Corporations cannot and do not tax, conscript, and kill under claim of legal authority to do so.
Only governments do that.
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Category: crime and punishment
Former Arkansas State Rep. Micah Neal pled guilty last week to a felony charge of conspiring “with an Arkansas state senator to use their official positions to appropriate government money to certain nonprofits in exchange for bribes.”
Neal, who embraced graft his first month in office, received $38,000 in “legislating-around” money between 2013, when he entered the House, and 2015.
Court documents mention a number of seasoned conspirators, though not by name. There’s mysterious Senator A, who took Rep. Neal under his crooked wing.
Their scheme, reported Arkansas Business, “direct[ed] $600,000 in state GIF funds to the Northwest Arkansas Economic Development District, which then distributed it to two nonprofit entities.” Those two outfits — Entities A and B — then kicked back dough to Rep. Neal and Senator A through bagmen.*
Arkansas Business sorted out “the alphabet soup of unindicted people and entities.” It turns out Senator A, the ringleader, is someone we’ve encountered before: former State Senator Jon Woods.
Remember Issue 3, the dishonestly-worded 2014 constitutional amendment that weakened term limits (while telling voters it “established term limits”), imposed a gift ban so “tough” that now all legislators can get free meals from lobbyists anytime, and created an “Independent Citizens Commission” (a majority appointed by legislators) that gave legislators a 148 percent pay raise?
That was Woods’s.
His indictment appears imminent.
Meanwhile, Neal’s attorney extends to us his client’s wish that “this case does not overshadow all the good he did while serving as [a] representative.”
What good? The term limits scam.
Neal’s corruption doesn’t overshadow all he did as a legislator — it illuminates it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Three additional conspirators were engaged in delivering the bribe money to Rep. Neal and Sen. Woods. In court papers, these bagmen were referred to as Person A (a lobbyist for Entity A), Person B (“the president of Entity B and a friend of Senator A”) and Person C (“a friend of Senator A and Person B”).
The Berlin terrorist attack just a little over a week ago fit a noteworthy pattern. German authorities had investigated Anis Amri — the Tunisian man who drove that large truck into a crowded Christmas market, killing 12 and wounding 56 others — and found “links with Islamic extremists.”
Later killed in Milan, Italy, Amri had been wanted in Tunisia for “hijacking a van” and jailed in Italy for arson and a “violent assault at his migrant reception center.” And yet with all that known or easily knowable, the German authorities couldn’t prevent him from killing innocent Germans.
It’s not just a European phenomenon, either.
Consider Omar Mateen, this country’s worst mass shooter, having massacred 49 people in Orlando’s Pulse nightclub. The FBI had spent ten months looking into Mateen.
Years before the Boston Marathon bombing, the FBI had tracked Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the bombers.*
“In case after case . . . authorities have come forward after the fact to say that they had enough cause to place the suspect under surveillance well before the violence,” the Washington Post recently noted. This was the case with the majority of recent lone-wolf terrorism plots.
“If any lesson can be learned from studying the perpetrators of recent attacks,” a report in The Intercept concluded, “it is that there needs to be a greater investment in conducting targeted surveillance of known terror suspects and a move away from the constant knee-jerk expansion of dragnet surveillance . . .”
Yet intelligence agencies are still grabbing our metadata in violation of the Fourth Amendment. That needs to stop.
The fact that known threats are consistently not being stopped suggests curtailing mass surveillance won’t hurt our security, but improve it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* The same is true regarding the Ft. Hood (work-place) shooter, Nidal Hasan. Likewise, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad (formerly Carlos Bledsoe), who was under the active eye of the FBI after returning from Yemen . . . until he opened fire on a Little Rock, Arkansas, recruiting station killing one soldier and wounding another. Ditto Ahmad Khan Rahami, the less deadly bomber in New York City and New Jersey.
Civil asset forfeiture is stealing. So, why is it still happening?
