In Which I Agree with the ACLU

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Toomey is right, and I’ll go a ways further: the NSA should be shut down, the agency disbanded and withdrawn from the government’s books, and the personnel all returned to the private sector.

Censorship

James O’Keefe’s Veritas did some undercover work, produced a video of that work, and ran it on YouTube.  However, the exposé was of…Alphabet’s Google (which in turn owns YouTube), so YouTube took it down—Alphabet’s censors couldn’t stand the criticism.

The video seems to be back up a few hours later as I write this on the late afternoon of Tuesday.

However.

Alphabet’s attempt to censor, regardless of its (temporary?) failure, is wholly unacceptable, and it demonstrates Alphabet’s (as the owner of Google and YouTube) dishonesty and cowardice.

How is it possible to trust an organization so precious, so self-important, that it can’t even handle criticism of itself?

Health Care for All

In Great Britain, Justice Nathalie Lieven of the Court of Protection (an ironically named court, as you’ll see in a bit) has ordered a woman’s pregnancy be terminated by abortion in the mother’s 22nd week.  The woman has the mental capacity of a grade schooler, and so Lieven has ordered the abortion ostensibly for the mother’s own sake.

Never mind that neither the woman nor the woman’s mother want the abortion, and the woman’s mother has said she would care for the baby—her granddaughter—as well as her daughter (for whom she already cares).  Lieven insisted

I am acutely conscious of the fact that for the State to order a woman to have a termination where it appears that she doesn’t want it is an immense intrusion[.]
I have to operate in [her] best interests, not on society’s views of termination[.]

A judge operating on her personal view of “best interests” rather than written-down law or written Constitution definitions—and recall that our own Left considers our written Constitution not binding on anything—is a judge operating with far too narrow a view of justice, much less “interests.”

This judge, operating in her personal view of “best interests,” is carefully and cynically disregarding justice for, and the best interests of, the baby she’s ordered killed.

And this:

Doctors at the trust [NHS trust, a section of the Great Britain’s National Health Service] wished to abort her pregnancy and argued that, due to her diminished mental capacity, the abortion would be less traumatic for the woman than giving birth, especially if the baby would then be placed in foster care.

These are doctors who care not a penny for the trauma they want to inflict on the baby.  But, then, these are doctors operating under a Government program of taxpayer-funded health-care-for-all; these are doctors from whom Government has arrogated all moral responsibility; these are doctors therefrom wholly lacking personal moral concerns.

And this:

Lieven also said she did not believe the woman’s mother, who already helps care for her daughter, would be able to offer care for a grandchild at the same time.

Because no parent ever, much less a woman, has ever been able to take care of two children at the same time, even if one has a “mood disorder”—whatever that is in the British NHS lowest-bidder medical system.

No, this is the British judge’s decision: kill the baby before it’s born, lest it become an inconvenience to the health-care-for-all System.

This is taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand—judge’s as well as mother’s—that would be available under the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Government-run Medicare for All.

Update: Sometimes, justice strikes. Sadly, this only applies to the particular case, still, it is justice. Lieven’s shameful ruling was appealed by the mother, and it has been overturned. A British appellate court’s judges, Lord Justice McCombe, Lady Justice King, and Lord Justice Jackson, straight up reversed Lieven’s ruling; although they said they’d give their rationale only “at a later date.”

Prior to the reversal, Westminster auxiliary bishop John Sheridan had said [emphasis added]

Forcing a woman to have an abortion against her will, and that of her close family, infringes her human rights, not to mention the right of her unborn child to life in a family that has committed to caring for this child.

That last also emphasizes why this bit of justice is so narrow.  John McKendrick QC, representing the woman’s mother, told the appellate court that

Lieven’s analysis of what was in the woman’s best interests was flawed.

His argument wholly ignored that bit about the baby’s own interests, his inalienable right to life. As long as the baby’s welfare is routinely ignored in such debates, the whole question of abortion is badly skewed.

In Which the Court Gets One Right

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.

No Fair

The United Auto Workers lost another attempt to “organize” Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, TN, factory; its latest move was voted down last Friday 833-776.  Tennessee is a right-to-work State, and those factory workers rudely exercised their right to work free of union interference.

Naturally, the UAW has its collective panties in a collective twist.  The loss is unfair, you see, because it’s always unfair when a union (or any faction of the Left, come to that) loses a contest. Brian Rothenberg, a UAW spokesman, made this nonsense plain:

Our labor laws are broken[.]

Well, they must be—they don’t guarantee a union victory.

Rothenberg went on:

Workers should not have to endure threats and intimidation in order to obtain the right to collectively bargain[.]

Certainly.  And they are, for the most part, free of threats and intimidation in Tennessee, as they are in every right-to-work State.  Workers also, though, should not have to endure threats and intimidation in order to maintain their right not to have a union “represent” them.

These workers have spoken, quite clearly, twice on this matter, now, and similarly situated workers throughout right-to-work States have been loud and clear with the same message to unions trying to interfere with their work environment: “Go away, and leave us alone.  Quit bothering us.”

Will the unions listen to the workers?  Do they ever?