Seizing his chance, the Duce strikes a deep blow at Social Security, Medicare

None of this is legal or constitutional.

But it's one hell of a victory for the hardest of the hard right.

Add this to the giant Trump tax cut for the rich and his continuing efforts to destroy utterly every jot of the ACA and you will see him endearing himself to the plutes whose support is deathless for the most vicious version of capitalism possible.

This kind of move shows Trump knows how to make his populism appealing to the really big money on the right.

And his repeated use of unconstitutional means is just so typical of the increasing radicalism, extremism, and ferocity of the American political scene.

Trump signs executive orders after coronavirus relief talks falter

President Trump on Saturday signed orders to extend unemployment benefits, suspend payroll taxes, and offer federal eviction and student loan relief, taking unilateral action that is on shaky legal ground amid stalled negotiations about a fifth round of coronavirus relief in Congress.

Forcing people to do what their religion forbids

Nobody wants to be an absolutist about it, but such coercion can certainly be overdone.

Forcing medical professionals or institutions to perform procedures that violate conscience is overdoing it.

And in that regard abortion is not the only issue.

Another Catholic Hospital Sued for Refusing Transgender Hysterectomy

How much worse would things get in this regard if we had outright socialized medicine like the NHS of the Brits?

A lot worse.

Even handing over the entire health insurance market to a single federal government run insurer would significantly diminish this liberty.

And would subject provision of medical services to rationing on the basis of invidious comparisons of the worth of individual lives, and subject R&D to state-sponsored judgments of value, morality, and justice.

I am a Democrat and a progressive, but not an anti-capitalist and not at all a PC authoritarian.

Cancel culture, BLM ideology, and Krugman's Red Guards

Don't recall seeing much, if any, of this on CNN or MSNBC.

Or BBC News, for that matter.

All of them too busy as cheerleaders and megaphones for the mob and the key mob propaganda points of BLM.

Not being a Fox viewer or regular reader I didn't know Krugman has lost his mind, for example.

(But I have noticed the long articles on their site are often exceptionally information rich.)

Paul Krugman, professors seek top economist's removal from influential job for criticizing Black Lives Matter

Quite a lot of information in this story.

Gregg Re doesn't like what Herr Krugman and these Cultural Revolutionaries are doing.

Neither does Andrew Sullivan, a well-known political moderate.

(Whose job may be in jeopardy.)

Nor does Michael Walzer, a much honored leftist intellectual.

An interesting story about a white radical destroyer of statues, described as "antifa".

One about the leader of the Times' extraordinary weaponization of history, The 1619 Project. 

Think Howard Zinn, but with a lot more vitriol.

NRO on the project. As history, it's worthless propaganda.

I have the impression the position of the right on racism in law enforcement under Trump is much as it has been for decades, that there is little or no racial bias in law enforcement and no institutional racism in America.

That view seems not to be shared even by most whites, these days.

Very likely, when Americans say they agree with the ideas of BLM this is what they mean.

Very likely, they otherwise have no idea what those ideas are.

About His Majesty, Ubu Roi

Cuomo denies Trump has ‘total authority’ to reopen US economy

Donald Trump is not a “king” and does not have “total authority” to reopen the US economy from its coronavirus shutdown, New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, said on Tuesday.

At a chaotic, angry and rambling White House briefing on Monday night, Trump, champing at the bit to reopen the US as early as 1 May, made a startling claim.

“When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total,” he said, referring to public health and police powers in the states and territories.

Constitutional scholars and state governors alike were quick to reject the idea with Cuomo leading the charge in a spat over tackling the pandemic that is pitting the White House versus state leaders.

“I don’t know what the president is talking about, frankly,” Cuomo told NBC. “We have a constitution … we don’t have a king … the president doesn’t have total authority.”

Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, also chimed in.

“I am not running for office to be King of America,” he said in a tweet.

“I respect the constitution. I’ve read the constitution. I’ve sworn an oath to it many times. I respect the great job so many of this country’s governors – Democratic and Republican – are doing under these horrific circumstances.”

. . . .

On Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund said the pandemic would lead to the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

. . . .

On Monday, the names of a “council to reopen America” were reported.

All were Trump administration officials, among them the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner.

There were no public health advisers among them.

. . . .

Trump’s performance at the White House podium, meanwhile, prompted alarm.

His repeated claim of “total authority” reminded some observers of Richard Nixon’s infamous claim after the Watergate scandal that “when the president does it, that means that it’s not illegal”.

Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, tweeted:

“Nope. That would be the literal definition of a totalitarian government – which our traditions, our constitution, and our values all rightly and decisively reject.”

There was also dissent among some Republican Trump allies in Congress, many of whom spent years accusing Barack Obama of executive overreach, including the Florida senator Marco Rubio.

As TV networks and news websites continued to debate whether Trump’s briefings should be shown live at all, some observers reached for more colorful language to describe the president’s misleading claims, attacks on journalists and showing of a propaganda film largely culled from Fox News.

In a column for the Daily Beast, the former Republican consultant turned anti-Trump author and organizer Rick Wilson called the briefing “a manic, gibbering, squint-eyed ragefest by America’s Worst President, a petty display by a failed man who long ago passed the limits of his competence and knowledge”.

On Tuesday, the White House scheduled its next briefing for 5pm.

Imagine Mussolini in charge of the Nanny State. Pushing the poor around

The Atlantic

Why is this a political issue at all?

BooMan and I guess the entire left want public policy to control who gets into what schools, as well as the moral and political content of what is taught, said, or even thought there.

Elite Universities Shouldn't Be Just for Elites

Galloping rather than creeping, their totalitarianism is.

Steve M. makes a valid point and I would like to add that academic survival, let alone anything like success, in college is especially hard for anyone with the misfortune to actually live on campus, and hardest for those living in a freshman dorm.

Animal House was tame, industrious, and quiet as a library by comparison.

Still, Scalia also makes a valid point generally recognized by all but the "reality based," who are known to inhabit their own PC fantasy land.

If you intentionally recruit people who are not up to the minimal standards of ability everybody else meets those people will have a much harder time and a lower success rate.

Liberals and diversity

Ages ago, I asked a liberal woman in a discussion of federalism about letting the states handle abortion each in their own way.

Likewise marriage laws, laws concerning sex, laws concerning censorship of expression and culture, and lots of other things, more or less as would be consistent with a pre-Civil War view of state and federal authorities, advocated at the time by conservatives of the likes of William Buckley and many others.

Sure, they were never such great federalists as all that.

Look what happened to the Mormons and their polygamy.

But still, some conservatives at the time were perfectly serious about letting most of the culture war issues rest with the states, where they more or less had been before the Supremes began to federalize them.

She opposed it.

Asked why, she raised her voice.

Puzzled, I pursued.

Did everyone in the world have to live the same way, their laws aligned according to the same beliefs about such things as religion, morality, and human rights?

So long as the laws and the culture were more or less a good fit with her own views where she lived, did she mind that other people elsewhere had laws suited to their very different beliefs and customs?

Yes, she did.

Pressed, she became angrier and more peremptory.

I let it drop.

I don't think her penchant for nationalist uniformity on these matters was a mere side effect of liberal reliance in those years on a runaway Supreme Court to force its cultural revolution on a country that was at the time opposed to it from sea to shining sea.

And anyway that could not explain her evident intent to foist her political values on the entire heedless globe.

Islamists, Kiplingesque partisans of the white man's civilizing mission, Wilsonian exporters of the blessings of democracy and liberty, and these folks all have much in common.

Fundamentally, it's the Will to Power wrapped in self-righteous justifying fantasies of religion, morality, and political and social justice.

Liberals think the world government they want the UN to be will be their tool for imposing their political and cultural values globally rather than, say, a tool for the Islamists or (worse yet?) Vatican traditionalists.

So far, very little goes on at the UN to contradict that view.

Things will be different when the movement to give states power in the UN according to population starts to make real headway.

And a local note about diversity in the US and the utter hypocrisy about liberals in connection with the First Amendment, free speech, free association, freedom of expression, free thought, and freedom of religion, as illustrated by this.

Christians must be made to bow

Frank Bruni of the Times in Bigotry, the Bible and the Lessons of Indiana quotes a gay philanthropist (and a Jew?) with approval,

"Church leaders must be made to take homosexuality off the sin list."

A remark I find both chilling and depressing.

Now, as a matter of historic fact, the Abrahamic religions in general and Christianity in particular are to fag-hating much as Christianity has been and Islam still is to Jew-hating.

Dropping the doctrines that only Christians can be saved and, in particular, that unconverted Jews cannot be saved, would help remove theological incitements to Jew-hating but is not actually necessary for that and, so far as I know, no liberal has been quite daring enough to insist that the Christian churches must be compelled to accept Universalism.

