Democrats

Independence Day Ethics: Historian Hype, Liberal Bias, And The Great Punctuation Mystery

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

founding-fathers-declaration-of-independence

First, a little background…

I have often found it depressing that historians so often lack the ethical integrity necessary to do their jobs. If there was any profession in which avoiding bias would seem to be paramount, historical research and analysis would seem to be it, but that just isn’t the case. Because historians are academics and scholars, and because academia has become almost exclusively a hot-house of left-ward ideology for more than half a century, too many historians view their duty as using the past to manipulate the present and future.

My introduction to this came early, when I was a fifth grader suddenly fascinated with the U.S. Presidency as the first national election that I could follow approached. I read various assessments of who the greatest of our past POTUSes were, and there was near consensus, it seemed. Washington and Lincoln, naturally, were “the berries,” and they were joined as “greats” by Jefferson, Jackson, Wilson, FDR, and Truman, Democrats all. Teddy Roosevelt was “near great”; Eisenhower was a dud. What a great party this Democratic Party must be! Of course, Jefferson’s racial hypocrisy, Jackson’s lawlessness and persecution of Native Americans, Wilson’s racism and bungling of the peace after World War I and FDR’s complicity in locking loyal Japanese-Americans in prison camps was never mentioned. Over time, I learned that even the most respected American historians were likely to be pursuing partisan agendas. The classic example, of course, was Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who carefully and unforgivably culled the facts he deemed worthy of revelation in order to add John Fitzgerald Kennedy to that list of brilliant Democratic Presidents. Was I surprised when a large number of prominent American historians signed a petition opposing the impeachment of President Clinton, a Democrat, thus asserting that a degree of dishonesty and lack of trustworthiness that was sufficient in every state in the union to mark a lawyer as unfit to practice was nonetheless not sufficient cause to remove a President from office?

I was not.

This brings us to the Case of the Missing Comma, brought to us by Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., aided and abetted by her left-leaning allies. Allen (who by the purest coincidence has a book out!) claims a major discovery. The iconic sentence in the Declaration of Independence—“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–”—was not intended to end in a period, as all current quotations and reproductions show, and the official transcript produced by the National Archives and Records Administration indicates.  Allen claims that her extensive research indicates that the period at the end of that phrase almost certainly did not appear on the original parchment version of the Declaration, and was mistakenly included in later versions. Just in time for July 4th (when Allen’s publicist calculated that her “Eureka!” would get maximum exposure) Allen explained to the New York Times that the extra period contributes to a “routine but serious misunderstanding” of the famous document signed by the Second Continental Congress in 1776. Continue reading →

Those Huge University Speaking Fees: Hillary Clinton A Venal Hypocrite? Say It’s Not So!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments
To be fair, she really needs the money...

To be fair, she really needs the money…

Hillary Clinton has sounded the alarms (lest Sen. Elizabeth Warren sound it louder) over student dept and the high cost of college education. Then she has blithely accepted nearly two million dollars to give one hour canned speeches at eight universities, including four public institutions.

This is causing some anger on campuses, as it should. How can a school raise tuition, claim that it is strapped for funds, and then pay a wealthy woman over $200,000 to give a speech? It can’t—not responsibly or ethically. Nor is it responsible or ethical for the speaker, while stating publicly that she deeply cares about higher education, to ask for and accept such funds.

The issue came to light after University of Las Vegas students began protesting a scheduled speech by Clinton at her going rate of $225,000, asking her to return the fee. What has followed is a lot of rationalizing and lame defenses of the indefensible.

Fact: no school should be paying the equivalent of a student’s multi-year tuition for a one hour speech, even if Abraham Lincoln has agreed to come from beyond the grave to give it.

Fact: no decent, caring public figure should charge or accept such a fee. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero Emeritus: Senator Howard Baker (1925-2014)

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Howard_Baker

Howard H. Baker Jr., a three-term Tennessee Senator whose trademarks were integrity, honesty, and a refusal to allow partisanship get in the way of what he believed was the right thing to do, died today.  The Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky,  called him “one of the Senate’s most towering figures.” How ironic, or perhaps just insincere. If McConnell understood and admired the qualities that made Baker “towering” he couldn’t possibly be the divisive, petty, ultra-partisan hack that he is. Then again, comparing Baker’s career and character to the scrimy, petty, self-centered and ethics-challenged dwarves that make up all of McConnell’s colleagues  in both Houses and on both sides of the aisle reveals such an obvious disparity that even the sorry likes of McConnell couldn’t deny it.

Howard Baker stands especially tall in my memory as I watch the disgraceful conduct of House Democrats, doing all they could to derail the I.R.S scandal hearings and to prevent the uncovering of facts surrounding the executive branch’s abuse of power, because they have chosen political loyalty and expediency over transparency, fairness, duty to country, and trust. Contrast this horror show with the principled stance of Baker during Watergate, seeking uncomfortable truths rather than throwing obstacles in the way of efforts to uncover them, treating abuse of power and attempted cover-ups from his own party’s President as he would the same from a Democrat, asking the famous question, “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” Continue reading →

Is It Possible That The Democratic Party Is As Corrupt As Its Conduct In The I.R.S. Investigation Suggests?

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Corleone testifiesThis began as an Ethics Dunce post, but designating Congressional Democrats as ethics dunces for their current, apparently agreed upon and coordinated response to the disgraceful I.R.S. scandal—and it is a scandal—appears far more sinister than that. This appears to be a cover-up, and a particularly blatant, clumsy and desperate one, as well as a sickening display of a major political party abandoning its principals and constituency—meaning the American people and not donors, sycophants or “the base”—to impede an effort to get to the truth.

Here’s Post columnist Michael Gerson’s fair summary of the I.R.S. affair to date:

“To review: After President Obama blamed “two Dilberts in Cincinnati,” an inspector general’s report found that high-level IRS officials in Washington were involved in directing additional scrutiny toward tea party groups seeking tax exemptions. [I.R.S. official Lois]Lerner admitted as much, before taking the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying before the House oversight committee. The House of Representatives held her in contempt. And now the evidence of possible communications between Lerner and other agencies (including the White House) has gone missing under suspicious circumstances. It could be a regrettable series of rogue operations, IRS management failures and technical glitches. Or they could be taking us for fools. If there was any political motivation for this abuse of power, it is a form of corruption — the kind of thing Americans like to criticize in countries they regard as less developed. And the circumstantial evidence is strong. This wave of heightened IRS scrutiny came after Democratic senators, warning of possible abuses spawned by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, demanded additional IRS scrutiny of nonprofit political groups. Because evidence of political influence is both plausible and circumstantial, a special counsel is needed to sort out the truth.”

The summary, in an accurate article titled “An arrogant and lawless I.R.S..” doesn’t include the fact that nobody has been disciplined or held accountable in any way for what occurred, including any of the imaginary scapegoats in the Cincinnati office. It doesn’t note that I.R.S. Commissioner Koskinen delayed informing Congress of the lost e-mails for months, after assuring members, under oath, that they would be provided. Yesterday, Koskinen stooped to Bill Clinton levels of deceitful parsing, arguing that when he swore to Congress that he would deliver all e-mails, he meant only all the e-mails that existed, since he couldn’t deliver those that no longer existed. Why didn’t he mention that those key Lerner e-mails had vanished? He wasn’t asked! Meanwhile, a government archivist testified yesterday that not informing Congress that the e-mails had been lost indeed violated a federal statute. Also yesterday, the I.R.S. admitted that it illegally played politics in 2012, leaking confidential tax information from an anti-gay marriage group to the pro-marriage Human Rights Campaign. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Month: Constitutional Scholar Floyd Abrams

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

This is a long quote, and deserves to be.

