Category: crime and punishment

Categories
crime and punishment education and schooling general freedom

Kamala Harris’s Attack on Parents

Kamala Harris, truancy, truant, schools, education, regulations, consequences

Among the skeletons rattling around in presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s closet is her support — while San Francisco’s district attorney and while running for state attorney general — for a law to punish parents for their children’s absences from school.

The story, reported by Huffpost, NPR, and others several years ago, has more recently been publicized by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Harris supported the harass-parents truancy program when it was conceived in the state legislature, saying that “a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime.” Under the program, which still exists, a school can refer persistent truancy to a district attorney’s office, which can then threaten to prosecute parents.

One victim was Cheree Peoples, who was arrested and handcuffed in 2013 while still in her pajamas. “You would swear I had killed somebody.” Her daughter Shayla had missed twenty days of school in the current school year. Cheree faced a possible penalty of $2,500 or a year in jail. 

Shayla has sickle cell anemia and required frequent hospitalization. 

Shayla’s mother fought the charges for a long time. Eventually, they were dropped.

Harris bragged about the truancy program while being inaugurated as attorney general. “If you fail in your responsibility to your kids, we are going to work to make sure you face the full force and consequences of the law.”

Today, Harris says the harass-parents law she championed has been abused by others. But isn’t the law itself the abuse?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment education and schooling First Amendment rights

Don’t Mention the Menace

school board, education, schools, gangs, censorship

“It was a chaotic ending to the public comment period during Tuesday night’s Loudoun County [Virginia] School Board meeting,” reports WJLA, the ABC affiliate in our nation’s capital, “when Chair Melinda Mansfield ended that portion of the hearing after giving multiple warnings to parents raising concerns about a current student with alleged gang ties [who] was arrested last year for carrying a gun and making threats to kill a classmate.”

Well, a public official did indeed put parents on notice not to talk further about the problem they came to discuss. However, a student who carries a firearm to school and threatens to murder his or her peers does perhaps warrant some smidgen of dialogue. 

“According to sources with knowledge of the situation,” WJLA informs, “the student is allegedly connected to the MS-13 gang and is in the U.S. illegally.”

Parent Abbie Platt divulged that her “daughter is terrified to go to school with him.”

Four parents addressed the school board regarding this student; each was cut off by the board’s chair who accused them of “breaking the school board policy” by “providing information that could identify the student.”

“Everything that was brought up in this public comment is already public knowledge,” explains Tiffany Polifko, a parent and former school board member, telling the board that to “stop your constituents from speaking” is a classic violation of the First Amendment.

A spokesperson for Loudon County Public Schools defended the board’s speech squelching: “Even some minor details could lead . . . to the identity of a student, that’s just not a situation we’re comfortable with, that we’re going to accept.”

So, your kid needs to accept the risk of brutal torture and death, and you need to be quiet about it — because even discussing the danger might reveal the identity of the murder-and-mayhem-threatening student.

Those are public school priorities. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Midjourney and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom

California vs. Inconvenient Speech

Kamala Harris, parody, satire, free speech, censorship, deep fake

California Governor Newsom wants to outlaw all political speech annoying to himself. If legislation he’s just signed is allowed to stand, he’ll be well on the way to doing so.

One target of California’s two new laws, the Babylon Bee, is filing suit against them.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents the Bee, says that the subjects of the lawsuit, California’s AB2839 and AB265, “censor speech through subjective standards like prohibiting pictures and videos ‘likely to harm’ a candidate’s ‘electoral prospects.’. . . AB 2655 applies to large online platforms and requires them to sometimes label, and other times remove, posts with ‘materially deceptive content.’”

Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon observes that, contrary to the wishes of “self-serving politicians [who] abuse their power to try and control public discourse and clamp down on comedy,” the right to tell jokes they dislike is secured by the First Amendment.

The vague nature of the laws would enable California officials to “police speech they disagree with,” according to ADF and Captain Obvious.

One of the laws requires a disclaimer to be attached to satirical content, a mandate that also violates the First Amendment.

The immediate incentive for fast-tracking the censorship bills into law was a parody video of Kamala Harris that includes a simulation of her voice. The video does bill itself as parody but that is obvious regardless. This video “should be illegal,” Newsom asseverated.

No, it shouldn’t. 

Anyway, watch the hilarity on YouTube . . . while you can.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment national politics & policies

Destroying What Has Been

Kamala Harris, tweets, riots, bail

Let’s assume that chief executives responsible for major appointments know something about whom they’re appointing.

Minnesota governor Tim Walz, the Democrat running for vice president, was fine with the appointment of an associate professor “of urban and multicultural education,” Brian Lozenski, to help write the state’s “ethnic studies” standards. Those were supposed to have been released for public comment in August but being kept under wraps.

