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COVID-19: It is our Constitution which is at the greatest risk of death

I have been critical of the illegal and unconstitutional actions some of our nation’s governors and mayors have taken during the COVID-19 crisis, who believe that they can use the COVID-19 emergency to violate the Constitution, but Mayor Bill deBlasio (NSDAP-New York City) takes first prize in the fascist authoritarian derby:

NYC may close churches, synagogues that don’t comply with coronavirus orders, de Blasio warns

By Vandana Rambaran | Fox News | May 29, 2020

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio warned Friday that the city could shut down certain places of worship if people continued to violate the state’s stay-at-home mandates and continue congregating for religious services there.

“A small number of religious communities, specific churches and specific synagogues are unfortunately not paying attention to this guidance even though it’s so widespread,” de Blasio, a Democrat, said at a news conference on the coronavirus outbreak.

City officials have continued to work rigorously to control the spread of COVID-19 as cases climbed over 1,000 on Sunday despite statewide closures of schools and non-essential businesses.

His Dishonor said:

No faith tradition endorses anything that endangers the members of that faith. So, the NYPD, Fire Department, Buildings Department, and everyone has been instructed that if they see worship services going on, they will go to the officials of that congregation, they’ll inform them they need to stop the services and disperse. If that does not happen, they will take additional action up to the point of fines and potentially closing the building permanently.

The First Amendment to the Constitution specifies:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Fourteenth Amendment has been used by the Supreme Court to ‘incorporate’ the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, to include state and local government action. Yet His Dishonor would prohibit the free exercise of religion, the way that some others have attempted to abridge the right of the people peaceably to assemble.

These idiotic mayors, and Mr deBlasio is but one of those who believes he has the right to be an authoritarian dictator, need to be slapped down, slapped down hard. They think that they are saving lives, but what they are doing is killing our constitutional rights. If we surrender them, ‘temporarily,’ because it’s an ’emergency,’ who can know when the next ’emergency’ will see them surrendered again.

Apparently we have learned nothing from history, nothing. In 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg, at the urging of Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler, issued a decree suspending the freedom of speech and of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, and the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications. Warrants for house searches and orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property were also made less difficult to get, all because of the ’emergency’ of the Reichstag fire. Scream “Emergency, emergency!” and it seems that you can get anything passed, in 1933 Germany, and 2020 America.

It wasn’t long after, slightly less than a month actually, that the Reichstag and Reichsrat passed the Enabling Act, which allowed the cabinet, technically, but the Reichs Chancellor, in practice, to issue decrees which had the full force of parliamentary-passed law, making Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship legal and official.  In the United States, in 2020, we haven’t even taken that step, but are allowing governors and mayors to get away with ruling by decree, and they are doing so to almost universal praise by the very people on whose rights they are trampling.

It is incredible, really. The left have been screaming that President Trump is a fascist and a dictator ever since November 9, 2016, but they are meekly accepting dictatorial actions and authority by several Democratic governors and mayors. Sadly, a few Republican executives have done the same things.

Der Führer’s dictatorship was a popular one.  He took strong steps to fight the Depression, dramatically cutting unemployment (though workers’ rights were greatly curtailed), he ended what the people saw as the injustice of the Versailles Treaty, put on the spectacular show of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and incorporated Austria and part of Czechoslovakia into the Reich, all without war. Oh, certain people didn’t like it: homosexuals, Gypsies and, most of all, the Jews, but the vast majority of the public were not homosexuals or Gypsies or Jews, and much of the public helped the Nazi regime by pointing out who the ‘undesirables’ were.

And the authoritarianism of our mayors and governors seems to be popular here as well. There are 1,600+ responses to Governor Phil Purphy’s (NSDAP-NJ) tweet, in which he said,

NO CORONA PARTIES. They’re illegal, dangerous, and stupid. We will crash your party. You will pay a big fine. And we will name & shame you until EVERYONE gets this message into their heads,

and the vast majority were positive. It had 71,200+ “likes” on Twitter, and idiots like Vanessa Shives responding:

Dear @GovMurphy  why can’t you just arrest them so they have a criminal record that follows them for the rest of their lives?

In Kentucky, we have been treated to the spectacle of fawning adoration of Governor Andy Beshear (NSDAP-KY), who had ordered the virtual house arrest, enforced by armed guards, of a COVID-19 positive man who refused to self-quarantine.

Gun grabbers like Governor Murphy, Tom Wolf (NSDAP-PA) and John Carney (NSDAP-DE) included gun stores in their ‘non-essential’ business closure orders, trying to restrict people’s Second Amendment rights, though the latter two eventually backed off.

This will not end well. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, so many have surrendered essential liberty in the hopes of some temporary security from COVID-19. Dr Franklin was literally risking his life to sign the Declaration of Independence, while Americans today are mostly risking far less. While potentially deadly, most of those who do contract COVID-19 survive it, though uncomfortably for a couple of weeks.

The greater risk of death is to our constitutional rights, not because the Constitution has changed, but because so many have proven so willing to surrender their rights.

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Déjà Vu All Over Again

Early 2016 is reborn! From The New York Times:

No, Not Sanders, Not Ever

He is not a liberal, he’s the end of liberalism.

By David Brooks | Opinion Columnist | February 27, 2020

A few months ago, I wrote a column saying I would vote for Elizabeth Warren over Donald Trump. I may not agree with some of her policies, but culture is more important than politics. She does not spread moral rot the way Trump does.

Now I have to decide if I’d support Bernie Sanders over Trump.

We all start from personal experience. I covered the Soviet Union in its final decrepit years. The Soviet and allied regimes had already slaughtered 20 million people through things like mass executions and intentional famines. Those regimes were slave states. They enslaved whole peoples and took away the right to say what they wanted, live where they wanted and harvest the fruits of their labor.

