Tag Archives: responsibilities

Good Reporting?

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That’s Howard Kurtz’ claim.  In his piece about the NLMSM, Michael Flynn, and the “leak” that led to his resignation as President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor, Kurtz said that The Washington Post story that began the thing was “good reporting.”

Then Kurtz said this:

[T]he Post story would not have been possible without the cooperation of nine unnamed senior officials who furnished the leaked information.

The Post story was built entirely on those unnamed persons.  Unnamed.  We don’t know there were nine.  We don’t know they were senior or even officials.  We don’t even know they exist.  I have to ask: what part of “unnamed” is unclear to Kurtz?

The Post didn’t provide a single bit of corroborating evidence; The Post didn’t name a single source who would corroborate the claims of the leaker or leakers.  The only corroboration in this whole sad affair is the lack of denial from the White House.  This is damning, certainly, but it’s hardly dispositive.

Kurtz added this:

But it must be said that the leakers’ information was right on target.

Based on what?  Kurtz, along with his confreres in the NLMSM, have chosen to not publish the leaked transcripts to which the NLMSM claims to have access.

When did rumor-mongering become good reporting?

More Fake News

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This time, courtesy of the Progressive-Democrats in the House of Representatives.  House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Congressman Elijah Cummings (D, MD), as part of their whining about the Republican majority in the House

…cited a tweet purportedly from [ex-National Security Advisor Michael (Lt Gen, USA, Ret)] Flynn that said, “I feel it is unfair that I have been made the sole scapegoat for what happened.”

Which Cummings proceeded to emphasize, with Pelosi chiming in.

CUMMINGS: Madam Leader, just this morning, Flynn tweeted, and this is a quote, “scapegoat,” end of quote. Scapegoat. He basically described himself as a scapegoat.

PELOSI: I have a tweet, I’m going to make, I’m telling my staff right now—it’s not scapegoat, it’s stonewall, and that’s exactly what the Republicans in Congress are doing.

Except the tweet being so enthusiastically touted was a fake.  There followed, then, this:

Both offices later acknowledged the mistake. Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill acknowledged that Pelosi inadvertently cited tweets from a fake account. Cummings issued his correction on Twitter: “Yes, sorry, to correct the record—just learned like many others that the Flynn tweet this morning was fake.”

Notice that.  Pelosi didn’t apologize for her smear; she didn’t do anything.  She hid behind her spokesman, who did nothing more than acknowledge a “mistake.”  Cummings had the integrity to speak for himself, but he didn’t apologize for his role in the smear, either.  He just expressed regret for needing to “correct the record.”  Not a syllable of apology.

Insulting?

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Army Colonel Jeffery Nance, the presiding judge in the Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl desertion case has some concerns, officially because Bergdahl’s lawyers has them; unfortunately, Nance has his own, and they’re misplaced.

The judge…called video of [President Donald] Trump repeatedly calling Bergdahl a traitor during campaign speeches “disturbing” at a pre-trial hearing Monday.

He went further:

He also asked prosecutors pointed questions about whether Trump’s criticism has already created a public perception that Bergdahl won’t be treated fairly.

Nance exposed his own prejudgment with his characterization of a politician’s—a businessman as political tyro’s—campaign rhetoric as disturbing as though such blather might prejudice Bergdahl’s case.  Nance then deepened his failure with his implication that the trial participants—judge, lawyers, jury—might be influenced by doings from outside the courtroom.

It got worse.  Nance asked the prosecution lawyers,

You’re not at all concerned about the statement he made, “If I get in we will review his case”…after ranting and raving about no jail time?

Ranting?  More importantly, though, is Nance’s slur here against officers and NCOs in the United States Army—that they’re such cowards they’ll be swayed from their duty as jurors by campaign commentary.

The trial needs to go forward.  The Army and Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers deserve justice.  Bergdahl deserves justice: if the charges are dropped by this judge, Bergdahl can never be viewed as anything other than a deserter, even if he were not.  A fair trial—juried by officers and NCOs who aren’t the timid Milquetoasts Nance thinks they are—will determine Bergdahl’s guilt or innocence; ducking away from the trial cannot.

What Should a Health Plan Cover?

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Anna Wilde Mathews wondered about that in her piece in The Wall Street Journal.  First, a couple of asides.  Notice the tacit acknowledgment that we have no health insurance plans available.  That industry was eliminated in toto by Obamacare, which replaced the industry with a Federally mandated, publicly/privately funded health coverage welfare program.  Next, notice the tacit assumption in the piece’s subhead: that the law should mandate business decisions.

To the piece itself:

The 2010 health law created a new set of federal requirements for plans sold to individuals and small businesses, including a list of 10 benefits, among them prescription drugs, mental-health services and laboratory tests. It also mandated that plans cover preventive services such as vaccinations at no cost to enrollees.

Along with women’s contraceptives (but not men’s…) at no cost to enrollees or the businesses providing the plans.

Trimming certain benefit categories from the required list could sharply raise the cost of those benefits for consumers who opt to have them.

That’s Mathews’ claim, anyway.  What she’s chosen to ignore is that a competitive, free market would sharply reduce the cost of most of those “benefits.”  What she’s also chosen to ignore is that eliminating the mandatory nature of the coverages would sharply lower the cost to millions of others who don’t need those “benefits,” but who must pay for them anyway—even if they’re included in a plan at “no cost to enrollees,” a fiction cynically foisted onto us by the Obama administration.  Enrollees certainly are paying for them; the added cost is simply hidden in a higher overall price.  And the rest of us are paying for them, too, in premiums similarly elevated to pay for that required coverage and/or in the taxes we must pay to pay for the subsidy.

It’s certainly true that other, rarer or more expensive to treat problems would have higher prices, but there’s never been a case made for why Government should pay for these ahead of family, friends, charity, church, local community—the usual suspects.

Plans with skinnier coverage can carry lower premiums, actuaries say. But as with everything in health care, that comes with a trade-off.

NSS.  But those trade-off decisions belong to the individual, not to Government.

Bigotry from Ignorance

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The Owners of Strata Plan LMS 4025* owns a building in City of Vancouver, British Columbia, that houses among other businesses a restaurant that went out of business.  Mengfa International, which owns a small restaurant chain known as Moby Dick’s, wants to open a Moby Dick’s restaurant in that space, but the strata won’t allow it.

It insisted “that the word ‘Dick’ in Moby Dick was an offensive term[.]”

Mengfa demurred (and is suing the strata):

It says that the Moby Dick name and logo are “not offensive to the public, given its literary significance and fame.”

Which would be obvious to anyone with an actual education.  It’s just as obvious to anyone outside a particular building in the City that Dick is a common nickname for those named Richard.  As it is, the strata’s claim, aside from interfering with legitimate business, is a deep insult to the intelligence of anyone with any sort of education.  Or possessed of actual experience of the world, even just that part of it immediately outside the bubble formed from a shell of brick and mortar.

Illiterati like the members of the building council that runs this strata illustrate the bigotry that flows from the ignorance that too many modern education systems create when they put feel-good esteem froo-froo ahead of actual education and performance accountability for students.

Call me Ishmael, indeed.

*A strata, according to the Courthouse News Service site is a Canadian legal entity that

may be created to divide a building or buildings or land into “separate components that are individually owned and common components owned by all of the owners.”

The building of LMS 4025 is run by a building council.