Category: crime and punishment

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crime and punishment national politics & policies scandal

Alien in Congress?

Ilhan Omar, Congress, crime,immigration, Islam, Somalia

So there I was, working hard on citizen-only voting measures in state after state, and also within Congress to create a new constitutional amendment, when a bigger non-citizen voting issue exploded.

And it has nothing to do with me!

It’s all about “Ilhan Omar.”

I give her those scare quotes around her name because, the Department of Justice alleges, that name wasn’t the one she used to get into Britain. It’s just the one she used to get into America. Her father had served in the Somalian military and was persona non grata in these United States.

She and her father lied to get in. Allegedly. She also lied about her age on her forms, though this may be the weakest charge — she probably didn’t know her date of birth.

Richer yet, she “married” (or pretended to marry) her brother in 2009, to finagle a visa for him.

Then, when MS Now’s Chris Hayes asked her, point blank, if she had actually married her brother, she responded with “Not to my knowledge.”

Skepticism about one’s own marriages shouldn’t take that form.

And it is marriages plural. In 2011, she separated from her brother-husband in a “faith-based” manner, then married and divorced another, and is now married to political consultant and ersatz vintner Tim Mynett — about whom scandals have swirled. 

The latest wrinkle to the story is from the New York Times. Contrary to Democratic accusations that the very idea that she married her brother was just so much partisan lawfare, The Times reports that, during the Obama Administration, the DOJ did indeed have evidence of her visa frauds but shelved the issue. 

Why? Statute of limitations. 

Besides, she was in Congress!

Ilhan Omar is one of those politicians who sends chills down my spine. Criticism and reform are helpful, but she strikes me as dangerously anti-American. 

Still, innocent until proven guilty. Follow the law. This applies to Ms. Omar as well as her prosecutors.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment fraud national politics & policies

Fraud’s a SNAP

Seattle, EBT, scam, welfare, crime, corruption

This may shock you . . . or not . . . but independent reporters led by Nick Shirley have confirmed that food-stamp fraud is rampant. At least it is in the streets of Seattle. Their work supplements a police investigation reported in October 2025.

One scheme involves fraudsters approaching “groups of unsheltered individuals . . . who had an EBT [electronic benefits transfer card] with money on it,” a Seattle police captain reported last year. They would “then take that person to a store with a shopping list.”

The fraudsters keep the goods for resale while paying the original card holder half the card value in cash. Alternatively, the fraudsters buy EBT cards at half-price directly from card holders.

Sometimes fraudsters let drug dealers know which persons living on the street have just gotten cash for their cards. The dealers then swarm into a homeless camps to sell their wares.

Shirley’s work shows that although police arrests of eleven of the scammers made a dent, the scams still go on — in Seattle and doubtless many other cities.

He found that local store clerks proved willing to adjust food prices charged to match the balance on an EBT card, say $120. Then, if all goes “well,” the clerk and the fraudster presumably split the take. 

Shirley’s video doesn’t document the last part of the process because, to avoid being complicit in the scam, he kept entering a false PIN.

Welfare fraud is, apparently, easy to perpetrate, hard to patrol. 

It used to be understood that the only way to distribute general benefits to the poor was to refuse to make it easy to receive, and to administer such programs as locally as possible. Incentives for bureaucrats and disincentives for abusers must always be made painfully clear. And punishments swift.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment litigation

An Anti-Lawfare Law Firm

lawfare, justice, Jeffrey Clark, law

We witness lots of lawfare, so we need lots of anti-lawfare. 

That’s why former Trump administration official Jeffrey Clark, a victim of lawfare himself, is opening a new law firm.

Democrats went after him because, he says, “I am a strong Trump supporter and thought Georgia investigating its election in 2020 at a deeper level was worth doing.” As part of this vindictive campaign, the DC Bar has been pushing to revoke Clark’s license to practice law.

On the X social media platform, Clark says that the firm, which he is leading, will combat all kinds of weaponization of the law, “but especially abuses of congressional and state legislative branch oversight, perversion of bar discipline processes, and . . . bogus criminal indictments.”

He is looking for help. “We already have a small team of dedicated lawyers with Article I, Article II, and/or Article III branch experience at the federal level and state government experience as well. You would join them and me in this important effort to turn our country around.”

He links to a page on itsyourgov.org describing the positions.

There you’ll learn that your duties would include “preparing rapid-response filings and ethics defenses for attorneys facing bar complaints, representing clients in constitutional, administrative, and investigative proceedings, and pursuing strategic litigation — including civil suits and possibly counter-complaints — against entities abusing legal and regulatory processes.” 

So if you’re an ace lawyer who finds this project exciting and worthwhile, and think you could help, you know what to do.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment international affairs

Chinazi Repression in America

Xi Jinping, China, CCP, spying, police

“A California woman was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport on Oct. 4 on a charge of acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government,” reports The Epoch Times. “The woman is accused of surveilling Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te’s U.S.-based son.”

Foreigners spying on Americans, and on other foreigners on American soil, goes back at least to 1798, when the Adams Administration kicked Constantin François Chassebœuf — that is, Volney, author of The Ruins (1791) — out of the country.