And yet every day we find more old quotes from Sanders apologizing for this sort of slave regime, whether in the Soviet Union, Cuba or Nicaragua. He excused the Nicaraguan communists when they took away the civil liberties of their citizens. He’s still making excuses for Castro.

To sympathize with these revolutions in the 1920s was acceptable, given their original high ideals. To do so after the Hitler-Stalin pact, or in the 1950s, is appalling. To do so in the 1980s is morally unfathomable.

There’s much more at the link.

David Brooks is yet another of the conservative #NeverTrumpers, and while liberals like Bari Weiss, a fellow Times opinion writer, and others have been spreading Mr Brooks’ message, much of the left have no use for him.

Mr Brooks wrote a similar article in March of 2016, with virtually the same title, “No, Not Trump, Not Ever.” His complain then, as now, is less about the individual than it is about populism.

Populism is a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups, but nothing in that definition naturally pushes it to the right or the left. Being an “us against them”, plebeians versus patricians type of philosophy, populism is somewhat defined by whom the elites happen to be. In 2016, for Donald Trump’s voters, as well as the Brexiteers, it was the liberal political establishment, while, in the same year, for the #BernieBros, it was capitalism and the economic elites.

The two articles by Mr Brooks are not mirror images of each other. In the newer, he claims that Mr Sanders is more revolutionary than he claims to be, and that his partisans are so disgusted with the system that they want to tear it down.

A liberal sees inequality and tries to reduce it. A populist sees remorseless class war and believes in concentrated power to crush the enemy.

Four years previously, he wrote:

Trump voters are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else.

In the older article, the author, noting Mr Trump’s stunning, unexpected electoral success, is explicit in his contempt for the American voters:

The voters have spoken.

In convincing fashion, Republican voters seem to be selecting Donald Trump as their nominee. And in a democracy, victory has legitimacy to it. Voters are rarely wise but are usually sensible. They understand their own problems. And so deference is generally paid to the candidate who wins.

And deference is being paid. Gov. Rick Scott of Florida is urging Republicans to coalesce around Trump. Pundits are coming out with their “What We Can Learn” commentaries. Those commentaries are built on a hidden respect for the outcome, that this is a rejection of a Republicanism that wasn’t working and it points in some better direction.

The question is: Should deference be paid to this victor? Should we bow down to the judgment of these voters?

He was less dismissive, explicitly, in the newer article, but it remains implied:

There is a specter haunting the world — corrosive populisms of right and left. These populisms grow out of real problems but are the wrong answers to them. For the past century, liberal Democrats from F.D.R. to Barack Obama knew how to beat back threats from the populist left. They knew how to defend the legitimacy of our system, even while reforming it.

Mr Brooks’ argument boils down to one simple thing, the old Wizard of Id cartoon in which the town crier yells, “The peasants are revolting,” to which the king replies, “You can say that again.”

Mr Brooks, whose net worth is estimated at $9 million, is definitely not one of the peasants. His political instincts are at least moderately conservative, but he was perfectly fine with 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, saying that she was determined, industrious even though somewhat unimaginative. To him, Mrs Clinton, though she’d doubtlessly have been further to the left than he would have liked, would still be a safe muddle at least somewhat close to the middle. For the patricians, a muddle in the middle is just what they want. It keeps them nice and safe and protects their status. Had he been in the Continental Congress on July 2, 1776, when Congress officially declared our independence, he would have voted against it.

But Mr Brooks, in his rhetorical question asking whether the judgement of the voters should be respected, at least recognized part of the problem:

Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how (Trump voters) would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.

No, his cronies and he were not “socially intermingled” with Mr Trump’s supporters, as the dismissive attitude of the coasties expressed by the term “flyover country” so potently demonstrated. As I noted on September 6, 2016, Heather Long, now of The Washington Post but then for CNN Money, reported that “Most Americans think unemployment is a lot higher than 5%. Americans think the economy is in far worse shape than it is.”

The U.S. unemployment rate is only 4.9%, but 57% of Americans believe it’s a lot higher than that, according to a new survey by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

The general public has “extremely little factual knowledge” about the job market and labor force, Rutgers found.

It’s another example of how experts on Wall Street and in Washington see the economy differently than the regular Joe. Many of the nation’s top economic experts say that America is “near full employment.” The unemployment rate has actually been at or below 5% for almost a year — millions of people have found jobs in what is the best period of hiring since the late 1990s.

But regular people appear to have their doubts about how healthy America’s employment picture is. Nearly a third of those survey by Rutgers believe unemployment is actually at 9%, or higher.

I pointed out than that while the ‘official’ U-3 unemployment rate was 4.9%, the U-6 unemployment rate for August, 2016 was 9.7%,¹ not too far off of the ‘common people’s’ estimate that it was “9%, or higher.”

The esteemed Mr Brooks may have recognized his disconnect with the commoners in flyover country, at least back in 2016, but that doesn’t seem to have changed his vision: he really cannot see, cannot understand, what the voters are thinking and feeling.

In this, President Trump ought to be very concerned. It has been reported that Senator Sanders is the opponent most Republicans want to win the nomination, believing that the kooky commie would be the easiest to beat, but remember, Mrs Clinton wanted Mr Trump to win the GOP nomination in 2016, thinking that he would be the easiest candidate for her to defeat. These things don’t always work out the way people expect.
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¹ – U-6 unemployment is defined as “Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force. Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for work. Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.

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Hold them accountable!

