Category: crime and punishment

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crime and punishment ideological culture

If Mamdani Wins

New York City, socialism, communism, authoritarianism

The civil war between sane New Yorkers and the other kind has reached its next phase. 

The victory of Zohran Mamdani in the city’s Democratic mayoral primary has some high-profile Democrats, like Sen. John Fetterman, expressing chagrin over the success of this openly commie slash-and-burn, soak-the-(white)-rich, pro-Hamas guy. Others, like former President Bill Clinton, who once posed as a moderate, are cheering him on.

Mamdani is also anti-policing. He has said: “We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD . . . NO to fake cuts — defund the police.”

Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels and former and current GOP nominee for NYC mayor, says that Mamdani “has a weird notion of how policing is, as if it should be people like Mahatma Gandhi walking around, you know, functioning as a social worker. That does not work.”

Some police officers say they’ll quit if someone so openly hostile to law and order — not to abuse of police power, but to reasonable policing when it’s obviously necessary — also wins the general election and becomes the next mayor. 

Top brass fear an exodus.

But would only police officers quit? Everyone in NYC who prefers civilization to annihilation should then quit. 

And it would be natural for many of the more successful New Yorkers to leave if Mamdani gets in on the strength of the NYC’s apparently huge and growing ressentiment vote and starts robbing and pillaging in earnest.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment insider corruption

The Quanta of Corruption

Michael Madigan, Illinois, corruption

The first initiative petition drive I ever ran was the Tax Accountability Amendment in Illinois in 1990. I remember canvassing Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives Michael Madigan’s district. 

He was a problem way back then. It was as if everything he worked for I worked against! The Democrat really knew how to wield power: going on to become the longest-serving leader of any state or federal legislative body in the history of the United States, holding the position for all but two years from 1983 to 2021. 

Well, he’s in the news again— and not for receiving a laurel of appreciation from a grateful state.

“Longest-serving legislative leader in US history given 7 1/2 years in federal corruption case,” reads the Associated Press headline.

In addition to the prison sentence following his February conviction for “trading legislation for the enrichment of his friends and allies,” Mike Madigan has alsobeen fined $2.5 million.

The “Velvet Hammer,” as Madigan was called, was, in the end, hammered, found guilty “on 10 of 23 counts in a remarkable corruption trial that lasted four months. The case churned through 60 witnesses and mountains of documents, photographs and taped conversations.”

At sentencing, U.S. District Judge John Robert Blakey demonstrated anger over Madigan’s perjury on the stand. “You lied. You did not have to. You had a right to sit there and exercise your right to silence,” the judge told the convict at sentencing. “But you took the stand and you took the law into your own hands.”

Just as the corrupt career politician did as Speaker for four miserable decades. 

Justice may have taken too long, but I applaud it. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Common Sense: Clown Car of Felonies
December 18, 2018

Common Sense: Keystone Correlation
September 28, 2017

Common Sense: Most Messed Up
July 13, 2017

Townhall: Term Limits, Now More Than Ever
May 04, 2014

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crime and punishment Regulating Protest

Force Over Reason

illegal immigration, riot, deportation, borders, cultures, defense, law

L.A. is in flames again, with rioting, looting, attacks on police (with “commercial grade fireworks”) and against the much-despised ICE agents. At issue, they tell us, are the horrible things ICE does to illegal entrants into the United States — kidnap them, say; or deport them, as the government puts it — and this requires. . . .

Well, what does it require in response? Open battles with the feds? 

As in the 2020 BLM riots, rioters are attacking federal buildings, with attempts at violent entry.

This is no way to persuade Americans of much of anything — other than that force triumphs over reason. 

So little wonder that the U.S. president chose to meet force with force by sending in the National Guard. Trump’s explanation on Truth Social qualifies as Classic Trump (not New Trump): “If Governor Gavin Newscum, of California, and Mayor Karen Bass, of Los Angeles, can’t do their jobs, which everyone knows they can’t, then the Federal Government will step in and solve the problem, RIOTS & LOOTERS, the way it should be solved!!!”

Federalizing the Guard will be fought in court — like everything else — but it appears to be yet another case in which folks argue that President Trump does not have the lawful authority . . . only come to find out that Congress does constitutionally enjoy said power but unaccountably legislated it away to the president.  

Rita Panahi of Sky News Australia covered the mayhem in her “Lefties Losing It” segment. “And while the Mexican flag was proudly flying throughout these protests, the American flag was nowhere to be seen,” Ms. Panahi observed, “unless it was being set alight.” 

Protesters waving the flag of the foreign state they’ve fled?!?!? 

That’s not Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment election law Voting

DOGE vs. Illegal Voting

DOGE, Government Efficiency, dog, bureaucrats, Washington D.C.

Only five people. What’s the big deal?

The Justice Department is prosecuting five recently stumbled-upon cases of illegal voting.

The Washington Times reports that the fraudsters include a Ukrainian mother and daughter, a Jamaican woman, and a Colombian man “who had been deported three times [and who] stole and lived under the identity” of an American citizen.

“I don’t think five cases is evidence of a systems-wide problem,” says Omar Nourelden of Common Cause. Surely too few to justify investigations or voting requirements that might curb voter fraud if only there were any.

One wonders how journalists like John Fund found material for investigative works like Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, published in 2004, or Our Broken Elections: How the Left Changed the Way You Vote, published in 2021.

The story quoting Nourelden mentions the Department of Government Efficiency’s referral of 57 cases of illegal aliens voting in the 2024 election. So that’s more than five recent examples. And DOGE isn’t done yet.

Willful negligence in conduct of elections is part of the problem. Specific fraud by specific persons is part of the problem.

Nourelden and others object to voter ID. They also criticize as invasive the new efforts by DOGE to find evidence of fraud, that rarity of our political life. (Of course, non-DOGE government personnel already have access to the voting and registration records.)

If there’s no big problem, DOGE won’t find a big problem. Let it hunt.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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budgets & spending cuts crime and punishment deficits and debt free trade & free markets

The Great Rail Robbery

Amtrak, trains, subsidy, transportation

It’s unclear “what problem Amtrak privatization proposals are intended to solve,” an Amtrak white paper argues.

The authors assert that “giving the United States the passenger rail system it needs will require substantial, assured, multi-year federal funding. . . .”

That flies in the face of experience. But if you are looking for a problem to solve, consider the biggest current story about Amtrak, its thieving employees. 

Buckle up, for the rail gets bumpy: Sixty-one of 119 Amtrak employees exposed in 2022 for perpetrating a healthcare scam were kept on the job until a recent internal investigation. 

For several years, these employees had collected kickbacks from doctors willing to file fake medical claims. 

Amtrak now promises that it is (finally) cleaning house.

The organization’s inspector general says that the large number of employees “who cavalierly participated in this scheme to steal Amtrak’s funds suggests not only a serious lapse in basic ethics, but a troubling workforce culture . . . in which blatant criminal behavior was somehow normalized.”

A culture that DOGE has been finding in many governmental endeavors.

What governments lack are decent feedback mechanisms that real markets provide. Amtrak operates in a fake reality of “needs” — those infinite “needs” mentioned in the white paper against privatization.

Businesses succeed; businesses fail — and if the latter, they move aside to let others try to do better. But the white paper treats business failure as proof that government funding is mandatory.

For taxpayers, always on the hook for Amtrak failures, privatization is a solution.

Privatization would also mean less tolerance for keeping thieves on payrolls.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment subsidy

Newsom’s Terrifying “Antiterrorism”

Gavin Newsom, Islam, Mosque, funding, California,

Some of the worthiest allies in the fight against terrorism are the cheerleaders of terrorism. Make sense?

Makes sense to California Governor Gavin Newsom, apparently. This March he sent nearly $200,000 — on top of earlier grants — to the Islamic Center of San Diego. It’s part of a program to help religious institutions fight terrorism.

The Center is led by an imam who rationalized Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks on Israeli civilians; no atrocity gave him pause. The Washington Free Beacon also reports on links between this mosque and the 9/11 hijackers.

Newsom has awarded similar “antiterrorism” grants to other mosques demanding the demise of Jews and Israel.

Daily reports of Islam-rationalized outrages and atrocities are aggregated by Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch. They aren’t rare.

Some regard “Islamophobia” — which, defined reasonably, means something like irrational hostility to Islam or to peaceful Muslims — as a worse threat than use of Islam to rationalize intimidation, repression, kidnapping, rape, murder. We do have reason to oppose the latter . . . and it is not any kind of “phobic,” contrary to the assertions of those who seek to blur important distinctions, because it is not irrational.*

People are responsible for their own actions, not the actions of others who belong to the same ethnic or religious group. 

But people are responsible for their own actions. 

It should go without saying that applauding the most vicious treatment of other human beings is not the kind of thing an American government should be encouraging.

By words.

Or cash.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 * Remember that the modern use of “phobia” hails from abnormal psychology, which is especially focused on needless fears. 

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Accountability crime and punishment national politics & policies

The State & Child Rape

kids in cages, immigration, border, trafficking,

Four billion bucks: That’s what Los Angeles County has confirmed it will pay “to settle nearly 7,000 claims of ‘horrific’ child sexual abuse related to their juvenile facilities and foster care homes over a period of decades,” according to a BBC report. “Survivors say they were abused and mistreated by staff in institutions meant to protect them — with many of the claims linked to MacLaren Children’s Center, a shelter that permanently closed in 2003.”

A lawyer for the plaintiffs offered the perfectly apt cliché, of foxes and hen house: “they were raping boys and raping girls.”

Meanwhile, something odd’s going on with the “children in cages” issue.

Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., head of Health and Human Services, said, in a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, that “we have ended HHS as . . . the principal vector in this country for child trafficking.” He went on to say that “during the Biden administration, HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking and for sex and for slavery. And, we have ended that, and we are very aggressively going out and trying to find these children — 300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration.”

