Daily Archives: 21 January 2020

The Contempt of the Left

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden says it’s time to start censoring private enterprise eliminate protections for tech platforms that publish user posts [emphasis added].

“Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked, number one,” Biden said in the interview, which was published on Friday.
The law, which was enacted in 1996 as part of the Communications Decency Act, gives websites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter broad legal immunity—essentially, it eliminates the possibility of legal consequences over what their users post. The statute was created to protect free speech on the internet.

Biden went further:

…we should be setting standards not unlike the Europeans are doing relative to privacy[.]

This is just more of Progressive-Democrats “be like Europe” sewage.

Biden did more:

[The Times] can’t write something you know to be false and be exempt from being sued. But [Zuckerberg] can….

This…foolishness…is a deliberately false analogy. Facebook isn’t originating content like [The Times] does. A more honest, albeit equally loose, analogy would be to liken Facebook to the distributor of editions of [The Times].  Maybe Biden wants newsstands, or the neighborhood paperboy, censored as responsible for [The Times]’s content.

It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false….

This is yet another example of the utter contempt in which Progressive-Democrats hold us average Americans. We’re just too grindingly stupid, Biden and his fellows insist, to discriminate for ourselves among the false, the erroneous, the satire, the foolish, the uncomfortably true, the simply true, etc. Our Know Betters have to do that for us.

There’s much over which to criticize Facebook, but government censoring free speech isn’t on that list.

Medicaid Block Grants

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The Trump administration is planning to set up procedures for allowing States to convert the Medicaid funding they receive from the Federal government from matching funds to block grants.

The new procedures would represent a large change.

Medicaid funding is open-ended, meaning the federal government matches state spending. If that funding is converted to a block grant, a state could get a limited, lump sum of federal money instead.

There are two key differences here. One is that the funding would go from strings-attached matches to no-strings block grants. The other is that the decision to go to block grants would be each requesting State’s, resulting in less Federal control over that State’s internal affairs.

Of course, this has vested interests twisting in their knickers.

Consumer groups and [Progressive-]Democrats say that limitation means thousands of people could lose Medicaid coverage or be unable to enroll if states’ costs rise or enrollment swells.

This is cynical and disingenuous. Whether a State’s citizens lose or can’t get access to their own State’s Medicaid is a matter strictly for, and wholly under the control of, the politicians and bureaucrats in that State’s government and the citizens who elect those politicians—who are the bureaucrats’ direct bosses.

At bottom, there is nothing at all preventing a State from reallocating its own spending to cover those costs or enrollments. Or of limiting access to ensure the truly needy can get the aid, limits that too often are blocked by those Federal strings.