Category Archives: rights

Naïve Foolishness

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors did it this time. In their editorial regarding FISA, they had this:

The law lets the intelligence community gather information from foreigners overseas and store it in a database. That database can then be searched for communications on matters of national security. If Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon start texting a New Jersey phone number, the New Jersey number is worth a follow-up.
All information in the database is legally gathered, and in 2024 Congress added safeguards against abuse. All queries for American information need prior bureaucratic approval and receive regular audits.

Safeguards. Queries for Americans’ information need bureaucratic approval? How is this any sort of safeguard? Any administration’s bureaucrats can easily approve searches for bureaucrat/administration disapproved Americans. Those bureaucrats are primarily senior FBI officials. To see how well this will work, it’s only necessary to recall AG Eric Holder’s promise to be then-President Barack Obama’s (D) wingman, rather than keeping DoJ independent. Recall further, those FBI senior officials. The FBI works for the AG. The Holders of the world will be back, and folks already are disdaining acting AG Todd Blanche of being no more than President Donald Trump’s (R) man.

Then there’s the FISA court, a by-design secret Star Chamber court where only administration-approved persons get to know the proceedings. That’s bad enough, but even when the Star Chamber was confronted with falsified search warrant requests, it chose not to take any serious corrective, much less punitive, action.

The Star Chamber needs to be abolished. Article III courts are fully capable of issuing sealed warrants that become public only on their being served. That also would apply enforceable safeguards on warrant issuance—they would be issued only by those Article III courts; there would be no recourse to a secret court.

A Solution to “Rigging” Elections

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California’s election process provides the canonical example of the problem. “Rigging” is in euphemism quotes (not the press’ over- and mis-used scare quotes) because the perception of rigging an election is as important as any actual rigging. The problem with California’s election procedure is this:

California sends mail-in ballots to all registered voters who have until Election Day to send them back. Many ballots don’t arrive at county election offices until days later. … The result is a large number of provisional ballots are cast that require more scrutiny. All of this prolongs vote-counting.
The state also lets third parties including unions, campaigns and political parties collect and return an unlimited number of ballots on voters’ behalf—a practice known as ballot harvesting.

And

An ID isn’t strictly required to register to vote. Those who don’t furnish one to register are supposed to present one when they vote for the first time in a federal election, though this requirement isn’t strictly enforced. The state lists a gym card, drug prescription and even a sample ballot as acceptable forms of ID. …
County election officials aren’t required to check whether a voter is a citizen or, well, even a person.

And

State regulations also allow late-arriving ballots to be counted even if they lack a post-mark as long as they include a handwritten date on the envelope.

None of that is fraudulent per se, but it sure makes fraud possible—there are no checks that assess the legitimacy of any ballot.

The solution is straightforward, even if politically difficult with timid Republicans and self-interested Progressive-Democrats rife in each house of Congress. Nevertheless, Article I, Section 4, of our Constitution

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations….

allows this solution. Congress can easily specify a nation-wide election rule that mandates these criteria:

  • only American citizens can vote in a Federal election
  • proof of citizenship must be provided at registration
  • mail-in ballots are available only when a voter requests one
  • the only voters eligible to request one are military personnel stationed outside their voting precinct or business persons on business travel outside their precinct on Election Day
  • mail-in ballots must be received by the end of Election Day in order to be counted. Ballots received after then cannot be counted
  • early voting cannot start before the second weekend before Election Day and can run through the Monday immediately preceding Election Day
  • there can be no third-party collection of ballots; each must be cast in person during early voting or on Election Day; mail-in ballots must be put into a mail receptacle for delivery. Unpostmarked ballots cannot be counted

Keeping the voting process universal across American citizens and simple not only is eminently possible, it would vastly reduce both election fraud and the perception of election fraud.

Not Relevant

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There is a property dispute in Wisconsin centered on a property owner owning a stretch of lake front beach and a neighbor who insists on traipsing across that private property beach, often with his dog, despite repeated warnings, signs, and calls to the police to get him to stop. It even went to trial, and the trespasser fined some $313.

But that’s not the end of it.

