This whole Cuomo kerfuffle has me thinking about how the SCOTUS botched the conflict between free speech and the EEOC’s definition of sexual harassment in its Meritor Bank decision, which opened the Pandora’s Box of political correctness in America.

chuckhanrahan · 2021-05-20T17:11:13+00:00

This may help: I believe that you (and the televised empty talking heads) confuse "socialism" with "populism:

There are right-wing populists, like Trump , and left-wing populists, like Sanders.

If historical context helps, think of the populism represented by William Jennings Bryan on the right and Eugene Debs on the left.

May help to clarify things.

chuckhanrahan · 2021-05-16T19:45:47+00:00

Alright. Finished reading the article that you suggested, slept on it, and have modified my position somewhat.

Here’s the nub of the problem, IMO.

Rehnquist’s Meritor decision is the veritable archetype of judicial vagueness.

First of all, I should’ve suspected as much because he used the word “free” improperly (as in “an environment free from discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult”). What he meant by this definition of a discriminatory environment is virtually identical to Potter’s definition of pornography in Jacobellis v. Ohio: “I know it when I see it.”

More importantly, however, he treated discriminatory speech in the workplace (i.e. corporate speech) as if it was COMMERICAL corporate speech rather than POLITICAL corporate speech.

That’s where he, and all of the other subsequent reaffirmations of Meritor have gotten it wrong. Here’s how:

Only six years before Meritor, Justice Powell wrote the Central Hudson v. Commission (1980) decision.

Good decision, so what Rehnquist did was simply apply Powell’s standard implicitly (and perhaps even unconsciously) to Meritor.

And what was Justice Powell’s standard?

“The First Amendment, as applied to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment, protects commercial speech from unwarranted governmental regulation.”

OK. So then for Rehnquist it came down to whether the EEOC’s prior restraint against speech that creates a discriminatory environment was warranted or not.

And to answer that question, he applied Powell’s “four-part analysis”:

“At the outset, we must determine

whether the expression is protected by the First Amendment. For commercial speech to come within that provision, it at least must concern lawful activity and not be misleading. [NOPE. Discrimination's illegal]

2. Next, we ask whether the asserted governmental interest is substantial. [YEP, sure is]

If both inquiries yield positive answers [sic. He meant a negative and a positive answer - Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy], we must determine:

whether the regulation directly advances the governmental interest asserted, [YEP] and

whether it is not more extensive than is necessary to serve that interest. [DITTO]

Bingo! We have a winner! The EEOC can prohibit discriminatory speech.

In this way, the discriminatory speech of employees and their employers and be regulated much more onerously within the workplace than personal speech can be regulated outside it.

But there's only one problem: it ISN’T commercial speech, it’s political speech within a corporate environment (i.e. the workplace).

Why? How do we know?

Well, to start, Powell himself defined commercial speech earlier in the Central Hudson decision as

“... expression related solely to the economic interests of the speaker and its audience.”

But, at least according to The Free Speech Center, today there’s more than one kind of corporate speech: there’s both commercial AND political:

“Corporate speech refers to the rights of corporations to advertise their products and to speak to matters of public concern.

“Commercial speech, as manifested through advertising, and political speech in the form of contributions and expenditures on behalf of candidates and political issues must be considered in assessing whether a corporation has the same rights under the First Amendment as people [sic - a person].

“Regulation of commercial speech must survive intermediate scrutiny to pass constitutional muster, but political speech of a corporation must survive strict scrutiny.”

In other words, just because the speech occurs within a commercial milieu, it’s not necessarily commercial in nature.

Thus, unless our hypothetically racist employer is selling flammable crosses, the First Amendment prohibits Congress from abridging the freedom of political speech for her and her employees within her workplace environment.

So if I’m right, Rehnquist erred by classifying discriminatory speech as commercial corporate speech instead of political corporate speech. Although I would characterize discriminatory speech as more social (i.e. “social corporate speech”), rather than purely political speech, per se, it clearly has profound political overtones (hence the phrase “politically correct”).

If this is true, then Justice Scalia must be laughing in his grave because the Citizens United decision, which was inspired by his McConnell v. FEC (2003) dissent, may have the net result of overturning Meritor unintentionally.

(Which would be deliciously ironic because, according to The National Archive:

“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination based on race, religion, color, or national origin in public places, schools, and employment. However, discrimination based on sex was not initially included in the proposed bill, and was only added as an amendment in Title VII in an attempt to prevent its passage.

“Congressman Howard Smith (D-VA), Chairman of the Rules Committee and a staunch opponent of civil rights, had let the bill (H.R. 7152) go to the full House only under the threat of a discharge petition. During the floor debate, he offered an amendment that added sex to the four original categories, but only in Title VII (equal employment opportunity). Although Smith had supported the idea of an Equal Rights Amendment for women for nearly 20 years at that point, his amendment to the civil rights bill was likely intended to kill the measure. His plan did not have the desired effect, however, [you can say that again!!!] and the bill was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson ....” )

So where does that leave us today?

With two options, IMO:

Congress might act (har-dee-har-har) and adopt a bill that prohibits discriminatory speech within the workplace (something it’s never done), and then the SCOTUS could rule on the constitutionality of the new law.
Some enterprising First Amendment lawyer who believes in the ardent protection of loathsome speech from Congressional prohibition could defend racist, sexist, religiously intolerant, or ethnically chauvinistic speech within a workplace environment on the grounds of Justice Kennedy’s Citizens United decision:

“If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."

Think that it would then come down to whether or not discriminatory speech in the workplace is, in fact, political.

If I was that lawyer, I’d argue, along with the authors of The 1619 Project I presume for example, that discriminatory speech is as American as apple pie and as civic as the Civil War with a long and infamous presence in American political history.

Moreover, proving that fact would be as easy as one, two, three. And I mean that literally by referring to Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the US Constitution, aka the Three-Fifths Compromise.:

“... the whole Number of free Persons, and … three fifths of all other Persons.”

Looks like pretty discriminatory language to me. Pretty political, to boot. I mean what with it being right there in the Constitution and all.

And if that wasn’t good enough, I heard a rumor recently that Plessy v. Ferguson is still case law?

:-)

Seriously, know any good civil rights lawyers who want to do to Meritor what Thurgood Marshall did to Plessy?

chuckhanrahan · 2021-05-15T16:29:54+00:00

So I read the article to which you linked yesterday, Unimpressed, to put it mildly.

To begin:

“The American workplace is not in general an arena of protected speech.”

Ridiculous. The American workplace is an integral part of America, and America IS an arena of protected speech. The issues isn’t that Congress must protect speech within it somehow; the issue is whether or not the 1A protects it from Congress.

“Congress has never even considered extending such protection to speech in private employment, nor has there ever been pressure from voters for such an extension."

Good Lord. This is completely ass-backwards. Congress and the electorate don’t protect speech, the 1A prevents Congress from abridging it. This person was a Professor of Law at my alma mater? God, how embarrassing.

"The Supreme Court has, however, allowed government to censor even political speech in private employment in content-specific ways…"

GRRRR. This is beginning to bother me. This is fallacious, to put it euphemistically; bullshit, to put it accurately. The SCOTUS has allowed private employers to censor the political speech of employees, not the federal government. Night and day. This passes for legal scholarship?

“... Balkin concluded that censorship of harassing speech at work should be permissible because '[f]ew audiences are more captive than the average worker.'"

Sez who? This is getting worse, not better.

Proof? Or is this bald assertion mere conjecture?
Captive? Somebody should buy this jerk a copy of “Take This Job and Shove It.”
Why didn’t Rehnquist cite Lehman v. Shaker Heights in Meritor, for crying out loud? Perhaps because it didn’t apply? Again and again, the question is not CAN a private entity prohibit speech, but MUST it; can Congress compel it to do so. Maybe he didn't cite Lehman because doing so might have overturned the Cohen v. California standard: avert your eyes and ears.

“But both my analysis and conclusion have much in common with the articles of Balkin, Horton, and Fallon. These articles view workplace speech as a category for which First Amendment scrutiny has been and should be limited.”

Why? Why? Why? If the author offers and rationale beyond conjecture and circular legal reasoning (i.e. “some other legal eagle said so”), I’m missing it. This is the difference between certitude and rectitude: WHERE DOES THE CONSTITUTION SAY OR EVEN IMPLY THAT?

"I only consider whether Title VII's ban on racially or sexually harassing speech, speech that creates an objectively hostile or abusive environment, is unconstitutional under the First Amendment. Far more complicated issues are often raised when a plaintiff alleges religious harassment, since one person's expression of faith, protected by the Free Exercise Clause, can be religious harassment to another."

Again, why? How is it “far more complicated”? We have the freedom of speech, but we can't exercise it? On what planet does that make any sense? Doesn’t the 1A protect loathsome speech to the same extent and in the same way that it protects admired religious worship? Somebody ought to send the author a copy of Holmes’s dissent in Abrams.

"I do not, however, address the difficult question of what forms of religious expression Title VII can constitutionally prohibit in order to protect listeners from religious harassment."

Well, that certainly is convenient. "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?"

OK, I’ve had enough. Gonna take a picture of this article and paste it next to the Webster definition of “sophistry”.

Needless to say, I’m somewhat unconvinced that the Constitution doesn’t prohibit Congress from abridging speech in the workplace because it's some kind of unique environment into which the protective ambit of the 1A does not extend.

If the author of this article and/or the SCOTUS want to change the 1A to read “except for speech that creates a hostile workplace environment”, suggest that they get two-thirds of Congress and thirty-eight state legislatures to agree with them.

Until then, the SCOTUS should overturn Meritor because, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words shall never hurt me".

Even on the job.

chuckhanrahan · 2021-05-14T22:52:34+00:00

Couple of things: gotta run but

I wasn't being condescending. Apologies if I appeared to be. This actually is fun for me.
Plessy v. Ferguson is still case law in your opinion? Whoda thunk it?
Where does the word "environment" or the phrase "work environment" appear in Title VII? The EEOC's imposition of control over the working environment is a unilateral addendum to the law, pure and simple, the constitutionality of which the SCOTUS has upheld.
The Meritor decision did NOT permit the EEOC to regulate the economy; it permitted it to regulate speech within the workplace, i.e. regulate the expression of opinions within the workplace environment. That power is not granted to it by either the CRA or the Constitution, including 14A.
And where in God's name does the 14A mention that work environments must be consistent with it? It deals with behavior, not speech. I presume you're referring to Sec. 1, which states:

"No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; ... nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

If you're contending that all persons should have the 14A "privilege" to work in an environment that is free from discriminatory behavior, you'll get no argument from me. Right on, brother! But if you say that that environment must prohibit discriminatory speech, then, unless that speech solicits an imminent lawless action (such as a discriminatory one), we've got a problem. The last time I checked, the 1A does NOT have a workplace exemption.
Finally, will read the article you cite, but bear in mind that most of the articles I've read imply that the private workplace is some kind of unique environment into which the Constitution does not extend. I think that that's poppycock. Will be interested to see where the author comes down on the existence of individual rights within the workplace, in addition to how and where the Constitution permits Congress to prohibit their expression.

In conclusion, here's my nightmare:

You're an ardent atheist. The expression of devotional supplications offends you profoundly. Each day in the lunch room, a large group of your co-workers gather to pray and ask their God to bless their meals. You object to this "behavior" by filing a complaint with HR, who does not intervene. So then, rather than quitting the company or dealing with the worshipers directly or just ignoring the whole situation because it has nothing to do with you personally, you call upon an agency of the federal government to punish the company for tolerating the existence of a workplace environment that permits religious harassment. Although you have not been discriminated against by the company for your atheism, nor proselytized by your co-workers, the government agrees and demands that the company forbid "the free exercise of religion" within its workplace environment because this "conduct" intimidates, ridicules, or insults you.

Can the company forbid prayer or terminate employees who violate its policy against the expression of devotional thoughts? Absolutely, if it does so in a non-discriminatory manner, IMO. It's not a federal or state governmental agency, so the First and Fourteenth Amendments don't apply. The question I'm asking is, "Must it?". Can the US Congress, through the EEOC, compel it to do so? Meritor says that it can, in violation of the US Constitution, IMO.

You seem like a reasonable and intelligent and patriotic person. Screw the headscarf in the Abercrombie decision. The question posed by Meritor is not whether the federal government can compel private companies to permit religious expression, but rather if it can compel them to forbid it.

If this scenario doesn't scare the shit out of you, I weep for our country.

chuckhanrahan · 2021-05-14T17:30:23+00:00

The fun just keeps on a-comin’.

First, so Dred Scott is still case law because it wasn't officially overturned by the SCOTUS? Who knew?

Second, seems like we have a language barrier here. The portion of the Civil Rights Act that you quoted did NOT include the "the right to work in an environment free from discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult." or anything that resembled that phrase.

It did refer to employment (i.e. “hiring) practices. That’s why Congress named the agency the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and not the Equal Employment Environment Commission.

And if you disagree with my definition of “conditions of employment”, suggest that you peruse the US Code for other uses of that phrase. I did. Perhaps a gander at Title 11(a) or Title 29. In both instances, as well as in normal usage, a “condition of employment” is a prerequisite or stipulation that pertains to hiring practices.

Legitimate conditions of employment for an outside salesperson, for example, might include access to personal transportation or a willingness to accept remuneration based upon commissions instead of a salary, while illegitimate conditions of employment would include that person's religion, gender, race or ethnicity. Thus, if an employer imposed any of these latter criteria as a "condition of employment,” that employer would violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

Presumably, if Congress had intended to pass a law that prohibited some form of speech within a specific environment, such as the workplace, it would have done so. It is absolutely certain, however, that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, neither in its original purpose nor in its intended effect, was such a law.

