Category: Rights

‘Surveys’ are brethren to ‘Polls’ i.e. hocus pocus to advance an agenda. Knowing who participated, informs you what the agenda is.
And the one thing missing in the whole deal about “policy effects” is a question about how all this interacts with the Constitutional restrictions that are slowly being acknowledged and put back into effect

Survey: Gun Policy Experts Find Some Common Ground Amid Broad Disagreement

Gun policy has become increasingly polarized over the past several years and it often seems like compromise is impossible, but new data suggests that may not be the case.

While wide gaps remain in attitudes toward gun policies, research indicates some areas of agreement among gun policy experts–often beyond the typical proposals that dominate the conversation around guns. That’s according to survey data published on Tuesday by the RAND Corporation. Researchers found that experts across the ideological spectrum were largely united on policy outcome objectives and even shared some common interest in specific policies such as prosecuting prohibited possessors who seek firearms and expanding mental health prohibitions.

“Our results strongly suggest that differing favorability ratings in the permissive and restrictive groups were explained largely, and indeed almost exclusively, by differences in estimates of what the true effects of the policies will be, not by differences in which policy outcomes predict the groups’ favorability ratings,” the study said. “Indeed, both groups’ most strongly preferred policy goals were to reduce firearm suicides and firearm homicides.”

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Next Step for the Parents’ Movement: Curriculum Transparency.
Parents have a right to know what’s being taught to their children.

In 2021, public school parents vaulted to the forefront of America’s fractured political landscape. Around the country, parents objected both to Covid-related school closures and to racially divisive curricula. Parental frustration helped secure sweeping GOP wins last month in Virginia, highlighted by Glenn Youngkin’s victory over former governor Terry McAuliffe. Youngkin has promised to rein in public-school radicalism and “ban critical race theory” on his first day in office.

Perhaps the central moment in the Virginia gubernatorial race was McAuliffe’s comment during a debate: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Like most Virginia voters, we couldn’t disagree more. Research shows that greater academic success follows when parents actively engage in their children’s education. To be sure, this doesn’t mean that we should decide the finer points of curricular design by plebiscite; nor does it mean that a minority of objecting parents should dictate school pedagogy. But public schools are institutions created by “We the People” and should be responsive to the input of parents and the broader voting public at the state and local level.

At a minimum, parents should be able to know what’s being taught to their children in the classroom. Transparency is a virtue for all of our public institutions, but especially for those with power over children. To that end, we have drafted a template—building on one of our earlier efforts at the Manhattan Institute and the work of Matt Beienburg at the Goldwater Institute—to inform state legislatures seeking to foster school transparency. The policy proposal is designed to provide public school parents with easy access—directly on school websites—to materials and activities used to train staff and teachers and to instruct children.

The last year and a half has demonstrated the need for transparency measures. As many public schools migrated to “virtual only” learning in response to the pandemic, parents received a first-hand look at the divisive, racialist curricula being taught to their children. They learned that public schools were forcing third-graders to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, showing kindergarteners dramatizations of dead black children and warning them about “racist police,” and telling white teachers that they were guilty of “spirit murdering” minorities. These were not isolated incidents.

These revelations prompted parents to demand to know exactly what was being taught to their children. They felt that the public-school bureaucracies had been hiding controversial materials and exerting undue influence over their children, all in the service of fashionable left-wing ideologies.

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1, Behar has the intellectual capacity of an amoeba.

2, This was already addressed by SCOTUS in Heller. to wit:
Some have made the argument, bordering on the frivolous, that only those arms in existence in the 18th century are protected by the Second Amendment.
We do not interpret constitutional rights that way. Just as the First
Amendment protects modern forms of communications,…….
., and the Fourth Amendment applies to modern
forms of search……….., the Second Amendment extends, prima
facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms,
even those that were not in existence at the time of the
founding

Joy Behar: It’s Time To ‘Tweak’ 1st And 2nd Amendments Because Founding Fathers Didn’t Have AR-15s And Twitter

“The View” co-host Joy Behar said Tuesday that the 1st and 2nd Amendments to the U.S. Constitution needed to be “tweaked a little bit” because the Founding Fathers did not have things like AR-15s and Twitter.

Co-host Whoopi Goldberg began the discussion with the news that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had stepped down a day earlier and noted that he had been proactive in policing hate speech — namely because Twitter was first to eject former President Donald Trump from its platform.

