Felons Voting

That’s what Democratic Socialist and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (I, VT) thinks ought to happen.  He couches this as all citizens having a right to vote, “even terrible people.”

Unfortunately, though, Sanders has misunderstood the nature of the social compact, and the Lockean nature of our American social compact.

Certainly, all American citizens ought to be able to vote in American elections.  However, felons, by dint of their voluntarily done criminal acts, have placed themselves outside the bounds of our social compact—they’ve made themselves outlaws in several senses of that term.  As felons under the terms of our social compact (Locke’s terms went a bit farther), these persons have surrendered a number of their citizen rights: freedom of movement, of keeping/bearing weapons, of association, of communication, and from search and seizure, among others.  Felons still can do many of these things, but they are severely restricted in the doing (and in some, completely barred) by the requirements of law and the strictures of the prison in which they’re held as those requirements are executed.

Since felons are outlaws, also, though, they’ve surrendered one more right of citizenship: the right to vote.

Censorship in the Patent and Trademark Office

The Supreme Court has heard the oral arguments for Iancu v Brunetti, a case I wrote about a bit ago.  Hadley Arkes’ op-ed in The Wall Street Journal shed additional light on the matter, which centers on whether Iancu’s business can trademark the name of his business, Friends U Can’t Trust, with its acronym stand-in.

Certain words are fixed in the language with the moral functions of “commending” and “condemning,” and some of them have a special edge….

You bet.

However, confusing F**T with the specially edged F**K can only be done by those with potty-mouthed minds.  Ordinary people, people with the barest modicum of decorum, are not so easily misled, whether they simply choose not to see the worst in everything they encounter, or they’re mildly amused by the obvious jape.

Chief Justice John Roberts did raise a significant point:

…advertisements will be posted in malls where children can see them. Mr Brunetti is appealing to rebellious young men, “but that’s not the only audience he reaches….”

However, this isn’t the risk that Roberts thought he saw.  This is an excellent opportunity to teach those children how to recognize critical differences and to not be misled by artificial similarities.  And to teach them how not to be easily offended or cavalierly crude.

Putting potty-mouthed minds into the PTO to effect government censorship according to their base criteria should be unacceptable.

Biden Takes Obama’s Apology Tour Domestic

Rafael Mangual wrote about Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s apology tour in a Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Even before announcing that he would seek the Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden was busy apologizing. At a Martin Luther King Day speech to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, Mr Biden said “I haven’t always been right….”

This, in response to criticism of his role in getting the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 enacted and his role in getting the preceding Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 enacted, this one especially with the support of 16 of the then-19 members of the House Black Caucus.

And so on goes Biden.

His steady drumbeat of apology over non-offenses just shows how weak of character Biden is.

Alternatively, if his apology drumbeat is legitimate, it shows how routinely offensive Biden is.

Either way, he’d be a President very dangerous to American values and to American national security.

Obstruction

President Donald Trump, along with many of the rest of us out in flyover country, are fed up with the Progressive-Democrats’ obsessive inquisition into his administration, and he’s decided to actively counter, now by saying he’ll “resist all efforts by the House to question current and former administration officials about special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.”

That report, recall, acknowledged officially what those of us in non-coastal US and outside enclaves like Chicago and Austin and San Antonio already understood: that despite repeated efforts to suborn them, the Russians failed utterly to get Trump, family members, or associates to go along with Russian attempts to sow FUD in our election processes and republican democracy.  That report also found no obstruction to have occurred, recounting as it does a short dozen of occurrences of an angry Trump venting and his staff having the skill to recognize that as such (even as Congressional Progressive-Democrats loudly contort venting into obstructing).

Those House Progressive-Democrats are responding to Trump’s latest effrontery.

Congressman Elijah Cummings (D, MD), House Oversight Committee Chairman, said

the White House was engaged in a “massive, unprecedented and growing pattern of obstruction.”

And Jerry Nadler (D, NY), House Judiciary Committee Chairman, said

the effort to block the subpoena for Mr McGahn was “one more act of obstruction by an administration desperate to prevent the public from talking about the president’s behavior.”

It is, after all, obstruction to object to attacks, it’s obstruction to defend oneself against any charge, whether the charge is grounded on actual evidence or is blatantly false.

The accused should simply roll over, surrender, and accept punishment.

This is the kind of government we can expect from a Progressive-Democratic Party reign.

Blocked, Because, Maybe

Great Britain’s regulators have blocked what should have been a private enterprise business decision taken in a free market.  But, then, Great Britain’s economy is no more free market than ours has devolved into, and in some ways, the Brits’ economy is even less so.

Regulators blocked the proposed merger between Walmart Inc’s British grocery unit and rival J Sainsbury citing competition concerns….

And

Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority said [last] Thursday the merger would reduce competition and could lead to price rises for shoppers.

“Concerns” about a possible future—one of many. “Could lead….”

All of this is prior restraint and idle speculation.  The Brits would have been better off to let market forces determine those outcomes, and if the merger proved uncompetitive, then take action based on actual facts, rather than their current course of acting on fortune telling and other guesses.

The Brits would be better off to return to a free market economy generally.