Category: crime and punishment

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crime and punishment election law partisanship

Election Challenge Criminalized?

Trump, election, indictment, votes, legitimacy

Another day, another indictment of former President Trump. This one, out of Georgia, would criminalize election challenges.

Jonathan Turley observes that in this fourth indictment, “every call, speech, and tweet appears a criminal step in the conspiracy. District Attorney Fani Willis appears to have elected to charge everything and everyone and let God sort them out.”

This is the kitchen-sink, banana-republic approach to “justice.” Facts? Plausibility? Irrelevant when the would-be one-party regime has a target in view.

In masterful understatement or point-missing, Turley writes that the “greatest challenge for Georgia is to offer a discernible limiting principle on when challenges in close elections are permissible and when they are criminal.”

But how can it ever be criminal simply to challenge election results or call for a recount or plead for further investigation of the flimsiest of allegations, even via imperfect phone call?

The “limiting principle” operative here is obvious. Is the challenger on our side or the other side? Our side, the challenge is legal. Other side, it’s illegal, prosecutable. This is Willis’s “principle.”

Per Turley, it’s important for campaigns to seek judicial review of an election “without fear of prosecution.” Yes, important. But from the perspective of those who want to prevent other-side campaigns from seeking recourse when an election is close or seems pockmarked by fraud, what’s important is making sure other-side campaigns do fully feel this fear.

The bad guys already understand what’s at stake, what Mr. Turley is so carefully explaining as if they are perhaps only a little confused.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture

Violence on the Rise

political violence

In a fascinating if vexing article courtesy of Reuters, we learn that political violence has risen in recent years. 

Not shocking news, to those paying attention, but still worth thinking about.

The article focuses on a few stories of politically motivated violence by individuals against individuals since the fateful day of January 6, 2021. This conveniently stacks the deck of partisanship, ruling out of consideration 2020’s mass violence and multiple deaths during the riots following George Floyd’s death. With this limitation, the majority of violence is from “the right” against “the left.”

But the article’s most interesting passage regards a recent poll about the acceptability of violence. There the breakdown evens out: “In a Reuters/Ipsos poll of nearly 4,500 registered voters in May, roughly 20% of both Democratic and Republican respondents called violence ‘acceptable’ if committed ‘to achieve my idea of a better society.’” 

A similar poll last year shows that these acceptability-of-violence levels are on the rise.

Why?

One thing is perception of news media and thrust of the media. 

On the right, folks have noticed that the news regularly lies and spins in favor of the center-left establishment — demonstrated repeatedly in the article with what Reuters considers accepted facts. On the left, folks who trust their news sources and party follow the repeated narratives painting Trump and his supporters as wholly evil.

Of course you can fight evil with violence! — so a logic runs.

Also, the suppression of online social media stories and accounts that are perceived as “anti-left” has bred much distrust and disgust. Democracy only works in a context of free speech and open debate. 

Dysfunctional democracy makes violence more likely. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment election law privacy

Donors Don’t Donate Their Privacy

donor, privacy, crime, law, surveillance

Alabama recently passed a law to prohibit public agencies from disclosing information “that identifies a person as a member, supporter, or donor of a 501(c) nonprofit organization . . . except as required by law.”

SB59 is comprehensive, stating that “notwithstanding any provision of law to the contrary,” no public agency may compel disclosure of such information or itself publicly release such information. 

The initial delimitation “except as required by law” seems ambiguous. But SB59 goes on to specify that exceptions would pertain to things like the requirements of a “lawful warrant” or a “lawful request for discovery of personal information in litigation.”

Passage is a big deal because, until now, agencies in the state had been permitted to collect and disclose such information.

Many nonprofits are political or ideological in character, promoting causes that are controversial. When this is so, who especially appreciates unfettered access to donors’ names and addresses? Obviously, opponents of the cause who would like to target donors with propaganda or even actively harass them.

On the national level, recognition of the problem is represented by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2021 ruling in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta. The court threw out a California requirement that nonprofits in the state had to divulge the names and addresses of their biggest donors to the attorney general. The Foundation plausibly argued that the requirement would deter people from contributing.

Several other states have also enacted SB59-style legislation. The number we need is 50.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights social media

Big-Gov-Google-Plex

social media, censorship

A major presidential candidate is suing YouTube for censorship.

The candidate’s a Democrat.

That’s right. Democrats can also be muzzled by social media companies . . . that is, by big corporations that obey the First Amendment-violating instructions of government officials.

Democratic Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has filed a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company, Google, for collaborating with the federal government to violate his free speech rights by removing various of his videos from YouTube.

Kennedy’s sins include openly disputing Official Government Doctrines about COVID-19 and the pandemic. Doctrines espoused by, among others, the incumbent he is running against.

