Category: insider corruption

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crime and punishment general freedom insider corruption

The Ayatollah for Governor?

Former Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson is running for governor.

Again.

You may recall, as I certainly do, that Mr. Edmondson prosecuted — more like persecuted — me and two others involved in a 2005 petition drive. He charged us with “conspiracy to defraud the state,” a felony carrying a 10-year prison term.

At our arraignment and processing, the three of us were shackled together with handcuffs and leg-irons and paraded before TV cameras.

“Has North Korea Annexed Oklahoma?” was how a Forbes magazine editorial greeted the spectacle. The conservative Wall Street Journal connected the Sooner State to the kind of repression practiced in Pakistan, while liberal consumer advocate Ralph Nader also condemned the prosecution. New Jersey Star Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine noted that Russia’s Vladimir Putin “could learn a thing or two from the Oklahoma boys.”

We became the Oklahoma 3. The AG earned the label “Ayatollah Edmondson.”

Loudly expressing our innocence, we waited for our day in court.

It was a long wait.

Edmondson held the indictment over our heads for a year and a half, publicly attacking us and calling us criminals. But he never permitted us our day in court. He went to great lengths to avoid completing a preliminary hearing, which would have allowed a judge to determine if enough evidence existed to hold a trial.

Finally, in 2009, as he prepared to launch his previous unsuccessful run for governor, he dropped all the charges.

When someone abuses power so recklessly, that someone shouldn’t be given more power.

Today, career politician Drew Edmondson tells voters he will “Put Oklahomans First.” He can’t even come up with his own slogan.

Ayatollah Edmondson: Dangerous. And unoriginal.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

 

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Additional Information

Capitol Beat: In critical analysis, Edmondson ranked among worst attorneys general
CEI: Drew Edmondson’s Prosecution of Paul Jacob Is Unconstitutional
Wall Street Journal: Still Oklahoma’s Most Wanted – Attorney General leads posse chasing critics of government
NewsOK: State’s Unjust Prosecution 
Capitol Beat: Edmondson should free “The Oklahoma Three”

My Writing on Edmondson’s Attack on Petition Rights

We, the Oklahoma 3 — Oct. 7, 2007
Guilt & Innocence in Oklahoma — Jan. 21, 2008
Constitutionally Unsuited for the Job — Feb. 13, 2008
Above the Law — March 14, 2008
Opposed to Answers — April 28, 2008
Edmondson vs. Term Limits — May 20, 2008
Another OK Court Decision — June 4, 2008
Petitioners May Petition — July 8, 2008
Scare Tactic in Oklahoma — July 23, 2008
Feeling Sorry for Oklahoma — Nov. 17, 2008
The Wheels of Injustice — Dec. 4, 2008
The Oklahoma Three, Free at Last — Jan. 26, 2009
The Year of Reform? — Feb. 18, 2009
The Untold Story of the Oklahoma 3 — May 1, 2009
Change Sweeping Down the Plains — May 19, 2009

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall insider corruption term limits

Corruption, Arkansas-Style

Arkansas, term limits, corruption, rules, regulations, initiative, democracy

On Friday, the Arkansas Supreme Court struck Issue 3, a citizen-initiated measure to restore legislative term limits, from Arkansas’ November ballot. The Court declared, 4-3, that there weren’t enough “valid” signatures.

This, despite opponents never disputing that more than enough Arkansas voters had signed the petition.

In recent years, legislators have enacted a slew of convoluted laws, purposely designed to wreck the initiative and referendum process.* The regulations give insiders and partisans a myriad of hyper-technical “gotchas” that can be used to disqualify whole sheets of bonafide voter signatures.

“The legislature,” explained former Governor Mike Huckabee recently, “sucker-punched the people of Arkansas and expanded their terms. They did it, I think, very dishonestly — by calling it an ethics bill . . . that had nothing to do with ethics. It was all about giving themselves longer terms.”

Since getting away with that 2014 ballot con job, giving themselves a whopping 16 years in office, seven Arkansas state legislators have been indicted or convicted of corruption. The author of that tricky ballot measure, former Sen. Jon Woods, just began serving an 18-year federal prison sentence for corruption.

Other corruption, that is.

“It’s one reason I think term limits are a very important part of our political system today,” said Huckabee. It is, he argued, “easier to get involved in things that are corrupt the longer you stay.”

Now, sadly, after 2014’s fraudulent ballot measure and two 4-3 state supreme court decisions neutering the entire ballot initiative process, political corruption can continue unabated in the Natural State. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The state supreme court has ignored the clear language in the state constitution regarding such petitions: “No legislation shall be enacted to restrict, hamper or impair the exercise of the rights herein reserved to the people.”

