Tag Archives: freedom

Hong Kong Protests

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And the People’s Republic of China threatens.  Hong Kong citizens have been protesting a PRC-endorsed law proposal that would allow Hong Kongese and others resident in or visiting Hong Kong to be extradited to the mainland for trial in the PRC’s government-run court system.

[The PRC’s] government signaled its fraying patience with protesters in Hong Kong after they stormed the city’s legislature, calling the violent turn a direct challenge to Beijing’s authority and suggesting it would have to be answered.
Public statements from Beijing marked a shift in Chinese leaders’ attitude toward the crisis in the semiautonomous territory, indicating they may be forced to step in….

Consistent with that, the PLA’s Hong Kong garrison has begun “emergency handling” exercises.

And this:

The [PRC] government’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office called the protests a “blatant challenge to the bottom line of ‘one country, two systems’….”

Hardly.  The PRC’s proposed extradition law for Hong Kong is a deliberate threat to the two systems part.  Yet, here’s Zhang Jian, Associate Research Fellow at the Shanghai Institute of International Studies:

The suspension of the bill is tantamount to a withdrawal. There is no more room for backing down, no more ground for retreating.

This, of course, is nonsense. Suspension is not withdrawal, it’s a deliberate attempt to keep the extradition bill alive for later, quieter reconsideration and for enactment out of site of the peasantry. There’s plenty of room for continued action: the actual withdrawal of the bill.

Beijing has often appeared tolerant in the face of mass protests in mainland China and Hong Kong—and when passions and attention fade, authorities detain, attack, or otherwise punish ringleaders to prevent a recurrence.

To be sure, that’s a faux patience, and the tanks may well roll across the bridges, just as they rolled into Tiananmen Square not so very long ago when another bunch of uppity peasants demanded freedom.

Pick One

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Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill that returns the ability to vote to felons when certain conditions are met.  However, in his piece at the link, Arian Campo-Flores wrote

Under the bill, the state doesn’t automatically restore rights to felons who completed their sentences but have outstanding fines, fees, or restitution—common for many released from prison.

That’s a misunderstanding of the law and of the Florida Constitutional Amendment that prompted it. Either the felon has completed his sentence, or he has not. If he still has outstanding fines, fees, or restitution, he hasn’t completed his sentence.

Being released from prison is an important milestone, but it in no way signifies completion of anything. Here is Florida’s Voting Restoration Amendment as it appeared on the ballot:

Constitutional Amendment Article VI, Section 4. Voting Restoration Amendment This amendment restores the voting rights of Floridians with felony convictions after they complete all terms of their sentence including parole or probation. The amendment would not apply to those convicted of murder or sexual offenses, who would continue to be permanently barred from voting unless the Governor and Cabinet vote to restore their voting rights on a case by case basis.

The Amendment passed, and this is how it appears in the Florida Constitution [non-italicized emphasis added]

Article VI, Section 4. Disqualifications.—
(a) No person convicted of a felony, or adjudicated in this or any other state to be mentally incompetent, shall be qualified to vote or hold office until restoration of civil rights or removal of disability. Except as provided in subsection (b) of this section, any disqualification from voting arising from a felony conviction shall terminate and voting rights shall be restored upon completion of all terms of sentence including parole or probation.
(b) No person convicted of murder or a felony sexual offense shall be qualified to vote until restoration of civil rights.

All terms of their sentence means all terms, not some of them.

In Which I Agree with the ACLU

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The National Security Agency illegally spied on American citizens, again.  This time occurred, last October, when the NSA

collected records about U.S. calls and text messages that it wasn’t authorized to obtain last year….

This

occurred several months after the NSA said it had purged hundreds of millions of metadata records it had amassed since 2015 due to a separate overcollection episode.

This flouting of law and of its instructions was no accident, not the second time.  It was deliberate.

An ACLU staff attorney, Patrick Toomey, said in part,

this surveillance program is beyond redemption and should be shut down for good.  The NSA’s collection of Americans’ call records is too sweeping, the compliance problems too many….

