Tag Archives: responsibilities

Not Throwing a Party is Exclusionary

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According to Howard Kurtz, self-styled news media “critic,” not having a party for members of the NLMSM is exclusionary.  President Donald Trump has decided not to throw a White House holiday party for the media this year.

the president’s decision to exclude the media establishment, at least for this year.

There it is, right from the jump.  Not having a big, expensive party is exclusionary.  Right up there with the actual bigotry of excluding blacks, or women, or… from access to a government facility or public business.

It gets really petty, too: not having this party is particularly terrible, Kurtz says.

The annual Christmas-season gathering was a significant perk for those covering the White House….

But it’s terrible that this perk won’t happen this year.

Journalists who attended the events, which featured a catered buffet of lamb chops, crab claws and elaborate desserts, got to roam the decorated mansion with a spouse or other family member, a friend or a colleague, adding to the invitation’s allure.

But it’s terrible that this right perk won’t be granted this year.

But the biggest fringe-benefit was the picture-taking sessions, in which the president and first lady would patiently pose with guests…copies of which were invariably sent home to mom.

Now Mom is being left out.  Heinous.

Aside from Kurtz’ whining over not getting his shiny, glittering toy this year, he gave his game away with his spin on his claimed motive for Trump’s decision.

President Trump has canceled the White House holiday party…a victim of his increasingly contentious relationship with major news organizations.

Here’s Kurtz insisting that it couldn’t possibly be because of the press’ increasingly contentious relationship with the President and First Lady—a hostility that the NLMSM has evinced in full throat from the very beginning of the Republican primaries.

How precious, how childish, can the NLMSM get?

Not Enough Paperwork

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It seems the San Francisco police don’t have enough paperwork to do, and they don’t coddle suspects enough.  And their police chief, William Scott, has too much time on his hands.

Police officers in San Francisco may no longer demand that suspects—whether handcuffed or not—sit on the ground or sidewalk at a crime scene, the city’s police chief writes in a department memo.
The practice is viewed as “demeaning” to suspects, city police Chief William Scott has determined, according to the Bay Area’s FOX 2.

In very exigent circumstances, suspects can be sat down.

Here’s the cherry on top:

Whenever that happens…the chief wants to know about it.
“Officer shall document, in an incident report, anytime it is necessary to seat an individual on the ground,” the chief writes.

Hmm….

Gullible

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That’s what NBC‘s Chuck Todd and his cronies of the NLMSM, Andrea Mitchell and Hallie Jackson, says 63 million of us Americans are because we voted for now-President Donald Trump.

I knew the gaslighting was out there. I knew it was every day.  But I think there was part of me in my head assumed people were discerning it out, knew the BS from the non-BS. So, I think what my sort of shock to the system was just sort of how gullible a big chunk of the country was to this and gullible because maybe they want to be gullible.

Oh, we recognized the gaslighting, and we did a fine job of discriminating the BS from the non-BS.

But because us irredeemably deplorable racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, misogynist religion-clinging gun-toters of flyover country were so foolish that we saw through the dishonesty of Hillary Clinton and the slanted nature of the plainly pro-Progressive-Democrat “press,” we continue to be disparaged by our Betters.  Many of us chose for Trump, many others of us chose against Clinton, and all of us chose the way we did because we saw through the press’ studied spin.  We chose not to take the NLMSM as seriously as those members of the press thought we should.

And here we are, two years on, and those persons still are attacking the man while ignoring his policies, still disparaging us for attending to his policies while not giving journalists’ weight to the superficialities of the man.

These worthies are so deeply immersed in their obsessive-compulsive neurosis that they cannot even recognize their own bias.

A Conservative’s View….

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My latest effort, a pamphlet on the American legal system (because I don’t lack for ego), A Conservative’s View of the American Concept of Law, has been released, and it can be found on amazon.com: https://amzn.to/2L4iVXx .  Links also can be found on my Books page.

Our legal system is explicitly founded on natural law through our Creator’s endowment—the origin and source of our fundamental principles.

Though government should not legislate morality beyond a very narrow arena (vis., a measure of specificity regarding types of homicide and theft; strictly limited controls on bearing false witness, etc.), with natural law as the foundation of our legal system, morality inescapably informs it.  This is so because morality flows from the Creator-endowed and individually-imbued nature of our inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our social compact was founded explicitly to protect these.  From that, our statutes are at their best when limited to attempts to implement and protect those foundational principles and nothing more. Any further legislation should be limited to improvements on those strictly circumscribed efforts. In particular, legislation should not be used to generate new morals.

The nature of our American judiciary and the proper role of judges in our jurisprudence has been argued throughout our history, but the argument has been especially virulent over the last dozen or so years.  The current dispute (I don’t call it a debate) centers on whether our Constitution means what it says and neither more nor less, or whether it’s a living document that should grow and adjust to meet a judge’s understanding of changing times and mores.

In this pamphlet, I lay out three key propositions.  The first is that only Congress may make law.  The second is that judges may strike a law before them as unconstitutional, but if they do not, they must apply the law as written.  The third is that the Constitution must be applied as it is written.  Alterations or updates to it are political decisions, and thus only We the People may make them.

Understand: I’m not writing about the origins of the idea of law or of systems of law.  A plethora of legal philosophers (HLA Hart, Jeremy Bentham, John Austin, and Gustav Radbruch to mention a few Western ones) treat these subjects should the reader wish to explore them. I begin later, with the principles underlying our American legal system.

 

Keep in mind, too, that government, per se, does not make law; the men who populate the government do.

 

Finally, Justice Antonin Scalia made this claim in his A Matter of Interpretation,

Surely this is a sad commentary: we American judges have no intelligible theory of what we do most.
Even sadder, however, is the fact that the American bar and American legal education, by and large, are unconcerned with the fact that we have no intelligible theory.

I agree, and in my hubris, I offer the beginnings of such a theory here.

“Impose Boundaries on Immigration Law”

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That’s the title of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s op-ed in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal.  In it, he decried the lack of uniformity of our immigration laws and associated judicial rulings on those laws.

…US immigration law is far from uniform. Inconsistent rulings by the 12 federal appellate courts have created a hodgepodge of jurisprudence, in which the applicable legal precedents depend on the location of the immigration court that heard a case.

He proposed a solution.

Congress can and should restore uniformity and promote efficiency by consolidating all immigration appeals in a specialized court of immigration appeals.

Whatever the merits of Rosenstein’s proposal, though, before any immigration law—any law—can have legitimate, and predictable, effect, boundaries have to be imposed on activist judges.  Before any specialist court—any court—can have legitimate, and predictable, effect, boundaries have to be imposed on activist judges.  This is particularly critical given the judge-centric nature of his proposal.

Judges cannot be allowed to place their personal views of societal need or “fairness” above what the law they’re applying actually says.  Judges cannot be allowed to violate their oaths of office with their imposition of personal views in place of imposing the text of the law(s) before them in cases, including immigration cases.

Failure requires consequences, else judicial failure will continue, to the increasing detriment of our republic.  Those consequences must include, in the most egregious instances or when particular judges demonstrate an especial predilection for activism, removal from the bench.