Less than two weeks ago, President Biden made a speech in which he commanded oil companies to lower their gas prices.
“To the companies running gas stations and setting those prices at the pump, this is a time of war, global peril, Ukraine. These are not normal times. Bring down the price you are charging at the pump. Do it now,” he said.
Then, on Fourth of July weekend, he repeated the order.
Observations: Continue reading
I wanted to keep all of today’s posts positive and appropriately celebratory of the official birthday of the greatest country on earth. It’s impossible, unless I just pretend “it isn’t what it is” out there, and I am distraught.
Let’s start with the shock headline that bannered the Drudge Report last night. Here is what it looked like:
GALLUP SHOCK: ONLY 38% PROUD TO BE AMERICAN
The information is pure clickbait of the worst kind. The headline on the linked Gallup article is “Record-Low 38% Extremely Proud to Be American” (my emphasis). The piece goes on to say that an additional 27% were “very” proud to be Americans, making the “extremely/very proud” number 65%. In fact, only 4% of those surveyed said they were not proud to be Americans.
I found that part of the poll surprising. Not surprisingly, Democrats lead the not-very-proud group, and since the party’s entire thrust recently has been to try to transform the nation into a European-style socialist nanny state while denigrating the U.S. as racist to its core. I would have expected the un-proud, as in “ashamed,” to be much higher. Continue reading
Five years ago, California passed a law blocking most taxpayer-funded travel to states “deemed” to have passed laws that discriminate against LGBTQ people. The key word is “deemed.” Assembly Bill 1887 was a response to a North Carolina law that required people to use public bathrooms based on the sex shown on their birth certificate. That’s not discrimination. That’s “a legitimate approach to a difficult issue that a powerful voting bloc in California has strong feelings about.” Twelve states landed on California’s first boycott list, and then, on June 28th, the 52nd anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, gay Attorney General Rob Bonta (above) announced that he was adding Florida and four other states to its official travel ban list, claiming that they passed “anti-LGBTQ” laws that are “directly targeting transgender youth.”
The “new improved” trope was an amusing Madison Ave. tradition when I was a kid. I always wondered if it worked: I suppose it worked on idiots. I remember an “Ice Blue Secret” TV commercial in which “Katy Winters,” the fictional women’s deodorant shill stunned her friends by saying, “Yes, it’s true: I’m through with Ice Blue Secret!” as she tossed a jar of the stuff into a waste basket. After the staged gasps, she then whipped out a newly designed jar and said, “I’ve switched to new improved Ice Blue Secret!”
When Richard Nixon had his big political comeback in 1967 as prelude to winning the Presidency in 1968, wags called him the “new improved Nixon.”
But I digress.
Let’s see if the New Improved Open Forum lives up to its name….
That’s my second favorite musical moment in “1776” (after “The Egg”), when South Carolina delegate Edward Rutledge, the youngest member of the Continental Congress, mocks the hypocrisy of the anti-slavery Massachusetts delegation, seemingly dooming independence over the slavery question. Of course, Rutledge didn’t sing his objections, and his opposition to leaving Great Britain was primarily over the fact that he didn’t think the Colonies could win the inevitable war. On this date, he issued a letter in 1776 explaining his reasoning. But he came around, and signed the Declaration of Independence a few days later. Thank goodness for that.
This is also the date (in 1972) when the Warren Court holdovers on the Burger Court launched Furman v. Georgia, ruling by a 5-4 margin that capital punishment was unconstitutional and in violation of the Eighth Amendment banning “cruel and unusual punishment.” This was the same kind of bootstrapping logic and judicial over-reach that led the same SCOTUS to Roe v. Wade the next year. Obviously the Founders didn’t believe that capital punishment was cruel or unusual, and it was considerably crueler in the 18th Century than in 1971. The liberal justices just didn’t like capital punishment and couldn’t leave the decisions about its use to the public and their elected representatives, so they acted unilaterally, democratically, and dishonestly. This bad decision was reversed just four years later, at a time when public support for the death penalty was soaring.
I can connect “Molasses to Rum to Slaves” to the Roe controversy, because there is a strong connection, but never mind.
