James Fallows from 1998, writes about a panel discuss on ethics hosted by Charles Ogletree from Harvard. He poses a hypothetical to a Viet Nam vet who had lost a limb.

Ogletree asked Downs to imagine that he was a young lieutenant again. He and his platoon were in the nation of “South Kosan,” advising South Kosanese troops in their struggle against invaders from “North Kosan.” (This scenario was apparently a hybrid of the U.S. roles in the Korean and Vietnam wars.) A North Kosanese unit had captured several of Downs’s men alive—but Downs had also captured several of the North Kosanese. Downs did not know where his men were being held, but he thought his prisoners did.

And so Ogletree put the question: How far would Downs go to make a prisoner talk? Would he order him tortured? Would he torture the prisoner himself? Downs himself speculated on what he would do if he had a big knife in his hand. Would he start cutting the prisoner? When would he make himself stop, if the prisoner just wouldn’t talk?

Downs did not shrink from the questions or the implications of his answers. He wouldn’t enjoy doing it, he told Ogletree. He would have to live with the consequences for the rest of his life. But yes, he would torture the captive. He would use the knife. Implicit in his answers was the idea that he would do the cutting himself and would listen to the captive scream. He would do whatever was necessary to try to save his own men. While explaining his decisions Downs sometimes gestured with his left hand for emphasis. The hand was a metal hook.

Then the question was posed to Peter Jennings and Mike Wallace.

But while Jennings and his crew were traveling with a North Kosanese unit, to visit the site of an alleged atrocity by U.S. and South Kosanese troops, they unexpectedly crossed the trail of a small group of American and South Kosanese soldiers. With Jennings in their midst the Northern soldiers set up an ambush that would let them gun down the Americans and Southerners.

What would Jennings do? Would he tell his cameramen to “Roll tape!” as the North Kosanese opened fire? What would go through his mind as he watched the North Kosanese prepare to fire?

Jennings sat silent for about fifteen seconds. “Well, I guess I wouldn’t,” he finally said. “I am going to tell you now what I am feeling, rather than the hypothesis I drew for myself. If I were with a North Kosanese unit that came upon Americans, I think that I personally would do what I could to warn the Americans.”

Even if it meant losing the story? Ogletree asked.

Even though it would almost certainly mean losing my life, Jennings replied. “But I do not think that I could bring myself to participate in that act. That’s purely personal, and other reporters might have a different reaction.”

Ogletree turned for reaction to Mike Wallace, who immediately replied. “I think some other reporters would have a different reaction,” he said, obviously referring to himself. “They would regard it simply as another story they were there to cover.” A moment later Wallace said, “I am astonished, really.” He turned toward Jennings and began to lecture him: “You’re a reporter. Granted you’re an American” (at least for purposes of the fictional example; Jennings has actually retained Canadian citizenship). “I’m a little bit at a loss to understand why, because you’re an American, you would not have covered that story.”

Ogletree pushed Wallace. Didn’t Jennings have some higher duty to do something other than just roll film as soldiers from his own country were being shot?

“No,” Wallace said flatly and immediately. “You don’t have a higher duty. No. No. You’re a reporter!”

Jennings backtracked fast. Wallace was right, he said: “I chickened out.” Jennings said that he had “played the hypothetical very hard.”He had lost sight of his journalistic duty to remain detached.

As Jennings said he agreed with Wallace, several soldiers in the room seemed to regard the two of them with horror. Retired Air Force General Brent Scowcroft, who would soon become George Bush’s National Security Advisor, said it was simply wrong to stand and watch as your side was slaughtered. “What’s it worth?” he asked Wallace bitterly. “It’s worth thirty seconds on the evening news, as opposed to saving a platoon.”

What followed was even more interesting.

Here’s a prime example of d0-gooders inflicting more harm on the poor, who spend a large percentage of their income putting food on the table.

Nolan Finley in the Detroit News

Be careful hiding those Easter eggs today, they soon may be worth their weight in gold.

Already in Europe, eggs are becoming as scarce as hen’s teeth, with production down and prices up 55 percent. The reason? New European Union rules granting cages with more elbow room to egg-producing chickens.

Those requirements are on their way to this country, along with a list of other new regulations demanding that animals be treated more kindly before they’re slaughtered and cut up into pork chops and drumsticks.

It’s part of a push that, in the name of protecting animals, will make it more expensive for human beings to eat.

Michigan is among a number of states that will ban, among other things, sow gestation crates, veal stalls and conventional cage systems for laying hens. (The changes here are scheduled to take effect in 2019.)

The result will be higher prices and less domestic production of livestock products — meat, eggs, milk, etc.