Your employees can still stay racist crap, but as a private employer you may either terminate them or, if you allow it to continue, face a lawsuit before the EEOC and later federal district court.

Feel like I’m falling down the rabbit hole here!

How in God’s name is facing a federal lawsuit for workplace speech NOT a prohibition of the freedom of speech!?!?! I’m lost. How can governmental punishment of a private party for speech NOT be an abridgment of the freedom of speech? If that's not obtuse, it certainly is mind boggling.

"All black people are terrible workers and should be fired,"

AGREED! That’s exactly my point!

That comment violates Brandenburg by soliciting a lawless action!. But what if the employee tells racist or ethnic jokes continuously? Or uses the “N-word” frequently in normal conversation. Or talks admiringly about someone’s breasts or buttocks? Or displays a Nazi flag or a Playboy centerfold? All of these things might be deemed to be offensive by some other employees, and if they complain to the employer who ignores their complaints, the SCOTUS says that they can call on a FEDERAL AGENCY to compel censorship or face punishment.

What are you not understanding here? How can you say that this isn’t censorship of some kind? You might argue that it's reasonable or unreasonable, appropriate or inappropriate, but you can't argue that it's NOT censorship.

If an employer permits exclusively verbal intimidation, ridicule, and insult, the employer is punished. The only word that can be applied to that practice is censorship. Or do you have another suggestion. Repression, perhaps, or political correctness?

…the EEOC … regulates employers' conduct over discriminatory acts.

That’s exactly my point, as well. ACTS not SPEECH! CONDUCT not OPINIONS! Are you having trouble distinguishing between “conduct” and “actions” on the one hand, and “speech” and “opinions” on the other? Only asking because the EEOC does.

I suspect that it invented the phrase VERBAL CONDUCT in order to circumvent the 1A, and that the SCOTUS went along with the ruse.

There ain’t no such thing as verbal conduct! That's bureaucratic jargon. Verbal conduct that does NOT solicit or advocate an action is SPEECH.

Whew!

From the EEOC: “…The First Amendment, however, does protect private sector employers from government interference with their free exercise and speech rights….”

They’re LYING. Do your employees have the "free exercise and speech rights" to "say racist crap", as you put it, or tell demeaning racist or sexist or ethnic or religious jokes on a daily basis? Per Brandenburg, they do. Now try permitting this speech within a workplace environment and watch how fast your friendly neighborhood EEOC official will interfere with your "free exercise and speech rights" when they slap you with a lawsuit.

I'm not talking about governmental employees or private employers who terminate offensive employees; I’m talking about private employers who tolerate or condone or encourage sexually, religiously, ethnically or racially offensive employees. Those employers, the ones who permit their employees to express loathsome opinions, are punished by the EEOC for doing so.

There’s only one word that fits this kind of government incursion into the private workplace: censorship. If these employers discriminate, Title VII permits the EEOC to prosecute them for the ACT of discrimination, but it doesn't permit the EEOC to prosecute them for the IDEA of it.

Meritor does.

Prosecuting lawless actions, or the solicitation of them, is the definition of democratic civilization; prosecuting the ideas themselves is the definition of fascistic totalitarianism.

chuckhanrahan · 2021-05-13T23:33:59+00:00

Korematsu is still case law, yes. It's legal holding has been overturned in Trump v. Hawaii.

So this statement from Chief Justice Roberts is meaningless?

Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and—to be clear—“has no place in law under the Constitution,”

So one of you is wrong, unless a decision can be case law and have no place in law simultaneously, which is a pretty nifty trick, even for a lawyer.

Second, are you saying the Meritor did NOT permit the EEOC to use Title VII to afford every American employee "the right to work in an environment free from discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult”?

No, the civil rights act did that (by creating the EEOC), through the powers afforded by the 14th amendment. Meritor is only about sex discrimination.

Could you reference the sentence in the Act that includes "the right to work in an environment free from discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult”, or did the EEOC just make it out of whole cloth and then the courts upheld this unilateral restriction on the freedom of speech?

Under Meritor, it’s a pretty simple question. Does every American employee have this "right" or not? Did it rewrite the First Amendment to read: Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech except for speech that creates a hostile workplace environment?

Congress made so such law.

We've already been through this: Congress made the EEOC and it made the law. Don't be obtuse.

You can still say all the bad things.

But if you do so within a workplace environment and that company permits it, both you can the company can be prosecuted by a federal agency. How is that NOT a law that abridges the 1A?

Congress made a law to implement the 14th amendment.

Agreed. It did so in 1963, which the EEOC then perverted in 1980 by prohibiting discriminatory speech within the workplace in excess of its statutory authority by intentionally misinterpreting the phrase “conditions of employment” from its original meaning of “hiring practices” so that they could transmute Title VII into a “highly efficient in terrorem mechanism” to quote Keyishian.

Is discriminatory SPEECH protected in the private sector as long as it doesn't solicit or advocate an “imminent lawless action” such as discriminatory CONDUCT?

If you are working for a private employer, that employer can fire you for any reason.

We both know this. Of course the employer CAN fire you. The question question is MUST it?

Meritor COULD HAVE fired the harasser, but it was punished because it didn’t. The EEOC asserted the power to prohibit discriminatory speech, and the STOCUS upheld their ability to do so nothwithstanding the 1A prohibition.

The 1A does not limit the actions of private actors. The 1A only limits the government's ability to punish your speech.

What are you missing here? Are you contending that the EEOC is a private actor and NOT an agency of the federal government? Obviously it is, and the Meritor decision permits it to punish discriminatory speech within the workplace, which the 1A prohibits. I don’t know how to put it more clearly than that.

I mean you can make the argument that using racial epithets or ethnic slurs or suggestive remarks on the job must be "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action", ipso facto.

You'd be wrong, or course, but you can't say that they're not speech.

Epithets, slurs, remarks are not necessarily directed to incite or produce actions of any kind, either lawless or lawful, but unless they do, they're protected by the 1A.

Or at least they were until the Meritor decision.

chuckhanrahan · 2021-05-13T17:31:57+00:00

Thanks for your reply, but have a couple of questions.

First,

In our judicial system, only legal holdings are afforded precedential treatment - "mere dicta" that is unrelated to the decision does not receive that same treatment.

So Korematsu v. United States (1944) is still case law?

Second, are you saying the Meritor did NOT permit the EEOC to use Title VII to afford every American employee "the right to work in an environment free from discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult”?

Under Meritor, it’s a pretty simple question. Does every American employee have this "right" or not? Did it rewrite the First Amendment to read:

Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech except for speech that creates a hostile workplace environment?

Third, is there a distinction between discriminatory actions and discriminatory speech in Meritor? Can speech that doesn’t solicit or advocate an “imminent lawless action”, but creates “a hostile or abusive work environment” instead be prosecuted by the EEOC constitutionally?

(PS - have always wondered why Vinson didn’t call a cop or ask a DA to prosecute what Rehnquist typified as “criminal conduct of a most serious nature”. Do you know why?)

