Category Archives: law

Examples of Progressive-Democratic Party Thought

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This is what some Progressive-Democratic Party candidates for office, some of whom have won their primaries and others of whom have significant leads in their primaries, are campaigning on. Keep in mind that party primaries are where party voters choose who they want to represent them.

Darializa Avila Chevalier Progressive-Democratic Party’s choice for a US Congressional seat from New York:

  • government ownership of the means of production
  • prison abolitionist
  • police abolitionist
  • proud of wiping her dirty hands on the American flag
  • open celebrant of Hamas butchery

Francesca Hong, Progressive-Democratic Party’s choice for Wisconsin’s Governor:

  • abolish the Senate
  • police exist to uphold white supremacy
  • canceling Thanksgiving as a colonizer holiday
  • canceling Halloween and Christmas just because

Christina Bohannan, Progressive-Democratic Party’s choice for a seat representing Iowa in the US Congress:

  • patriotism is a sensitive and controversial subject
  • 1619 Project is preferred history of the US

Party has selected or is close to selecting similarly disposed candidates in other States—viz., Angie Craig for US Senate and Ilhan Omar for US Congress in Minnesota, Pramila Jayapal for US Congress (again!)—and it already elected the dual-membershipped (DSA and Party) Zorhan Mamdami. That’s only so far in this election cycle.

This is what the Progressive-Democratic Party stands for, made explicit by its taking the Democratic Socialists of America into its bosom.

It’s true that Republicans picked Victor Marx as their candidate for Colorado governor, but he’s a clear exception to what the party stands for. Those others are typical of Party.

Dodging NYC’s Pied-à-Terre Tax

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Folks subject to New York City Democratic Socialist of America Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax, and folks who aren’t subject but got the threatening letter from Mamdani anyway, are looking for ways to duck the tax.

offshore corporation in the Cayman Islands to hold their New York City pied-à-terre

Nope. Still a pied-à-terre subject to the tax. The owner’s corporation would still have to pay the tax.

pay a stranger to pretend to live in their second home as a full-time resident

Nope. That has other tax implications—income tax, for instance, as well as making the owner now subject to NYC’s landlord laws. And that’s apart from whether the owner can dodge the outright tax fraud aspect of the move.

There’s another way, guaranteed legal and guaranteed to get the owner out from under the socialist’s thumb. This consists of those owners selling those pied-à-terres to folks who want to live in the city, and for the now ex-owner stopping living there altogether. The city, anymore, as very little left to recommend it—even the finance industry is on the move out of the city, some out of the State—so there’s little loss here.

Wrong Solution

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New York City’s Socialist (officially Progressive-Democrat) Mayor Zohran Mamdani published an extensive list of residences which he claimed were secondary residences—pieds-à-terre—owned by the Evil Rich, together with his intention of taxing them heavily for their existence. It turns out his minions didn’t trouble themselves to proofread the list, and it contains massive errors.

In his magnanimity, Zohran’s administration granted a reprieve, of sorts.

Homeowners across New York City now have an extra month to prove their primary residency and avoid Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new pied-à-terre tax, an extension triggered by mass confusion over a publicly posted tax roll.

This is Leftist government being Leftist. It shouldn’t matter how much time a city resident has in which to prove the home in which he lives is his primary residence and not the part-time secondary abode that the city claims it to be. This is a reversal of our national tradition—and legal requirement—that it’s the government’s task to prove its charge is correct and not the accused’s task to prove it incorrect.

Mamdani’s administration should be required to prove—in court and city expense—that the home in question is, indeed, the pied-à-terre that the city clams it to be. There is no excuse for shifting that most basic requirement of government off onto the citizen. That’s the attitude of Ruler regarding his Subjects.

One More Thought on our Second Amendment

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The thought coalesced, finally, on reading a post over at Grim’s Hall, a blog I strongly recommend on GPs.

A problem I’ve had with Bruen from the start, hanging its hat on historical tradition as it does, is that the opinion, thereby, accepts as constitutionally legitimate any weapon regulation, so long as it’s been historically long-standing.

The Second Amendment carries no such caveat or exception, though. Its bar on the government is universal and unequivocal: the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. The first attempt to regulate that right should have been ruled unconstitutional. It’s not too late today.

…7th Circuit recently upheld Illinois’ ban, noting that the ubiquitous firearm from 1791 through the mid-19th century was a single-shot muzzleloader. AR-15s with large-capacity magazines, the majority said, are “a far cry from these antecedents.”

This seems to me a patently erroneous argument by the Sages of the Seventh Circuit. The Founders, along with, especially, those members of the first Congress who wrote the Second Amendment, along with the People who ratified it, were no strangers to innovation and to technological advancement. Yet no one in any of the courts that I’ve seen have addressed the premise that with that broad awareness, and against the backdrop of so many of the Continental Army’s and Navy’s large weapons systems employed in the just-concluded Revolutionary War were privately owned, the Amendment was written to be technologically agnostic.

That backdrop, those large weapon systems being privately owned, strikes me as the only valid historical tradition.

“Journalists Shouldn’t Have To Face That Risk”

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The “risk” that Judith Miller, of the Manhattan Institute, faced was going to jail (temporarily realized for all of three months as she refused to give up the source who’d illegally passed her national security information. Miller wants a shield law that would place journalists above the law.

This is typical—demonstrative—of the intrinsically arrogant and dishonest “industry” of which she is a part.

By Miller’s own admission, she had been given a leak of national-security information. This was an obvious illegal transferal, and everywhere outside the journalism guild, receiving stolen property like this “leak” was would itself be a crime.

Further to Miller’s dishonesty, she chose to conflate her subpoena with the recent badly done subpoenas for New York Time news writers as though badly done subpoenas justify tossing correctly done ones like the one that sent her to jail for three months.

Further to Miller’s dishonesty, she noted that she was released only when her contempt of court was cured by her source giving her permission to reveal him. No permission was necessary and no permission is necessary today: journalists must be required to give up their sources of illegally transferred information whether or not they choose to publish those stolen goods.

Shield law: she already has one, as she noted:

…Justice Department guidelines call for issuing subpoenas to journalists only as a last resort and after a thorough investigation fails to determine the source of the leak….

Along with our court system, which deals appropriately with subpoenas to journalists that do not meet those guidelines, just as the court did with those NYT subpoenas.

There is no right of confidentiality for journalist-source relationships, as there is for lawyer-client or doctor-patient, nor should there be. Even with those latter two relationships, lawyers and doctors are required to notify law enforcement or other appropriate authority of the fact of an impending crime if not of which of their clients or patients may be the impending criminal.

Finally, Miller doesn’t even know what national security-related information is:

National security wasn’t compromised by the Qatari plane stories….

Of course it was. The President’s change of movement plans in response to a perceived security threat, as that NYT article itself acknowledged, certainly was national security related, compromising as it did the President’s movement changes, the fact that our government knew about a threat in advance of its realization, and compromised that threat’s goal before they could attempt their move and be intercepted and arrested.

Constitutionally protected newsgathering is vital to a democracy.

Certainly. But there is no constitutional protection for receiving stolen goods. Neither is that protection necessary for effective newsgathering.

In one respect, though, Miller is right about facing the risk of jail. Jail for concealing the sources of illegally transmitted information should be a certainty. Even if the source is later identified. The illegal reception crime would still exist and still want jail in response.