Tag Archives: #Authoritarians

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The left say they are for democracy, but they’re really not We must do as Our Betters say, because it's for our own good!

It took a couple of Washington Post reporters to say the quiet part out loud. According to her Post biography, Lauren Weber joined newspaper in 2023 as an accountability reporter focused on the forces promoting scientific and medical disinformation. She previously investigated the decimated public health system and covid disparities for Kaiser Health News. Yeah, that’s the definition of an unbiased reporter! Joined by Joel Achenbach, they produced this gem:

Covid backlash hobbles public health and future pandemic response

Lawsuits and legislation have stripped public health officials of their powers in three years

By Lauren Weber and Joel Achenbach | Wednesday, March 8, 2023 | 6:00 AM EST

When the next pandemic sweeps the United States, health officials in Ohio won’t be able to shutter businesses or schools, even if they become epicenters of outbreaks. Nor will they be empowered to force Ohioans who have been exposed to go into quarantine. State officials in North Dakota are barred from directing people to wear masks to slow the spread. Not even the president can force federal agencies to issue vaccination or testing mandates to thwart its march.

Conservative and libertarian forces have defanged much of the nation’s public health system through legislation and litigation as the world staggers into the fourth year of covid.

If you hold your cursor on the title tab, you’ll see that the article was originally entitled “Covid lawsuits weakened public health, U.S. pandemic preparedness.” Reporters submit their articles, but editors frequently write the headlines.

But think about what Miss Weber and Mr Achenbach wrote: that “conservative and libertarian forces” — quite the liberal bugaboo there! — used “legislation and litigation” to “(defang) much of the nation’s public health system”. Legislation is the act of legislatures, the elected representatives of the people, and litigation is the use of the courts, the legal system, to bring to account actions taken which might be outside existing law. Are not both acts of democracy in a democratic system?

At least 30 states, nearly all led by Republican legislatures, have passed laws since 2020 that limit public health authority, according to a Washington Post analysis of laws collected by Kaiser Health News and the Associated Press as well as the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and the Center for Public Health Law Research at Temple University.

Health officials and governors in more than half the country are now restricted from issuing mask mandates, ordering school closures and imposing other protective measures or must seek permission from their state legislatures before renewing emergency orders, the analysis showed.

We have previously mentioned Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) dictatorial orders concerning COVID-19 restrictions, and his refusal to involve the General Assembly.

Beshear was asked at Friday’s (July 10, 2020 — Editor) news conference on COVID-19 why he has not included the legislature in coming up with his orders. He said many state lawmakers refuse to wear masks and noted that 26 legislators in Mississippi have tested positive for the virus.

Though the Governor is supposedly very popular, and the public supposedly approve of his handling of COVID-19, the November elections increased Republican control over both chambers of the state legislature. The GOP increased their majority in the state Senate from 28-10 to 30-8, and in the state House of Representatives from 61-37 (with 2 vacancies) to 75-25. Both were, and again are, veto-proof majorities under the state constitution. Republicans campaigned in 2020 on reining in the Governor’s powers, and the voters of the Commonwealth apparently approved of their message.

The subsequent legislative elections, in 2022, further increased the Republicans’ majorities, to 31-7 and 80-20. As an act of democracy in the only polls that count, actual elections, it would appear that the voters approved the Republicans’ actions in the previous legislative sessions.

Of course, our Democratic Governor was appalled that the state legislature would rein him in:

Beshear has indicated he would like no approach at all. He has criticized the effort to restrict his ability to issue executive orders, painting it as a potentially “catastrophic” attempt to limit his ability to deal with COVID-19, and one that would hamstring future governors if another unforeseen emergency arrives.

“I hope when they show up, making a lot of noise, let’s take a breath, let me get on through this and afterwards, have at it,” Beshear told the Herald-Leader when asked about the legislature’s effort to limit executive power. “Then we can go to court or anything else.”

Also see: William Teach: All That Backlash To COVID Tyranny Will Make Next Pandemic Tough

As we have previously noted, the General Assembly passed the bills restricting the Governor’s emergency powers, requiring any executive orders to be approved by the legislature within thirty days or automatically lapse, which Mr Beshear vetoed, his vetoes were promptly and overwhelmingly overridden, and the Governor then went to his toady judge to file suit to overturn the legislature’s actions. It took 5½ months, but the state Supreme Court finally overruled Judge Philip Shepherd’s injunction and stated that the legislature acted within their authority.

All of that, even with the delays, was through the democratic action of a legally elected state legislature, and ruled on by legally elected judges.

That, of course, appalls Miss Weber and Mr Achenbach!

The movement to curtail public health powers successfully tapped into a populist rejection of pandemic measures following widespread anger and confusion over the government response to covid. Grass-roots-backed candidates ran for county commissions and local health boards on the platform of dismantling health departments’ authority. Republican legislators and attorneys general, religious liberty groups and the legal arms of libertarian think tanks filed lawsuits and wrote new laws modeled after legislation promoted by groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative, corporate-backed influence in statehouses across the country.

I just love that paragraph! The authors note a “populist rejection of pandemic measures”, “Grass-roots-backed candidates”, “Republican legislators and attorneys general, religious liberty groups and the legal arms of libertarian think tanks”, and “groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative, corporate-backed influence in statehouses”, all examples of public opinion in democratic action.

The Alabama legislature barred businesses from requiring proof of coronavirus vaccination. In Tennessee, officials cannot close churches during a state of emergency. Florida made it illegal for schools to require coronavirus vaccinations.

We were critical, from the very beginning, of the authoritarian dictates of so many of our nation’s governors when the COVID-19 scare first erupted.

On March 19, 2020 Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) unconstitutionally ordered all churches closed in the Bluegrass State. That order covered the Easter holiday, the most important day in the Christian calendar. When a couple of churches ignored the Governor’s order, he sent the Kentucky State Police to record license plates and vehicle identification numbers on vehicles in church parking lots, on Easter Sunday!

Two federal judges ruled against the Governor, allowing churches to reopen, but they did not rule until May 8, 2020.

The result, public health experts warn, is a battered patchwork system that makes it harder for leaders to protect the country from infectious diseases that cross red and blue state borders.

Well, it will certainly make it hard for dictators to take action! In states like Kentucky, the Governor can issue executive orders, but he has to call the General Assembly into a special session — if they are not already in session — to approve the orders if they are to extend beyond thirty days. That almost sounds, you know, reasonable!

“One day we’re going to have a really bad global crisis and a pandemic far worse than covid, and we’ll look to the government to protect us, but it’ll have its hands behind its back and a blindfold on,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. “We’ll die with our rights on — we want liberty but we don’t want protection.”

There was a rather famous Virginian by the name of Patrick Henry who said something about liberty.

There’s a lot more at the Post’s original, and if you are stymied by the Post’s paywall, you can read the whole thing for free here. But what you will be reading is a thinly-veiled defense of authoritarianism, of allowing Our Betters the power to tell us what we must do and cannot do in the event of the next panicdemic.

No, that’s not a typographical error: I spelled it to indicate exactly what I thought it to be.

The cited article is not listed as an opinion piece, but the authors’ opinions are very, very obvious. That quiet part they said out loud? That we must sit down and shut up, and be ruled by the left.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

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Al Gore’s unhinged rant at Davos The best thing George W Bush ever did was to keep Al Gore and John Kerry out of the White House

We previously noted how Special Envoy for Climate John Kerry told attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that they were a “select group of human beings” who got to talk about saving Mother Gaia from global warming climate change emergency, something about which Robert Stacy McCain wrote in more detail. Not unexpectedly, Mr Kerry was not the only former Democratic presidential nominee to go off anything that could have been considered a preplanned script. Mr Kerry’s remarks were certainly impolitic, as talking to other patricians about how they need to guide the plebeians’ actions is not something which is likely to endear the commoners to Mr Kerry’s, and the other Davos denizens’, ideas, but at least he didn’t go off on an unhinged rant.

Al Gore goes on ‘unhinged’ rant about ‘rain bombs,’ boiled oceans, other climate threats at Davos

Gore claimed climate change could ultimately end mankind’s ability for ‘self-governance’

by Gabriel Hays | Fox News | Wednesday, January 18, 2023 | 12:30 PM EST

Climate activist and former Vice President Al Gore recently went on an “unhinged” rant on the dangers of climate change at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Gore’s speech, which involved him yelling about climate change “boiling the oceans,” causing freak weather occurrences like “rain bombs” and ultimately affecting humanity’s ability for “self-governance,” made for quite the spectacle on the world stage and on social media.

The former U.S. leader and current WEF agenda contributor spoke on the Davos stage in front of the global community urging drastic action on protecting the environment and combating climate change.

One thing is certain: for all of his other faults, we owe the younger George Bush an incalculable debt of gratitude for keeping Messrs Gore and Kerry out of the White House!

You can watch Mr Gore’s rant on the video, below the fold: Continue reading →

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To the surprise of absolutely no one, Philly is reinstating its indoor mask mandate The question is: who will obey it?

Cheryl Bettigole, from BillyPenn.

As we predicted on Aprilth, authoritarians gotta authoritarian, and the City of Brotherly Love is reinstating its indoor mask mandate. But there’s a catch:

    Why Philly is bringing back its indoor mask mandate

    by Jason Laughlin | Monday, April 11, 2022 | 2:50 PM EDT

    By resuming the indoor mask mandate, city officials hope to stave off another surge in hospitalizations and deaths that could accompany the current case increase that appears to be caused by the BA.2 omicron subvariant.

    “If we fail to act now, knowing that every previous wave of infections has been followed by a wave of hospitalizations and a wave of deaths, it’ll be too late for many of our residents,” Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole said during a briefing Monday.

Why, that almost sounds like ‘two weeks to flatten the curve!’

    Bettigole noted that 750 Philadelphians died in three months over the winter during the omicron wave.

    “We don’t know if the BA.2 variant in Philadelphia will have the kind of impact on hospitalizations and deaths that we saw with the original omicron variant this winter,” Bettigole said. “I suspect that this wave will be smaller than the one we saw in January.”

    Hospitalizations may be the key in determining how long the masks will stay on, Bettigole said.

    “This is our chance to get ahead of the pandemic, to put our masks on until we have more information on the severity of this variant.”

But there’s a catch:

    The mandate announced today won’t go into effect until April 18, city health commissioner Cheryl Bettigole said, to give businesses time to adjust. The move came amid rising COVID-19 cases in Philadelphia in recent weeks.

So, the virus will go ahead and wait a week? If it’s serious enough to infringe on people’s rights, then shouldn’t the mask mandate be reinstated immediately?

The Inquirer article was illustrated with this photo of a worker, a masked worker, removing a “Face Coverings Required” sign just last month; the city rescinded its indoor mask mandate on March 1st, just six weeks ago. After over a year and a half of the mandate, and only six weeks of it being gone, just how much adjustment is needed? Isn’t virtually every indoor business in the city already very familiar with the protocols?