1. How does this crap get stopped? Yesterday, while writing a draft of an official court document on Microsoft Word, I used the editor function to catch about 40 typos. The program also flagged what Word called a “Diversity” error. I used the verb “master,” as in “master the material.”
Obviously, I was referencing slavery, according to the robot woke word censors. Word told me I should use “learn,” or “become skilled at.”
I used “master,” and began to search for a document program that isn’t trying to brain-wash the world.
2. Bizarro World logic. At least 51 illegal immigrants—even Fox News is calling them “undocumented migrants” now, which is deceit—were found dead in a tractor-trailer in San Antonio, Texas,and more than a dozen were hospitalized. Who is responsible? Well, they are, for trying to break our laws and enter the country illegally, and the smugglers who took their money to aid and abet the crime. Next in line is the Biden administration and open-border advocates, who send the message to such desperate foreigners that the U.S. really welcomes them, once they can get into the country. Biden’s incompetent paid liar, Karine Jean-Pierre, responded to that criticism by saying, “The fact of the matter is the border is closed.” Right. Who believes that? If that’s true, why is a massive caravan of would-be border-jumpers creeping toward the Mexican border? It’s closed! It’s amazing that the 12 million or more illegal immigrants in the U.S. ever got in.
Here’s the libertarian response, from Tim Carney, the editor of the Washington Examiner:
He’s not an “open border person,” but he’s arguing that not having open borders is at fault for the deaths. Ace of Spades responded with typical emphasis, writing in part, Continue reading
Here is another epic Comment of the Day on the Dobbs freakout, this one by mermaidmary99, whose best comments are nearly always sent to SPAM by WordPress. Yet she persists….
Here it is, and may I say…
Wow.
***
As a woman, what guts me is that the safest place for a baby to be isn’t, and the person who above all others should advocate for that baby’s life and protect it, instead is upset they can’t kill it at will, for any reason whatsoever, including their own irresponsibility and stupidity.
Hearing my fellow “sisters” complaining that they can’t “exercise their RIGHT” (and have others pay for it) is one of the sickest, ANTI-SCIENCE, anti-nature, things I have ever seen.
And, for a party committed to science, Democrats have huge blinders on with this one.
So huge their religion that condemns abortions is IGNORED as well! Continue reading
I don’t understand the persistence of such a blatantly unethical situation at all. It is the apotheosis of “It isn’t what it is.” Any group, movement, elected official or individual who approves of such an obvious injustice should be branded as untrustworthy, whether it be due to intellectual deficiencies, dishonesty, delusion or cowardice.
Ricci Tres, a 29-year-old transgender woman, defeated 13-year-old Shiloh Catori, to win the $500 top prize in a women’s division of New York City street skateboarding competition. The real girl got $250. Four of the six finalists were under the age of 17, with the youngest being 10-year-old Juri Iikura, who came in fifth. Tres was the oldest contestant. Tres had previously failed to qualify for the Women’s Street USA Skateboarding National Championships in a bid to qualify for the Olympics, but was rejected because of an excess of testosterone, according to The Daily Mail. Obviously, Tres is the victim of transphobia.
So she decided to beat some little girls and pick up an easy 500 bucks. It should cover shaving costs. Continue reading
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting really tired of the mouth-foaming anti-Supreme Court rants from people who can’t mount any kind of a coherent legal or ethical argument. The absurd attempts to compare the earlier Bruen ruling on gun rights and Dobbs were particularly forced, but then so are the claims that Dobbs is based on Catholic theology [See Seth Tillman’s neat debunking of a Columbia prof on this silly assertion here…] and that the opinion portends the banning of birth control. I found it particularly disheartening that a smart, usually rational lawyer friend echoed back those MSNBC talking points. I know she watches the shameless leftist-propaganda network, but assumed that she had the brains and integrity to know when she was being fed garbage. I guess not. Scary.