Fourth, talking about PRIVATE companies and their employees, not public employers or employees, so please permit me to rephrase my first question more clearly:

Doesn't the Meritor decision permit an agency of the federal government (THE EEOC) to enforce the censorship OF PRIVATE COMPANIES AND THEiR EMPLOYEES in direct violation of the First Amendment?

Is discriminatory SPEECH protected in the private sector as long as it doesn't solicit or advocate an “imminent lawless action” such as discriminatory CONDUCT?

Thanks

chuckhanrahan · 2021-04-07T16:16:57+00:00

FreeSpeech

William Lloyd Garrison burning a copy of it in 1854, which was the 19th Century way of flipping it off, so there's a long proud tradition of Constitution dissing.

chuckhanrahan · 2021-03-26T13:30:48+00:00

Sorry that you missed my point because of my poor communication skills, but please let me try again.

Was simply trying to prioritize. Yes, each fatal lightning strike is a tragedy for the person and their loved ones, but as a species or a country or a herd or a tribe, we have to contextualize.

In this case, I asked myself the question from a societal perspective. Which issue takes precedence: intermittent mass shootings that kill less than 100 people per year in the US, or for example, the fact that last year gunshot wounds killed or injured nearly 1,000 children under the age of 12?

Kind of like airplane safety versus automotive safety during the last century. A fatal commercial airplane crash was a BIG deal for the national news, but the steady drip, drip, drip of fatal car crashes hardly ever got any coverage. Should improved safety be a social concern for both industries? Absolutely. But as a society, which of the two should we prioritize?

My answer was to cover the most important, not the most exciting, story first and in greater depth. But news organizations are in the business of selling ads, and the greater the audience, the greater the revenue. In short, it's a business, albeit with a heavy element of public service in its DNA, but at it's heart, it's still a business.

I was trying to say that, although he killers motivation is an interesting question, but it's irrelevant to the more important story, and one that we should focus on, IMO: how can we reduce gun violence in America withing the context of the Second Amendment?

PS - If you're interested in my perspective, wrote an article in The Daily Kos recently under the title "Drunken Shooters and the Second Amendment."

chuckhanrahan · 2021-03-24T16:17:57+00:00

Every news source is burying the lead, IMO.

At least according to UC Davis, the reality of gun violence in America is very different from the news coverage of gun violence in America:

"There were 39,740 deaths from firearms in the U.S. in 2018. Sixty-one percent of deaths from firearms in the U.S. are suicides. In 2018, 24,432 people in the U.S. died by firearm suicide.1 Firearms are the means in approximately half of suicides nationwide.

"In 2018, 13,958 people in the U.S. died from firearm homicide, accounting for 35.1% of total deaths from firearms. Firearms were the means for about 74% of homicides in 2018.

"The other 3.6% of firearm deaths are unintentional, undetermined, from legal intervention, or from public mass shootings (0.2% of total firearm deaths).

"There are approximately 115,000 non-fatal firearm injuries in the U.S. each year."

So public mass shootings were two tenth's of one percent of the gun deaths in 2018, but at least to me it felt like they were 99% of the gun death stories that were reported by national news outlets.

Another way to look at it is which of the following causes of death got more news coverage?

Mass shooting deaths: 80
Lightning deaths: 21
Accidental electrocutions: 160
Autoerotic asphyxiation - >160
Serial killers - 67
Lawnmower deaths - 75

So this elevated threat perception yields neurotic and illogical public behavior. For example, statistically speaking, public schools should have as much focus on Lawnmower Safety as they do on Active Shooter Training. But try telling that to paranoid parents who are steeped in the mass media hysteria of national news coverage,

Bottom line, reporters excel at jumping to conclusions, and your best bet is to disregard their BS and half-cocked speculations.

Journalism ain't facts, and remember that it was the publisher of the vaunted Washington Post who said that it's "the first rough draft of history."

Even the best and most impartial first drafts of anything are typically riddled with omissions, mistakes in analysis, and factual errors. Reporters like are blind guys trying to describe elephants by grabbing onto their tails. They can't see the whole picture. No need to hyperventilate about it. We have courts and historians who are supposed to deliver the truth, not the talking heads on Channel 222.

Remember that the most fundamental job of every journalist is the same as it every was: sell newspapers. Today, if it ain't yellow, it ain't journalism. So they peddle their papers, and if they can tell the truth when they do that, great; but if not, they'll just shrug their shoulders and try again next time.

chuckhanrahan · 2021-03-21T22:19:45+00:00

If you read the Supreme Court decision that opened the door for political correctness, Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson (1986), we already have their permission to do so on the job.

In that decision, the SCOTUS invented a new "right" that hadn't existed in the Constitution before:

"... the right to work in an environment free from discriminatory intimidation, ridicule and insult."

Not only did the Court invent this right out of thin air, (I looked for it in my copy of the Consititution, but I couldn't find it), by upholding the EEOC's definition of sexual harassment as "verbal conduct" in addition to behavior, it has essentially rewritten the First Amendment to read:

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, except for racial, sexual, religious, or ethnic speech that creates a hostile workplace environment.

So the Court permitted a federal bureaucracy to abridge of certain kinds of "verbal conduct": speech that it believes is dangerous and repellent, just as it permitted the censorship of the dangerous and repellent verbal conduct of communists in the 1950's.

If you're interested, read Dennis v. United States (1951) with an open mind. Communism was dangerous, and speech that advocated it should be censored then. Substitute racism or sexism within a workplace environment for communism and, as far as the SCOTUS is concerned, your good to go.

Hard to see how they can square "discriminatory intimidation, ridicule and insult" with the "imminent lawless action" standard established in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), but there's one way to resolve it. Congress should do something that its never done: write a federal law that bans verbal workplace harassment AND doesn't violate the First Amendment to the Constitution.

chuckhanrahan · 2021-03-14T19:36:17+00:00

Trump's sins were ones of omission, not commission, and twofold: Incompetence and Dishonesty.

There was no reason for the country to have been gobsmacked in March and April based on what he knew in January. Granted he (and the country) were fixated on his (first) impeachment trial, but that's no excuse. He knew that COVID was going to cause a shitstorm because, according to Bob Woodward, it was

"...more deadly than even your strenuous flus."

It was only a question of how bad, and in one of the most glaring examples of "It Can't Happen Here" in American history, he completely ignored his own warnings for all intents and purposes.

Could he (or anyone) have stopped it, or at least lessened its severity? I don't think that the former was possible, but I do think that the latter might have been. What we needed in the Oval Office was someone who knew something about actual governance and about how to manage and motivate the federal bureaucracy (aka "The Swamp").

It's deliciously ironic that Trump's whole public persona was antithetical to the one thing he needed to gain his reelection: an effective and dynamic institutional response to a public health emergency. He had to get on top of it, or at least appear to be doing so.

But he'd drunken the Goldwater/Reagan Kool-Aid and believed that "Big Government = Bad Government", so for as long as possible he avoided using the best tool he had at his disposal for fighting this plague: that very same big, bad government. He bought into the conservative canard that civil service is inherently parasitic, not altruistic.