In January, acting Food and Drug Administration head Commissioner Janet Woodcock told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee that she expected that, eventually, almost everyone would contract the virus. Celebrity doctor Anthony Fauci said that COVID-19 would infect “just about everybody.” Why, I have to ask, is the city imposing restrictions on people when the supposed experts are telling us that it doesn’t matter, almost everyone is going to contract the virus?

As has been the case in the past, the people who will have to enforce the mask mandate are going to be cute college girls working as hostesses in restaurants, shop keepers and bodega owners. The hoitiest and toitiest restaurants in Center City will put up their signs and make the waitresses mask again, but the small cell phone shops and payday loan sharks and bodegas in North Philadelphia? The last thing that they’re going to want to do is piss off an unmasked customer who’s probably packing heat!

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COVID restrictions are for the plebeians, not the Patricians The autocrats who demanded that you mask up partied hearty without them, even though their servants had to wear face diapers

My good friend — well, good internet friend, anyway; I’ve never actually met him — William Teach noted with some amusement that the hoitiest of the toitiest got together for a Washington party, and BAM! a bunch of them contracted the virus:

    Oops: Big COVID Outbreak From Gridiron Club Dinner

    by William Teach | April 8, 2022 | 6:45 AM EDT

    There are all the people who screeched at people for refusing to be OK with masking and lockdowns and such, who were in favor of government tyranny:

      After Gridiron Dinner, a covid outbreak among Washington A-list guests

      Raimondo, Schiff, Castro, Garland and several other officials or journalists tested positive after the elite Gridiron dinner

      By Paul Farhi, Roxanne Roberts and Yasmeen Abutaleb | Wednesday, April 6, 2022 |Updated: Wednesday, April 6, 2022 | 5:29 PM EDT

      More than a dozen guests who attended Saturday night’s Gridiron Club dinner — including two Cabinet members, two members of Congress and a top aide to Vice President Harris — have since tested positive for coronavirus, sending ripples of anxiety through a city on the cusp of restarting its traditional social whirl after a two-year pause.

      A-list guests were asked to show proof of vaccination but not negative tests, and many mingled freely without masks at the dinner at the downtown Renaissance Washington Hotel.

      But by Wednesday, Reps. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) and Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.) and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo had announced they had tested positive. They were soon followed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, who requested a test Wednesday afternoon after learning he may have been exposed — and discovered that he, too, carried the virus. Thus far, none have reported serious illness.

Gina Raimondo Moffit, as you may recall, when she was Governor of Rhode Island, ordered checks first of all New Yorkers, and then all people from out of state, at the beginning of the COVID-19 scare. She even sent the National Guard door-to-door in coastal resort areas to order out-of-state visitors to self-quarantine for 14 days.

Mrs Moffit, as you might have guessed, grew up in privilege.

Gina Marie Raimondo was born in 1971 in Smithfield, Rhode Island, where she later grew up. Of Italian descent, she is the youngest of Josephine (Piro) and Joseph Raimondo’s three children. Her father, Joseph (1926–2014), made his career at the Bulova watch factory in Providence, Rhode Island. He became unemployed at 56 when the Bulova company decamped operations to China, shuttering the factory in Providence. Raimondo was a childhood friend of U.S. Senator Jack Reed. Raimondo graduated from LaSalle Academy,[1]Current tuition for Grade 12: $16,625. While financial aid is available for ninth through twelfth grades, it is not for middle schoolers. This isn’t a school for poor people. She did veto a … Continue reading in Providence, as one of the first girls allowed to attend the Catholic school, where she was valedictorian.

Raimondo graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude in economics from Harvard College in 1993, where she served on the staff of The Harvard Crimson. While at Harvard, she resided in Quincy House. She attended New College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where she received a Master of Arts (MA) degree and Doctor of Philosophy in 2002 in sociology. Her thesis was on single motherhood and supervised by Stephen Nickell and Anne H. Gauthier while she was a postgraduate student of New College, Oxford. Raimondo received her Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School in 1998.

Following her graduation from law school, Raimondo served as a law clerk to federal judge Kimba Wood of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Later, Raimondo acted as senior vice president for fund development at the Manhattan offices of Village Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and backed by Bain Capital and Highland Capital Groups.

Raimondo returned to Rhode Island in 2000 to co-found the state’s first venture capital firm, Point Judith Capital. Point Judith subsequently relocated its offices to Boston, Massachusetts. At Point Judith, Raimondo served as a general partner covering health care investments; she retains some executive duties with the firm.

A strong advocate of authoritarian COVID-19 restrictions, Mrs Moffit apparently saw those restrictions as being for Other People, not for her.

Mrs Moffit was hardly the only one. The Washington Post original lists many of the guests, and if the Post’s paywall stops you from reading it there, Mr Teach included the link to the same story on Yahoo!, which is free.[2]Yeah, I’m paying for a subscription to The Washington Post.

    Tom DeFrank, a contributing columnist for National Journal and president of the Gridiron Club, said that as of Wednesday afternoon, the group knew of 14 guests who had tested positive.

    “There is no way of being certain about when they first contracted covid,” he said in a statement. “But they did interact with other guests during the night and we have to be realistic and expect some more cases.”

    About half of the cases appeared to have been clustered at three tables, he said, and the club was taking steps to notify anyone who sat next to or across from the infected guests.

    How many of the infections began at the dinner and how serious the outbreak will prove to be remains unclear. Many of the guests have jobs that require regular testing that catches some asymptomatic cases. Castro and Raimondo said they are suffering only mild symptoms while Schiff said he is “feeling fine” — and touted the value of vaccinations and boosters.

