Gun Control

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is a strong fan of gun control to the point of, ultimately, seizing all of our guns.  He’s even running a Super Bowl ad to that effect. Tim O’Brien, one of Bloomberg’s senior campaign advisors even says about the ad and its gun control subject,

This [gun question] is something that touches families. It most profoundly touches communities of color.

You bet it does. Gun control was something enormously expanded by the Democratic Party to disarm newly freed blacks so they could more easily be lynched by the Democratic Party’s KKK.

Now the Progressive-Democratic Party, and its leading politicians, want to continue that disarmament; they want to prevent blacks, and Hispanics in this 21st century, from being able to defend their families from thugs; they want to maintain gun free zones so people of any skin color or religion are unable to defend themselves.

Nothing to See Here

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Recall that in the aftermath of an initial Flynn pushback against the charges against him, the prosecutors in his case withdrew their recommendation for a lenient sentence and demanded significant jail time.  Recall further that in response to that, Army Lt Gen (ret) Michael Flynn has moved formally to withdraw his guilty plea with an excoriating list of prosecutorial and FBI transgressions as his grounds.

Among the misbehaviors listed in Flynn’s plea withdrawal motion are

  • no actual record of Flynn’s statements to FBI agents exists
  • the original handwritten FD-302 witness report from a critical FBI interview is “missing”
  • subsequent versions of that 302 have been “edited” by allegedly anti-Trump FBI officials

In response, those same prosecutors now have withdrawn their harsher sentence demand and said they’d accept probation and no jail time.

They’ve been caught persecuting Flynn rather than prosecuting him, and they don’t want to have that exposed in open court. They’re hoping they can buy off Flynn with this latest move.

Move along.

Criminalizing Speech

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That’s what a Progressive-Democrat President Elizabeth Warren would try to do.

She would also lead a charge to criminalize the mere spreading of false information about the process of voting in US elections.
“I will push for new laws that impose tough civil and criminal penalties for knowingly disseminating this kind of information, which has the explicit purpose of undermining the basic right to vote[.]

She masquerades her initial move as a criminalization of false claims concerning when and how to vote, but she ignores the fact that it’s already illegal to interfere with an election; there’s no need for additional laws.  She also declined, as Progressive-Democrats do regarding all efforts to regulate, to identify her limiting principle.

This is just an opening move to a broader speech censorship effort by the Left.

The…foolishness…of such an effort is illustrated by commentary concerning her plan. Senator Rand Paul (R, KY):

Would this apply to the tall tales you tell and those networks allow @ewarren?

Jeff Blehar of the National Review:

Elizabeth Warren is an American Indian. Go ahead Liz, charge me.

No, this is yet another example of the utter contempt in which Progressive-Democrats hold us deplorable average Americans. We’re just too stupid to do our own sorting of accurate speech from inaccurate speech from deliberately inaccurate speech. Our Betters must do this for us.

It’s also a very short step from there to criminalizing all speech of which this or that party disapproves, and from there it’s an even shorter step to criminalizing all speech of which this or that person in power disapproves.

Poking My Nose

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…into an arena where my experience is limited and dated. But I’m gonna do it, anyway. My experience is this: I hold a private pilot license; although I haven’t had the opportunity to fly for some years: I’m non-current.  However, I do have several hundred hours in fighter aircraft simulators, accumulated when I worked as Test Director for the world class manufacturer of military aircraft simulators—which hours include extensive time flying in instrument conditions, albeit without the buffeting of real-world winds and wind gusts.

The helicopter that crashed in California killing all nine of its occupants, including the pilot, Kobe Bryant and his daughter, his daughter’s basketball coach, and those five additional unfortunates, didn’t have a warning system in its instrument suite that might have helped the pilot recognize his physical situation.  That system is a Terrain Awareness And Warning System, which could have greatly raised the pilot’s understanding of his location relative to the terrain, not just below him, but around him, as well.

It’s no big deal that the pilot didn’t have TAWS on his helicopter.  However, I would have expected that an experienced pilot would have known better than to fly in that terrain/weather without it.

Green Card Residency

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The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote (I’m tempted to say “party line vote,” but CJ Roberts might demur were he not otherwise occupied at the moment), lifted a district court’s stay blocking implementation of the Trump administration’s public charge immigration rule. The rule blocks permanent residency and allows for denial of entry visas in the first place for those in our nation or entering it if they are considered likely to rely on our welfare programs. The stay removal allows the rule to be enforced while the underlying case wends its way through the courts.

Europe, exemplified by Deutsche Welle, is dismayed (even as many of the EU’s members demur from accepting immigrants making their passage from northern Africa).  It’s a harsher immigration law.  It significantly expands the criteria for denying legal residency. It disproportionately put[s] permanent residency out of reach for low-income applicants from developing countries.

The stay-issuing district judge, George Daniels, is in a high dudgeon, too. He wrote in his ruling that the rule was repugnant to the American Dream, and was a policy of exclusion in search of justification.

Last things first. The district judge was—and is—completely out of line in his ruling. His task, his duty as an American judge, is to find the law underlying the rule, or the rule itself, unconstitutional or, failing that, to apply the underlying law and the rule as they are written. Full stop.

Our Constitution and the judge’s oath of office, which enjoins him to uphold our Constitution, bar him from implementing his personal opinion or his personal view of what’s good or bad for our society.

Regarding the alleged disproportional impact on the poor or on third-world applicants, that may or may not be true. However, as is the case with all nations, those entering ours are expected to be beneficial to our nation, not drains on it.

On the beef that the rule makes it harder for an entrant to gain legal residency, that’s the point of borders. No one has an inherent right to come into another nation without that nation’s prior permission. No nation has an inherent obligation to grant that permission. Entry requirements and entrants are solely at the discretion of that nation.

Nor have we any obligation to extend the benefits of our already overstretched (and too inefficiently run) welfare programs to noncitizens. Such an extended overstretch can only work to the detriment of our citizens.