Category: government transparency

Pro Bono No Bueno

The twisty highways and byways of campaign finance regulation bring us to another strange pass.

The Texas Ethics Commission is considering whether to effectively ban pro bono legal work for candidates. The method? Mandate that such work be regarded as an in-kind contribution subject to campaign finance regulations.

David Keating, president of the Institute for Free Speech, observes that most candidates “can’t afford to hire counsel and spend probably hundreds of thousands of dollars challenging the constitutionality of a law where the opinion may not come out until after the election. . . . Basically, the opinion would slam the courthouse door shut to candidates and most political committees.”

Campaign finance regulation has always meant curtailing speech and the activities that enable it and flow from it. This latest regulatory prospect is more of the same. As long as campaign finance regulation exists, there will always be obnoxious new ways to use it to hamper speech and action.

The commissioners, apparently seeing some merit in the pro-pro bono argument and therefore judging the issue at least worth mulling, have deferred their decision. It would have been far better to simply accept Keating’s objections and put an end to the proposed new crackdown then and there.

Meanwhile, Texans — especially potential candidates — must sit on the edge of their seats until the commission decides whether to make it prohibitively expensive to fend off unconstitutional assaults on candidates and campaigns.

Not unlike the unconstitutional assault exemplified by campaign finance regulation itself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags campaign finance reform, freedom, government

government transparency too much government

Last of the Big Spenders

The state government of California spends a lot of money. But how much and on what?

That information has, apparently, been a state secret.

Until now.

For years, a watchdog group called OpenTheBooks.com has been working to discover and disclose government spending in the United States. Its efforts were enabled by 2006 legislation sponsored by Senators Tom Coburn and Barack Obama to establish a website, USASpending.gov, that details federal expenditures. Until his death in 2020, Coburn was the honorary chairman of OpenTheBooks.com.

The group reports that in 2021, it filed some 47,000 Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain data on some $12 trillion of government spending. So they’ve been busy.

California is now the fiftieth state whose spending is being made public in detail.

The state had long resisted requests for info about its spending. State controller Betty Yee said that it was impossible to comply with such requests because California has no central database of government payments. Compiling the data would be too darn hard.

The auditors at OpenTheBooks.com performed the chore instead, filing requests for public records with each of 469 state-government entities.

According to founder and CEO Adam Andrzejewski, “It was a historic knockdown, drag-out dogfight that lasted a decade and spanned the last two California controllers. Since 2005, the state invested $1.1 billion in accounting software, yet still couldn’t publish a complete record of state spending.”

Various budgetary items will doubtless prove controversial — now that they are publicly known.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags California, FOIA, oversight, spending

government transparency too much government

Trudeauvian Tyranny

Discovery in a lawsuit brought against the Canadian Government has revealed that “Follow the Science” was a ruse.

When Trudeau’s administration announced, last year, a restrictive travel ban on all who refused to get “vaccinated” against COVID, the breathtaking nature of the political move (which was followed by a snap election) — and its sheer illiberality from a Liberal — may have overshadowed how little science was behind it.*

Of course, now that the vaccines have proven to be ineffective at stopping the disease, the medical rationale seems especially shaky. But, as Rupa Subramanya writes at Bari Weiss’s “Common Sense” Substack news page, “Court Documents Reveal Canada’s Travel Ban Had No Scientific Basis.”

Among the juicy revelations uncovered?

“No one in the COVID Recovery unit” — which Ms. Subramanya identifies as “the secretive government panel that crafted the mandate” — possessed any medical credentials or had undergone any significant medical training.

The impetus for the travel ban came from above, in Trudeau’s cabinet.

And, juicier yet, “leading up to the implementation of the travel mandate, transportation officials were frantically looking for a rationale for it. They came up short.”

Oddly, the COVID Recovery unit has no website, and is rarely mentioned in official documents.

The plaintiffs in the case that has brought the information to light are Karl Harrison and Shaun Rickard. Lawsuits are expensive, and some of the funds to bring the case forward were raised on GoFundMe. In February, following Trudeau’s crackdown on the Trucker protest, GoFundMe kicked Rickard off the site.

In mid-June, Canada lifted the travel bans. But threatened to re-introduce them as, er, needed.

What we have learned is that the “necessity” was always a political one.

The science was just not there.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Emails released recently by the United States’ Food and Drug Administration show a similar lack-of-science basis for high-level political requirements for dramatic “medical” responses to COVID.

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Art assist: craiyon

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education and schooling government transparency

Parents Kept in the Dark

education, sexual orientation, teachers, parents, children

When does it become irresponsible to send children to a public school?

Has the line been crossed in Fairfax County, Virginia?