N.B. For relevant links, check yesterday’s splash page for this weekend’s Townhall column.

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Categories
incumbents insider corruption

The Politics of Exclusion

locks, Republicans, Democrats, democracy, Libertarians, Greens

“The mainstream media screams about Russia stealing elections,” says U.S. senatorial candidate Dale Kerns, “but behind the scenes they pull the strings to keep the duopoly in control.”

Mr. Kerns, who is running in Pennsylvania as a Libertarian in a four-candidate race, has had the rug pulled out from under him. Early on, the League of Women Voters had assured him that he would be able to participate in televised candidate debates in Philadelphia. That opportunity was dashed as the date of the event neared.

“Make no mistake, this is cronyism,” insists Kerns, who notes that “big media corporations collud[e] with big government political parties to keep out competition.”

Eric Boehm covers the scandal/not-a-scandal over at Reason. The early promise of inclusion came from the League, and it was “other organizers” of the event who decided that the Libertarian and Green candidates’ polling numbers were low enough to excuse exclusion.

You might wonder why debate organizers would want to have less interesting debates. But remember: the two entrenched parties’ candidates want to win. Period. The last thing they want are challengers from other parties included, because those challengers can only peel off voters from them.* And though the major-media hosts may wish to seem non-partisan, they almost never refrain from taking a side. 

I do not (and cannot) know which reason contributed more to the Philadelphia renege, so will let you hazard your own guesses. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Which helps explain why the parties tend to “cheat with both hands,” as Nicholas Sarwark, the Libertarian candidate for the mayorship of Phoenix, Arizona, put it.

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Photo from Max Pixel

 

Categories
crime and punishment ideological culture insider corruption media and media people

Socialist Saboteurs Infiltrate

Stuart Karaffa, socialism, DSA, Democratic Socialist,Project Veritas, James O’Keefe

Once upon a time, people who worried about communists infiltrating the government were often dismissed as paranoid. 

“Sure, commies under every bed! Right!”

Communists in the State Department or wherever generally weren’t caught on tape boasting that they were Soviet agents and part of the Resist Truman or Resist Eisenhower movement. Allen Funt did not expose Alger Hiss. But now we have this social-media thing happening. And we have members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) caught on tape touting their illicit exploits as federal employees.

Project Veritas is a conservative group* that conducts hidden-camera interviews with lefty activists. In one of Veritas’s recent exposes, several DSA members confess to abusing their government positions in order to impede Trump Administration policies, including any even slightly pro-market policies. The goal is to “f*ck sh*t up,” as one rebel summarizes.

Several of the Resisters boast that “we can’t really get fired.” That’s probably almost true; they’re federal bureaucrats. But DOJ paralegal Allison Hrabar and others may find that their license to chill is about to expire. 

Hrabar was in the news a few months back for helping chase Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen from a restaurant. Now she has admitted using government resources to dredge up the home address of a DC lobbyist she wanted to target. Address in hand, she and several DSA comrades swooped down on the residence to hold a harassing protest. 

Not quite how taxpayer dollars are supposed to be deployed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, whom I know and like, has done enormous good with his undercover stings of ACORN and others. Last year’s failed effort against the Washington Post is the exception. Had Project Veritas succeeded in slipping this false accusation into the newspaper, the result would have been to publicize a harmful lie, not show the truth (per his group’s name.

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Categories
crime and punishment general freedom insider corruption

Puppycide

dogs, puppycide, police, shooting, drug war, abuse, family

The cost of the War on Drugs is not to be reckoned just in dollars. Or in that more serious accounting index: lost lives. The hit to our civil liberties has been enormous, too, and instrumental in setting up the modern Surveillance State.

But beyond these, there is a stranger result: the War on Drugs is also, de facto, a War on Dogs.

“Detroit police officers shot 54 dogs last year, according to public records obtained by Reason,” writes C.J. Ciaramella. “That’s a marked increase over the number reported by the department in 2016 and 2015, and more than twice as many as Chicago, a city with roughly 2 million more people.”

Reason magazine has been covering the War on Dogs by police forces across the country — identified in Ciaramella’s article as “puppycide” — for years, and I’ve mentioned it here on Common Sense, too. The problem is not dogs shot because they are wild, or have rabies, or the like. One expects that sort of thing.

What is problematic is that a third of the Detroit shootings took place in the course of no-knock raids and other common police actions entailed by contraband interdiction. The Detroit number turns out to be “more animal shootings than the entire Los Angeles Police Department performed — 14 total — in 2016,” Ciaramella relates.

