It is clear the the 2022 Ethics Alarms Award for the Most Incompetent Elected Official of the Year is going to come down to the wire. Oregon Governor Kate Brown, already a strong contender (as she was in 2021 and 2020), just delivered a pure grandstanding exhibition that insulted multiple juries, undermined the rule of law, and in effect lowered the penalty for vicious murder to that of far less heinous crimes.
Her decision to commute the death sentences of 17 convicted killers who have forfeited the right to live in civilized society is legal, and the power she has to make it is necessary. There has to be some safety valve for the justice system, which is bound to fail as all systems do, and making the executive the final arbiter of extreme and unusual cases is the best of several flawed options. However, many governors abuse this power, and, like Brown, use it to pander to a political base. Here, from Oregon Live, is the list of the seventeen men on Death Row that Brown feels deserve to continue to live at taxpayers’ expense: Continue reading →
The news was that former college soccer player Kiersten Hening could proceed in her First Amendment lawsuit against Virginia Tech soccer coach Charles “Chugger” Adair. [Full disclosure:I have a reflexive bias against anyone who sports the nickname “Chugger.”] She alleges that he benched her after subjecting her to a vicious dressing down in front of the team, for her refusal to support the Black Lives Matter-dictated kneeling gesture supported by him and most of her teammates in 2020. Hening and two teammates declined to kneel during the Atlantic Coast Conference’s Unity Statement, which was read on stadium loudspeakers prior to the season opener against the University of Virginia in September 2020.
The court ruled that the lawsuit’s claims are worthy of being decided by a jury, declining a motion for summary judgment filed by the coach. Continue reading →
What more needs to be said about a) a woman who would tweet this ethically-deranged nonsense, and b) a society in which substantial numbers of people think she’s worth paying attention to? Continue reading →
Bill Wolf’s Comment of the Day is four days old, and yet in light of subsequent developments, like this, this, this and this, it seems as fresh as new-fallen snow….
Okay. I acknowledge that this qualifies as a rant. However, rants can be cathartic.
The “Free Press” is failing us again or more accurately stated: continues to fail us. The US being the American people. “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. True, but who is casting that shroud of darkness upon the country?
Our Founding Fathers were aware of the might and necessity of the “power of the pen” as they set upon their task to form the country’s government. So much so that they felt it necessary to address it as a preeminent limitation of government’s power. But why did they feel so strongly of the need for a free press? Perhaps Thomas Paine said it best: “Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one. The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.”
I love this! It’s got everything you want in a smoking gun biased news media reveal, and best of all, there’s only one way to interpret it. Once again, the lesson is, “When these people show you who they are, pay attention, and believe them.
But Taibbi and Weiss are not “conservatives.” Taibbi was a reporter and pundit for the very progressive “Rolling Stone” until he became disgusted with the unethical and biased trend in his profession. Bari Weiss was a New York Times editor until she left in a similar demonstration of independence and integrity. If fact, the very reason Elon Musk chose them to be among the analysts and reporters of the Twitter documents he is releasing was precisely because they were not “conservative,” but journalists who have protested and exposed exactly the kind of unethical and anti-democratic conduct the “Twitter Files” reveal. Referring to Weiss and Taibbi in this way was an effort to discredit them and to imply that they are the biased and unethical ones.
1. Wow. The mainstream media is really determined to die on this hill. It really believes that if it pretends that there is nothing sinister, undemocratic or dangerous about how a bunch of snotty, self-empowered progressives conspired—and succeeded!–to manipulate public opinion, access to information and public discourse to advance a partisan agenda, eventually everyone will forget about it as if it didn’t happen. This is exactly the approach it took with the Hunter Biden laptop story in the first place, and clearly, it has learned nothing and changed nothing. Bury, deny, and “It isn’t what it is” are still the tactics of choice. And they are certain that the public is, most of it anyway, lazy, apathetic, gullible and stupid.
That, they may be right about.
2. However, this unforgivable attempt to deny an important news event indicts the media as much as the Twitter files indict Twitter. I find it impossible to believe the virtually unanimous reaction to this story hasn’t been coordinated. Continue reading →
Mayor Levar M. Stoney (D) of Richmond, Virginia is all puffed up with pride because he has overseen the complete removal of statues in the city depicting major Civil War figures who sided with the Confederacy. “Over two years ago, Richmond was home to more confederate statues than any city in the United States,” Stoney said in a statement on Twitter. “Collectively, we have closed that chapter. We now continue the work of being a more inclusive and welcoming place where ALL belong.” His victory lap was occasioned by the toppling of the last Confederate statue remaining in the city of 230,000, which memorialized Ambrose P. Hill, Robert E. Lee’s most trusted lieutenant general, and which had stood on a pedestal at a busy intersection in Richmond since 1892. Hill’s remains were in the pedestal of the statue, now ticketed for the local Black History Museum, where it can be assured of obscurity. Hill’s remains? Supposedly they will be deposited in a grave somewhere, but who knows? They may get flushed down a toilet.
