Tag Archives: responsibilities

What Are You Going to Do about It?

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“The Vatican” has proclaimed its regret for the decades of abuse in Pennsylvania of 1,000 or more children by hundreds of the Vatican’s priests.

The abuses described in the report are criminal and morally reprehensible. Those acts were betrayals of trust that robbed survivors of their dignity and their faith.

The Church must learn hard lessons from its past, and there should be accountability for both abusers and those who permitted abuse to occur[.]

On the other hand, Pennsylvania’s Attorney General has pointed out the skill with which this perfidy was executed.

The cover-up was sophisticated. And all the while, shockingly, church leadership kept records of the abuse and the cover-up.  These documents, from the dioceses’ own “Secret Archives,” formed the backbone of this investigation.

Because the men who run the Catholic Church chose not to conduct their own investigation.  It’s a reminder of the atrocity in Boston two decades ago where the Cardinal there, far from nailing his child-abusing priests, simply relocated them to fresh hunting grounds.  It’s a reminder of the abuses inflicted on Argentine children only recently uncovered—officially, that is.

Talk is cheap, men of the Vatican, and rended garments easily replaced.  What are you actually going to do?

Chicago Mayhem

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Recall the bloody mayhem going on in Chicago these days while its mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) fiddles.  Over 80 people were killed or injured one recent weekend alone.

Last year, President Donald Trump told Emanuel to get things under control, or else the Feds would.  That was a year-and-a-half ago and so greatly predates the recent weekend.

Trump’s own mistake was in not following through on his implied threat.

Here’s President Hines’ solution, and it’s not too late to implement it; although the bloody cost of sitting on the sidelines is rising.  Since Emanuel has chosen to do nothing but natter on about how terrible things are, Hines would get on to Governor Bruce Rauner and tell him he has one week to get the Illinois State Police deployed in Chicago in place of the city’s police (who are pouting like toddlers over their mistreatment by Emanuel—a justified beef, but no excuse for shirking their duty) and beginning to restore order to the city.  In the same notice to Rauner, Hines would Federalize the Illinois National Guard.  If Rauner said his State police didn’t have the resources, Hines would tell Rauner that if he needs Guard support, Hines would authorize it.

The bottom line is this: if the city and State governments can’t be bothered to bring Chicago under control, the Federal government has to.

I grew up in Illinois.  It’s more than irritating to see a once great State descend into such bloody chaos, especially when it’s occurring because the State and local governments won’t do their jobs.

Free Speech

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Christopher Mims had a piece up in his Thursday Tech column concerning the “usefulness” of good-guy bots to help combat filter bubbles, hate speech and harassment, and state-sponsored disinformation, along with other troll-ish speech.

Mims, unfortunately, is operating from the false premise that speech should be censored. Apart from obvious attempts to incite criminal violence, of course it should not be. Free speech must be free, bad speech—whatever that is; the definition varies from person to person and time to time—can only be answered with more speech.

As one commenter on Mims’ piece noted further,

The idea of algorithms controlling which information is disseminated to the people strikes me as the fast lane to the Orwellian world of Big Brother or perhaps Wells’ future in the Time Machine.
…
Ensuring that our political and educational systems prepare people to maintain their common sense and independence is probably a better defense than leaving it to the machines.

Integrity Redux

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I wrote about the level of integrity in the Manafort trial a bit ago as it concerned an accountant who sold her testimony to Mueller’s prosecutors for immunity from her confessed crimes (or who was browbeaten into it with the potential charges as cudgel).  Here’s another example of the level of integrity in Mueller’s case against Manafort, this time involving Mueller’s prosecutors’ star witness, Rick Gates.

Gates, long prior to the start of the Manafort trial, pled guilty to a count of conspiracy against the United States and a count of lying to the FBI.  As part of the plea, Mueller dropped 22 other charges against Gates.  Also on the table are the sanctions ensuing from the deal: a reduction of his likely jail sentence from 100 years (!) to 5-6 years—and potentially to just probation—and a reduction of his fine from $500,000 to as little as $2,000.

Another part of the plea deal is the kicker: to get those reductions, he must cooperate with Mueller’s prosecutors in their investigation and trial of Manafort.  That cooperation, with the Manafort trial underway, clearly centers on how well he testifies to the prosecutors’ satisfaction.

Since so much of Mueller’s case against Manafort depends on witnesses who’ve sold their testimony so blatantly, or who were browbeaten into giving the testimony those prosecutors demanded, how can this case have any credibility at all?

Integrity

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Recall that Paul Manafort, briefly a campaign mucky-muck for then-Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, is on trial for a number of tax and bank fraud charges.

One of those charges relates to a tax return filed by Manafort that supposedly

contained inaccurate information [that] falsely reduced his tax liability by classifying millions of dollars she believed was income as loans.

The accountant who filed the return, Cindy Laporta (“she” in the above cite) testified under oath last week at Manafort’s trial that [emphasis added]

manipulating tax returns in such a way was “inappropriate” and that she knew it was wrong, but did it because Mr Manafort was a longtime client of her firm. “I prepared the tax returns and communicated with banks based on information that [Richard] Gates and Mr Manafort provided to me that I didn’t believe[.]”

This included such incidents as

Ms Laporta said she agreed to help finesse [Manafort’s] company’s income, recasting $900,000 as a loan, based on a two-page loan agreement that appeared to be from one of Mr Manafort’s clients, Telmar, that she suspected was fake.

And another:

Messrs Manafort and Gates pressed her to send to the banks what she believed were false documents purportedly forgiving the previously booked loans, after the banks had asked to see more income to provide the mortgages.

She could have refused to do these things.  She chose, instead, to be serially dishonest.

Laporta was granted immunity for this testimony.

Given her testimony that she contributed to falsifying tax documents—Federal felonies (and State felonies if these affected any State taxes)—why should any of her testimony be believed?  She’s confessed to being dishonest; how can we take any of her testimony as other than dishonest?

On the other hand, Mueller’s Manafort prosecutors traded her immunity for her testimony.  On what basis then, can we conclude she simply didn’t sell her testimony like a Thursday night hooker?  Alternatively, on what basis can we conclude she wasn’t brow-beaten, with those felonies of hers as cudgel, into testifying the way she has?  Either way, it seems clear to me that it was the Mueller prosecutors, not Laporta, who testified during Laporta’s time on the stand; they were just using her mouth to do so.