Similarly, dropping homosexuality per se from the sin list, possibly an even more drastic departure from genuine, traditional, orthodox Christianity than Universalism (or even Unitarianism!), would be a good thing in many ways.

But it is not essential for ending actual persecution or prosecution of gays, as the current state of things in the US must make obvious.

And does actual freedom no longer count for anything in the face of liberal demands that all bend the knee?

My God, we are so very, very far from Voltaire!

American liberty, American individualism.

Government Threatened Foley Family Over Ransom Payments, Mother of Slain Journalist Says

Her claim has been confirmed by others.

So.

Pretty much always the interests of law enforcement and government on the one side and those of victims, witnesses, or victims' families on the other are opposed.

Given the chance, governments will and in some cases have made it a criminal offense for such folks to act in their own interests, contrary to those of the government.

Government can and will always argue it represents "the greater good," or anyway the interests of prospective future victims and their families, loved ones, etc.

But unless we are prepared to allow government to pursue its ends "by any means necessary" we have to insist both that government act only within the law and that the law protect at least some of the very people and interests government would sacrifice, if wholly free.

Unless we are to surrender liberty and the individual to universal serfdom and the hive, unless we are to abandon individualism to collectivism, we cannot allow government such power.

[Aside:

And when you come right down to it, this is all the more necessary as always and everywhere government for each of those governed criminalizes some conduct he cannot or will not entirely eschew and for which he insists on escaping punishment - or demands conduct he prefers to avoid, also escaping punishment.

The whole issue of privacy comes in here, touching everything from the Fourth Amendment and the NSA to Zamiatin's walls made of glass and the child spies of 1984.

But that, of course, speaks to the interests of us all as lawbreakers, or anyway defiers of convention, which is not the issue here.

/Aside]

As to the present matter, so far as I know, it is neither illegal nor unusual for the families of kidnap victims to pay ransom, and that is as I would prefer.

About this particular incident, I would also prefer to see those officials responsible for terrorizing the family of the kidnapped journalist jailed for a bit of serious time, though I expect nothing of the kind.

Arguably, they cost the fellow his life.

But it is only too likely this revolting and tyrannical behavior represents the attitude of the administration all the way to the top, including O.

Recall their contempt for the constitutional and legal rights of that fellow who put on the Internet a video critical of Mohammed, upon which they deceptively blamed the Benghazi incident.

Recall their contempt for the rights of the Protestant Minister who repeatedly publicly planned a bonfire of Korans.

And recall that in both cases their contempt was shared by a very large number of high ranking public figures of both parties who publicly demanded, very high on their moral horses indeed, punishment of people who had acted, or had merely planned to act, entirely lawfully.

Another step toward the total surveillance society

Should we get rid of cash?

We

Privacy evaporates before our eyes, the world of Zamiatin commences

Universally shared medical records on-line.

Employers, bankers, libraries, doctors, bookstores, grocery stores, retailers, and every piddling Mom and Pop keep computerized, hackable records on all of us.

Some judge in some state said traffic camera records are valid evidence in court.

And more cameras are put up to watch us, everywhere, every day.

As for this about listening, do you really think the US government, or any government, will cool it because its constitution says it should?

"Totalitarianism" was abused when used of Hitler and Stalin.

The real thing comes when government sees and hears and so can control your every moment.

Elective, republican totalitarianism, in our case.

National security, privacy, and the constitution

Checks and balances, anyone?

A life tenured and independent judiciary enforcing a written constitution with a lovely Bill of Rights will save us from a runaway executive, right?

After all, that is their critical role in defending the people against tyranny by forcing lawfulness upon the king's men.

Though Madison insisted there was absolutely no cause for alarm and no need at all for a Bill of Rights, we have come over two centuries to recognize the essential role they play in enabling judges to do anything at all to restrain the executive.

But refusing to court the public humiliation of being ignored, rather than fight such atrocities as this - and how long did the president's men hold Bradley Manning in jail, in solitary, without bail, before giving him the speedy and public trial that was his due? - our courts themselves join in the national fun-fest of constitutional disobedience, to the applause of the executive they should be trying to restrain, by everywhere unlawfully legalizing gay marriage.

All the walls are made of glass

In Eugene Zamiatin's We.