It appears that the NSA didn’t explicitly call for the data when it asked a (sadly name-redacted) telecommunications firm for legitimately collectable data; that firm “overprovided.”  The data, though, were “overprovided” for nine days before the NSA asked the company to…investigate…its delivery.  Nor is there evidence the NSA purged those overcollections.

Especially that last bit about compliance: the NSA, with this latest collection, has demonstrated that it considers laws, rules, constraints to be solely for the small people; they don’t apply to august entities like themselves.

Toomey is right, and I’ll go a ways further: the NSA should be shut down, the agency disbanded and withdrawn from the government’s books, and the personnel all returned to the private sector.

I’m Not Talking to You

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Like an angry wife of a bygone era, the Iranian government is having a hissy fit over the latest round of sanctions, these applied directly to the likes of Ali Khamenei, Iran’s MFWIC; Foreign Minister Javad Zarif; and three military leaders:

Ali Reza Tangsiri, who was responsible for the Iranian regime’s forces threatening to close the straits of Hormuz; Amirali Hajizadeh, who was commander of the air force and responsible for downing the US unmanned aircraft in international airspace; and Mohammad Pakpour, who is responsible for IRGC’s ground forces.

Iran’s government isn’t happy.

A spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry said in a tweet Tuesday that the new US sanctions that target Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other Iranian officials permanently end any chance of diplomacy between countries.

This, though, is just another example of the Iranian government’s dissembling. When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe visited Khamenei, Khamenei refused to receive a message from President Donald Trump that Abe was bearing, and Khamenei said that he’d never talk to Trump.

All channels of diplomacy and any chance of future diplomacy have been closed off by Iran for some weeks.

Khamenei, Abbas Mousavi (Spokesman and Head of the Center for Public and Media Diplomacy), Hassan Rouhani (Iranian President), et al., are just acting out the temper tantrums of those angry wives.

In Which the Court Gets One Right

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The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the Bladensburg Peace Cross is not an unconstitutional favoring by government of a particular religion, reversing the 4th Circuit. Only Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

This is the privately done monument that was

built in 1925 and paid for by local families, businesses, and the American Legion to honor 49 World War I veterans from Prince George’s County [in Maryland]. But the 40-foot cross sits on a now-busy highway median owned since 1961 by a state commission that pays for its maintenance and upkeep.

The American Humanist Association, an anti-religion gadfly with many such attacks, particularly against what it considers Christian devices, had sued for the monument’s removal (these five decades and more after the commission assumed responsibility for the monument).  The appellate court had agreed with the AHA, ruling that the monument is an aggrandizement of Latin Crosses and nothing else.  That court also had displayed its contempt for the intelligence of ordinary Americans, ruling that the “display”

says to any reasonable observer that the commission either places Christianity above other faiths, views being American and Christian as one in the same, or both[.]

However, Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the Court, had the right of it [emphasis added].

The cross is undoubtedly a Christian symbol, but that fact should not blind us to everything else that the Bladensburg Cross has come to represent.  For some, that monument is a symbolic resting place for ancestors who never returned home. For others, it is a place for the community to gather and honor all veterans and their sacrifices for our Nation. For others still, it is a historical landmark. For many of these people, destroying or defacing the Cross that has stood undisturbed for nearly a century would not be neutral and would not further the ideals of respect and tolerance embodied in the First Amendment.

It doesn’t get much clearer than that.

As an aside, Ginsburg in her dissent, which she emphasized by reading it from the bench, echoed the 4th Circuit’s contempt for us ordinary Americans:

As I see it, when a cross is displayed on public property, the government may be presumed to endorse its religious content.  The venue is surely associated with the State; the symbol and its meaning are just as surely associated exclusively with Christianity.

Further to the aside, here is F Scott Fitzgerald’s test of genius:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

The Court’s ruling, including Ginsburg’s dissent, can be read here.