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We’ve heard in the past that it was not just one right, but all of them that TPTB wanted to restrict. Well, those saying that were right.

Second Amendment Censorship

When White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki called the Biden administration’s desire for speech restrictions from Big Tech “our asks” last July, tremors shook the foundation of the First Amendment so hard they reverberated all the way to the Second.

Gun owners are already acutely aware that Facebook, Twitter and other Big Tech companies censor, demonetize and outright ban a lot of firearm-related content. It also isn’t a secret that President Joe Biden (D) and his administration want a long list of gun-control laws, gun bans and more sent to his desk. So the notion that this administration could pressure—or, as Psaki says, “ask”—Big Tech to help them control the conversation about the Second Amendment in order to sway public opinion is worrying.

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In early colonial times, some colonies often ordered the populace to bear their weapons to work and even to church services. Even farther back than that, in medieval Europe, the practice of being armed at certain public functions finally devolved into carrying huge, ornately decorated ‘Bearing Swords’ which was more an indication of class status. The bigger and more expensive, the higher up the ladder you- or the master a squire was carrying for -was.
The city council of this town wants everyone attending council meetings to bear arms…. if they want to.
I rather like the idea.

‘Legally armed’ rule has critics gunning for New Mexico town

ESTANCIA, N.M. (AP) — Mayor Nathan Dial said a recently approved rule requiring people to be “legally armed” to attend an Estancia Town Council meeting is just a way of sending notice that the town is not going to let the state dictate what it can and cannot do.

“Rural New Mexico is just tired of being pushed around,” Dial told the Albuquerque Journal as he sat in town hall with a snub nose .357 on his hip. “This is not just about the Second Amendment. This is about all civil liberties.”

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Right To Dissent & The Right To Bear Arms: Bulwarks Against Tyranny

Americans remain at the moment privileged to celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, Independence Day, Labor Day, and other Holidays. But, for how much longer.

A year ago July, Independence day we wrote of the dire threats to our Nation, coming from within.

“With Independence Day only days away, this Country can hardly be in a celebratory spirit, as the very words, ‘nationalism’ and ‘patriotism’ are treated like obscenities.

We witness two-legged predators laying waste the Land, destroying property, intimidating innocent Americans, causing bedlam and mayhem. The police, under fire, are ordered to stand down. Government cowers. Law and Order breaks down everywhere. The seditious Press and Radical Left members of Congress, along with Radical Left State Governors and City Mayors give their blessing to the perpetrators of this violence.”

See also our sister article, posted a few days earlier.

Has anything changed, almost seventeen months later? Yes, the threat to our Nation has only grown direr.

The Trotting Horse of American Marxism and Neoliberal Globalism is now running at full gallop. It is charging directly toward a formidable defense to be sure—the Bill of Rights. But it is determined to break through, destroying the Constitution of the United States, annihilating a free Republic, subjugating a free and sovereign people.

Evidence for this is everywhere, including, inter alia:

  • Government acquiescence to violent rioting, and looting in the Nation’s cities.
  • A systematic plan to indoctrinate the Nation’s youth with “Critical Race Theory”.
  • Constraints on the exercise of Free Speech/Intolerance toward Dissent.
  • Violations of Due Process and Equal Protection Guarantees.
  • Violations of the Right Against Unreasonable Searches and Seizures. [Red Flag Laws]
  • Unlawful Government orders and mandates, such as mandatory COVID Vaccinations.
  • Failure of Government to Enforce the Nation’s Immigration Laws.
  • Debilitation of the Military: Purging of the Ranks, Politicization of Upper Echelons, Creating Dissension, and Destroying morale.
  • Consolidation of Governmental power in a single Branch.
  • Expanding Federal Government power over the people and the States.
  • Emasculation of State and Community Police Forces.
  • Politicization and Corruption of Executive Branch Departments.
  • Deliberate Destruction of the Nation’s Economy.
  • Collusion between the Government and the Press to Distort News and to indoctrinate the public. [Fake News Media]
  • The defacing, destroying, and removing of national monuments.
  • Denigration of the American Flag and other national emblems.
  • Belittlement of the notion of “Citizen of the United States”.
  • Ennoblement of Marxist Lawbreakers and Illegal Aliens.

