Monthly Archives: April 2020

Another Crackdown

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Maybe cut from the same cloth: you can’t dispute with me—I’m your government.

The organizer of a protest against New Jersey’s coronavirus stay-at-home order is facing a criminal charge, authorities said.
Kim Pagan, of Toms River, NJ, was charged Friday following the small but noisy demonstration in front of the New Jersey Statehouse in Trenton.
New Jersey police accused Pagan of violating emergency stay-at-home orders issued by Governor Phil Murphy [D] to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

Never mind our Constitution with its petty little nonsense about the right of the people…to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Those are just words, as Murphy makes clear:

When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.
…
The question is…which is to be master—that’s all.

There is one critical difference here from the situation in Hong Kong: jury nullification is available, and it works.

A Crackdown

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Or maybe a purge beginning. Fourteen (so far) Hong Kong protestors now are under arrest by the People’s Republic of China Hong Kong police for their rudeness in objecting to the PRC satrap government’s behavior.

Among those arrested Saturday were 81-year-old activist and former lawmaker Martin Lee and democracy advocates Albert Ho, Lee Cheuk-yan and Au Nok-hin. Police also arrested media tycoon Jimmy Lai, who founded the local newspaper Apple Daily.
The sweeping crackdown amid a coronavirus pandemic is based on charges of unlawful assembly stemming from huge rallies against proposed China extradition legislation….

Naturally, the PRC has defended those arrests and the West’s objections to them. Here’s the Office of the Commissioner of the Chinese Foreign Ministry in Hong Kong:

It is completely wrong that the UK Foreign Office spokesperson has distorted the truth by painting unauthorized assemblies as “peaceful protests….”

Because, after all, when a Government official uses a word, it means just what he chooses it to mean—neither more nor less.

This is what the Republic of China can look forward to. “One country, two systems” really means that second system is subjugation. And the dictionary will have only Government-approved definitions.

在中国, Newspeak 还活得很好.

Overseeing PRC Telecomm

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The Senate has started looking into tightening oversight of People’s Republic of China telecomms that are operating in the US.

In a forthcoming report, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will level sharp criticism at a group of telecom regulators for failing to scrutinize the Chinese companies and the way they handle data going back nearly two decades. Senate investigators who briefed The Wall Street Journal on their findings said that without proper oversight the Chinese companies “present an unacceptable amount of risk.”

It’s a start.

But even with suitably proper oversight, a larger question remains unaddressed, much less unanswered: why are these companies allowed to operate in the US at all? They are, after all, arms of the PRC government, not free enterprise entities competing on their own recognizance and beholden to the laws of the political jurisdiction within which they operate.

And this:

Representatives for American carriers warned the Senate investigators that the US moves could cause Beijing to retaliate by cutting off their business with Chinese carriers to provide services. That, the carriers have said, would potentially hurt their customers in China, such as US companies, and hinder the carriers’ ability to cooperate with US intelligence-gathering requests.

Couple things about this. Cutting off American carriers’ business inside the PRC would be relatively minor for operations in a nation that demands domestic partners and technology sharing as a condition of doing business within that nation and that demands government-accessible backdoors into foreign companies’ critical software suites as a condition of doing business within that nation.

The bit about hindering US carriers’ ability to cooperate with US intelligence-gathering requests emphasizes a critical difference between us and the PRC. US carriers’ cooperation with our government’s intel requests is entirely voluntary, for all the political pressure a carrier might face for noncompliance. PRC telecomm companies operating in the US have no such option: PRC government requests for intel-related information are required to be satisfied. The only request aspect relates to the type of information the PRC government requires to be collected.

Federal Aid

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The Federal Paycheck Protection Program is out of money—the first round was that successful—and Progressive-Democrats are once again blocking it from being funded unless they get

hundreds of billions more for hospitals and city and state governments[]

added in.

This is nonsense, but these worthies don’t mind blowing up our nation’s economy if they can’t have their way.

Never mind that the States don’t need more money; any budget gaps they have are the direct result of their conscious spending decisions. They need only to reallocate the monies they’re spending.

To the extent more Federal money really is needed in particular States, those funds should bypass the State governments and go directly to the entities needing the funds—those hospitals, for instance, small businesses—that PPP thing—unemployment insurance facilities, and the like. Along with the stimulus payments directly to taxpayers and pension/SS recipients.

It’s true that State employment facilities are State government facilities, but State governments need not get their hands on the money on the way by; this opportunity could be mitigated by making receipt of the money contingent on the State Government not siphoning other monies already programmed or planned for the employment facility—perhaps even by requiring the State governments to match the Federal disbursements dollar-for-dollar with State spending allocations reallocated. (NB: promises to reallocate future spending should be ignored.)

Flip-Flops

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These two paragraphs in a Friday Wall Street Journal pretty much illustrates the whole problem of divisiveness in our nation and the Left’s role as the driving force in that.

So it went this week as President Trump popped off that he had “absolute authority” to reopen the economy. Governors and the media shrieked that he was triggering a constitutional crisis by acting like the dictator they have long claimed he wants to be.
Then on Thursday evening Mr Trump issued new guidelines for ending the lockdowns that put the decision to reopen in the hands of governors. The Democratic-media line immediately flipped to say Mr Trump was refusing to lead and abdicating responsibility. Mr Trump’s “absolute authority” impulse was wrong on the law and self-damaging, as he so often is. But even when Mr Trump turns around and acts as they prefer, his opponents denounce him and predict catastrophe.

It doesn’t get any clearer than this that the Progressive-Democratic Party has no policies in whose merits they believe enough to tout and to campaign on; all they have is “No” to anything Trumpian.

With their behavior in Congress blocking—now twice; although after four days, they agreed a compromise on the first effort—any Federal aid to our nation’s workers whose employers have been so broadly reduced by political responses to the Wuhan Virus situation, Party is demonstrating that it has something more broad than that: “No” to anything Republican.

Even if they have push one claim one day and its opposite the next. “No” is the word.