Category: Accountability

You Could Look It Up

Your constitutional rights have been violated. Now what?

One thing you can do is find out exactly where you stand with respect to what the Institute for Justice calls “clearly established law.” IJ has created a new research tool, the Constitutional GPA, to help lawyers and others identify relevant legal decisions.

The tool is designed to help users make government accountable despite the many confusing barriers to accountability. The “GPA” in the name refers both to “grade point average” and the question that is part of the tool’s graphic design: “Is your Government Preventing Accountability?”

Doctrines of qualified immunity and other special rules often prevent government officials who violate your rights from being held responsible unless courts have ruled otherwise with respect to specific rights-violating actions. Exactly what the law permits or proscribes can vary widely in different jurisdictions.

The interactive tool grades state governments and federal courts of appeal based on how they treat claims of immunity and helps users “identify the clearly established law necessary to defeat qualified immunity.”

IJ gives the example of a government employee’s unjustified search of your car supposing this takes place in Nevada. Answering a few simple questions enables one to search the Constitutional GPA database of hundreds of cases to find about a dozen pertinent legal decisions.

So if you find yourself on the wrongest of wrong ends of the State, watch the Institute’s YouTube video on how to use the new tool and try it out at the ij.org/gpa web page.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Institute for Justice, law, qualified immunity

Accountability Second Amendment rights

Accidentally on Purpose?

Sacramento, California, guns, permits, privacy

“Just an accident?”

Maybe.

But the “accidental” release of the private information of thousands of California gun owners is just the sort of thing that many foes of Second Amendment rights would happily perpetrate.

So we can be forgiven if we harbor doubts.

On June 27, the California Justice Department’s 2022 Firearms Dashboard Portal went live. The publicly accessible files included private details — names, dates of birth, and home addresses — about persons who had applied for concealed carry permits between 2011 and 2022. More than enough information to cause trouble.

The info was removed the next day. Attorney General Rob Bonta said that his office would investigate.

The California Rifle & Pistol Association is threatening to sue.

If the leak was deliberate, maybe the AG was not responsible even indirectly. Maybe the culprit was some anonymous clerk, akin in spirit to the clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court who leaked Dobbs.

If the leak was a pure accident, though, the degree of carelessness strains credulity. This wasn’t a hack of data that had been poorly encrypted in keeping with modern traditions of lackadaisical security. The data was out in the open for all to see.

But, sure, maybe the exposure was unintentional. Maybe what happened was just some tech guy not knowing what he was doing. And every tester of the system also screwing up. Etc.

Such blunders are not unknown. Government workers have bungled bigly before, serially and in parallel. There are precedents. Yes.

So maybe.

But if government cannot reliably keep private information confidential, then maybe it should not require the logging of such information in the first place. Maybe “concealed carry” should be a right, not a licensed privilege.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 2nd Amendment, California, gun control, guns

Accountability education and schooling initiative, referendum, and recall

After Recall, Revival

Is San Francisco waking up from its dystopian nightmare?

The egalitarians who have pushed the great city into absurdity have suffered another setback.

The earlier victory for sanity was won in a landslide election this February when parents recalled three members of the local school board for doing things like renaming 44 schools to conform to a left-wing agenda, keeping San Francisco schools closed because of outsized fears of the pandemic, and using a lottery system to undermine the magnet school Lowell High.

The lottery ended Lowell’s merit-based admissions, preventing the most qualified students from getting in unless they happened to get a lucky number. A step was thus taken toward reducing all students in the district to the same low academic level. Obviously, kids too behind or lazy to be even good students let alone top students would not suddenly become stellar academicians merely by winning a lottery.

The three board members ousted in February were the only ones then eligible to be recalled. Now the reconstituted board has voted 4 – 3 against extending the lottery system. The vote restores merit-based admissions.

A victory, but way too narrow. One flipped vote and the district would be back to hobbling the best and brightest.

The three anti-education board members who voted against the best possible future for the best students are Kevine Boggess, Mark Sanchez, and Matt Alexander.

They should be recalled or at least defeated in their next election. Since district parents are on the alert and active, there’s a good chance that this will happen.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags education, recall, San Francisco, school board

Accountability education and schooling

Grading on a Skewed Curve

Oak Park and River Forest High School, a Chicago-area school, is imposing standards of grading designed to equalize academic performance among races.