    But the outbreak at the Gridiron — where some of the comic skits featured actors dressed as the coronavirus, like large, green bouncing balls with red frills — highlights the personal risk-benefit balancing act much of the country will be negotiating as the pandemic subsides.

Mr Teach again:

    Not that wearing a mask really would have made much difference, but, these are the Elites, so, even if masking was required, only the servants would have been required to wear one. . . . .

    Who wants to be they had no masks on? Oh, wait, what’s this?

      The dinner was supposed to reflect a return to normalcy after being canceled the past two years because of the pandemic. Few guests wore masks or observed social distancing, according to people in attendance. Only the serving staff was consistently masked throughout the evening. While organizers asked attendees to show their vaccination cards at the door, there was no requirement to be tested.

    Who’s surprised that the peons were forced to mask up?

Emphasis Mr Teach’s.

Here we had an “A-List” event — my invitation was apparently lost in the mail! — in which everybody was required to show their papers, their vaccination cards[3]Yes, I have been vaccinated, but I absolutely refuse to carry my vaccination records, and anyone who demands to see my papers, “Papiere, bitte,” will receive an unpolite response., though not required to show the results of a recent test — I wonder if the latter included the servants — yet still the virus apparently propagated from vaccinated person to vaccinated person.

And now, as I predicted three days ago, The Philadelphia Inquirer is projecting that the City of Brotherly Love will reimpose its indoor mask mandate:

    Philly’s indoor mask mandate likely to return next week, as city COVID-19 cases creep upward

    Masks may soon again be needed in public indoor spaces next week, according to a city official.

    by Felicia Gans Sobey, John Duchneskie, and Jason Laughlin | Wednesday, April 6, 2022

    Philadelphia is poised to reinstate its indoor mask mandate next week as COVID-19 cases climb again.

    An Inquirer analysis showed the most current COVID case counts and the percent increase of cases both meet the city’s benchmarks that would trigger the return of the mask mandate for public indoor spaces. The Philadelphia Department of Public Health agreed with the analysis.

    “What we see and know is cases are rising,” said James Garrow, a spokesperson for the department. “People should start taking precautions now.”

    The Inquirer analysis isn’t predictive, and it is possible that key metrics triggering the return of the mask mandate could decrease by Monday. It’s “certainly possible,” Garrow said, but the city has not yet reached the peak of the case increase that appears to be building now. The city will review Monday’s hospitalization numbers and the last seven days of case counts to decide whether to change policies.

    The COVID data are not alarming enough to warrant an immediate change in the city’s mask policies, though, he said. The city has said it would announce changes to its COVID safety requirements on Mondays, and an announcement on whether mask requirements would return would likely come then, Garrow said. If the COVID metrics stay around where they are now, or increase, the health department could choose not to resume mandating masks indoors, he said, but it’s unlikely.

There’s more at the original, but I have to ask: after five weeks of freedom from the odious mask mandate, just how many Philadelphians will obey a new one? After all, even Dr Anthony Fauci is predicting that almost everyone will contract the virus anyway:

    FDA Head: ‘Most people are going to get COVID’

    By Ralph Ellis | January 13, 2022

    With a record number of COVID-19 cases being reported, two top U.S. health officials made a stark prediction on Tuesday: Most Americans eventually will be infected with the virus.

    “I think it’s hard to process what’s actually happening right now, which is most people are going to get COVID,” FDA acting Commissioner Janet Woodcock, MD, told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee.

    Woodcock had been asked if the United States needed to change its COVID strategy. She said people need to accept the reality of widespread infection so the nation can focus on maintaining “continuity of operations” in crucial sectors.

    “What we need to do is make sure the hospitals can still function, transportation, you know, other essential services are not disrupted while this happens,” she said. “I think after that will be a good time to reassess how we’re approaching this pandemic.”

    Anthony Fauci, MD, chief White House medical adviser, said COVID will infect “just about everybody.”

    “Omicron, with its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of efficiency of transmissibility, will ultimately find just about everybody,” Fauci said in a virtual fireside chat with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

There’s more at the original, but note: this was prior to the BA.2 variant making its appearance.

The obvious question becomes: if almost everybody is going to contract the virus anyway, why should we impose onerous personal restrictions on people? Full disclosure: despite an illness last December, which my wife, an RN who works in a hospital treating COVID patients, said appeared to be COVID, I tested negative for the virus twice around that illness; either the tests were inaccurate, or I had some other bug. If I have ever had COVID, I was completely asymptomatic.

References

References
↑1 Current tuition for Grade 12: $16,625. While financial aid is available for ninth through twelfth grades, it is not for middle schoolers. This isn’t a school for poor people. She did veto a bill that would have harmed charter schools in Rhode Island.
↑2 Yeah, I’m paying for a subscription to The Washington Post.
↑3 Yes, I have been vaccinated, but I absolutely refuse to carry my vaccination records, and anyone who demands to see my papers, “Papiere, bitte,” will receive an unpolite response.
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Wir müssen Ihre Dokumente sehen!

Despite the fact that the COVID-19 vaccines appear to have little, if any, effect in reducing the transmissibility of the virus, especially the Omicron variant, the tinhorn dictators want to separate people from each other, want to impose restrictions on a segment of the population who haven’t Obeyed Orders. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

    A new vaccine mandate is poised to impact Philadelphia’s restaurants next week

    How restaurant owners can prepare for new vaccine mandate rules in the new year.

    by Gene Marks | Tuesday, December 28, 2021 | 12:24 PM EST

    Starting Jan. 3 indoor eateries in Philadelphia will be required to see proof from patrons of vaccination against COVID-19.

