Tag Archives: politics

A Thought on Brann’s Decision

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Recall that Federal District Judge Matthew Brann dismissed the Trump campaign lawsuit that sought to reject hundreds of thousands of votes in Progressive-Democratic-run Pennsylvania counties because, the suit alleged, changes to State voting rules violated our Constitution’s equal protection requirement.

Brann ruled in part that he

has no authority to take away the right to vote of even a single person, let alone millions of citizens.

What Brann chose not to consider is that he also has no authority to see the vote of even a single person, let alone millions of citizens (more accurately, hundreds of thousands; “millions” is his cynical exaggeration), be diluted to the point of meaninglessness by illegally cast or illegally counted ballots.

The Third Circuit has agreed to hear, promptly, the campaign’s appeal. Hopefully, the appellate court will consider both sides of the matter rather than just the convenient side.

The Business of Business and the Wuhan Virus

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Another precinct is passing in its results.

After scrambling to hoard cash in the spring, some large US companies that halted their dividend payments are reversing their decision, a sign that their leaders believe the worst of the crisis is behind them.

Mark Zandi, Chief Economist at Moody’s Analytics:

The resumption of corporate dividend payments is an encouraging sign that executives believe that the pandemic will soon be behind us.

And

[Kohl’s r]evenue fell 14%, compared with a 23% drop in the previous quarter. Kohl’s said it would resume its dividend in the first half of 2021.

And

Retailer TJX Cos said last week that it would resume its dividend, but at a 13% higher rate than it last paid in March, citing its cash flow and $10.6 billion in cash on its balance sheet. The company has reopened most of the TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and HomeGoods stores it had closed in the spring.
“We are very bullish on the longer-term outlook because that feels significantly better than it did at the beginning of [the third quarter] when we didn’t know where all of this was heading,” CEO Ernie Herrman said on a conference call.

Those are just a few of the myriad illustrative examples that aggregate into the trend. It’s time the bureaucrats in our governments, at all levels of jurisdiction, stopped abusing their authority and stopped their panicky responses to the Wuhan Virus situation.

Full stop.

Some Thoughts on Europe’s Defense

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French President Emmanuel Macron has one and so does German Chancellor Angela Merkel (through her Defense Minister, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer). And so do I.

Macron strongly favors a Europe that is strategically autonomous in its defense. After all, he notes (OANN‘s paraphrasing),

the United States would only respect a Europe that was more self-reliant in defence.

AKK, on the other hand, says that (again, OANN‘s paraphrasing)

Europe [will] remain dependent on Washington for its defence for a long time to come.

They’re both right, although Merkel/AKK is a bit pessimistic. It will take some time for the member nations of the European Union and for the EU as a whole to make the necessary adjustments for a Macron-esque defense autonomy, but it shouldn’t take as long as Merkel envisions. That simply requires more commitment to Europe’s own responsibilities than currently exists.

The US can, and should, do everything we can to support European defense (and that includes a newly freed from the EU Great Britain), but we should not—we cannot—take on Europe’s responsibility in their stead; they must act on their own responsibility. All we can do is stand with them.

An Adjacent Issue

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A group wants to paint the message “Black Pre-Born Lives Matter” on a street outside a Planned Parenthood site near Capitol Hill in DC. The city’s government has refused to issue the necessary permit, and police arrested two folks who tried just to chalk the message rather than paint it. The group now has sued in Federal court over the refusal and subsequent prevention of painting; the suit reads, in pertinent part,

Your original decision to paint “Black Lives Matter” on the street is government speech. However, your decision to allow protestors to paint “Defund the Police” opened the streets up as a public forum. You are not permitted to discriminate on the basis of viewpoint in making determinations relating to public assemblies in public fora[.]

That raises the adjacent issue. Government speech wants citizen speech in answer, also, or what’s a First Amendment for?

Tyranny and the First Amendment

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On the matter of Target’s initial attempt to ban a book (Irreversible Damage: the Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters for those following along) because some folks objected to it, followed by Target’s reversal and decision to sell the book after all, a letter-writer published in The Wall Street Journal‘s Thursday Letters had this remark:

Lobbying the government to make a book illegal is pro-book banning. Lobbying Target to take a book off the shelves is pro-capitalism.

This is not even close to correct. Lobbying Target to take a book off the shelves is suppression of speech, even when done by private citizens.

Not buying the book is capitalism. Encouraging one’s fellows to not buy the book—boycotting the book—is capitalism.

Demanding the book not be sold denies others those same choices, along with denying them their opposing choice to buy the book. That’s at the core of tyranny.