Big Tech and social media vs free speech

In keeping with recent Tea Party blog themes:

 Mike Lester cartoon via Flopping Aces

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Big Brother and facial recognition

 image credit: metro.co.uk

Oddly enough, the state of Massachusetts is considering some legislation that could begin to challenge the Big Tech’s threats to Free Speech. From WND (linked to Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin, which has a paywall, so I cannot vet this report):  

Facial recognition programs are becoming more common. From cameras on street corners to airports and stores, images are being captured continuously, reports Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.

But one privacy organization says there’s an opportunity right now for people to encourage one state to become a leader in fighting “invasive government surveillance.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a report by Hayley Tsukayama that Massachusetts “has a long history of standing up for liberty.”

But lawmakers “need to hear from the people of Massachusetts to say they oppose government use of face surveillance.”

Polling shows 91 percent of likely voters in the state support government regulation of face recognition surveillance, and 79 percent support a statewide moratorium.

For background, the report explains the threat to privacy posed by face surveillance. And the surveillance “chills protest in public places and gives law enforcement unregulated power to undermine due process.”

The report at WND is here. Eyes on Massachusetts…

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Rep. Marcia Fudge is on the wrong side. Again.

photo credit: www.essence.com

NumbersUSA is urging Cleveland area voters to call Rep. Marcia Fudge at 202-225-3121 to DEMAND a vote on H.R. 3056 to end the border crisis. Speaker Pelosi has thus far refused to bring the Act to the floor. The talking point:

H.R. 3056 is the Border Crisis Supplemental Appropriations Act, to deal with the ongoing border crisis. I urge you to demand an immediate floor vote on this badly needed spending package! This crisis has gone on long enough, and it's time for Congress to act.

I have to wonder whether Rep. Fudge and her staff pay any attention to Tea Party people, but it’s probably worth the couple of minutes on the phone.

Here's more. In an op-ed piece at American Greatness, Candace Owens warns Trump voters to not become complacent – and she provides a few examples (out of zillions) of rage, hatred, and hysteria from the Progressive Left:

Just last week Congresswoman Marcia Fudge described Trump voters as “either racist, steeped in religious beliefs, ignorant, or, as my mother used to say, just plain dumb.”

These people are not trying to retake control of the White House merely to advance their agenda. They want to punish the Americans who made them look like fools in 2016.

This new breed of Democrats cheer as the social media giants silence and eliminate any voice that opposes them or threatens the monopoly liberal journalists have over the flow of information. They’re prepared to pack the courts, let 16-year-olds vote, and even eliminate the Electoral College in order to help them win. They’re already talking about the prospect of the election being “stolen” by “racism,” which gives a pretty good indication of the strategy they plan to fall back on if they lose again.

In short, they will do anything they can to destroy our coalition and make sure the humiliation of 2016 can never happen again.

(Full article is here.) Spot the racist and the dummy. And maybe give her a call.

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Healthcare update – and it’s good

image credit: powerlineblog.com

Headline: Trump Just Revolutionized Health Care — And Nobody Noticed

The editorial at Issues and Insights reports:

Under the plan, employers will be able to fund tax-free Health Reimbursement Accounts for their workers, who can then use the money to buy an individual insurance plan — thereby taking another step toward fixing the 77-year-old tax distortion. The rule also lets employers fund a different account to buy cheaper “short-term” plans.

“This subtle, technical tweak has the potential to revolutionize the private health insurance market,” wrote Avik Roy, one of the smartest health care experts around, in the Washington Post.

The administration figures that 800,000 employers will eventually move to HRA plans, and 11 million workers will get their benefits this way.

At the same time, Trump also loosened the federal rules that had needlessly impeded “association health plans.” These are plans that let members of various groups band together to buy insurance. The result will be more competition, and more affordable choices for millions of people.

The Democrats’ response? Attack these changes as another attempt by Trump to “sabotage” Obamacare. What they really fear, however, is that the two new rules will destroy their case for socialized medicine.

The full report is here. Even as Congress continues to drag its feet, and the RINO’s who campaigned on repealing Obamacare reneged on their promises, the Trump administration is finding ways to improve healthcare for Americans.

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Deporting illegal immigrants: some good news

Meme credit: Bookworm Room

From Quin Hillyer at the Washington Examiner: 

President Trump’s renewed pledge to deport huge numbers of illegal immigrants is inspiring anger, but it's hardly righteous. If, as a Homeland Security adviser has explained, the targets of Trump’s deportation plans will be those illegal immigrants who have failed to show for their assigned court hearings, then Trump is morally, ethically, and legally justified in deporting them. The tut-tutting chorus might as well spare us their faux moral histrionics.

The immigrants Trump is targeting are people who have broken American law not once but twice. First, they entered the country illegally, without papers. Second, when given a court hearing (where they could, for example, make bids for asylum or otherwise make a case for being allowed to stay), they again thumbed their noses at the legitimate authority of their generous hosts. Such poor guests deserve no sympathy, no matter what circumstances they came from.

Full report is here.

P.S. For livestream links to President Trump’s campaign launch this evening at 8 pm, try here.

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The new "normal"? -- Victor Davis Hanson

Over the weekend, the historian Victor Davis Hanson posted an essay at American Greatness. With the progressive-liberal community constantly projecting their own fantasies and corruptions on conservatives, it is a relief to read VDH’s perspective. Here's a brief extract from his closing comments:

The current normal correctives were denounced as abnormal—as if living in a sovereign state with secure borders, assuming that the law was enforced equally among all Americans, demanding that citizenship was something more than mere residence, and remembering that successful Americans, not their government, built their own businesses and lives is now somehow aberrant or perverse.

Trump’s political problem, then, may be that the accelerating aberration of 2009-2016 was of such magnitude that normalcy is now seen as sacrilege.

Weaponizing the IRS, unleashing the FBI to spy on political enemies and to plot the removal of an elected president, politicizing the CIA to help to warp U.S. politics, allying the Justice Department with the Democratic National Committee, and reducing FISA courts to rubber stamps for pursuing administration enemies became the new normal. Calling all that a near coup was abnormal.

Let us hope that most Americans still prefer the abnormal remedy to the normal pathology.

Full article is here.

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Are you a “Hate Agent?”

Allum Bokhari at Breitbart has this scary report:

Facebook monitors the offline behavior of its users to determine if they should be categorized as a “Hate Agent,” according to a document provided exclusively to Breitbart News by a source within the social media giant.

The document, titled “Hate Agent Policy Review” outlines a series of “signals” that Facebook uses to determine if someone ought to be categorized as a “hate agent” and banned from the platform.

Those signals include a wide range of on- and off-platform behavior. If you praise the wrong individual, interview them, or appear at events alongside them, Facebook may categorize you as a “hate agent.”

Facebook may also categorize you as a hate agent if you self-identify with or advocate for a “Designated Hateful Ideology,” if you associate with a “Designated Hate Entity” (one of the examples cited by Facebook as a “hate entity” includes Islam critic Tommy Robinson), or if you have “tattoos of hate symbols or hate slogans.” (The document cites no examples of these, but the media and “anti-racism” advocacy groups increasingly label innocuous items as “hate symbols,” including a cartoon frog and the “OK” hand sign.)

Facebook will also categorize you as a hate agent for possession of “hate paraphernalia,” although the document provides no examples of what falls into this category.

The document also says Facebook will categorize you as a hate agent for “statements made in private but later made public.” Of course, Facebook holds vast amounts of information on what you say in public and in private — and as we saw with the Daily Beast doxing story, the platform will publicize private information on their users to assist the media in hitjobs on regular American citizens.

Full article is here.

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