And most ominously,

  • Concerted Attacks on Civilian Possession of firearms and of the inherent, natural Right of Armed Self-defense.

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This isn’t something new. It’s been going on as long as I can remember.

Government Is Conditioning Americans To Despise Their Rights & Liberties

The Neo-Marxist/Neoliberal Globalist goal is to dismantle the Republic.

To accomplish that task it is necessary to disrupt the underpinnings of our society. That society is predicated on the tenets, precepts, and principles of Individualism and on the Judeo-Christian ethic, not the amoral tenets, precepts, and principles of Collectivism, permeating throughout society. The manipulation of language plays an important part in the attempt to transform America into a Collectivist Dictatorship.

Language offers a more emphatic and critical need for serious discussion. For political theorists and sociologists, the politico/socio import of reshaping language is important. It is certainly important to the Destroyers of a free Constitutional Republic. It is important for the Destroyers of our Nation to change our perception of it; of its basic underpinnings. Manipulation of language becomes an important tool in the arsenal of those forces bent on dismantling a free Republic.

If language is perception, and reality is built on perception, and a million people say the “emperor” is wearing fine apparel, when he is stark naked, is this delusion, then, to be taken as reality? Perhaps not; probably not. But, if a few sane people exist in a Nation that has gone insane, who claim to see the emperor as he really is, “in the buff,” and dare to say it is so, then all the worse for those rational people. They will not be long tolerated. They must play along, just as the masses have played along, pretending the emperor is fully draped in his finest apparel, lest they be targeted for special, unpleasant treatment.

But, through time, the delusion becomes more entrenched. And as more and more people seemingly “buy into” the delusion, to avoid negative repercussions for pointing out the delusion, then the distinction between reality and illusion will truly become blurred, distorted, and at some point, the intellect will not be able to tell the two apart.

But we are not quite there, yet. Sanity may still prevail.

Many Americans are coming to perceive the imminent threat the Marxist/Globalist poses to the preservation of a free Constitutional Republic.

Americans see that the Marxist/Globalist aims are not compatible with the continued existence natural law rights go unchecked. One or the other must go.

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The Rittenhouse Trial Underscores the Left’s Determination to Eliminate the Natural Right of Self-Defense

The American left’s determination to conduct a media-inspired political trial of Kyle Rittenhouse had as its objective the ultimate disarming of Americans and the elimination of the Second Amendment.  While Kyle Rittenhouse was listed as the defendant, it was the right of self-defense that was on trial.

To what extent does man have a natural or God-given right to self-defense and protection of himself and his property?  This question has been bandied about for thousands of years and that issue, not guns (which are an instrument of self-defense), is at the heart of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The United States is the only nation in the annals of mankind to be established on the basis of a political and social philosophy centered on natural, or God-given, rights.
Among these are self-defense and property.  Property rights are the bedrock of the American political system; without that foundation, there is no freedom.

The Founders held that property rights encompass not just physical property but also one’s life, labor, speech, and livelihood, as individuals own their own lives; therefore, they must own the products of that life which can be traded in free exchange with others.  Further, as there is a natural right of self-preservation, man has the right and duty to defend himself against transgressors, including the state, that would deny, abrogate, or unlawfully seize his property.

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Tools in the service of tyranny

What do a virus, a Marxist movement, and bans on firearms have in common?  Nothing, superficially.  Delving deeper, they are tools of federal oppression.

An obvious common element of the three tools is the fear they engender: of infectious death, of unchecked rioting and looting, and of gun violence.  These dangers are in fact greatly exaggerated or fabricated altogether.

Stanford economist Paul Romer is credited with first saying, “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”  Washington has taken this idea to heart.

In 2019, when no crisis existed, the Washington establishment created the perception of existential threat from COVID that would kill 2.2 million Americans without drastic federal intervention.  In fact, COVID carried a risk for the general, healthy population similar to seasonal flu and was dangerous only to elderly, immuno-compromised individuals with pre-existing conditions.  Biden, Fauci, and the media made it seem as if we all would die if we did not follow Washington’s draconian orders for lockdowns, social distancing, and vaccine mandates.

Fauci commanded Americans to put aside concerns about “personal liberties” for the greater public welfare.  We had to accept federal suppression of constitutionally guaranteed rights such as free speech, religious liberty, right to assemble, and even right to work to defeat the “common enemy.”

The “swamp” used fear of COVID as a tool to impose pseudo-martial law.

