Category: crime and punishment

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crime and punishment folly insider corruption local leaders responsibility

First-Class Arrogance

“One thing is clear,” New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell declared, “I do my job, and I will continue to do it with distinction and integrity every step of the way.” 

She marshaled this self-righteousness in response to media inquiries as to why, as The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate reported, “Cantrell has charged the city of New Orleans $29,000 to travel first- or business-class instead of coach.”

Mayor Cantrell defiantly refuses to pay back “the exorbitant fees” she ran up “for the upgraded tickets, including an $18,000 first-class trip to France over the summer.”

But that’s precisely what City of New Orleans policy demands of her. “Employees are required to purchase the lowest airfare available,” it clearly states. “Employees who choose an upgrade from coach, economy, or business class flights are solely responsible for the difference in cost.” 

Yet, her excuse for upgraded jet-setting is priceless. 

“As all women know, our health and safety are often disregarded . . .” Cantrell offered. “As the mother of a young child whom I live for, I am going to protect myself by any reasonable means in order to ensure I am there to see her grow into the strong woman I am raising her to be,” she continued. “Anyone who wants to question how I protect myself just doesn’t understand the world black women walk in.”

Hmmm. Just how much safer is it in the airplane’s high-priced seats? 

Plus, a pity that the mayor didn’t show any consideration for those fearful souls flying with her. One of “Cantrell’s flights cost nine times that of an aide who accompanied her but flew in coach.”

There is good news, however. A recent poll of registered voters shows a majority (55.4%) support recalling Queen — er, Mayor Cantrell.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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A Plausible Theory

Donald Trump, deep state, Hillary Clinton, top secret files, fishing expedition

A solid majority of Americans — a supermajority, even — are likely unaware that Donald J. Trump is suing Hillary Clinton and a gaggle of her cohorts for their part in the Russiagate hoax.

Though it has been reported on, here and there and now and then, I wasn’t aware until a few weeks ago.

Most major network news outfits do not make much of it.

Indeed, CNN’s initial coverage was quite instructive in how to downgrade a story in potential readers’ minds: “deep state” is in scare quotes and Hillary crony John Podesta is himself quoted as saying the suit was sure to be a “hoot.”

That’s the dismissive tactic of the current Vice President’s cackle. 

But this lawsuit may be the key to understanding what the FBI was really looking for during its documents raid at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence: the material he had collected to bring this lawsuit against his enemies who had tried to unseat him using farrago, fantasy, and fraud.

In The Epoch Times, Jeff Carlson expounds on this theory that Trump had the goods on Clinton and certain other players on her staff and within the FBI and elsewhere, and that the FBI was trying to confiscate and muddy up the waters about what documents may be used in Trump’s lawsuit.

Calling the raid “a targeted fishing expedition — designed to capture any and all information relating to the Russiagate hoax,” Carlson notes it comes “at the exact time that the DOJ is defending its actions taken in the Russiagate hoax in court against Trump’s RICO case.”

Evidence, over time, has indeed linked Russiagate directly back to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Indeed, the Muller Report was  a jumble of nonsense and notoriously fizzled. The whole mess is indecent.

But the only thing we — outside the halls of power — can count on for sure is that the insiders cannot be trusted to do anything but protect their power.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment education and schooling

Justice (Almost) Done

donuts, racist, college

It ain’t over until the money’s in the bank. But one wrong, long fought, may soon be righted. Justice done.

Years ago, Gibson’s Bakery won a judgment of $38 million against Oberlin College because of the Ohio school’s role in harassing the bakery and defaming it as “racist” after a 2016 shoplifting incident.  

The shopkeeper of the family-donuts, racist, college bakery, Allyn Gibson, caught students trying to steal wine. They attacked him. They were black.

For whatever reasons, students on campus chugged into uproar mode, accusing the bakery of racism as if it prefers to be robbed only by persons of pallor. 

The shoplifters eventually pled guilty and acknowledged that the bakery is not racist.

The students’ irrationality was bad enough. Then Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo chimed in, working with protesters to defame the bakery. The school canceled its contract with Gibson’s and would claim in legal filings that the bakery’s “archaic chase-and-detain policy regarding suspected shoplifters was the catalyst for the protests.”

In 2017, the bakery sued Oberlin and won.

Oberlin has been appealing. Now it has lost in the Ohio Supreme Court, which refused to hear the appeal.

Only the U.S. Supreme Court can save Oberlin now. But according to the Legal Insurrection blog, the chances that it will even consider the case are slim.

Is $38 million the right award? Perhaps Oberlin should pay Gibson’s $50 million. Or a cool billion. 

But Oberlin deserves to be punished just as Gibson’s deserves to be compensated. 

May this finally happen.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thin Blue Nonsense

Justice, thin blue line, Themis, scales of Justice

What did Vice President Mike Pence learn from the Trump years?

Perhaps, that his 2016 ploy to ratchet up his career backfired . . . when his running mate actually won?

Thank goodness, he followed normal procedures in January 2020, rejecting then-President Donald J. Trump’s pleas to send back to the states the Electoral College slates. 

