Category Archives: regulation

That’s the Point of the Escort

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The DC Circuit court has upheld Pentagon press reporter escort restrictions inside the Pentagon while the underlying case works its way through the judicial system.

Judge J Michelle Childs dissented, and in her dissent, she demonstrated her lack of understanding of the problem:

Reporters can hardly verify sources, gather information, or speak candidly with Department personnel with an escort looming over their shoulders.

Nor should those Department personnel be able to speak “candidly.” They’re possessed of too much classified information, and that information is classified for very good reasons. Passing that information to reporters, whether deliberately or accidentally, would do damage to our national security, potentially very severe damage.

Aside from that, we—and she—have no reason to believe the reporters are verifying any sources, since those reporters refuse to identify any of them.

These personnel have no business talking to reporters inside the Pentagon, anyway; they should be referring the reporter to the relevant Public Affairs Officer, who is well-trained in answering reporters’ questions as candidly as classification limits allow, as well as obfuscating and weasel-wording in response to a reporter’s obvious gotcha and trolling questions.

Dangerously Naïve Assumption

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Matthew Continetti, in his Free Expression piece, had this early on:

Yet Democrats are looking at the wrong maps. They’re winning the gerrymander battle while losing the larger war for America’s future. Their state machines produce Democratic victories, but from a shrinking base. Their populations are fleeing high taxes and housing shortages for Republican strongholds. Nor are Democrats prepared for 2030, when the decennial census will realign national politics toward the GOP-friendly South.

As Continetti noted,

House Minority Leader Congressman Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) threatened retaliation and summed up his party’s philosophy: “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

But he missed the implications of that, and that miss falsifies his underlying assumption that the Census Bureau count and subsequent House Representatives reallocation will occur in the normal fashion. That’s a dangerous miss, but he’s not alone in making that naïve assumption. No one in the press is thinking about the effect on the Census Bureau of Progressive-Democratic Party victories in the next two elections.

When the Progressive-Democrats gain control of the House and possibly the Senate after the 2026 elections, retain House control and retain or gain the majority in the Senate while winning the White House in the 2028 elections, this is what Party will do. First, it will use its Senate majority, possibly as early as January 2027, to gain outright control of the Senate by eliminating the filibuster altogether. That’ll be bad enough, devolving us from the liberty-preserving republican democracy of our present government structure to the tyranny of popular democracy.

Next, they’ll rescind any requirement for voters to show ID in order to vote, and they’ll lift restrictions on who is allowed to cross our border and under what conditions. To prevent States like Texas from doing their own border enforcement, they’ll pack the Supreme Court in order to get the judicial rulings they want regarding immigration and voting rights.

Finally, they’ll use all of that to cement for generations Party control over the popular democracy they will have created: they’ll alter the rules of counting the Census Bureau is required to use to prevent just that Representative reallocation in order create and preserve their Electoral College advantage.

There’s one more step that will put a big, blue bow on it. Many of the Progressive-Democratic Party-run States are making agreements among themselves to have each State award its Electoral College votes to the Presidential candidate that wins the national-level popular vote. Interstate agreements or compacts are illegal without explicit Congressional approval of each agreement or compact attempted, per our Constitution’s Art I, Sect 10, Clause 3. The Party-run Congress will promptly approve those agreements.

Our nation faces nation-defining elections in 2026 and 2028. The futures of our children and grandchildren and their children and grandchildren depend on the outcomes of those elections.

Dangerous Mistake

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The Trump administration is completing its move to change the classification of marijuana from a Schedule I drug…alongside LSD and heroin…to Schedule III, making it obtainable with a prescription.

This is a mistake on two fronts. The first is that marijuana is a highly dangerous drug, having been bred explicitly to strengthen its effects. Those effects include brain damage on developing brains, and human brains are always developing; although the pace of development slows markedly in a human’s middle twenties. The damage done, too, isn’t like a smoker’s damage to his lungs, which can be mostly repaired if the smoker stops smoking. Despite the plasticity of our brains, damage done chemically by the materials in marijuana is permanent.