You can read it in its entirety here.

Wacky!

Wacky!

The whole quote is the testimony of Floyd Abrams, the renowned Constitutional lawyer who argued Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, before the U.S. Supreme Court, regarding a cynical Constitutional Amendment, S.J.19, ostensibly proposed to change the First Amendment so Citizens United can be overturned, but really as a campaign issue, since the chances of amending the Constitution are nil, and they know it. This proposed amendment is the Left’s equivalent of the despicable flag-burning amendment pushed by Republicans in the late Eighties, just as disingenuous, just as offensive to free speech, equally constricted to appeal to voters who don’t understand what free speech is.

The Citizens United opinion has been blatantly misrepresented by everyone from Occupy Wall Street to the President, and continues to be a source of political deceit by Democrats and their allies in the media, often out of ignorance. If you have friends who are prone to say silly things about “corporations being people” and “billionaires buying elections,” you should tell them to read Abrams’ testimony, and learn some things they should have learned in high school.

Some highlights (there are many more): Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Ron Fournier

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“In the 18 months since I began writing columns focused on the presidency, virtually every post critical of Obama has originated from conversations with Democrats. Members of Congress, consultants, pollsters, lobbyists, and executives at think tanks, these Democrats are my Obama-whispers. They respect and admire Obama but believe that his presidency has been damaged by his shortcomings as a leader; his inattention to details of governing; his disengagement from the political process and from the public; his unwillingness to learn on the job; and his failure to surround himself with top-shelf advisers who are willing to challenge their boss as well as their own preconceived notions.”

—–National Journal reporter Ron Fournier, in a post titled “‘I’ve Had Enough’: When Democrats Quit on Obama”

That's all right, Curley; we respect and admire you.

That’s all right, Curley; we respect and admire you.

What? They respect and admire a leader who displays “shortcomings as a leader” and  “inattention to details of governing”; who is disengaged  “from the political process and from the public;” is unwilling “to learn on the job;” and fails “to surround himself with top-shelf advisers who are willing to challenge their boss as well as their own preconceived notions”? That’s irresponsible and destructive. Good heavens, who else do these people “respect and admire”?

We ought to respect leaders who recognize the difficulty of the job they have accepted the challenge of performing on behalf of the entire nation, not just their supporters, and who don’t allow arrogance and ego to interfere with their acquiring the skills and expertise necessary to meet that challenge. We should respect leaders who have the courage to sacrifice and compromise to solve problems rather than make excuses and blame others because they are ideologically rigid and more adept at political maneuvering than governing. Continue reading →

Betrayal of Trust: The Turncoat Virginia State Senator

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments
Senator Puckett and daughter: 'Anything for little girl...even screwing over my constituents...'

Senator Puckett and daughter: ‘Anything for my little girl…even screwing over my constituents…’

Virginia Republicans are preparing for a show-down with Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe over the state budget and the expansion of Medicare to handle uninsured Virginians under the provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Unfortunately for them, Democrats hold the majority in the state Senate, or did, until some smoke-filled room maneuvering persuaded a conflicted Democratic state senator to resign, giving the GOP control of the chamber, at least for a while. Democratic Sen. Phillip P. Puckett ’s unexpected departure gives Republicans a 20-to-19 majority.

The Washington Post reported that Puckett (D-Russell) will announce his resignation from the Virginia Senate, effective immediately, paving the way for his daughter to continue as a district judge and for Puckett to take the job of deputy director of the state tobacco commission. Rationalizations for the move are flying, particularly as it affects Puckett’s daughter. Martha Puckett Ketron is already a Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court judge. Circuit Court judges in Southwestern Virginia gave her a temporary appointment last year while the General Assembly, which approves judicial appointments for the state, was in recess. The Virginia House of Delegates approved her appointment to a six-year term when it reconvened earlier this year, but the Senate rejected the appointment because of its standing policy against appointing the relatives of active legislators to the bench. (It’s a good policy.) Thus, you see, Daddy’s resignation directly benefits his little girl, though it stabs his party and his constituents right in their backs.