Lozenski’s left-wing ideas are notorious in Minnesota. For instance, he has advocated overthrowing the United States — not to be replaced by an Elysium of reason and freedom, we can be sure.

Let’s also assume that someone running for president of the United States is familiar with his or her own views and agenda.

One thing we should know about his running mate, the current Vice President Kamala Harris, is that in 2020 she asked people to “help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.” In jail for unpeacefully destroying the property of others. 

A couple of years later, she denied making the appeal . . . but her tweet doing so remained up on the platform and, regardless, had been screenshot.

Commentators sometimes suggest that the future policies of Kamala Harris are mysterious, since she has said or half-said so many different things.

What mystery?

All of her left-wing, socialist, anti-capitalist, anti-First Amendment, anti-Second Amendment statements and actions express her true impulses. All her blarney about how she’s now a big fan of fracking or a gun owner who’d drop any intruder, etc., are attempts to fool voters who’d be appalled by her actual agenda.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment partisanship

Who’s Afraid of Tulsi Gabbard?

Tulsi Gabbard, surveillance

Former Democratic congresswoman and anti-warmonger gadfly Tulsi Gabbard is no terrorist. Yet, the government is treating her like one.

Last November, UncoverDC related the testimony of retired Air Marshal Sonya LaBosco, now executive director of the Air Marshal National Council, which works on behalf of Air Marshals.

LaBosco says that instead of tracking genuine threats, the TSA surveillance programs like Quiet Skies are focusing on political targets, such as those who entered the capitol (or just the capital) on January 6, 2021.

Air marshals are also being diverted to the southern border to perform mission-unrelated tasks like dispensing water.

LaBosco says she’s been getting nowhere with requests for explanations from Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas and others with oversight of the surveillance programs. Shocker.

Now UncoverDC reports that according to an Air Marshal whistleblower, Tulsi Gabbard has been added to the Quiet Skies program, created to “protect traveling Americans from suspected domestic terrorists.”

Listing Gabbard, who is now accompanied by Air Marshals and other TSA personnel when she flies, certainly appears politically motivated. Marshals “were first assigned to Gabbard on July 23, a day after she criticized Kamala Harris, Biden, and the National Security State in an interview with Laura Ingraham.”

Such targeting of critics is very disturbing. Thanks to UncoverDC’s reporting and LaBosco’s testimony, it does not seem as implausible as it might have been a few years ago. Years of similar opposition-targeting conduct by the Biden administration have helped us accept it, too.

Discussing the surveillance, Gabbard says: “No American deserves to live in fear of our own government.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment local leaders

Okay, Not Okay

Melisa Robinson, Institute for Justice

Melisa Robinson won her case.

After years in lower courts, she prevailed definitively in the Oklahoma Supreme Court. The court ruled that the town of Okay, Oklahoma, must compensate her for their taking of her property.

But the town balked — the judgment has not been obeyed. The town says that the department that dug the sewer line, the Okay Public Works Authority, has no money. And that the city is not responsible for the bill even though the Authority is run by the city.

More litigation, this time federal litigation — which Robinson is undertaking with the help of Institute for Justice — is required to force the town to comply with the result of the previous litigation.

Robinson’s problems began in 2009, when city workers dug a sewer line through her family’s mobile home community without any legal right to do so and without even notifying the property owners in advance, causing much damage in the process.

A jury award for the damage was overturned on appeal. But in 2022, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that the city owed an amount that with attorney’s fees and other costs totals more than $200,000 today.

“Okay needs to pay what the Oklahoma Supreme Court says it owes me,” says Melisa Robinson. “If the city can do this to me, there’s nothing stopping any government from doing the same thing to others. I want to be paid and I want to put a stop to this before it catches on.”

It would certainly be the opposite of Okay to see this practice “catching on” beyond Okay.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Photo provided by Institute for Justice

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment media and media people

Crime’s Ups and Downs

crime, statistics, protests

“Our crime rate is going up,” proclaimed former President Donald Trump during the Republican National Convention. 

But no, says Reason magazine: “Promising To Restore ‘Law and Order,’ Trump Falsely Claims Crime Is Rising.”

I often refer to Reason’s Jacob Sullum for these kinds of statistics, but Sullum may be missing something this time.

Setting aside the new journalistic cliché of accusing Trump of “falsely claiming” in the headline, what of the stats?

1. “Violent crime in the United States has fallen precipitously since 1993, when the homicide rate was 9.5 per 100,000 residents. By 2013, the rate was less than half that number.”

2. “[T]he most notable recent increase in the homicide rate happened on Trump’s watch, and violent crime has been falling since then.”

Crime did indeed spike under “Trump’s watch.” But was Trump to blame? 

