Category Archives: culture

Government Convenience

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The Federal government’s Securities and Exchange Commission is vacuuming every scrap of data—including personally identifiable—on every single stock trade done by every single American, and it’s collecting these data from every single broker, exchange, clearing agency, and alternative trading system in the US.

It’s also doing this without any Congressional authorization to do so. The New Civil Liberties Alliance has filed suit to attempt to block the SEC from continuing and to get the SEC’s Consolidated Audit Trail, the mechanism by which the SEC collects and stores these ill-gotten data, completely eliminated. Peggy Little, the NCLA’s Senior Litigation Counsel:

By seizing all financial data from all Americans who trade in the American exchanges, SEC arrogates surveillance powers and appropriates billions of dollars without a shred of Congressional authority—all while putting Americans’ savings and investments at grave and perpetual risk.
The Founders provided rock-solid protections in our Constitution to prevent just these autocratic and dangerous actions. This CAT must be ripped out, root and branch[.]

The SEC’s argument in favor of its invasion is utterly cynical [summarized by former Attorney General William Barr]:

[I]t could investigate things more easily if it weren’t limited to gathering investor information on a case-by-case basis after suspected wrongdoing took place.

Barr’s response:

But the whole point of the Fourth Amendment is to make the government less efficient by making it jump through hoops when it seeks to delve into private affairs[.]

Indeed. The convenience of Government is no excuse for Government doing anything. We the People don’t exist to give Government something to do. Government works for us.

It’s time to thoroughly rein in the SEC, and a (not the) efficient way to do so is for Congress to cut the SEC’s budget to the bone, including reducing its payroll line item, until the SEC’s commissioners and staff straighten up or are replaced. And note that that payroll line item includes those commissioners’ pay.

Coherent Argument

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Progressive-Democratic Senator Chris Murphy (CT) provides yet another example. He kindly provided his own Friday morning reminder that Progressive-Democrats are unable to form coherent arguments on policy, and so they engage in smear.

Murphy’s example:

Chris Murphy
@ChrisMurphyCT
Your Friday morning reminder that Republicans are full of shit when they complain about the border.
They killed the tough, bipartisan border security bill because Trump told them to keep the border a mess because it would help him politically.

The border bill Murphy so loves did nothing to secure our border, rather it codified an annual flood of 1.4+ million illegal aliens before the Federal government even would be permitted to act, and that bill would have codified 1.5+ million illegal aliens flooding in every year before actually requiring the Federal government to act.

Contempt for Average Americans

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Television personality Katie Couric has made it plain. Herb Croly, one of the founders of the modern Progressive Movement, wrote a century ago in his The Promise of American Life, that

the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.

Couric had this to say on Bell Maher’s podcast:

The socioeconomic disparities are a lot and class resentment is a lot and anti-intellectualism and elitism is what is driving many of these anti-establishment—which are Trump voters—so, I think that is a huge problem that we have to address[.]

We average Americans are just too stupid to be taken seriously by the Know Betters, especially press personalities who style themselves the filter, the gateway, of what they deem fit for us to know.

Some Progressive-Democrats…

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…are beginning to rue the consequences of their Party’s no borders policies. But only a couple seem willing to say so out loud. The Chicago City Council’s Budget and Government Operations Committee voted 20-8 to move Progressive-Democrat Mayor Brandon Johnson’s wish for $70 million for illegal alien support to the Council floor for debate and voting up. (Aside: is there political featherbedding here? 28 Council members on the Budget Committee out of 50 members on the whole Council.)

Progressive-Democrat 29th Ward Alderman Chris Taliaferro is one of only two of those eight willing to demur from this vocally.

We are not taking care of our own. We have all but forgotten the residents on the West Side and South Side.

The 9th Ward’s Progressive-Democrat Alderman Anthony Beale is the other one choosing to speak up.

Here we are begging for more money when we don’t have money for the people here. We don’t have money for after school programs. We don’t have money to help our kids get off the street. Yet, we would just blow money left and right. That’s a fundamental problem.

Wolf pups in sheep’s clothing, bleating in the wilderness.

Free Speech NPR-Style

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And by extension, given the leftist (not the nearby center-left part of the political spectrum) bias of National Public Radio, here is the concept of the Left’s free speech. This is illustrated by NPR‘s retaliation against one of its own who spoke apart from the Narrative™.

Recall that Uri Berliner, a 25-year denizen of NPR and lately Senior Business Editor, wrote an op-ed for The Free Press that called out NPR for its far left and growing farther bias in its news reporting, extending even into the stories it chooses to publish or ignore.

NPR has suspended veteran editor Uri Berliner after he detailed his employer’s “absence of viewpoint diversity” last week in a stunning rebuke of the news organization.
NPR media reporter David Folkenflik reported the five-day suspension without pay began on Friday.

This is what the “news” and ideology opinion outlet and the Left generally think of free speech.

National Public Radio needs to have its Federal subsidies—that’s your and my tax money—cut off entirely. That won’t be much given that 69% of NPR‘s financing comes from “Corporate sponsorships” and “Core and other programming fees,” and 30+% comes from other private sources, but at least we won’t be paying for this abuse out of our own pockets.

Update: Following NPR‘s atrocious behavior regarding free speech, Berliner has resigned altogether from that outlet.