Biden COVID mandates exceeded federal authority.  They are unconstitutional, as the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals recently reminded Washington.  Public health measures are state, not federal, responsibility.

BLM (Black Lives Matter) is a proudly Marxist, domestic organization hiding behind the obvious slogan that the lives of black people matter — just as the lives of all people matter.  Yet the Biden administration has tolerated the violence, arson, looting, and even murder by armed BLM agitators in all-black garb and ski mask anonymity.

Washington and Biden’s DoJ tacitly condone BLM’s domestic terrorism for one reason: it promotes an atmosphere of fear and insecurity.  This led to cries to the federal government: do something, anything!  In response, they changed or suspended rules, laws, and constitutional rights using violence in the name of social justice as an excuse.  Washington encouraged defunding local police departments while offering federal “policing” for local communities.

Washington’s tolerance and covert encouragement of BLM is another way to justify extending federal power and reach.

When the Bill of Rights was written, there was no real difference in military power of a state militia compared to the Continental Army.  They both had muskets, handguns, bayonets, horses, and even cannon.  The Second Amendment does not use words such as “may” or “should” or “cannot.”  It reads “shall not [italics added] be infringed” — a simple, unambiguous, and unarguable command.

The Founders wanted private citizens to have the military capability to resist central government attempts to reimpose tyranny on its citizens.  Thus, after free speech and religious independence, the next most important “right” was to keep and bear (use) firearms, in armed defense, if necessary, of personal liberty and American freedom.

This is why Democrats seek to circumvent the Second Amendment and take away guns from private citizens.  Gun bans are another tactic of federal oppression.

In progressive hands, COVID, BLM, anti-gun laws, and many others are tools in the service of tyranny…if we allow it.

Free States Must Defend the Right to Self-Defense

The jury is still out as I write this; I wish I could be confident that our justice system will provide what it promises and that the unjustly accused will leave the courthouse wearing a smile instead of handcuffs. Kyle Rittenhouse, who went into the void created by the cowardly leftist officials who refused to protect decent citizens from the militarized wing of the Democrat Party, might well be convicted.

He got dragged through a legal nightmare, and if that’s all that happens to him, then that’s the best-case scenario. Us lawyers understand that evidence and law are not what determine jury verdicts; they are merely factors in a much bigger picture. Instead of facing life in prison, Kyle ought to get a medal for taking out several degenerates, including a promising potential Lincoln Project intern.

If you are looking for justice, you won’t necessarily find it in a courthouse.

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Comment O’ The Day
Can’t decide if the best part is Cheryl schooling this reporter or the VA results scrolling underneath

Watch This Based Mom School A Reporter On Why Good Guys Should Have Guns

It’s no secret that corporate reporters aren’t the most poised or articulate about handling or talking about guns, but a recent interaction between ABC News reporter Devin Dwyer and a mother of five in New York might take the cake.

ABC News aired a segment on Tuesday night previewing the laws and background of New York State Rifle and Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, which the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments for on Wednesday. The coverage is part of the corporate outlet’s larger “Rethinking Gun Violence” series, which is often used to amplify anti-gun activists’ war on firearms.

In the interview, Dwyer asks Cheryl Apple, a small business owner and recent first-time gun owner, to justify why she felt the need to apply for an unrestricted license to carry her 9 mm pistol. Her response to Dwyer is perfect.

“Do we really want a whole bunch of Cheryls running around with pistols in the grocery store?” Dwyer asked.

“Yeah, we probably do because Cheryl is trained,” Apple replied indignantly. “I feel proficient with my weapon, I feel secure with my weapon, and I feel confident with my weapon. I don’t think the Cheryls are the one[s] out there that are hurting people and committing the crimes and being unsafe with their guns.”

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From what little time I spent in Maryland, I wouldn’t want to be a part of the state either.

Justice to call special session for three Maryland counties to join West Virginia

After five Maryland lawmakers from three western Maryland counties announced that they want to secede from their state to join West Virginia, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice has begun planning a special session to try to make it happen.

The lawmakers represent three counties that border West Virginia – Allegany, Garrett and Washington. Allegany and Garret are the two counties within the narrow strip of northwestern Maryland that extends between Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Part of Washington is also in that strip of land.

