Tag Archives: responsibilities

More Hateful Violence-Inciting Rhetoric from the Left

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They just can’t let go, even after they’ve been shown, graphically, what their incitement to violence achieves.

“My advice would just be to Republicans who do cozy up to him—it’s like hugging a suicide bomber,” [MSNBC Political analyst Elise Jordan] said. “He blows you up in the process with him.”

Her problem with reality continued, as she insisted that Trump “wasted the country’s collective time speculating over the tapes’ existence.”  Never mind that the only ones wasting time in the speculation was the NLMSM: it was their editorial decision to obsess over an obvious trolling move.  No one made them.  And no one outside the “press” room cared.

Obstructionism

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…for the sake of obstructionism.  And now the Progressive-Democrats in the Senate are getting blatant about it.  They don’t want to help reform the health care coverage disaster of the last eight years, so to block Republican and Conservative efforts at reform, these Progressive-Democrats have decided to block everything in the Senate.  Here’s Senator Chris Murphy (D, CT) o the overall attitude:

What more could we do—hold Republican Senators by the arms to stop them from getting to the chamber?  I think we’ll use every tool at our disposal.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) even arranged to force cancelation of all committee meetings last Monday, regardless of the subject or purpose of those meetings.  No business was allowed to be conducted—all to block health care coverage reform.

Meanwhile, these Progressive-Democrats are ignoring the millions of Americans who are about to lose all coverage as coverage provider after coverage provider leave the Obamacare markets and withdraw from the ObamaMarts in the States.  Iowa, for instance, is about to lose all providers of individual plans—every single one of them—and no Iowa citizen will have access to market coverage.

This blanket obstructionism while the health coverage industry burns stinks, it’s damaging to Americans who need or want health care insurance, and it’s destructive of our democracy.

Pseudo-Science

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I got an email ad over the weekend, inviting me to join the American Association for the Advancement of Science—AAAS, which used to be a respectable organization.  The ad said in part,

Organizations that have propelled us forward—NIH, NOAA, and the EPA, just to name a few—are facing major funding cuts.

Because fraud, waste, and abuse are important only when it’s the other guy’s FWA.  We wouldn’t been involved with any of that.  Not us.

No, even were these organizations sound, their spending can be tightened, and they can absorb budget cuts.  They can do the same amount of work, or more, did they only spend with efficiency rather than profligacy.

On the other hand, not all of these organizations are sound.  NOAA, for instance, has been caught more than once falsifying climate data and altering its climate data bases.  NOAA does not even follow its own protocols, as one ex-NOAA scientist put it, in the way its data are handled, documented, and stored.  EPA’s abuse of its authority and its dependence on false science (plant food is atmospheric pollution?  Ignoring the fact that atmospheric CO2 lags planetary warming by 800-1,800 years?  Really?) are widely documented.

Of course the men and women managing the AAAS know this.  And their knowledge makes their claims all the more disingenuous.

And this in that ad:

President Trump has begun the process of pulling the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord, putting us in the company of only two other nations to reject this planet-saving agreement.

Science by political consensus.  Sure.

Too, the men and women minding the AAAS store know full well that the “Accord” bound no one to any performance whatsoever.  Further, the non-binding “bindings” left the People’s Republic of China free to continue to expand its emissions into the 2030s, and only from that peak to start reducing.  If it felt like it.  In addition, the Accord’s non-binding “binding” left India free to refuse to do anything at all until it was paid the $3 trillion or more vig that it is demanding.

Such pseudo-science is most assuredly to be done away with.

Leaks, Again

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Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on leaks about ongoing investigations:

Americans should exercise caution before accepting as true any stories any stories attributed to anonymous “officials,” particularly when they do not identify the country—let alone the branch or agency of government—with which the alleged sources supposedly are affiliated.

Indeed.  And here’s Peter Carr, a Robert Mueller spokesman, assuring us that Mueller’s special counsel operation

has undertaken stringent controls to prohibit unauthorized disclosures that deal severely with any member who engages in this conduct.

Then, I have to ask, why is Mueller still allowing these leaks to occur?  Why hasn’t he hailed his leakers into court, civil or criminal?

Another “Leak,” Another Rumor

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President Donald Trump’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey is now a subject of the federal probe being headed by special counsel Robert Mueller, which has expanded to include whether the president obstructed justice, a person familiar with the matter said.

The rest of the article continued in that vein: no real-world sources cited, only this deliberately unidentified one.  The Wall Street Journal‘s article at the link also cited a Washington Post article on the same subject; that bit also only cited “sources”—five of them in WaPo‘s case—whose identities were carefully withheld.

“…a person familiar….”  “…five officials….”  The WaPo piece even said their “five officials” demanded anonymity because they were speaking without authorization.

This raises two questions and a concern. The questions are these. First, with no substantiation, how are we to know these sources even exist?  How can we do our own checking?

Second, these sources—if they exist—begin as liars: they’re speaking without authorization, and so they have broken the terms of their employment and possibly their oaths of office.  How can we believe the claims of liars? Why would WaPo or WSJ take such claims seriously?

And this, at the end of the WSJ piece, with no trace of irony on the part of the authors:

At a June 13 hearing at a House of Representatives panel, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein declined to say who asked him to write a memo justifying Mr Comey’s firing.  …  Mr Rosenstein said he wasn’t at liberty to discuss the matter.

“The reason for that is that if it is within the scope of Director Mueller’s investigation, and I’ve been a prosecutor for 27 years, we don’t want people talking publicly about the subjects of ongoing investigations,” Mr Rosenstein said.

So much for that.

The concern is this: why WaPo and especially WSJ have walked away from basic, foundational journalist standards—that allow for anonymous sources but require them to be substantiated by two or more on-the-record sources—and descended themselves to rumor-mongering.