The case of Hugo Villanueva-Morales has made the news. Mr Villanueva-Morales and Javier Alatorre, 23, are the suspects in the Tequila KC bar mass shooting in Kansas City, Kansas. Mr Alatorre has been apprehended and charged with four counts of murder, but Mr Villanueva-Morales is still at large. In the shooting, Mr Villanueva-Morales had, allegedly, been kicked out of the bar, left, got Mr Alatorre, and the two then returned to the bar and started shooting.

The mass shooting hasn’t attracted quite as much attention from the gun control press, possibly because the motive wasn’t some form of white supremacy but an intoxicated rage, and, I have to wonder, because the alleged perpetrators aren’t evil white men.

It also turns out that Mr Villanueva-Morales is a previously convicted felon, so he was in violation of gun control laws already, simply by having a weapon. And he shouldn’t have been able to commit the crime at all, because he should have already been in jail. From the Kansas City Star:

Judge gave KCK mass shooting suspect probation last year instead of 9 years in prison

By Katie Bernard | October 9, 2019 | 12:03 PM

More than a year before Hugo Villanueva-Morales allegedly walked into a packed Kansas City, Kansas, bar and began shooting, a Leavenworth judge had given him probation instead of nine years in prison.

In doing so the judge, who made news earlier this year for another controversial sentencing decision, departed from state sentencing guidelines over the objections of prosecutors.

Further down:

More than a year ago, in August 2018, Villanueva-Morales pleaded guilty to trafficking contraband in the Lansing Correctional Facility, where he was serving time for a 2011 aggravated robbery in Wyandotte County.

Trafficking contraband in prison is a charge that can carry more than nine years in prison.

Leavenworth Judge Michael Gibbens instead sentenced him to two years of probation because he “accepted responsibility” according to court documents.

Prosecutors opposed the decision.

“We did argue for prison,” said County Attorney Todd Thompson. “But there’s no way anyone could foresee this horrific tragedy from a possession of synthetic marijuana case in prison.”

Gibbens did not respond to The Star’s request for comment.

Gibbens is the same judge who made national news earlier this year when he reduced the sentence of a convicted sex offender because he said the 13 and 14-year-old girls who were victims in the abuse were actually “aggressors.”

The Star’s story has more on Mr Villanueva-Morales’ rap sheet, but that’s not necessary for this article. The alleged perpetrator is the same kind of bad dude we far too frequently read about, and an idiotic judge, who had the opportunity to keep Mr Villanueva-Morales locked up swallowed some sob story and gave him probation, in effect turning him lose on the streets of Kansas City, Kansas.

The article noted that the Kansas state legislature, following Judge Gibbens decision in the child molestation case, changed the law to disallow judges from reducing sentences on sex crimes against minors just because the children might have been willing participants. But no disciplinary action was taken against the judge, because even though he is boneheadedly stupid, he apparently broke no laws.

And that’s the problem: public servants in the lawful performance of their duties are not accountable for the consequences of their actions. But, make no mistake about it: if Messrs Villanueva-Morales and Alatorre actually are the killers, then Judge Gibbens is just as responsible for Everardo Meza, 29, Alfredo Calderon Jr., 29, Francisco Garcia Anaya, 34, and Martin Rodriguez-Gonzalez, 58 being stone-cold graveyard dead as the shooters! If Messrs Villanueva-Morales and Alatorre are convicted of this crime, Judge Gibbens should be right there with them, sharing the same prison cell.

He won’t, of course, because he was simply exercising his judgement in the performance of his duties, but his terrible judgement left four people dead and five others wounded. He should be publicly shamed, shunned by everyone who knows him, and driven from the bench. People should refuse to do business with him. Pickets should be set up outside of his home. The families of the victims should try to sue him, personally, into penury and homelessness, and while such a lawsuit probably wouldn’t work, it would expose him to more ridicule and public shaming, and cost him a good deal of money in legal fees.

We need to hold public officials accountable for the consequences of their decisions. Law enforcement officers who let illegal immigrants go rather than turning them over to ICE should he be held personally and criminally liable for any further crimes committed by those illegals. Judges who let off hardened criminals with light, or no, sentences upon conviction, should he held personally, and criminally, liable for crimes committed by the thugs they had the power to send to prison, but did not.

Hold them accountable!

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Once Again, The New York Times Opines Against First Amendment Protections . . . For Wrongthinkers

In 1971, President Richard Nixon sought a restraining order to prevent The New York Times and The Washington Post from printing more of the so-called “Pentagon Papers,” technically the Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, a classified history and assessment of American policy and operations in the Vietnam war. The Times and the Post fought the injunctions in court, the Times winning in New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971). The Times was all about the First Amendment and Freedom of the Press.

Well, that was then, and this is now:

Free Speech Is Killing Us

Noxious language online is causing real-world violence. What can we do about it?

By Andrew Marantz¹ | October 4, 2019 | 6:01 AM EDT

There has never been a bright line between word and deed. Yet for years, the founders of Facebook and Twitter and 4chan and Reddit — along with the consumers obsessed with these products, and the investors who stood to profit from them — tried to pretend that the noxious speech prevalent on those platforms wouldn’t metastasize into physical violence. In the early years of this decade, back when people associated social media with Barack Obama or the Arab Spring, Twitter executives referred to their company as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” Sticks and stones and assault rifles could hurt us, but the internet was surely only a force for progress.

No one believes that anymore. Not after the social-media-fueled campaigns of Narendra Modi and Rodrigo Duterte and Donald Trump; not after the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Va.; not after the massacres in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and a Walmart in a majority-Hispanic part of El Paso. The Christchurch shooter, like so many of his ilk, had spent years on social media trying to advance the cause of white power. But these posts, he eventually decided, were not enough; now it was “time to make a real life effort post.” He murdered 52 people.

