Category Archives: rights

“Pre-Crime”

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Another word for Government’s prior restraint of private citizens, a word used by Holman Jenkins in his Friday op-ed to disguise this assault on our freedoms.

Let’s face it, with big data, with impersonal algorithms that could track every earthly resident’s web activity, travels, purchases and electronic interactions with the world, it might be quite possible to know whose life and personality are disintegrating, who might seek to resolve the impasse by going on murder binge.

Jenkins saw this favorably as the basis of a “pre-crime” era of law enforcement, however pessimistically he also saw it as coming to pass anytime soon.  I see that unlikelihood less sanguinely, but to the extent it’s slow to come or doesn’t come at all, that’s a good thing.

Then Jenkins closed his piece with this:

The more the average citizen can understand and recognize the pattern, the more such incidents likely will be avoided without us even knowing it.

Indeed, and yet Jenkins completely ignored the implication of this. We don’t need Big Brother looking over our shoulder everywhere we are, in the real world or the virtual world of social interactions, nor do we need a Hoover-esque FBI peering in through our windows, real or virtual, nor can we support any other excuse for Government extend its regulation of our lives through this new version of prior restraint.

What we need is a return to a sense of community, where private citizens look out for each other at the local level. Local problems dealt with locally are much less likely to become national problems. And even those don’t require the assault on liberty that is prior restraint, which can only be done from politicians’ definitions of alleged need for the prior.

The Supreme Court is Considering the Limits of Partisan Gerrymandering

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The case stems from a Wisconsin state districting case

where a three-judge lower court last year invalidated a redistricting plan enacted by the Republican-controlled Wisconsin legislature in 2011.

That court insisted that, following the 2010 census, the Republican State legislature redrew its legislative districts to favor Republicans and disfavor Democrats.

Election results since then have shown the redistricting had its intended effect, with the GOP winning a larger majority in the state assembly, even as the statewide tally of votes was nearly even between Republicans and Democrats, the lower court said.

This smacks entirely too much of disparate impact sewage.  The ruling would be legitimately reversed on that ground alone.  That one party won a collection of close-run elections proves nothing.  Close-run means no more than that the two parties were evenly matched.  Apparently, an even election is too partisan, not favoring Democrats sufficiently, to suit the court.

The Supremes and lower courts have long held, though, that

gerrymandering that discriminates against minority voters [is] unconstitutional….

There aren’t any minority voters, only American citizen voters, though. Not any more.  As a Chief Justice John Roberts said only a few years ago in Parents Involved in Community Schools v Seattle School District No.1, the way to end discrimination is to stop discriminating.  Mandating districts explicitly to benefit minorities is exactly that cynical discrimination.

Woodrow Wilson once said about segregation that blacks should be grateful for the protection it affords them.  Is that really what today’s Progressive-Liberals, including the Liberal Justices on the Supreme Court, want?  We should return to that despicable era of racial racist discrimination?

Regardless of any of the foregoing, the question is easily enough settled, if there’s enough collective courage to do so.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: draw equal-sized district squares, regardless of demographics, deviating from the square shape only at State borders and only along the side that is the border.

Timidity

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A group of perpetually-offended atheists, agnostics and freethinkers are threatening to sue a small Wisconsin town because of two welcome signs.

Here’s an example of the signs, which have been up 50 years or more:

The churches extend the welcome, not the town’s government in the name of any church or all of them.

Of what are these folks so terrified?  There’s nothing stopping them from putting up their own welcome sign: “Atheists of Oconomowoc Welcome You.”  If the town’s government objected to that, only then might there be an actual beef.

Or: these folks are just terrified of how foolish they’ll look in an open contest of ideas, so they’re suing in the hope of using that to extort acquiescence.

I trust the town of Oconomowoc will show themselves made of sterner stuff than these snowflakes and welcome them into court—and then refuse to settle the matter.

A Party’s True Character

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A Party’s True Character

The Progressive-Democratic Party leader of the time, President Woodrow Wilson, said of segregation, “segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.”  The Progressive-Democratic Party also is the party of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan.

The Progressive-Democratic Party is the party that made national minimum wage laws for the explicit purpose of keeping blacks on the plantation—literally—instead of migrating north and competing for jobs by being willing to work for less than white union members were.

