Tag Archives: rights

Speech and Private Enterprise

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Some companies are reaching the conclusion that it’s become necessary to pull advertising from Facebook over the latter’s mishandling of speech, if in many cases they’re misapprehending the types of speech being abused.

The WSJ article at the link led off with this:

Facebook Inc said it would start labeling political speech that violates its rules and take other measures to prevent voter suppression and protect minorities from abuse.

Pick one. Suppressing political speech is suppressing voters.

Furthermore, Zuckerberg is hardly in a position to define “abuse;” his censorship is itself abuse.

There’s also this from a commenter in the article’s comment thread, which illustrates the breadth of the misunderstanding regarding free speech obligations:

Facebook is a private company, and platform. It can do as it pleases so long as you sign off on their terms and conditions agreement….

As a legal matter, sure. However, the principle underlying the injunction against Government abridging the freedom of speech is universal and applies to everyone. Zuckerberg knows this full well, and he knows further from that that he has a moral obligation to actively support free speech as well as to passively not abridge it.

His obligation is expanded by the size and control over political—and other—speech his Facebook has achieved and exercises.

No Voter Fraud?

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Here’s one case—a single incident, but much too large a case to be dismissed for that.

Paterson, NJ, with a population of 145,000, last month held—rather, is holding, since the city isn’t done counting votes—an election for City Council, among other positions. The election was done by mail-in voting since the Powers that Be considered the city’s Wuhan Virus situation that serious.

16,747 vote-by-mail ballots were received, but only 13,557 votes were counted. More than 3,190 votes, 19% of the total ballots cast, were disqualified by the board of elections.

Nineteen per cent of the votes have been tossed.

Why?

Over 800 ballots in Paterson were invalidated for appearing in mailboxes improperly bundled together—including a one mailbox where hundreds of ballots were in a single packet. The bundles were turned over to law enforcement to investigate potential criminal activity related to the collection of the ballots.
The board of elections disqualified another 2,300 ballots after concluding that the signatures on them did not match the signatures on voter records.

There’s more:

Reporting by NBC further uncovered citizens of Paterson who are listed as having voted, but who told the news outlet they never received a ballot and did not vote. One woman, Ramona Javier, after being shown the list of people on her block who allegedly voted, told the outlet she knew of eight family members and neighbors who were wrongly listed. “We did not receive vote-by-mail ballots and thus we did not vote,” she said. “This is corruption. This is fraud.”

And

There were multiple reports that large numbers of mail-in ballots were left on the lobby floors of apartment buildings and not delivered to residents’ individual mailboxes, further casting doubt on the integrity of the election.

But who cares, right? It’s only 3,200 votes that were…wrong.

In a single ward of one council seat race, 24% of the votes cast were tossed by the State’s Board of Elections.

One case? Not so much. Statewide, across all of its 31 elections, the Elections Board had to “disqualify” 9.6% of the mail-in ballots cast. Even with Paterson’s failures discounted, the Statewide failure rate is over 8%.

Mail-in ballots, which have none of the controls of absentee ballots, are a petri dish for the voter fraud that Progressive-Democrats insist is a right-wing conspiracy.

Statehood for DC?

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That’s the House Progressive-Democrats’ plan. They voted on the thing last Friday.

One of the rationalizations for the move is this, from the District of Columbia’s “shadow senator” Paul Strauss:

DC [he’s cited as saying], created in July 1790, pays more federal taxes than any other non-voting territory and does not receive proportional services for their population, which is larger than those of Wyoming and Vermont.
“We are essentially a donor state,” he said.

That’s not an argument for statehood, though. It’s an argument for ending the transfers of citizens’ and their business’ tax monies from one State/territory/District to another other than in times of regional emergency.

What’s being carefully avoided in the discussion is the fact that this new State, were it to come to pass, would provide two Progressive-Democrat Senators to the Senate—and that’s why it’s Progressive-Democrats who are making the push. The same problem would exist were DC just as partisan, but Republican, and Republicans were making the push, and the solution would be just as invalid.

To answer James’ Madison’s Federalist 43 concerns about a State housing the Federal government, Strauss says this new State would exclude the Federal government’s facilities—just surround them entirely:

…Capitol, White House, and other federal buildings would remain in its own neutral area, with only the surrounding area being part of the new state….

Nah. If the politicians are serious about the region simply needing the benefits of statehood, that “surrounding area” should be returned to Maryland and Virginia, from which they were carved in the first place in order to form the District.

There’s no need to create a new State.

Occupation by Remote Control

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Details of the People’s Republic of China’s overt takeover of Hong Kong via its new “security” law have been released by the government organ Xinhua News Agency. The high points, summarized by OANN, are these:

  • Hong Kong must establish a “local” national security council to enforce legislation, headed by the city’s Chief Executive, Carrie Lam
    • to be supervised and guided by a new PRC commission specially created for the purpose
    • a PRC “adviser” will be a member of the council
  • New local police and prosecution units to be set up to investigate, enforce the new law
    • backed by PRC security and intelligence officers deployed to the new commission
  • Lam will have power to appoint judges to hear cases related to national security
    • bypasses existing judicial appointment procedures

Notice the supremacy of the PRC law over Hong Kong domestic law.

Notice, too, that those entities each have a Communist Party of China apparatchik embedded.

Misapprehensions

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Here is one. In an editorial in Friday’s Wall Street Journal concerning the ripened crop of charges brought by Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard Jr against a cop in the Rayshard Brooks shooting, the Editorial Board hazarded this bit:

Yet amid protests and riots over police brutality—arsonists burned down the Wendy’s where the Brooks shooting took place—prosecutors are under pressure to pursue maximum charges against officers.

No. Prosecutors aren’t under any pressure at all beyond what they inflict on themselves in their fetid timidity. The howling mob cannot threaten their jobs. Only their bosses can and then only through specified procedure—which in the Georgia county prosecutor’s case is the next election—and his bosses haven’t spoken yet.

Even at that, though, if this prosecutor feels pressure now from his bosses, it’s only because he favors his job over his honor.

Howard’s surrender to any (self-inflicted) “pressure” simply amplifies the…foolishness…of his stampede to virtue signal; it simply increases the risk to confidence in the legal system should Rolfe be acquitted on the overcharged, hastily done batch.

In the event, Rolfe’s legal team should push hard for his Constitutional right to a speedy and public trial, since of course Howard is ready to go to trial, else he would not have filed the charges.