That the editors of the Times considered this an important article is demonstrated by the title graphic, a bit more ornate than is typical:

It was spread full sized across the screen, taking up both the width and depth of my fairly large-sized monitor. This was a can’t-not-notice display, something the editors use to grab your attention.

Mr Marantz, the author, continued:

Having spent the past few years embedding as a reporter with the trolls and bigots and propagandists who are experts at converting fanatical memes into national policy, I no longer have any doubt that the brutality that germinates on the internet can leap into the world of flesh and blood.

The question is where this leaves us. Noxious speech is causing tangible harm. Yet this fact implies a question so uncomfortable that many of us go to great lengths to avoid asking it. Namely, what should we — the government, private companies or individual citizens — be doing about it?

He has now made the argument of speech causing tangible harm, pretty much the opposite argument made by the Times in 1971, when the government claimed a “clear and present danger” in publishing the Pentagon Papers. Speech, at least the unregulated speech of “trolls and bigots and propagandists,” has caused direct harm, and, of course, he argued that free speech, in the form of “social-media-fueled campaigns,” helped elect right-wing leaders Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte, and, of course, the evil Donald Trump. No wonder Mr Marantz is appalled!

The author’s bias is apparent in so many ways. The speech he decries is all from the right side of the political spectrum. Not a word was published against the speech of Antifa, which has led to violence from the far left in this country. There was no criticism of speech by those supporting the socialist regime in Nicaragua or advocating the same socialism which led to totalitarianism and as many as 100 million deaths in the old Soviet Union, in Communist China, in Pol Pot’s Cambodia and North Korea. No, he was concerned that a social media campaign helped elect Donald Trump!

Mr Marantz, while exercising his First Amendment rights, clearly does not like the unregulated speech of others:

After one of the 8chan-inspired massacres — I can’t even remember which one, if I’m being honest — I struck up a conversation with a stranger at a coffee shop. We talked about how bewildering it was to be alive at a time when viral ideas can slide so precipitously into terror. Then I wondered what steps should be taken. Immediately, our conversation ran aground. “No steps,” he said. “What exactly do you have in mind? Thought police?” He told me that he was a leftist, but he considered his opinion about free speech to be a matter of settled bipartisan consensus.

I imagined the same conversation, remixed slightly. What if, instead of talking about memes, we’d been talking about guns? What if I’d invoked the ubiquity of combat weapons in civilian life and the absence of background checks, and he’d responded with a shrug? Nothing to be done. Ever heard of the Second Amendment?

So, he believes that it is a problem, is out of character, for a self-identified “leftist” to support freedom of speech? We did learn about his feelings concerning our rights under the Second Amendment; is it any wonder that conservatives don’t trust leftists?

Using “free speech” as a cop-out is just as intellectually dishonest and just as morally bankrupt. For one thing, the First Amendment doesn’t apply to private companies. Even the most creative reader of the Constitution will not find a provision guaranteeing Richard Spencer a Twitter account. But even if you see social media platforms as something more akin to a public utility, not all speech is protected under the First Amendment anyway. Libel, incitement of violence and child pornography are all forms of speech. Yet we censor all of them, and no one calls it the death knell of the Enlightenment.

No, actually. We punish the consequences of such speech, but we do not censor it. We do not have all speech going through government-controlled channels to nip such things in the bud before they ever hit people’s computer screens, but we can punish people for causing harm by speech. But perhaps that government-controlled channel is what he wants:

Congress could fund, for example, a national campaign to promote news literacy, or it could invest heavily in library programming. It could build a robust public media in the mold of the BBC. It could rethink Section 230 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — the rule that essentially allows Facebook and YouTube to get away with (glorification of) murder. If Congress wanted to get really ambitious, it could fund a rival to compete with Facebook or Google, the way the Postal Service competes with FedEx and U.P.S.

Facebook and YouTube get away with the glorification of murder? Might as well mention Hollywood, and the body count racked up by Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s Terminator series, Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo movies and, let’s be honest, every action-adventure movie ever made. Heck, even the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings movies were filled with death and destruction, albeit that it was mostly orcs and goblins who bit the dust therein.

But I digress. Mr Marantz apparently sees some great good in a government-controlled social media network, forgetting, perhaps, the old Russian saying, В Правде нет новостей, и в Известиях нет правды.² Government organs of information are controlled by the government, and if the BBC is mostly innocuous, it isn’t completely. Given how the British have criminalized certain speech, something happening in the United States as well, perhaps Mr Marantz might remember just who is President. Perhaps had such existed when Barack Obama was President, the government could have censored all of the information about Hillary Clinton and gotten her elected President, which would have made Mr Marantz happier, but Donald Trump is President now, and might be for the next 5¼ years. I’m guessing that he wouldn’t like an official social media channel controlled by conservatives.

Free speech is a bedrock value in this country. But it isn’t the only one. Like all values, it must be held in tension with others, such as equality, safety and robust democratic participation. Speech should be protected, all things being equal. But what about speech that’s designed to drive a woman out of her workplace or to bully a teenager into suicide or to drive a democracy toward totalitarianism? Navigating these trade-offs is thorny, as trade-offs among core principles always are. But that doesn’t mean we can avoid navigating them at all.

Those first two examples already have legal problems, in that they aren’t subject to prior censorship, but the speakers can be held liable for illegal actions.

The third, “drive a democracy toward totalitarianism?” That is what bothers Mr Marantz, given that he seems to believe that was what happened in 2016. I could argue that it is the policies enunciated by the various Democratic candidates, which include confiscation of some firearms, and restrictions on personal actions and vehicles with the “Green New Deal” proposals; why shouldn’t those be censored?

