Category Archives: rights

Legal Protection for Whistleblowers

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Jay Solomon, writing for The Free Press, wants legal protection for whistleblowers, and under the color of that, he also wants protection for journalists who are harboring “confidential,” or some such, sources.

One of the things that makes America exceptional is that journalists here have freedoms that exist nowhere else. … That also requires the freedom to rely on confidential sources to get that information.

The problem with this is that actual whistleblowers already have lots of legal protection for what they run up their chains of command, to Congress, and ultimately to the public. Beyond that, the freedom that that exists nowhere else apparently includes freedom from the laws that ordinary Americans must obey: laws barring receiving and profiting from goods that were illegally obtained by the transferor.

What Solomon wants, what he’s conflating with whistleblower disclosures, even though he should know better, is protection for journalists who publish leaks, those illegally obtained goods (which might—might—be OK), and for leakers who are doing the leaking.

Some sources who talk to journalists are, in fact, whistleblowers. Most, though, are simply acting, on the face of it, illegally, by transferring those goods—which maybe they obtained illegally or maybe they obtained in the legitimate course of their duties—in violation of the terms of their employment or their oaths of office. These leakers also are hiding behind anonymity, supposedly out of fear for their jobs—but that just shows either their recognition of the illegality of their actions or their own lack of moral principles as they put their jobs ahead of their moral obligation to do a right thing, or both. Leakers are entitled to no protection whatsoever.

Moreover, journalistic claims that a source is a whistleblower doesn’t make it so. The journalist must provide evidence that the claimed source is, in fact, a whistleblower, vis., evidence that the source has exhausted all of his whistleblower avenues. Having shown that, the journalist must—at the very least for credibility’s sake—identify the whistleblower. A whistleblower source no longer needs anonymity; he has the legal protections of whistleblowing. The whistleblower work environment might still be uncomfortable, but in that case, refer to “job ahead of doing a right thing” above.

In the particular case at Solomon’s hand, in which a reporter is being held in legal jeopardy over her refusal to reveal the source(s) she used in her reporting in 2017, the reporter throughout her reporting and at all opportunities since, declined to provide any evidence at all that her source(s), which she claims were whistleblowers, were in fact whistleblowers and that those sources had exhausted all of their whistleblowing avenues within the organizations that employed them, before the source(s) talked to the reporter. As a result of the reporter’s refusal to reveal her source(s),

In February, US District Court judge Christopher Cooper held her in contempt of court—and fined her $800 a day—until she turned over her confidential sources. Although he said he “recognizes the paramount importance of a free press in our society and the critical role that confidential sources play in the work of investigative journalists like Herridge,” he added that he was required to strike a balance between press freedom and that Yanping Chen’s “need for the requested evidence overcomes Herridge’s qualified First Amendment privilege in this case.”

Solomon, like the judge (despite his on the whole correct ruling) is conflating whistleblower with confidential source, even though the two are distinctly separate from each other, similar only in their willingness to talk to reporters, but radically different in the legal protections they have.

Press freedom advocates, however, fear that [the judge’s] ruling against Herridge could cripple the ability of journalists to protect whistleblowers and confidential sources to provide critical information to the public.

Solomon, and his press freedom advocates, are making a specious argument with this claim. Whistleblowers need no journalistic protection. Leakers deserve none.

Overarching that, in years past, editors required reporters to have in their articles at least two on-the-record sources that corroborate the claims of their “confidential” sources. The press industry has long since walked away from that requirement, and no one in the industry has been willing since to say what publicly available and concretely measurable standard of journalistic integrity is in use today in place of that erstwhile standard.

Those on-the-record sources are all the protection journalists would need, too, were today’s journalists not too lazy to find and use them.

More Free Speech Leftist-Style

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As if we don’t need another example of Leftist censorship version of free speech, Ezra Klein, of the text [of our Constitution] is confusing because it was written more than a hundred years ago infamy, provides us with another.

New York Times columnist Ezra Klein slammed Democrats over their stubborn denials that US cities are plagued with rising crime, out-of-control migration, and skyrocketing prices….

To this point, Klein is right to decry the Progressive-Democratic Party’s foolishness.

As reported by the New York Post (the article is behind a paywall, but the tabloid’s subscription cost isn’t worth the candle), though, Klein couldn’t stop there, and he expressed a core tenet of Party:

And this idea that “The economy is actually good,” or “Crime is actually down, this is all just Fox News,” shut the f–k up with that[.]

Because speech of which Klein personally disapproves—even if he’s correct in its thrust—cannot be allowed. Free speech is only what he, or his Leftist cronies, say it is. It’s certainly not what that old-young Constitution of ours says it is. Of course, I have it on similarly good authority that [our Constitution] has no binding power on anything, anyway, so there’s that.

Fundamentally Transform America

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That’s what ex-President Barack Obama (D) bragged was about to occur shortly before his 2008 election victory. He got a major step of that transformation when he nationalized roughly one-sixth of our economy with his nationalization of our health care coverage industry with his Obamacare.