Their school board now prohibits teachers from telling parents when children “change gender” or pretend to change gender. Such decisions may be evidenced by a student’s changing his name or by identifying as a member of the opposite sex or as “nonbinary” on a school’s learning portal.

The district is not inviting teachers to exercise discretion about whether to inform parents. One can imagine cases in which a teacher knows parents to be physically abusive and likely to come down on a kid like a ton of bricks if alerted to such an event.

Rather, the policy stipulates that parents needn’t ever be told about such matters. To the extent teachers obey, parents won’t know unless informed by the children themselves.

If you live in Fairfax County, you could protest.

And you could do other things, such as

attend school board meetings to object, as parents attended a Fairfax board meeting to object to the policy of suspending fourth-graders for using the “wrong” pronouns for classmates;
join the shadow board that parents have formed to criticize the doings of the Fairfax County board;
vote against a school board member or try to recall members — unless a judge decides that your recall petition fails to show “probable cause for removal.”

Or you could just get your kids the heck out of the public schools.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags education, Parent Teacher Association, schools, sex, woke culture

government transparency

Now A Straight Answer?

Last week, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), “America’s civil space program and the global leader in space exploration,” got in on the UFO disclosure racket.

Why that word, “racket”?

UFO skeptics and mockers have been using that sort of word to describe the subject itself — unidentified advanced aerial phenomena on the planet — but now we hear UFO “nuts” useit to describe NASA’s announcement.

“A crock,” says Tyler Glockner of the popular SecureTeam10 channel, reminding us of NASA’s nickname: “Never A Straight Answer.”

Many UFO researchers believe that NASA has been “in” on “the UFO cover-up” from the beginning of its mission.

I know nothing about that, but I do know that we cannot trust government.

While rumors about NASA programs to scrub photos of the Moon and Mars to get rid of alien structures on the surfaces of those two bodies, as well as alien craft, are outlandish, so to speak — it surely looks like something is going on regarding UFOs.

While NASA insists that it “is not part of the Department of Defense’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force or its successor, the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group,” which have so far dominated recent UFO news headlines, it does proclaim that it is coordinating with other agencies.

More significantly, physicist Michio Kaku recently changed his tune on UFOs, and is talking of an independent research group that confirms the physical reality of UFOs darting about with advanced physical attributes.

Not new, I know: same thing French scientist Jacques Vallee wrote in the 1960s, and General Twining apparently memo’ed in the ’40s.

In covering this issue for the last few years, my point has been: government transparency. Let’s remember the long history of government agencies stringing us opaquely along.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags military, NASA, transparency, UFOs

government transparency progress responsibility

UFOs and Other Foes

invisible, invisibility cloak, UFO, defense, disclosure

Frivolous federal spending: you don’t approve; I don’t approve. Which is why I’m usually on Reason magazine’s side when it comes to government prodigality. But complaining about the money spent by the Pentagon to make sense of the UFO phenomenon misses the bigger story.

In “The Feds Spent $22 Million Researching Invisibility Cloaks, UFOs, and a Tunnel Through the Moon,” Fiona Harrigan sets up the problem: “The 2008 Defense Supplemental Appropriation Act included $10 million for the AATIP [Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program] and the 2010 Defense Appropriations Act allotted $12 million, amounting to $22 million over five years. It is unclear how much of that money went toward researching UFOs and how much went toward invisibility cloaks, because how the money was used has been shrouded in secrecy.”

If when I’ve talked about these programs before I didn’t much discuss invisibility cloaks or spintronics and other ancillary aspects of UFO disclosure, it’s because I knew little about them . . . and neither, I gather, does Ms. Harrigan.

What they all show is the first teensy bit of transparency . . . on the apparently non-dismissible persistence of aerial phenomena that were dubbed UFOs* by Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt in his 1956 study, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.

The military has apparently known about the puzzling reality of this phenomena for a long time. If we are to believe current reports, or past leaked documents like the Twining Memo, the objects observed by the military are (contrary to official statements) real objects intelligently controlled that do not behave according to the laws of physics that we were taught in school.

Ms. Harrigan warns us of a very different irregularity: how the research was contracted under the authorizing legislation.

That sure seems like the lesser story.

The biggest story? Cover-up. Investigation into UFOs couldn’t be done in-house because of the layers of secrecy already in place. Non-disclosure agreements’ and top-level secrecy compartmentalization required outsourcing. We may have to accept some irregularities . . . the regular methods having led to secrecy of extreme sorts.

The kind that makes the Deep State deep.

And as for invisibility cloaks: they are associated with UFOs, and would obviously be very useful for the military. Besides, cloaking technology is now in use, no longer a mere sci-fi dream.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Ruppelt thought the initials should be pronounced as one word: YOU-foe!

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