Just Like….

Be snitches, sez the Governor.

Oregon Governor Kate Brown during an interview on Friday supported the idea that citizens should alert authorities when neighbors fail to comply with coronavirus restrictions.
“Look, this is no different than what happens if there’s a party down the street and it’s keeping everyone awake,” the Democrat Brown said. “What do neighbors do? They call law enforcement because it’s too noisy. This is just like that. It’s like a violation of a noise ordinance.”

It’s not at all like neighbors calling the authorities over a too-loud party. That’s neighbors acting on their own initiative.

The other is a head of (State) government actively pushing neighbors to rat out their fellows.

Even the Progressive-Democrat governor Kate Brown knows that. She’s acting just like heads of the governments of other types of nations.

A Thought on Brann’s Decision

Recall that Federal District Judge Matthew Brann dismissed the Trump campaign lawsuit that sought to reject hundreds of thousands of votes in Progressive-Democratic-run Pennsylvania counties because, the suit alleged, changes to State voting rules violated our Constitution’s equal protection requirement.

Brann ruled in part that he

has no authority to take away the right to vote of even a single person, let alone millions of citizens.

What Brann chose not to consider is that he also has no authority to see the vote of even a single person, let alone millions of citizens (more accurately, hundreds of thousands; “millions” is his cynical exaggeration), be diluted to the point of meaninglessness by illegally cast or illegally counted ballots.

The Third Circuit has agreed to hear, promptly, the campaign’s appeal. Hopefully, the appellate court will consider both sides of the matter rather than just the convenient side.

Some Thoughts on Europe’s Defense

French President Emmanuel Macron has one and so does German Chancellor Angela Merkel (through her Defense Minister, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer). And so do I.

Macron strongly favors a Europe that is strategically autonomous in its defense. After all, he notes (OANN‘s paraphrasing),

the United States would only respect a Europe that was more self-reliant in defence.

AKK, on the other hand, says that (again, OANN‘s paraphrasing)

Europe [will] remain dependent on Washington for its defence for a long time to come.

They’re both right, although Merkel/AKK is a bit pessimistic. It will take some time for the member nations of the European Union and for the EU as a whole to make the necessary adjustments for a Macron-esque defense autonomy, but it shouldn’t take as long as Merkel envisions. That simply requires more commitment to Europe’s own responsibilities than currently exists.

The US can, and should, do everything we can to support European defense (and that includes a newly freed from the EU Great Britain), but we should not—we cannot—take on Europe’s responsibility in their stead; they must act on their own responsibility. All we can do is stand with them.

Rule By Law

Rather than Rule of Law, which is how we do things here.

The men and women of the government of the People’s Republic of China change the nation’s laws whenever convenient to their personal aims and whenever convenient to their personal power. This is how those men and women have acted, have preserved their power, since the beginning of the days of Chinese emperors.

Two current examples: their enactment in 2017 of an intelligence cooperation law that requires all PRC companies, whether state-owned or “private,” to cooperate with any intelligence community request for information, including about any company affiliate or customer wherever in the world that affiliate or customer might be.

There’s also the just-enacted law that permits the PRC government to remove—outside of the courts—anyone in the Hong Kong governance apparatus of whom the emperor’s men the men and women of the PRC government might decide to disapprove.

Now we come to the Progressive-Democratic men and women of the Wisconsin State government.

At a special meeting that lasted more than five hours, [Progressive-]Democrats on the state elections commission sought to change recount guidelines after the Trump 2020 Campaign filed a petition to review the state’s votes in Dane and Milwaukee counties.

Existing State law on the matter had become inconvenient to those Progressive-Democrats, so—time to change the rules. As Reince Priebus noted,

The Trump campaign sent the Wis Election Comm. $3 mil and filed its petition for a recount. Then the WEC immediately called a special meeting to change certain recount rules that deal with the issues brought up in the petition? You can’t make this up!

Here are Progressive-Democrats in action.

WaPo Contempt

The Washington Post is at it again. Abolish the electoral college, its editors demand. And they thereby display the same contempt for ordinary Americans, our Constitution, and our federal republic structure as did Herb Croly, Woodrow Wilson, and more recently Ezra Klein, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi, among a long list of today’s Leftists and Progressive-Democrats.

The electoral college, whatever virtues it may have had for the Founding Fathers, is no longer tenable for American democracy.

After all,

Right now, our presidential elections are conducted by 51 separate authorities, each with its own rules on registration, mail-in balloting and more. Each state counts its own ballots, and each decides when recounts are needed.

You bet. That’s right there in that pesky Constitution, because federation. That’s where the individual States, by design, are nearly on a par with the central government. That’s so a far away, remote government cannot rule the roost with its one-size-fits-all diktats. Those pesky States just keep getting in the way of Progressive-Democrats’ need to implement their Know Better policies. Absolute control from the center would make that so much more convenient. Here’s Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the need for a Progressive-Democrat majority, reigning from DC:

[Jake Tapper, interviewing Ocasio-Cortez]: Are you going to work with more moderate Senate Republicans to try to pass something in the House that can get through the Senate?
[Ocasio-Cortez]: Well, I’m going to be spending my next couple of months doing everything that I can to extend help and offer support…that we secure a Democratic Senate majority, so that we don’t have to negotiate in that way[.]

Back to WaPo‘s need to clear away the obstacles to Leftist control of the promise of American life.

Small states already have disproportionate clout in our government because of the Senate, in which Wyoming’s fewer than 600,000 residents have as much representation as California’s 39.5 million.

With the Electoral College having far more popular representation than the Senate, surely, these wondrous exemplars of what passes for journalism will be demanding proportional representation in the Senate, too. Truly equal representation gives the dinky States, those locales too small to be worthy of notice, ‘way too much representation.