Category Archives: rights

A Department of Veterans Affairs Fail

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Yet another in an appallingly long list of Veterans Affairs fails.

This time it’s the VA’s conscious decision to deprecate, if not outright ignore, our nation’s veterans and to give priority access to limited resources to illegal aliens instead. Yes, yes, they signed a contract with ICE to do this, but they were not forced to do so. Here’s Senator Marsha Blackburn (R, TN):

We checked this week; it is up to one million claims for healthcare and benefits. As we were doing some oversight work of the VA, we realized that what they were doing was using some of their resources and their money to allow veterans—to approve veterans for community care—and to process claims, or to approve community care, for illegal immigrants, not for veterans, and then also to process claims for illegal immigrants.

And

When you’ve got a backlog of a million veterans that are waiting to get healthcare, and are waiting to get benefit answers, and you find out that money that should be being used to solve their situations is being used for illegal immigrants…it is absolutely maddening[.]

Indeed.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Valid Arguments

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Several States’ Attorneys General have filed an amicus brief in a Supreme Court case centered on whether Texas and Florida statutes that limit Big Tech’s ability to censor speech done on their platforms are legitimate. The analogy they draw is one valid argument.

[Summarized by Fox News]: [G]iving Big Tech the ability to moderate or censor users’ content would be like giving cable or telephone companies permission to cut phone lines on speech at their discretion. The AGs note that under federal “must-carry requirements,” those companies are banned from subjugating any speech on their lines.

And:

The Eleventh Circuit concluded social media companies could censor content because they have “historically exercised” power to refuse transmission of disfavored ideas.
But telegraph companies have a much longer history of censorship. Social media is less than two decades old. Congress did not impose must-carry requirements on telegraphs until 1888, 50 years after their invention[.]
Yet it is well recognized today that those must-carry regulations were constitutional—even though this Court declared that telegraph companies are “not common carriers.” History thus provides no basis for dismissing the striking similarities between social media companies and telegraph and telephones by dubbing social-media censorship “editorial judgment[.]”
While the earlier laws applied to telegraphs and telephones, it is no different when the companies carrying other people’s speech are digital rather than analog[.]
The States thus have a paramount interest in urging this Court to affirm that longstanding, historic authority of States to protect freedom of speech and enable representative government by prohibiting dominant communication networks from censoring[.]

There is one more argument that is, IMNSHO opinion, dispositively on point. This is the status of those Big Tech platforms—X (nee Twitter), Meta’s Facebook, and Alphabet’s YouTube, for instance—as public forums. Indeed, some of these platforms have explicitly stated that they intend to be public squares for public discourse, even as they also provide mechanisms for exchanging private correspondence.

The public square is precisely where speech may not be censored except within a very few very narrowly defined boundaries—incitement to riot, explicit threats of violence against particular persons. Whether any Big Tech platform has explicitly styled itself a public square, each of these platforms have grown so large—become so dominant—that each one of them is, de facto, a public square. Their censorship practices must be barred.

A Death Penalty Revival

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Former President Donald Trump (R) revived the use of the death penalty after a hiatus of some duration, and President Joe Biden (D) has moved to deprecate the death penalty anew, even if inconsistently so.

I confess to being conflicted regarding the death penalty. There are some crimes so heinous that they cry out for execution of the criminal. Rape, especially of children, and premeditated murder come to mind for me, along with mass and serial murder.

However, the error rate in getting convictions for these crimes is high enough to give me pause. Some errors are the result of police error in the investigation, police or prosecutorial misconduct in the runup to trial, prosecutorial or judicial error during trial, or prosecutorial misconduct during trial. These instances are very rare, but they happen. Another reason for my reluctance is improving technology. Increasing ability to analyze DNA data—even the basic ability to handle DNA as evidence at all—reveals what becomes erroneous trial and conviction today even when those convictions of yesterday were correctly obtained given the evidence then available.

Thus: it’s easy enough to execute a criminal tomorrow. But if he’s executed today, and tomorrow we learn that he was wrongly convicted, we can’t undo his execution.

It’s maddening, on the other hand, for the survivors of the criminal’s crime to suffer the delays defense attorneys and “liberal” Others throw up to obstruct and delay an execution, and those delays deny justice for those survivors.

One at least partial solution would be to streamline the death penalty appeals process. Require attorneys bringing a case for delay or sentence reduction to something less than execution to present all of their objections in a single case, to include consolidation of all of the several separate lawyer cases into a single, class-action if you will, case. Perhaps, allow a single additional appeal based on truly newly developed evidence.

That won’t address the errors later discerned with improving technology. However, we can’t allow heinous criminals to escape the death penalty on the basis of inherently speculative potential future technology advances.

Probably Won’t Be Invited Back

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Newly elected Argentina President Javier Milei was invited to the World Economic Forum. He had some things to say while he was there.

Today I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger. And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have defended the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inevitably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty[.]

