Tag Archives: freedom

In Which I Agree with the ACLU

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The National Security Agency illegally spied on American citizens, again.  This time occurred, last October, when the NSA

collected records about U.S. calls and text messages that it wasn’t authorized to obtain last year….

This

occurred several months after the NSA said it had purged hundreds of millions of metadata records it had amassed since 2015 due to a separate overcollection episode.

This flouting of law and of its instructions was no accident, not the second time.  It was deliberate.

An ACLU staff attorney, Patrick Toomey, said in part,

this surveillance program is beyond redemption and should be shut down for good.  The NSA’s collection of Americans’ call records is too sweeping, the compliance problems too many….

It appears that the NSA didn’t explicitly call for the data when it asked a (sadly name-redacted) telecommunications firm for legitimately collectable data; that firm “overprovided.”  The data, though, were “overprovided” for nine days before the NSA asked the company to…investigate…its delivery.  Nor is there evidence the NSA purged those overcollections.

Especially that last bit about compliance: the NSA, with this latest collection, has demonstrated that it considers laws, rules, constraints to be solely for the small people; they don’t apply to august entities like themselves.

Toomey is right, and I’ll go a ways further: the NSA should be shut down, the agency disbanded and withdrawn from the government’s books, and the personnel all returned to the private sector.

I’m Not Talking to You

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Like an angry wife of a bygone era, the Iranian government is having a hissy fit over the latest round of sanctions, these applied directly to the likes of Ali Khamenei, Iran’s MFWIC; Foreign Minister Javad Zarif; and three military leaders:

Ali Reza Tangsiri, who was responsible for the Iranian regime’s forces threatening to close the straits of Hormuz; Amirali Hajizadeh, who was commander of the air force and responsible for downing the US unmanned aircraft in international airspace; and Mohammad Pakpour, who is responsible for IRGC’s ground forces.

Iran’s government isn’t happy.

A spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry said in a tweet Tuesday that the new US sanctions that target Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other Iranian officials permanently end any chance of diplomacy between countries.

This, though, is just another example of the Iranian government’s dissembling. When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe visited Khamenei, Khamenei refused to receive a message from President Donald Trump that Abe was bearing, and Khamenei said that he’d never talk to Trump.

All channels of diplomacy and any chance of future diplomacy have been closed off by Iran for some weeks.

Khamenei, Abbas Mousavi (Spokesman and Head of the Center for Public and Media Diplomacy), Hassan Rouhani (Iranian President), et al., are just acting out the temper tantrums of those angry wives.

In Which the Court Gets One Right

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The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the Bladensburg Peace Cross is not an unconstitutional favoring by government of a particular religion, reversing the 4th Circuit. Only Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

This is the privately done monument that was

built in 1925 and paid for by local families, businesses, and the American Legion to honor 49 World War I veterans from Prince George’s County [in Maryland]. But the 40-foot cross sits on a now-busy highway median owned since 1961 by a state commission that pays for its maintenance and upkeep.

The American Humanist Association, an anti-religion gadfly with many such attacks, particularly against what it considers Christian devices, had sued for the monument’s removal (these five decades and more after the commission assumed responsibility for the monument).  The appellate court had agreed with the AHA, ruling that the monument is an aggrandizement of Latin Crosses and nothing else.  That court also had displayed its contempt for the intelligence of ordinary Americans, ruling that the “display”

says to any reasonable observer that the commission either places Christianity above other faiths, views being American and Christian as one in the same, or both[.]

However, Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the Court, had the right of it [emphasis added].

The cross is undoubtedly a Christian symbol, but that fact should not blind us to everything else that the Bladensburg Cross has come to represent.  For some, that monument is a symbolic resting place for ancestors who never returned home. For others, it is a place for the community to gather and honor all veterans and their sacrifices for our Nation. For others still, it is a historical landmark. For many of these people, destroying or defacing the Cross that has stood undisturbed for nearly a century would not be neutral and would not further the ideals of respect and tolerance embodied in the First Amendment.

It doesn’t get much clearer than that.

As an aside, Ginsburg in her dissent, which she emphasized by reading it from the bench, echoed the 4th Circuit’s contempt for us ordinary Americans:

As I see it, when a cross is displayed on public property, the government may be presumed to endorse its religious content.  The venue is surely associated with the State; the symbol and its meaning are just as surely associated exclusively with Christianity.

Further to the aside, here is F Scott Fitzgerald’s test of genius:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

The Court’s ruling, including Ginsburg’s dissent, can be read here.

A Party of Bigots?

