Category: crime and punishment

Action Ensued

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio seemed proud of his new initiative. To fight coronavirus, he thinks — and he is joined by a whole lot of other people — that everyone should stay at home indoors. And wear masks, gloves, etc., when going out for essentials only.

But since not everyone will cooperate, what to do? Apply social pressure, such as eye-rolls and a few tsk-tsks?

Well, not this Big Apple mayor.

Better get the police power involved!

De Blasio’s notion has been called a “snitch hotline.” In the spirit of “see-something/say-something,” he asked New Yorkers to snap photos of the scofflaws:

Text the photo to 311-692
and action will ensue.

And boy, did he get responses!

Immediately.

The U.K.’s Daily Mail explains that “the service was inundated with prank calls, pictures of genitalia and memes likening de Blasio to Adolf Hitler.”

My favorite “meme” sports a photo of the Führer captioned “TO THOSE TURNING IN THEIR NEIGHBORS AND LOCAL BUSINESSES / YOU DID THE REICH THING.”

And while Stalin analogies might be more apt for the quasi-commie mayor, Hitler references sting more.

John Nolte at Breitbart, referencing George Orwell’s 1984, called the responses “glorious” and “freakin’ awesome.”

The city closed down the hotline for a while to set up a filtering service before sending out leads to the police departments.

In New York City, as in most places in America, if you attempt to establish a Big Brotherish snitch-line, you will get a free-wheeling re-action.

Is this a great country or what?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment general freedom moral hazard The Draft

Draft Mom or Not?

draft, registration, selective service, woman, women, female, barbed wire,

“The biggest piece of opposition” to extending draft registration to women, former Nevada Congressman Joe Heck told The New York Times, “was, we are not going to draft our mother and daughters, our sisters and aunts to fight in hand-to-hand combat.”

Yet, that seems precisely what the National Commission on Military, National and Public Service, chaired by Heck, called for in its just released report, urging Congress to make our daughters sign up for the military draft and to be equally conscripted in any call-up.

Or in a new compulsory military will draftees be able to say, “No thanks, I don’t feel like engaging in hand-to-hand combat”?

Today, women comprise nearly 19 percent of 1.2 million active-duty soldiers. They rightly have all combat jobs open to them — the very positions a draft has traditionally been used to fill.

So, in the name of equal rights are we forcing mom into a foxhole or not?

It seems . . . complicated.

“Women bring a whole host of different perspectives, different experiences,” offered Debra Wada, a commission member and former assistant secretary for the Army.

Since when does the military conscript people for their “perspective”?

“[B]eing drafted does not necessarily mean serving in combat,” The Times paraphrased Wada. “In a time of national crisis, the government could draft people to a variety of positions, from clerical work to cybersecurity.”

This doesn’t seem to be about actual equality of service —or equality of risk — at all, but instead about a bigger pool of possible forced labor.

“If the threat is to our very existence,” Wada rhetorically inquired, “wouldn’t you want women as part of that group?”

Yes! Certainly.

Of course.

But as volunteers, not as conscripts — and the same for men.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment general freedom The Draft

A Policy Misadventure

draft registration, women, female, soldier, selective service, draft,

The National Commission on Military, National and Public Service released its report today, advocating that Congress should force our daughters to register for the military draft.

“The commission recommended that the United States keep a draft option in place,” explains The New York Times. Commission chair and former Nevada Congressman Joe Heck called it a “low-cost insurance policy against an existential national security threat.”

But that flies in the face of former Selective Service Commissioner Bernard Rostker’s testimony: “there is no need to continue to register people for a draft that will not come; no need to fight the battle over registering women, and no military need to retain the MSSA [Military Selective Service Act].”

And speaking of “an existential national security threat,” the scenario Heck put forth at one hearing was a simultaneous invasion from both Canada and Mexico.

Puh-leeze.

“This is a necessary and fair step,” states the 255-page report, according to Politico, “making it possible to draw on the talent of a unified Nation in a time of national emergency.”

It has always been possible to draw on the talents of the American people — both men and women. Just not to draft folks against their will.

Legitimate arguments for fairness and equality* must not obscure what we are talking about: A step closer to using force to fill the military’s ranks.

There is only one reason for a military draft: the inability of a nation to persuade citizens to voluntarily defend their country. Yet, as I told the commission last year, never have Americans failed to rise to their country’s defense.

Conversely, too often our “leaders” have substituted foreign misadventures for actual national defense.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* More soon on the sort of “equality” being envisioned in the next military draft.