And

Unfortunately, in recent decades, motivated by some well-meaning individuals willing to help others, and others motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged caste, the main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism. We’re here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world, rather they are the root cause.
Do believe me, no one [is] in a better place than us Argentines to testify to these two points[.]

And this:

The case of Argentina is an empirical demonstration that—no matter how rich you may be, or how much you may have in terms of natural resources…or how many bars of gold you may have in the central bank—if measures are adopted that hinder the free function of markets, free competition, free price systems, if you hinder trade, if you attack private property, the only possible fate is poverty.

And this, moving in a slightly different direction:

I would like to leave a message for all businesspeople here…you are social benefactors, you’re heroes[.]
Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral. If you make money, it’s because you offer a better product at a better price.

The WEF persons probably won’t have him in to any more of their assemblages.

Frank Fleming added this regarding our own administrations’ [sic] failures at successive WEF confabs:

Why can’t we get a guy like this in America? This is supposed to be our thing[.]

Unfortunately, those motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged caste vastly outnumber those well-meaning individuals willing to help others, and so the damage that flows from gatherings like the WEF will continue.

A complete transcript of Milei’s speech can be read here. A video of his speech can be viewed here on Disclose.tv’s X account (@disclosetv).

Racism, Arrogance Against Election Integrity

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In the aftermath of the 2020 election confusions in Georgia (both general and runoff), that State passed its Election Integrity Act that, among other things, shortened Georgia’s early voting period from nine weeks to four, reduced the window for mail-in ballots, and moved the deadline for registering to vote to 29 days before an election.

The Sixth Dist. of the Afr. Methodist Episcopal Church, the Ga. State Conf. of the NAACP, and The Concerned Black Clergy of Metro. Atlanta Inc., joined by the Federal government’s DoJ, sued to strike the law as voter suppressing—the stricter voting period unfairly discriminates against Black voters, among other complaints.

This was a nakedly racist suit that used a manufactured racism beef as the core of their argument. Federal District Judge JP Boulee issued a preliminary injunction upholding the law. With particular reference to the Act’s runoff requirements, he wrote,

Plaintiffs presented evidence that Black voters are more likely to vote early. Plaintiffs did not present any evidence, however, which would show why Black voters would disproportionately struggle to vote during the new early voting period

And [emphasis added]

In short…the Court is not persuaded that evidence showing that black voters use early voting more often is sufficient to show that the Runoff Provisions, which shorten the early voting period, will have a disparate impact on black voters. In other words, without more, generalized evidence related to the use of early voting is not sufficient to automatically show that this particular provision, which pertains to one aspect of runoff elections, is discriminatory.

And

Plaintiffs have failed to meet their burden to show that the Runoff Provisions have a disparate impact on black voters. Indeed, Plaintiffs failed to show that eliminating the registration period before a runoff election disproportionately impacts black people. Plaintiffs also failed to show that reducing the early voting period and not mandating weekend voting has a disparate impact. The Court thus weighs this factor in favor of Defendants and against a discriminatory purpose finding.

“Plaintiffs” just expected their unsubstantiated claim to be taken as dispositive fact. Their arrogance runs as deep as their racism.

Regarding the specific question of Plaintiffs not getting their preferred way, Boulee noted the 11th Circuit’s precedent, binding on his court (the 11th Circuit includes Georgia):

The Court acknowledges that the Legislature did not include the alternative option that Plaintiffs would have preferred [a one- or two-week longer voter registration period]. Importantly, the Eleventh Circuit has held that the failure to “‘include the alternative option[s] that Plaintiffs would have preferred’ is not evidence of discriminatory intent.”

That’s the arrogance of Plaintiffs being handled.

The dishonest nature of the plaintiff’s beef is illustrated in Footnote 6 of the Boulee’s ruling [emphasis added, cites omitted]:

6 As to the other named organizations, the Court is not convinced that Plaintiffs established an injury based on a diversion of resources. By way of example, Plaintiffs argued that “[i]t is false that Common Cause ‘says nothing about runoffs,’ . . . Common Cause testified about its voter participation efforts in both the ‘2020 Primary and Runoff election cycles.'” A close look at Plaintiffs’ evidence, however, does not show that Common Cause diverted its resources to counteract the Runoff Provisions. Instead, Common Cause’s representative stated that “[a]s part of the organization’s voter participation efforts, Common Cause GA provided free personal protective equipment (PPE), food, and water to persons, including voters, at or around polling sites, in Fulton County during the 2020 Primary and Runoff election cycles.” Simply put, the fact that Common Cause elected to give out water and other gifts during a runoff election does not show that it diverted resources away from its ordinary activities to counteract the Runoff Provisions.

These plaintiffs, their judgments clouded by their racism and arrogance, are just making things up and claiming them to be true without even a pretense of substantiation.

The judge’s ruling can be read here.