To live in accordance with how one thinks. Be yourself and don’t try to impose your criteria on the rest. I don’t expect others to live like me. I want to respect people’s freedom, but I defend my freedom. And that comes with the courage to say what you think, even if sometimes others don’t share those views.
Texas Governor and 2012 presidential candidate Rick Perry has never been exactly “my guy.” But now he seems like a kindred spirit, having been indicted on two felony counts of . . . well . . . as the indictment states it, “threatening to veto legislation that had been approved and authorized by the Legislature of the State of Texas.”
The indictment is only two pages. Easy to read.
What seems hard to read is why a prosecutor would bring a criminal charge in a case like this.
Last year, Governor Perry publicly and transparently threatened a veto of the $7.5 million in funding for the Public Integrity Unit of the Travis County District Attorney’s office unless Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg resigned her office.
Why should she resign? Lehmberg was arrested and convicted for driving drunk and still found it necessary to behave badly in the process. Which arguably, per Gov. Perry, clashed with her continuation as head of the Public Integrity shop.
Lehmberg refused to resign and Perry vetoed the $7.5 million.
Now Perry is facing two felony charges from the same prosecutor’s office that has had other high profile cases — most famously the prosecution of Tom DeLay — end in acquittal. If convicted, he could face up to a 99-year sentence.
Someone more “my guy,” former Texas Congressman Ron Paul, called the indictment “pure politics” and “a joke.”
He didn’t mean it was funny, though. It is a very serious signal of just how out of control our political process has become.
Governors have the constitutional veto power for a reason. Threatening a veto is standard politics. It’s their job.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The important group Democrats Against Democratic Obstruction of Justice (DADOOJ) has yet to be formed to denounce ongoing cover-ups by the Obama administration.
If a DADOOJ did exist, though, its two or three members would surely cite a recent Hill column by Rick Manning, “More lost emails—When will Democrats have enough?”
Manning, of Americans for Limited Government, notes that some twenty different Obama administration officials have “lost”/destroyed congressionally requested email records. He echoes Darrell Issa, the exasperated chairman of the House Committee on Oversight who says it “defies logic that so many senior administration officials were found to have ignored federal record-keeping requirements only after Congress asked to see their emails.”
What we have here, concurs Manning, is “coordinated and condoned cover-up,” not massive coincidence of careless keystrokes. So why aren’t any prominent Democrats expressing outrage at this “affront to our constitutional system,” and demanding answers? During the Watergate scandal, at least a few Republicans soon joined calls for the Republican president to come clean. Today, though, Dems are mute en masse.
Investigators should find a way to raid the offices of the IRS, DOJ and so forth; don’t just solicit cooperation. Confiscate or clone drives and servers so we can do some exhaustive forensics on the zeroes and ones. If we look real hard — maybe even not that hard — we’ll find the missing email.
I offer this proposal gratis as the first item for the DADOOJ advocacy agenda.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.
This weekend at Townhall.com, the biggest takeaway from the confusion events coming out of Ferguson, Missouri. Click on over, then come back here:
The War on Drugs led to the use of police state tactics and widespread corruption.
Every once in a while, a judge makes a judgment so sensible, it’s as if he had this Common Sense column in mind.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Edmund Brennan has determined that the same right to video-record police in public also applies within a would-be videographer’s home.
The case involves a 2011 search of the home of Mary Crago, which was subject to search without warrant under the terms of her probation. Defendant Kenneth Leonard deleted a video recording she made of the search, telling her that recording it was prohibited. In court Leonard has contended that no right to video-record police officers has been established for persons on probation or in a non-public setting.
To this, Judge Brennan responds that if a plaintiff has “a clearly established constitutional right to record from a public place where the plaintiff has the lawful right to be, a plaintiff surely has such a right in his or her home.”
Brennan sees no “no principled basis” for the assumption that we have a protected right to record officers performing their duties in public that “does not extend to those performed in a private residence. The public’s interest in ensuring that police officers … do not abuse [their] authority … does not cease once they enter the private residence of a citizen.”
If anything, it is even more urgent to protect a citizen’s right to document proceedings when an officer’s actions are shielded from public view — from other witnesses.
But of course. It’s just Common Sense, isn’t it?
I’m Paul Jacob.
If you see what is right and fail to act on it, you lack courage.
Yesterday morning, Paul Waldman of the Washington Post wondered why libertarians and limited government conservatives weren’t all over the Ferguson riot suppression, and the police shooting that sparked the whole fracas. He recognized that Reason magazine’s website has covered it, but, he noted, “the politicians and conservative media figures who claim to be the most fervent advocates of individual freedom and to care the most about misuse of government power have been silent.”
One might be tempted to conclude they believe that when somebody’s grandson has to pay taxes on their inheritance, it’s a horrifying injustice that demands redress, but when somebody else’s grandson gets shot walking down the street, that’s just how things go sometimes.
Or maybe one should yield, instead, to the temptation to wait and see what they say when they say it. Rep. Justin Amash tweeted about it later in the day. But Waldman got his licks and innuendo in first.
The whole thing smacks of bad government to me — deadly misgovernment — but I can understand why many folks might want to reserve judgment.
Weighing on the wait-and-comment-later side of this particular debate, it is worth acknowledging that the information so far has been awfully confusing. Especially since the Ferguson government has been cracking down on reporting and video recording, as well as being not very forthcoming about the initial shooting or the autopsy.*
The 24-hour news cycle is bad enough. The 24-hour commentary/reaction cycle is doubly daunting. Forgive me if I don’t have anything profound to say yet. I’m sure, when the facts become clearer, at least I will make my thoughts known.
Isn’t it too early to make comments about comments not made?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Those are good reasons to be protesting in Ferguson. There are no good reasons for looting Ferguson businesses.
And this is man’s prerogative and no further; so much and no more may be given or received thereof: even so much as is conducent to a better being, more safety and freedom, and no more. He that gives more, sins against his own flesh; and he that takes more is thief and robber to his kind — every man by nature being a king, priest and prophet in his own natural circuit and compass, whereof no second may partake but by deputation, commission, and free consent from him whose natural right and freedom it is.