My question is what will the airbrushers plan to do with the city? Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy; its existence is certainly a more prominent memorial to the Grays than any statue of a general most non-Civil War buffs couldn’t distinguish from Benny Hill or Pork Chop Hill. Richmond’s crucial role in the Civil War is its primary claim to fame. Level it, I say. That’s the only way to “close the chapter.” A city that was mission central for the South’s efforts to enslave blacks—-there was really more to it than that, but I’m mouthing the official, historically ignorant line here—can’t possibly be a welcoming place: who does the woke mayor think he’s fooling? At very least, Richmond has to change its name, doesn’t it? Maybe to something like Floydtown or Diversityopolis?
“Ultimately, the concerns about Twitter’s efforts to censor news about Hunter Biden’s laptop, blacklist disfavored views, and ban a president aren’t about the past choices of executives in a social media company. They’re about the power of a handful of people at a private company to influence the public discourse and democracy.”
Exactly.
I’ll have observations of my own tomorrow. For now, let me just post a readable version of the fifth Twitter stream to describe the unethical, destructive and despicable censorship and double standards that Twitter employees engaged in, a blatant and undeniable effort by people who had neither the acumen, judgment or objectivity to pursue their own agendas at the cost of open discussion, argument and dissent.
As before, you will have to go to the source to see the many fascinating attachments: Continue reading →
12. Well, that’s one...Rep. Ro Khana (D-CA) on Fox Business: “It is wrong to censor newspapers. It is wrong to censor journalists. Look, The New York Post hasn’t written a kind thing about me in my six years in Congress. They’re a conservative-point-of-view paper. But that doesn’t mean that you can stop publishing their pieces or articles or censor their journalists from sharing stories…it just offended the basic principles that our country is based on…”
See? That wasn’t so hard, was it? [Pointer: Other Bill]
11. Let’s boycott this unethical restaurant for Christmas...I object to boycotts, but the Metzger Bar and Butchery in Richmond, Virginia should be run out of business in the public interest. The non-profit Christian lobbying organization Family Foundation of Virginia was refused service after making a reservation for a private event because members of the service staff said they were made “uncomfortable” by the group’s political and religious beliefs as stated on its website. The religious discrimination is illegal, the political discrimination is unethical, and the restaurant’s explanation is moronic:
“Metzger Bar and Butchery has always prided itself on being an inclusive environment for people to dine in. In eight years of service, we have very rarely refused service to anyone who wished to dine with us. Recently we refused service to a group that had booked an event with us after the owners of Metzger found out it was a group of donors to a political organization that seeks to deprive women and LGBTQ+ persons of their basic human rights in Virginia…Many of our staff are women and/or members of the LGBTQ+ community. All of our staff are people with rights who deserve dignity and a safe work environment. We respect our staff’s established rights as humans and strive to create a work environment where they can do their jobs with dignity, comfort and safety.”
Fine them, boycott them, bankrupt them. In this country, being able to support political organizations and lobby for laws and policy is a basic American right; aborting living human individuals is not. The claim that this is an “inclusive” environment is a lie. Even religious bigots have a legal right to eat in restaurants, but restaurants have no right to discriminate against them. The principles, if you can call them that, advocated by the Metzger Bar and Butchery is poisonous to democracy. The complaining staff should have been given the choice of serving the group, or learning to code. [Pointer: RB] Continue reading →
My father told me he was certain that there were incidents like this during World War II, but that the military covered them up.
The Army Board for Correction of Military Records has changed the death record of African-American WWII Private Albert H. King to list him as having died “in the line of duty.” King, a 20-year-old black soldier with the Quartermaster Corps, was in fact murdered on March 23, 1941, by a white member of the military police, Sgt. Robert Lummus, who shot King five times as he walked on the main road at Fort Benning toward his barracks. King had tried to escape a mob of whites intent on beating him on a bus. Sergeant Lummus claimed self-defense and just 13 hours after shooting King, was found not guilty by a military court.
A thorough investigation had taken place, clearly.
Okay. I acknowledge that this qualifies as a rant. However, rants can be cathartic.
The “Free Press” is failing us again or more accurately stated: continues to fail us. The US being the American people. “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. True, but who is casting that shroud of darkness upon the country?
Our Founding Fathers were aware of the might and necessity of the “power of the pen” as they set upon their task to form the country’s government. So much so that they felt it necessary to address it as a preeminent limitation of government’s power. But why did they feel so strongly of the need for a free press? Perhaps Thomas Paine said it best: “Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one. The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.”
Continue reading →