Monthly Archives: November 2021

A Second Amendment Case

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors opined on the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v Bruen, a gun rights vs gun control case currently before the Supreme Court. That case centers on whether New York State gets to allow or not allow a citizen of New York (and so a citizen of the United States) to carry a firearm outside his home based on a bureaucrat’s personal view of the “need” for the citizen to carry.

In the course of that piece, the Editors exposed their own misunderstanding.

Regular citizens in New York face an almost insuperable bar if they want to bear a firearm for personal defense.

There’s nothing in the 2nd Amendment that authorizes Government to specify any purpose, personal defense or other, for an American to keep and bear Arms:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

On top of that, the 9th and 10th Amendments bar Government from making one up.

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

And

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

(The courts already have made clear the relationship between this individual right and a Militia.)

Misleading—And Potential Fraud?

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Getting an adverse reaction—of any sort—from an employer-mandated or -encouraged Wuhan Virus vaccination? The Biden-Harris OSHA doesn’t want to hear about it.

The Department of Labor’s pledge Monday to publish an “emergency temporary standard” on COVID vaccine mandates “in the coming days” threatens to worsen the skewed picture federal regulators have been getting from employers for five months.

29 CFR Part 1904 – RECORDING AND REPORTING OCCUPATIONAL INJURIES AND ILLNESSES, among other things as JtN puts it requires employers to “record and report work-related fatalities, injuries, and illnesses[.]” OSHA, though, is exempting employers from reporting Wuhan Virus-related adverse reactions.

And this:

[T]he exemption is a “welcome reprieve to employers” because their insurance could have jumped based on recordkeeping logs of adverse reactions to vaccines, which have “little to no correlation” with an unsafe workplace, [labor lawyer Keith Wilkes of Hall Estill] told Just the News.

Concealing health data from the company’s health insurer could amount to insurance fraud, depending on the terms of the employer-insurer contract. It also could impact negotiations over new or renewed employer-insurer contracts, and fraudulently so if those withheld data are material to the matter being negotiated.

To be sure, OSHA still encourages employees

to file complaints when they believe their employer has exposed them to COVID or is “not taking appropriate steps to protect you from exposure.”

Which, to a candid world, would seem a bit one-sided when the employers are being told by the same OSHA to shut up about adverse reactions.

But that’s the Biden-Harris administration for you.

A Progressive-Democrat’s Bigotry

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Recall Senator Joe Manchin’s (D, WV) statement a couple of days ago when he said that he wouldn’t—couldn’t—be pressured into voting for a reconciliation bill about which he has serious, and potentially bill-killing reservations in order to get the already Senate-passed “infrastructure” bill voted on in the House.

Manchin said major parts of his reservations centered on these:

How can I in good conscience vote for a bill that proposes massive expansion to social programs when vital programs like Social Security and Medicare faces insolvency and benefits could start being reduced as soon as 2026 in Medicare and 2033 in Social Security? How does that make sense?

And

Nor will I support a package that risks hurting American families suffering from historic inflation. Simply put, I will not support a bill that is this consequential without thoroughly understanding the impact that it’ll have on our national debt, our economy, and most importantly, all of our American people.

In response, Congresswoman Cori Bush (D, MO) said

Joe Manchin’s opposition to the Build Back Better Act is anti-black, anti-child, anti-woman, and anti-immigrant.

Manufacturing a racist or sexist beef where there is no racism or sexism, as Bush has so blatantly done, is an especially pernicious form of racism, of sexism, of bigotry in general.

A Window on Biden-Harris Priorities

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Not so much from President Joe Biden’s (D) words or his Vice President and co-President Kamala Harris’ (D) careful silence, as much as what’s left in and left out of the current iteration of his reconciliation bill.

What’s still in after its seeming paring from $3.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion (don’t believe those numbers or that any numbers are anywhere near close to finality or even accuracy, but take them at value for now): climate change initiatives.

What’s out (so far):

  • paid family leave and Medicare expansion
  • drug pricing, paid leave, Medicare expansion on dental and vision
  • pathway to citizenship for millions

As Varshini Prakash, Executive Director of Sunrise Movement argued,

Progressives are the ones who have fought like hell for Biden’s full agenda, and their votes cannot be taken for granted[.]

Yet those concrete and potentially directly actionable programs are the ones that were dropped in favor of the Biden-Harris (and of so many others) fantasy of global warming as an existential threat to our species.

Yet, if those dropped programs actually were any good, they’d be fully supportable and easily voted up in their separate and individual bills. Prakash even (cynically I say) argued that the pathway to citizenship for millions was left to an unelected parliamentarian—never mind that here too, maybe especially so, the pathway to citizenship question, if it’s actually something We the People want, would be easily voted up in a separate Pathway Bill.

But no. Progressive-Democrats know these are not particularly desirable; that’s why they tried, from the height of their control of both houses of Congress and the White House, to ram these things through unilaterally with not a syllable of input from the minority party.

Success or Failure?

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In a Just the News piece concerning how the People’s Republic of China is stealing our (and Japan’s, Republic of Korea’s, and European Union’s) technology and using it to build a military establishment that can defeat us and from that compel us to do PRC bidding, FBI Director Christopher Wray was quoted as testifying before the House Committee on Homeland Security September a year ago,

I think I publicly acknowledged that the FBI now has over 2,000 counter-intelligence investigations related to China, by far the biggest chunk of our counter-intelligence portfolio, and we are opening a new Chinese counterintelligence investigation about every 10 hours.

2,000 investigations, with a new one begun every 10 hours. Wray was touting that as the level of effort the FBI is putting into the matter.

What it really looks like is the extent of the PRC espionage effort, especially since those cases and case-openings only represent what the FBI has detected. Those data seem, more accurately, to indicate the degree of success the PRC is having at stealing our data, and the lack of success we’re having in defending ourselves.

That failure is not all on the Federal government, either, for all the centrality of their role in our nation’s security. It’s also, in very significant part, on the managers of our private enterprises and their lack of effort—empirically demonstrated by how often and how easily they’re entered (72 new FBI cases every month, not all of which concern government penetrations)—in protecting their own data.

Wray’s claim does not describe any form of success at all. He describes failure, perhaps even lack of seriousness regarding the matter.