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This article is “triggered” by a segment last Thursday on Fox News Overtime. A panel including otherwise respected Democratic (note: not Progressive-Democratic) pollster Doug Schoen, the show’s host Harris Faulkner and another lady (sorry, her name escapes me). The panel was discussing Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ (D, NY) despicable, and repeated, equation of the detention centers along our border wherein we house illegal aliens pending their disposition with the World War II concentration camps used explicitly for rounding up Jews, Romani, and others—seizing them from their own homes for the purpose—and exterminating them (with a view to carrying out genocide of the Jews in particular).  Mind another distinction: the folks housed in those detention centers are free, given some associated paperwork, to leave at any time, provided they leave to go home. The folks “housed” in the Holocaust concentration camps were not free to go anywhere except to die.

Schoen had the grace to be embarrassed by the behavior of what he still refers to as his party.

Here’s the thing, though.  The Progressive-Democratic Party has refused to condemn either Ocasio-Cortez for her bigoted remarks or those remarks.  Jerry Nadler (D, NY), House Judiciary Committee Chairman, openly supports Ocasio-Cortez’ remarks:

One of the lessons from the Holocaust is “Never Again”—not only to mass murder, but also to the dehumanization of people, violations of basic rights, and assaults on our common morality. We fail to learn that lesson when we don’t callout such inhumanity right in front of us.

Nadler’s refusal to condemn Ocasio-Cortez or her remarks speaks loudly and clearly, but there’s more to his tweet.  His naked distortion of what’s going on in those detention centers and Nadler’s equation of that with what went on in those Holocaust concentration camps is a clear demonstration of Nadler’s personal bigotry.

Senator and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (I, VT) gave a CNN interview in which he insisted (as cited by Haaretz)

“I didn’t use that terminology,” noted Sanders, subsequently repeating twice in the interview that he had “not used that word.”

He went on to equate the detention centers with the Holocaust’s concentration camps.  Notice that: Sanders quibbled with Ocasio-Cortez’ terminology, but he wholly agrees with her claims, thereby exposing his own bigotry.

The rest of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Presidential candidates—every single one of them—have stayed carefully silent on Ocasio-Cortez’ bigoted remarks.  Those two dozen candidates for the highest office in our nation therewith actively demonstrate their agreement with Ocasio-Cortez and thereby demonstrate their own overt bigotry.

This comes on the heels of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s refusal to censure Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D, MN) over her bigoted, anti-Semitic remarks.  Party refused even to call her out or condemn her words. In the end, Party passed a carefully saccharine resolution that said, “We don’t like mean words.”

This is of a piece with the Progressive-Democratic Party’s effort, not just to divide us, but to partition us with their racist and sexist identity politics.

I have to wonder what it will take for Schoen to leave the Progressive-Democratic Party.

No—the Progressive-Democratic Party is not a party of bigots, it is an institution of bigotry, and we have to take care next year lest our nation fall under its sway.

“Radical-Right” and the Left

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The Washington Post ran a panic-mongering op-ed about the Supreme Court last week.

Last month, the new conservative majority—being driven by Justices Neil M Gorsuch and Brett M Kavanaugh—signaled that this change is coming. In overruling a 40-year-old precedent governing how state governments can be sued, the new court majority, all of whom pledged reverence for precedent during their Senate confirmation hearings—sang a different song: “stare decisis is ‘not an inexorable command,’ … and is ‘at its weakest’ when interpreting the Constitution.” This was the second time in less than a year that the conservative majority has tossed aside decades-old precedent.

Thus screamed the WaPo in its terror.  Never mind that reverence for precedent is not blind adherence to it, no matter how wrong the precedent.  The Brown example the paper so piously cited elsewhere in its op-ed was itself an overturning of an 80-year-old precedent, that of Plessy.  Never mind, more importantly, that as Justice Clarence Thomas has said on many occasions, the primary precedent in all of American jurisprudence is the text of our Constitution.

And this “fear:”

….race-conscious programs in employment and admissions that are now pervasive could be forbidden.

The op-ed’s author wrote that with no trace of irony.

“Race-conscious” programs are by definition racist; that they’re pervasive just means that the evil is far too ubiquitous.  They should be forbidden, and the sooner and louder the better.

And this:

The past decade has seen a conservative court slow further social progress….

That’s entirely appropriate, it’s regrettable that this was even necessary, and it’s further regrettable that court-imposed “social progress” was only slowed and not halted altogether.  Social progress—whatever that is—is a political matter, to be furthered or opposed only by the political arms of our government.  Courts have no legitimate role in political matters; this is made clear in that primary precedent’s Article I, Section 1.

The paper headlined its op-ed thusly:

We need to prepare for a complete reversal of the role the Supreme Court plays in our lives

I certainly hope the Court reverses course; I certainly hope the Court goes back to applying the Constitution and the laws as they’re written, instead of in accordance with the “philosophies” of the likes of Thurgood Marshall—”I make my ruling and expect the law to catch up”—and Ruth Bader Ginsburg of living Constitution, amend it from the bench according to a judge’s personal view of society, ideology.  I certainly hope the Court reverses its role in our political lives and absents itself from it.

It’s illustrative of how dangerously far left the Left has gone when simple adherence to the Constitution is radical-right.