This week, the lawmakers sent letters to West Virginia House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, R-Clay and Senate President Craig Blair, R-Berkeley, requesting the state to add them as constituent counties of West Virginia. The letters said they believe the change would be beneficial to both states and requested to be advised on the next step.

All five lawmakers are Republicans in a state that is mostly Democratic. Former President Donald Trump received a majority of votes in all three counties in a state in which nearly two-thirds of the vote went for President Joe Biden. The counties are in a more rural and more conservative part of Maryland.

Justice, Hanshaw and Blair all expressed support for the change.

“Our state supports personal freedoms, we value the Second Amendment, and we love the rights of the unborn,” Justice said in a statement. “We love and embrace our energy industry. Moving to West Virginia means job opportunities like crazy and a chance to live in paradise. No matter where you’re from, we’d love to have you in West Virginia.”

There are more than 251,000 people who live in the three counties and if they joined West Virginia, two of the cities would be among the state’s 10 largest cities: Cumberland and Hagerstown.

Welcome to the Party, Pal!

Polimath (and others) are feeling the same oppressive weight of the government boot on their necks that America’s gun owners have been feeling ever since the introduction of the Sullivan Act.

“Just give up a little bit of your rights, and you’ll make the rest of us feel safer” has been the motto of the gun control movement since day one. Now that same logic, (if you want to equate emotion of feeling safe as logic) is being applied to public health as a whole, and people aren’t liking what they’re hearing.

Stephen Kruiser once said that firearms are the gateway drug to freedom. In this case, however, firearms ownership is the canary in the coal mine. What big government and runaway political corruption have been doing to our freedoms under the Second Amendment, they’re now doing to every other civil right as well.

Welcome to the party, everyone. Don’t say we never tried to warn you.

Virginia Parents Announce ‘Not a Domestic Terrorist’ March in Washington

The Supreme Court dealt with this in Heller. That the gun grabbers still try to roll it out merely indicates they have nothing left but BS.

UNDOING THE MUSKET ARGUMENT

While Virginia gun owners are trying to take back their state this month from the radical far-left that pushed through most of Ralph Northam’s extremist gun control agenda in 2020, elsewhere around the country anti-gunners will once again fall back on their favorite boilerplate arguments to do the same in your state.

You can have some fun with these people, while teaching them a lesson and making the extremists look really foolish.
Good for the goose …

I’ve lost count of the occasions when someone has tossed up the argument that at the time the Second Amendment was written, there weren’t modern firearms. The Amendment, they argue, should only apply to muskets and flintlock rifles.

Here’s how I’ve responded to the premise: “Look, if you want to roll back the clock and calendar, I’m game. But remember, if that’s where you want to take this debate, there are a few things to consider.”

• When the Bill of Rights — for which the Second Amendment is the cornerstone — was adopted, we didn’t have television or radio, no cable channels, no web offset presses for mass-producing newspapers or the Internet and social media. So, under your suggestion, they wouldn’t be protected by the First Amendment, right?

• We didn’t have organized police departments, and if criminals came to your home, you were expected to deal with the problem, not call 9-1-1 for help because they didn’t have telephones, either.

• Nobody needed a license or permit to carry a firearm. There were no background checks. It was not unusual to encounter armed citizens doing business in towns and villages, and no one raised an eyebrow.

Naturally, they’ll try to ridicule these remarks but the Bill of Rights is an all-or-nothing proposition. It’s not a legal buffet from which you can pick and choose those rights you like while discarding those you don’t. The Bill of Rights is a 10-course banquet and it’s still today’s menu, not yesterday’s blue plate special.

This would be a good time to remind your opponent the U.S. Supreme Court could be taking on more Second Amendment cases to further define the parameters of the right to keep and bear arms.

Joe Biden has made a habit of contending the Second Amendment is “not absolute.” Five months ago, when he announced his “Comprehensive Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gun Crime and Ensure Public Safety,” he told a gaggle of reporters, “The Second Amendment, from the day it was passed, limited the type of people who could own a gun and what type of weapon you could own. You couldn’t buy a cannon.”

This is demonstrably false. Mississippi River keel boats were frequently armed with swivel guns; small cannons used to fend off river pirates or raiding war parties. Some on the frontier owned cannons to defend their stockades. Privateers sailed with cannons.
Last year, when quizzed about Biden’s campaign assertion regarding cannon ownership, a fact checker consulted David Kopel, research director and Second Amendment project director at the Colorado-based Independence Institute.