Mr Marantz suggested that it needn’t be the government, that private companies could “ban inflammatory accounts, take down graphic videos, even rewrite their terms of service.” That’s something they already do, far too much, with a decided tendency to censor conservatives much more than the left. Twitter bans “deadnaming” and “misgendering”, not allowing any discussion of whether the ‘transgendered’ really are the sex they claim to be rather than their biological sex — something The New York Times gave Parker Malloy space to claim actually promotes freedom of speech³ — and Mr Marantz himself noted, with some apparent glee, that two far-right speakers, Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos, “have been permanently banned from all major (social media) platforms.”

The notion of banning “egregious actors” on the left?  That got no support, or even mention, by Mr Marantz.

Mr Marantz’s totalitarian impulses were evident in his concluding paragraph:

In one of our conversations, (John A. Powell, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley) compared harmful speech to carbon pollution: People are allowed to drive cars. But the government can regulate greenhouse emissions, the private sector can transition to renewable energy sources, civic groups can promote public transportation and cities can build sea walls to prepare for rising ocean levels. We could choose to reduce all of that to a simple dictate: Everyone should be allowed to drive a car, and that’s that. But doing so wouldn’t stop the waters from rising around us.

The philosophy of the left is the impulse to control, to control everybody. It’s supposedly all for our own good, of course, so we couldn’t possibly object to that.

The New York Times has a long and distinguished record of being champions for First Amendment protections and freedoms . . . for itself. For other people? Not so much. The editors of the Times appear to believe in the freedom of speech for those who rightthink, but for those who commit the thoughtcrime of wrongthink, well, they don’t really deserve to be able to speak, do they? After all, it’s harmful to our civil society!
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¹ – Andrew Marantz (@AndrewMarantz) is a staff writer for The New Yorker. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book, “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.”
² – There is no news in Pravda, and no truth in Izvestia.
³ – Parker Malloy is a male claiming that he is female.
______________________________

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Hold them accountable!

It’s a very good thing that prosecutors let Jeffrey Epstein skate on charges in 2008. Well, that good thing comes at a cost, the cost being an unknown number of other teenaged girls being sexually abused, but maybe, just maybe, some real good can come of this. From The Miami Herald:

Lead U.S. prosecutor in ’08 Epstein case — who sources say wanted to charge him — resigns

BY Julie K Brown and Jay Weaver | August 8, 2019 07:38 PM | Updated August 9, 2019 2:48 PM

A. Marie Villafaña, the lead federal prosecutor who helped negotiate a controversial plea deal for accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, has submitted her resignation to the Justice Department, the Miami Herald has learned.

Her departure comes amid a federal probe into the role she and other federal prosecutors, including her former boss, Alexander Acosta, had in sidelining a 53-page indictment against the wealthy New York investor in favor of a state plea to minor prostitution charges in 2008. Epstein, 66, was accused of molesting dozens of underage girls, most of them 14 to 16 years old, at his Palm Beach mansion more than a decade ago. He is now facing federal sex trafficking charges involving minors brought against him last month by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.

The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) is examining whether Acosta, who resigned his cabinet post as secretary of labor last month — and other U.S. prosecutors involved in the 2007-2008 case — committed misconduct in negotiating the secret pact with Epstein. A federal judge in February ruled that the prior deal was illegally negotiated because Epstein and federal prosecutors concealed it from his victims in violation of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act.

The Herald has learned that several people involved in the Epstein case have been questioned by the Justice Department in recent weeks as part of its ongoing OPR investigation.

There’s more at the original, but Mrs Villafaña is the last member of the federal investigation team who is still employed by the Department of Justice.

Mr Epstein was given special treatment during his incarceration in 2009, being allowed to work in his office on work release, being chauffeured, and allowed to sleep with his cell door open when he was in jail. While the story says nothing about money changing hands, the mollycoddled treatment he received certainly raises questions about it. Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL):

ordered a criminal investigation into the state’s handling of the Epstein case, from his sentencing in 2008 to his incarceration and probation in 2009. In 2006, former Palm Beach State Attorney Barry Krischer declined to prosecute Epstein on serious sex charges, which led to the U.S. Attorney and FBI taking over the case in 2007.

My website, The First Street Journal, has a long series called Hold Them Accountable, in which we have urged that government officials who treat criminals too leniently or release them too soon be held responsible for the crimes that those criminals commit at times when they should have still been locked up. If these investigations concerning the lenient treatment Mr Epstein received result in criminal convictions and prison time, it will send a message to other law enforcement officials: if you don’t do your jobs right, you, too, can go to jail.

And I’m guessing that prosecutors, policemen and sheriffs who wind up in jail will not have a pleasant experience therein.

It’s a shame that there were (probably) more young teenagers (allegedly) raped and sexually abused and held as virtual slaves by Mr Epstein and his cronies, but past episodes of lenient behavior like this: several Philadelphia Police officers went to early graves because weak-willed judges gave out too lenient sentences and prosecutors let criminals off too easily, but somehow dead cops don’t quite resonate the way abused pretty girls do. Repugnant as it is to say, maybe we needed to have those additional victims abused to get something done.

If Mr Epstein is convicted, he’ll spend the rest of his miserable life locked up. Of course, that could have been the case starting in 2008, but some people didn’t do their jobs. They need to be held accountable for the injuries done to Mr Epstein’s (alleged) victims during that time.

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Hold them accountable!

It’s a very good thing that prosecutors let Jeffrey Epstein skate on charges in 2008. Well, that good thing comes at a cost, the cost being an unknown number of other teenaged girls being sexually abused, but maybe, just maybe, some real good can come of this. From The Miami Herald:

BY Julie K Brown and Jay Weaver | August 8, 2019 07:38 PM | Updated August 9, 2019 2:48 PM

A. Marie Villafaña, the lead federal prosecutor who helped negotiate a controversial plea deal for accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, has submitted her resignation to the Justice Department, the Miami Herald has learned.

