Expanding Government for Freedom

That’s the Progressive-Democrats’ Orwellian claim about their HR1 bill, just passed on party lines.  It’s for the children, too.  If it saves just one life….  Here is some of what’s in the bill:

Mandates a nationalized system to publicly finance federal elections. It would allocate federal money to match certain small-dollar donations 6-to-1 and deposit those funds in campaign accounts.

We already can designate, on our tax returns, a donation to a Federal fund for Presidential campaigns; the monies to be divided equally between the political parties.  That’s been a complete failure over the years, with the amounts designated falling, and private money going directly to the parties, candidates, PACs, etc, expanding. The Progressive-Democrats’ answer is to “correct” that by forcing us to donate to political campaigns in even larger amounts, whether we want to or not.

Requires several classes of politically active organizations, including tax-exempt 501(c)(4) groups, to disclose donors who have given $10,000 or more during an election cycle.

Because anonymity is as anathema to Progressive-Democrats as it is critical to free speech and to liberty generally.

Changes the membership of the Federal Election Commission to five members, with the president’s party in the majority, from its current six members, evenly split between Democratic and Republican appointees.

Because balancing the membership also is anathema to Progressive-Democrats: they desperately need a purely partisan facility for overseeing our elections.

Fortunately, Republicans still have a majority in the Senate.

Alphabet Strikes Again

Recall Alphabet’s decision to use its Google arm to help the government and defense establishment of our enemy, the People’s Republic of China, while simultaneously refusing to help our own develop the tools needed to defend our nation.

Now Alphabet has chosen to use its Google facility to actively aid the government of Saudi Arabia in keeping Saudi women down on the Arab farm.  The Saudi government has put an app into Alphabet’s Google Play store that allows Saudi male citizens to track “their” Saudi women and control where they travel.

Alphabet says that’s jake and refuses to block the app.

Whatever happened to Don’t be evil?  Whose side are these Precious Ones on, anyway?

Kamala Harris Wants to Confront Dark History

Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate wannabe and Senator Kamala Harris (D, CA) wants us to take our dark history seriously.

We must confront the dark history of slavery and government-sanctioned discrimination in this country that has had many consequences, including undermining the ability of black families to build wealth in America for generations.  We need systemic, structural changes to address that.

Absolutely.  The Progressive-Democratic Party must confront its dark history of slavery and government-sanctioned discrimination.

The Progressive-Democratic Party must confront its dark history of its Democrat, Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, who ruled that Dred Scott, a free (because escaped) black man in the north, must be returned to the southern ownership of his owner—and who further ruled that blacks could not be citizens of the United States because blacks were not fully men.

It must confront its demand for the States Right of holding slaves, slavery over which the nation had to fight a bloody civil war to end because of Party intransigence.

The Progressive-Democratic Party must confront its dark history of its creation, the Ku Klux Klan, which it used to terrorize newly freed blacks—and any who supported them—in the aftermath of the Party’s lost overt slavery policy.

The Progressive-Democratic Party must confront its dark history of its Jim Crow Laws, designed explicitly to keep blacks from voting.

The Progressive-Democratic Party must confront its dark history of segregation, resumed in full under President Woodrow Wilson (D), who actively resegregated the Federal government after it had been steadily integrated following the Civil War, a policy for which Wilson insisted blacks should be grateful for the “protection,” and which continued apace in schools under the fiction of “separate but equal,” which included all public spaces, and which extended even to sections of buses, drinking fountains, and rest rooms.

The Progressive-Democratic Party must confront its dark history of destroying black families by enacting “welfare” laws that paid single mothers but not intact families, making it fiscally useful, if not wholly immoral, for fathers to absent themselves.

The Progressive-Democratic Party must confront its dark history of deliberate, overt racial (and gender) discrimination in its “affirmative action” policies that give special treatment based, ultimately, on skin color and/or gender.

The Progressive-Democratic Party must confront its dark history of undermining the ability of black families (such as they’re allowed to exist) to build wealth by keeping them trapped in Party’s welfare cage with the designed-in welfare cliff that prevents welfare recipients—most of whom are minority recipients, with most of those black—from getting a new job or a pay raise that would put them above an income threshold because that would cut welfare payments by more than the pay raise.

The Progressive-Democratic Party must confront its dark present of identity politics that seeks to give special treatment to particular groups of Americans—which is nothing more than segregation modernized.

The Progressive-Democratic Party does, most definitely, need systemic, structural changes to address that.

Foreign Meddling

More European nations have recognized the Guaidó government as the legitimate government of Venezuela following the passing of those nations’ Sunday deadline for Maduro to schedule free elections with no action by Maduro (though left unaddressed is the conundrum of how Maduro could schedule anything if he’s not the legitimate head of government).

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin demurs.

…domestic issues should be solved by Venezuela and its people. “Attempts to legitimize usurped power” constitute[] “interference in Venezuela’s internal affairs….”

Two things make Putin’s position risibly hypocritical.  One is the idea that calling the Guaidó administration a usurped power is itself a blatant interference in Venezuela’s internal affairs.  The Venezuelan legislature—the legitimately elected one, not Maduro’s puppet show—constitutionally asserted its authority and with that authority swore in Juan Guaidó as interim President, pending free elections of a new President and legislature.

Take careful note of that: the legislature swore in a temporary President, not a President-for-life as Maduro’s henchmen have done.

The other thing is the right and duty of a people—acknowledged in so many words in our Declaration of Independence, but entirely applicable to all peoples—when faced with a Government embarked on a long train of abuses and usurpation [that] evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism…to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Again, contra Putin, the Venezuelan people are exercising their right and duty to solve Venezuela’s problem.

It is the right and duty of all other free nations to support the Venezuelan people’s effort.  It is the right and duty of all other free nations to block despotic nations from interfering with these people’s quest for freedom.

Full stop.

Emergency Powers

President Donald Trump is giving very serious consideration to declaring a national emergency so he can reallocate certain funding toward building the border wall that’s so necessary in various places and that the Progressive-Democrats are so dead set against funding, even though they’ve voted, within the last decade, an order of magnitude more money for a wall than Trump is requesting.

Trump clearly has the legal authority to declare such an emergency and to carry out the funds reallocation.

Trump, though, has another way to force the Progressive-Democrats’ hand.  Here’s what Article II, Section 3 says, in pertinent part:

…he [the President] may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them….

The next time Congress takes a break of any sort—this just ending weekend, for instance—Trump should call both Houses back into active session and refuse to let them have any break, interruption, recess, or other departure from active presence on the House and Senate floors until demonstrably good faith negotiations over border wall funding are well in progress and initial (successful) votes conducted.