Meanwhile, I have been surprised to see how so many of the media defenders of abortion so quickly defaulted to ugly, transparently unethical (and immoral) reasoning. On HLN, for example, a special report cautioned that states ending the wholesale slaughter of the unborn would face serious economic hardships as scores of women had to deal with unwanted pregnancies, keeping them out of the workplace. I am beginning to believe that an unexpected salutary result of Roe’s fall, which I was not expecting or in favor of, may be that a larger proportion of the public will realize just how brutal, callous and unethical the “pro-choice” movement is and has been all along.
Remember, abortion isn’t an ethics conflict, in which there are two strong ethical values pulling in opposite directions. It’s an ethical dilemma, with a powerful, indeed the most powerful, ethical consideration—life—is being opposed by non-ethical considerations like convenience, ambition, avoidance of unpleasant consequences and finance. The pro-abortion movement, some of it anyway, understands that, and also understands that framed as a an ethics dilemma, their position is a loser. Thus it has pretended that the life side of the issue doesn’t exist. It’s amazing that they got away with this deception for so long, but in the desperate efforts to justify their outrage, they are only revealing their lack of respect for human life for all to see.
1. Why does anyone pay attention to this woman? Writer, pundit and progressive activist Saira Rao tweeted, “This country is a racist transphobic homophobic xenophobic ableist classist Islamophobic misogynistic dumpster fire. As such, seeing the American flag makes me want to vomit.” The statement is an expression of hate only, and deliberately insults not only the nation of her birth but also every normal American who is justly proud on the nation, its history and culture. One of the benefits of the U.S. is that you can say or write offensive stuff like that, but if your perception, values and judgment is that poor, I don’t care what you think. You’re untrustworthy and incompetent. Continue reading
As Ethics Alarms has stated many times, any individual, official, politician, pundit, journalist, celebrity or organization that abuses its public trust and engages in unethical and destructive conduct when their statements make the public more ignorant than it already is, and it already is too ignorant to competently participate in a democracy.
Welcome to the BET Awards!
The hostess of last night’s televised festivities (of a racially exclusive awards show that makes pronouncements about equality and civil rights), Taraj Henson, got things off to an irresponsible start by saying, with the ‘I’m pissed off and certain I am right though I have no clue what I’m ranting about’ expression on her face you see above by saying,
“It’s about damn time we talk about the fact that guns have more rights than a woman. It’s a sad day in America. A weapon that can take lives has more power than a woman who can give life, if she chooses to.”
This is being called a “powerful statement” this morning, on CNN’s HLN among other places. Stupid statements are not powerful. It is not a fact that guns have more rights than women: inanimate objects have no rights. Henson is making declarations about rights when she doesn’t understand what a right is. Weapons don’t take lives: they have no agency or autonomy. People take lives. Unlike “guns,” abortion is an act performed by people, and that act has taken far, far more lives in the U.S. since Roe v. Wade was written than people firing guns have. No laws in any states either require women to “give life” or prevents them from doing so. The laws at issue do limit the extent to which a women, having created human life, can unilaterally end it when she “chooses to.”
Misleading, inarticulate, hyperbolic and intellectually muddled pronouncements like Henson’s do no good whatsoever, and a lot of harm by making intelligent debate impossible.
Others were similarly adamant and destructive.
Democrat Rep. Jake Auchincloss’s chief of staff was caught by Capitol police defacing posters outside of the offices of Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene back in March. Timothy Hysom, a veteran Democrat congressional staffer who worked for Rep. Adam Schiff before becoming Auchincloss’s top aide, was caught on hidden camera security footage defacing Greene’s posters with stickers. As far as I can tell, he did not draw mustaches on pictures of her face.
Police believed Hysom was involved in seven poster attacks outside Greene’s office in the Longworth House Office Building between January and March. The aide, who is 51-years-old, refused to cooperate with police when confronted.
Auchincloss’ spokesperson, spokesman Matt Corridoni, justified his colleague’s violation of DC Code § 22–3312.01 Defacing Public or Private Property” by saying that the real victims were people “forced to read” Greene’s posters stating that male and female are only two genders, and calling such a message “bullying.”
Some conservative commentators are making a major issue out of the fact that “the same U.S. Attorney’s office that pursued the Jan. 6 defendants declined to approve an arrest warrant” for Hysom, proving a double standard. This misses the real ethics point by the proverbial country mile. Continue reading