But it’s not just spying. “A Bronx man was convicted of the same charge in May, accused of operating a Chinese undercover police station in New York City for China’s Ministry of Public Security.” The Epoch Times’s article calls it “transnational repression.”

These “police stations” are all over the place. Four years ago, I quoted one source saying that there were at least “54 of these Chinese ‘service stations’ in 30 countries . . . including one in New York City.” While this all technically falls under the rubric of “rendition,” these fake cops don’t usually “arrest” and transport targets as prisoners. Instead, they threaten harm, often to relatives back home. 

The Epoch Times quotes Attorney General Todd Blanche, who says the Department of Justice will keep investigating “as long as the conduct persists.” The AG admits, however, that it’s “hard to catch because once you catch one, there’s a lot of others.”

The problem, Blanche says, is not the lack of existing laws to counter transnational repression, but that there is just so much of it and it is inherently hard to sort out.

But worth the attempt, surely . . . if America is to continue to be the “land of the free” and a refuge for dissidents fleeing totalitarianism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment Eighth Amendment rights regulation too much government

Fly the Cruel and Unusual Skies

Alaska, civil asset forfeiture, property, prohibition

Sometimes, cruel punishment is the usual, as in states like the People’s Republic of China. Everybody is a victim there. But entire ethnic or religious groups of people are routinely subjected to even more cruel tyranny than most Chinese people must put with.

If Americans aren’t yet in this situation — not for lack of trying by various local, state, and federal autocrats — one reason is that instances of cruel and unusual punishment can be fought in court. Which is what Ken Jouppi is doing with the help of the Institute for Justice.

What was Jouppi’s alleged crime? He let a passenger bring “visible” containers of beer on board his Cessna 206. Why is this a problem? The number of beer cans was 72, and the destination was a dry village, so you can imagine the horror involved!

The trial court determined intent as Jouppi being “willfully blind” to the contraband, but it may be that he just failed to leap into action when he noticed the beer . . . assuming he did. 

Jouppi was punished 13 years ago, a year after the “crime,” with three days in jail and a $1,500 fine. But that wasn’t good enough for the Alaska government, which tenaciously enforces local alcohol prohibitions — it demanded that Jouppi forfeit his $95,000 airplane. 

“Although that penalty seemed grossly disproportionate,” says Reason magazine, “the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that it did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on excessive fines.” 

Yes, this is a case of civil asset forfeiture, covered here for decades now.

Will the U.S. Supreme Court see reason? Regardless of the outcome, the process has also been the punishment, one that is both cruel and all too usual.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment prohibition regulation

Just Say Uncool

drug war, marijuana, prohibition, culture

Something curious has happened to the young, a new government report suggests: “the number of high school students who use marijuana has decreased by almost half — 44 percent — since states started enacting adult-use legalization.”

I’m quoting an article from September 22. In it, Marijuana Moment editor Tom Angeli repeatedly contrasts the decrease in teen cannabis use with the rise in state legalizations. “The new federal data, released on Monday, shows that 12.9 percent of high school students currently consume cannabis, which is defined as having used it at least once in the past 30 days. That’s down from 23.1 percent in 2011 — the year before the first U.S. states approved recreational marijuana legalization laws.”

Angeli reminds us of a standard argument against marijuana legalization: If marijuana is readily available, kids will increase usage of the ‘pernicious weed.’

Hasn’t happened!

But why?

It may be relevant to note that sexual activity among the young has gone way down. So has testosterone in boys; teen pregnancies are also in decline. 

Meanwhile, teen use of prescription drugs is way up. If your brain function is altered by one or more psychiatric medications, doctor prescribed, perhaps these compete with traditional psychoactive drugs, reducing demand.

Angeli insists, however, that “[p]rior research also suggests that marijuana use by young people has generally fallen in states that legalize it for adults.”

If this turns out to be true, we may have to accept his framing: a significant driver of drug use among young people is The Cool Factor, and legal drugs are not cool; prohibited drugs are. 

For decades, anti-drug activists used celebrities and cartoon characters to convince kids that “drugs aren’t cool.” 

Instead, legalization did the job.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment Fourth Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture too much government

I Spy vs. They Spy

Flock, surveillance, traffic, police

There is an argument making the rounds: Flock cameras are good because cop cams have proven themselves so useful. More transparency!

Flock cameras, you may remember, are the traffic cameras integrally linked to an artificial intelligence that tracks car license plates (and thus the cars, and drivers) that come within the cameras’ field of vision. 

The company contracts with cities and other governments. To surveil us. 

You know, “to protect us from crime.”

The fear — and I know it, because I fear it — is that this will lead to a total surveillance state where “innocent until proven guilty” has no real meaning. Watched and analyzed, our every action on the roads and sidewalks would potentially become ensnared in Big Brother tyranny.

A somewhat secondary fear is that police and other government workers — or hackers — would be able to access the database/a.i. for reasons of an, uh, extra-legal character.

And that has happened aplenty!

