Tag Archives: rights

Mao-ist China Returns?

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People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping has been consolidating his power and centralizing control of the PRC in his hands for a while.

Now he’s seizing more direct control of the nation’s economy.  Xi has removed Lou Jiwei, the PRC Minister of Finance from office.  Lou was “reform-minded” (read: more open and freely operating domestic markets with a more rational tax régime), but that conflicted with Xi’s demand for more government control over those same domestic markets.  Xi has reassigned Lou to run the nation’s pension fund.  The fund is in a disastrous condition; this is simply a move to set Lou up for failure and removal from government altogether.

Look for Li Keqiang, the PRC’s Premier of the State Council (so far) and nominal number two in the government, to go next.

All that’s remaining is to see whether these folks go into peaceful “retirement” or they’re given reeducation coursework to complete in a quiet rural environment.

Nor does this bode well for the PRC’s international behavior generally, nor does it indicate any interest in Xi’s improving relationships with American government officials.  This consolidation simply makes it easier for him to pursue his economic warfare against us through his government’s cyber attacks and cyber spying against our businesses, our nation’s economic infrastructure, and our nation’s government.

A Couple of Litmus Tests

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The two major party Presidential candidates have them.  All Presidents and candidates who wish to nominate Supreme Court Justices have them; some are more or less legitimate than others.

Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s wants:

The kind of people that I would be looking to nominate to the court would be in the great tradition of standing up to the powerful, standing up on behalf of our rights as Americans[.]

Read that again.  Clinton wants Justices who put social agendas ahead of the actual law before them, ahead of the text of the Constitution, ahead of the Justices’ own oaths of office, which swear them to uphold and defend the Constitution, not ignore it, or “reinterpret” it.

Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s wants:

[Justices who would] interpret the Constitution the way the founders wanted it interpreted.

Notice that.  Justices who will do the opposite of what Clinton’s choices will do: rule on the basis of what the law and the Constitution actually say, rather than on what the Justices might wish had been said.

There’s just one more litmus test that I would add, one as general and carefully nonspecific as Trump’s: lose deference to the other branches of the Federal government.  The founders also wrote the Judicial branch as the equal of the Legislative and Executive branches.  No deference is owed, no deference is legitimate.  Deference subordinates what is intended to be a coequal branch of the government to the other two.  Besides, a law is Constitutional, or it is not; that does not depend in any way on who says it.   Further, a matter before the Court comports with the law and the Constitution on its merits, or it does not; that does not depend on who is bringing or defending the matter.

One of these two will be nominating Justices in the next term—at least one, likely three, and maybe four or five.  The next President will determine the tenor of the Court and the viability of our legal system for generations.

It’s clear which set of choices are better for the present and long term health of our nation.

A Protest for Free Speech

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On Wednesday, the Young Conservatives of Texas club at the University of Texas at Austin held an “affirmative action bake sale” offering cookies at different prices based on the race and sex of the buyer.

A cookie cost $1.50 for Asian males, $1 for white males, and 50 cents for African-American and Hispanic males. Cookies for American Indians of both genders were free of charge.

[The affirmative action link is in the original of the above quote; I included it so readers can see Instagram’s complicity at the time of my writing (27 Oct) in censoring this bit of news.]

That pricing is a direct reflection of the nature of UT Austin’s affirmative action programs, which similarly varies accesses to the school based on ethnicity and not merit.

But never mind that.  The school objected to having its racist policies so blatantly illustrated.  Gregory Vincent, the school’s Vice President for Diversity and Community Engagement, had this on the matter:

[F]ocusing our attention on the provocative nature of the YCT’s actions ignores a much more important issue: they create an environment of exclusion and disrespect among our students, faculty and staff[.]

Such dialectics are at the core of freely conducted debate, though.  This university’s management plainly does not understand actual freedoms acknowledged in the First Amendment.

Embarrassingly, Vincent went on, and unable to form a coherent argument on the matter, stooped to attacking the protestors and not the protestors’ argument.

He…questioned the club’s motive behind the bake sale.

This is what our State’s tax dollars are buying, and it’s not education.

Guilty

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Concerning Eric Garner’s chokehold death, Attorney General Loretta Lynch (D) has made up her mind.  NYPD officers are guilty of murder, and she wants a prompt hanging, no more delays.  Those impertinent New York City-based FBI agents, all of whom have recommended against Federal charges against the officers, have been relieved of their duties on the case and replaced en masse by FBI agents from…elsewhere.  Lynch’s DC-located Civil Rights Division of her DoJ have taken the matter over.

Never mind that a State investigation has already been completed, and the State’s prosecutor failed to get a grand jury to indict—in an environment (not limited to New York) where a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich—any of NYPD’s finest in the case.

Lynch Knows Better.