimmer’s future well-being was more important than the fate of the unconscious girl he raped. Recall further that he thought the rape was so inconsequential that he functionally condoned it with a slap-on-the-wrist sentence of six whole months in jail—reduced to three months because of the rapist’s “good behavior” in jail.

Persky lost a subsequent recall election, held because of his coddling of the rapist.

This is, also, the same…judge…who tried to freeload off the public, tried to get them to pay the legal costs he incurred from the steady stream of frivolous lawsuits he instigated in an effort to block that recall election from happening.

Now Persky has been hired by San Jose, CA’s, Lynbrook High School to coach the school’s girls junior varsity tennis team.

The judge who thinks it’s OK to rape unconscious college girls is going to coach high school girls….

After I wrote this, the Fremont Union High School District, which oversees Lynbrook, and Lynbrook had a change of heart.

Lynbrook High School held a meeting Monday with the parents of JV and varsity girls’ tennis teams in response to the community’s concerns over Persky’s employment.

Then FUHSD fired Persky.

We believe this outcome is in the best interest of our students and school community. The District will begin the search for a new coach immediately….

This is a better outcome. It would have been best, though, had Persky never been hired into this position in the first place. The school and its female athletes never should have been jerked around like this.

But neither should Persky have been.  His attitude toward young women shouldn’t be used to justify treating him like he treats others. We should be better than that.

“Impartiality Is the Source of a Newspaper’s Credibility”

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That’s the headline of Walter Hussman’s piece in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal.  Impartiality certainly is a contributor, but the Critical Item for a newspaper’s credibility—for any journalistic entity—is integrity.

To set themselves on the path back to honesty, and so to believability—not just credibility—members of the journalism industry must address these items:

  1. identify at least some of their sources
  2. if an anonymous source refuses to be identified, show two things

-the source actually exists
-why the source should be believed

  1. if the anonymous source is a whistleblower, show that the source has exhausted all internal whistleblowing channels before deciding to leak

4. most importantly, journalism used to have a standard that required two on-the-record sources to corroborate the claims of anonymous sources. An editor-in-chief must address the following:

-why his news outlet has chosen to walk away from that standard of journalistic integrity
-explain the standard he currently uses in place of that one.

These questions have been asked before, and journalists continue studiously to duck them.  Interestingly, Hussman, as publisher of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, is among those ducking the questions.

None of this does anything for newspapers’ or other journalistic outlets’ credibility.  After all, merely impartial lying is still lying.

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.