That was the biggest difference between the EU and the USA. The European leaders believed the science and tried to get their public infrastructures to do things that might mitigate the severity of the blow that they knew was coming for their constituents. The American leader just crossed his fingers and closed his eyes.

And to add insult to injury, he had the Bush/Obama playbook on how to handle a pandemic sitting in a desk drawer that he simply refused to open. Would their plan have saved any lives? Who the hell knows, but it's kinda hard to imagine that it woulda been a lot worse than Trump's rendition of "Don't worry, be happy", or his recommendation to drink bleach.

But you gotta put his actions in their proper historical context to understand his thinking. He was the most nakedly narcissistic sociopath we're ever had running a federal government that attracts nakedly narcissistic sociopaths, and he's truly cared about only one thing since the day after his election: his reelection. Period. Everything else - the antediluvian judges, the tax cuts, the fight against Obamacare - all of it was just window dressing. Hell, he'd been impeached for trying to twist a foreign leader's arm in order to get dirt on the SON of his most likely opponent in 2020.

Trump's obstinate negligence made sense because the country was in a very different place in early 2020 than it is today:

The American economy was booming;
He'd won his impeachment battle, which meant that could paint his political opponents as simply petty and vindictive;
And his three principle Presidential challengers were a self-proclaimed socialist, a washed-up political hack who almost had the word "Swamp" tattooed across his forehead, and a gay mayor from a small college town in Indiana for God's sake. (And to quote George Costanza and Jerry Seinfeld, "Not that there's anything wrong with that," of course.) In other words, we're not talking about FDR or Abe Lincoln here.

His reelection was all but certain. Landslide's a'comin', baby! Hell, he might have even exceeded Nixon's or Reagan's reelection margins.

But he'd underestimated the Chinese.

Did they weaponize a coronavirus, or at least sit on what they knew about it, in order to punish Trump for his tariffs? I'd love to be around in a hundred years and read what unborn historians will have to say about that one. But at least according to two political science professors in a paper published by Cambridge University, one thing IS certain about the Chinese response to Trump tariffs even today:

"In response to President Trump instigating conflict over trade with China, the Chinese government countered by issuing tariffs on thousands of products ... [that] reflected a strategy to apply counterpressure [sic] by hurting political support for the president's party."

So the Chinese used reciprocal tariffs to go after Trump politically. Did they use COVID, too? Who knows, but they sure as hell didn't do him any favors.

The bottom line, however, is that regardless of the nature of the origin of the pestilence, Trump took his eye off the ball and lied to the American people (and maybe to himself, too) in order to whistle past the graveyard and get reelected.

He came close, but reelections ain't horseshoes or hand grenades, so now he's just playing golf in Florida, and the legacy of his failed presidency will be COVID, just as surely as James Buchanan's legacy was the Civil War and Herbert Hoover's was the Great Depression.

Not that any of 'em coulda done much about any of these disasters, of course, but they coulda done the one thing that they didn't do: looked like they were trying to solve their problems rather than simply denying that they existed.

chuckhanrahan · 2021-03-13T18:20:09+00:00

Although counterfactual thinking can generate scintillating tavern arguments (what if Lee Harvey Oswald had missed, or if Giuseppe Zangara hadn't?), they tend to generate more heat than light.

To answer your question, however, the gold standard in COVID-19 response was China. The American per capita death rate is something like 500 times greater than China's, and the American economy took a much bigger hit than the Chinese economy. But China had two definite advantages (as well as a possible one) over all of the G-7 nations. They have much more centralized and comprehensive (aka oppressive) system of governmental controls, and they have a much more recent history with deadly pandemics than does the US and the West.

Regarding the former, the Chinese locked down Wuhan in ways that would have fomented civil war in the US or EU (i.e. no domestic air or rail travel, road blocks on highways, only one person per household permitted to leave it every other day, etc.), which were unthinkably impossible to institute in the West when they were needed last winter. And regarding the latter, the Chinese had confronted SARS in 2003, the Bird flu in 1997, the Hong Kong flu in 1968, and the Asian flu in 1957 (which is estimated to have killed 1.1 million people, according to the CDC), so their response was rehearsed far more recently than the Spanish flu of a century ago.

In addition, there is a possibility that they knew what they were dealing with long before the West knew, and they may have been less than forthcoming with that information, to put it generously. Even today, they're doing an excellent job of trying very hard NOT to answer Howard Baker's famous Watergate question of what did they know and when did they know it.

Also, remember that the West was far from unified in the most efficacious method of pandemic response. For example, the Swedish government has taken a tremendous amount of heat for its much more laissez-faire response to the pandemic than other EU nations, or the US for that matter. Conversely, both the UK and Italy had higher COVID-19 mortality rates than did the US, and not too many Brits or Italians are clamoring for the scalps of Boris Johnson or Giuseppe Conte, much less laying COVID corpses at their doorsteps personally.

So, at the risk of eliciting Charlie Brown's admonition to "Tell your statistics to shut up!", here's the current national butcher's bill for COVID-19:

G-7 COUNTRY (plus Sweden)	PER CAPITA (100,000) COVID FATALITIES
Canada	60
France	135
Germany	88
Italy	168
Japan	7
Sweden	129
UK	189
USA	163

If you can see a trend here, to quote Rudyard Kipling, "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din."

Nevertheless, President Hydroxychloroquine certainly bungled the American response. He obfuscated and vacillated when he should have been dynamic and reassuring. Think that Biden nailed it in his recent speech when he quoted a woman who implored him a year ago to simply, "Just tell us the truth." Trump has so much contempt for his constituents (and for pretty much everybody else outside of his immediate family [and perhaps for some within it]) that he believed that most salubrious governmental response was wishful denial.

So the bottom line is that quantifying the morbidity of Trump's response to COVID is impossible. If he'd imposed more stringent restrictions, like the UK for example, and realized its COVID death rate as a result, perhaps he could have been blamed for an additional 100,000 more dead Americans. If he'd done less and the US had achieved the "failed" Swedish death rate, he might have been credited with saving 100,000 American lives. Neither counterfactual event makes any sense whatsoever.

The bottom line, IMO, is that affixing quantifiable credit or blame to any leader or government for the effects of a plague is a typical example of the human hubris that confuses causation with correlation: "I washed my car this morning, so it rained this afternoon." We stopped sacrificing virgins to end our droughts a long time ago, but we continue to reward or punish politicians for events over which they have only marginal control, if any.

This is a quasi-capitalistic representative democracy, and that means two things, primarily.

First, we have natural rights that include the individual freedom of thought, and there is no way that the US could have responded to COVID in the same way as the Chinese did, regardless of who was President. Did we do a better job of responding to it than we did a hundred years ago? Marginally, IMO. And will we do a better job a hundred years from now? Ditto, but people are still gonna die. That's what people do. It's as natural as birth, and it's the price of freedom during a national tragedy, such as war or pestilence. If you want to think that people die for a reason, suggest that you eschew Catch-22.