“I am not aware of a ban on any arm in colonial America,” Kopel said at the time. “There were controls on people or locations, but not bans on types of arms.”

In 2020, when the Biden campaign was questioned about his cannon allegation, a fact checker wrote in the Austin American-Statesman newspaper, “the campaign was unable to come up with an example of a law banning private ownership of cannons, and historians of the period doubt that any existed.”

Where Humor Stops

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Apparently some parents have been listening

BLUF:
Roy Speed, in Bethel, noted that many of those behind the most radical political experiment in history studied in little, rickety houses, in medium-sized, mostly uncultured cities or on the edges of sprawling farmlands. They read with the aid of candlelight. They were Zoom-less. They squeezed their studies in between milking cows and learning how to use a rifle. They were steeped in the greatest minds of the ancient world and the Enlightenment. 

The Founders did not have the benefit of any playground or tablet or teachers union, but they were free thinkers. The Constitution, Speed pointed out, “was largely the work of people instructed at home.” 

American Homeschooling Goes Boom: Meet the parents yanking their children — some five million of them — from schools that they say aren’t working.

In March 2020, as the coronavirus engulfed America, Kristen Wrobel got the news: “We heard on Friday that there would be no school for two weeks. Which just turned into no school.”

That was the last time her children — one in third grade, one in first —  were in a classroom.

In the beginning, they did the remote-school thing. Wrobel, a 42-year-old stay-at-home mom with a bachelor’s degree in software engineering, called it a “nightmare.” The Zoom sessions, the Italian lessons on Duolingo, the stuff she had to print out, the isolation, the tears, the nagging, the shuttling the kids between her house, near Burlington, Vermont, and their dad’s, a half-hour away.

“Everyone was freaking out all the time,” she said.

By May, at the risk of violating state truancy laws, Wrobel had stopped fighting and let her kids log on (or not) whenever they felt like it. It was, she said, “the darkest hour before dawn.”

That September, she started homeschooling. She didn’t like all the restrictions her kids’ private school had implemented: Students seated six feet apart. Masked. In wedding tents. Outside.

She figured she’d send her kids back to the school in 2021, after everything had gone back to normal.

That was then. Now? “There’d have to be a revolution in schooling.”

She’s hardly alone. Wrobel is one of hundreds of thousands of moms and dads across the nation who have decided to become the principals of their very own, very small elementary schools. 

The number of kids going to school at home nationwide has doubled over the past two years. In 2019, there were about 2.5 million students learning at home. Today there are nearly 5 million. That means more than 11 percent of American households are educating their children outside of traditional schools.

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Why Southerners Don’t Care About New York Times Op-Eds

I was born and raised in the Deep South. I have a deep affinity for the place of my birth, one that I wouldn’t have imagined I’d have in my teenage years.

Down here, we have our issues, to be sure, but one thing we’ve never been really big on are people from the North trying to tell us how to live our lives. Call it a holdover from Reconstruction or just plain stubbornness, but when the New York Times tries to tell Southerners how to live, it usually doesn’t work out well.

Yet, that’s pretty much what the Times decided to do with an op-ed titled, “Southern Republicans Cannot Be Trusted With Public Health.”

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Comment O’ The Day:

I don’t view gun grabbers as an enemy because of politics, I don’t think they’re evil because of politics. I don’t care about the (D) or (R) after your preferred candidate’s name.

I view them as an enemy because the only possible reason someone would want to disarm me is if they intend to do me harm. If they intend to interact peacefully with me, my level of armament doesn’t matter to them.  I’m a peaceful person and have never given anyone a reason to doubt that. The only people with a vested interested in my disarmament are those that intend to get violent with me and don’t want me to be able to fight back.

Scratch a Lib-Find a Tyrant #2744

There are some people I know that would actually relish the idea of this happening, just for the ‘opportunities’ it would present. And they are the kinds of opportunities I think all my readers can readily imagine.

Biden Administration May Consider ‘Vaccine Passports’ For Interstate Travel

President Joe Biden really wants Americans to get vaccinated, and after rolling out all the stops, from free beer to free Uber rides to child care, the administration has plans to penalize those that either won’t get the shot or don’t feel obligated to prove to the government or businesses that they’ve gotten the shot.

The administration may consider creating vaccine requirements for interstate travel for citizens within the US.