The title of the complaint names only “Google LLC” and “YouTube LLC.” But the document makes clear the originating role of the federal government in censoring Kennedy. The complaint is avowedly about “freedom of speech and the extraordinary steps the United States government has taken under the leadership of Joe Biden to silence people it does not want Americans to hear.”

YouTube’s conduct “may be fairly treated as that of government itself,” the filing explains. “For example, although it cited its own COVID vaccine misinformation policies when censoring Mr. Kennedy, the policies rely entirely on government officials to decide what information gets censored.”

The relief that Kennedy seeks includes restoration of the deleted videos and an order declaring Google’s speech-banning misinformation policies to be “unconstitutional on their face.”

Kennedy wants to be able to state his views and distinguish them from the incumbent’s without being routinely censored by the Big-Gov-Google-plex.

Google and other social media companies must somehow be prevented from colluding with politicians and bureaucrats to interfere in the democracy they only pretend to support.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment insider corruption judiciary

Not Having It

Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, classified files, race, racism

U.S. District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika is not having it, as yesterday’s headlines indicate. The super-lenient “deal” that Hunter Biden’s lawyers made with the Department of Justice to let the president’s son off with barely a scrape stinks.

And she’s not signing off on it.

But there is a hitch, which Reason summarizes in its title to Jacob Sullum’s coverage: “Hunter Biden Shouldn’t Go to Prison for Violating an Arbitrary Gun Law.”

And Sullum is right. Sort of. 

And wrong. Really.

The letter of the law that Hunter most definitely ran afoul of is, as Sullum argues, definitely ill-advised and almost certainly unconstitutional. And, to add cream to the jest, had Hunter committed his lying infraction a little later, after his father signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act last year, he would have been in even deeper doo. 

“The fact that President Joe Biden stubbornly defends a policy that could put his own son behind bars,” Sullum concludes, “should not blind us to the injustice that would entail.”

True, but it’s not just about gun laws. It’s tax law, too, that Hunter defied.

The real problem, of course, is that Hunter Biden was engaged in an uber-corrupt shake-down operation — with his family, including his father — leveraging his father’s position in government. Letting Hunter off with a wrist-slap onlesser charges, allowing the statute of limitations to expire on various crimes, bestowing wide immunity, also lets President Biden andthe whole crime family off, thereby keeping a lid on a corruption scandal that makes Teapot Dome look like a child’s tea party.

Besides, shouldn’t the children of politicians be prosecuted to the fullest extent of their parents’ laws?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment ideological culture

Haunted by the Specter of Mao

red guard, America, United States, antifa, revolution

“There is a whole intellectual structure, architecture, and, ultimately, strategy bound up with the idea of how to disrupt society, disrupt the West, overthrow the traditional order,” M.L.R. Smith tells Epoch Times.

According to Smith and David Jones, authors of The Strategy of Maoism in the West: Rage and the Radical Left (2022), the conduct of the America’s radical Left resembles that of the Red Guards and others during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s in China.

The authors got the idea for their study from the riots that swept the U.S. after the killing of George Floyd. These rage-filled protests-turned-riots made them think of Maoism:

  • Defacing and toppling of monuments, reminders of the pesky past.
  • Shouting down and “cancelling” speakers. (Sometimes physically as well as verbally assaulting them.)
  • Abject kneeling and self-criticism in response to alleged wrongdoing, including “‘white guilt’ genuflection.”

The parallels are real, even though the scale of the humiliations and destruction that we have seen is nowhere near that of the Cultural Revolution, when millions were tortured and murdered. 

Jones says Maoism was bred in China and hothoused in Paris but “achieved its global appeal in the Ivy League schools of the United States,” where it is manifest in thinking about race and gender.

The authors explore the nature of rage as a motivating force and strategy, “an energy to be harnessed as a mode of power.” This is the fuel of many a revolution, where mob action serves as a kind of open terrorism. Histories and treatises are filled with it.

America’s Founding Fathers feared such rage, hence in their revolution they stated principles in elegant but clear sentences. They expected argument and readily engaged.

But now?You can’t reason with rage.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment subsidy

Taken for Billions and Billions

Congress, clowns, wizards

The U.S. Small Business Administration’s (SBA) pandemic assistance loan programs didn’t go off sans hitch. 

“Over the course of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, SBA disbursed approximately $1.2 trillion of COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) and Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds,” explains a report from the SBA’s Office of Inspector General. “The economic assistance was intended to help eligible small business owners and entrepreneurs adversely affected by the crisis.” 

You might think that $1.2 trillion would do the job, if anything could.

But of course there was “a hitch” — it’s the thing in government we are never “without.”

The hitch was fraud.

“So far,” writes Eric Boehm at Reason, “investigations into COVID-related fraud have netted 1,011 indictments, 803 arrests, and 529 convictions. The joint efforts of the SBA, U.S. Secret Service, and other federal agencies have resulted in nearly $30 billion in COVID funds being seized or returned to SBA. . . .”