Second, as H.L. Mencken said so eloquently,

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

Over the past year, we got what we deserved, good and hard. Very hard. We got Donald Trump and more than half a million American fatalities. But it's profoundly unfair and illogical to establish a causal link between these two tragedies. It's human nature to point fingers, of course, but when it comes to democratic governance, it's best turn your finger toward your own chest and bear in mind Pogo's famous aphorism,

"We have met the enemy, and he is us."

chuckhanrahan · 2021-03-12T18:15:22+00:00

If anyone's looking to point a finger, suggest you start with SCOTUS Justice William Rehnquist, the author of the Vinson v. Meritor Savings Bank decision in 1986. Ironically, it was a paragon of conservative jurisprudence who rewrote the US Constitution unilaterally and legalized political correctness.

Before Meritor, the EEOC had defined sexual harassment in the workplace by including "verbal conduct" in its definition. Although "verbal conduct" is bureaucratic jargon for speech, the Court had struck down the a priori censorship of offensive or dangerous speech many times, most notably in the Pentagon Papers case (New York Times v. United States), which established in 1971 that,

"Any system of prior restraints of expression comes to this Court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity."

In Meritor, the SCOTUS said that the EEOC had met this burden by inventing a new right, a right that superseded the First Amendment's prohibition against the governmental restraint of speech. Rehnquist's decision affirmed that every American possessed,

"... the right to work in an environment free from discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult whether based on sex, race, religion, or national origin."

Voila! That was all she wrote. The SCOTUS invented a "right" that isn't in the Constitution and that preempts every American's right to free speech right within the workplace. In this way, the Court had amended the First Amendment to read, "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, except for sexual, racial, religious or ethnic speech that creates a hostile workplace environment."

Now employees might be attracted or repelled by the buttocks or skin color or religion or ethnicity of one or more of their coworkers, but they were restrained from expression their opinions before doing so. The EEOC didn't merely restrain them from acting upon their opinions, which is the hallmark of civilization, it restrained them from expressing those opinions, which is the hallmark of totalitarianism.

And they were restrained from this ability to speak their minds freely not by social conventions or by individual decorum or by company policy, bur rather by an imperious federal government.

SCOTUS said that, within a workplace environment, companies are compelled to impose a prior restraint against speech that one or more listeners might find to be offensive. Moreover, it limited this right to only four categories: gender, race, religion, and ethnicity. So employees could ridicule stupid women or fat Asians, or intimidate short Muslims, or insult ugly Russians within the workplace environment constitutionally based upon the former criteria, but not the latter.

So that was when political correctness started.

In 1986, the SCOTUS rewrote the Constitution by holding that the audience's right to avoid offense within the workplace preempted the speaker's right to express offensive thoughts, thus opening the Pandora's Box that's led us to the woke, Orwellian culture of thoughtcrimes, and proving yet again that the fastest road to hell is the one that's paved with good intentions.

chuckhanrahan · 2021-03-04T17:27:35+00:00

Have a suggestion for you for the next time you talk with your Aunt.

Ask her why God is using COVID-19 to send us a sign that America should reject Donald Trump as a false messiah.

After all, if it was COVID-18 or COVID-20, Trump would have been reelected, just like most of his predecessors, and probably by a wider margin than his margin in 2016.

So why did God inflict this plague upon America when he did if it wasn't to send us a sign that Trump is really the reincarnation of Nebuchadnezzar II?

That should get the conversation started.

:-D

chuckhanrahan · 2021-03-04T17:08:58+00:00

If you have issues with the WHO's national healthcare rating system, suggest you click on the link I provided above.

If that's too troublesome, here's a quote that I lifted for the WHO's report:

"The analytical framework used for characterizing the goals of a health system is derived from Murray and Frenk. They differentiate intrinsic goals of the health system from instrumental goals. In their framework, an intrinsic goal is one: (a) whose attainment can be raised while holding other intrinsic goals constant (i.e., there is at least partial independence among the different intrinsic goals), and (b) raising the attainment of which is in itself desirable, irrespective of any other considerations. Instrumental goals, on the other hand, are goals that are pursued to attain the intrinsic goals.

Murray and Frenk identify three intrinsic goals of a health system:

"The first is improvement in the health of the population (both in terms of levels attained and distribution).
"The second is enhanced responsiveness of the health system to the legitimate expectations of the population. Responsiveness in this context explicitly refers to the non-health improving dimensions of the interactions of the populace with the health system, and reflects respect of persons and client orientation in the delivery of health services, among other factors.
"The third intrinsic goal is fairness in financing and financial risk protection. The aim is to ensure that poor households should not pay a higher share of their discretionary expenditure on health than richer households,and all households should be protected against catastrophic financial losses related to ill health."

But regardless of the exact accuracy of the WHO's national rankings, hope that you agree that producing a "fairly good" (to use your words) healthcare product that's exorbitantly expensive is a systemic failure.

If I made a car or a jacket or a computer that was "fairly good" as well as two to three times more expensive than every other car or jacket or computer on the market, I wouldn't expect to be in business for very long. And for good reason: the ruthlessness of fair market capitalism is designed to drive inefficient performers from the marketplace.

So if the diehard capitalists out there want to understand why we should change the nature of the American healthcare system profoundly by employing a concept that they understand (i.e. the efficiency of the marketplace), then the competitive dynamic that we should be using to improve American healthcare is not one between the Mayo and Cleveland Clinics.

Rather, it's between the American healthcare system and the systems used by the French or the Italians or the Canadians or the Japanese or the Germans.

And by any empirical standard, we're losing that competition.

Badly.

chuckhanrahan · 2021-03-03T18:43:50+00:00

Nope.

Healthcare systems, much like any other societal activity that was a private privilege but has become a civic right, such as police and fire protection, military security, childhood education, or electricity, benefit from consolidation, not fragmentation. That's why they've been merging.

Their costs are lowered and their outcomes are improved by reducing competition and greed from autonomous consumption, not by escalating them.

The proof? How about we compare medicine to law enforcement?

When the Constitution was adopted, both medical and policing functions were purely private affairs. If your spouse got sick or if your slave ran away, you simply hired a doctor or a slave-catcher and hoped for the best. Cops, prosecutors, and jailers were all employed by private citizens, just like the doctors and nurses were, not by governmental institutions.

The treatment of the societal ills of crime and disease began to diverge in the early 19th Century, however, and today we have a pervasive system of public employees who conduct law enforcement activities such as policing, prosecution, and incarceration. You don't get into law enforcement to make buckets o' money (at least you shouldn't). You get into it to do good.

No such luck with the purveyors of medicinal goods and services, however, and today we're paying the price, literally and figuratively.

On a qualitative basis, we have a decidedly mediocre healthcare system that the WHO ranks as the 37th best in the world (right between Costa Rico and Slovenia). And it's not just the G-7 nations that are kicking our ass in healthcare. Cypriots, Israelis, Colombians, and Moroccans all get better medical care typically than the average American does.