This is known as a conflict of interest. The soon-to-be ex-senator needs to bone up on the concept and its ramifications.The ethical way to handle this conflict would be for Puckett to refuse to do anything to influence the resolution of his daughter’s appointment whatsoever.

“It [that is, the resignation] should pave the way for his daughter,” said Republican Delegate Terry Kilgore, who sure looks like the architect of this smelly deal.  “She’s a good judge. . . . I would say that he wanted to make sure his daughter kept her judgeship. A father’s going do that.”

Not if he’s ethical, he won’t. The spin Republicans are putting on this is that Puckett is resigning for his daughter, and after that decision was made, Kilgore, who serves as the chairman of the state tobacco commission, offered him the post of deputy director. Not as a quid pro quo, mind you. Because he was qualified for the job.

Right.

Even if this was the actual sequence, and I doubt it, it has the appearance of impropriety and undermines public trust. That makes it the kind of transaction legislators are bound to avoid. The Huffington Post’s headline on the story is “GOP Straight Up Bribes Democratic Senator In Effort To Block Obamacare,” which is stating one interpretation of an ambiguous sequence of events as fact….lousy and unethical journalism, but as I said, this is the Huffington Post.

It could be that Puckett, on his own or even at the behest of his daughter, resigned so he could stay a judge, and then, realizing that Republicans would benefit and that he would be a pariah in his own party, negotiated the deal that got him his new job. It could also be that the Republicans, seeking a Senate majority, cooked this up, offered Puckett a package he couldn’t refuse (because he’s a corrupt and disloyal public servant), and thus it really was a quid pro quo deal. Note that Huffpo, biased as it is, frames this so the GOP is the villain.

This is not technically bribery, which is a crime. This is slimy, nauseating politics, but classic sausage-making: the Affordable Care Act owes its very existence to these kind of deals and worse. The question isn’t whether these maneuvers are ethical–they are not— but whether politics can exist without them, and whether one can have a functioning adversary party system without them. My guess is no. If you like the results of such old-fashioned hard-ball politics, then this is utilitarian: “Lincoln” showed how the 13th Amendment was passed by Lincoln’s operatives and lobbyists picking off weak and conflicted legislators like lions targeting wounded water buffalo. If you object to the results, well then, it’s dirty politics, and an unethical display of “the ends justify the means” at its worst.

But one man, had he integrity and proper respect for the job he had been entrusted by his constituents to do, could have made the whole matter academic by just performing the job he had been elected for, and subordinating his daughter’s career aspirations to his duty. Instead, Phillip P. Puckett betrayed his party, his post, his constituency and his state.

And one more thing: if his daughter were ethical, as judges are supposed to be, she would refuse to keep her judgeship this way.

__________________________

Sources: Washington Post, Huffington Post

Congratulations, Sen. Reid: Abusing Government Power To Stifle Political Speech And Participation Works!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

 

Nice choice of role models, Harry.

Nice choice of role models, Harry.

From the Washington Post:

“Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid’s relentless attacks on the billionaire Koch brothers are having an unforeseen impact: spurring other wealthy Republican donors to give more money to groups that keep their supporters’ names secret. Several prominent pro-Republican advocacy groups say they are benefiting from a burst of cash as some donors — fearful of harsh public attacks such as those aimed at the Kochs — turn away from political committees that are required by federal law to reveal their contributors.”

What a surprise. Citizen participants in the political process who see others like them engaging in no illegal or unethical conduct. other than taking positions with which the leader of the U.S. Senate disagrees. being called “un-American” and having their reputations and names savaged by him in speech after speech on the Senate floor, decide that it is no longer safe for a citizen to openly contribute to political causes in the U.S.

