Tag Archives: responsibilities

Government Intrusion

Posted on by
Reply

A particularly bad effort by the Progressive-Democratic Biden administration, this one attempts to insert Government between parents and their children, have the children engage directly with Government persons, and block the parents from participating or any sort of oversight at all.

The proximate subject is a CDC-generated

private chat platform that enables teens to discuss—without parental oversight—a range of highly fraught issues, including LGBT challenges, occult topics, dealing with difficult relatives or even finding an alternative “family” through communities that are more accepting.

This Q Chat Space

includes features that enable its teen users to evade parental scrutiny and oversight.
For example, the platform offers two options for text reminders of upcoming chats—discreet or detailed. Detailed reminders include a “Q Chat Space” tag and other identifying information. Discreet reminders, however “are private, they do not include ‘Q Chat Space’ or the name of the chat,” the platform explains. “They only say ‘Reminder: You have an online discussion in about 1 hour.’ or ‘Reminder: You have an online discussion in about 24 hours.'”
At the bottom of the Q Chat Space website, there is a bar with a button reading “Click/tap here for a quick escape…” accompanied by a picture of a person running towards an exit door. Clicking on the button changes the screen to Google’s website.

Jaco Booyens has the right of it:

It is not the role of the CDC or any school environment to educate Americans’ children on gender, sex, sexual conduct, or sexual preference. In fact, this particular site is highly deceiving, encouraging children to hide their activity on the site from their parents by giving them an easy exit button.

There are two major Government crimes in Booyens’ objection: one is that intrusion of Government into parental responsibilities. The other is Government teaching children to not trust their parents, to hide important family matters from them, functionally to lie to their parents, if only by omission.

This is what the Progressive-Democratic Party is trying to do to traditional family structure. We must start the removal process this fall.

Lawlessness

Posted on by
Reply

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer is busily mandating prevailing-wage requirements for contracts let by the State’s government. Never mind that she’s defying the will of the legislature—and in the present case, the will of the citizens of Michigan—in doing so.

…a citizen initiative under the Michigan Constitution. We collected tens of thousands of signatures, sending the issue straight to the Legislature. Lawmakers overwhelmingly stood with taxpayers, bypassing the governor [then-Governor Rick Snyder (R)] and ending prevailing wage for the whole state.

It hardly matters, though, since Progressive-Democratic Party politicians like Whitmer think petty laws don’t apply to their august selves.

Jimmy Greene, Associated Builders and Contractors of Michigan President, who spearheaded that citizen initiative, isn’t done, though, and neither are the good citizens of Michigan.

So with the help of the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation, we’ve filed a lawsuit asking state courts to throw out the prevailing wage.

The fight still won’t be done, though. The suit is a necessary step, but even with a victory in the courts, there’s no reason to believe Whitmer’s bureaucrats won’t tacitly enforce the union wage business simply by which companies they select for contract award and the weasel-worded pseudo-rationales those bureaucrats provide.

It’s necessary to take the next couple of steps, also: vote the Progressive-Democrats out of office en masse in Michigan, and then the newly installed Executive Branch politicians will need to follow through and fire the bureaucrats, also en masse.

They’re Both Wong

Posted on by
Reply

A Washington Post columnist wrote Thursday, regarding the Wuhan Virus (my term, not hers) lockdowns and the impact they had on our children,

I am basically totally uninterested in who was right and who was wrong in the summer of 2020. Kids don’t need adults’ self-justifications. They need us to get moving and looking forward.

The thrust of her justification centered on

It’s time to start thinking about how to pay them back[.]

That’s mistaken. Blowing off who made the mistake goes too far.

There was a fair amount of demurral regarding her position. A Deseret News contributor offers what I think is the canonical objection.

I am very interested in who was right and who was wrong because we need to make sure that the people who made bad policy will never make policy affecting children again[.]

She’s wrong also, but from the opposite side. Emphasizing fixing blame goes too far in the opposite direction.

Finding out who made the error matters to the extent that it’s important to track trends of good and bad performance so we can emphasize the successful and lessen the impact of the unsuccessful. Mistakes occur, including serious ones, but if those are not part of a pattern, the corrections still need to be made and the lessons learned, but the individuals, in the main, should be continued.

The most important aspect of a mistake, though, especially the large ones like these lockdowns, is the fact of that mistake. Investigations into the mistake need to focus on how the mistake occurred—its mechanics—so efficient, focused corrective action can be taken and the likelihood of that mistake recurring greatly reduced, if not prevented altogether.

If that investigation into the mechanics of the mistake leads the investigators to a who as the what that led to the mistake, that’s when who did it becomes important. That’s when responsibility (not blame) can be attached and personnel-related corrective action, as efficient, focused corrective action, can be taken. And not before.

A Lawless DA

Posted on by
Reply

Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon doesn’t like California’s Three Strikes law, which requires prosecutors to include in their charging documents prior felony convictions—which on conviction for the current crime can seriously extend the penalty for that crime. Pursuant to his dislike, Gascon has refused to charge those prior felonies, and he’s ordered the prosecutors in his office to refuse, also.

Subsequent to implementing that practice, Gascon was ordered by the relevant California State district court to cut that out and to charge in accordance to the Three Strikes law. He appealed and lost at the appellate level. He’s still refusing to charge under the law, and now under two court orders, and he’s appealing the whole thing to the State’s Supreme Court.

Gascon’s rationale?

Gascon on Thursday called the appellate court’s decision “a dangerous precedent” and argued that it amounted to “taking the charging decision out of a prosecutor’s hands.”
“The Three Strikes law imposes Draconian penalties on defendants who were previously convicted of certain prior felonies[.]”

Say Gascon is right on both of those—the charging decision has been taken from the prosecutor, and the Three Strikes law leads to draconian penalties. That’s what the law requires, for good or ill. Gascon’s beef is with the political arms of California’s government; he doesn’t get to simply ignore laws of which he personally disapproves. His role as a District Attorney is to prosecute defendants within the bounds, and according to the requirements, of the law.

The recall of George Gascon must proceed to a successful end, so the good citizens of California can be rid of a prosecutor who doesn’t believe in law or in rule of law.

The Opposite of Courage

Posted on by
Reply

In a Just the News article centered on George Washington University Law Professor, and holder of the university’s Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law, Jonathan Turley’s view that four Border Patrol agents have defamation and denial of due process cases (the four agents face administrative punishments even though the Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Professional Responsibility investigation found they’d done nothing wrong), JtN quoted National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd as saying,

…the president of the United States said that these individuals would pay, and the moment he said that, those investigators had no choice but to find some sort of fault—whether it was criminal or administrative.

On that I must disagree. There’s no doubt the “investigators” might have felt pressure to find a fault, but they also without doubt were not forced to do so. The most pressure that could have been applied would have been to cancel their jobs.

It would have taken a measure of courage to resist the pressure. Choosing their jobs, assuming such a threat was made or implied, over doing the right thing, however, took no courage.

In choosing between doing a right thing and doing a wrong thing, the opposite of courage is cowardice.