The latest tale comes from Sussex, Wisconsin, where our “public servants” tracked a specific person — Napoleon Jones, a Navy Veteran — after he had recorded a traffic stop that “just didn’t feel right” and had then been arrested and (understandably) filed a complaint.

While it is legal to record a public traffic stop, for some reason cops really don’t like “civilians” to record them.

In the course of reviewing the complaints, Jones’s lawyer discovered that the police had been tracking him through the Flock system.

Before you shout the now common protest of “What the Flock,” remember what we are up against: government workers using the system to defend their own misbehavior.

This is not the transparency we were looking for.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment Fourth Amendment rights privacy

Goose/Gander/Flock

flock camera, surveillance, privacy, police

The people behind the Flock cameras that I talked about a month ago have not stopped trying to erect a total roadway surveillance state.

Pairing traffic cameras with artificial intelligence, the company behind the cameras provides a complete spy system, tracking drivers’ and automobiles every move. At least, they are trying. They have enough data to cook up a transportation profile on you right now, at least if you drive through the cities and freeways where Flock cameras are pointed at traffic.

The fact that the police with access to Flock’s database cannot keep their hands off the data is just the tip of the goosefeather. 

Musician, technology maven, and YouTuber Benn Jordan decided to test Flock Safety, to see if what is good for the goose is also good for the gander. So he registered as a journalist to attend Flock Forward 2026, the company’s swag-pushing, PowerPoint-heavy convention. But he was rebuffed: no journalists allowed. Not only barred from the convention floor, the good geese at Flock so feared exposure that they had the Hilton he had registered at cancel his reservation!

Using his technological expertise, Mr. Jordan recorded Internet traffic and open-mic conversations as well as — and this is genius — used a.i. face-recognition to answer Juvenal’s challenge, “who will watch the watchers”: he watched, finding policemen, politicians, businessmen and a former Minnesota state senator amongst the gaggle.

We are told that we have no expectation of privacy on public roads. But is a Flock of a.i.-backed cameras the kind of thing we want spying on us, tracking our every move?

While we say that “it’s only a conspiracy if they do it in secret,” what is it when the people who seek to destroy the last vestiges of our privacy demand their own privacy even as they plot against us?

Not good. That’s what.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment government transparency

Deadly Shenanigans

Covid, conspiracy, cover up, crime

It has been five years since I first wrote about “The Man the Media Missed,” Dr. Peter Daszak. But this British zoologist, crucial in the funneling of U.S. taxpayer funds to gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is now feeling heat from U.S. prosecutors. He may get away unsinged, but . . .

As reported here over the weekend, a man has confessed to conspiring to “evade public records laws and conceal government documents related to grant research funding and the Covid-19 pandemic.” His name is David Morens, and he received two bottles of a Napa Valley red blend wine from Daszak. And a note containing two killer sentences: 

“This is the first of what I hope will be a continued series of expressions of gratitude for your advice, support, and behind-the-scenes shenanigans in my battle against your bosses [sic] boss, his boss, and the ultimate boss on the hill. It takes courage and commitment to do what you’ve done, given your job and the vindictive nature of the Administration.”

The effrontery: In April 2020, funding to Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance was cut off. This is apparently the president’s “vindictiveness.” How awful of the administration, seeking vengeance for Daszak’s evading the prohibition on dangerous research . . . and unleashing a deadly virus upon the world! 

Daszak yearned for a more forgiving president, I guess.

For his part, Morens — now facing five years in prison — was more than forgiving, and advised Daszak to hide emails, also complaining that FOIA requests were “dreadful and paranoia inducing.”

Daszak may get away with his crime against humanity, but at least this fact is clear: Morens and his boss Antony Fauci conspired with Peter Daszak to bury the truth of their deadly “shenanigans.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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crime and punishment ideological culture partisanship

The Violence Is Inclusive

worried democrat, radicals, leftists, progressivism, socialism, communism

“I don’t feel safe going,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel recently shared about her decision to skip the Michigan Democratic Party state convention later this month. 

“I don’t want to get chased around. I don’t want to get harassed. I don’t want to get yelled and screamed at.”

It’s a gathering of her own political party! 

“This cannot continue, and the fact of the matter is, we have to be able to be a society where we can have intelligent discourse and debate about ideas without people being threatened,” the attorney general implored, “and certainly without people carrying out those threats.”

When people don’t feel safe, that indicates a failure of our criminal justice system. The attorney general is each state’s highest law enforcement official. So, what does it say when a state AG feels threatened? Afraid to venture out in public?

“Nessel’s declaration,” explains The Times of Israel, “comes in the final days of the primary between Rep. Haley Stevens, a pro-Israel stalwart, and Abdul El-Sayed, a democratic socialist who is deeply critical of Israel.”

Still, even bitter policy disagreements do not have to metastasize into hate-filled harassment . . . threats of violence . . . or worse.

“Former Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow has also acknowledged antisemitism within the Democratic Party,” the Daily Wire reports, “recounting an incident at the Democratic National Convention in which, she said, an attendee shouted an antisemitic slur at her Jewish husband while he was walking with their five-year-old daughter.”

Michigan’s hotly contested U.S. Senate Primary will end tomorrow. The fear of political violence will not.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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