Tea at Trianon: Rookie Cop Fired Unjustly

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, April 14, 2024

Rookie Cop Fired Unjustly

From the NY Daily News:

A Westchester County rookie cop says he was fired for writing a ticket to a lawyer who tried to get out of it by giving him a police union courtesy card.

“It’s kind of mind-blowing,” Joseph Saetta told the Daily News. “I want my job back. I want my name cleared. “I did nothing wrong.”

Saetta’s lawyer Peter Brill filed a federal civil rights lawsuit last Friday that seeks damages on the former officer’s behalf. He also filed in state Supreme Court what under New York law is known as an Article 78 proceeding, which asks that the Westchester County Public Safety Department reverse its decision to dismiss Saetta.
“He basically was fired from his job for doing his job,” Brill said. “He apparently violated some unwritten rule that you can’t give a ticket to someone who flashes one of these cards.” (Read more.)