That leaves aside the slowed reflexes and impaired judgment of a marijuana user while he’s using. Driving or operating machinery while under the influence of marijuana is just as dangerous to the user and to others as is driving or operating machinery while drinking alcohol.

The other front is that this is the wrong place to make money. The profits from universally legal cultivation and sale of marijuana qua marijuana is just chump change compared with the profits available from commercializing marijuana for medicinal use. There is a plethora of anecdotal evidence that marijuana helps with pain management, PTSD, depression, and the like. That warrants serious research to determine the specific chemicals and chemical combinations in marijuana that have these and potentially other medicinal benefits.

With that successful research, and I submit that with concerted effort by a variety of pharmaceutical companies, success is within five years, the cultivation of marijuana for medicinal purposes and the extraction of those chemicals and chemical combinations can be done under license (which we already know how to do in the narcotic medicine venue). Those actual medicines then can be sold under prescription or over the counter, depending on the specific combination. (I’m eliding here the fact that herbal medicine—which is what marijuana would be, even by prescription—suffers badly from inconsistent dose control.)

Progressive-Democrats Destroy Again

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This time they’re Illinois’ Progressive-Democrat governor, the inestimable JB Pritzker, and the State’s Party-dominated legislature. (The Wall Street Journal misattributed the fiasco to Pritzker, but even within Party, Governors need the complicity of Party’s legislative syndicate.) Following is from the Chicago Tribune, from which the WSJ quoted.

The owner of two-thirds of a massive natural-gas-fired power plant in Will County is moving their part of the facility to Texas.
Literally.
As in, putting huge turbines on flatbed trucks and driving them south to friendlier climes.
We’ve learned that two-thirds of the capacity at the 1,350-megawatt Elwood Energy facility—the largest natural-gas-fired peaker power plant in Commonwealth Edison’s territory and one of the biggest in the nation—now is being shut down thanks to Illinois’ landmark clean-energy law [Climate & Equitable Jobs Act] enacted in 2021. The sudden removal of that whopping 900 megawatts of capacity could well drive up local electric bills that already have been rising.

And this:

The remaining three units at Elwood will continue to operate at the site and now will be permitted to do so under the law until 2045. Why? Because the previous owner, J-POWER, sold those three units to Dairyland Power Cooperative, of LaCrosse, Wisconsin, which by virtue of being a nonprofit is allowed by CEJA to operate gas-fired power plants over the next few decades that otherwise would have to shutter in a few years.
So those emissions also will continue well into the future, but only because ownership changed from a private company to a nonprofit.
Yes, that’s how CEJA works. If you’re not a privately held gas-plant operator, you can continue to pollute.

This is far more than the empty virtue signal that the WSJ article suggested. This is the wanton foolishness resulting in destruction that Party is so enthusiastically pursuing for reasons only Party members can have a glimmer of understanding.

Progressive-Democratic Party and Religious Freedom

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Consider the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, who operate a 42-bed nursing facility in New York that gives free palliative care to poor people with cancer. The State of New York is trying to force this Catholic institution to deliberately violate their religious beliefs. The New York State Department of Health requires the Sisters to begin

  • assigning patients to rooms by self-identified sex
  • [stop] segregating restrooms by biological sex
  • use…patients’ preferred pronouns even when the patient is not present
  • allow patients to cross-dress

The Department is threatening the Sisters with fines, injunctions, potential loss of licensing, and imprisonment if they do not repudiate their religious beliefs and commit these egregious to them acts.

The Sisters have applied for a religious exemption, and the State has ignored their application.

The Sisters are just the tip of a monstrous iceberg. This is Party’s attitude toward the 1st Amendment’s Establishment and Free Exercise clauses. Party already badly wants to disarm us and deny us our right to speak as we see fit. Now we’re to have no conscience, as well.