Democrats who use this development to attack the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, eliminating financial limits on the expressive activities of domestic advocacy groups and legal entities in political campaigns, will reveal themselves as beneath contempt. Reid, primed by President Obama, who has also crossed that line that must not be crossed by using his high elected office to call down the public’s disapproval on private citizens for their political views, has engaged in conduct that deserves the label of “McCarthyism.” Fair Americans, pundits, journalists and politicians of all political stripes ought to be candid and open about who is the ethics villain here. It is not the Koch Brothers, the Supreme Court or the GOP donors who are turning away from transparency. It is the disgraceful Senator Harry Reid.

At last count (in April; an update is needed), Reid had attacked the Kochs by name 134 times, when it is a breach of Senate tradition and a violation of the intent of the U.S. Constitution for a government official acting in his  official capacity to do so even once. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Month: Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV)

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

The Honorable Racebaiter And Jerk, Jay Rockefeller

The Honorable Racebaiter And Jerk, Jay Rockefeller

“It’s very important to take a long view at what’s going on here. And I’ll be able to dig up some emails that make part of the Affordable Care Act that doesn’t look good, especially from people who have made up their mind that they don’t want it to work. Because they don’t like the president, maybe he’s of the wrong color. Something of that sort.I’ve seen a lot of that and I know a lot of that to be true. It’s not something you’re meant to talk about in public, but it’s something I’m talking about in public because that is very true.”

—- Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), once again playing the race-card (he’s done it before) to impugn the motives of opponents of the Affordable Care Act and other Obama policy initiatives.

How low, lazy, irresponsible, despicable, and cowardly. Continue reading →

Confirmation Bias or Contrived Ignorance: The New York Times and the Inadvertent Voter Fraud of Mario Hernandez

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments
Accidental illegal Mario Hernandez waits to finally get the citizenship he thought he already had. Those 10 votes he cast without being eligible don't matter, because he wasn't trying to defraud anyone. What else is there to the story? That's it, right? Problem solved!

Accidental illegal Mario Hernandez waits to finally get the citizenship he thought he already had. Those 10 votes he cast without being eligible don’t matter, because he wasn’t trying to defraud anyone. What else is there to the story? That’s it, right? Problem solved!

Last week, the New York Times happily related the heart-warming tale of Mario Hernandez, a former federal employee and an Army veteran who for decades thought he was a United States citizen but wasn’t. The problem was rectified at last when he was sworn in as a citizen in a ceremony in Jacksonville, Florida. In the process of telling the story, the Times casually notes that he voted in every major election since Jimmy Carter’s in 1976. The Times’ ethics alarms are long dead: to them, this is just a detail on the way to arguing one of its pet agenda items, that the immigration system needs fixing. It does, but one weird story where a series of record-keeping errors resulted in a botched citizenship status doesn’t prove it. Because he has a different concern, however Wall Street Journal blogger James Taranto did the math. Hernandez, a non-citizen, voted in ten elections, by his own admission, and nobody knew.

That is significant, and does prove something. It proves that the Democratic, NAACP, Eric Holder mainstream media claim that there is no evidence that people are voting in elections who shouldn’t is a problem worthy of addressing is a cynical excuse to cry racism to tar Republicans who are pushing for an obvious, practical, responsible requirement of photo ID cards to establish voter eligibility. As Taranto points out, such a system would have not only prevented Hernandez’s invalid—but tallied*—votes, but also would have alerted him decades ago of his citizenship problem. More important, the incident illustrates the inherent dishonesty of the argument that because a large number of such votes by non-citizens haven’t been caught, they problem doesn’t exist. If one non-citizen, however innocently, could have voted ten times over decades without it being noted, it is fair to assume that there is a problem. Voter IDs address the problem; it is irresponsible not to address the problem, and to argue that only racism could be behind an effort to improve the integrity of a system that allows a single non-citizen to cast ten votes is unfair, irresponsible and intentionally misleading. Continue reading →