Today marks the eighth anniversary of the attacks of 9/11. It is a day that should always serve as a reminder of two irrefutable facts:
- There are people in this world that hate America and the freedom it represents, and would do anything to destroy us.
- There are unsung heroes that everyday put their lives on the line to safeguard our communities.
Let me first acknowledge that second point by thanking the firefighters and police officers that step up everyday when no one is looking to protect and to serve. Thanks for what you do.
As to the first point, I can’t help but be concerned about the direction our country is heading. On 9/11, the terrorists failed to destroy America, but since that time, a greater and greater number of those elected to lead our country have made, and are making, decisions that might well accomplish what the terrorists failed to do those eight years ago.
On a state level, we’ve seen indictment after indictment against our elected officials. Yet, rather than outrage, the citizens of the state seem willing to accept this as just the way things are. Even the recent fleeing from the scene of an accident by the Governor and his staff is just seen as just another news story:
The state’s boating law says the operator of a vessel has 48 hours to provide information about an accident, and Condit complied with that, according to Jodi McGinnis Porter, spokeswoman for the energy and minerals agency.
Porter said Fay, the boat’s owner, stayed at the scene and provided information to investigators, while Richardson, Condit, Miller and the state police officers left. They were not required to remain there, she said.
What’s been largely missing from this discussion is not what is legal, but what is ethical. Legally, the perpetrators of the accident may not have been required to remain at the scene of the accident, but ethically, they should have remained.
Think about it.
There are only two reasons that the Governor and his staff fled. First, there was alcohol involved, and it would have been determined that a crime had been committed. Or second, they wanted to avoid the unfolding public relations nightmare that would have been made worse by having their pictures taken at the scene of the accident. I’m reasonably confident that if cell phone records were checked, one of the individuals in the party will be shown to have called for advice on whether or not they “had” to remain at the scene of the accident.
There is always a lot of gratuitous talk about the need to legislate ethics in this state. But, this is just another example of why you can’t legislate ethics. Unethical people will act in their own self-interests, and the shrewdly unethical will do it in within the letter of the law. You probably also noticed that not one Democrat running to lead our state in 2010 condemned the blatantly unethical act committed by Governor Richardson and his staff.
Speaking of speaking out, Representative Joe Wilson is in trouble for breaking with decorum by shouting out that the President of the United States was lying to the American people while giving his healthcare address. Yet, there was much truth to Representative Wilson’s accusations:
A GAO report finds that illegal immigrants constitute more than one-third of all Medicaid-funded pregnancies in California. Elsewhere in the country, the GAO found: “From 1992 to 1995 in Texas, the number of Medicaid-funded births to undocumented alien mothers more than doubled, while the total number of births remained fairly stable.” People respond to economic incentives. Even when the people and the incentives are illegal.
Missouri attorney general Chris Koster has estimated that one in ten Medicaid claims is fraudulent. How much of that fraud diverts money to illegal immigrants? Nobody knows for sure and don’t ask the state bureaucrats for help in finding out: When the federal government passed new rules demanding better documentation of legal residency for Medicaid recipients, the states resisted. In California, officials representing the state’s Medicaid program, Medi-Cal, wanted to use such lamentably inadequate documentation as insurance records and school report cards in place of passports and birth certificates. We are entitled to question their motives, and their prudence.
So, Representative Wilson could use a visit from Miss Manners. But he is telling the truth, and President Obama is not.
Of course, President Obama’s dishonesty on this topic is not limited to the question of whether or not illegal immigrants will benefit from the healthcare changes being proposed. There were numerous inaccuracies his speech. For example, take this:
OBAMA: “Nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have.”
THE FACTS: That’s correct, as far as it goes. But neither can the plan guarantee that people can keep their current coverage. Employers sponsor coverage for most families, and they’d be free to change their health plans in ways that workers may not like, or drop insurance altogether. The Congressional Budget Office analyzed the health care bill written by House Democrats and said that by 2016 some 3 million people who now have employer-based care would lose it because their employers would decide to stop offering it.
In the past Obama repeatedly said, “If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period.” Now he’s stopping short of that unconditional guarantee by saying nothing in the plan “requires” any change.
Considering how much effort goes into writing a presidential speech, these careful manipulations of the English language cannot be considered accidental. Again, we deal with a question of ethics. Is it ethical to put something forward as factually truthful that is actually intended to deceive?
Of course, these unethical manipulations of language are not limited to our elected officials. They are also being used by “community organizations” to confuse the issues. Consider this taken directly from the ACORN site:
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now does not apply for nor does it receive any federal grants.
ACORN has had contracts with other nonprofit organizations to perform work on projects which received federal grant support.
In illegal circles, what ACORN is describing is called money laundering. Organized crime has been doing this for years. In the case of organized crime, dollars from an illegal activity, take prostitution as an example, are flowed through a third party entity before making its way to a “legitimate” business. In this way, the business has deniability about the illegal source of the funds. Much the same way as ACORN has deniability about the federal source of its funding.
As long as we’re on the topic of federal funding, ACORN and prostitution, you might want to consider this:
Two staff members of the Baltimore office of ACORN were fired Thursday after they were captured on hidden camera appearing to give advice on evading tax laws to a man and woman posing as a pimp and a prostitute.
The video depicts a man and a scantily dressed female partner visiting the Charles Village office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, where they appear to ask two employees about how to shield their work from state and federal tax requirements. The supposed pimp also appears to ask the employees how to conceal underage girls from El Salvador brought into the country illegally to work for him.
“If they don’t have Social Security numbers, you don’t have to worry about them,” the employee says.
If you haven’t seen the videos, I strongly urge you to watch them. It’s like watching an SNL skit from when SNL was actually funny.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UOL9Jh61S8]
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgqORp48uik]
Of course, the only problem is that this isn’t a comedy skit. It’s actually real. Now, factor in the economy, our increasingly uncompetitive educational system, the ever-growing size of government, and the you’ll see why I’m so concerned that America may be doing to herself what the terrorists failed to do on 9/11.