A study released last month by the United Soybean Board, an agriculture industry trade group, warned that costs of those products could rise 10 percent to 25 percent, reduce agricultural exports by $1.1 billion a year and kill 9,000 jobs.

Did your Easter ham give you sticker shock? Pork prices already have jumped nearly 14 percent this year in part due to new rules on pig housing. Combined with the spike in the cost of eggs, the traditional workingman’s breakfast of bacon and eggs will so be a luxury meal…

Obama could provide the biggest boost to the US economy  by having his regulators sit down, shut up and leave things alone. Let the productive part of America express itself with jobs and new wealth.

This is not to argue for no regulation, but for sane regulation.

But no…

James Bovard in the WSJ

The Obama administration is on the verge of compelling most of the largest corporations and universities, as well as many smaller businesses, to adopt a 7% hiring quota for disabled job applicants—lest they be debarred from doing business with the federal government. This radical personnel policy could raise costs and slash the productivity of almost 200,000 companies with U.S. government contracts.

Announcing the proposed regulations for the quota last Dec. 8, Patricia Shiu, director of the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), declared: “For nearly 40 years, the rules have said that contractors simply need to make a ‘good faith’ effort to recruit and hire people with disabilities. Clearly, that’s not working.”

Note: she is unelected, but able to issue rules that can affect millions.

The evidence? Primarily that the percentage of disabled with jobs is lower now than it was in the 1980s. Yet as HR Policy, an association of chief human-resource officers, notes, the federal government itself has only 5% disabled on its payrolls—and the Labor Department’s percentage of disabled employees has decreased every year since President Obama took office, despite a sharp increase in the number of department employees.

The notice in the Federal Register about the hiring quota was more than 53,000 convoluted words, and many businesses and trade associations are vehement that the Labor Department’s $81 million estimate of the costs of compliance is greatly underestimated. HR Policy estimates the total cost would be at least $1.8 billion, not counting the losses resulting from companies hiring less-productive employees.

Since bureaucrats mark progress creating paperwork, they see no harm in demanding that productive businesses waste valuable resources on meddlesome record keeping.

The Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments of 2008 vastly expanded the definition of disability to include people with diabetes, depression, heart disease or cancer, as well as people who have significant troubles “standing, sitting, reaching, lifting, bending, reading, concentrating, thinking, communicating and interaction with others.” Anyone who is labeled disabled acquires a right to request “reasonable” accommodations from employers and others—with the federal government waiting to sue businesses who fail to pass muster.

Okay, let’s apply that to Social Security’s disability coverage.

Should SS be compelled to cover 7% of the population? Ooh, I can’t read — send me a monthly check, Uncle Sugar!

Back to the outrage:

The Associated General Contractors of America, a construction industry lobby, has long complained that many construction craft positions are inherently unsuited and too perilous for physically disabled applicants. But the OFCCP has a long history of scorning common sense on safety—as I discovered when I investigated the agency in the 1990s.

In 1994, for example, the agency debarred Kentucky’s Commonwealth Aluminum Corp. in Lewisville, Ky., from federal contracts for refusing to hire applicants with serious back injuries and hernias for heavy-lifting jobs. The following year, the agency punished the Jack Kelley Trucking Firm in Amarillo, Texas, for refusing to hire a man who suffered from uncontrollable epileptic seizures to drive a truck full of hazardous waste. (Most companies, fearing retaliation, were afraid to talk about the details of their clashes with OFCCP.)

Just imagine a plaintiff’s lawyer going after the trucking firm in the case of a spill that cost lives.

He’d point to the hiring of the epileptic driver and claim negligence.

Brilliant.

UPDATE:

Big Government

The Department of Justice is in full-on spin mode over the James O’Keefe Project Veritas tape in which a young white man is offered Attorney General Eric Holder’s ballot. Desperate to prove that voter ID should not be presented in order to obtain a ballot, the DOJ fired back at O’Keefe and Project Veritas today, with a DOJ official telling tried-and-true media ally Talking Points Memo, “It’s no coincidence that these so-called examples of rampant voter fraud consistently turn out to be manufactured ones.”

This is nonsensical. Obviously this wasn’t an actual case of voter fraud—O’Keefe and Project Veritas didn’t want to break the law. And obviously the situation is manufactured—it’s the only way to show that voter fraud is easy and plausible, since we presumably don’t know when voter fraud takes place. That, in fact, is the point of the video: that voter fraud in this way is virtually undetectable and bears almost zero risk.