Police seize boats, cars, houses and cash that they allege were used in the commission of a crime or were proceeds from the crime. Sometimes they simply take cash found on a motorist in a normal traffic stop, claiming it’s “drug money.”
Tragically, only 13 percent of forfeiture is criminal, i.e. involving a conviction. The rest is civil, wherein the person hasn’t been convicted of anything. Often not even charged.
When officials confiscate property without due process of law, it’s theft. The legal rationale government uses to snatch our stuff via civil forfeiture is a sick joke. Our property can be deemed “guilty” without enjoying our presumption of innocence. Instead, we have to go to court to prove our stuff is innocent.
Often officials negotiate a large cut, because hiring an attorney to get one’s money back might well cost more than the money itself.
The good news? People are becoming aware of civil asset forfeiture and overwhelmingly oppose it. A Cato Institute/YouGov poll found 84 percent of Americans against taking property without a criminal conviction.
While New Mexico and Nebraska have outlawed civil forfeiture, and some other states have sought to at least minimize its abuse, there is still significant pushback from police and prosecutors, who like getting all that dough. And who often have the ears of decision-makers.
The time has come to short-circuit the watered-down half-measure. Twenty-four states and a majority of cities enjoy the initiative process.
Let’s do it ourselves.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Confucius said that our first task is to “rectify the language.”
That amounts to word control, but we probably should not take that too literally. We cannot “control the language.” Instead, we should take caution: error often rests upon improper word choice.
Take as an example not word control, but . . .
Gun control.
Which, Thomas Sowell reminds us, isn’t what it seems to be. “The fatal fallacy of gun-control laws in general is the assumption that such laws actually control guns,” Sowell wrote on the first day of winter. “What such laws actually do is increase the number of disarmed and defenseless victims.”
A new wisdom? No. Sowell, in 2016, is disabusing The New York Times for its inanities regarding the bearing of arms. In 1925, H. L. Mencken took on The Nation.
Gun control, Mencken wrote, “would not take pistols out of the hands of rogues and fools; it would simply take them out of the hands of honest men.”
Sowell argues that, no matter how irrational spree and mass murderers may seem, they “are usually rational enough to attack schools, churches, and other places where there is far less likelihood of someone being on the scene who is armed.”
Mencken noted that the gunman of his day “has great advantages everywhere. He has artillery in his pocket, and he may assume that, in the large cities, at least two-thirds of his prospective victims are unarmed. But if the Nation’s proposed law (or amendment) were passed and enforced, he could assume safely that all of them were unarmed.”
Maybe, following Confucius*, we should call laws against concealed carry not “gun control” but “citizen disarmament.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* “Confucius” is the Western name for Kong Qui (551-479 B.C.E.), the great Chinese sage. He was often referred to by the honorific Kong Fuzi, meaning “Grand Master Kong,” which Jesuit missionaries to China in the 16th-century Latinized to “Confucius.”
“You think the police deserve to be killed?” That’s what talk show host Michael Savage asked his caller yesterday.
What brought that on?
A self-described liberal woman named Teri had called The Savage Nation. Though not a Trump supporter, she “did not have the antipathy for him that most liberals did.”
“[U]nderneath his brashness and braggadocio,” Teri had thought, “there actually beat a heart for America.” But after his numerous initial appointments, she is now “terrified.”
On air, Teri admitted that her preferred candidate for president had been independent (not turned Democrat) Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Savage called Sanders a “con man” — a “race-baiter” who “attacked the police regularly.”
That’s when he inquired if it was her desire to see police officers murdered. To which, she replied, “No, my husband was a police captain.”
Savage: “That’s amazing. How could you vote for a man like Bernie Sanders, who hated the police and used the police as a weapon to stir up minorities?”
Teri: “Believe it or not, my husband actually supported him, too.”
Savage: “Why would a police captain support Bernie Sanders?”
Teri: “Well, my husband was a very honored and honorable policeman.”