Her departure comes amid a federal probe into the role she and other federal prosecutors, including her former boss, Alexander Acosta, had in sidelining a 53-page indictment against the wealthy New York investor in favor of a state plea to minor prostitution charges in 2008. Epstein, 66, was accused of molesting dozens of underage girls, most of them 14 to 16 years old, at his Palm Beach mansion more than a decade ago. He is now facing federal sex trafficking charges involving minors brought against him last month by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.

The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) is examining whether Acosta, who resigned his cabinet post as secretary of labor last month — and other U.S. prosecutors involved in the 2007-2008 case — committed misconduct in negotiating the secret pact with Epstein. A federal judge in February ruled that the prior deal was illegally negotiated because Epstein and federal prosecutors concealed it from his victims in violation of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act.

The Herald has learned that several people involved in the Epstein case have been questioned by the Justice Department in recent weeks as part of its ongoing OPR investigation.

There’s more at the original, but Mrs Villafaña is the last member of the federal investigation team who is still employed by the Department of Justice.

Mr Epstein was given special treatment during his incarceration in 2009, being allowed to work in his office on work release, being chauffeured, and allowed to sleep with his cell door open when he was in jail. While the story says nothing about money changing hands, the mollycoddled treatment he received certainly raises questions about it. Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL):

ordered a criminal investigation into the state’s handling of the Epstein case, from his sentencing in 2008 to his incarceration and probation in 2009. In 2006, former Palm Beach State Attorney Barry Krischer declined to prosecute Epstein on serious sex charges, which led to the U.S. Attorney and FBI taking over the case in 2007.

My website, The First Street Journal, has a long series called Hold Them Accountable, in which we have urged that government officials who treat criminals too leniently or release them too soon be held responsible for the crimes that those criminals commit at times when they should have still been locked up. If these investigations concerning the lenient treatment Mr Epstein received result in criminal convictions and prison time, it will send a message to other law enforcement officials: if you don’t do your jobs right, you, too, can go to jail.

And I’m guessing that prosecutors, policemen and sheriffs who wind up in jail will not have a pleasant experience therein.

If Mr Epstein is convicted, he’ll spend the rest of his miserable life locked up. Of course, that could have been the case starting in 2008, but some people didn’t do their jobs. They need to be held accountable for the injuries done to Mr Epstein’s (alleged) victims during that time.

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The nanny state prepares to strike again

As William Teach pointed out, it’s rather humorous that the Pyrite State is so worried about sugary drinks, yet legalized marijuana usage. From the Los Angeles Times:

Is gulping soda as bad as smoking? California seems to think so

By The Times Editorial Board | March 4, 2019 | 3:10 AM PST

In California, soda is the new tobacco — at least from a public policy point of view.

Adopting some of the same methods that have been employed to reduce smoking, California legislators have put together an ambitious package of bills aimed at curbing consumption of sodas, energy drinks and other beverages that have added sugar.

The proposals, which are sponsored by the California Medical Assn. and California Dental Assn., include levying a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, mandating warning labels on their bottles and restricting how they are promoted and displayed in stores, as well as limiting the serving size of fountain drinks. The proceeds from the tax (the amount is yet to be determined) would fund programs to prevent obesity, diabetes and other health problems associated with the overconsumption of sugar.

It’s an intriguing approach that has already sparked a backlash from the soda industry and a public discussion about what role the government should play in grocery store purchases. Now the onus is on public health officials to make a clear and compelling case about the dangers — and to explain why sugary drinks deserve as harsh a regulatory response as cigarettes.

There’s much more at the original.

Full disclosure: I love Mountain Dew, and I had been consuming mass quantities of it since I was a teenager in the 1960s. It was nothing for me to drink four bottles or cans of Dew in a day, and on a particularly hot summer day, the count could go higher. When we lived in Pennsylvania, I even had my own, separate Dew refrigerator in the basement, because Mrs Pico continually complained that I had the regular ‘fridge set too cold, and was freezing the produce and eggs.

On July 1, 2017, when we moved back to the Bluegrass State, I gave up soda, cold turkey. I really haven’t missed it.

But, I digress. There is little question that soda isn’t particularly good for you; the Times’ editorial board was simply making the case that it hadn’t been proven bad enough for you for California to attempt to regulate and tax into disuse. I find it interesting that a state which has legalized the recreational use and sale of pot, has passed an assisted suicide law, tried to (but shelved) ban homosexual conversion therapy, and makes millions off of advertisements and product placements for the consumption of alcohol, is so very worried that you might drink a Pepsi.

But one of the proposed measures that could show results is definitely worth exploring: taxes on drinks with added sugar. Last week, a three-year study of the tax on sugar-sweetened beverages imposed by Berkeley in 2014 — the first in the nation — found that people in low-income neighborhoods bought fewer sugary drinks after the tax was imposed, while consumption trends remained the same in neighboring cities that didn’t have such a tax. The study also found that the people who drank fewer sugary beverages consumed more water during the same period.

This finding mitigates the argument that such a regressive levy would hit low-income people the hardest. Poorer people, many of them black and Latino, would still suffer, economically and physically, if they continued to drink copious amounts of sugar-sweetened drinks. But black and Latino Californians have higher rates of obesity than other populations, so if the higher cost encouraged them to switch to healthier (and untaxed) water, it would be a double benefit to them.

Translation: yes, it would have a disparate impact on minorities, but it’s for their own good, so that doesn’t matter!

The obvious question has to be asked: why is it any of the government’s business to “encourage” people to change their choices and habits? The city of Philadelphia imposed a special tax on sugary drinks, and part of the effect was to cut revenue to retailers near the city limits when their customers could, and did, easily drive to stores in neighboring Bucks and Montgomery counties to buy Mountain Dew without paying the ridiculous tax. It seems that customers were willing to spend a little more in gasoline to buy what they chose.

Of course, alcohol consumption is worse, far worse, than that of sugary drinks, and nobody in the Pyrite State is (seriously) trying to ban or reduce that. The editors of the Los Angeles Times even advocated changing state law to allow businesses which serve alcohol to continue serving until 4:00 AM rather than the 2:00 last call specified by state law:

California is still hewing to a 1935 law dictating that alcohol sales stop from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m., and that blanket prohibition no longer makes sense for cities with thriving music and nightlife scenes that compete for investment and tourism with the likes of New York City, Las Vegas and other late-night cities.

Heaven forfend! We wouldn’t want the “thriving music and nightlife scenes” to be stifled by not having people drinking during the very wee hours of the morning, would we? At best, I found some California sites which want to help people who drink too much alcohol to moderate their intake, but it seems that nobody wants to curtail it back to zero. The National Institute for Health said:

An estimated 88,0008 people (approximately 62,000 men and 26,000 women) die from alcohol-related causes annually, making alcohol the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States. The first is tobacco, and the second is poor diet and physical inactivity.

Yet California’s legislature doesn’t seem to care much about that!

The truth is that sugary drinks aren’t good for you, tobacco isn’t good for you, alcohol isn’t good for you, and, let’s be honest here, casual sex isn’t good for you, but you sure won’t find the home state of Hollywood trying to discourage the hook up culture!

Governments should just stay out of people’s personal decisions about what to put in their mouths. Yeah, a lot of things people do put in their mouths aren’t good for them, but those are decisions, intelligent or otherwise, which ought to belong to individuals, not politicians.

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Hold them accountable!

If you were a judge, and had a second-time convicted sex offender before you, awaiting sentencing, and you gave him probation rather than the 2 to 2½ years in the penitentiary for which the prosecution asked, and he offended again, is there any reason that you shouldn’t be held liable for the sex offender’s subsequent crimes?

Portland protest leader Micah Rhodes avoids prison for sex abuse
By Aimee Green | agreen@oregonian.com | The Oregonian/OregonLive | July 2, 2018

For the second time in recent weeks, Portland protest leader* Micah Isaiah Rhodes stood before an Oregon judge ready to go to prison for having sexual contact with an underage teen.

And for the second time, an Oregon judge agreed to veer from state sentencing recommendations and give Rhodes five years of probation.

Multnomah County Circuit Judge Jerry Hodson on Monday said he wouldn’t send Rhodes to prison for two to 2½ years because he believes Rhodes earnestly is trying to change despite the prosecution’s arguments to the contrary.

“I can tell that you’re sincere and I can tell that you’ve grown a lot over the last couple of years,” Hodson said as Rhodes wiped away tears.

Rhodes was 20 and 21 at the time of his crimes, in 2014 and 2015.

In March, Rhodes pleaded guilty to two counts of felony second-degree sexual abuse for at least twice having sexual contact with a 17-year-old boy. Investigators say Rhodes met the boy on a gay dating app, and the contact happened in Gresham and Troutdale.

Days earlier, a Washington County jury had found Rhodes guilty of second-degree sexual abuse of a 17-year-old girl. A defense memo said the contact happened after the girl went to watch a movie with Rhodes at his mother’s house.

There’s a lot more at the link, including information concerning Mr Rhodes previous record as a sex offender.

  • At age 14, he sexually abused a 9 year old boy;
  • At age 15, he sexually abused three younger boys. He was convicted as a juvenile of first degree sodomy and sexual abuse; and
  • He has thrice been through sex offender treatment programs, which don’t appear to have worked.

Multnomah County Deputy District Attorney Bumjoon Park said that Mr Rhodes does not respect the authority of the courts and “simply must not believe that having sex with minors is wrong.”

At least Mr Rhodes will have to register as a sex offender, and was ordered to have no contact with minors, but I fail to see how that protects potential victims while he’s out on the street.

Well, guess what? It was only three weeks later that the esteemed Mr Rhodes was arrested for violating the terms of his probation!

Portland protest leader Micah Rhodes is arrested, again

By Aimee Green | agreen@oregonian.com | The Oregonian/OregonLive | July 23, 2018

Portland protest leader Micah Rhodes is back in jail on allegations that he violated terms of his probation by having contact with minors.

Rhodes, 24, was ordered to stay away from anyone under 18 years old after he was convicted this year on three counts of second-degree sexual abuse for having illicit sexual contact with a 17-year-old girl in Washington County and a 17-year-old boy in Multnomah County. The sexual abuse occurred in 2014 and 2015, and Rhodes was 20 and 21 years old at the time.

Washington County Circuit Judge Janelle Wipper and Multnomah County Circuit Judge Jerry Hodson decided in separate hearings not to sentence Rhodes to two to 2 ½ -years in prison, as state sentencing guidelines recommended. Instead, the judges ordered five years of probation for Rhodes with a long list of conditions, including that he was forbidden from being around children without the prior permission of his probation officer.

Last Wednesday, Rhodes was arrested and brought to the Multnomah County Detention Center on accusations that he had been in the presence of children. On Thursday, he was transferred to Washington County Jail, where he remains.

Fortunately, Mr Rhodes does not appear to have molested anyone, but he was caught at the protest “near a 15-year-old boy and outside a tent set up for children’s activities.” This time, Mr Rhodes was finally sent to prison, for 2½ years, for his probation violation.