But the DOJ isn’t interested in the real point of the video. They know full well that voter fraud is simple when nobody has to show identification. They just don’t care, since they’re happy to watch political allies take advantage of the loopholes. Instead of targeting O’Keefe and Project Veritas for showing the American public the dangers of the current voter identification system, the Department of Justice and Holder are apparently interested only in preserving the absence of voter ID, no matter how many fraudulent ballots are actually cast.

by Burt Prelutsky

At times, I find myself wondering if, after a thousand postings, I will eventually run out of things to carp, whine and scream about. I should only be so lucky, for it would mean that liberalism had finally all but vanished from our nation’s capital, and the likes of Barack Obama, Harry Reid , Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Henry Waxman, Sheila Jackson Lee, Patty Murray, Charles Schumer and Pat Leahy, had all been returned to the various zoos from which they’d been on loan.

In the spirit of bi-partisanship, I would acknowledge that there are a fair number of naïve bumpkins in both parties. Although they are far more numerous in the voting blocs of Democrats, even in the GOP there are those I refer to as Utopians. Whereas on the Left, such lunkheads tend to think that if only a thousand more laws are enacted, we will achieve Nirvana; on the Right are those who believe there is an ideal presidential candidate who will somehow combine the best elements of George Washington, Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. Anything short of that and they threaten to stay home and sulk on Election Day, even if the alternative is to allow an international disaster like Obama to be re-elected.

Another source of annoyance is the U.S. military. While I continue to respect and admire the young warriors who risk life and limb on our behalf, Bill Clinton’s influence on the armed forces has begun to show in various unpleasant ways. When nothing was done about Major Nidal Hasan prior to his massacring dozens of innocent people, when every single one of his superior officers at Fort Hood knew they had a committed jihadist in their midst, it’s because Clinton had filled the officer ranks with men like himself, politically correct cowards.

It then took Barack Obama, whose contempt for the military has been made blatantly clear by his gutting of defense funding, to further demoralize the troops by ending the policy known as “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell.” In his latest attempt to neuter the troops, he has overseen a program that insists that combat troops wear fake breasts and “empathy” bellies so they’ll understand how pregnant soldiers feel during physical training. Apparently, nobody has bothered pointing out that pregnant soldiers have no place in the military, unless it’s typing, filing and/or nursing. And because I wouldn’t want to risk being labeled a sexist, I would say that holds true whether the expectant mother is male or female.

But what else would you expect of a president who recently announced a plan to diminish our nuclear stockpile by 80% at the same time that China, North Korea and Iran, are all rattling their nuclear sabers?

As bad as Clinton and Obama have been, the Democrats have been lousing up this country going back at least as far as Woodrow Wilson, whose contempt for the Constitution rivaled his contempt for black people, a century ago. More recently, we had FDR, who long before Rahm Emanuel observed that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, used the excuse of the Great Depression to introduce socialism to America and massively expand the size and power of the federal government.

It would be unfair to overlook Lyndon Baines Johnson and his own updated version of FDR’s “New Deal,” which he called “The Great Society.” LBJ, who wreaked havoc on our foreign policy by doubling down on the Vietnam War, did similar damage to us domestically. His Civil Rights Bill gave us Affirmative Action, which sold itself as the first step towards a colorblind society, when in fact it actually condoned reverse-racism.

At the time, LBJ’s policy led Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan to point out: “If you create government incentives that make it more profitable for people to abandon their children than to stay with them, which is exactly what Aid to Families with Dependent Children did, you will reap the demographic whirlwind.”

Moynihan was tragically prophetic, as borne out by the poverty, crime and out of wedlock birthrate that has ravished black communities, making two-parent homes nearly as rare as teeth on a chicken.

Yet another unintended but predictable consequence of the Great Society is known as the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Because certain states had been guilty of disenfranchising blacks of their voting privileges either through Poll Taxes, Jim Crow laws or physical intimidation, it was decided that they would be overseen by Big Brother in the form of the Department of Justice.

As a result, such states as Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia, along with certain counties in California, Florida, New York, North Carolina and South Dakota, and a handful of townships in Michigan and New Hampshire, would have to seek federal approval to not only amend any of its voting laws, but to move polling venues from a church to a school or a school to a private home.

In spite of the fact that blacks have had no problem being elected to public office in any of those places, the law has been renewed four times over the past 47 years, most recently in 2006 when George W. Bush, no doubt currying favor with Ted Kennedy, signed a 25-year extension! The tragic irony of all this is that the man currently heading up the Justice Department is Eric Holder, the same self-righteous bigot who refused to indict the Black Panthers for threatening white voters in 2008 and who, for good measure, instructed his agents not to prosecute cases of voter intimidation unless, of course, it involved whites threatening blacks or Latinos.

Perhaps on the day that our next president nullifies ObamaCare, he can also rid us of that toxic item.

I was actually referring to the Voting Rights Act, not to Attorney General Holder. But on second thought….