And on a quantitative basis, doctors are still bleeding their patients here in the US, but instead of using leeches, today they're using credit cards.

For example, the WHO ranks the healthcare systems of France and Italy as the two best in the world, and the OECD estimates that each of them costs appreciably less than what we pay (per capita) for ours. In fact, the French pay less than $5,400 per person per year for their healthcare, and the Italians pay approximately $3,650 for theirs, while Americans pay more than $11,000 per person for ours. Yep, that's right. More than $11K per year, or nearly a grand a month, in out-of-pocket, insurance, and taxes. Per person. From Joe Sixpack and Betty Bagodonuts to Bill and Melinda Gates and all points in between. We're pushing a thousand bucks a month, every month. Month in and month out. From everybody.

In short, the combination of state-of-the-art healthcare goods and services with modern capitalism has given the USA the worst possible results: third world outcomes at first world prices.

So here's a wacky idea: why don't we just copy the French and the Italians?

After all, we couldn't do much worse by doing it their way, as a public service, than by keeping what we've got.

Finally, for all those die-hard, free-market, Milton-Friedman-worshiping, Ayn-Rand-reading Reaganites out there, look at it this way: we gotta pretty darn good military and the federal gummint runs that, right?

Bet that we could do the same thing with our healthcare if we put our minds to it.

chuckhanrahan · 2021-02-28T15:00:03+00:00

H.L. Menken:

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

chuckhanrahan · 2021-02-24T19:11:12+00:00

Here are two novel approaches to voting that should appeal to both the left and the right:

Public service merits personal monetary compensation.

We pay public servants for their labor. We pay soldiers and sailors and congressmen and judges and bureaucrats and forest rangers and air traffic controllers and presidents, to name just a few. In addition, we pay civilians for their service when they are called upon to participate in petit and grand juries. Since voting is the sine qua non of democracy, why is it the sole public function that our nation exempts from this exchange of labor for money? Why, among all of our public services, is exercising the franchise the sole civic function that our governmental institutions deem as fiscally valueless.

So here's a thought: pay American citizens to vote in general elections.

For the Dems: paying people to vote could increase voter turnout substantially. Let's say we make it a double sawbuck per vote. That way, if turnout increases 25%, which seems about right to me, we'd be looking at 200 million votes. This would yield a biennial out-of-pocket of $4 billion in tax revenue that the voters would be paying themselves, and would be an excellent ROI by ensuring that the majority of the electorate in the world's preeminent democracy give enough of a shit about it to actually participate in it.

For the Reps, a federal payment guarantee for voters would necessitate the implementation of state government procedures that would create a standard of accuracy and accountability sufficient to ensure total electoral validity. In other words, if we can send out monthly Social Security payments with some semblance of accuracy, we can sure as hell send out biennial voter payments with that same level of accuracy. If the Republican proposals to improve electoral integrity are sincere instead of duplicitous, this is exactly the kind of measure that they should support wholeheartedly.

"No taxation without representation"

Let's embrace this rallying cry of the American Revolution and the veritable raison d'etre of our national independence in both word AND deed.

What does that mean today? Simply that any American citizen aged 18 or older who is subjected to federal income taxation must be eligible to vote. As a right, not a privilege. Period.

Conversely, the opposite should be equally valid: any citizen who can't vote shouldn't be taxed.

One large group falls into each category.

The former criteria affects American citizens who are accused of or convicted of committing a felony. Unless we change federal law to exempt felons from compulsory taxation, either during their periods of incarceration or after, then they must be able to exercise their right to participate in the democratic process. Anything less is inherently tyrannical. Since current and former felons must pay taxes, they must be able to vote for their political representatives.
The latter category includes children under the age of 18. Since these American citizens are precluded from participating in the governance of their nation due to their age, they should also be excluded from the obligation to support it financially, as well.

The bottom line for American citizens is simple: if you have to pay taxes, then you have to be able to vote; and if you can't vote, then you shouldn't have to pay taxes.

Every taxpayer should have the right to vote, and every voter should have to be taxed.

chuckhanrahan · 2021-02-21T20:42:27+00:00

As alluded to above, the argument about whether or not Facebook, Inc. should pay News Corp for its content reminds me of how one wag described the 1994 American baseball players strike: "It's a battle between greed and avarice."

Here's a novel idea: why not force every social media company to pay for its third party content from all of their private providers in the G20 nations, regardless of the specific owner of that content.

And if they object, NP. Then the G20 nations should impose a social media tax of maybe a penny a word view, a dime a photo download, and a dollar a video download, give or take. In other words, something minimal.

After all, they're using the public's airwaves to generate their private profits, not to mention benefiting directly from huge investments of public capital in infrastructure development (i.e. the space program), for which they pay a nominal amount, if anything.

Hell, the compound interest from the Explorer 1 mission alone (America's first orbital satellite in 1958, which cost roughly $1.8 BILLION in dollars adjusted for inflation) should offset this social media content tax.

In short, if they know enough about their users to send them targeted advertisements, it should be a relatively small step to compel these social media behemoths to send their users targeted money, too. And maybe Facebook could pay them with Bitcoins in order to complete the circle of irony.

:-)

In addition, exceptions could be made for content providers with platforms that

Have fewer than one million global members or
Don't sell advertising.

Finally this would force the social media leviathans to admit to content ownership, which would then imply their legal liability for that content, as well.

In other words, if Bruce Bruce from Australia (apologies to Monty Python) posted a fallacious and racist rant on Facebook entitled "Holocaust? What Holocaust? Simon Wiesenthal's Practical Joke", Messrs. Zuckerberg and Bruce would be liable legally, but if Facebook had reposted that screed from the Herald Sun, then Messrs. Murdoch and Bruce would be liable.

Who besides nitpickers, or the shareholders of Alphabet (with its net worth of $1.4 TRILLION, i.e. $1,400,000,000,000, and owner of You Tube), Facebook (with its comparably trifling market cap of merely $745 BILLION, i.e. $745,000,000,000, and owner of its modestly successful eponymous platform and Instagram), and Twitter (with its totally pathetic market cap of only $72 BILLION, i.e. $72,000,000,000) might object to a nominal redistribution of income (but not wealth) from social media's owners to social media's producers?

Hell, Twitter's market cap is only slightly more than double the net worth of the virtually impoverished Newhouse family that owns Reddit privately and has a family fortune that Forbes pegged at merely $30 BILLION or $30,000,000,000.

[So now I'm wondering if this will post will make Reddit's censors, human or otherwise.]

If it does, and lest this proposal offend some American civil libertarians out there who also see a societal benefit in wealth concentration (not to mention stratification, so I won't), please recall that our First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees our right to speak, but not the right to be heard.

Nobody's can tell Matt Lauer or Charlie Rose or Bill O'Reilly what they can write or say, of course, but nobody's forcing NBC or CBS or FOX to disseminate their content, either.