The Progressive-Democratic Party is the party of racist and sexist affirmative action programs.

The Progressive-Democratic Party is the party of the welfare cage that keeps our poor, of any stripe, trapped in poverty and dependent on government handouts.

Jason Riley in The Wall Street Journal has some insights on the current nature of the matter.

[Now] race-consciousness is once again ascendant, not only among “alt-right” types, but more tellingly among self-styled progressives and left-wing institutions that once worked so hard to combat Jim Crow policies. The liberals who are cheering the recent removal of Confederate monuments to racial separatism also indulge the separatist rhetoric of groups like Black Lives Matter. Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s calls for colorblind policies seem as dated as concerns about interracial hookups.

And

College campuses offer near-daily examples of this liberal devolution on racial matters. The most prominent recent episode involves Bret Weinstein, a biology professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, who has come under fire from students and fellow faculty members for criticizing the school’s “Day of Absence” protest, which involved whites quitting campus for the day.

And

Sadly, these antics have become commonplace in recent years. Students at the University of Wisconsin have demanded free tuition and housing for blacks. At the University of Michigan, a student group that previously complained about the lack of racial “diversity” and “inclusion” at the school has since requested a safe space on campus reserved for students of color to gather. At the University of Missouri, only students of color were invited to participate in a “die-in” protesting the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson.

And

Last year, at the urging of the school’s black student union, California State University, Los Angeles began offering segregated housing for black students. The University of Connecticut, the University of California, Davis and the University of California, Berkeley are among the colleges that have similar arrangements in place.

And

This year, Harvard held its first-ever commencement ceremony for black graduate students. The New York Times reported that racially segregated end-of-year ceremonies like the one held at Harvard have become more mainstream, more openly embraced by universities and more common than ever before.

The Progressive students of the campuses and those institutions’ management are demanding exactly what that Progressive icon, Woodrow Wilson, promised them: the “protection” of segregation.  This is what the Party’s Big Government-mandated dependency has wrought.

A First Amendment Beef

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This one, I think, is a bad beef.  A Columbia University club known as the Knight First Amendment Institute, styling themselves a First Amendment advocate organization, has taken notice of the fact that President Donald Trump has blocked some folks from his personal twitter account, @realDonaldTrump, an account he’s had since well before the campaign and his election.  The Director of the Institute, Jameel Jaffer, wrote a letter to “the Trump administration” claiming that the Constitution “requires” those accounts to be unblocked.

Users who have been blocked cannot follow you on Twitter, and they are limited in their ability to view your tweets, find your tweets using Twitter’s search function, and learn which accounts follow you….  Blocking users from your Twitter account violates the First Amendment. When the government makes a space available to the public at large for the purpose of expressive activity, it creates a public forum from which it may not constitutionally exclude individuals on the basis of viewpoint. This is true even if the space in question is “metaphysical” rather than physical.

What Jaffer is ignoring, among other things, is that the government did not create the @realDOnaldTrump account; private citizen Donald Trump did.  The government created the @POTUS and @WhiteHouse accounts.

The President’s personal twitter account is not the same thing as @POTUS or @WhiteHouse, which are public forums created by the White House some administrations ago specifically for the purpose of passing out White House announcements and, perhaps, exchanging views.

So what do we have?  This is what the 1st Amendment says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

None of that applies here.  Trump’s blocking some folks from his personal twitter feed has nothing at all to do with religion, nor does it restrict the press—NLMSM or legitimate—at all.  Even the use of social media as press—this blog, for instance, or established press’ and pressmen’s own Facebook pages, twitter feeds, Instagram setups, etc are not restricted in the slightest.

That leaves the question of free speech, peaceful assembly, and petitioning of the Government.

None of these are impacted by blocking some twitterers from a private account, either.  Those folks still have unfettered access to the government via the @POTUS and @WhiteHouse accounts: they still can engage in free speech activities with the administration and with Trump; they still can peacefully assemble, even if that assembly is “metaphysical,” and they still can fully petition the Government.  And that’s just through the government’s twitter feeds.  These folks also have access via the White House’s Facebook page, email even via old-fashioned snail mail.

This is just some folks with more time on their hands than productive activities along with their rent-seeking lawyers manufacturing another excuse to whine.