Excessive shooting of dogs is costly to cities, of course — to taxpayers, to be precise — in terms of civil lawsuits filed and settled. And to families, some of them quite innocent of any crime, who lose their pets. 

It is a sign of a police culture corrupted by . . . the War on Drugs.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Categories
Common Sense free trade & free markets government transparency insider corruption local leaders media and media people national politics & policies too much government

Never Trust a Politician

salt, lies, politicians, politics, Donald Trump, truth, economy, trade

One of my more persistent critics on this site asked, last week, why I might believe anything the current president says — considering all the lies.

For reasons of decorum I won’t repeat his exact wording.

The odd thing about the comment was not the vulgarity, though (unfortunately). It was the idea that I was relying upon belief in Donald Trump’s veracity. The whole point of my commentary regarding Trump’s handling of trade and foreign policy was to read between some lines.

I try never to believe anything . . . er, everything . . . any politician says.

In Donald Trump’s case, though, there are lies and there are fictions and there are exaggerations. And corkers . . . and “negotiating gambits.” Separating the wheat from the chaff from the grindstone is not always easy.

Based not only on some of what he says, but also on results-thus-far from the EU negotiations, Trump’s idea of “fair trade” appears to be multilateral free trade. But he has chosen a bizarre method to get there: the threat of high-tariff protectionism — which in the past has led to multilateral protectionism, not free trade.

Trump sees everything as a contest. Trade isn’t a contest as such. It’s win-win. But trade negotiations are contests. And Trump’s game of chicken is dangerous.

Regarding foreign policy generally, though, he seems to be playing a more familiar game: we can outspend everybody. The recent increase in Pentagon spending is bigger than Russia’s annual military budget!

So, who pays? Americans in

  1. higher taxes and 
  2. the consequences of massive debt, as well as in
  3. the higher prices from his tariffs.

That’s awfully daring of him. For us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Photo from Max Pixel

 

Categories
Accountability incumbents initiative, referendum, and recall insider corruption local leaders political challengers term limits

Sneaky Lobbyists Prefer Sneakiness

time expired, time limit, term limits, Arkansas, politicians, referendum, vote, lobbyists

The Arkansas Chamber of Commerce’s CEO and chief lobbyist, Randy Zook and Kenneth Wall, have formed Arkansans for Common-Sense Term Limits. 

The Chamber has a burning hatred for term limits — Common-Sense or otherwise — just like every other lobbyist and special interest. But Zook and Hall are fibbing in their name because they realize that voters love term limits. 

The ballot committee’s stated purpose? To “advocate for the disqualification or defeat” of the Arkansas Term Limits Amendment, which citizens just petitioned onto the ballot, collecting 129,000 signatures.

Defeating such a popular ballot measure isn’t likely. Instead, these politically-experienced lobbyists are preparing to sue, hoping to disqualify valid voters’ signatures on some ginned-up technicality, feigning confusion over the clear ballot language — anything that might keep democracy from coming this November.*

At issue? The difference between real term limits and ridiculous ones.

That is, between term limits set by citizens and those set by legislators themselves. 

Currently, legislators can serve for 16 years in a single seat under the state’s “limits.” And because two-year Senate terms aren’t counted at all, senators can stay as long as 22 years. 

Legislators snuck this past voters in 2014 with a ballot title claiming only to “establish” term limits . . . amidst other lies. Politicians thereby turned Arkansas’s toughest-in-the-nation term-limit law into the nation’s very weakest — a significant 50 percent longer than limits in any other state.**

Unfazed by all the corruption in the Arkansas Legislature, Chamber lobbyists are focused on putting politicians in their pocket for as long as possible. 

But those pesky Arkansas voters are once again in the way.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* After recently threatening to challenge the signatures of another initiative petition, Zook had to admit that he was not aware of a single problem or deficiency in the petition. But he quickly added, “It’s a very complicated process.”

** Arkansas’s term limits were the same as Michigan’s until 2014, three terms, six years in the House and two-terms, eight-years in the Senate.

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Original photo by Jeff Kubina

 

Categories
Accountability general freedom government transparency incumbents insider corruption local leaders moral hazard national politics & policies term limits

“Dorky” Doesn’t Define It

term limits, Congress, myth, power, corruption

“Term limits,” said Daniel McCarthy, editor of The Modern Age, in a recent podcast conversation with historian Tom Woods, “was one of the dorkiest ideas of the 1994 so-called Newt Gingrich revolution.”

He characterized it as not having really gone anywhere.

Huh?

Granted, Congress is still not term-limited. But Americans in 15 states — including California, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, and Ohio, and representing 37 percent of the nation’s population — do enjoy term-limited state legislatures.*

And it sure wasn’t Newt Gingrich’s idea. Gingrich opposed it.

