Category: crime and punishment

The Man from Freedom

David Roland, Freedom Center of Missouri, Girl Scouts, Jennifer

In the Show-Me State, an attorney is showing us government held accountable.

He leaves folks inspired about their freedom, wondering … who was that masked attorney?

Well, no. Against my advice, he won’t wear a mask to court, nor leave behind silver bullets. (He says they’re too expensive.)

David Roland is the Man from Freedom — er, the Freedom Center of Missouri, co-founded with his wife Jenifer in 2010. Every day, they defend “individual liberty and constitutionally limited government.”

I first heard about the Center when Dave Roland defended two Girl Scouts being harassed by the City of Hazelwood. “People would assume you have the right to have a lemonade or cookie stand in your yard,” he explained. “Here we have a city that says not only is it illegal, but you can’t even get a permit to do it.”

Last January, Roland won a verdict preventing St. Louis County officials from banning third party and independent candidates from special election ballots.

Earlier this month, our crusader* achieved another big victory, this time against the East Missouri [Drug] Task Force, which had been violating the open records law by blocking public attendance at its public meetings.

Yet, the judge failed to award the Center attorney’s fees. Hey, even super-heroes and super-lawyers have to pay the rent.

Let’s form “a posse”: click here† to support the work of the Freedom Center of Missouri with our own silver bullets, coins … or just pull out your plastic. Please.

The Man and Woman from Freedom will thank you (and so do I).

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Darn it, if Dave doesn’t refuse to don the cape, too.

† This link goes to the Freedom Center’s main page — the PayPal donation button is at right.

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Tags David Roland, Freedom Center of Missouri, Girl Scouts, Jennifer

Accountability crime and punishment education and schooling ideological culture moral hazard

The Damage Done

In his Washington Post op-ed, “The dangerous myth of the ‘missing black father,’” Mychal Denzel Smith argues that “responsible fatherhood only goes so far in a world plagued by institutionalized oppression.”

He asks:

If black children were raised in an environment that focused not on bemoaning their lack of fathers but on filling their lives with the nurturing love we all need to thrive, what difference would an absent father make? If they woke up in homes where electricity, running water and food were never scarce, went to schools with teachers and counselors who provided everything they needed to learn, then went home to caretakers of any gender who weren’t too exhausted to sit and talk and do homework with them, and no one ever said their lives were incomplete because they didn’t have a father, would they hold on to the pain of lack well into adulthood?”

Hmmm. The first question answers itself. If all children get everything they “need to thrive,” it is assumed they’ll thrive. The second question is impossible to know … at least until the creation of that perfect utopia with universal material abundance, a flawless education system and indefatigable single-parents.

Fatherlessness is not just a black problem. And let’s agree there are great single-parent (or no-parent) homes as well as terrible two-parent homes.

Still, fathers are nice. Oftentimes they help children thrive, in part by providing “electricity, running water and food” as well as “love” — both tough and nurturing. Proclaiming that fathers would not matter in a society where everything’s automatically supplied is … simple-minded.

Often called socialism.

Smith raises the issues of “racist drug laws, prosecutorial protection of police officers who kill, mass school closures … the poisoning of their water.” He’s right: having a father won’t magically solve those.

But it would solve the problem of not having a father.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Original photo by Sunil Soundarapandian on Flickr

Tags black, children, father, race, racism

crime and punishment free trade & free markets general freedom meme moral hazard national politics & policies too much government

Which is more dangerous?

Corporations cannot and do not tax, conscript, and kill under claim of legal authority to do so.

Only governments do that.

Click below for a high resolution version of the image:

Tags corporations, corruption, danger, government, government vs. corporation, law, meme, power, which is more dangerous

Accountability crime and punishment folly government transparency insider corruption local leaders porkbarrel politics responsibility

Hog-Wild Corruption

Arkansas State Rep. Micah Neal, Independent Citizens Commission, Senator Jon Woods

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”).

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Tags Arkansas State Rep. Micah Neal, Independent Citizens Commission, Senator Jon Woods

Accountability crime and punishment general freedom moral hazard national politics & policies privacy responsibility

In Plain Sight

terrorism, surveillance, privacy, fingerprint, targeted, illustration

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.

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Tags Berlin, fingerprint, illustration, privacy, surveillance, targeted, terrorism

Accountability crime and punishment initiative, referendum, and recall moral hazard national politics & policies

Stealing Now Unpopular

Civil Asset Forfeiture, crime, drugs, marijuana, stealing, theft, police abuse

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.

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