From the liar files: Chinese companies that tells us they don't do the Chinese government tells them to do

The Washington Post has analyzed public marketing presentations by the computer hardware and internet company Huawei, now taken offline to hide them. Not surprisingly, the presentations had evidence that the company was involved in Chinese government spying on the Chinese people. 

The marketing presentations had been posted on a publicly accessible Huawei website, but the company removed them last year. They show Huawei touting the use of its technologies to help government authorities identify individuals by voice, monitor individuals of political interest, manage ideological reeducation and labor schedules for prisoners, and help retailers track shoppers using facial recognition.

Huawei technology: Monitoring people by voiceprint

Also not surprising, the company denies everything. A company statement comments: “Huawei has no knowledge of the projects mentioned in the Washington Post report. Like all other major service providers, Huawei provides cloud platform services that comply with common industry standards.” What a bunch of liars.

Huawei claims to be just an innocent maker of computer and cloud hardware and software. The company says it would never cooperate with the Chinese government in China to do anything nefarious. At this point, it is worth noting that the Chinese government is brutal, authoritarian and it is the law, regardless of what the written laws may say. So, if Huawei did refuse to do what it was told to do in China or anywhere else on the planet, some Huawei heads would roll, maybe literally.

Huawei publicly claims that it doesn’t know how its technology is used by customers. But the detailed accounts of surveillance operations on the company’s slides accords with long-standing concerns about lack of transparency. Huawei is the world’s largest vendor of telecommunications gear. For years, Huawei has been criticized that it is opaque and closer to the Chinese government than it claims. 

WaPo comments: “A number of Western governments have blocked Huawei gear from their new 5G telecom networks out of concern that the company may assist Beijing with intelligence-gathering, which Huawei denies. .... The new details on Huawei’s surveillance products come amid growing concerns in China, and around the world, about the consequences of pervasive facial recognition and other biometric tracking. Even as the Chinese Communist Party continues to rely on such tools to root out dissent and maintain its one-party rule, it has warned against the technologies’ misuse in the private sector.”

Question: Is it credible to believe that, just like it does with all other Chinese companies, the Chinese government doesn't tell Huawei what to do and the company does it, or is Huawei just plain lying?

From the grossly excessive nails in the coffin files: The 2020 election was not stolen

According to the AP, a detailed analysis of all the fraudulent votes in the 2020 election indicates that Biden won fair and  square. An article, Far too little vote fraud to tip election to Trump, AP finds, lays the evidence out.

The AP notes that its review of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by the fascist Republican Party and our treasonous ex-president found fewer than 475 instances. That would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election even if all those 475 votes went to Biden. Some of the fraudulent votes were for the traitor and most of the fraudulent votes were caught and not actually counted.

The AP commented that its review of the evidence that took months and included more than 300 local election offices. That makes it one the most comprehensive examinations so far of suspected voter fraud in 2020 presidential election.

Questions: Should the ex-president and the Republican Party be called out as domestic terrorists? Or, is the AP lying and millions of fraudulent votes were cast and counted, making Biden an illegitimate president as the ex-president and many or most Republicans still claim? 

1/6 Traitor sentenced to 28 months

The Washington Post reports that one of the traitors at the 1/6 coup attempt who threatened to kill Pelosi received a paltry 28 month sentence. He took at least two guns and 2500 rounds of ammo to the 1/6 GOP party in D.D. This murderous thug, 53 year old Cleveland Meredith repeatedly texted treasonous sentiments to his family and friends. One message that said he was “gonna collect a … ton of Traitors heads.” Another said “he [Trump] wants HEADS and I’m gonna deliver.” He also texted twice that he was considering “putting a bullet in her [Pelosi’s] noggin on live TV.” 

In other activities, Meredith is a devout follower of the QAnon religion. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene and other Republican luminaries in congress will probably want to give this fine patriot the Congressional Medal of Honor or something like that. Meredith deserves celebration of his resistance to tyrannical Democratic Party democracy and the evil Democratic Party rule of law and their stolen election.

The traitor's guns

The traitor's gun accessories and ammo

In court, the judge read the text messages, many of them vulgar. She wanted to emphasize her belief that “the level of discourse in this country has become so debased and degraded.” Really? Nah, can't be.

Meredith pretended to be contrite, commenting “I know what I did was wrong. It was political hyperbole that was too hyper. … I’m very embarrassed about the whole situation. It’s not who I am and it’s not who I want to be remembered as.”

Political hyperbole. That is all it was. Just innocent Republican patriots with guns doing their patriotic thing.