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crime and punishment national politics & policies

Frisky Friends

Michael Bloomberg, Donald Trump, stop and frisk,

“WOW, BLOOMBERG IS A TOTAL RACIST!” tweeted President Donald J. Trump.

He was reacting to a recording, recently unearthed, of Democratic presidential aspirant Michael Bloomberg speaking to the Aspen Institute in 2015 about his controversial “stop-and-frisk” police policy while mayor of New York City.

“Ninety-five percent of your murders, murderers and murder victims fit one M.O.,” Bloomberg told his audience. “You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16 to 25. . . . that’s where the real crime is.”

“And the way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands,” explained Mayor Mike, “is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them.”

Bloomberg has since apologized for targeting young male minorities to be regularly detained, searched, harassed and thrown into walls by police on the basis of nothing more than being young male minorities. Ultimately, a federal court struck down Bloomberg’s program as an unconstitutional mass violation of Fourth Amendment rights.

“We did it in New York, it worked incredibly well and you have to be proactive and, you know, you really help people sort of change their mind automatically,” Trump argued in 2016, floating a national roll-out and defending Bloomberg as “a very good mayor.”

Back in 2009, Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Trump were together on something else: Bloomberg disregarding a campaign promise and defying two clear citywide referendums to run for a third mayor term.

“Well, I’m not a believer in term limits,” Trump said then, adding, “Michael is a friend of mine.”

Funny, asked about then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, Trump offered, “I think she’s a wonderful women,” but “she’s a little bit misunderstood.”

Not long after posting the racist-baiting tweet noted above, the president deleted it.

We understand.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment national politics & policies

Protector Protection

cfpb, watcher, eye, consumer, bureaucracy, power,

Government organizations are here to help. How do we know this? They have names that say so!

Take the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Great name. It is all about protecting consumers, right?

Created as part of the Dodd-Frank legislation that was pushed through Congress following the 2008 financial implosion, the CFPB is tougher than the usual run-of-the-mill government agency, however. In the words of Cato scholar Ilya Shapiro, it is “the most independent of independent agencies.” It has a single director, who is almost impossible to remove, and it is empowered to make, enforce, and adjudicate its rules.

And punish violators.

The CFPB doesn’t have to answer to anybody, not even to secure funding.

If this does not raise at least a teensy sense of alarm, let me offer two words of caution: power corrupts.

We all know the ease with which regulatory agencies may abuse their power over us — and few are as insulated from the rule of law as is the CFPB; its near-immunity from oversight makes the ‘power-corrupts’ problem much worse.

The law firm Seila Law LLC — which helps clients deal with debt problems — has sued to challenge the constitutionality of how CFPB is structured. Although lower courts have not been sympathetic with Seila’s argument, the case has now been accepted by the U.S. Supreme Court.

A satirist once famously asked, who will watch the watchers?

In the United States, we should ask, who will protect us from the protectors?

By the Constitution that would be the Supreme Court.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment insider corruption

Good Golly, Healthy Holly

One reason to talk about corruption a lot is that there is a lot of corruption to talk about.

The scheme was to get Kaiser Permanente to buy 20,000 copies of her children’s book, Healthy Holly, at a decidedly non-discounted price of $5 a pop, while the health provider was negotiating a contract with UMMS and while she was serving on the UMMS board deciding that contract.

It’s been several months since I’ve discussed Baltimore, Maryland, a hotbed of Big Government degeneracy. Now that former Mayor Catherine Pugh has been indicted — this Tuesday — on multiple federal charges, we should take a moment to appraise her own tricky larceny against the city’s taxpayers and the patients of University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS).

What a scam.

And not her only one. She leveraged this scam to fund her mayoral campaign, for example.

So, it is good that she is being prosecuted.

Odd, though, that it is the federal government doing the prosecuting. Baltimore is a corporate entity under the sovereignty of the State of Maryland, not the United States.

What have state and local investigators and prosecutors been doing?

While this might seem a picky point, the federalization of law and order is, as the college crowd says, ‘problematic.’ Tasking the Federal Government to the rescue is great, insofar as it actually rescues. Yet, it is also an unmistakable sign not only of the corruption of the criminal justice system, but also of a failure of representative democracy to hold government officials accountable in that state or locality.

This is certain: government, removed from citizens’ vigilance, almost necessarily breeds corruption . . . and not just in Baltimore.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.