It helps us realize the importance of privacy, which is the ability to escape control and violate law, custom, and the expectations of others whose expectations matter, unbeknownst to anyone we choose to keep - or rather leave - in the dark, in safety and with impunity.

This is a crucial aspect of liberty that is never discussed with candor.

When I was a lad I bought books for cash at stores where no one knew me.

I never had or wanted a credit card until I was more than 30, and checking account debit cards did not come into general use for years after that.

But now my credit card bank knows nearly everything I buy and where I buy it.

My phone, tablet, and auto navigation device all have GPS.

My grocer knows my eating habits and what my wife smokes.

Amazon and B&N know nearly all the books I buy and the library knows what I borrow.

I believe the country is working toward everyone having a single, on-line medical record with the whole scoop in it.

Computers and the net have put privacy in the gravest possible danger and, coupled with foolish police and intelligence measures adopted to deal with the much inflated threat of Muslim terrorism, have vastly diminished our ability to safely ignore and disobey government.

This is the kind of Big Government Republicans especially but office holders and government agents generally, especially in the forces of order, very strongly favor.

Politicians will tell you that in the face of all this they can and will protect privacy, but that is pretty much always boilerplate.

They do not value disobedience.

They do not cherish its possibly, much less its widespread and far-ranging reality. 

Good Lord.

Street membranes!

Privacy and state power

The argument against total transparency – total absence of privacy, the "surveillance society" – has to be that we don’t want to be punished for some, at least, of the things we do, and want to continue to do, that are illegal or contrary to society’s religious or moral views, despite the disapproval of others, whether by the government, our employers, religious authorities, or anyone else.

That is to say, we don’t want law enforcement, crime prevention, or simply the social sanction to be too effective.

And yet we are the same people who pass laws in the hope crime - well, some crimes, anyway - can be, if not prevented, at least avenged and so, at least, discouraged.

Some of us do our best to get employers to punish behavior or even merely thoughts or speech we disapprove.

And we may otherwise join in with efforts to apply the social sanction.

Accepting the viewpoint of Hobbes, we allow certain constraints on our own behavior in return for like constraints on others.

But none of us really get to control Leviathan, our neighbors, or the social sanctions.

So Leviathan, our employers, and our neighbors can be counted on to seek to constrain us in ways we don't wish to be constrained, even if that means they won't be, either.

And even beyond that we may, for whatever reason, wish to see things punished that we ourselves fully intend to continue to do, and for which we hope to escape punishment.

And so, accepting the viewpoint of De Sade, we insist on cracks and fissures, holes and corners, where we have the freedom to commit our preferred crimes even at the risk of enduring the like - or unlike! - crimes of others.

It’s just as bad when liberals do it

Booman soon to be a social scold

He writes,

I think we need to talk about the social problem. . . .

We need to figure out what this country is really all about.

What it should be all about.

He explains,

I think progressives need a moral narrative beyond fairness, beyond equal opportunity, and beyond license.

We need a moral narrative for our role as citizens and for our county's role in the world.

We need a vision for de-fracturing some significant part of our culture and giving it higher collective purpose. 

Among the most repulsive features of people who care about politics is their casual totalitarianism.

Control freaks on steroids, most of them.

Every bit as bad, some of them and in their own ways, as the Islamists tearing up the Muslim world, these days.

And it’s by no means only the clericalist conservatives who aspire not only to control the moral outlook of the nation but to define a mission, a global mission, for our country and lead us all on it.

This is something the libertarians surely have right.

Freedom is not being drafted - figuratively but more especially literally - into some national mission cooked up by someone convinced that life, or anyway our national life, has no meaning without one – and that our national life definitely needs to have meaning.

Or that his nasty little "moral narrative" demands it.

Didn't I warn you morality is about coercion, force, and bloodshed? 

Yes, I did.

Freedom is most certainly not being subjected to somebody’s vision of a so-called “higher collective purpose.”

Democrats (small “d”) like me want to empower people (including ourselves, thanks) against those who would oppress or exploit them, but otherwise let them be.

Liberals like Booman want to give people marching orders.

And, come to that, far too often this is literally true.

So great is their will to power that liberal globalism includes an unwavering commitment to military meddling, everywhere.

Amazing how far our freedom relies on the natural indifference of others, isn’t it?

People who don't give a hang about politics or about what we are doing?

Or whether our lives measure up to their standards of meaning, purpose, or morality?

Man’s lack of interest in his fellow man doesn’t only have a downside.