Tag Archives: freedom

ERIC Surveillance

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ERIC (Electronic Registration Information Center) is an increasingly farther-Left standing organization that shares voter registration data among the member States, ostensibly so the States collectively have cleaner voter rolls that contain fewer ineligible registrants. Apparently, ERIC also shares those data with others than the member States, too, and does so in deliberate secrecy, without required permissions, and outside the center’s charter—for instance, with the Center for Election Innovation & Research, which got $70 million from the Leftist Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, just in time for the 2020 elections. I’m actually more concerned about another aspect of ERIC’s activities [emphasis in the original].

The authors [of a Heritage Foundation report] note concerns about ERIC forcing member states to engage in active voter registration activities, despite states already making it easy for citizens to register to vote. …the membership agreement forces states to send out notices essentially yearly (every 425 days, to be precise) to at least 95 percent of the individuals in a state who are potentially eligible to vote but who have not registered “inform[ing] them how to register to vote.”

How does a State know who is eligible to register but has not? Certainly, the needed data are generally publicly available, but they need explicitly to be sought out, collected, and then fused into an eligible-but-not-registered list. Why are States being required by ERIC to conduct this surveillance, instead of leaving that up to the citizens of each State to do or to refuse to do? Why is it any American government’s business why this or that American citizen chooses to register, or not? Why is it any American government’s role to hector any American citizen to engage in this lawful behavior rather than that one? What other government surveillance is this supposed Organizational Compact trying to get governments to carry out at its behest? For what purposes? Maybe more States should be leaving ERIC and leave the government surveillance of private citizens to the Progressive-Democratic Party-run States whose governing personnel actually think this level of surveillance is a good idea.

Ban Assault Weapons

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President Joe Biden (D) wants to ban assault weapons completely.

His Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Director Steve Dettelbach, testifying under oath before a House Appropriations subcommittee, flat refused to say what an assault weapon was when asked by Congressman Jake Ellzey (R, TX).

…if Congress wishes to take that up, I think Congress would have to do the work, but we would be there to provide technical assistance. I, unlike you, am not a firearms expert to the same extent as you maybe, but we have people at ATF who can talk about velocity of firearms, what damage different kinds of firearms cause, so that whatever determination you chose to make would be an informed one.

Weasel words. You define the term, Dettelbach said, we’ll “help.” After all, he could have provided his own definition; those same experts could have advised him as he prepared for his testimony.

Biden wants to ban, and his ATF honcho—the man and the agency responsible for “regulating” the weapons us American citizens choose to keep and bear—refuses to say what it is that this administration would ban.

The obvious, and only logical, conclusion from this deliberate obfuscation is that Biden and his fellow Progressive-Democratic Party syndicate members intend to ban all of our firearms.

“Hurting Relations”

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The People’s Republic of China greatly reduced its export of addicting drugs for the criminal trade into the United States after former President Donald Trump (R) pressured PRC President Xi Jinping to do so. Under Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden, Xi has resumed and vastly increased his nation’s addicting drug export, particularly of fentanyl and of fentanyl precursors into Mexico for transshipment and Fentanyl manufacture and shipment into our nation.

The fact that Xi so greatly increased his export of this drug and of its precursors, targeting us, is a clear illustration of Xi’s attack on us without going kinetic. He’s already supported, just in the two years of the Biden administration, the export into our nation enough fentanyl to completely exterminate us, were it not for the Biden-undermanned CBP.

Now Wang Wenbin, the PRC’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Information Department Deputy Director, speaking for the PRC’s Foreign Affairs Department and in turn for Xi, objects to even the slight umbrage Biden is beginning to show.

The Treasury Department said Friday that the sanctions against Wuhan Shuokang Biological Technology Co, Ltd, Suzhou Xiaoli Pharmatech Co, Ltd, Yao Huatao, Wu Yaqin, Wu Yonghao, and Wang Hongfei are “part of a whole-of-government effort to counter the global threat posed by the trafficking of illicit drugs into the United States that is causing the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans annually, as well as countless more non-fatal overdoses.”

Here’s Wang:

China, in the spirit of humanitarianism, has been trying to help the US as best it can….

And

…US [move] to impose sanctions “seriously undermines” bilateral cooperation between the two countries over drug control….

How humanitarian of the PRC to sedate us before killing us.

What sort of cooperation, what sort of relationship of any sort, can we have with an enemy nation that already is at war with us, economically and via poisoning as many of us as it can with its drug war? We are not undermining relations; the PRC already has been doing so, for years.

The Only Party Governing

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Helen Raleigh, of The Federalist, wants President Joe Biden (D) to clarify his Taiwan policy to the American people and America’s allies.

Anyone who believes that the US should remain strategically ambiguous about whether it will help defend Taiwan so as not to “provoke” China doesn’t understand the thinking of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and especially its current leader, Xi Jinping.

She went on:

Although the CCP never ruled Taiwan, its obsession with the self-governing island is rooted in the party’s insecurity—the CCP wants to be the only party that governs China and sees Taiwan as a threat to the party’s legitimacy.

Here, though, she needs her own clarity. The CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, is the only party that governs the China that’s on the mainland, the People’s Republic of China. The Republic of China, the nation that sits on the island of Taiwan, is a separate nation, never governed by the PRC (which she backhandedly acknowledged later in her piece), and will only be “governed” by the PRC through naked invasion and conquering.

Here’s some strategic clarity: Biden needs to completely repudiate the 50-yr-old betrayal of the Republic of China, support the RoC’s application to rejoin the UN, and especially (re)extend formal recognition of the nation, to include exchange of embassies. This needs to be done in conjunction with the actual delivery of the billions of dollars of weapons already sold to the RoC and already paid for by the RoC, as well as the sale and transfer of yet more weapons suites. Also in conjunction with this, Biden needs to send the Navy sailing close to the PRC-occupied islands of the South China Sea and patrolling the Taiwan Strait.

And get out of the way of our rebuilding our own defense establishment: his current proposal is a cut, in real terms, of our defense spending.

False Entries

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DA Alvin Bragg’s indictment accuses the defendant [former President Donald Trump (R)] of the crime of FALSIFYING BUSINESS RECORDS IN THE FIRST DEGREE in thirty-four counts.

Thirty-four counts of made and caused a false entry in the business records of an enterprise…, all of them centered on voucher entries into a Detail General Ledger, and check stubs and invoices kept…somewhere.

Thirty-four counts of intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof…. leading into the sentences claiming those false entries. But nowhere does Bragg say who he thinks was the target of the “defraud,” nor does he say what that “another crime” is. Absent a defraud victim, there is no defrauding. By withholding what that other crime is, Bragg is denying the defendant his opportunity—his right—to answer the charge of that other crime.

False entries. Maybe—maybe—three real counts, but cut apart and expanded in 34 of them.

Withholding what that “another crime,” though, 34 times…. How about: false indictment.

 

Bragg’s charging document, the output of his grand jury, can be read here.