Connections

One in particular stands out for me: that between Senator Amy Klobuchar (D, MN) and the truth.  Charles Hurt, in the Washington Times, has the sordid story.

[Klobuchar] claims to have read 148,000 documents that reveal Judge Kavanaugh to be so heinous as to be unfit for the high court.

OK, let’s say Ms. Klobuchar spent two minutes reading each document. That would be 296,000 minutes—or 205 days—reading these documents. Which is pretty remarkable considering Judge Kavanaugh was nominated 55 days ago.

There is another word for this. It is called a “lie.” And the person who utters it is known as a “liar,” even if the person she tells this “lie” to is so sleepy-eyed as to appear to be fully asleep.

And this:

But this isn’t even the most astonishing part of Ms Klobuchar’s sewer dive on national television.

She goes on to say that as horrific as all these documents reveal Judge Kavanaugh to be, she is not allowed to share the documents with the American people. She is not even allowed to tell us what they say.

“I can’t even tell you about them right now on the show[.]”

In her opening remarks during Tuesday’s Senate Judicial Committee confirmation hearing on Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination, she repeated lie about the documents, too.  The woman is shameless.

Remember this in the fall when she’s up for reelection.  Remember it in general as all the Progressive-Democrat candidates running this fall show their approval of her dishonesty with their silence.

An Interview Ducked

The New Yorker invited Steve Bannon to a panel debate, its New Yorker Festival.  Then, after “public criticism,” the mag disinvited him.  Other scheduled participants also…objected.

Shortly after Mr Bannon was announced as a guest, several film stars, producers and comedians declared on Twitter that they didn’t want to be on a schedule with the former White House senior adviser. Actor Jim Carrey, comedy producer Judd Apatow, and comedian John Mulaney all backed out, citing Mr Bannon’s participation as the primary reason.

New Yorker editor David Remnick made the laughable claim that

This…[is] a question of putting pressure on a set of arguments and prejudices that have influenced our politics and a President still in office[.]

From that, Remnick claimed, the Festival was not an appropriate venue for engaging Bannon.

What abject cowards are Remnick, Carrey, Apatow, and Mulaney. What better way to show up Bannon, to put[] pressure on a set of arguments and prejudices that have influenced our politics and a President still in office, than to debate him and expose the foolishness of his positions and those arguments and prejudices?

They’ve exposed their own prejudices, and they’ve shown they have no arguments to make to counter Bannon.

Kavanaugh and Precedents

Brent Kendall, in a piece in Monday’s The Wall Street Journal, wrote about the importance of judicial precedence and how willing Supreme Court Justice nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh would be to overturn them.

Liberals warn that key rulings on abortion, affirmative action, and gay rights could be weakened or reversed by a court that leans further to the right. Many conservatives, on the other hand, hope those precedents will be limited by future rulings and eventually crumble, even if Judge Kavanaugh moves carefully rather than tearing through established doctrine.

Sure enough, in Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing’s opening remarks, it was the End of Days according to the Progressive-Democrats on the Committee.  Kavanaugh represents, you see, everything wrong with President Donald Trump (even though his nomination to office was confirmed a couple of years ago), with Republicans, and with the non-Progressive world.  Women will die (although unborn babies dying doesn’t matter).  People will get horribly sick.  Segregation will return (although it was the Progressive-Democrat Woodrow Wilson who resegregated the Federal government work force that post-Civil War Republicans had integrated, and it’s Progressive-Democrats’ identity politics that actively seeks to segregate Americans politically.)  Violence will rule the streets.

As Kendall pointed out, though,

The judicial doctrine of stare decisis—respect for precedent—is a pillar of the US legal system, and justices generally are reluctant to toss out a ruling without a compelling reason that goes beyond believing it was wrongly decided.

There are two reasons why a precedent should be reversed or overturned by a court, in particular by the Supreme Court.  One, contra reluctant judges (and Kendall?), is if the precedent was wrongly decided: in that case, the precedent should be overturned.  Allowing an error to stand only allows injustice from the error to stand, and the longer the delay in correcting the error, the greater the injustice.  It’s never too late to correct an error.

