Tag Archives: responsibilities

Independence Day

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I posted this in 2012; it bears repeating.

On this day 235 and more years ago, a group of Americans got together and, pledging their Lives, their Fortunes and their sacred Honor to each other while relying on the protection of divine Providence, took our country free from tyranny and set us on a new, wholly experimental course.

These men openly acknowledged both our right and our duty to throw off any government that too badly violates its moral obligations to us sovereign citizens, that for too long abuses our liberties and our individual responsibilities.  At the same time, though, they acknowledged that routinely rebelling at every small offense was equally wrong: Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.  Yet those light and transient offenses want correction along with those abuses and moral failures.

And so, while fighting (and some dying) for our newly born nation and during the immediately ensuing years of a troubled peace, these men, with others from the newly independent and united States joining them, in a second phase of our experiment invented a wholly new form of government.  They created a government that would recognize the essential sovereignty of the members of a voluntarily formed social compact over our compact’s government, and they gave that government a structure and a strictly limited set of authorities designed to maximize our control of government and our ability to maintain that control.

They also invented a wholly new mechanism for throwing off an abusive government and replacing it with one more suited to our needs and to our control: a set of elections that would let us turn all the rascals out of one house of our legislative body every two years, that would let us depose the whole of the other house of our legislative body in sequential one-third increments every two years, and that would let us fire the chief executive of this government every four years—any and all whom we found wanting during their time in office.  This invention was accompanied by another invention of these men: a judiciary that sat, neither above nor below our executive and legislative, but equal to and separate from them—a third powerful check that granted stability to the whole.

We are here today arguing amongst ourselves, usually with great passion, over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, climate change, Benghazi, emails, and a host of other things, too, both momentous and trivial.  And we could not be without the genius and the sacrifice of those men those 235 and more years ago.

As you sit around by your barbecue, or at the beach, or wherever you may be, hamburgers and hotdogs in hand, beer nearby, children screaming and yelling in their own happinesses, take a moment to think about that.

The Europe the Left Wants Us to be Like

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Germany’s Bundestag has enacted legislation that not only attacks the concept of free speech (apparently an American concept, and not a human one), but also requires private enterprises to be the government’s enforcers of the new law.

Under the new legislation, social media companies have 24 hours to remove posts that obviously violate German law [hate speech, fake news, terror propaganda, and the like] and have been reported by other users. In cases that are more ambiguous, Facebook and other sites have seven days to deal with the offending post. If they don’t comply with the new legislation, the companies could face a fine of up to 50 million euros ($57.1 million).

And it’s government that will decide what constitutes hate speech, what news is fake, what is propaganda.  As if any of this should be proscribed by government.

The answer to unpopular speech, the answer to hurtful speech, is not silence but yet more speech.  Apparently, though, that’s another solely American concept and one that’s wholly missed in Europe.

Sadly, this is what our own Progressive-Democrat Left wants for us, too.  Oh, wait—they’ve already shown their attitude toward free speech.  At colleges and universities, at “protests” in DC, etc.

Sanctuary Cities

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For the Left it means sanctuary from inconvenient laws.  Nevertheless, the House has passed two bills aimed at eliminating such sanctuary by reducing the ability of local cities and counties to give sanctuary to illegal aliens.  One such is the No Sanctuary for Criminals Act, which looks to persuade—notice that: not force, as many on the Left insist it does—locals to hold folks in jail who’ve already been arrested by locals for local violations for up to 48 hours in response to an ICE detainer.  Kate Steinle was murdered by an illegal alien who had just been released—deliberately in contradiction of an ICE request.  Opponents, though, insist that

cooperation [with ICE] would undermine trust in law enforcement in immigrant communities….

This is just cynical: requiring that laws be obeyed (NSCA, after all, only requires existing procedure be followed) undermines respect for law and law enforcement.  Sure.

The other bill, “Kate’s Law,” for the unfortunate Ms Steinle, whose murderer was a five-times deported and reentered illegally alien, would successively increase the price of repeatedly illegally reentering the US after deportation.  The protests from the Progressive-Democrats in Congress are just as loud and foolish on this one.

It’s stupid, it has nothing to do with the criminal act that was done against Kate Steinle, which was a terrible thing[.]

Except that it has everything to do with that “terrible thing.”  Had the law been in effect at the time, it’s possible—likely, even—that Steinle’s multiply-deported and reentered murderer would have been in jail at time and Steinle would be alive today.  Of course, maybe not, too, but as the Progressive-Democrats are wont to say, “If it saves just one life….”

Oh, wait….

Fake News

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During a recent White House press briefing, the White House press representative Sarah Huckabee Sanders was answering a question from another reporter, when Brian Karem, of the Prince Georges County Sentinel, interrupted her and his colleague (I suppose his words were more important than others’ so he was going to say them regardless of who actually was speaking) to whine about the NLMSM being called out by the Evil Administration for press’ penchant for publishing misleading rumors disguised as fact.

You’re inflaming everybody right now with those words[.]

Huckabee Sanders didn’t dignify his arrogant rudeness with a response.

Karem took his beef to MSNBC News and Chris Matthews’ show:

There are reporters who have given their lives to get news to the public and to be labeled as “dishonest” and “fake news” rankles me[.]

Indeed there have been reporters who’ve sacrificed their lives, sometimes via miserable and lingering deaths, to get news to the public.  The whining, worse, today’s inflaming pseudo-journalism and the dishonesty of reporters who print deliberately unsubstantiated rumors purveyed by carefully anonymous “sources” sullies and insults the memory of those reporters.

Guys like Karem rankle me.  But he has gotten his 15 minutes of fame with his rant.

Misleading NLMSM

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Again.  On 22 Jun, CNN published, as part of its pseudo-journalism series on alleged ties between President Donald Trump and his associates and Russia, a claim that Anthony Scaramucci, an informal advisor to President Donald Trump, was tied to the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a sovereign fund of the Russian government and led by Dmitri Medvedev and Vladimir Putin, with whom readers might have a passing familiarity.  The fund has been sanctioned by the US government (by the Obama administration; although it’s not under Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, then or now, another of CNN‘s false claims), hence the nefariousness of Scaramucci’s alleged association and the depth of CNN‘s smear against him.

After Breitbart, et al., exposed the misleading, anonymous, single-source rumor nature of CNN‘s hit piece, CNN further assaulted the public’s ability to know by deleting the piece from the Internet, rather than merely admitting it was false and retracting it.  CNN with this move has chosen to censor the news in addition to making it up.

But that’s not all.  CNNMoney Executive Editor Rich Barbieri sent a memo to CNN staff requiring that, henceforth,

No one should publish any content involving Russia without coming to me and Jason [VP of Premium Content Video Farkas] first.

There’s less to that, though, than meets the eye.  The editors now demanding pre-publication review are the same editors who allowed the carefully unsubstantiated story to be published in the first place.  These are the same editors who set that standard in the beginning. Too, given the volume of writing and the pace of publication, how carefully will that “review” be done on all those stories, even on a single subject? They’ll just get a lick and a CNN promise. And what about all the unsubstantiated rumors on other subjects these guys publish or repeat?

There’s more to it, too, than meets the eye.  CNN is adding some seeming scapegoats to its “corrections:”

CNN announced late Monday that Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Haris have left the network.
Frank wrote the story. Lichtblau edited the piece, and Haris oversaw the CNN department, which is a new investigative unit.

More importantly, there’s still no requirement for corroboration by on-the-record sources of those “anonymous” sources’ claims.

Nothing is changing at CNN.