Whenever I see one of the several “Love is Love” lawn signs in my Alexandria, VA. neighborhood, I think of the poster girl for untrustworthy teachers, Mary Kay Letourneau. This is her anniversary, the day she married her former student, her rape victim ten years earlier, and the father of two of her children, Vili Fualaau, 22.  Letourneau had been released from prison after serving a seven-and-a-half year sentence for raping him while teaching at Shorewood Elementary School, in the Seattle suburb of Burien.  Letourneau, was 34 when she began  a sexual relationship with the 12-year-old. At the time, she was married and had four children. 

But it was all OK, you see, because they were in love. I wrote about Letourneau several times. I ended this post, a few years before the happy couple’s marriage, this way:

It is absolutely a perversion of law, ethics and common sense that she should be permitted to pick up where she left off seven years ago, building on the young man’s attachments he had formed toward a trusted teacher to exploit him sexually and emotionally. Allowing her this creates an incentive for other disturbed teachers and adult supervisors to distort their young charges’ affections, ignoring the long term harm that is certain to result.

What Villi needed years ago was counseling and treatment, so that he could escape this illicit and illegal emotional attachment created by his teacher. Unfortunately, Villi’s family is of the same strange mindset as the Springer crowd, and never perceived the wrongfulness of LeTourneau’s conduct, or the damage it caused. Her betrayal of trust screamed out for a civil suit, as surely as any Catholic priest’s molestation. Then, perhaps her victim could have received help, and would now be moving into healthy relationships and a life far away from his seductress-teacher.

That is not to be, it appears. But a relationship that was ethically wrong in its inception does not suddenly become right simply because it is no longer illegal.

Yecchh. But today’s Disney employees would probably approve…

1. She truly is an incompetent and ignorant woman, you know. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Instagram to join the fatuous “Roe v. Wade is being reversed because of religious fanatics!” chorus with this argument:

For people who say ‘oh, but you’re harming a life, I believe this is life’, well some religions don’t. So how about that?

Our Jewish brothers and sisters, they are able to have an abortion according to their faith.

There are so many faiths that do not have this same definition of life as fundamentalist Christians. And so what about their rights? What about their rights to exercise their faith?

It’s ridiculous and it is theocratic. It’s authoritarian. It is wrong.

I shouldn’t have to specify what’s moronic about that, but just in case: Continue reading →

Valkygrrl tipped me off to the Supreme Court case of Patel v. Garland, a 5-4 decision involving both ethics and law. It’s almost too complicated to describe, so I recommend you read it, including Justice Gorsuch’s dissent, here.

It’s a terrific example of where the role of the Court diverges from what the average citizen thinks it is. The majority held that federal law bars courts from reviewing a judge’s alleged factual error in an immigration matter: Patel was held to have forfeited his chance at getting back on a path to citizenship because he had—mistakenly, he claims—stated falsely that he was a citizen on a key document. The trial judge ruled that this was intentional; Gorsuch states that this was an obvious error on the judge’s part, and that justice demands a judicial reversal. The conservative majority held that the decision could not be reviewed one way or the other.

“Today, the court holds that a federal bureaucracy can make an obvious factual error, one that will result in an individual’s removal from this country, and nothing can be done about it,” Gorsuch wrote. “No court may even hear the case. It is a bold claim promising dire consequences for countless lawful immigrants.” But the majority, in opinion by Justice Barrett, said federal law bans judicial review of decisions by immigration judges that deny discretionary relief from deportation, and the ban also prevents judicial review of factual findings underlying the denial of relief.

As the Waco Kid (“Blazing Saddles”) would say, “Boy, is she strict!”

I don’t understand why Gorsuch is so convinced Patel is being honest when he says he checked the wrong box by accident. Nor was he exactly a “lawful immigrant”: he came to the U.S. illegally to begin with.

1. From the “Quotes that would instantly make up my mind about who to vote for” Dept.: Kathy Burnett, one of the Republicans on the ballot in the GOP primary to determine who runs for the open U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania (Dr. Oz is among her competition, and the Trump endorsed candidate), was asked if she would support whoever got the nomination if she didn’t, and said,

“I have no intentions of supporting globalists. I believe we have ran out of room on this runway for this spaceship. I believe we have very little rope left to just roll the dice and we’ll see how it all works out on the other end. I believe our country is in trouble. I don’t believe we have much longer and I believe what I have done is I have made it possible where Pennsylvanians do not have to hold their nose and vote for the lesser of two evils this time. I don’t think we have room to just vote for any old warm body with an R next to their name. I think we can do better than that.”

The fact that someone who talks and thinks like that can even be this close to a seat in the Senate is sufficient reason to start looking for a real spaceship.

2. New York, New York! Continue reading →

Well, I’ve about had it. I just spent 45 minutes that I will want back on my deathbed trying to find an actual link to the Buffalo shooter’s “alleged manifesto.” Maybe you can find it, and good for you, but it should not be that difficult, and I am sick of this crap. These sources are counting on most readers simply relying on their interpretations, and their interpretations cannot and must not be trusted. The word from Protect Democrats Media Central went out that there was an opportunity to politicize the shooting, which left 10 dead, by blaming it on Fox News and Tucker Carlson. In one particularly odious headline in Rolling Stone, this reasoning was used to impugn all Republicans: “The Buffalo Shooter Isn’t a ‘Lone Wolf.’ He’s a Mainstream Republican.” Nice. Yet I couldn’t find any such smear piece that allowed readers to read what was driving this theory.

Over at the reliably conservative PJ Media, Matt Margolis provided his debunking of the Fox/Tucker narrative, writing in part,

A search of the entire manifesto also yields no mentions of Tucker Carlson and specifically mentions “the internet” as where he got his beliefs…the shooter describes himself as “authoritarian left-wing,” but the left [is] trying to blame ‘right-wing extremism’…Later in the manifest, the shooter insists, “I would prefer to call myself a populist. But you can call me an ethno-nationalist eco-fascist national socialist if you want, I wouldn’t disagree with you.” He also repeatedly attacks capitalists, and rejected the conservative label because, he wrote, “conservativism is corporatism in disguise, I want no part of it.”

But Margolis doesn’t link to a copy of the document either! Why should I trust him? Why should I, or anyone, trust any of these biased, manipulative messengers? Let me see this “alleged” manifesto, and I’ll decide who to blame. Believe me, I’ll be happy to point the finger at Tucker Carlson or Fox News if the text supports that. Now over at Liberty Unyielding, a right-wing site, the case is made that “The Great Replacement” is really a Left-inspired concept, and implies that this makes the other side of the ideological divide blameworthy for the 18-year-old’s rampage. But that site only links to a single page of the 180 page document!

I’m sick of our rotten, unprofessional, arrogant, unethical communications and information networks and agents. They are all untrustworthy. I detest every one of them.

Continue reading →