In a recent speech at St. Anselm’s College, the former Vice President advised fellow Republicans not to overreact to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. Mr. Pence insists that Republicans “can hold the attorney general accountable for the decision he made without attacking the rank-and-file law enforcement personnel at the FBI.”

That sounds about right, until you read the rest of Pence’s remarks. “The Republican Party is the party of law and order. Our party stands with the men and women who stand on the thin blue line at the federal and state and local level, and these attacks on the FBI must stop. Calls to defund the FBI are just as wrong as calls to defund the police.”

Has Pence lost “the plot”? The FBI has a long history of abusing the rule of law. While leaders are rightly blamed — J. Edgar Hoover used his agency to create a vast spy-and-blackmail network — they have not worked alone to do flagrantly unconstitutional things. After all, remember in October of 2020, the Bureau made headlines foiling a plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor. The plot was concocted by multiple agents, who worked mightily to entrap members of a citizen militia into going along with it.*

Pence surely remembers that the FBI agents who conspired against the Trump administration were breathtakingly partisan, lying and concocting documents to perform what amounts to an attempted coup d’etat. 

It’s not a “law and order” outfit if its most consequential actions illegally serve partisan political purposes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* These G-men and G-women were consenting adults — consenting not only to the politics of such entrapment, but also to engaging in sexual acts to get their way. 

Note: Two defendants in the Michigan conspiracy case are now being retried, after the jury in their first trial could not reach a verdict.

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Do Not Remove This Tag

penalty of law, mattress tag

Unless you’re the customer. Then it’s okay.

Once upon a time, the warning that now reads something like “Under penalty of law this tag is not to be removed except by the consumer” did not include those last four words.

The original wording has been the occasion of much not entirely genuine concern about the prospect that officers of the law will invade the homes of unruly tag-rippers. These renegades were celebrated in song by science fiction writer, libertarian, and singer L. Neil Smith. (You’ll find the lyrics in his novel The Wardove.) More famously, Chevy Chase, in the movie Fletch (1985), bluffed his way out of a tight spot pretending to be concerned about mattress tags.

But if you’re a company selling something with a tag, removing it can be deceptive. Especially if you remove it in order to replace it with another tag that gives customers a very mistaken idea about the product you are selling.

Such a fraud has apparently been committed by a company called Lions Not Sheep, which caters to lions (leaders). The company removed tags saying Made in China from clothing that it sells and replaced them with tags saying Made in USA. For this, the FTC fined the firm $211,335.

Lions Not Sheep understands its market.

Yes, when buying stuff, many people hope to avoid directly or indirectly supporting the Chinazi government to the extent possible. These folks create a substantial demand for goods made not in China but in America (or in other acceptably non-totalitarian countries).

But defrauding the buyer is, of course, not the way to meet this demand.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment national politics & policies U.S. Constitution

The Act That Can’t Cut It

Trump, raid

During Donald John Trump’s time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he expressed his displeasure with some documents by tearing them up.

Which is illegal, as CNN takes pains to make clear. His underlings would then scoop up the shreds of paper and tape them together. 

Keyword: farcical.

This comedy might be funny to watch in a sequel to, say, In the Loop, the 2009 political satire. But it’s not so funny in the current iteration, with the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion.

The search for documents “illegally removed from the White House” has seems an obviously political ploy. Since Trump was legally allowed to de-classify documents, his taking of allegedly still-classified docs seem, well, a rather trivial matter.

Keyword: petty.

Right-leaning media and the left-ensconced media talk about all this very differently, of course, and I confess to finding the former a little more convincing than the latter. Focusing on documentation seems like an excuse to find some petty thing to disqualify Trump from running again in 2024.

While Trump not running again might be the best thing for the GOP, and America, that’s not really relevant: Republicans are stuck with the one champion, with few decent alternatives, and Democrats are in worse shape. Which is why they fret about Trump.

Using the Presidential Records Act of 1978 as a disqualifier for a Grover Clevelandesque re-run of a defeated president is on everybody’s lips. But there’s a problem: how could it possibly pass constitutional muster? The Constitution specifies the qualifications for the job. Congress cannot add or subtract to those qualifications by law.

That was the argument used to disqualify term limits in U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton: qualifications for candidates were specified in the Constitution. Neither states nor Congress could change it.

If Democrats seek to breach this principle . . . then let’s look at term limits again.

Keywords: do it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment general freedom Second Amendment rights

Cannabis and Carry

guns, gun control, marijuana

The Biden Administration wants to make sure that marijuana users do not own guns. 

Florida Commissioner of Agriculture Nikki Fried, a Democrat, is not with the administration on this matter. Her department oversees concealed carry permits as well as some cannabis regulation, and she “argues that prohibiting all cannabis consumers from owning guns violates the Second Amendment” as well as violating “a congressional spending rider, known as the Rohrabacher-Farr Amendment, that bars the Justice Department from interfering with the implementation of state medical marijuana laws,” explains Jacob Sullum for Reason magazine. Fried has sued the federal government to allow Florida to grant concealed carry permits to marijuana users — something the federal government disallows.