Last year, a whistleblower claimed that the Biden-Harris administration had “created a ‘white glove delivery service’” funneling migrant minors “into the hands of criminals, traffickers, and cartel members throughout the United States.” 

The federal government has failed worse than LA County.

Not so much by intention of politicians (we hope) but by abusive acts of government workers and contractors.

However, a major lawsuit against the worst contractor has been dropped, and the contractor re-engaged in “servicing” migrant children.

On this issue, government failure has been massive.

So, maybe when we hear calls for taking kids away from parents at local and state levels, for, say, “gender acceptance” rationales, we should demand that proponents come up with guarantees that such interventions will make things better.

For the children.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment judiciary

Today’s Stunning Outrage

judge, immigration, law, court

“Americans are watching with outrage the stunning news that Trump’s FBI has arrested a sitting judge in Milwaukee for alleged obstruction of an immigration arrest,” declared U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.).

Arresting judges?

“This is a drastic escalation and dangerous new front in Trump’s authoritarian campaign of trying to bully, intimidate, and impeach judges who won’t follow his dictates,” Raskin explained. “We must do whatever we can to defend the independent judiciary in America.”

Oh, my goodness, what is Mr. Trump doing now? was admittedly my first thought. But then I looked at the two cases raised. 

The first features Joel Cano, a former magistrate judge in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, and his wife, Nancy, both charged with evidence tampering, as reportedly “jail records show.” Cano resigned back in March, after the Department of Homeland Security raided his home, on information that “an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela whom authorities suspect of being a Tren de Aragua member, and others were staying on the Canos’ property.”

Last Friday, the FBI arrested Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan on obstruction of justice charges, “alleging,” NBC News reported, “that she obstructed federal authorities who were seeking to detain an undocumented immigrant by escorting the man and his defense attorney though a nonpublic jury door.”

That man, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, in court on a new domestic violence charge, was successfully apprehended by ICE, nonetheless. But what to make of a judge aiding and abetting a criminal’s escape?

Yes, we want an independent judiciary. But independent from politics — not independent from the law. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights international affairs

How We Tear Up

“We revoked her visa,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a reporter asking about Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student from Turkey, detained recently by plainclothes officers of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the process of deporting her.

“Her only known activism,” the Associated Press relates her friends saying, “was co-authoring an op-ed in a student newspaper that called on Tufts University to engage with student demands to cut ties with Israel.”

A federal judge is now preventing her deportation.

Citing those who “want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus,” is how Rubio explained the rationale for the ousting. “We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist, to tear up our university campuses.”

But there’s the rub, isn’t it? 

Obviously, those who “tear up” by committing acts of violence and intimidation, breaking our laws, should be deported. 

Yet, what about those merely speaking or writing words — whether you like them or loathe them, or their speaker — that tear up the university’s status quo in the minds of listeners? Or might, if allowed voice?

Any “alien” in our country legally has a First Amendment right to speak. Even our Highest Court has so ruled. 

The Trump administration appears to have vast legal authority to remove aliens from U.S. soil . . . except perhaps the way they’re doing it. Deportation cannot be a selective punishment for speech, which is protected. 

“America was built on free speech, so if we don’t have that, then what?” said Carina Kurban, a Lebanese American, at a recent rally in defense of Ozturk. “Then where do we go?”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment ideological culture

Propaganda by the Deed

TESLA, Elon Musk, donkey, Democrats, terrorism

“Five Tesla vehicles were damaged when a fire was started at a Tesla Collision Center in Las Vegas on Tuesday morning,” reports Megan Forrester for ABC News, “the latest in a wave of incidents aimed at the electric vehicle company, according to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.”

Described as a “targeted attack” by the police, these acts of outrageous property destruction are not confined to the Silver State. Occurring all over the country, these are obvious political attacks on Elon Musk, who turned against Democrats by supporting Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run, and who has since led the DOGE effort to confront federal government “waste, fraud and abuse.”

“Violence against Tesla dealerships will be labeled domestic terrorism,” Reuters quotes President Trump, “and perpetrators will ‘go through hell.’”

As of last week, Tesla stock had plunged 50 percent since December, but “[s]hares of the automaker closed nearly 4% higher on Tuesday,” continues the Reuters report, “rebounding from the biggest one-day fall in four-and-a half years the previous day, after the president appeared with Musk at the White House to select a new Tesla for his staff to use.”

“House DOGE Subcommittee Chairwoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.,” USA Today told us last week, “announced that she and her committee colleagues had sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel asking for an investigation into the ‘organized’ attacks against Musk, Tesla and the DOGE effort.”

These spectacular destructions of private property are indeed terroristic. Anarchists used to use a similar approach over a century ago, calling the technique “propaganda by the deed.”

But the tide of public opinion turned against the anarchists, and I suspect it will turn strongly against today’s saboteurs as well. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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