Foreign generated cyber attacks against the United States government and private businesses, which have been increasing both in number and volume, have advanced to a level where they cannot be ignored. What’s extremely alarming is that major businesses, which represent a large segment of our national security, have not done their due diligence on prevention. The White House has identified the continued hacking as a national security threat, which has interrupted major segments of American life and has stated that no area of retaliation is off the table.
So on Sunday morning Secretary of Commerce Gina Romundo made the rounds of the TV shows, supposedly to give us the word on the government’s position. She should have stayed home because she contributed nothing to the conversation. What she sounded like was a Republican trying to explain a Trump policy. For those of you who are searching your memory for a Trump policy, that’s exactly the point. Romundo said nothing. She avoided answering every question and blabbered endlessly about the private sector needing to be more secure. Like we didn’t already know that. She slipped past whether the government should require businesses to do anything, while avoiding any discussion of whether Russia belongs in the conversation.
When asked whether we should be contemplating military action, she went back to that table which seems to hold all the options but from which we have, so far, removed nothing. Every word Romundo spoke was an evasion, not an answer. Gina would have served herself and the country better if she’d stayed home and read the papers last week.
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Facebook executive, Nick Clegg was on This Week discussing the two-year ban they have put on Donald Trump, specifically for inciting violence on Jan 6. He makes a very good case but he also makes a good case for the point of view that this ban and all censorship may be unconstitutional and even if it weren’t it would be the government’s job and not that of private industry. Of course what he’s talking about, legislative action aimed at some kind of censorship, will never happen simply because no one in congress has the guts to do it. Any legislation that deals with political speech will inevitably become political legislation and as such will be useless in curbing the abuses for which it is intended.
One thing Clegg is correct about is that breaking up Facebook or any other company will not advance the cause of censorship. It will just create smaller companies that do what Facebook is doing now.
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A discussion broke out on This Weekover whether Biden has a mandate from the American voter to do what he is trying to do legislatively. Well he won the election by 4.5% that’s the highest winning percentage in the last 6 elections. He won the election by over 7,000,000 votes, the highest number of winning votes in the last quarter century. There are those who believe that his election could have been very close and Trump could actually have won the Electoral College with a small number of changes. That assumes that we want to equate a win in the Electoral College, which is a false win, with the wants and wishes of the American people. Trump won the 2016 election in the Electoral College despite being outvoted by three million votes. That means he became President, but he did not win the votes of the American people. He was a minority president as was George Bush. If Biden’s 4.5% majority, and his 7,000,000 plus margin of votes, doesn’t give him a mandate to proceed with the things he promised the American people then nothing does. Biden ran on; we’re going to end the COVID virus, we’re going to fix the American economy, we are going to raise the minimum wage, we are going to fix unemployment, our infrastructure, out tax problems, our health care and a whole raft of other nagging inequities that keep getting in the way of the American people living functional, successful lives. Trump ran in 2016 on; we’re going to make America great again. He was still running on that in 2020 and he still hadn’t achieved any part of that promise or come up with any idea of what it meant. In fact, he had made America worse, far worse.
If Joe Biden doesn’t have a mandate to do what he’s doing, no president ever has. He inherited a country ripped apart by a pandemic whose deadly results were multiplied by the stupidity and incompetence of his predecessor. The economy was on the brink of collapse, citizens were at war with each other and we existed in a world where our nation had fallen to the level of third world dictatorship. If he didn’t have a mandate to fix all of that it’s only because a whole political party was too ignorant to understand what had to be done. That’s not Joe’s fault, it’s ours.
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The GOP has instituted an all- out war on the American people’s right to vote. The democratic reaction appears to be one of shock. Why? Have the Republicans, at any time in the recent past displayed a propensity for any actions driven by morality? I find it amusing that so many people with consciences are shocked by the Republican attempt at snatching democracy from the American people. What the hell did they expect? These clowns have nothing else to sell. They have no platform, no plans, no concept of what the American public needs. They have nothing that the American people want or that will help them, so they fall back on the only thing they do have, stealing the right to vote from the people who put them in office. Certainly attention must be paid; certainly we must keep these greedy whores from succeeding in their attempt to steal the vote from the American people. But the reality is that most of the attempt will fail. That’s because turn out at most elections is decided by the ability of the campaign managers to motivate people to show up and cast their votes. The reality is the well-motivated voter will show up and vote, no matter how tough the GOP makes the effort. We saw this in the last election when lines of voters six and eight hours long waited in cold and rain to cast their vote to throw Donald Trump under the bus. The Democratic legislators can muzzle all the GOP attempts at stopping the vote simply by accomplishment. Mitch McConnell understands that, which is why he has only one agenda. The only thing Moscow Mitch wants to accomplish in office is to stop Biden from getting anything done. He doesn’t care what it is or how it will damage the American way of life. All he cares about is that Biden wants to do it and that makes it anathema in his book. There is a plethora of necessary legislation that must be passed in order to help the American people triumph over the destruction of the Trump years. If Biden can force that legislation through Congress he will be able to erect a functional monument to what the Democrats want to do and what the Republicans can’t and won’t. Right now it is far more important to pass the legislation that is on the books to push the infrastructure and social items that the Democrats want to pass then it is to try to fight individual state legislatures all across the country. The Democrats can’t stop all the legislating against free elections in states that are already red. The way to stop that is not by fighting the legislatures and the red states now, but by beating the GOP legislators at the polls in 2022. And the way to do that is by giving the people what they want and then making sure they know where they got it. This is not a call to surrender to the GOP attempts at stealing the ability to vote from their constituents. What this is, is a warning that if we do not pass the legislation necessary to help the American people through these trying times we will have no ammunition with which to fight the fight. Yes, we still need to battle each red state legislature as they try to steal the vote from their constituents, but we must remember that the big fight, the one we must win is the fight that will give the American people what they need to survive and to live graciously in a world where everyone needs some help.