In response to the fine, the trespasser

argues it is absurd to say he could wade past but not put a foot higher up the shore.

His pretense here is from his arrogance. It doesn’t have to be not absurd to him; the distinction is set by law, it is quite clear, and all he need do is obey it. His arrogance doesn’t stop there, though.

My personality is such that if I’m confronted with it I don’t back away from [the argument over his access to the property owner’s property[.]

As if his arrogance justifies anything.

And this argument from the presiding judge, who despite her remark, had the integrity to rule on what the law says rather than what she thought it ought to say:

…a decision favoring the landowner over the public was out of touch with the practices in other states.

This isn’t relevant. We’re a federal republic. What other States do regarding privately owned beachfront property has nothing to do with how Wisconsin treats privately owned beachfront property. “Out of touch with the practices in other states” is a non sequitur.

Birthright Political Seat

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In last Tuesday’s Texas Progressive-Democratic Party primary runoff election “for a recently redrawn House seat,” ex-Progressive-Democrat Congressman Colin Allred (from a pre-redraw district) defeated incumbent Progressive-Democrat Congresswoman (from a pre-redraw district) Julie Johnson by 54%-46%.

This is upsetting to senior Party members, even as the upset itself is surprising by its existence. The upset is centered on Johnson being Texas’ only openly LGBTQ Representative in Congress, as if that matters in some way.

For instance, here are Congressmen Mark Takano (D, CA) and Ritchie Torres (D, NY), Party’s Equality PAC co-chairs:

It’s no secret that, without Julie, Texas—and likely the entire South—will lose openly LGBTQ representation in Congress. Many in our community remain deeply hurt by Colin Allred’s decision to challenge one of our own.

The effrontery of Allred—that seat belonged to the LGBTQ community.

The dismay also is typical of Party’s attitude toward blacks. Johnson is white, and Allred is black. That man should have remembered his place, which is squarely in back of the LGBTQ community.

Never mind that, by solidly choosing Allred in the primary, Party voters themselves clearly demonstrated their overall preference for Allred, if not their overall dissatisfaction with Johnson.

The Nub of the Matter

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An article concerning the nature of “sex work” and the debate over whether it ought be decriminalized and destigmatized, there was this characterization:

On [one] side are those arguing for total decriminalization, which lifts all laws regulating the buying and selling of sex acts.

And this, from a woman who ultimately escaped from the environment:

Prostitution is someone using their money and power to get someone else to provide a service for them. You’re literally paid to be a product that is used and discarded.

There it is, in all its glory, from the life of an individual once in the environment and from the broad movement looking to decriminalize “sex” work. It isn’t about sex; it’s about faceless male gratification, for whom the woman isn’t even a human being; she’s just a body temperature, organic inflatable sex doll. It’s not even a matter of buying a selling sex; it’s only renting a warm doll for a hour or a night, otherwise akin to renting a power tool.

Say, though, that in an amoral yet otherwise ideal world, this work is entirely legalized. On what basis would we believe the women involved really are engaging in it on their own initiative and entirely free of coercion? Pimps will still be there, now legalized as agents or brokers for the firms renting these commodities. And they’ll still control the women, who they engage with, what they’ll do—be required to do under the terms of their employment—during those engagements.

Would a woman be free to leave one…employer…for another whenever she chose to do so? Would she be free to leave the…industry…altogether and seek employment doing other things wholly apart from being a rented sex doll? Those answers seem obvious.

Tellingly, too, the movement wholly ignores the men who are trafficked or pimped out as male prostitutes, and worse, the movement wholly ignores the children, of both sexes, who are trafficked for sex.

The answer to “sex work” isn’t to legalize it. It’s a multipart question: help the women (and the men and children) recover from the damage done by their present strait and then learn other means of earning a living—a legitimate living and one in which they keep all of their wages. In parallel, hammer severely the traffickers and pimps making these victims—and that’s what the women (and men and children) are to five nines significance—”available.” Hold criminally liable the customers of these pimps and traffickers for receiving illegal goods. They’re certainly not customers of the women; they’re receivers of the pimps’ and traffickers’ product. And publicly shame those customers for their abuse of the women whose bodies are the product they rented.