Clinton-2 vs Obama-3

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That’s the hope expressed by Phil Gramm and Mike Solon in their Tuesday op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

By electing a divided government, Americans may get what they appear to want: a Biden first term that’s more like Bill Clinton’s second term than a third term for Barack Obama.

That is in no way a done deal. The current situation is not at all comparable to the Clinton situation. Biden’s handlers have no inclination whatsoever to move off their far-left ideology, much less the far-left policies they intend for enacting that ideology.

Nor have they any willingness to compromise, as Ocasio-Cortez has made blatantly clear.

The best we can hope for is a Republican-majority Senate and enough party unity to say “No” for four years.

‘Course a gridlocked government isn’t a bad thing.

WaPo Contempt

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The Washington Post is at it again. Abolish the electoral college, its editors demand. And they thereby display the same contempt for ordinary Americans, our Constitution, and our federal republic structure as did Herb Croly, Woodrow Wilson, and more recently Ezra Klein, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi, among a long list of today’s Leftists and Progressive-Democrats.

The electoral college, whatever virtues it may have had for the Founding Fathers, is no longer tenable for American democracy.

After all,

Right now, our presidential elections are conducted by 51 separate authorities, each with its own rules on registration, mail-in balloting and more. Each state counts its own ballots, and each decides when recounts are needed.

You bet. That’s right there in that pesky Constitution, because federation. That’s where the individual States, by design, are nearly on a par with the central government. That’s so a far away, remote government cannot rule the roost with its one-size-fits-all diktats. Those pesky States just keep getting in the way of Progressive-Democrats’ need to implement their Know Better policies. Absolute control from the center would make that so much more convenient. Here’s Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the need for a Progressive-Democrat majority, reigning from DC:

[Jake Tapper, interviewing Ocasio-Cortez]: Are you going to work with more moderate Senate Republicans to try to pass something in the House that can get through the Senate?
[Ocasio-Cortez]: Well, I’m going to be spending my next couple of months doing everything that I can to extend help and offer support…that we secure a Democratic Senate majority, so that we don’t have to negotiate in that way[.]

Back to WaPo‘s need to clear away the obstacles to Leftist control of the promise of American life.

Small states already have disproportionate clout in our government because of the Senate, in which Wyoming’s fewer than 600,000 residents have as much representation as California’s 39.5 million.

With the Electoral College having far more popular representation than the Senate, surely, these wondrous exemplars of what passes for journalism will be demanding proportional representation in the Senate, too. Truly equal representation gives the dinky States, those locales too small to be worthy of notice, ‘way too much representation.

Continuing Censorship

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Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and controlling shareholder of his Facebook, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday. He said that

his company often must decide between “difficult trade-offs” when it comes to content moderation, and that he believes “some of these trade-offs would be better made through a democratic process.”

Two things on that. One is his stuff about trade-offs via a democratic process. What democratic process he posited is unclear. Would it be one where all of his employees would do the voting? One where all of his censors fact checkers/fact checker overseers would do the voting? There’d plainly be nothing democratic about that since his employees, including his checkers, are overwhelmingly far left, and the press outlets he sometimes uses are nearly as far left.

The larger thing, though, is Zuckerberg’s claimed difficult trade-offs while moderating content. This is Zuckerberg’s cynically offered false premise: there’s no need to moderate content on his facility. Not if he wants to continue as a pipeline rather than a publisher.

For instance, Zuckerberg also testified in that hearing that he has Facebook vetting political ads for “essential accuracy.” This is censoring of political speech, and it’s deeply insulting both to the political candidates involved and to the American voters viewing the ads. The opponent being targeted by a political ad is fully capable of responding for himself, and in his own way, to an ad. He does not need, not by a long shot, Zuckerberg or any of his minions to speak for him. It’s the same for American viewers of political ads. We do not need the Zuckerbergs of the world to speak for us. Nor are we so grindingly stupid—as he so clearly assumes we are—that we cannot evaluate for ourselves, and in our own ways, the ads that we see.

Clearly, though, Zuckerberg has every intention of continuing to censor speech, however he tries to obfuscate his intent.

MeToo

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We hardly knew ya.

Actress Melissa McCarthy publicly apologized this week [last week as this is published] for having briefly helped direct charitable donations toward an anti-sex-trafficking organization….
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Among 20 charities promoted by the actress was Exodus Cry, a group that “fight[s] for the freedom of all sex trafficking victims” and seeks to “break the cycle of exploitation and help those sold for sex[.]”

All because the Daily Beast claims Exodus Cry is anti-abortion—which Exodus Cry denies.

And: Exodus Cry has been expelled from McCarthy’s “20 Days of Kindness” campaign.

Apparently, as murdering babies in utero is entirely acceptable to Hollywood denizens, so is supporting women who are victims of sex-trafficking just as unacceptable.

So much for Hollywood’s pretense of #MeToo.

Some Editors Don’t Get It

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board, in its Friday edition, ran a piece strongly decrying the Left’s and their Progressive-Democratic Party’s shrill attacks on Justice Sam Alito for his effrontery in decrying their attacks on freedom of speech and freedom of religion. In those personages’ eyes, Alito behaved despicably in two ways: defending those two freedoms, and any others, is far too political a thing for any mere Justice to do. And he did it in front of that dastardly bastion of individual liberty, the Federalist Society.

Then the editors deprecated their otherwise excellent piece with this, near the end of their editorial:

The American judiciary, in its best tradition, balances majoritarian demands with the constitutional rights of weaker and less politically powerful groups, whether they are socialist or conservative.

This is a very large misunderstanding. The American judiciary, in its best tradition—if only rarely honored—doesn’t balance anything. It acts on the text of the Constitution and the statute(s) before it in a case.

Any balancing is a political action legitimately carried out only by the political branches of our American government, the members of which are elected—and replaced—by our nation’s sovereign political aggregation, We the People.