Savage: “You mean, all the police who were killed deserved to be killed?”
Savage, indeed. Does he really believe that a person criticizing certain police behavior or seeking reform necessarily thirsts for the blood of innocent police? Really?
Or does he simply hope to shut down any thoughtful conversation about the injustice in our criminal justice system?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
When President Obama announced last week that he wants my daughter to register for the draft — as a symbol of the nation’s commitment to gender equality and a “ritual of adulthood” — believe me, I noticed.
Sure, the symbolism rings hollow, I wrote at Townhall. The president is on his way out and Congress just agreed on a defense authorization bill blocking any Christmas-time sign-up of women by the festive folks at Selective Service.
Still, President O’s symbolism is all wrong.
Free societies don’t require the involuntary service of men and/or women for their defense, much less celebrate conscription as a secular rite. Our All-Volunteer Force is the most effective military in the world. Its leaders neither need nor desire to swell its ranks with draftees — even if, heaven forbid, a major war bubbles forth from all the foreign conflicts and interventions in which we’re currently engaged.
As for the “it’s just registration” argument, and promises by politicians that they don’t support a draft. Well, it’s registration for the draft. Per politicians’ promises, I rest my case.
Yet, this comment at Townhall called me back into service: “Has this author been against draft registration for the last 30+ years or is it just because his little princess might have to register? If men have to do it, so should women.”
With slight edits, I replied: “I oppose the draft on principle . . . As Daniel Webster pointed out, government has no constitutional authorization to conscript citizens. The draft further violates the 13th Amendment. Conscription has been the hallmark of dictators and totalitarian regimes, not America. We’ve had a draft rarely in our history.
“In 1980, I refused to register for the draft when Jimmy Carter brought it back. Candidate Ronald Reagan said, ‘The draft or draft registration destroys the very values that our society is committed to defending,’ and pledged to end registration as president. But Reagan reversed himself and prosecuted 13 of us who had spoken out against the policy and refused to register. I served six months in a Federal Correctional Institution (without being corrected) — the longest of anyone post-Vietnam.
“Here are the reasons I resisted at the time (1985) and a more recent reflection (2010).
“My daughter will make her own decision, and I’ll be supportive. But it is a terrible policy that will diminish our military defense, while also violating . . . ‘the very values our society is committed to defending.’
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Today, Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016, marks the 32rd anniversary of my arrest by the FBI for violating the Military Selective Service Act by refusing to sign a draft registration form.
Additional Information
Common Sense: Needless List
Townhall: Draft the Congress and Leave My Kid Alone (2003)
Townhall: Americans Gung-Ho to Draft Congress (2004)
Here is something I don’t quite understand about us moderns — we, oh-so-sophisticated citizens of the world; we who say that government is instituted to help us . . . but often we expect almost no real help when it comes to even the basics.
Take this very “virtual” venue: the Internet; “the Web.”
This wasn’t a thing in the first decade of my adult life. I never expected to spend so much time “on” something that did not, then, exist in any meaningful way.
Well, computers opened up brave new worlds for us, but, did you notice? Bad guys were right there from the beginning, making “viruses” and “spyware” and “malware” of all kinds. Destroying billions of dollars of data and equipment, robbing us of the most important thing of all: time.
And what did the United States government do?
Nothing, or next to it.
Belatedly, and haphazardly, it scraped together a digital defense for its own infrastructure, and began to cook up ways to surveil us all.
But did it offer to help? What programs did it provide the public, or the states, to assist us with bad guys trying to steal our savings, credit, and virtual identities?
I haven’t seen anything. And our local governments have stood around useless, too.
Yet I haven’t heard anyone complain.
Our security has been up to us. Long ago, John McAfee invented the first anti-virus software, and an industry grew up from his kernel — and that industry is where we turn to for help.
Government has mostly just stood by — in the sole area of the computer industry that it could plausibly have warrant to “interfere.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Questions Answered:
Does government fulfill its main function consistently?