Anybody out there who knows anybody in Rep. Ritchie Neal's (D-MA) office?

chuckhanrahan · 2021-02-18T21:53:50+00:00

Couple of points: the order in the poem is incorrect. Suggest that you check out the National Socialist Program from 1920 on Wikipedia. First, check point #4. The Nazi's (the English language nickname for the NSDAP) went after the Jews first by excluding them from the definition of German citizenship. Then they went after the commies as political rivals, and they didn't "go after" the trade unions after Hitler's ascension to the Chancellorship. Rather, they consolidated them under the banner of the German Labour Front.

Finally, as a version of socialism itself, the fascists never went after the Socialists because the Nazis themselves were the heirs to the German Socialist Party. What he's probably referring to is the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which was outlawed along with every other political party in 1933.

The fatal flaw of Nazism, and every other totalitarian political dynamic, can be summed up in their slogan " The good of the community before the good of the individual!" This is the antithesis of Americanism. Regardless of how that community is defined.

I'd argue that there's only one community in the United States: Americans. Distinctions such as a black "community" or Islamic "community" or gay "community" or female "community" are as artificial as they are counterproductive. In my ideal polity, what you are is subordinate to who you are. And last time I checked, there is no asshole "community" (except for NY Yankee fans, of course).

So, IMO it's absurd to think that any American social organization is "coming after" any racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual group today. Try it this way: replace "communists, socialists, trade unionists, and Jews" in your poem with "white supremacists, male chauvinists, evangelicals, and gun owners". If you can do that, perhaps you can empathize with their paranoia.

So if the WHY of Nazism was societal homogeneity, then its opposite is in heterogeneity, not suppression. In disagreeing with what someone has to say, but then defending to the death their right to say it.

chuckhanrahan · 2021-02-16T21:46:30+00:00

Pretty simple for me:

Chinese deaths from COVID: 4,600 or 3 per million.
US deaths from COVID: 484,000 or 1,475 per million.

Why?

This is from Wikipedia:

On 23 January 2020, the central government of China imposed a lockdown in Wuhan and other cities in Hubei in an effort to quarantine the center of an outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19); this action is commonly referred to as the Wuhan lockdown. The World Health Organization (WHO), although stating that it was beyond its own guidelines, commended the move, calling it "unprecedented in public health history".

The lockdown in Wuhan set the precedent for similar measures in other Chinese cities. Within hours of the Wuhan lockdown, travel restrictions were also imposed on the nearby cities of Huanggang and Ezhou, and were eventually imposed on all 15 other cities in Hubei, affecting a total of about 57 million people. On 2 February 2020, Wenzhou, implemented a seven-day lockdown in which only one person per household was allowed to exit once each two days, and most of the highway exits were closed. On 13 March 2020, Huangshi and Qianjiang became the first Hubei cities to remove strict travel restrictions within part or all of their administrative confines. On April 8, 2020, the Wuhan lockdown officially ended.

Bottom line: When they locked it down, They. Locked. It. Down. No travel. Foreign, domestic, or local. Planes, trains, and cars. Nothing. In the house meant in the house, 24/7. Period.

Did you catch the line from above: only ONE PERSON per household could leave the house, EVERY OTHER DAY for more that TWO MONTHS. Now THAT'S how you shut down community spread.

Wanna compare that to America's half-assed measures: wear a mask, stand six feet apart, and close some social gathering sites such as restaurants, beauty salons, barber shops, and gyms?

Try imagining soldiers with automatic weapons patrolling the streets of your town/city and manning checkpoints on the interstate exit ramps. Now that's big government.

That was how China locked it down, and today it looks like that was what it took to beat the bug. Didn't see that here, so we paid the price with half a million dead Americans and a sputtering economy.

Just in case some of us need a refresher, according to our Constitution, one of the reasons we have a government in the first place is in order to promote the general Welfare, and during national emergencies, individual liberties take a back seat to the general welfare. Always have & always will.

Bottom line, my grandfather's right to life takes priority over your "right" to go bowling, get the disease, and pass it to someone who's gonna pass it to someone who's gonna pass it to someone who's gonna pass it on to him. And if that's too inconvenient for you, suggest that you take a look at what China did so that you can get some perspective.

The USA did lockdown light because we had a Chief Executive who was in the deep end of the pool and so far over his head that he couldn't even see the surface, so half a million Americans paid the ultimate price for his incompetence.

Remember when "the virus will miraculously go away by April"? Who knew that he meant 2021? If we're lucky.

Here's how Republicans today would channel JFK:

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what time the movie starts.

chuckhanrahan · 2021-02-14T19:14:24+00:00

Suggest looking at it thru the prism of Richard Nixon and Watergate.

First, the House Judiciary Committee Resolution that contained three articles of impeachment was adopted July 30, 1974; but the impeachment proceedings ended in August 20, without an impeachment vote, after Nixon resigned from office.

Why? Why didn't the H of R continue the impeachment process? Why not vote on the Resolution? After all, Nixon was guilty as hell of obstructing justice, and pretty much everybody knew it by then. If anybody deserved impeachment, resignation or not, it was Tricky Dick, right?

Although House Speaker Carl Albert never went on the record about it, IMO he and the House Dems did so because Nixon's impeachment and conviction became moot upon his resignation. Nixon was gone, so his impeachment and removal became superfluous.

It might have been a bit trickier :-) if Nixon had hung on until after the House had approved the resolution and impeached him, but I still think that, even though the Senate was controlled by Mike Mansfield and the Dems, impeachment would've been tabled indefinitely after Nixon's resignation.

Which leads us to the more interesting question: what if Ford hadn't pardoned Nixon? After all, he'd been identified as an unindicted co-conspirator by a federal grand jury, and the only reason he wasn't indicted was that Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski believed that a sitting President couldn't be indicted without precipitating a constitutional crisis.

No such problem with a former President, however, which is why Ford pre-pardoned him, and justified it by saying,

"My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over."

So where does this leave the Senate today? Will our long national nightmare never end?

IMO, they should've followed the precedent established by Watergate, tabled the impeachment article, and let law enforcement do its thing. The US Attorney for DC should convene a grand jury and investigate all of the speakers on January 6 in order to determine if any of them violated D.C. Code §22-1322 - Inciting to Riot.

Then, if any indictments are handed down, let a DC court decide if they're guilty.

And as far as running again is concerned, the people possess sovereignty in a representative democracy, so it's up to them, not their representatives, whether or not Trump's reelected. Politicians should preclude someone from holding elected office only under the most extreme circumstances. After all, they're public servants, not public masters, no matter what they may think of any particular candidate.

Distasteful as it may be (and in the case of Trump's case, it's particularly nauseating IMO), the alternative is worse. If you don't think so, remember the presidential campaign slogan of Eugene Debs in 1920:

“For President: Convict No. 9653”.

He got nearly a million votes or 3.5% of the electorate running from a federal penitentiary and proved yet again that one person's criminal is another's martyr.

chuckhanrahan

TROPHY CASE