Infallability? That you won’t get. Transparency and democracy you would, from me.
Just a couple of hours to get your ballots in. Looking at the board minutes but not at the email, I figured there were seven more hours after that, but such will not be the case. Get your ballots in by 5 Panama Time today.
If I am elected as chair I will be a voting delegate to the upcoming DA global convention. If not I won’t be.
The following is a significant resolution, co-sponsored among others by our current (outgoing) and previous chairwomen. Some of the ideas I might support but in general I oppose it. I especially object to the idea that a government authority would have the power to determine what’s true and order The Panama News or any other publication off of the Internet, without any right of the affected person, page or periodical to be heard. I also object because none of these people were involved in the grunt work of doing battle with the swarms of false online personas going into target groups in the last months of the 2016 and 2020 campaigns with “don’t vote” / “write in Bernie” / “vote Green” / “vote Kanye” / “vote for some party that does not exist” messages. We know that a lot of these came from Russia in 2016, while last year it seems to have been US-based call centers of white supremacist trolls doing it. You’d think that they would get into trolling blitzes using fake personas, but they seem to be above that.
Apparently none of these people have faced bogus criminal defamation charges like I have. Remember the Montana Freemen? Now THERE was a militia dear to the hearts of those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, and when one of them who had done time in prison in Colorado for fraud came here with this wonderful investment program to sell to expats, I called him a “hustler.” He hired Alejandro Moncada Luna, who had previously been Noriega’s guy for shutting down the opposition press and later was Ricky Martinelli’s presiding magistrate of the Supreme Court, as his private prosecutor. I beat Moncada Luna, who is now out of prison and practicing law again, and “Rex Freeman,” in that case. I have won all such cases against me. But I should not have had to go through this annoyance.
I think it’s important that we have leaders with practical political sense, and who respect basic principles of freedom and democracy. Neither the high school in-crowd mentality nor bureaucratic disrespect for fundamental rights should guide us.
Also, this is similar to legislation that Josh Hawley is supporting — he also wants to strip immunity from the online platforms. I can’t get into that sort of “reach across the aisle” politics.
There IS a need to deal with monopolistic abuses, and I support Elizabeth Warren’s move to invoke antitrust laws against Facebook, Google and Amazon. Were it up to me I’d declare eminent domain over the Google search engine and the main body of Facebook, but I don’t think that the body of US opinion is there yet.
Vote. There are more than just personalities involved.
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