Questions: Should the Republican Party be named as a domestic terrorist group? QAnon?

Supreme Court Conservatives grope for “non-political” rationales to overturn Roe v. Wade

It appears that Chief Justice John Roberts is looking for a way that appears to be “non-political” to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision on abortion. A recent paper by a legal scholar points out that in the oral arguments about a Mississippi abortion law a couple of weeks ago, Roberts focused on what the parties in Roe asked the court to do. In a master stroke of misdirection, Roberts shifted attention from what the Roe court held in 1973, to what the parties involved argued in that case. That is a new angle on attacking settled precedent (stare decisis). The New York Times writes:

A new study traces a trend at the Supreme Court: looking to what the lawyers had argued in assessing whether to follow a precedent. 

A decision in the Mississippi case is not expected until late June. If the court overrules Roe, an increasingly real possibility, it will have to explain why it is departing from the principle of stare decisis, which is legal Latin for “to stand by things decided.”

At his 2005 confirmation hearings, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the Supreme Court should be wary of overturning precedents, in part because doing so threatens the court’s legitimacy.

“It is a jolt to the legal system when you overrule a precedent,” he said, listing various factors the court must consider before it takes the momentous step of discarding a precedent. They include, the court has said, “the quality of the decision’s reasoning.”

At the argument in the Mississippi case, concerning a state law that bans most abortions after 15 weeks, the chief justice refined that factor in an apparent attempt to dampen the jolt to the system.

He suggested that the fetal-viability line established in Roe was not a crucial part of the decision’s reasoning. “Was viability an issue in the case?” he asked. “I know it wasn’t briefed or argued.”

In shifting the focus from what the court had done to what the parties in the case had asked it to do, the chief justice was trying to justify upholding a 15-week line while stopping short of overruling Roe entirely, which would allow states to make all abortions illegal.

Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard, explored this mode of argument in a recent article in The Supreme Court Review called “Advocacy History in the Supreme Court.”

The article makes the sensible point that a full understanding of a Supreme Court decision requires consideration of how the parties had framed the case.  

Chief Justice Roberts’s question about Roe was in a sense irrelevant, as the significance of fetal viability had been thoroughly argued in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that reaffirmed Roe’s core holding.

That made Roe a “super-duper precedent,” Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania said at Chief Justice Roberts’s confirmation hearings. The chief justice did not adopt Mr. Specter’s terminology, but he did not quarrel with the senator’s larger point.

The NYT article points out that legal arguments in a prior decision can be relevant, so lawyers review those briefs and arguments. Another legal expert the NYT spoke with asserted that the opinion in a decided case can sometimes be less helpful than the prior briefs and arguments. But here Roberts’s inquiry went farther. His reasoning clearly suggested that the meaning and weight of a decision may depend on the arguments that had been presented to the court in Roe.

The NYT went on to point out that Roberts pulled a similar stunt in 2007. There, to limit race as a factor in assigning students to public schools to achieve integration Roberts cited a key precedent, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that banned public school racial segregation. In that 2007 case, Roberts wrote that his opinion was “faithful to the heritage” of Brown by quoting from the original briefs in the case and from the oral argument in 1952. The NYT comments on that clever tactic: “Lawyers who had worked on the Brown litigation called the chief justice’s analysis ‘preposterous’ and ‘100 percent wrong.’”

Whether it is preposterous or 100 percent wrong, it is clear that the Republicans on the Supreme Court are desperate to overturn Roe. The other Republicans are less concerned with the appearance of being political than Roberts, but it is clear that he wants the same outcome as the other Republican justices. 

This analysis reflects a criticism that for decades critics have directed at the court. They criticize the practice of deciding a case first and then trying to figure out how to make it look grounded in legal principle and not personal ideology or bias. Clearly, the Republicans on the court are rigid ideologues who are heavily biased to overturn Roe. That is a major part of why they were picked. 

Overturning Roe is probably what the Republicans are going to do, maybe with a ~65% or ~75% chance. They will do that at the end of next June, or maybe a month, two or three earlier if that is deemed politically helpful for Republicans running for office in the 2022 elections.

For some people, but not most Republicans, the harder Roberts tries to make the Supreme Court look non-political, the more political it looks. 

Questions: 

1. Is it the case that the harder Roberts tries to make the Supreme Court look non-political, the more political it looks? 

2. Is Roe a super-duper precedent, or is its precedent status irrelevant in view of the Republican judges’ (i) socially hyper-conservative political ideology, (ii) Christian nationalist dogma, and (iii) radical right political agenda for American society, government and law?