Take your stinkin' paws off my rights, you damn dirty ape!

The Ape-in-Chief is trying to monkey with the Bill of Rights. We all have to act to stop him. He still has 27 weeks in which he can do tons of damage.

When James Madison wrote that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press," he meant to ensure that news and information important to the public could reach the populace freely, untrammeled by political spin or falsehoods, and without government censorship.

For Madison, "press" meant newspapers. Today it means print, broadcast, and digital media, but the idea remains the same. We the public have the right to straight-up and factual news and information about facts that concern us, and the government has no right to prevent us from getting it.

COVID-19 is, or should be, a subject of interest to everyone who draws breath. Until Tuesday the best place to find detailed information about it was CDC.gov. That was the date (Bastille Day, ironically) when the Department of Health and Human Services, at the behest of the Gorilla-in-Chief, ordered information from the nation's hospitals to be sent to HHS (and some to the White House!) instead of CDC. The next day that information disappeared from the CDC website.

The initial announcement about this displacement of data said tellingly that the data would be in a database inaccessible to the public.

Did that last bit get your attention? The Executive Branch of the government was planning to sequester information about public health, keeping it from the very public who need to have it.

Then, surprise! Two days later the information is back at CDC.gov. There's a lot of speculation about what happened to it in the interim, ranging from the data being bugged so the administration can tweak it at will to HHS personnel realizing they couldn't deal with the data inflow, let alone analyze it.

Of course the data never actually went away. One portal to it was closed, but it's still out there on lots of news, public health, and university websites.  

So no harm, no foul, right? Wrong! The fact that the data never went away is irrelevant.

We've not returned to the status quo ante. We've seen an open attempt on the part of the administration to withhold important public health information from the American people. My personal feeling is that they failed because they're so tightly enclosed in the Trump bubble they didn't realize just how accessible the data is.

They will try again, and they will keep trying to deny crucial information to the American people. This administration is capable of acts we can't even imagine.

As election day comes closer and the unpresident becomes ever more desperate, he will become more dangerous. As I've said before, the people have to move to stop him. Our most direct route to accomplishing this is by keeping heavy pressure on our members of Congress to act in some meaningful way to contain DJTrump.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.¹


--- Diogenes, 7/17/2020  


¹ Wendell Phillips, American abolitionist, 1852.


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