National Digital ID

The Senate’s Progressive-Democratic Party-dominated Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (as are all Senate and House committees in this Congress so dominated) passed out of committee a plan to impose a national digital ID system for US citizens—the better for Government tracking of its subjects.

Supporters claim that such national IDs could be

the key to unlocking access to financial services, various government benefits and educational opportunities, as well as a number of other critical services.

What they ignore is that such things also could be key to freezing those same items when they’re held by those of whom Government disapprove—just as the Progressive-Democrat-run IRS targeted conservative political action entities, and as the Progressive-Democrat DoJ is (still!) targeting mothers who object to school board wokeness as domestic terrorists, and as the Progressive-Democrat-dominated FBI still is targeting Trump-supporters, and as the Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is naming half of us average Americans pseudo-fascists.

Jay Stanley, a Senior Policy Analyst for the ACLU on national digital IDs:

…digital IDs could prove to be a privacy nightmare. “But digital is not always better—especially when systems are exclusively digital.”
“There’s a reason that most jurisdictions have spurned electronic voting in favor of paper ballots, for example,”

That’s the best purpose that a national ID could serve—and it’s anathema to individual liberty. But it’s part and parcel of Party’s avowed purpose of “fundamentally transforming America.”

No.

We already have a national ID. It’s our passports. The critical difference is that generation of and possession of a passport is strictly voluntary and done solely on the initiative of each individual American citizen.

What’s next from the Progressive-Democrats? Internal travel documents? They tried that, after all, in some areas at the height of the Wuhan Virus situation, barring travel unless the traveler could present suitable vaccination papers to relevant authorities.

Why We Can’t Trust the CDC

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s primary advisory panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, has voted unanimously to recommend routine Wuhan Virus (my term) vaccinations for children via the Vaccines for Children program, which pays for ACIP-recommended vaccines for children in low-income families. This likely will lead to green-lighting schools—especially teachers union-controlled schools—to require the vaccinations as a condition of enrolling.

It doesn’t matter that the vaccines aren’t FDA-approved for children under 12.

It doesn’t matter that children well into junior high age aren’t at risk from the virus beyond—perhaps—getting mildly ill and recovering in a day or two.

It doesn’t matter that the risk from the virus is extremely tiny for any healthy person up through adulthood and into old age.

Here are some hard numbers illustrating the degree of “risk” from the virus, based on work by John Ioannidis, who has routinely studied Wuhan Virus infection fatality rates (IFR) since early in the pandemic:

…median IFRs of 0.0003% for 0-19 years, 0.003% for 20-29 and 0.011% for 30-39, according to the preprint, which has not been peer-reviewed.
The IFR jumps substantially between ages 50-59 (0.129%) and 60-69 (0.501%).

Even that “substantial jump” is from a risk of nearly zero to a level still right next door to zero.

But the CDC takes seriously an advisory panel that insists on vaccination because…”we say so.”

The CDC could walk well down the path back toward trustworthiness if it rejects the ACIP’s recommendation and then gets rid of the ACIP altogether.

Voter Suppression

Early voting is under way, and Georgia’s Jim Crow 2.0 Law® is in full swing.

Georgia has seen 539,297 people cast ballots as of Tuesday, far outpacing the 182,684 by this point in the 2018 midterm primary elections, according to data compiled by Georgia Votes.
The numbers have even outpaced those posted during the 2020 presidential election by 156%….

Tuesday was Day Two for those Leftists and Progressive-Democratic Party members keeping score at home.

These numbers are for a mid-term election, which typically has a much lower voter turnout than during a Presidential election year.

But wait….

The first day of early voting in Georgia set a new midterm turnout record, with nearly 123,000 in-person voters casting their ballots.

That’s how much voters are being suppressed; that’s how hard it is for them even to get to a voting booth—they’re voting in person in record numbers.

This is voter suppression in the minds of those Wonders who style themselves so much smarter and…better…than us average Americans.

Go figure.

Still only Chit-Chat

Now ex-President Barack Obama (D) thinks it was a mistake to essentially ignore the Green Revolution in Iran in 2009, the Iranian people’s uprising against the tyrannical Ayatollah regime.

That’s awfully … of him to say so, now, 13 years too late for it to matter for the Iranian people or for him to suffer any consequences, even as it comes amid the current protests by Iranian women against that same tyrannical Ayatollah regime.

Now he’s saying,

Every time we see a flash, a glimmer of hope, of people longing for freedom, I think we have to point it out.
We have to shine a spotlight on it. We have to express some solidarity about it[.]

Chit-chat. Obama, and his BFF President Joe Biden (D), still are interested in limiting themselves to yakking about the Iranian people’s efforts. Talk is cheap; what concrete action would today’s Obama or Biden be willing to take?

They’re not quite being silent.

Women’s Rights

The Iranian women are campaigning, with great courage, for their freedom (proximately to dress as they wish, but it’s much broader than that) against the tyrannical, murderous, and terrorism-supporting regime reigning over Iran. Many Iranian men are campaigning with them, and together, they’re struggling for broad freedoms for everyone: the freedom for Iranian citizens of both sexes to make their own, individual, decisions regarding their any of their actions.

The Progressive-Democratic Biden administration is shamefully quiet on the matter, even as it continues to beg on bended knee—from the kiddie table, yet—to be allowed to rejoin the JCPOA, the Obama-era agreement to allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons after expiry of some restrictions.

This is how the Progressive-Democratic Party has chosen to interact with the terrorism-supporting regime, though. An earlier Iranian people’s attempt to fight for individual rights, joined by Iranian women that time (compared to the women’s campaign being joined by men this time), was just as shamefully ignored by an earlier Progressive-Democratic administration.

The last time the Iranian people risked their lives for freedom from the benighted theocracy that subjugates them—the 2009 protests against a stolen election—Washington chose shame. The White House turned its back on the protesters for a week until they gathered near the former US embassy building in Tehran chanting, “Obama, you’re either with them or with us.” This finally evoked a statement of support, but it was too little, too late.

Emphasis on too little. Obama’s words were—by design—empty; he followed up on those words with…nothing at all for the Iranian people, not a minim of actual, concrete support.

Joshua Muravchik is being generous in his op-ed at the first link, though, regarding Biden.

The Biden administration has been more forthcoming in its pronouncements during the current protests, but it can and should do more.

He appears to take Biden seriously in its being more forthcoming. Biden’s pronouncements are just empty words, and not even as articulately snowing as Obama’s prior chit-chat. The Biden administration can and should do more, but it won’t. It’s too desperate to get back into that nuclear weapons authorization agreement.

Those Iranian women—they’re on their own.

It’s not only the Progressive-Democratic Party administrations who are silent, though. Just as shamefully, what passes for the current American feminist movement is just as meekly quiet. And they don’t even have a sham realpolitik motive for it.