The other reason is if the circumstances of the precedent no longer apply.  An example of this is the Supreme Court’s ruling of a lack of presumption of privacy in its upholding warrantless wiretapping of a wireless telephone connected to its homeowner’s base station by a then-unencrypted radio signal.  The public has gotten quite a bit more sophisticated about privacy and quite a bit more concerned with preserving it in all venues today, and so the circumstance of that precedent no longer applies—it should be reversed.

In either case, though, it’s not a straightforward affair to come to the recognition of error or of inapplicability.  That depends on the particular facts of a case and on what the applicable law actually says.  It’s unreasonable to expect Judge Kavanaugh to be able to comment substantively on whether he’d use a case to overturn Roe v Wade, for instance, or any of the other cases the Progressive-Democrats have their panties twisted around: he hasn’t seen those cases, since they haven’t come before him.

It’s also unreasonable to say what he might do, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said at her confirmation hearing.  To speculate in advance would be to prejudge those cases, and no honest judge can do that.

The Progressive-Democrats know that, also.

Nike

Nike makes shoes, among other things.  It also has chosen to use Colin Kaepernick in its new Just Do It campaign.  You recall Kaepernick: ex-49er quarterback who’s the instigator and leader of the NFL players’ campaign of contempt for our national anthem and our flag and of insult for the generations of our veterans who’ve fought, been maimed, and died for our freedom, including these players’ right to be stupid and to engage in contemptible and insulting behavior.

But wait—aren’t the players protesting police brutality, discrimination, and other social injustices?  That’s certainly their claim.  However, if their claim were accurate, they’d protest police brutality, discrimination, and other social injustices instead of attacking our anthem, flag, and veterans.  They’d also go into the neighborhoods where these things are occurring and actively help the locals, as many of the players who aren’t behaving so contemptibly and insultingly are doing.

Further, even if that had been their message at the outset, it’s clear that their message has been not understood that way by much, if not most, of their audience.  They would, then, clarify by changing their message delivery in order to have their message better understood.  Instead, the players have continued their delivery unchanged in the slightest.  From that, it’s clear that either their message never was what they claimed it to be, and they’ve been attacking these symbols and defenders all along, or they’ve walked away from their message and now are simply engaged in a toddler’s ego trip of out-stubborning those who disagree with them.

The players know all of this; in particular, Kaepernick knows all of this; and Nike knows all of this.  Yet,

Nike has said it “opposes discrimination of any type and has a longstanding commitment to diversity and inclusion.”

Too bad that doesn’t apply to our anthem, our flag, or our veterans.

I’ve bought my last Nike product.  I’m Just Doing It.

Trust Us

It seems that Alphabet and Mastercard have hooked up: Mastercard seems to have agreed to share its customers’ shopping habits with Alphabet’s Google in return for Google’s separately accumulated data on those same customers.  The subhead on Bloomberg‘s piece is instructive:

Google found the perfect way to link online ads to store purchases: credit card data

The hookup is this:

For the past year, select Google advertisers have had access to a potent new tool to track whether the ads they ran online led to a sale at a physical store in the US. That insight came thanks in part to a stockpile of Mastercard transactions that Google paid for.

And that Mastercard freely sold.

Who knew the deal had been done?  Almost nobody, especially including the owners (morally if not legally) of those data.

[M]ost of the two billion Mastercard holders aren’t aware of this behind-the-scenes tracking. That’s because the companies never told the public about the arrangement.

Then this:

[T]he deal, which has not been previously reported, could raise broader privacy concerns about how much consumer data technology companies like Google quietly absorb.

Gee.  Ya think?

It also raises the broader privacy concern of how much personal that data primary collectors, like credit card companies, are busily peddling to the Googles of the world behind our backs.

A carefully anonymous Google spokeswoman offered this:

Before we launched this beta product last year, we built a new, double-blind encryption technology that prevents both Google and our partners from viewing our respective users’ personally identifiable information.  We do not have access to any personal information from our partners’ credit and debit cards, nor do we share any personal information with our partners.

Trust us.  Trust us both.

Sure.