Category Archives: rights

“Misunderstanding” of the Left

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A number of credit card companies, on the demand of the Federal government as washed through the International Standards Organization, are going to start explicitly listing gun sales by lawful gun stores to individual average Americans. Among those credit card companies are Visa, Mastercard, and AmEx.

The Federal government now is going to track us average Americans and build a database of who among us has a firearm.

For what purpose?

…gun control advocates who argue that a separate category for gun store sales will help track suspicious quantities of firearm sales that could potentially lead to a mass shooting.

Because buying a firearm is ipso facto suspicious under the ideology of the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party. But wait—suspicious quantities—what’s wrong with that? This is the camel’s nose. It won’t be long before the Feds decide that one is a suspicious number of firearms to buy. And then one is a suspicious number of firearms to own.

The concern of us average Americans is justified by this misleading claim by New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) as he demonstrates his “misunderstanding” of the tracking.

When you buy an airline ticket or pay for your groceries, your credit card company has a special code for those retailers. It’s just common sense that we have the same policies in place for gun and ammunition stores[.]

Buying “guns and ammunition” is an explicitly protected activity under our Constitution. Buying firearms—keeping and bearing Arms—is an entirely unique activity for us average Americans, quite apart from the ordinary, day to day, activity of grocery buying, or the process of buying a travel ticket. There is no reason to track Americans going about our Constitutionally protected behaviors.

Other than identifying who has firearms for further Progressive-Democrat “control.” This is another effort of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s desired surveillance state.

Surveillance State, Part 2

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Another one from New York. It seems that US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley’s Stand for America PAC, a 501(c)(4) organization with a legally protected list of donors has had that list released by the NY AG’s Charities Bureau to Politico, which then proceeded to publish that list.

The Charities Bureau is an arm of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ (the same one who “consulted” with then-FBI Director James Comey to suppress any hint of investigation of Hillary Clinton’s classified email handling ‘way back in 2016) Attorney General office.

Never mind that the leak was illegal. Never mind that the Supreme Court in Prosperity Foundation v Bonta—just a year ago—had ruled that the California AG’s blanket demand that all charities disclose donor information was unconstitutional.

Letitia James, a Progressive-Democrat through and through, cares not a fig for any law that’s inconvenient to her. She’s going to collect non-Progressive-Democrat data and release it whenever she takes a notion to.

Surveillance States

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That’s what New York and California are becoming, only instead of using cameras, they want to use our banking institutions.

Visa Inc, Mastercard Inc, and American Express Co should begin tracking gun sales and flagging suspicious purchases to law enforcement, similar to how financial institutions look out for money laundering, the attorneys general of New York and California said.

And

The three leading credit-card companies should take a front-line role in trying to prevent mass shootings and reduce the risk of gun trafficking, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and New York Attorney General Letitia James, both Democrats, said Friday in a letter sent to the companies.

Because honest Americans buying firearms are similar to money launderers: buying guns is inherently suspicious, claim these Progressive-Democrat AGs and their States’ governments.

On the other hand, in pressing for this government-mandated financial institution surveillance, California and New York Attorneys General Rob Bonta and Letitia James (both Progressive-Democrats) wrote,

If tracking MCCs could stop just one mass shooting or derail one gun trafficker aiming to flood the streets with guns, the change would be justified.

Do they mean, for instance, then-US Attorney General Eric Holder’s Operation Fast and Furious, which ran guns to Mexican drug cartels?

Special Master

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The Federal judge, Aileen Cannon—an actual Article III judge, not the magistrate judge who issued the suspect search warrant—overseeing the outcome of the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago has granted the Trump team’s request that Special Master be appointed to sort through the seized documents and determine which should be returned to former President Donald Trump’s possession, and which can be retained by the DoJ.

I have questions.

What deadline was set for DoJ to deliver all of the documents (subject to DoJ’s inevitable appeals, which will only further the slowdown in DoJ’s “investigation,” a slowdown that DoJ claimed would result just from the Special Master’s appointment) following the appointment?

What sanction will be applied when DoJ misses that deadline?

What proof is being required of DoJ that all of the documents its FBI confiscated have been turned over to the Special Master?

What proof is being required of DoJ that it has retained no copies at all of the documents it confiscated?

Cannon also ordered DoJ to stop reviewing and using the seized documents as part of its criminal investigation until the special master can complete a review. What proof is being required of DoJ that it has stopped reviewing and using? Will the documents have to be (provably) held by a third party pending completion of the Special Master’s review?

It also would be illuminating to force DoJ to release its own “filter team” sorting outcome so the rest of us could compare that outcome with the actually unbiased Special Master’s outcome.

Contempt for our Constitution

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President Joe Biden (D) has canceled thousands of dollars of student loan debt with a few swipes of his Executive Order pen. Lay aside the amorality of that, and lay aside, too, the enormous cost of his move.

It’s blatantly illegal.

January 2021…the Department of Education issued a legal memo saying the education secretary “does not have the statutory authority to cancel, compromise, discharge, or forgive, on a blanket or mass basis, principal balances of student loans, and/or to materially modify the repayment amounts or terms thereof.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) Biden didn’t have the power to cancel student debt.

That has to be an act of Congress…the president can’t do it. That’s not even a discussion.

Only the Congress can specify the spending—or lack of spending—that the Federal government engages in. No President can do that unilaterally.

It’s also a cancelation of existing contracts, both without consultation with and acceptance by the contracts’ counterparties, it’s done without compensation to those counterparties. These are Federal loans to the students, though, doesn’t that make the Federal government the counterparty? No. It’s We the People, the taxpayers, who floated these loans and who will lose from their unilateral modification. The Federal government only acted in our name.

It’s what we have an elected legislature for, and a legislature that is the sole source of legislation, and the House of Representatives in particular that is the origin of spending bills.

I’m reminded of the remark made by a future philosopher: I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further.

This is Biden’s Woodrow Wilson-esque contempt for and disregard of our Constitution. That document and statutes that implement it are to be themselves laid aside whenever they’re inconvenient.