Or, Charlie Gard and sovereignty.
Charlie Gard is the baby with a rare genetic disease that has damaged his brain, probably fatally and soon. The baby’s parents want to be able to try alternative treatments, or in the alternative, be allowed to bring him home to die there with his parents who love him rather than encumbered by the state’s bureaucrats and representatives, his parents also by-the-way present, in an emptily sterile hospital room.
President Donald Trump has formed his commission to look into national-scale voter fraud, as promised, and that commission has asked each of the several States for a potful of voter roll information. Even though the commission has asked for a broad range of data, it has emphasized that it wants only the data that are publicly available according to the respective States’ laws.
Nevertheless, a significant number of States have chosen to refuse to supply the data. Virginia Governor Terry McAuliff (D), for instance, wondered with a straight face “what voter fraud? Who—us?”
I posted this in 2012; it bears repeating.
On this day 235 and more years ago, a group of Americans got together and, pledging their Lives, their Fortunes and their sacred Honor to each other while relying on the protection of divine Providence, took our country free from tyranny and set us on a new, wholly experimental course.
These men openly acknowledged both our right and our duty to throw off any government that too badly violates its moral obligations to us sovereign citizens, that for too long abuses our liberties and our individual responsibilities. At the same time, though, they acknowledged that routinely rebelling at every small offense was equally wrong: Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes. Yet those light and transient offenses want correction along with those abuses and moral failures.
Another word for Government’s prior restraint of private citizens, a word used by Holman Jenkins in his Friday op-ed to disguise this assault on our freedoms.
Let’s face it, with big data, with impersonal algorithms that could track every earthly resident’s web activity, travels, purchases and electronic interactions with the world, it might be quite possible to know whose life and personality are disintegrating, who might seek to resolve the impasse by going on murder binge.
The case stems from a Wisconsin state districting case
where a three-judge lower court last year invalidated a redistricting plan enacted by the Republican-controlled Wisconsin legislature in 2011.
That court insisted that, following the 2010 census, the Republican State legislature redrew its legislative districts to favor Republicans and disfavor Democrats.
Election results since then have shown the redistricting had its intended effect, with the GOP winning a larger majority in the state assembly, even as the statewide tally of votes was nearly even between Republicans and Democrats, the lower court said.
The Justice Department is clashing with career site Glassdoor Inc over the company’s refusal to identify users who posted anonymous employee reviews of a veterans health-care company under federal investigation.
That’s been fought over in civil courts, but this is a first for a potentially criminal matter. The Federal government is the one making the demand this time because the Feds want witnesses for a grand jury investigation into Glassdoor.
Whatever the parameters of any possible criminal case involved here, there are some questions that need careful consideration. Leave aside 1st Amendment questions regarding a right, especially but not necessarily limited to political discourse, to discourse anonymously.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on leaks about ongoing investigations:
Americans should exercise caution before accepting as true any stories any stories attributed to anonymous “officials,” particularly when they do not identify the country—let alone the branch or agency of government—with which the alleged sources supposedly are affiliated.
Indeed. And here’s Peter Carr, a Robert Mueller spokesman, assuring us that Mueller’s special counsel operation
has undertaken stringent controls to prohibit unauthorized disclosures that deal severely with any member who engages in this conduct.
Then, I have to ask, why is Mueller still allowing these leaks to occur? Why hasn’t he hailed his leakers into court, civil or criminal?
Puerto Rican Governor Ricardo Rosselló is coming to the mainland to stump for statehood for the territory on the basis of the just completed referendum on matter. The referendum had only a 23% turnout after heavy boycotting by several other interests; the last referendum had a 78% turnout. That tiny turnout, though, voted strongly for statehood rather than the status quo or independence, the alternatives on the ballot.
Rosselló’s effort should be strongly rejected.
The Chinese Communist Party’s powerful disciplinary wing is taking aim at the country’s internet censors for not pushing a party-line agenda, saying they were “irresolute” in implementing the policies of President Xi Jinping and “not trying hard enough to ensure political security.”
Read: political purity.
…authorities now want people to become absorbed by politics as defined by the party.
“If you let people get too sucked into entertainment, no one will care about what the leaders are saying. If you don’t do this [crackdown], no one will watch the ‘Network News,'” he said, referring to the staid evening news program of the official state broadcaster, China Central Television.
A group of perpetually-offended atheists, agnostics and freethinkers are threatening to sue a small Wisconsin town because of two welcome signs.
Here’s an example of the signs, which have been up 50 years or more:
The churches extend the welcome, not the town’s government in the name of any church or all of them.
Of what are these folks so terrified? There’s nothing stopping them from putting up their own welcome sign: “Atheists of Oconomowoc Welcome You.” If the town’s government objected to that, only then might there be an actual beef.