WHY is it a good morning?
1. Why are some people missing their ethics alarms? A family member owned a horse as a pet, and when the horse got old and infirm sold it to a slaughterhouse for dog food. This caused a long-running rift with the Alexandria branch of the Marshall clan, in which my wife will capture spiders and gently release them into the wild while singing “Born Free.” However, the family horse-trader is a saint compared to Fallon Danielle Blackwood, 24, a veterinary student in Alabama, who offered shelter for rescue horses only to profit by secretly selling the animals to Mexican slaughterhouses. She was arrested on a similar charge last year in North Carolina.
Though the current charges involve just 13 horses, Stolen Horse International, a nonprofit that helps find lost or stolen horses, says Blackwood may be behind the disappearance of dozens more. Her MO was to reach out to those in need of help caring for their horses and offer the equines a loving home at her farm near Boaz, Alabama.
Well, I hear veterinary school is expensive…
2. Why do the news media and the public let Democrats get away with the “immoral and ineffective” talking point? I discussed this in detail here. The latest to use the self-contradictory rhetoric was Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), who denounced President Donald Trump’s “quest for a racist and sinful big wall” between the U.S. and Mexico during a speech on the House floor, and followed up with a tweet calling the wall “hateful and ineffective.” Now it’s “sinful” to enforce the borders, is it? How does someone make the argument that border security is “racist” and simultaneously claim that they are in favor of border security? If trying to keep illegal immigrants out is sinful and racist, how can the claim that border security is desirable be anything but hypocrisy?
This argument depends on listeners not paying attention, being complicit in an open borders strategy, or having the IQ of a mollusk.
3. Why do people this inept keep getting elected to Congress? At a Washington reception billed as a “celebration of Asian-American and Pacific Islander (API) members of the 116th Congress,” Hawaii Democratic Rep. Ed Case said that he felt like “an Asian trapped in a white body.” How awful! Trapped in a white body! Yechh! Pooie!
Pandering to racists is a bi-partisan activity, especially in the Aloha State, where hostility to whites is open and palpable.
4. Why does the Trump administration have so many lazy goof-offs in positions of power? “Emoluments Clause? What Emoluments Clause?” The General Services Administration apparently doesn’t read the news. worries that President Trump’s lease on a government-owned building that houses his DC hotel could violate the Constitution when the agency let him keep the lease after he won the White House, the agency’s top watchdog said Wednesday.
The Trump Organization won a lease on a government-owed building before he became President. After the election, the GSA had to decide whether his company could keep the lease for the building, now home to the Trump International Hotel. That meant determining whether the lease violated the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which bans Presidents from taking payments from foreign governments. It didn’t bother, and a number of foreign governments have held events and rented rooms at the hotel in the past two years. . The Washington Post says that the Inspector General found “that [GSA] improperly ignored these Emoluments Clauses, even though the lease itself requires compliance with the laws of the United States, including the Constitution.” The report does not recommend that Trump’s lease be canceled but said there should be a fresh review of the deal.
There is no excuse for this but arrogance, inattention and incompetence. The official logo for the Trump administration should be someone shooting himself in the foot.
5. Why do conservative pundits keep falling into the same hypocrisy trap? This was passed along on right-wing mega-blog Instapundit:
Hilarious. Kasich was a news commentator on Fox News after he left the House, hosting Heartland with John Kasich from 2001 to 2007 and was a frequent substitute host for The O’Reilly Factor.
I don’t recall any protests from the Right then. Nor were there claims of degraded media/political norms when Fox hired Sarah Palin, then seen as a rising Presidential hopeful, and Mike Huckabee, who had run for President and would again, in 2016.
Kasich also shares with Huckabee and Palin the feature that he will never be nominated for President. In addition, working for CNN, unlike bloviating for Fox, only makes that fate more certain, unless Kasich is contemplating changing parties, which would require gender reassignment surgery.
6. Why do we entrust our young to educators who say things like this? Carol Folt, the chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who endorsed the historical air-brushing exercise of tearing down a statue of a Confederate soldier on campus, is leaving (Good!) but made it clear that she will make sure the pedestal “Silent Sam” once stood on leaves with her, saying
“The presence of the remaining parts of the monument on campus poses a continuing threat both to the personal safety and well-being of our community and to our ability to provide a stable, productive educational environment. No one learns at their best when they feel unsafe.”