The AP reports that “…while more severe measures — such as mandating vaccines for interstate travel or changing how the federal government reimburses treatment for those who are unvaccinated and become ill with COVID-19 — have been discussed, the administration worried that they would be too polarizing for the moment.”

“That’s not to say they won’t be implemented in the future,” the AP writes, “as public opinion continues to shift toward requiring vaccinations as a means to restore normalcy.”

The Biden administration has forced many federal employees to vaccinate, and has urged US businesses to force their employees to get vaccinated as well, under penalty of losing their position or persistent COVID testing.

The Biden administration said they would work with businesses to create a vaccine credentialing system, but has repeatedly said that there would be no federal database of vaccine recipients.

Disney, United, and Google issued vaccine mandates for their employees. More than 600 colleges and universities are requiring the vaccine as well, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

“We are essentially saying there are different paths you can take, but the path that you cannot take is doing nothing—that’s the one unacceptable position right now,” said deputy director of strategic communication and engagement for Biden’s COVID-19 response team Ben Wakana.
Georgetown Law took up the question of Americans’ rights to travel freely within the United States under the Trump administration at the start of the pandemic. At the time, Americans in many parts of the country were asked to “lockdown” for two week and to “slow the spread” so that when Americans got sick and ended up in the hospital, they didn’t all end up there at once, overwhelming the medical infrastructure.

Meryl Chertoff, Executive Director, SALPAL writes: “The right of Americans to travel interstate in the United States has never been substantially judicially questioned or limited. In 1941, the Court declared unconstitutional California’s restriction upon the migration of the ‘Okies’—whose travails are famously documented in ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ Justice Douglas referred to ‘the right of free movement’ as ‘a right of national citizenship,’ and the rights of the migrants were upheld under the Commerce Clause.”

“The Privileges and Immunities Clause protects the rights of US citizens,” Chertoff goes on to say, “who are each also the citizens of a state, against discriminatory treatment under the law of a different state. In a 1985 case, the Court found that the Privileges and Immunities clause prohibited discrimination against a non-resident except where (i) there is a substantial reason for the difference in treatment; and (ii) the discrimination practiced against nonresidents bears a substantial relationship to the State’s objective.

In deciding whether the discrimination bears a close or substantial relationship to the State’s objective, the Court has considered the availability of less restrictive means.”
“The baseline, then, is that freedom of movement within and between states is Constitutionally protected,” Chertoff concluded.
On Thursday, the CDC was asked outright what they would be doing to make sure that counterfeit vaccine cards were not in circulation, and if they’ve reconsidered creating a federalized system to track vaccine recipients and issue identification for the vaccinated to enable them to move freely through society while those who don’t have the credential are shut out from public life.

Biden administration COVID spokesperson Jeff Zients was asked “Is the administration reconsidering something like a QR code, or a passport, to help verify people’s vaccination status and if not, what are you doing to stop the proliferation of fake vaccine cards?”
“There are a number of ways people can demonstrate their vaccination status,” Zeints said. “Companies and organizations and the federal government are taking different approaches, and we applaud this innovation.”
“Through vaccination requirements, employers have the power to help end the pandemic,” Zients said.

But, Zients said, “There will be no federal vaccination database as with all other vaccines, the information gets held at the state and local level. Any system that is developed in the private sector or elsewhere must meet key standards, including affordability, being available both digitally and on paper, and most importantly protecting people’s privacy and security.”
Biden said on Thursday “I know there are a lot of people out there trying to turn a public safety measure, that is children wearing masks in school so they can be safe, into a political dispute. And this isn’t about politics. It’s about keeping our children safe.”
“I saw a video and reports from Tennessee, protestors threatening doctors and nurses, who before a school board were making the case that to keep kids safe there should be mandatory masks. And as they walked out these doctors were threatened, nurses were threatened. Our health care workers are heroes. They are the heroes when there was no vaccine. They’re doing their best to care for the people who are refusing to get vaccinated,” Biden said.

“And unvaccinated folks are being hospitalized and dying as a result of not being vaccinated,” the president continued, harkening back to his statement that COVID is now a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
“To the mayors, school superintendents, local leaders,” he said, “who are standing up to the governors who are politicizing mask protection for our kids, thank you, thank you as well. Thank God that we have heroes like you. And I stand with you all, and America should as well.”