“Harassment of the Press”

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In their house editorial, the worthies of The Wall Street Journal let loose this remark regarding the leak of President Donald Trump’s (R) decision, on the advice of his Secret Service, to change his Air Force One ride out of Turkey to Great Britain:

Notably, the Justice Department has subpoenaed New York Times writers who reported the story to disclose their sources. That’s harassment against the press that won’t make the US safer.

This is the self-serving preciousness of our routinely mendacious press. The information the NYT‘s news writers received for their story was illegally transferred by a leaker who leaked classified information to those writers.

It isn’t harassment of the press to demand that pressmen reveal the sources of their illegally transferred and illegally received by them goods. Anyone but a pressman convicted of receiving stolen goods would be jailed for the felony. The august press guildsmen cannot even be charged under current practice.

Aside from that, there is nothing in our Constitution, especially in our First Amendment, that contains any reference, any hint, of journalist-source confidentiality. The journalist is not a doctor or a priest, neither is the source a patient or supplicant.

At bottom, whether a journalist should or should not be put on trial for receiving stolen goods, there is no threat to press freedom from requiring a journalist to provide the name of his source when that source has potentially committed a crime by an illegal transfer.

It’s Time

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When an enemy nation comes for another nation’s children, it’s long past time for honorable nations and honorable politicians to respond.

The People’s Republic of China now is targeting the Republic of China’s children in the former’s effort to isolate and suffocate the RoC into abject submission.

Last month, organizers of an August global choral music symposium in the Chinese territory of Macau blocked the National Taiwan Hakka Children’s Choir from performing under its name, objecting to the suggestion that Taiwan was a separate nation.
Organizers of the World Latte Art Championship in San Diego similarly changed the winner’s home affiliation from “Taiwan” to “Chinese Taipei,” adopting Beijing’s preferred nomenclature for the democratic self-governing island of Taiwan.

It’s time for participants in the next World Latte Art Championship contest and future such contests to decline further participation in response to the WLAC organizers’ cowardice and complicity in the PRC’s attack on those youths.

It’s time for the United States government and especially our Secretaries of State, Defense, and Homeland Security to start referring to the RoC by its correct name: the Republic of China. It’s time, also, for nations and their politicians wanting to be friends or allies to do the same.

Those words, that appellation, is important in itself, but it’s insufficient. That step needs to be followed in short order by formal recognition of the Republic of China and an exchange of Embassies with it.

What DSA Wants for the United States

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The Democratic Socialists of America has published its Program. The categorizations are mine.

  • Government-owned means of production—land, labor, capital and general infrastructure and capital goods
    • publicly-owned social housing
    • strictly regulated investment properties
    • universal rent control
    • publicly owned energy and transit infrastructure
    • phase out the use of fossil fuels
    • earth’s resources for all
    • public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries
  • National security
    • disempower police unions [there’s a pro-worker move]
    • abolish the police and prison system
    • defund the Department of War
    • end economic warfare against [enemy] countries…such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran
    • end ICE detention and deportations
    • legalize migration
    • grant amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status
  • Government—national—structure
    • replace the two-party system with a multi-party democracy
    • expand the House of Representatives
    • abolish the Senate
  • Economy
    • reparations
    • aggressive wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations
    • Protect, expand, and enforce the rights of all workers to form, join, and strike with their unions, regardless of industry [except for those Evil Police, which are being eliminated, anyway]

This also is what the Progressive-Democratic Party is absorbing into its own core with its enthusiastic embrace of the DSA, the objections of the small right wing Establishment of Party notwithstanding.

How Far Have the Brits Fallen?

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We’re all well aware of the shambles Labour—and the Tories before them—have made of the UK economy, of what they still so cutely think of as their borders, and of their foreign policy.

Look elsewhere, too, for instance at the nation’s flagship airport, Heathrow, in western London. It’s a wholly owned subsidiary of…well, lookie here…. It’s owned by a consortium consisting of

Ardian, a French private investment company
Qatar Investment Authority
Public Investment Fund, a Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund
Australian Retirement Trust
GIC, a Singaporezn sovereign wealth fund
China Investment Corporation, a People’s Republic of China sovereign wealth fund

In their aggregate, they own 100% of Heathrow, all under the transparent fig leaf of FGP Topco Limited, which is headquartered in Middlesex. And circularly, its acquisition by Ardian and Qatar Holding LLC (Qatar Investment Authority) was approved by the European Commission in 2024.

Do the Brits own anything of their own anymore? This would be bad enough, but five of those owners are foreign governments, which own, collectively, 67.4% of that erstwhile pride of the United Kingdom.

A Premium on Acting

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In their house editorial regarding President Donald Trump’s (R) Thursday speech and his remarks about the SAVE Act, the WSJ‘s editors cited Senator Thom Tillis (R, NC):

By his reckoning, the US has about 10,000 county clerks or municipal entities that carry out America’s decentralized elections. The midterms are barely 100 days away, early voting sooner. “The math doesn’t work,” he said. “It can’t be done.”

Leave aside the all too typical Republican timidity inherent in that “can’t.” Most Conservatives intuitively understand that “can’t” is just a copout for something that might be deucedly hard. Most of us also understand that “hard” means “doable.”

Instead, consider that the SAVE Act is necessary to secure our election system (or to further secure it, if skeptics are close to accurate and our elections already are quite secure). If implementing SAVE really would take the time the Tillises of the Republican Party think, that just makes it all the more imperative for Republicans in the Senate to screw their courage to the sticking post and pass what the House—via House Republicans—already has passed twice.

The bill wouldn’t enhance election security, as the editors claim? It won’t reduce election security, either; a worst it would have no effect. Senate Republicans need to stop hiding under their desks whenever Progressive-Democrats or their Leftist supporters say mean things to them.