Tag Archives: freedom

Offensive

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Three dentists in North Carolina dressed up in traditional clothing of an American Indian, a Japanese, and a Scot in order to run an advertisement under the catchphrase “Everyone smiles in the same language!”

Oh, the hoo-raw.  SJWs crawled out through their baseboard holes on this one, proclaiming the ad to be “ignorant and offensive” and racist.

No.  What’s ignorant and offensive is the naked racism of manufacturing a beef where there is none for the sole purpose of supporting the professional victim industry.

Felons and Voting

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In general, felons have no voting rights—it’s part of their punishment for having committed their crimes.  There also are growing movements to restore voting rights to felons—they are, after all, US citizens.  (I’m eliding here felons who aren’t citizens; they have no voting rights to restore.)

It’s a debate worth having, but a couple of misunderstandings need to be cleared up first.  These misunderstandings are illustrated in a recent Wall Street Journal article.

As the midterm elections draw closer, Dameon Stackhouse is eager to cast a ballot, but he can’t under New Jersey law because he remains on parole after more than a decade behind bars for second-degree robbery.

If he’s on parole, he’s still serving his punishment for his crime; he’s only entered a new stage of that punishment.  With his punishment still in progress, he shouldn’t get his right to vote back.  On successful completion of his parole—successful completion of the punishment society has said is required for his crime—then it’s worth seriously considering reenfranchising him and others in similar situations.

And this, from Stackhouse:

We have no say [without a right to vote].  This is one of the worst things you can do to a citizen.

No, Stackhouse did this to himself with his decision to commit his crime; no one else did this to him as a citizen.  His apparent inability to accept responsibility for the outcomes he created with his misbehavior in addition to the misbehavior itself does not suggest that his rehabilitation is being entirely successful.

I am spring-loaded to restore the franchise to those who’ve successfully completed their punishment—for the vast majority of crimes, there should be an endpoint to the punishment short of death, whether by execution or old age.  But the punishment must be completed before reenfranchisement.

The Special Counsel Authorizing Letter

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House investigating committees have demanded that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein turn over his letter to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and Rosenstein has refused to do so.  Now, in a case Mueller brought against ex- and brief-Trump Campaign Manager Paul Rosenstein, the presiding Federal judge TS Ellis has demanded that Mueller turn over to him an unredacted copy of that letter, and he’s given Mueller two weeks to comply, which works out to 18 May.

We’ll see. Two weeks is much too long to give Mueller to produce his copy of Rosenstein’s authorizing letter; 36-48 hours is plenty—especially since Mueller’s team plainly has that copy always ready to hand; they are, after all, responsible persons.

Ellis also needs to be prepared to jail Mueller and possibly Rosenstein for contempt if Mueller doesn’t meet the deadline, whether Ellis’ or mine, or Rosenstein won’t allow him to, and keep them locked up until the letter is produced.

President Donald Trump could speed things along by declassifying the letter, if Mueller/Rosenstein try to hide behind that. This is a national affair, and We the People need, and have the fundamental right, to know what Government’s unelected bureaucrats are doing under the pretense that it’s in our name.

Slippery Stairs

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In a Miami speech to peddle his book, ex-FBI Director James Comey had some remarks about gun control, insisting those who object to changing existing law as starting down a slippery slope are simply wrong.

It’s not a slippery slope, it’s a concrete set of stairs….  Let’s have these conversations standing there, holding the rails.

Slippery slope or concrete stairs, it’s still a downward trip away from individual liberty.  It’s instructive, too, that he continues to decline to identify his limiting principle on gun “control.”  Where would control efforts stop, does he think?  What natural limit exists?  So far, all he—and other gun control supporters—are willing to do is have us rely on the good offices of a government that would limit our access to weapons.

Until gun control supporters identify their limiting principle, there’s no debate to be had.  Of course, it may be that they’ve already identified their limit.

Selling Weapons to the Republic of China

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Especially in the face of an aggressively acquisitive People’s Republic of China that’s busily trying to cow the Republic of China, The Wall Street Journal favors our selling the RoC updated F-16s.

Such a sale would be a good start, but it’s only that.

There’s no need to wait on international consensus regarding an F-35B sale to the Republic of China (a concern of the WSJ); we should consider moving unilaterally. Or selling an F-35C that isn’t part of any consortium. The People’s Republic of China already has the F-35 secrets, anyway, courtesy of the Obama administration’s decision to eschew IT security. ‘Course, I think the F-35 is a wasteful pig, and uprated F-15s, F-16s, and A-10s would be better buys.

Aside from that, though, we should be selling the RoC high and intermediate altitude missile defense systems and encouraging Israel to sell the RoC its Iron Dome and Arrow defense systems.

And we should resume active and frequent patrols of the Tawain Strait.

It’s time to stop treating the PRC with kid gloves.  It’s time, also, to stop ignoring the RoC’s needs as a sovereign nation.