Now the Progressive-Democratic Party is on the verge of finishing the transformation as they sit on the knife’s edge of a sweeping election victory next week. The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial headline lays it out:

[Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala] Harris has already endorsed President Biden’s plan to impose “ethics” rules on the Justices that would invite political harassment and compromise judicial independence. Now she won’t disavow packing the Court. She has called for Democrats, if they keep the Senate in November, to bypass the 60-vote filibuster rule, letting them enact such bills without even a modicum of compromise.

Those would be the final two straws in the destruction of our federated republican democracy form of government. It would be the institution of one-party rule, with the minority party not even a loyal opposition but merely irrelevant, and the conversion of our Supreme Court and of our Federal judiciary in general from its current status as an independent, coequal check on the power of the central government into a rubber stamp of Party decisions.

The WSJ editors aren’t given to hyperbole, and they’re not being hyperbolic in their closing paragraph.

Democrats are serious. They say Mr Trump is a threat to democracy and US institutions, while they’re pledging to restructure the judiciary wholesale. Do they notice the cognitive dissonance? Apparently not. But voters might.

That’s what’s at stake next week.

No Compromise

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Not even a little bit. That would be the outcome of a Progressive-Democratic Party majority in the next Senate as that majority eliminates the filibuster. One outcome of that refusal is demonstrated by Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris in a Tuesday interview with NBC.

Q: What concessions would be on the table? Religious exemptions, for example, is that something that you would consider with a Republican-controlled Congress?
Ms Harris: I don’t think that we should be making concessions when we’re talking about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body.
Q: To Republicans like, for example, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, who would back something like this on a Democratic agenda, if, in fact, Republicans control Congress, would you offer them an olive branch, or is that off the table? Is that not an option for you?
Ms Harris: I’m not gonna engage in hypotheticals, because we can go on with a variety of scenarios. Let’s just start with a fundamental fact: a basic freedom has been taken from the women of America, the freedom to make decisions about their own body, and that cannot be negotiable—which is that we need to put back in the protections of Roe v Wade. And that is it.

Leave aside Harris’ cynical distortion of the legal fact (cynical because as the talented prosecuting lawyer that she is, Harris knows better): there never has been a fundamental freedom for a woman to have an abortion. There has been a Supreme Court opinion that a woman can have an abortion under some conditions. Court opinions have the force of law, but they are not law: only Congress can make laws under our Constitution. In the present case, that Court opinion was rescinded under Roe.

The larger matter here is what it is women should be allowed to do—what their fundamental right is—under a Harris administration. That fundamental right is a woman’s “right” to kill the baby she’s carrying. To deny even a religious exemption to that is to deny a fundamental right that actually exists: the baby’s right to life.

Government Investment Nanny

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The Federal government regulates who it will permit to invest in private investments—startups, pre-IPO opportunities, loans to private companies, and the like. These are highly risky investments, and they have high payoff possibilities, even if those possibilities are low. The Feds limit those who it permits into these private opportunities to folks with $1 million in net assets, not including their primary home residence, or at least $200,000 in yearly income, or $300,000 for a joint household.

Now there’s a move afoot to add a government-regulated glorified intelligence test as an alternative path for investors to make these investments.

A group of lawmakers has proposed legislation that would allow any investor capable of passing an exam to buy private securities—an array of investments like shares in pre-IPO startups or loans to private companies that are considered riskier because they have looser disclosure rules than public securities and can be harder, and sometimes impossible, to sell in a pinch.

Passing an exam as a prerequisite to being allowed to invest in a class of securities—passing an exam as a prerequisite to being allowed to vote in an election. That Jim Crow era requirement has long since been done away with. Except now Congressmen want to revive the practice for investing.

Private securities—meaning outside the scope of government regulation. This is something far too many politicians can’t stand; it limits their power to dictate to us; it limits their power, period.

The idea is that the ability to make these high-risk, high-reward bets should be open to all sophisticated investors, not just those with the biggest bank accounts.

Of course the definition of who’s sufficiently sophisticated, the definition of “sophisticated” itself is carefully left to government personages.

Patrick Woodall, Americans for Financial Reform‘s Managing Director for Policy (AFR is vehemently pushing for even more government regulation of our financial decisions):

Knowledge cannot protect people from the potential losses if they invest in risky, opaque, and illiquid, private offerings[.]

Neither can government. Nor should government try. The decision to run those risks are ours alone.

This is nanny-state-ism intruding into us private citizens’ own affairs far beyond regulation of public company-related investments. Companies are private rather than publicly owned explicitly to get out from under the government’s thumb, and citizens invest here—or would if we could—explicitly to stay out from under the government’s thumb—especially when that thumb operates, according to government, for our own good.

No.

We average Americans do not need government protections from ourselves. We are fully capable of making our own decisions, and we are fully capable of handling, and fully and responsible for, the outcomes of our decisions. We are not wards of the state, much as one of our major political parties is bent on reducing us to that condition.