But that’s not even a quarter of it. The Inspector General’s report indicates that the SBA made 4.5 million loans to fraudulent recipients, and the full estimate of their loot is $200 billion — more than 15 percent of the total. 

No mystery, though. “It is noteworthy that SBA executed over 14 years’ worth of lending within 14 days, and this was just the beginning.”

Politicians’ make-believe would have us thinking they can just command things to happen and they do. “Everything is possible.” Because, well, “government.” Or “willpower.” Or what-have-you.

Well, losing hundreds of billions is always on the table.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment general freedom property rights

Guilty of Claiming Innocence

civil, asset, forfeiture, police, robbery

Some gangsters take it personally if you object to being railroaded. So they railroad you some more.

That’s what happened to Robert Reeves, a Detroit auto mechanic and construction worker. In 2019, Wayne County confiscated his Camaro after police saw him visit a site that supposedly contained stolen equipment. The police did not formally accuse him of the alleged theft or try to convict him of it.

Nevertheless, the county wanted Reeves to pay $900 to retrieve his car.

Instead, Reeves went to court to end what Institute for Justice, which has been representing him, calls a “seizure-and-ransom policy.”

Soon the county was accusing Reeves of made-up felonies of receiving stolen property and telling the court that he had no right to challenge its forfeiture policy while being accused of these felonies.

Reeves challenged the county’s dishonest challenge, and the court dismissed the charges for lack of evidence. Two weeks later, though, the county did the exact same thing, making the same fake charges and asking the same judge to dismiss the same case on the same grounds. The judge again refused.

Now, years later, Reeves is suing Wayne County for the way it further violated his rights when he challenged its initial violation of his rights.

Although this again makes Reeves a target, “Robert will not be silenced,” says IJ attorney Christian Lansinger, and the Institute will continue to hold accountable governments that seize the vehicles of individuals without evidence of wrongdoing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment ideological culture

After Anarchy, Sue!

Seattle, BLM, protests

In 2020, in Seattle, Washington, “anarchists” took over a section of the Capitol Hill district and set up their own ersatz government, first called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) and then, confusingly, Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP). At the crime scene, which went on for weeks during what Seattle’s mayor called “The Summer of Love,” the anarchistic element was always a bit hard to figure, but the Black Lives Matter (BLM) presence stuck in memory. 

Now it’s routinely considered a BLM event.

What it accomplished was a lot of violence and property loss. So Molly Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream, a shop in the center of the 10-block CHAZ/CHOP territory, is suing.

Not Black Lives Matter.

Which the owner, Molly Moon Neitzel, takes pains to say she still supports: “At Molly Moon’s we hold race equity at the top of our list of our priorities for how we want to make the world better. Black Lives Matter. The lawsuit filed on Wednesday, June 7 is not meant to undermine that important message,” Ms. Neitzel explained. 

She’s also not suing the individuals who organized and engaged in the insurrection/conquest, especially the 30 or so “protesters” eventually arrested.

The target? The City of Seattle.

Molly Moon demands compensation for revenue losses, of course, and the “team morale impacts we experienced during and for many months after CHOP caused by the City of Seattle’s decision to affirmatively create and assist the CHOP occupation of Capitol Hill, to abandon the police precinct and to stop responding to public safety needs in our beloved Capitol Hill community.”

In short: Blame the government for not protecting you from the criminals you support!

One might laugh were it not for all the violence that this very attitude excuses.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment deficits and debt tax policy

Just Say NO to the IRS

taxes, Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, Congress, audit, IRS

The IRS wants to do your tax returns. Should we let it?

On this question, the agency has stacked the deck in its favor by commissioning an “independent” review by a left-wing think tank, New America, already on record in support of giving IRS officials authority to do this.

Basically, the IRS handed $15 million (of taxpayer money) to New America to say “Yes, based on our very independent review, we agree with you and ourselves about thus expanding your power over taxpayers.”

Under the proposed IRS Direct File program — already being tested in a pilot program — taxpayers would use government software to let IRS crunch the tax numbers.

Mark Tapscott’s report for Epoch Times cites many objections to the scheme.

Among the most pertinent is voiced by David Williams, president of Taxpayers Protection Alliance. He notes that when individuals and private tax preparers fill out tax forms, they’re typically trying to keep the tax take to a minimum. But the IRS won’t have the same incentive to maximize deductions and refunds.

Moreover, “There is no reason to trust the IRS with even more sensitive financial information. . . .”

Participation in the IRS Direct File program would not be mandatory, at least not initially.

Once established, though, the program would make it easier to mandate participation for at least some categories of tax returns. 

And let us not pretend that such a development would be surprising. Governments tend to use precedents of newly granted power to expand that power.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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