Who do Americans turn to for effective security?
If government doesn’t even bother doing its main job, why give it more jobs?
I support neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump for the presidency. Still, I do understand several reasons to vote for Trump, including, most obviously, “he’s not a Clinton.”
The most persuasive strategic reason given for voting for the man, however, and the one that has most purchase with me, is that he would appoint better Supreme Court justices than would Mrs. Clinton.
Note: if the Democrats gain hold of the U.S. Senate, an elected Donald Trump would “negotiate.” And the next set of Supremes might be quite bad.
But is all this irrelevant? It does not look like Trump will be elected, so any vote thrown at him will be just as “wasted” as a vote for Johnson, Stein, or Mickey Mouse.
More importantly, if Hillary wins, no biggie on the Supreme Court front IF (a big “if”?) the Republicans maintain congressional dominance.
Why?
Our Senators are not required to vote for any of a president’s appointees. But, alas, that is not what Democrats are saying now! Forget such self-serving nonsense. The Constitution does not specify the number of justices on the Supreme Court. It is nine now, sure, but the Highest court in the land was first manned by five justices, then seven.
So, after the election, unpack the court.* Back down to seven, at least.
And then let’s talk terms for the currently “serving for life” justices, and term limits.
In any case, the best case for Trump isn’t so much a case for him, as a plan of action no matter who is elected.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
*This notion is more doable, I think, than Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s infamous court packing scheme, in which he threatened to put more justices in to over-rule those justices who thought his “New Deal” program unconstitutional. Congress, not required to vote in any proposed Supreme Court candidate, could balk at all and then, by law, reduce the number, even removing one justice from office if need be.
Questions Answered:
Does the best reason to vote for Donald Trump really hold water?
Does the Constitution specify the number of justices that should be on the Court?
Is Congress really at the mercy of any bully who occupies the Oval Office?
The Next Question:
Will voting for someone other than Trump be more of a “wasted vote” than voting for Trump himself, if, as polls indicate, he loses?
The story of the Wisconsin John Doe raids against conservatives, covered yesterday and the day before, is a big one. Huge. So I now continue.
The rest of the story? Recently, materials that police seized from the subjects of those dawn raids were leaked, illegally, to the Guardian newspaper — in direct violation of a court order. Yet more lawlessness.
Who leaked this information? Well, it was in the possession of the Milwaukee County prosecutors, and they haven’t alleged a Russian hack.
What’s really going on? Eric O’Keefe stated on Monday that “even though they never brought a charge, the prosecutors did achieve one of their major goals: the unlawful seizure of millions of private communications to create a searchable database of political intelligence spanning Wisconsin and the entire country.”
In short, the abusive investigation was part and parcel of a partisan effort.
State Rep. Dave Craig is urging the creation of a special legislative committee to “take sworn testimony . . . to determine whether those charged with the public trust have acted maliciously by intentionally leaking sealed materials in violation of state policy.”
It’s important that justice be done. To prevent future tyranny.
We don’t want to see a repeat of the IRS abuse of Tea Party groups without anyone being held to account.*
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Speaking of the IRS, it turns out that the head of Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board (GAB) was a pal of Lois Lerner, who headed the IRS division responsible for violating the civil rights of Tea Party groups — before she took the Fifth, refusing to testify before Congress and then retiring with a six-figure pension. Further, there is evidence the GAB may have illegally provided confidential information to the IRS in hopes of getting the Feds to join in harassing these conservative groups.
FOR MORE ON THIS INCREDIBLE STORY
- Watchdog.com: Wisconsin’s Secret War
- Watchdog.com: People shouldn’t face jail time for speaking out on the issues
- Ballotpedia: John Doe investigations related to Scott Walker
- Wisconsin John Doe: O’Keefe Wins Profile in Courage Award
- Common Sense: A Perfect Storm of Wrongs, Righted
- Human Events: Federal judge shuts down Wisconsin witch hunt
