Category: crime and punishment

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crime and punishment folly national politics & policies

Don’t Fence Me In?

Joe Biden, border wall, immigration, NIMBY

“The Biden administration on Thursday said it would expand former President Donald Trump’s wall,” informs The Gray Lady, with a stiff upper lip. 

And do it lickety-split: “Biden criticized for waiving 26 laws in Texas to allow border wall construction,” the UK Guardian headlines its report. 

In fiscal 2023, government data shows 245,000 people entered the United States from this Rio Grande Valley sector.

“There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States in the project areas,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas stated in the federal registry.

“Well, Mexico didn’t pay for the wall,” quipped the American Economic Liberties Project’s Matt Stoller, “Biden did.”

“There will not be another foot of wall constructed in my administration,” the president had promised to the contrary during the 2020 campaign. Now Sleepy Joe’s administration has so awakened to the need for action on immigration that it argues for fencing off the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Endangered Species Act from getting in the way . . . 

. . . of building that wall. 

Fast!

The New York Times notes “intensifying” complaints coming from “Democratic leaders in New York, Chicago and elsewhere who say the influx is overwhelming their ability to house and feed the migrants.” 

Want a nimble response to the border crisis? 

Instead, we see a NIMBY response — from big-city politicians, as the buses arrive from down south.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment ideological culture insider corruption

Traditional Terrorism

Jamaal Bowman, Congress, antifa, false alarm, protest, insurrection,

It’s a mild form of terrorism . . . perpetrated by a sitting member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) pulled a fire alarm in the Capitol, apparently to postpone a vote on a measure that would have kept the federal government operational, as it lurches into another of its periodic debt ceiling crises.

He denies the accusation . . . even as Breitbart News reports that he “ripped down two signs warning a second floor door in the Cannon House Office Building was for emergency use only before pulling the fire alarm and running out through a different door on a different floor.” It’s all “on tape,” requiring no advanced dialectic to determine the truth. 

I hazard that no one believes Bowman’s denial, not even his many defenders — for no one is really that stupid, not even in the Imperial City.

The go-to interpretive of the non-left commentariat is to compare it to the January 6 protests and riots. 

When those 2020 entrants into the Capitol disrupted the Senate’s ratification of the Electoral College results, they were accused of affronts to democracy, the peaceful handoff of power, and of obstructing the normal operations of government. Rep. Bowman, by misusing a fire alarm, was doing pretty much the same thing. But he is on the side of Big Government and the Democratic insider elite, so he’s probably not in as much jeopardy as those “losers” who found themselves stuck in prison.

But I notice another parallel: the juvenile stunt of pulling the fire alarm is a classic tactic of leftist protesters. Leftwing saboteurs of free speech have pulled many a similar alarm, if usually only to scuttle campus speaking events by the likes of Ben Shapiro, Cathy Young, et al. The saboteurs almost always get away with it. 

Bowman probably thought he would, too.

It’s tradition!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment Second Amendment rights social media

A Gun with His Name On It

Trump, Glock, self defense, 2nd Amendment

An “X” post by a Trump spokesperson implicated the former president in a crime.

What followed implicates the U.S. Government in something far worse.

But first, to clarify:

  1. By “X” I mean “Twitter.” Remember, Elon Musk changed the name of his social media company.
  2. By “Trump” I mean, of course, Donald John Trump, former president of the United States running the same office, a man surrounded by armed guards at all times.
  3. By “crime” I mean an infraction of federal law, not a willful abuse of someone’s rights at common law. 
  4. The crime in question is the act of receiving “any firearm or ammunition which has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce” by a person “under indictment . . . a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year.” Trump’s been indicted quite a number of times, recently, and therefore isn’t legally allowed to buy a gun.

The initial tweet said Trump admired a Glock that had his name stamped on it. It was the “Donald Trump edition,” gold-colored, retailing for under a thousand bucks. Trump’s on video saying he wants one of these handguns.

When X went all a-twitter with the implications, spokesman Steven Cheung took down his post and the campaign issued a corrective: “President Trump did not purchase or take possession of the firearm. He simply indicated that he wanted one.” 

This is all explained by Jacob Sullum at Reason, who goes on to indicate that the law makes no real sense. The obvious absurdity of not allowing a well-guarded presidential candidate to guard himself with gun of any kind, that’s one thing. Flouting the Second Amendment by prohibiting the innocent, i.e. not yet proven guilty, from bearing arms, looks far worse — a policy of rights suppression.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Corrigendum notice: a correction was made late on the date of publication [Trump is not a “Jr.,” as originally stated].