According to a plan discussed at a recent school meeting, “Traditional grading practices perpetuate inequities and intensify the opportunity gap.”

Teachers must now ignore whether, for example, students miss class, misbehave, or fail to promptly submit homework. It seems that students of certain races commit such lapses, on average, more often than students of other races.

It’s not the first major step taken at the school to promote “diversity, equity, inclusion and justice [sic].” Last year, a teacher there adopted a grading scale under which students had to score as low as 19 percent to get an F and could get an A with 80 percent, a B with 65.

Students who conscientiously try to learn despite the fact that excellence and conscientiousness are no longer being appropriately recognized may do okay despite the perverse incentives being pushed.

But what about students on the margin who need to be rewarded for their efforts? Might they not slide into apathy if, no matter what they do, they’re treated like anybody else? Grades, after all, are there to serve as feedback — signalling successes and failures in learning, rewarding for excellence and warning for error. Take that away and one incentive to adjust studying habits flies out the window.

Even under the new plan, there will perhaps be some remnant of recognition of actual individual performance at Oak Park and River High. But precedents have been established that pave the way to further erosion of standards.

Unless the whole noxious egalitarian approach is repudiated, things there can only get worse.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags education, race, racism

Accountability insider corruption international affairs

Xinjiang’s Hacked Police Files

Post author By Redactor
Post date May 27, 2022
3 Comments on Xinjiang’s Hacked Police Files

The Chinese government’s internment, rape, torture, and murder of Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang “reeducation” camps, supposedly to prevent terrorism, has long been confirmed by the testimony of many of the victims.

No honest person could deny the evidence.

Nevertheless, there are denials.

In February 2021, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, uttering a standard denial, told the United Nations that “basic facts show that there has never been so-called genocide, forced labor or religious oppression in Xinjiang.”

But now a hack of China’s police computers has unearthed a trove of documents showing what is happening in the camps according to the regime itself.

The files include mug shots of prisoners and records of protocols to be followed as police subdue detainees, handcuff and blindfold them while moving them between buildings, and shoot to kill anyone who tries to escape.

The xinjianpolicefiles.org site also hosts an explanation of the files by Adrian Denz, an expert on Chinese documents.

The “thousands of documents, speeches, policy directives, spreadsheets, images” come “directly from police computers in two ethnic minority counties in Xinjiang,” Denz says. “They for the first time give us a firsthand account of police operations inside reeducation camps.”

Unsurprisingly, they confirm the involvement of government officials.

Basic facts, abundantly documented.

Can Chinese officials still deny them?

Yes, but the job of controverting the incontrovertible is harder now. It will also be harder for appeasers in the West to pretend that none of this horror matters.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags China, human rights, Uyghurs

Accountability general freedom local leaders term limits

Freedom in Granite

“In the past two years,” the Cato Institute announced last January, “Governor [Chris] Sununu and the State of New Hampshire have topped Cato’s rankings for both our Fiscal Policy Report Card* on America’s Governors* and our recently released Freedom in the 50 States report.”

How? Why?

The governor points to “a long history of local control,” insisting that “town meetings matter.”

He also cites the state’s executive council which, along with the governor, publicly debates “every contract over $10,000,” as well as a two-year gubernatorial term that “sucks” for him but gives citizens “all the say.”

Most of all, consider the sheer size of New Hampshire’s House of Representatives.

“When you have one of the largest parliamentary bodies in the free world with 400 members representing only 1.4 million people,” Gov. Sununu explains, “by definition” it has to be “one of the most representative bodies of government in the world.”

He elaborates that “they only get paid a hundred bucks a year. I mean, it’s like herding cats. Don’t get me wrong, it has its ups and downs. But that’s one state representative for about every 3,000 people. Like town selectmen, your representative in Concord is going to be somebody you know, somebody you see at the grocery store, somebody you can easily reach and who can hear you. It’s very different from other states where you have one person representing a district with tens or hundreds of thousands of people.

“Which means the control is really at the individual level,” Sununu adds, and “an individual citizen has much more say on how their taxes are spent or what’s going on in their schools or whether that pothole is going to get filled or not.”

Sounds like citizens are more in charge.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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