Crime spiked in the “Summer of Love” as a result of the mass protests against George Floyd’s death, the left’s demands to “defund the police,” and the climate of approved (“mostly peaceful”) violent riot. Trump’s enemies caused all this. Much of it may have been fueled by pandemic anxieties, but there was another factor: the Democrats’ anarcho-tyranny push to pry Trump out of office in annus horribilis 2020.

Since then crime, which is usually under-reported, now appears to be increasingly under-reported for systemic reasons. Some crimes, such as theft, have been demoted in the law books, allowing theft to run rampant in several major American cities — not just San Francisco — thereby disallowing the uptick in crime to even hit the stats.

What if bad data is the consequence of such policy? 

Meaning the perception of an increase in crime is true . . . at least in some places.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment free trade & free markets general freedom

Rogue City Government?

repair shop parking

Is it a coup?

Two years ago, Azael Sepulveda, a mechanic, sued the city of Pasadena. The city had demanded that he provide 28 parking spots before he could open a shop to fix things. The property his shop is on can accommodate only a few parking spaces.

With the help of Institute for Justice, which fights for people’s right to earn an honest living all over the country, Sepulveda reached a settlement with the city. He would be allowed to open.

Hurray. Big hassle, but now he could go on with his life.

Except that for two years the city has still blocked him from opening up.

So IJ had to sue again. And get this. Members of the Pasadena City Council recently said that for the past year they have been kept in the dark about developments in the case. This, “even though the city’s attorney claims to be acting on ‘instruction from city council.’”

That attorney, Bill Helfand, has been arguing that the city should be immune from litigation to enforce the city’s own settlement.

So . . . is it a coup? Is Helfand running local government himself, unauthorized, randomly ignoring settlements and whatnot?

Could some weirdly pervasive and persistent miscommunication be the problem? It just seems unlikely that mislaid telephone messages are why Sepulveda is still being stonewalled.

Whatever the problem is, Pasadena, fix it. “Stop with the games,” as IJ says. And let Azael Sepulveda get started fixing other things.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment national politics & policies

The Slope of Service

Trump, sniper, Secret Service, DEI

“Heads should roll at Secret Service,” I declared on Monday.

That was before I stumbled upon Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle explaining to ABC News the strategic situational thinking employed by the agency in determining not to place agents on top of the roof of a building where the assassin fired multiple rounds, hitting former President Trump in the ear, killing a man attending the rally with his family and seriously wounding two others. 

Director Cheatle offered that “the Secret Service was aware of the security vulnerabilities presented by the building Crooks took a sniper’s position on to aim at Trump,” Fox News reported. “However, a decision was made not to place any personnel on the roof.” 

So much for “awareness.” And why was this decision made?

“That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point,” she pointed out. “And so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof. And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside.”

Competing safety factors, eh? The former president’s and that of novice roof-climbers in the Secret Service.

Instead, three local law enforcement sharpshooters were stationed inside the building as the shooter easily climbed up onto that ever-so-dangerously slanted roof and opened fire.

The finger-pointing at local police by Secret Service officials, who claimed that securing that building was a local law enforcement responsibility, is simply passing the buck.

Cheatle acknowledged that her agency “is responsible for the protection of the former president,” adding “the buck stops with me.”

Good, I’m looking for immediate change.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment general freedom national politics & policies

A Cool Ninety Million

Joe Biden

“Some major Democratic donors have told the largest pro-Biden super PAC, Future Forward, that pledges worth roughly $90 million are now on hold if President Biden remains atop the ticket,” a New York Times article explained on Friday.

A daring bit of pressure from insiders whom Biden now calls, without hint of irony, “the elites.”

“A leaked poll from a group closely linked with Future Forward after the debate showed that the super PAC had tested the strength of potential Biden alternatives, including Ms. Harris, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary,” The Times elaborated. “The poll showed that Mr. Biden had a worse overall favorability rating than all the alternatives.”

Forbes identified the skeptical billionaires as including Mark Pincus, Christy Walton, Michael Novogratz, Reed Hastings and Mark Cuban. Biden, refusing to bow out, “has attempted to undo the debate damage by rallying his allies in Congress, sitting for a series of media interviews and holding his first post-debate press conference Thursday. The interviews and Thursday’s presser are widely viewed to have gone better than the debate, but not well enough to reverse the backlash.”

“Everything is frozen because no one knows what’s going to happen,” explained one Democratic strategist to CNN. “Everyone is in wait-and-see mode.”

Well, that mode did not last long. 

On Saturday their bête noir Donald Trump was shot. The whole question of winning the race got infinitely harder, for the still-alive former president looked heroic after the bullet, especially contrasted with a feeble Biden. Used to plying an insider advantage, “the elites” now have almost no advantage to ply. They might as well unfreeze their $90 million. 

Or keep it, instead. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts