Couldn’t Help But Notice (051507)

The last word on McDermottgate? The Wall Street Journal in a Saturday subscription-only editorial loaded with snark sure hopes so. Perhaps Mr. McDermott wishes he had cut his losses earlier (bolds are mine):

As Judge David Sentelle described Mr. McDermott in his 1999 dissent: “a public official charged with the oversight of the ethics of his colleagues willfully dealt with felons and knowingly received unlawfully obtained evidence on the chance that he might be able to use something contained therein to embarrass one of the colleagues whose ethics he was charged with policing.” Classy guy.

The Hill newspaper reports that Mr. Boehner offered to drop the suit four years ago if Mr. McDermott would admit wrongdoing, apologize and make a $10,000 donation to charity. Mr. McDermott has refused, and now faces $60,000 in damages, plus perhaps $500,000 more to cover Mr. Boehner’s legal costs.

Rather than a lawsuit, the proper remedy was censure or expulsion by the House. In the event, Mr. McDermott resigned from the Ethics Committee, which found he had violated the “spirit” of its rules but took no formal action against him. We guess he met community standards. Mr. McDermott could appeal to the Supreme Court, but we hope he concludes he’s already done enough damage.

Ending the potential for damage by throwing him out of office is obviously too much to hope for from the voters of his loony-left congressional district.

I personally won’t consider it the end until Baghdad Jim cuts Mr. Boehner a $500K check.

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Sterling Burnett at Planet Gore is surprised at the lack of coverage (HT Ohio Conservative) received by two reports (both are PDFs — here and here) that attempted to identify the costs of globaloney initiatives and who gets impacted the most.

I’m not.

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Bill Vlasic and Bryce G. Hoffman of the Detroit News dedicated over 1,500 words to a story about tensions in the Ford family over the future of the automaker, and I’m supposed to believe that this never came up. Uh huh — even though a shareholder resolution on the issue involved was on the agenda of the upcoming annual meeting.

This description of the reax at the meeting, admittedly not from an unbiased source, belies what I believe is feigned apathy by the company:

Tom Strobhar, who read the proposal at the meeting for shareholder Dr. Robert Hurley, believes other shareholders who are angry about Ford Motor Company’s financial woes listened with open ears to statements about the negative impact of the company’s support of the homosexual agenda. “Clearly, Ford has been going in the wrong direction and has had disastrous financial consequences, which set the tone of the whole meeting,” observes Strobhar.

Hurley’s resolution, the eighth of nine presented that day, received just short of the five percent of votes it did last year. But Strobhar says one difference this year was the level of attention shareholders seemed to give to the facts he mentioned during its oral presentation. As he puts it, the resolution “quieted” the meeting.

“People were very attentive,” he says. “You could have heard a pin drop at the meeting when I did my resolution. There were many angry shareholders there, and when I told the shareholders about the 700,000 people who are boycotting Ford, they paid attention.”

Strohbar elaborated in a subsequent One News Now article:

But they were also angry, according to Strobhar, and he feels that there is a backlash that could be in the works from consumer boycotting of Ford’s investment choice with its charitable dollars.

“There were many angry shareholders there,” the activist says, “and when I told the shareholders about the 700,000 people who are boycotting Ford, they paid attention.” And with more announced plant closings, he is convinced that “workers at those institutions [being shut down] would be horrified to know that Ford Motor is giving money to gay and lesbian pride events in London and [toward] building gay and lesbian centers at the expense of their jobs.”

As I’ve said before, I believe those now-708,000-plus signers and the organizations that have signed on to the boycott have, through their spheres of influence and organizational relationships, not only convinced 10% or more of the car-buying population not to buy Ford vehicles, but that those who on’t buy are many of Ford’s most potentially profitable SUV and crossover-minivan customers. Even if I’m only half-right, how can a company that is circling the drain even be thinking about alienating a significant portion of its buyer base in such an in-your-face fashion?

The best that can be said about all of this is that if Ford does somehow turn itself around, its obstinate adherence to Political Correctness and so-called “Corporate Social Responsibility” will have caused that recovery to have taken much longer and to have inflicted a lot more pain on shareholders, employees, suppliers, and communities than it should have.