Category Archives: rights

Jim Eagle and Joe Biden

Posted on by
Reply

Georgia has just enacted a law reforming and improving its voting processes. The reforms include such things as expanding weekend before Election Day voting from one Saturday and Sunday to two Saturdays and a county-level option to add a second Sunday. Instead of a hazy, subjective signature-matching bit of guesswork on absentee ballots, the State now requires a State-issued (for free) ID. It makes drop boxes mandatory, but they’re available only in in-person voting areas, they’re kept locked after hours, and they’re always under surveillance. The State now allows no-excuse absentee ballot voting.

This expansion of voter access and increased protection of the sanctity of an eligible voter’s vote is what President Joe Biden (D), in his…something…has termed “un-American,” “sick,” “pernicious.” He says, “This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle.”

It would be sad, were it not so insulting and racist. This is, after all, Biden (along with his Progressive-Democrats, who with their silence if not their own hue and cry, agree with him) playing the race card (and thereby demonstrating their own racism), which they do because they can’t make a rationale argument for any of their policies.

And: for those keeping score at home, Jim Crow was a creation of the Democratic Party, as was the KKK, which Biden’s partner in the administration said was the equivalent of today’s ICE.

For those keeping further score at home, Georgia’s voter law compares with Biden’s home State of Delaware, which requires a shorter in-person voting period than does Georgia’s reformed law, to the point that Delaware does not allow in-person early voting at all. Delaware doesn’t allow no-excuse absentee ballot voting.

Relics

Posted on by
Reply

In last Thursday’s matinee press conference, President Joe Biden (D) agreed with a reporter’s question and suggested answer regarding the filibuster:

“President Obama said he believed the filibuster was a relic of the Jim Crow era. Do you agree?” a reporter asked Biden.
“Yes,” he answered.

So, ex-President Barack Obama (D) and Biden, both of whom previously loudly defended the filibuster, have confessed themselves as racists for having done so, the filibuster being a relic of Jim Crow, and all.

Still, their racism is entirely consistent with the intrinsically racist core of the Progressive-Democratic Party of which they’re leading lights: its forebear and least-left wing of the Progressive-Democratic Party, the Democratic Party, is the Party of Jim Crow and of racism generally, and the current Progressive-Democratic Party subsumes that core into its body and actively extends it with its racist—and sexist—identity politics of rank segregation.

Slander

Posted on by
Reply

Our slander laws are convoluted, and as part of that convolution, they put certain Americans—celebrities and politicians, for instance—out of effective reach of their protection, and they put other Americans—journalists, for instance, functionally immune to their restrictions. Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, in his Thursday Wall Street Journal op-ed, wants to niggle around their edges to improve them.

No. It’s time, to coin a phrase, to go big. Libel law, in fact, is simple enough to simplify: if someone lies about or otherwise slanders another, the liar/slanderer is liable. If someone mistakenly mischaracterizes another and doesn’t correct the mischaracterization when advised of the error, mischaracterizer is liable, if to a lesser degree.

That’s pretty simple and straightforward. The only grey area—and this is where juries earn their pay—is in that area between lie and mistaken mischaracterization.

That straightforward correction of slander laws can be made simpler, yet. The new law should apply to the press—it’s really not that hard for a pressman to tell the truth, except, apparently, in the minds of those of the journalist guild—and it should apply equally to the politician or celebrity who’s the victim.

But, but—according to Reynolds, New York Times Co v Sullivan, the Supreme Court ruling that created the imbalances involving the press and celebrities and politicians,

grew out of a concerted effort by Southern states to use libel lawsuits as a weapon in a sort of asymmetric warfare. Civil-rights organizers had powerful support from national media organizations, but local judges and juries were sympathetic to segregation.

No, it didn’t. Those judges’ rulings and their influences on juries via judicial instructions to those juries had nothing to do with slander, per se, and everything to do with those judges acting in accordance with their personal agendas rather than in accordance with the text of the laws before them.

Sullivan needs to be reversed.

“Not Renew”

Posted on by
Reply

Newspeak for “Cancel.”

That’s what the University of Cincinnati has chosen to do to its now ex-instructor John Ucker in the school’s…reaction…to Ucker’s referring to our favorite virus as the “chinese virus.”

The school’s Dean of Engineering and Applied Science, John Weidner, said this about that:

These types of xenophobic comments and stigmatizations around location or ethnicity are more than troubling. We can better protect and care for all when we speak about COVID-19 with both accuracy and empathy, something we should all strive for.

Regarding that, I have a question for Weidner: what are his preferred pronouns for the Zika, Ebola, West Nile viruses? What self-identifications does he find acknowledge for the South Africa Variant, the UK Variant, the Brazil Variant of our favorite virus?

The school said last Friday that Ucker’s contract “would not renew”—that Ucker would be canceled—because he spoke with accuracy and without stigmatization or xenophobia and not from within the school’s Parameters of Preciousness.

Another Model for Election Integrity Legislation

Posted on by
Reply

A short time ago, I posted a model out of Georgia that that State was enacting to protect the integrity of its election process, including its role in Federal elections. Here’s another model, this one from Arizona. This one, a collection of separate bills (what an innovation: small bills covering a single subject, instead of one huge, unreadable “omnibus” bill):

  • HB2792, which will prohibit the mass mailing of ballots to voters who have not requested one—and enforce the provision by making it a class five felony to violate it
  • HB2569, aims to prohibit the private funding of election activities. … Zuckerberg-funded nonprofits in turn “influenced the process for how elections go,” [State Representative Jake (R), who led the legislation’s passage,] Hoffman said. “And that is a bridge too far … that is something that we absolutely do not want.”
  • Other measures prohibit same-day voter registration, require hand count audits to be statistically significant with a 99% confidence level, and prevent government officials from modifying statutorily prescribed election deadlines—as was seen in many states ahead of last November’s election. [And which was a plain violation of our Federal Constitution.] The bill adds a class 6 felony for any violation of the latter provision.

The legislation now is in front of the Arizona Senate.

Imagine that—States in our federal governance structure moving to protect the sanctity of a citizen’s vote.