McCarthy repeats the old chestnut that what term limitation “winds up doing is actually weakening Congress and congresspeople in particular — relative to their own staff, who stay in Congress and become sort of experts and learn how to manipulate their congressman, and also relative to the executive branch who have people rotate in from time to time.”

Nifty theory — one very popular with politicians, who know that voters fear unelected influences on legislation.

The reality, however, is that Congress, designed by the Constitution’s framers to be both most powerful and closest to the people‚ is, today, the weakest branch.

And legislators are not term limited.

Ditch the “manipulation theory”; adopt a “collaboration theory”: legislators with Methuselah-long careers learn, sans “rotation in office,” to feather their own nests and those of the interest groups that fund their re-elections (and insider trading schemes).

Term limits remain popular with normal Americans because voters intuitively grasp the reality of such everyday corruption, which is directly tied to Congress having sloughed off so much constitutional responsibility.

We need term limits to restore a Congress sold out by professional politicians.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Nine of the ten largest cities in America likewise have termed-limited their elected officeholders. For more information, see the links to the column from which this episode of Common Sense is condensed.

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Categories
Accountability government transparency insider corruption local leaders media and media people nannyism national politics & policies political challengers Regulating Protest responsibility

Not Fine with Feinstein?

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, election, candidate, California, Democratic Party, money, campaign

Could it be that Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, may not be liberal enough?

The San Francisco Democrat has ostensibly represented the Golden State in the United States Senate for the last 26 years. Before that, Feinstein spent eight years on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors and then a decade as mayor.

Now, after 44 consecutive years as a public official, what does the 85-year-old Feinstein seek? More. That is, another six-year lease on her powerful perch in the U.S. Senate.

But the Executive Board of the California Democratic Party — Feinstein’s Party — just said, “No way!”

A whopping 65 percent of the 333-member board opted for State Sen. Kevin de León, a fellow Democrat seen as more “progressive.” Only seven percent supported endorsing Feinstein.

Keep in mind that Feinstein is already on the November ballot. She was the leading vote-getter in California’s primary last month. Yet, she received only 44 percent of the vote: a majority does favor someone else.

In February, 2,700 activists at the State Democratic Party Convention in San Diego voted 54 to 37 percent for State Sen. De León over U.S. Sen. Feinstein.

“Feinstein, who spends much of her time in Washington, has had a distant relationship with party activists for years,” noted the Los Angeles Times report.

Still, what Democratic Party activists want may not matter so much. Mrs. Feinstein enjoys tremendous name recognition and, according to the Times, has “$7 million in campaign cash socked away as of May, ten times what De León had.”

That money seems to be Sen. Feinstein’s real base of support.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Categories
general freedom ideological culture insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies political challengers

Plantation Revolt

#Walkaway, voters, conservatives, culture, liberals, twitter, Facebook, Brendan Straka,

The #Walkaway movement started with Brendan Straka, who proclaimed that his tribe — the liberal Left — had become “intolerant, inflexible, illogical, hateful, misguided, ill-informed, un-American, hypocritical, menacing, callous, ignorant, narrow-minded, and, at times, blatantly fascistic.”

Mr. Straka’s beef — and the general tenor of the pile-on Twitterstorm — was not about Democratic Party policy, as Scott Adams noted. It was about the left-of-center movement’s rhetorical/propagandistic rut. Since the election of Donald Trump, Democrats had come to rely almost exclusively on the feeding of frenzy by psychological manipulation, by ginning up fear.

Straka’s appeal to “walk away” became a hit, especially amongst those “racial, sexual, and religious minorities in America” that he says the Democrats have treated as if they owned.

Yet the Washington Post pooh-poohs the trend as just a social media blip — over-hyped by the very nature of the medium itself.

Plausible?

David Catron says no. Before the #WalkAway movement, he writes in The American Spectator, African-American voters had already walked away from Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in enough numbers to allow Trump his victory. And this bodes badly for the Democratic Party, for, as Catron quotes YouTube sensation Candace Owens, “I’ve seen black liberals go conservative, but never seen a black conservative go liberal.”

It doesn’t take many defections, says Carton: “All that is needed is about 5 percent more African-Americans to vote Republican and another 5 to 10 percent to simply stay home.”

But be warned: wishful thinking and Straka’s litany of political vices — “groupthink, hypocrisy, division, stereotyping, resentment” — can overtake any movement pretty quickly.

Anti-leftists in general and Republicans in particular are not immune to mass mania and suicide-by-panic.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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