It’s May! It’s May!
1. So Joe Biden went on “Morning Joe” and denied that Tara Reade was telling the truth. So what? What does this tell us? Was there any chance whatsoever that he was going to say, “Yup, I finger-fucked her. I don’t know what came over me!”? No. This is like the Kurt Gödel conundrum about the island where there are only truth-tellers and liars, and there are some questions where they will give exactly the same answers. He picked a screamingly partisan journalist, Mika Brzezinski, to ensure soft-ball treatment (she actually was a bit tougher than expected), and, to some eyes, looked as if he had rehearsed his statement. Ann Althouse does an extensive analysis here.
I don’t see the point. It’s a pro forma denial, and Biden was pressured into it.
I do think the Post article used some unfortunate phrasing..
“The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee was rebutting Tara Reade’s accusation that he reached under her skirt to penetrate her with his fingers somewhere in the Capitol in 1993. This denial requires him to thread a thin needle.”
2. Showing it has more integrity than most women’s groups, Planned Parenthood, the Daily Beast reports, was the only one among the major pro-abortion groups in the nation that responded directly to the progressive site’s request for a comment regarding Tara Reade’s allegations. The “Democrat-aligned” groups either “did not respond” or ” replied and did not provide a statement”…except Planned Parenthood.
Its president released a statement saying in part, “We believe survivors—and saying we believe survivors doesn’t mean only when it’s politically convenient…Joe Biden must address this allegation directly.'”
3. Ethics Hero. Expect Bret Stephens, the on-again/ off-again token conservative in the New York Times op-ed stable to be seeing “Fire Bret Stephens” hastags in his sleep. In a contrarian op-ed this week, he wrote in part,
If New York City proper were a state, it would have suffered more fatalities than 41 other states combined…No wonder so much of America has dwindling sympathy with the idea of prolonging lockdown conditions much further. The curves are flattening; hospital systems haven’t come close to being overwhelmed; Americans have adapted to new etiquettes of social distancing….Yet Americans are being told they must still play by New York rules — with all the hardships they entail — despite having neither New York’s living conditions nor New York’s health outcomes. This is bad medicine, misguided public policy, and horrible politics.
…I write this from New York, so it’s an argument against my personal interest. But I don’t see why people living in a Nashville suburb should not be allowed to return to their jobs because people like me choose to live, travel and work in urban sardine cans…Gina Raimondo, the Rhode Island governor, was on to something when, a few weeks ago, she wanted to quarantine drivers arriving from New York. The rest of America needs to get back to life.
4. Here’s an example of never letting a crisis go to waste and being irresponsible about it. But try explaining that to the average American. The massive $2 trillion pandemic bill, passed in a rush with Democrats using the emergency to sneak in as many partisan agenda items as they could, included a huge increase in unemployment benefits, a $600 a week bonus. That created benefits aligned with working full time at $15 an hour, the minimum-wage level Democrats have long been pushing. Workers will now get an average of $978 in unemployment benefits. Labor Department statistics show half of full-time workers earned $957 or less each week in the first quarter of 2020, so this means many workers will realize they can earn more by not working than by going back to their jobs.
This unemployment pay raise helped spark the massive surge in unemployment claims, and a Heritage Foundation report concluded that just this one provision will result in almost 14 million more people to file for unemployment benefits than would otherwise be the case. The wholly intended results of setting the de facto wage floor at $15 an hour will be that companies will have to offer higher wages to lure people back to work who were making less than that.
The Heritage study also found that the $600 bonus alone will cut the GDP by as much as $1.5 trillion, and provides state-by-state breakdowns of the negative impact. This will also slow the economic recovery, which should help Democrats in the election.
Unethical, of course. But smart! [Source: Issues and Insights]
5. World’s smallest violin…for lifetime Democrat Tara Reade, based on this reported quote:
“I used to think that a Republican talking point was to call the mainstream media biased. So I used to think, ‘Oh, that’s just a talking point for them. I don’t believe it.’ But now I’m living it [in] real time, and I see it — like, I see it for what it is.”
I see. So as long as mainstream media bias and news manipulation benefited her and her party, she was happy to deny it existed, thus enabling the destructive rot of the delicate balance of democratic institutions. Now that it’s turned on her, she sees the light.
Ethics Alarms 
4.
And then when unemployment benefits run out and these people try to get back in the workforce the jobs will be no more because either the employers are now out of business or the jobs themselves have been automated.
Or an illigal immigrant who doesn’t qualify for unemployment will take their jobs.
Oregon added unemployment benefits to gig workers (which I support.. except now we should make them pay the tax) and illegal aliens as part of an emergency bill.
Don’t let an emergency go to waste in the effort to gain power.
1. Going on MSNBC and denying the allegations is neither under oath nor after evidence has been presented in court. Joe can and has spewed a gigantic load of shite in very recent history…some of which was even marginally intelligible. He wouldn’t lie about this, would he? Please.
