Combs Spouts Off

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: britain, fitness, health care, obesity | Leave a Comment »

CO cyberbullying bill criminalizes protected speech

Posted by Richard on March 27, 2014

UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh (of The Volokh Conspiracy) and Mike Kraus of the Independence Institute have called on the Colorado Senate (originally published in the Denver Post) to kill a cyberbullying bill that has passed the Colorado House:

On March 12, the Colorado House passed House Bill 1131, on “cyberbullying of a minor.”

While undoubtedly well-intended, the bill as written is an unconstitutional restriction on protected speech, and should be swiftly dispatched by the Colorado Senate.

The bill would criminalize using social media in a way intended to “cause the minor to suffer serious emotional distress, or makes a credible threat against a minor that the actor knows or reasonably should know will be communicated to or viewed by the minor, commits cyberbullying if the conduct results in serious emotional distress to the minor.”

Now the punishment for making credible threats seems quite sensible. Such threats are constitutionally unprotected, and should indeed be punished. But the ban on intentionally causing “serious emotional distress” to a minor is far broader, and runs afoul of the First Amendment.

Volokh and Kraus suggested several examples of speech that would be criminalized by this bill, but is protected by the First Amendment.

HB14-1131 (PDF) was introduced by Rep. Rhonda Fields, one of the legislature’s leading advocates of gun control. I can understand (but not excuse) her antipathy to guns; in 2005, her son and his fiancee were assassinated to prevent him from testifying against the murderer of his best friend. But Rep. Fields apparently is no more concerned with upholding the First Amendment than she is with the Second.

The examples given by Volokh and Kraus are of well-intentioned speech that would be criminalized. But even ill-intentioned, hateful speech — if it doesn’t involve making a credible threat — is protected by the First Amendment. Posting “everyone hates you,” “you’re disgusting,” and “why don’t you kill yourself” is not in the same category as posting “I’m going to kill you.”

When I was young (many years ago), every kid knew — and deployed whenever appropriate — the saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” When I was young, the term “bullying” applied to physical acts of aggression or threats of aggression, not to mere hateful words.

Children today seem to be these fragile hot-house flowers that can’t deal with rejection, criticism, ridicule … all the negative aspects of interacting with others that one should learn to deal with growing up because they’re an inevitable part of life.

I think there’s something seriously wrong with what passes for parenting and educating children today.

Subscribe To Site:

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: bullying, children, colorado, free speech | Leave a Comment »

Obamacare is an abysmal failure by its own standard

Posted by Richard on March 27, 2014

The raison d’être for Obamacare is to provide health insurance coverage for the 30 million to 50 million people (depending on whose wild-ass guess you believe) uninsured. How’s it doing so far?

The Obama administration and its media shills have been crowing that 5 million people have “enrolled” for Obamacare on the state and federal exchanges. When asked how many of those have actually paid the first month’s premium, they claim they don’t know, although their own rules require insurance companies to report that information monthly. Estimates of the number of “enrollees” who haven’t actually completed the process by paying their premiums range from 20% to 25%.

So let’s do a little math. Assuming 20% of the 5 million “enrollees” haven’t paid brings the number covered down to 4 million. According to the management consulting firm McKinsey, as of the end of February, 27% of the “enrollees” were previously uninsured, but they were even less likely to have paid their premiums than the previously insured. McKinsey’s number crunching arrives at an estimate that only 14% of those actually now covered were previously uninsured.

But let’s be generous and assume that more of them have paid premiums since February. Heck, let’s be real generous and assume that a full 25% of the 4 million were previously uninsured. That’s 1.25 million.

Divide 1.25 million by 50 million or by 30 million, and you discover that Obamacare has covered somewhere between 2.5% and 4% of the previously uninsured. Epic fail.

And to achieve that underwhelming result, it’s cost millions of the previously insured their insurance plan of choice, forced millions more to pay higher premiums, and resulted in probably tens of millions having a smaller provider network that may not include their doctor or hospital of choice. Not to mention saddling insurance companies with a process so screwed up that, if it isn’t fixed soon, many (most?) may just stop offering individual (and probably small group) health insurance entirely.

One could be forgiven for suspecting that the real purpose of Obamacare all along was to destroy the private health insurance market in order to replace it with a British-style, government-run, single-payer socialist system. After all, one of the architects of this abysmal failure has said as much.

Subscribe To Site:

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: health care, obamacare, socialism | Leave a Comment »

Media bias eviscerated in just a few tweets

Posted by Richard on March 27, 2014

Check it out.

Subscribe To Site:

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: media bias, msm | Leave a Comment »

Anti-gun CA state senator charged with firearms trafficking, corruption

Posted by Richard on March 27, 2014

There’s nothing unusual about gun control advocates turning out to be hypocrites (there are many more examples, from Carl Rowan to Sean Penn). But Leland Yee takes the cake. Yee is the leading gun control advocate in the California state senate — not an easy distinction to achieve, I’m sure. It turns out, if charges are true, that he’s been involved in international weapons trafficking and associated with a criminal gang leader:

SAN FRANCISCO — In a stunning criminal complaint, State Sen. Leland Yee has been charged with conspiring to traffic in firearms and public corruption as part of a major FBI operation spanning the Bay Area, casting yet another cloud of corruption over the Democratic establishment in the Legislature and torpedoing Yee’s aspirations for statewide office.

Yee and an intermediary allegedly met repeatedly with an undercover FBI agent, soliciting campaign contributions in exchange for setting up a deal with international arms dealers.

…

Yee, D-San Francisco, highlights a series of arrests Wednesday morning that included infamous Chinatown gangster Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, whose past includes a variety of charges including racketeering and drug crimes. Targets of the early-morning raids appeared in federal court in San Francisco on Wednesday afternoon.

A 137-page criminal complaint charges 26 people — including Yee and Chow — with a panoply of crimes, including firearms trafficking, money laundering, murder-for-hire, drug distribution, trafficking in contraband cigarettes, and honest services fraud.

Yee is charged with conspiracy to traffic in firearms without a license and to illegally import firearms, as well as six counts of scheming to defraud citizens of honest services. …

The charges are particularly shocking given that Yee has been among the state Senate’s most outspoken advocates both of gun control and of good-government initiatives.

Laws are for the little people.

UPDATE: Wow. The affidavit alleges Yee offered to provide $2 million of automatic weapons to Islamic rebels.

Subscribe To Site: