Author: Redactor

Categories
crime and punishment too much government

One Helluva Policy

Protecting the peace isn’t easy. Sometimes it calls for extraordinary action. Like a recent police assault to capture and kill an outlaw . . .

In this case, the targeted outlaw wasn’t really a person at all, but a fawn named Giggles.

The baby deer was being illegally held by the Society of St. Francis no-kill animal shelter and farm near Kenosha, Wisconsin, without the required state permit. Giggles had been nursed back to health by shelter employees, who told reporters they were within days of moving the fawn to an Illinois wildlife facility.

Four sheriff deputies and nine Department of Natural Resources agents took the heavily-armed SWAT-like approach, and, through “aerial surveillance,” were able descend upon the fawn and kill it.

It is policy to euthanize because of the potential for disease and danger to humans.

“That’s one hell of a policy,” said the man who had cared for the dangerous Giggles.

Why the rush to kill this deer? And, why not make a phone call to talk to the folks at the Society of St. Francis, instead of a launching a military-style assault?

“If a sheriff’s department is going in to do a search warrant on a drug bust,” DNR spokeswomen Jennifer Niemeyer explained, “they don’t call them and ask them to voluntarily surrender their marijuana or whatever drug that they have before they show up.”

Right. No quarter is given to outlaws. Even if they are innocent forest creatures who had received illegal charity from well-meaning humanitarians.

This is Common Sense? I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
nannyism

Big Soda Ban Still Fizzles

One of the Nanny State’s ninniest nannies is New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, eager to save New Yorkers from big cups of sugary drinks. Big Soda supposedly makes you tubby. Bloomberg feels that it is the government’s job to prevent such tubbiness. (No word yet on bans of big chocolate, big hamburger, big pizza . . .)

In July, a court upheld a prior ruling that the NYC Board of Health had exceeded its bounds by trying to ban certain Big Soda sales. According to the Times, the justices objected to “exceptions and carve-outs in the rule [that] demonstrated that the board was concerned with matters beyond its core mission to improve public health. . . .”

The now-banned ban was indeed full of carve-outs and contradictions — unavoidable this side of a totalitarian state. To achieve its goals consistently, the government would have to monitor our every sip. How much more must it have to do to really stop us from gaining “too much” weight, Bloomberg’s rationale for the assault on Big Soda sales?

It is not government’s job to compel good living by violating the very political rights that we need in order to live well. Its job is to safeguard those rights; i.e., to safeguard the freedom to make choices about matters big and small according to our own judgment. A state that bans every conceivable “wrong” choice also prohibits our means of making the choices that are — for each of us, given our individual purposes and priorities — the right choices.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Winston Churchill

What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone?

Categories
Thought

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard ShawThe only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.

Categories
links

Townhall: The Fight for Your Gun Rights

This weekend’s Common Sense column at Townhall.com looks at the latest political battles over gun-ownership rights in the two states of the union that have also legalized marijuana. Shoot on over, and reload back here, with more information:

Categories
Thought

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Alexsandr SolzhenitsynA state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

Categories
video

Video: White Riot

Enough of the “Black Community” and the “White Community” — how about seeing everyone as an individual? Though not perfect, this bit of satire is well worth thinking about:

http://youtu.be/NjyUSxCD4jg

Categories
judiciary

Innocent

What kind of world do we live in?

That was my thought when I heard how Sharon Snyder got fired for doing right.

The 70-year-old worked in a Kansas, Missouri, court for over three decades. She was fired for providing a public — public — document showing how an inmate could successfully request DNA testing.

Twenty-seven years ago, Robert Nelson was convicted of rape. Nelson was no angel back then. He was also sentenced for robbery; the sentence for rape would begin after he had served the time for robbery.

When his sister appealed to Snyder in 2011, Nelson had filed two previous requests for DNA testing, both denied. Snyder gave her a copy of a motion that had worked in a different case. It worked again. A crime lab determined that Nelson’s DNA was not that found at the crime scene.

He was released with decades left to serve on the rape charge.

Then the judge who had denied Nelson’s first two motions, David Byrne, fired Sharon Synder for violating court rules. Whatever validity those rules may sometimes have, they were wrongly applied here.

We live in a world where persons like Byrne feel justified in firing a woman for helping a wrongly convicted man escape many years of unjust imprisonment. That makes me angry. But — it is also a world in which Sharon Snyder acted to save that man from suffering any more of that unjust prison time. Thank you, Sharon Snyder.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard ShawCensorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read.

Categories
national politics & policies

Pat Paternalism

Ever since Demosthenes choked up a pebble, politicians have been trying to improve their persuasion techniques.

The new “nudge” initiative is, in that context, not new.

Our glorious leaders in Washington are in the process of cooking up a “Behavioral Insights Team,” which will research behavioral economics, psychology and allied fields for new ways to nudge we, the people, to do what they, the rulers, want.

Ominous?

It’s a revival of the fashionable “libertarian paternalism” of a few years back. The idea is to find ways to encourage “good behavior” by providing the right contexts, juxtapositions, and options for citizens as they interface with their beloved overlords.

Excuse me: beloved public servants.

Businesses have used similar techniques. What do you think the art of product placement near cash registers is but a “nudging” of consumers to “impulse buy”?

Folks in government smilingly shrug off any ominous odor of intimidation: placing organ donor options on drivers’ licenses is a fine example of the technique. They want to extend such practices to encourage us to save, drive safely, pay taxes., etc., etc.

But how well behaved are our paternalistic manipulators? After all, as Greg Gutfeld pointed out on Red Eye or The Five (they blend in my mind), the reason they must encourage people to save is that the incentives to save have been undermined by other government policies. And people would pay taxes more readily if taxes were easier to understand . . .

The paternalism is obvious. The context anything but “libertarian.” But, all in all, much worse things have come out of Washington in recent years.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.