The Justice Department has now asked the courts to dismiss the case.

This is especially rich, since President Biden himself has been on the liberal side of marijuana regulation — though certainly not with guns, where he’s on the tyrants’ side.

Among many inconsistencies, current law does not prohibit people addicted to legal psychoactive drugs from owning guns, as Sullum notes, nor make a big deal about alcohol, the abuse of which has a well-understood linkage with violence, while marijuana does not.

One could go through all the inanities, here, but we should not assume government makes sense on these issues. The federal government should generally not be in the business of regulating either gun ownership or drug usage.

States that recognize “constitutional carry” show how Florida could advance beyond the current mess of too much government interference in this realm. 

It wouldn’t be an issue were Florida to get out of the concealed carry permit racket.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment local leaders Second Amendment rights

A Constitutional Sheriff

ATF, guns, Sheriff, 2nd Amendment

For residents of Klickitat County, Washington, it’s an easy two-step process. 

Well, optimally, one step. Two only if necessary.

County Sheriff Bob Songer tells gun-owning constituents that if agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives come to their door wanting to inspect their guns but have no warrant, they should tell the agents to go away.

ATF agents have started to make “surprise home visits of persons who have purchased two or more firearms at one time.” The sheriff was alerted by video of such a visit to a home in Delaware.

Republican Congressman Matt Rosendale of Montana has called for an investigation into the intimidatory practice.

Although Sheriff Songer knows of no such incidents yet occurring in the Evergreen State, he wants his county to be prepared. So he also provides a second step: if the agents don’t leave when asked, the resident should call Songer. He will then “make contact with the agents. If they still refuse to leave, I will personally arrest the ATF agents for Criminal Trespass and book them into the Klickitat County Jail.”

All other sheriffs, please make the same announcement.

Songer belongs to the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association and regards protecting the constitutional rights of his constituents as part of the job.

When it comes to respect for the Constitution, there really shouldn’t be more than one type of sheriff. But if there are going to be more than one, “constitutional sheriff” is the type you want to be.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment national politics & policies Second Amendment rights

A Mad Cycle

gun free zone, 2nd Amendment, guns, gun control. US Constitution

The cycle runs like this:

  1. Some (usually young) man shoots a number of people in a gun-free zone;
  2. Media people whip their viewers into a frenzy about the need for “common sense gun control laws” or a complete gun ban;
  3. Politicians scurry to “do something.”

Despite the fact that the Uvalde and Indianapolis mall shootings suggest contrary policies, Congress has just produced a law that actually takes a step . . . in the wrong direction, adding more penalties, for example, on top of existing penalties for convicted felons caught in possession of firearms.*

“Contrary to what you may have read or heard, the story of how that happened is not an inspiring example of bipartisan cooperation to protect public safety,” writes Jacob Sullum in Reason. “It is a dispiriting illustration of how the worst instincts of both major parties combine to produce policies that are neither just nor sensible.”

The deal gave R’s tougher sentences and D’s more gun control, and “both got to pretend they were doing something to prevent mass shootings.”

Not addressed? The insane policy, originally pushed by one Senator Joe Biden, of “gun-free zones.” As anyone with common sense knows, bad guys who want to make a statement by killing lots of people, prefer gun-free zones to other areas.

A more subtle aspect of the cycle is how the topic of gun legislation, as handled by politicians and major media propagandists, itself elicits broken men to break the law and kill, kill, kill.

What if the best way to break the cycle would be to accept the Second Amendment as a given and spurn every demagogue in Congress and the media who persists on defying the Constitution?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Neither the Uvalde nor the Indianapolis shooter were convicted felons.

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Starbucks Gets Out

Starbucks, coffee, violence, crime, safety

Though not a fan of Starbucks’s often obtrusive lefty politics, I sure like its beverages, such as the glorious Flat White. I’ll take a venti.

Thankfully, it appears that trendy politics has limits. Despite the company’s support for a Marxist organization that riots and rampages in the name of racial justice (I won’t name names, but the initials are BLM), CEO Howard Schultz is reluctant to tolerate crime that makes it unsafe to sell lattes.

In leaked video of an internal meeting, Schultz says he’s shocked “that one of the primary concerns that our retail partners [employees] have is their own personal safety.”

One way Starbucks will cope is by giving managers authority to do things like limit seating and close bathrooms. Employees will also be trained in conflict de-escalation and dealing with “active shooter scenarios.”

And Starbucks will close “not unprofitable” shops in areas where risks to employees and customers are most severe. This means closing 16 stores in which people feel unsafe because of crime and open drug use. The closures are taking place in such bastions of crime nurturing as Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Washington DC.

More shutdowns are to come, Schultz said, adding that “governments across the country and leaders, mayors and governors, city councils have abdicated their responsibility in fighting crime.”

Starbucks has — all companies have — every right to escape the resulting lawless conditions. 

Were they also to abstain from doing anything to promote such conditions, that would be whipped cream on top.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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