1. God, I LOVE misplaced or lazily-placed modifiers:
“[H]e reached under her skirt to penetrate her with his fingers somewhere in the Capitol.”
“Oh nothing could be finer than to be in [rhymes with Carolina]in the morning.”
Maybe Joe’s defense is he had no idea where in the Capitol his fingers were? Maybe this is in a talking points memo put out by the DNC?
1, I have to admit, had Joe gone on Mika and Joe’s little gab fest and said, “Yup, I finger-fucked her. I don’t know what came over me!”? I’d vote for him for president. That would be George Washington/I cut down that cherry tree stuff.
Or Grover Cleveland’s “Yeah, I knew that woman. She may well have my son.”
Ma! Ma! Where’s my Pa? Gone to the White House! Ha-Ha-Ha!
Bingo!
To be fair to Cleveland, he did blandly admit that the child was probably his son and the woman in question had a reputation of being promiscuous. He had the good fortune of running against Blaine who was throughly corrupt. So his spun the story somewhat and wound up being a mediocre president.
Oh, I think you have to rank Grover as better than mediocre. For one thing, he saved the US from financial disaster by negotiating a bail-out by J.P. Morgan. But his famously candid admission may have had a very sinister side, which I discussed here: https://ethicsalarms.com/2017/02/20/its-presidents-day-our-special-guests-the-22nd-and-24th-presidents-grover-cleveland/
The Panic of 1893 resulted in a severe depression which put into receivership all of the US railroads and left many parts of the country on the brink of starvation. As a result, Cleveland and the Democrats were blamed for it and William McKinley and the Republicans swept the next presidential election.
Right. But without the bail-out, it would have been much, much worse.
(3) How much of New York’s death toll has to do with the fact that they made it illegal for nursing homes to refuse COVID-19 patients? The hospitals didn’t want to deal with those patients, so , they sent them to nursing homes. As long as the nursing home had space, they were not allowed to refuse, even if they had no way to isolate the patient and keep the virus from spreading to everyone in the facility. So, New York basically infected their entire nursing home population on purpose.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/coronavirus-spreads-new-york-nursing-home-forced-take-recovering-patients-n1191811
How much of the destruction of the US economy is due to the fact that New York Democrats decided upon unbelievably stupid and dangerous policies? We threw away and entire school year of learning for almost every child in the country because of the decisions of New York politicians.
I am old enough to remember when the lockdown was supposed to be for two weeks. Indeed, there wass little protest, and none of us kln ew what we were dealing with at the time.
I am old enough to remember the lockdown being extended to April 19th.
But we have learned more,.
The earliest known death was confirmed to have been on February 6th, in Santa Clara County, California. Furthermore, the decedent had not been to China recently, implying that there was community spread of the Wuhan virus since at least early January.
With infections far outnumbering confirmed cases, the U.S. as a whole reached its peak in mid-April (although some hot spots like New York City and New Orleans may have just hit the peak around the end of April).
This was not helped by the overreaction of some public officials.
And now we have the cost of these lockdowns. Over a billion people across the world could become unemployed.
This overreaction is why people are protesting the lockdown.
#1: As long as SloJo didn’t call Reade a “dog-faced pony soldier” or threaten to punch her out, it might appear that his ability to respond has improved. I wonder if he was provided with the questions in advance of the interview.
Of course he was provided the questions in advance. How else would they know what to put on his teleprompter?
#4 – The Oregon employment department added a snitch line for employees to report workers who will not come back to work when offered.
Is that for employees, or employERS? If it’s the latter, that actually seems like a good idea.
Mistyped that one. It is a tip line for employers.
My own business had to furlough 150 employees without pay. My partner and I called to check in with almost all of them last week and found that they were mostly loving the lockdown. We’re in a low-wage industry, and 90% of our employees are making more money on unemployment than they were making when they were working. Many of them are making more money than they have ever made before in their lives. The happiest were the part-time employees. Here in New York, part-time employees generally qualify only for partial benefits, but now they’re getting the $600/week bonus on top of that, so they’re making multiples of what they were making before the lockdown.
About that snitch line: What are the ethics of making an employee who’s safe at home making $900/week come in to a workplace where he risks possible infection for himself and his family for $500/week? We’re currently under government lockdown orders but have received permission to reopen a small part of our business, which would require us to recall 6 to 8 employees from furlough, so we’ve got to make a decision about whether and whom to recall.
That’s the elephant in the room, Greg. It’s preposterous that anyone will face liability for anyone catching a virus, but that’s where we’re headed. It’s what’s scared the hell out of all sorts of businesses and other entities. The insurers are scared shitless and they’re scaring their business insureds. There needs to be some sort of pre-emptive federal legislation, if that’s possible, taking this situation out of the tort liability arena. I have no idea if such a thing would be constitutional, but I think it could be under the interstate commerce line of cases. But the trial lawyers, and therefore the Democrats in Congress will fight it tooth and nail. But without it, the entire economy will be tied up in every county court in the nation indefinitely.