Tag Archives: political parties

Voter Discrimination

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Alabama, pursuant to the latest decennial census, has drawn its electoral map, and the outcome supposedly yields a House delegation of six white Republicans and one Black Democrat for the Federal Congress.

Opponents of the map say it disadvantages black voters. So far, the map stands, as the Supreme Court ruled that the map mustn’t be changed this close to an upcoming Federal election, but it’s a temporary ruling: the Court said it will hear the full case in its next term, starting in October. Thus the map will be the one in effect for next November’s midterms.

The “disadvantages black voters” bit rings hollow to me. There’s no doubt that the map is gerrymandered to favor one group of Americans over another, but that’s what gerrymandering does, and both parties have been doing it, for good or ill, ever since there were two dominant parties in our Republic.

What makes the beef ring hollow though, it the bit about disadvantaging one group of Americans over another. That suggests, strongly, that it would be OK to advantage that group of Americans over the other, currently advantaged. Or even merely to seek some version of “equity” or “equality.”

Either way—explicitly targeting one group of Americans separately from another, regardless of purpose—is nothing but rank identity politics. While there remains bigotry afoot in our republic, this is no longer the 1950s. We have come far closer today to realizing our ideal—as carved into the Supreme Court building—of all Americans being equal under law, just as we are—as acknowledged in the opening sentences of our Declaration of Independence—equal under God.

There is no need, any longer, to explicitly carve out districts to favor any race or ethnicity over any other: we’re all the same voters; we’re all American voters.

The answer, of course, for all that it’ll be easier written than done, is to do away with gerrymandering altogether. Divide each State up into squares of substantially equal populations of citizens, beginning at the State’s geographic center, and deviating from straight-line district boundaries only at the State’s boundary with an adjoining State.

Madness

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That’s what the Ottawa Police Chief, Peter Sloly, claims the Canadian truckers’ Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa is.

[a] nationwide insurrection driven by madness

Because the truckers disagree with the Canadian government’s diktats regarding individual health and individual decisions regarding health.

Now where have I heard before such characterizations of disagreement with Government being the definition of madness?

Oh, yeah—Nikita Khrushchev’s and his successor Tzar General Secretary, Leonid Brezhnev’s, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (For completeness’ sake, they were only extending and expanding Josef Stalin’s use of psychiatry as a political tool of control, but that’s a separate story.) Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s USSR government would routinely decide dissenters were insane—suffering from delusions of reformism—and confine them to asylums until they were…cured. Or died from one cause or another. Major General Pyotr Grigorenko was only one of the more prominent ones “driven by madness.”

Now here is Sloly: a wrong-minded protest—his position—must perforce be an “insurrection,” and insurrections must be—again, his position—acts of insanity.

“in the event of an investigation into a user”

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The IRS is bent on using facial recognition to allow (or block) an American taxpayer to have access to his own tax records that the IRS maintains on each of us. The program is called ID.me, and it

will require a face scan, with which it will then “verify” a person’s identity, store in a database, and use for future logins.

As the WSJ asks, What could go wrong? It then answers the question:

Tucked into the agency’s ID.me project document is a line explaining that the agency will also use the mobile phones that submit selfies as a “piece of identity evidence” and that “geolocation can be gleaned from [mobile network operators] in the event of an investigation into a user.”

This is People’s Republic of China-grade surveillance, this time by a weaponized IRS of each of us American citizens. This is the IRS whose weaponization was begun under the Progressive-Democrat, Barack Obama. This is the IRS whose weaponization is being expanded to republic-threatening levels by the Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden.

Update: The IRS now claims it’s not going to do the facial recognition bit. But it hasn’t made any similar claims regarding “geolocation” or any other piece of “identity evidence” that it might hold, or get hold of, and would willingly pass along to support any “investigation” into a user.

Sort of like tax data and forms that it already has a history of passing along to the press.

The Fed and Social Engineering

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President Joe Biden (D) wants our Federal Reserve System to engage in economic social engineering, so he’s nominating as the Fed’s banking supervisor the climate activist Sarah Bloom Raskin. Among her lately remarks concerning credit allocation and climate change was her last-spring op-ed in The New York Times. She led off that piece with this:

Climate change poses the next big threat. Ignoring it, particularly to the benefit of fossil fuel interests, is a risk we can’t afford.

She had this, too, in the same piece:

The Fed is singularly poised to seed strategic investments in future economic stability.

And this:

The decision to bring oil and gas into the Fed’s investment portfolio not only misdirects limited recovery resources but also sends a false price signal to investors about where capital needs to be allocated[.]

Raskin had this in her September 2020 Project Syndicate op-ed, reprinted by Duke Law:

US regulators need to be encouraged to think more imaginatively about how they can engage with local transition efforts. For example, how might financial policies from diverse agencies be stitched together to produce outcomes that enable firms to hit their net-zero targets? How can financial policy be used to help accelerate a transition that redeploys workers for new jobs, or to assist households that are being asked to change their spending habits? And how can regulatory changes relating to disclosure, access to credit, and pricing of risk support a rapid and just green transition?
…
In short…[f]inancial regulators must reimagine their own role so that they can play their part in the broader reimagining of the economy.

That’s not the Federal Reserve’s role, though. The Fed’s statutorily required goals are to maximize employment, stabilize prices, and moderate long-term interest rates. There’s nothing in there about climate change, or “guiding” lending to this or that government-favored group of Americans and away from that or this government-disfavored group of Americans, or any other sort of social engineering.

One more thing. Aside from Raskin’s own altered-state understanding of the Fed, a larger problem regards the present administration’s overall attitude. That Biden-Harris actually nominated Raskin says volumes about his own view of law and his own willingness to disregard it in order to increase his administration’s power.

Lies of our President

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President Joe Biden (D) has made his announcement that he’ll only appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court, meaning that no one else—no white man or woman, or Hispanic man or woman, or Asian man or woman will even be considered. Biden has set a purely racist and sexist pair of requirements as his primary criteria for a Supreme Court Justice.

Now Biden is objecting to the hue and cry over his racism and sexism.

The White House is…saying that Republicans who are criticizing President Biden for his promise to appoint a Black female to the bench did not object when former President Trump made a similar promise to nominate a female to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020.

And through his White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates,

When Donald Trump promised to nominate a woman to the Supreme Court just over a year ago none of these members objected[.]

Biden, again through Bates, also claimed that then-Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan also promised to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court.

But Biden’s claims are patently false, as Jonathan Turley points out.

Trump, when he said that he would be putting a woman on the Supreme Court, had already spent months and months with a public short list that they’d been vetting. … And when he [Trump] said he was going to put a woman on the court, it was days before he was going to announce her name.

And

Reagan said that he would give one of his first positions, one of the vacancies, to a woman, but the White House stressed that was not a guarantee, and when O’Connor was selected, he had a short list with a majority of men on it.

And

What these presidents didn’t do is they didn’t say that they would not consider anyone else beyond people with this race, this gender[.]

Biden knows this as fully and as clearly as does Turley.

Lies are the blanket over the head of cowards.