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crime and punishment folly too much government

The California Experiment

safety first, California, socialism, globalism, global warming, climate change, control

California is determined to give us the full bleak picture of totalitarianism, American-style.

Anticipating proposed SEC regulations, Newsom’s California is set to impose nonsensical mandates for reporting greenhouse gas emissions and “climate-related financial risk” that target companies with annual revenue of $1 billion or more (according to the terms of SB253) and $500 million or more (SB261).

Billion-dollar businesses will have to report all direct and indirect emissions, including emissions produced throughout a business’s supply chain. Business travel. Employee commutes. Penalties for failure to report could be as high as $500,000.

The cost is in time, money, privacy, freedom, with no benefits except to bureaucrats and politicians who enjoy bossing us around and destroying our ability to function.

These requirements are tyrannical in the same way they’d be tyrannical if required of you and me as individuals. 

Do you know all about the emissions produced in delivering the water, electricity, electronics, gas, paper you use each month? 

Care to drop everything you’re doing to find out? 

And submit the data in a bureaucrat-satisfying format?

We already know what the results of California’s experiment will be. We already know that crushing freedom and giving unfettered power to slave-masters is not the road to wealth and happiness.

What we don’t know is exactly how far the Tarnished State’s aspiring totalitarians will go. But whatever the consequences, they’ll blame others . . . or just mutter “Good riddance, we didn’t want that prosperity and those evil businesses anyway.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Downshifting Before the Cliff

climate, global warming, energy, government

A scenario: You and millions of others are willy-nilly running toward a cliff.

You don’t want to go over the cliff; like Bartleby, you would prefer not to. But you’re caught in the surging mass. Enough of the stampeders think that it’s the greatest idea ever — long overdue, in fact.

But just as you’re coming within sight of the cliff, the Great Leader leading the charge raises his hand and asks to be heard.

“We have decided that we are running too fast toward the cliff. We need more time to make the transition. We will therefore reduce the speed of our blind hurtling toward the cliff by 11 percent.”

Fiction? No.

The above summarizes the amended policy of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak vis-à-vis how quickly policymakers will shove Britain’s industrial society over the proverbial cliff in the name of pretending to fine-tune global climate. Various bans on various things that people need in order to function will reportedly be slightly delayed so that people have more time to . . . pretend . . . to prepare.

It won’t become illegal to sell petrol (gas) and diesel vehicles so that buyers of new cars would be stuck with more expensive and impractical battery-powered cars until 2035. 

Not 2030 as previously stated.

Instead of 100 percent of gas boilers being phased out by 2035, the new goal is 80 percent.

Off-grid oil burners will now be banned in 2035, not 2026.

Other slight delays of annihilative mandates are also in the works.

British people, enjoy your five-year and nine-year reprieves.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment election law initiative, referendum, and recall

Methinks the Mayor

petition, private property, taxes, schools

“So, Walmart has no rights?!”

The frustration flowed from Yakima Mayor Janice Deccio to a 911 operator. Her compassionate heart bled profusely for the long-suffering stockholders and executives of one of the world’s richest companies. 

“Hi, this is Mayor Deccio. I know that this isn’t an emergency call, but I need to talk to somebody,” she told the dispatcher. “There are far rightwing petitioners at Walmart and they are not leaving after Walmart has asked them repeatedly to do so. And the police have not taken them off the premises.”

But, as the voice at 911 explained to the distraught officeholder, Washington State law requires that commercial property must make a public accommodation for First Amendment activity such as petitioning. 

The mayor’s thirst for a police solution to these “far rightwing” petitioners went unquenched.

“Obviously, the extreme left is freaked out by these initiatives,” offers Glen Morgan on his We the Governed podcast.

He’s referring to six conservative-oriented initiatives being promoted by Let’s Go Washington and petitioned onto Washington State’s 2024 ballot.

“Four of these initiatives reduce taxes,” Morgan points out. “One of them allows the police to actually chase violent criminals once again. And the other one confirms that parents have the right to know what strangers are doing to their kids at school or in unsupervised medical settings.”

Deccio now claims that mystery constituents told her the petitioners were aggressive and threatening . . . something she didn’t mention that on the call. The fact that her 911 plea has been made public might have something to do with her change of tune.

And don’t even mention ideology! “I don’t care,” she contends, “nor even know what they were petitioning about.”

The mayor added: “No one told the group they couldn’t petition, and it was certainly not my intention to stop them.”

No, of course not — she intended for the police to stop them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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