    The rule doesn’t fully take effect immediately. Through Jan. 17, restaurants can choose to accept a negative COVID-19 test within 24 hours of entry instead of proof of vaccination. But after that date, only proof of vaccination will be acceptable.

I am, as I have stated previously, both fully vaccinated and have taken the booster shot, though the booster was not recorded when I took the photo of my vaccination record for this site. It is on my card now.

But I absolutely refuse to carry this vaccination record with me! I got vaccinated for my own protection, something wise since my wife is a hospital nurse who sometimes takes care of COVID patients, but I will not comply with the petty little bureaucrats who say, “Wir müssen Ihre Dokumente sehen!” “Ve need to see your papers!” The business which makes such a demand of me will not only not see my papers, but will never, ever, get a single penny from me.

Maybe that’s easy for me, here in the Bluegrass State, where we aren’t seeing such stupidity. I have already noted that while Kroger KR: (%) has masking requirements to enter its stores, most people ignore the signs, or at least the requirements, and shop without putting on a face diaper.

We’re now being told that cloth face masks are ineffective anyway, so the face mask requirements, which Kentuckians have naturally seen as ineffective anyway, are ridiculous.

    The rule also applies to employees. A restaurant’s staff as well as young patrons ages 5 to 11 will be required to have one dose of COVID-19 vaccine by Jan. 3 and to complete the series by Feb. 3. Exemptions apply to children under age 5, people with medical reasons and those with religious objections.

    Just about every establishment that serves food and/or drink will be affected by this rule, from cafes, bars and sports venues to movies theaters, bowling alleys, and food halls.Obviously, these new rules will add another strain on local restaurants that are already grappling with existing mandates, rising prices, and shortages of supplies and labor.And while these rules extend only to indoor dining, concerns have been raised that they will go into effect before new legislation can make permanent the outdoor dining structures that have sprung up during the pandemic.

So, Philadelphians are going to have to carry their supposedly private medical records with them if they want to eat indoors at a restaurant — and who wants to eat outdoors, in Philadelphia, in January and February — even though the Omicron variant, which is fast becoming, if it has not already become, the dominant variant in the United States, seems to slide past the vaccines with virtually no reduction in transmissibility.

Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia) and Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole cannot be unaware of those statistics, and those facts, but they certainly do love them some authoritarian power, and are choosing to exercise it, as much as they can, without any reason to do so. If the vaccines do not reduce transmission, then there is no reason whatsoever to put in place vaccine mandates. If the vaccines do not reduce transmissibility, but only help to reduce the severity of symptoms for those who contract the virus, then the only people put at greater risk of serious illness are those who choose not to get vaccinated. At that point, it’s their risk, and their risk alone. If masks do not reduce the transmissibility, then there is no reason to require masks; there is no greater danger to the public from those who don’t wear masks than from those who do.

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Impeach Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd!

Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd. Photo: Kentucky Administrative Office of the Courts.

I wrote Impeach Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd! back on March 3, after he issued his illegal and unconstitutional injunctions against laws passed by the General Assembly, and it appears I was right. It took way, way, way too long for the state Supreme Court to rule that the injunctions should not have been issued, and order the injunctions dissolved:

    We find that this matter presents a justiciable case or controversy but that the Franklin Circuit Court abused its discretion in issuing the temporary injunction.[1]Cameron v Beshear, Section B, pages 13 forward. Accordingly, we remand this case to the trial court with instructions to dissolve the injunction.[2]Cameron v Beshear, page 2.

Now, five days later, we find that Judge Shepherd is not going to follow the instructions to dissolve the injunctions!

    KY judge delays following Supreme Court COVID order as Beshear & lawmakers negotiate

    By Jack Brammer | August 26, 2021 11:57 AM

    Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and legislative leaders are working together on a new set of COVID-19 emergency orders, which they hope to present to a Franklin Circuit Court judge before he dissolves an injunction against new laws that will torpedo Beshear’s existing emergency orders and regulations.

    At a status conference hearing Thursday morning, Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd said he will follow the Kentucky Supreme Court’s instructions in a ruling last Saturday for him to dissolve the injunction but he will wait until the court hears more about the work between the Democratic governor and the Republican legislative leaders.

    The high court unanimously said the injunction was wrong and that the new laws limiting Beshear’s emergency powers during the coronavirus crisis should not have been blocked. A provision in one of the new laws would limit Beshear’s executive orders to 30 days unless renewed by the legislature.

Just where in the Court’s ruling does it give Judge Shepherd the discretion as to when to dissolve the injunctions?

    Beshear has said he would like to implement a statewide mask mandate, but lawmakers have shown little interest in that suggestion.

Of course they haven’t: getting rid of the mask mandate was what the voters elected the legislators to do!

    David Fleenor, counsel for Senate President Robert Stivers, told Shepherd he did not know exactly when the negotiations between the governor and lawmakers would be completed but said he expects it to be in days, not weeks, quickly adding, “I hope I’m not being overly optimistic.”

The Court specified that the General Assembly makes policy for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, not the Governor,[3]Cameron v Beshear, page 20: “As we have noted time and again, so many times that we need not provide citation, the General Assembly establishes the public policy of the Commonwealth.” yet somehow Judge Shepherd believes he has the authority to hold off on following the Supreme Court’s instructions to dissolve the injunction until he hears more about what, if any, negotiations are ongoing between the Governor and legislative leaders.

That was not part of the Court’s ruling.

Judge Shepherd has told the parties to report back to him on Tuesday, September 7th, 12 days from now, and 17 days since the Supreme Court issued its ruling. Judge Shepherd, who had already suspended the laws which the state Supreme Court noted were passed legally, for 171 days, now thinks he can add another 17 days on top of that. That would be one day short of 27 weeks, more than half a year.

The state House of Representatives needs to impeach this judge when the regular session begins next January, and the state Senate needs to remove him from office and attaint him from ever holding another office in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. The state Court of Appeals needs to overrule him and dissolve the injunctions, if the Supreme Court doesn’t beat them to it; I would expect Attorney General Daniel Cameron (R-KY) to immediately appeal Judge Shepherd’s refusal to dissolve the injunctions, and move that he be removed from the case.

References

References
↑1 Cameron v Beshear, Section B, pages 13 forward.
↑2 Cameron v Beshear, page 2.
↑3 Cameron v Beshear, page 20: “As we have noted time and again, so many times that we need not provide citation, the General Assembly establishes the public policy of the Commonwealth.”
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Why don’t neoconservatives, who support American-style liberty and democracy abroad, support liberty at home?

When commenting on Patterico’s Pontifications, I am styled “The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana”, since one of his main writers is named Dana.

The site host was previously a Republican, and certainly a conservative, but he left the GOP when Donald Trump started to make headway toward the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, and became one of the #NeverTrumpers. His dislike of our 45th President has been apparent from the start, and he wanted Mr Trump not just impeached, but removed from office.

Patterico has been vocal in advocating that people get vaccinated against COVID-19, and I agree: they should. But this I did not expect from him:

I have previously noted how neoconservatives Max Boot and Bill Kristol, upset that not as many people as they believe should have have freely chosen to take the COVID-19 vaccines, have urged making vaccination mandatory.

When Patterico tweeted:

We may get to a point where the big debate becomes: why on Earth didn’t we institute more coercive measures on the unvaccinated in July 2021, when we could have stopped COVID before it mutated beyond the vaccines’ capacity to immunize people against it?

he has not precisely stated, as Messrs Boot and Kristol have, that he believes that vaccination should be mandatory, but one wonders: just what does he mean by “more coercive measures”?

A clue, I suppose, comes from his retweet from Allahpundit, who referenced yet another #NeverTrumper, David Frum, and his article in The Atlantic:

    Vaccinated America Has Had Enough

    In the United States, this pandemic could be almost over by now. The reasons it’s still going are pretty clear.

    By David Frum | July 23, 2021

    In the United States, this pandemic could’ve been over by now, and certainly would’ve been by Labor Day. If the pace of vaccination through the summer had been anything like the pace in April and May, the country would be nearing herd immunity. With most adults immunized, new and more infectious coronavirus variants would have nowhere to spread. Life could return nearly to normal.

The article title itself practically drips with contempt: “Vaccinated America has had enough.” With that, the distinguished Mr Frum, an urbanite who lives in Washington, DC, and Wellington, Ontario, tells his readers that “vaccinated America” and he are just better than the riff-raff who have decided against it.

    Experts list many reasons for the vaccine slump, but one big reason stands out: vaccine resistance among conservative, evangelical, and rural Americans. Pro-Trump America has decided that vaccine refusal is a statement of identity and a test of loyalty.

Or, perhaps, they have decided that they just don’t trust government very much. Such used to be commonplace among conservatives. Actually, it’s pretty commonplace among liberals as well . . . when conservatives are in power. Conservative states have been tightening up election security, but the left see that not as insuring against election fraud, but as trying to prevent some citizens from voting at all. And the left certainly distrusted government during President Trump’s four years in office!

Naturally, I cannot quote all of Mr Frum’s article; that would violate Fair Use standards. Suffice it to say that he spends the next three paragraphs telling us of all of the evils and sorrows the vaccine hesitant and conservative politicians have spread throughout conservative states.

    Reading about the fates of people who refused the vaccine is sorrowful. But as summer camp and travel plans are disrupted—as local authorities reimpose mask mandates that could have been laid aside forever—many in the vaccinated majority must be thinking: Yes, I’m very sorry that so many of the unvaccinated are suffering the consequences of their bad decisions. I’m also very sorry that the responsible rest of us are suffering the consequences of their bad decisions.

There it is again: Mr Frum is telling his readers that he is just so much smarter than those with reservations, that those who have not been willing to take the vaccine are irresponsible. As I have pointed out previously, insulting people, telling them that they are stupid, might not be the best approach to get them to buy what you are trying to sell.

    As cases uptick again, as people who have done the right thing face the consequences of other people doing the wrong thing, the question occurs: Does Biden’s America have a breaking point? Biden’s America produces 70 percent of the country’s wealth—and then sees that wealth transferred to support Trump’s America. Which is fine; that’s what citizens of one nation do for one another. Something else they do for one another: take rational health-care precautions during a pandemic. That reciprocal part of the bargain is not being upheld.

And here I thought that Mr Frum was supposed to be a conservative! Now he’s using the leftist argument that the liberals support conservatives. Well, Philadelphia might seem more productive, with its inflated prices for everything, and their 2020 voting pattern (81.44% for Mr Biden vis a vis 17.90% for President Trump), than Estill County, Kentucky, where I live, (77.98% for Mr Trump, 20.72% for Mr Biden) but we sure don’t kill each other the way they do in the City of Brotherly Love! We don’t have to surround our homes with iron bars to keep the criminals out!

    Can governments lawfully require more public-health cooperation from their populations? They regularly do, for other causes. More than a dozen conservative states have legislated drug testing for people who seek cash welfare. It is bizarre that Florida and other states would put such an onus on the poorest people in society—while allowing other people to impose a much more intimate and immediate harm on everybody else. The federal government could use its regulatory and spending powers to encourage vaccination in the same way that Ron DeSantis has used his executive powers to discourage it. The Biden administration could require proof of vaccination to fly or to travel by interstate train or bus. It could mandate that federal contractors demonstrate that their workforces are vaccinated. It could condition federal student loans on proof of vaccination. Those measures might or might not be wise policy: Inducements are usually more effective at changing individual behavior than penalties are. But they would be feasible and legal—and they would spread the message about what people ought to do, in the same way that sanctions against drunk driving, cheating on taxes, and unjust discrimination in the workplace do.

Mr Frum, like Patterico, is an attorney, and just loves him some ways of forcing people to comply. No, he didn’t say, “Make the vaccines mandatory,” but wants to try to regulate the non-compliant into poverty. And Mr Frum wonders why some people wouldn’t trust the government!

    In the end, the unvaccinated person himself or herself has decided to inflict a preventable and unjustifiable harm upon family, friends, neighbors, community, country, and planet.

And here we see the urbanist liberal argument again: that those who are doing nothing wrong — say, by owning a firearm even if they have never shot anyone — simply by living their lives as they see fit, are still guilty, guilty, guilty! of hurting other people. Mr Frum does not, and cannot, know whether any particular unvaccinated person has contracted the virus and then spread it to “family, friends, neighbors, community, country, and planet.” He simply assumes that all are guilty. Yet, at least here in the Bluegrass State, the Fayette County Health Department, in the Commonwealth’s second largest city, reported that 24.3% of all new COVID cases in July were “breakthrough” cases, instances in which vaccinated people still contracted the virus.

I look at people like David Frum and Max Boot and Bill Kristol, neoconservatives who supported American intervention to bring American-style liberty and democracy to places which were not liberal Western democracies,[1]Mr Frum was a speechwriter and assistant to the younger President Bush in 2001 and 2002, in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. yet don’t seem to support liberty here at home.

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↑1 Mr Frum was a speechwriter and assistant to the younger President Bush in 2001 and 2002, in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.
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Kathleen Sebelius advocates authoritarian controls; the credentialed media try to ignore it to death

Kathleen Sebelius was Secretary of Health and Human Services during the previous Democratic administration, but it seems that she has taken her lessons not from Barack Hussein Obama but Xi Jinping. First, from The Wall Street Journal:

    Get Vaxxed or Stay Home, Some Local Chinese Governments Say

    Some areas are planning to restrict people from public venues unless they get shots, sparking criticism

    By Chao Deng | Updated: July 15, 2021 | 7:17 AM ET

    Several local governments in China are planning to bar residents who haven’t been vaccinated against Covid-19 from accessing public venues, stirring controversy as the country makes a push for herd immunity.

    In recent days, a dozen counties and cities in the eastern provinces of Zhejiang, Fujian and Jiangxi set late-August deadlines for people 18 years or older to complete a two-shot vaccine regimen, according to similarly worded online statements. Many of them also set dates in late July by which unvaccinated people would be barred from entering schools, libraries, prisons, nursing homes and inpatient facilities at hospitals without a valid medical exemption.

    Some of the localities attributed their new policies to “national, provincial and municipal arrangements,” without explaining whether they received a decree from the central government.

    China is dealing with sporadic outbreaks of Covid-19 and authorities have been offering homegrown vaccines free of charge since last December.

    The government notices have sparked online pushback from some Chinese and triggered a debate—as in the U.S. and elsewhere—about whether people should be required to present proof of inoculation to travel, work or undertake other routine activities outside their home.

There’s more at the original.

Mrs Sebelius, previously the Governor of Kansas, apparently loves the way the Chinese Communists do things. From Breitbart, via The Pirate’s Cove:

Mrs Sebelius stated:

    Sebelius said, “We’re in a situation where we have a wildly effective vaccine, multiple choices, lots available, free of charge, and we have folks who are just saying I won’t do it. I think that it’s time to say to those folks, it’s fine if you don’t choose to get vaccinated. You may not come to work. You may not have access to a situation where you’re going to put my grandchildren in jeopardy. Where you might kill them, or you might put them in a situation where they’re going to carry the virus to someone in a high-risk position.”

    That’s, I think the point where we are, is freedom is one thing, but freedom when you harm others like secondhand smoke and issues that we’ve dealt with very clearly in the past you can’t drive drunk. You can drink, but you can’t drive drunk because you can injure other people. You can’t smoke inside of a public place where you can give cancer to someone else in spite of their never having been a smoker.

    So I think we’re reaching that point in the United States where those of us who are vaccinated, I want to take off my mask. I want to be able to live my life with vaccination, and right now, I’m being impinged on by people who say I don’t want to get vaccinated. It’s fine. I want them to maybe have a limitation on where they can go and who they can possibly infect.

You know what’s interesting? Breitbart is a definitely conservative site, and I like to cite liberal sources to prevent complaints by the left that my sources are biased, so I made a Google search for Mrs Sebelius’ first sentence. As you can see from the screen capture at the right, on which you can click to enlarge to make it more readable, all I found were conservative sources and individual blogs. Given that Breitbart had a video of the interview embedded, one which has two annoying commercials in it and one I cannot embed, the story is confirmed, but, oddly enough, the credentialed media seem loath to report it. Site searches for Sebelius on The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Philadelphia Inquirer yielded zero returns of this. Even a site search of CNN, where the interview was broadcast, yielded only one article, Young children will pay the price if enough US adults don’t get vaccinated against Covid-19, expert says, in which Mrs Sebelius’ statement is buried down in the 19th paragraph.

The credentialed media absotively, posilutely do not want such a totalitarian statement from a former Secretary of Health and Human Services to get much publicity, and so the story is being quietly buried, quietly ignored to death. Such is apparently not news that is fit to print! But we can be certain of one thing: if President Biden proposed such a thing, the left would certainly go along with it, because the left love them some totalitarian controls!

“Democracy Dies in Darkness,” The Washington Post has as its masthead tagline. Yet it seems that a former Democratic Secretary of Health and Human Services’ advocacy of authoritarian controls is news the editors of the Post want to keep in darkness.

It’s interesting that the Wikipedia biography for Mrs Sebelius states, “She is strongly pro-choice,” but it seems that, like so many others on the left, she is pro-choice on exactly one thing.

It should be noted that I am, and have previously stated, that I have been vaccinated against COVID-19. That was my personal choice, a choice I took freely, and my decision is the one I think others should take. But I also believe that people have the right to decide that for themselves, and that the government ought not to have any authority to penalize or punish them if they choose differently than I have.

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I wish that I had written this!

Yes, I have been harping on the promulgation of fear in our society rather a lot lately, but Glenn Greenwald said it better than I ever have!

Fear is crucial for state authority. When the population is filled with it, they will acquiesce to virtually any power the government seeks to acquire in the name of keeping them safe. But when fear is lacking, citizens will crave liberty more than control, and that is when they question official claims and actions. When that starts to happen, when the public feels too secure, institutions of authority will reflexively find new ways to ensure they stay engulfed by fear and thus quiescent.

Mr Greenwald wasn’t even talking about the restrictions so many have accepted, to out freedom of peaceable assembly, to our free exercise of religion, to mask mandates and the other things government has imposed on us due to COVID-19, though he certainly could have been. No, he was talking about the Biden Administration and its cranking out of ‘domestic terror’ alerts.

The New Domestic War on Terror Has Already Begun — Even Without the New Laws Biden Wants

Homeland Security just issued its fourth danger bulletin this year. And both the weapons and rhetorical tactics of the first War on Terror are increasingly visible.

Glenn Greenwald | June 2, 2021

The Department of Homeland Security on Friday issued a new warning bulletin, alerting Americans that domestic extremists may well use violence on the 100th Anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre. This was at least the fourth such bulletin issued this year by Homeland Security (DHS) warning of the same danger and, thus far, none of the fears it is trying to instill into the American population has materialized.

The first was a January 14 warning, from numerous federal agencies including DHS, about violence in Washington, DC and all fifty state capitols that was likely to explode in protest of Inauguration Day (a threat which did not materialize). Then came a January 27 bulletin warning of “a heightened threat environment across the United States that is likely to persist over the coming weeks” from “ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority” (that warning also was not realized). Then there was a May 14 bulletin warning of right-wing violence “to attack higher-capacity targets,” exacerbated by the lifting of COVID lockdowns (which also never happened). And now we are treated to this new DHS warning about domestic extremists preparing violent attacks over Tulsa (it remains to be seen if a DHS fear is finally realized).

Just like the first War on Terror, these threats are issued with virtually no specificity. They are just generalized warnings designed to put people in fear about their fellow citizens and to justify aggressive deployment of military and law enforcement officers in Washington, D.C. and throughout the country. A CNN article which wildly hyped the latest danger bulletin about domestic extremists at Tulsa had to be edited with what the cable network, in an “update,” called “the additional information from the Department of Homeland Security that there is no specific or credible threats at this time.” And the supposed dangers from domestic extremists on Inauguration Day was such a flop that even The Washington Post — one of the outlets most vocal about lurking national security dangers in general and this one in particular — had to explicitly acknowledge the failure:

Thousands [of National Guard troops] had been deployed to capitals across the country late last week, ahead of a weekend in which potentially violent demonstrations were predicted by the FBI — but never materialized.

Once again on Wednesday, security officials’ worst fears weren’t borne out: In some states, it was close to business as usual. In others, demonstrations were small and peaceful, with only occasional tense moments.

President Biden just said:

Terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today. Not ISIS, not al Qaeda, white supremacy.

Here’s the video:

According to the Philadelphia Police Department, as of 11:59 PM EDT on Wednesday, June 2nd, 221 people had been murdered in the city so far this year. That’s 1.444 per day in the City of Brotherly Love, a rate, which if maintained throughout the year would mean 527 people spilling out their life’s blood in the city’s mean streets.

In Chicago, 266 people have been murdered so far this year, 1.739 every single day, putting the Windy City on track for 635 homicides.

In much smaller St Louis, 78 people have been killed, ‘only’ 0.510 per day, for ‘just’ 186 for 2021.

In just those three cities, that’s a total of 565 people murdered so far this year, and a projected 1,348 for the entire year.

White supremacists? So far they’ve killed exactly zero people in 2021![1]The claim that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick was killed in the Capitol kerfuffle is untrue. The Washington medical examiner found the Officer Sicknick had died of “acute brainstem and … Continue reading Yet President Biden tells us that they are “the most lethal threat to the homeland today.”

Mr Greenwald compares the measures the Democrats are taking today to those under Presidents Bush and Obama following the September 11th attacks, and finds them shockingly similar.

Yeah, I want you to keep reading The First Street Journal, every day, but this is the time in which you should follow the embedded link and read Mr Greenwald’s article on substack. It’s just plain brilliant!

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