Get that? Washington County Circuit Court Judge Janelle Wipper wasn’t all that upset that Mr Rhodes had raped minors, but that he had disobeyed her prior court orders! Yeah, the prison term was based on he molestation convictions, but the fact that he was sent to the clink was because he violated his probation.

The teenagers of Washington County are fortunate — as far as we know — in that none of them were raped by an incorrigible sex offender, but Judges Wipper and Hodson still exposed them to that danger. And even with the last violation, Mr Rhodes was sentenced to five years probation, yet Judge Wipper sent him away for only 2½, not five years.

Yeah, I know: government officials are shielded from legal responsibility for the decisions they take in their official capacity, as long as those decisions do not violate the law, and Judges Hodson’s and Wipper’s previous sentencing decisions were perfectly legal; they committed no crimes.

But at some point, such judges must somehow be held accountable when they release criminals on society when they have the power to lock them up, and those criminals re-offend.

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Hold them accountable!

If you were a judge, and had a second-time convicted sex offender before you, awaiting sentencing, and you gave him probation rather than the 2 to 2½ years in the penitentiary for which the prosecution asked, and he offended again, is there any reason that you shouldn’t be held liable for the sex offender’s subsequent crimes?

Portland protest leader Micah Rhodes avoids prison for sex abuse
By Aimee Green | agreen@oregonian.com | The Oregonian/OregonLive | July 2, 2018

For the second time in recent weeks, Portland protest leader* Micah Isaiah Rhodes stood before an Oregon judge ready to go to prison for having sexual contact with an underage teen.

And for the second time, an Oregon judge agreed to veer from state sentencing recommendations and give Rhodes five years of probation.

Multnomah County Circuit Judge Jerry Hodson on Monday said he wouldn’t send Rhodes to prison for two to 2½ years because he believes Rhodes earnestly is trying to change despite the prosecution’s arguments to the contrary.

“I can tell that you’re sincere and I can tell that you’ve grown a lot over the last couple of years,” Hodson said as Rhodes wiped away tears.

Rhodes was 20 and 21 at the time of his crimes, in 2014 and 2015.

In March, Rhodes pleaded guilty to two counts of felony second-degree sexual abuse for at least twice having sexual contact with a 17-year-old boy. Investigators say Rhodes met the boy on a gay dating app, and the contact happened in Gresham and Troutdale.

Days earlier, a Washington County jury had found Rhodes guilty of second-degree sexual abuse of a 17-year-old girl. A defense memo said the contact happened after the girl went to watch a movie with Rhodes at his mother’s house.

There’s a lot more at the link, including information concerning Mr Rhodes previous record as a sex offender.

  • At age 14, he sexually abused a 9 year old boy;
  • At age 15, he sexually abused three younger boys. He was convicted as a juvenile of first degree sodomy and sexual abuse; and
  • He has thrice been through sex offender treatment programs, which don’t appear to have worked.

Multnomah County Deputy District Attorney Bumjoon Park said that Mr Rhodes does not respect the authority of the courts and “simply must not believe that having sex with minors is wrong.”

At least Mr Rhodes will have to register as a sex offender, and was ordered to have no contact with minors, but I fail to see how that protects potential victims while he’s out on the street.

Well, guess what? It was only three weeks later that the esteemed Mr Rhodes was arrested for violating the terms of his probation!

Portland protest leader Micah Rhodes is arrested, again

By Aimee Green | agreen@oregonian.com | The Oregonian/OregonLive | July 23, 2018

Portland protest leader Micah Rhodes is back in jail on allegations that he violated terms of his probation by having contact with minors.

Rhodes, 24, was ordered to stay away from anyone under 18 years old after he was convicted this year on three counts of second-degree sexual abuse for having illicit sexual contact with a 17-year-old girl in Washington County and a 17-year-old boy in Multnomah County. The sexual abuse occurred in 2014 and 2015, and Rhodes was 20 and 21 years old at the time.

Washington County Circuit Judge Janelle Wipper and Multnomah County Circuit Judge Jerry Hodson decided in separate hearings not to sentence Rhodes to two to 2 ½ -years in prison, as state sentencing guidelines recommended. Instead, the judges ordered five years of probation for Rhodes with a long list of conditions, including that he was forbidden from being around children without the prior permission of his probation officer.

Last Wednesday, Rhodes was arrested and brought to the Multnomah County Detention Center on accusations that he had been in the presence of children. On Thursday, he was transferred to Washington County Jail, where he remains.

Fortunately, Mr Rhodes does not appear to have molested anyone, but he was caught at the protest “near a 15-year-old boy and outside a tent set up for children’s activities.” This time, Mr Rhodes was finally sent to prison, for 2½ years, for his probation violation.

Get that? Washington County Circuit Court Judge Janelle Wipper wasn’t all that upset that Mr Rhodes had raped minors, but that he had disobeyed her prior court orders! Yeah, the prison term was based on he molestation convictions, but the fact that he was sent to the clink was because he violated his probation.

The teenagers of Washington County are fortunate — as far as we know — in that none of them were raped by an incorrigible sex offender, but Judges Wipper and Hodson still exposed them to that danger. And even with the last violation, Mr Rhodes was sentenced to five years probation, yet Judge Wipper sent him away for only 2½, not five years.

Yeah, I know: government officials are shielded from legal responsibility for the decisions they take in their official capacity, as long as those decisions do not violate the law, and Judges Hodson’s and Wipper’s previous sentencing decisions were perfectly legal; they committed no crimes.

But at some point, such judges must somehow be held accountable when they release criminals on society when they have the power to lock them up, and those criminals re-offend.