The woman does not know what “safe” means. She is under the delusion that pedestals are dangerous. She believes that the students learn by removing references to the past that they might find disagreeable. The fact that someone like this could rise to lead a major university shows that none of America’s students are safe—from indoctrination, censorship, and idiocy.
Ethics Alarms 
Regarding the emoluments clause, does that extend to all elected federal officials? If so, what do we do with those owning stock in Boeing, McDonnell Douglas or any other firm that may sell anything to a foreign official. My understanding of the emoluments clause was so that the elected official could not draw compensation from a foreign power as an employee or contractor. Can Nancy Pelosi sell wine from the family vineyards to any foreign government. Can Trump simply ban services to foreign governments? What if the foreign government representative is gay, or some other protected class. No one demanded the Clinton Foundation which took in millions frim foreign powers shed the Clinton name and HRC when pressed stepped down from the foundation placing her child as its head; basically the same steps Trump has taken.
There is another issue at play here as well, I believe it is called unjust enrichment. The building which houses the Trump hotel was renovated using millions ofTrump organization funds.
The emoluments clause issue has been nothing more than a means to attack Trump and I would bet those overseeing the day to day activities of GSA have been around for many previous administrations. More likely, the lease did not become an issue because it did not trigger some bureaucratic event.
Sure. But that doesn’t excuse walking into it like its a spinning airplane propeller.
Have you considered that anti-Trump GSA officials purposely ignored it in order to allow time for a foreign power to rent space? My only point is that most GSA personnel are career people that may not care about doing what they should and only do what is the minimum amount described in the job description.
Given I don’t know who Trump’s head of GSA is or even if this is one position that remains unconfirmed I am hesitant to make this Trumps fault.
Followup
The lease itself does not create a problem with the emoluments clause. The only emolument that could be considered is the profit that inures to the president resulting from the services purchased by the foreign officials. It seems a bit unfair to label GSA officials as incompetent when they do not audit the Trump hotel’s books. How would they know who books what. Furthermore, the only responsibility for Trump is to notify Congress about the emolument (net profit) and if they say it must be returned he can return the net profit.
I thought the problem with Kasich is that he sold himself to the public as a moderate Republican, but once he realized that wouldn’t get him to the White House, he became a leftist so he can vie for the 2020 Democratic nomination. I didn’t think it was that he was hired, but that they hired hired im after they knew (or because they knew) he was that phony and that he would be running for President in just 1 year. Also, has any network employed someone as a political commentator WHILE they were engaged in primaries and the election?
No.
Maybe this can be a first for CNN.
1. I wouldn’t have imagined that it would be economical to ship a horse from Alabama to Mexico for the purpose of turning it into dog food.
Depends upon if you want the horse alive at the end of the trip. Freezer trucks are fairly economical when packed with high value content like meat.
In Texas the laws regarding selling horses for meat have gotten so bad that one cannot afford to have a horse die. The official disposal costs have gotten ridiculous. It is so bad, that there is property I know of which has a dead horse hidden in the center, away from prying eyes. Cheap to let the buzzards and coyotes dispose of it.
Many land owners find it cheaper to rent a bulldozer to bury the horse without anyone knowing. If someone asks where the horse went (which is rude in Texas) they get a “it got out and never came back.”
Getting a “little bit” from the slaughter buyer is a viable alternative to spending even more on euthanasia and removal of the remains. My mare went down last year and between the vet “farm call fee” (it seems to always happen late on a Saturday night), the exam ending in the bad news and the euthanasia, and the removal the next morning I was down nearly $1000.
The kill buyers frequent the auctions and low-ball bids until their trailer is full…. and there are activists who go to these auctions and bid up on every horse in hopes of making the trip a financial loss to the kill buyers. Its a nasty business.
If you are going to have horses you should be sure your tractor will accept the backhoe attachment.
Fallon claimed the horses’ last words were: “Carry on comrades, long live Napoleon!”