Category: national politics & policies

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Accountability crime and punishment general freedom government transparency individual achievement media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies privacy Snowden U.S. Constitution

Happy Birthday, Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden, birthday, surveillance, whistleblower, patriot, sacrifice, NSA

Edward Snowden turns 35 today and begins another year as a fugitive stuck in Russia.

Five years ago, he fled the country to Hong Kong, meeting with The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras to discuss documents he had released showing illegal National Security Agency collection of our phone records, social media posts and mega other metadata.

It is not merely Snowden who calls the NSA’s programs unconstitutional, or me, but how a federal judge ruled.

Remember when James Clapper, President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, wittingly misled Congress by claiming our private information was not being swept up, except “unwittingly.” We only know that Clapper fibbed because of what Snowden divulged.

“[T]he breaking point was seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress,” Snowden has explained. “There’s no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust it and regulate its actions.”

Clapper is free, collecting his pension. Snowden has been indicted under the Espionage Act, which unconstitutionally limits his defense.

Snowden sure has paid for his courage. He was making very good money, and living with his girlfriend in Hawaii, when he decided he had a duty to alert us to our government’s lawlessness — at the cost of his livelihood, his future, his very life, perhaps.

While our leaders call him a traitor, I call him “friend.”*

Edward Snowden is a friend of every American who cherishes our Fourth Amendment right “to be secure in [our] persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Freedoms the government was secretly stomping upon.

It is time to bring him home.**

Ed Snowden, thank you for your service. Happy Birthday!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* I feel a connection to Mr. Snowden, and have an inkling of what it’s like to do what you believe is right and to find yourself wanted by the government, on the run, far from home.

** Snowden deserves a presidential pardon. But he has said he would even return to face prosecution, provided the charges did not preclude him from defending his actions in open court.

 

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Accountability crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies political challengers Regulating Protest

Assaults Not Allowed

speech, argument, hate speech, minds.com, Bill Ottman, violence, free speech, tolerance

Have Americans forgotten that freedom makes getting along easier?

We do not all have to like each other. We do not even all have to be nice to each other. We just don’t have license to hit or hornswoggle our fellows. Hate speech may be bad, but it is hate assaults — not talk — that should be punished by law.

Yes, free people are at liberty to insult each other, call each other nasty names, even demean each other. And those insulted, besmirched, and dissed may return in kind or shrug the negatives off.

But we needn’t let it go at that.

Bill Ottman, founder and CEO of Minds.com, reminds us that there is more than one way to skin a hate. When coming across vile nonsense and worse, “the most important question is how we deal with these situations,” he writes.

We may be able to find the answer in the work of Daryl Davis, a famous blues musician with a hobby of  befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan. According to him: “Once the friendship blossoms, the klansmen realize that their hate may be misguided.” By having dinner with Klansmen, he has inspired over 200 members to give up their robes.

Ottman goes on to call for a concerted effort to reclaim a future for “internet freedom and human rights.” That’s a good idea.

Don’t accept the premise that, to get along, we must squelch speech. Instead, ignore disagreeable people trying to make us feel bad.

And look for ways to persuade those who hate us.

We can be adults about this. And keep freedom of speech.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Accountability crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies privacy Regulating Protest Second Amendment rights U.S. Constitution

Brownells Defends Itself

YouTube, guns, gun control, censorship, 2nd Amendment, censor, ban, school shootings

I’m glad to be able to say this: Brownells has, present tense, a YouTube channel. Especially glad because, on June 9, Google had shut that channel down without warning or explanation.

Brownells is a family-owned supplier of firearms, firearm parts and accessories, gunsmithing tools, and emergency gear. Well-known and well-regarded by shooters, hobbyists and gunsmiths, the company has a website and a YouTube channel that serves as a “portal to everything shooting and hunting,” as Pete Brownell explains.

Brownells’ YouTube channel is substantial, with almost 1,800 instructional videos and some 71,000 subscribers. Patrons stress that there’s nothing outré, radical, or offensive about the offerings — unless you’re reflexively anti-Second Amendment, I guess.

We’ve got no smoking gun in the form of an explicit admission from Google. But we may plausibly suspect that the firm terminated this YouTube channel for ideological reasons. Perhaps Google shot from the hip here in reaction to the recent spate of school shootings, without pausing to properly distinguish between promoting responsible gun ownership and promoting murder.

We may also never know whether Google expected Brownells to meekly accept the arbitrary snuffing of a resource it had spent so much time and energy developing. In any case, Brownells used Twitter and other forums to urge supporters to call Google and object.

The self-defense paid off. On June 11, Google undeleted the channel. The protests against injustice must have been too many to ignore.

YouTube is no longer a mere platform for video sharing. It has taken political controversy and complaints as excuses to editorialize.

Were it a government, I’d say “censor.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Accountability crime and punishment folly free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies privacy property rights responsibility too much government

Working to Boost Unemployment

occupational licensing, hair braiding, permission, law, crime, employment, unemployment, control, health

Some government officials work overtime to throw people out of work.

What I’m referring to differs from losing your job or business because of slack performance or slackening sales. Instead, you lose the right to earn your living a certain way so that the government can benefit competitors at your expense.

Occupational licensing is great at dis-employing people. The regulations are especially galling when the work being regulated obviously requires no formal training in order to be done well and safely.

Hair braiding, for example.

The Institute for Justice — which has done incredible work over the years representing victims of destructive government mandates — just won a victory for hair braiders in Iowa. Thanks to IJ’s efforts, a new law there exempts braiders from having to waste time and money getting a cosmetology license in order to practice their craft.

Such battles are never won permanently, of course. Washington, D.C., recently started requiring day care providers to get a college degree or lose their job. (As I have argued in a Townhall column, the same “logic” would justify forcing people to get college degrees to become parents.) IJ is helping affected parties to challenge the absurd law.

It is time for a new licensing requirement. Nobody gets to become a local, state or federal lawmaker unless he first writes a million times in a row, “I will never help violate the rights of any man or woman to earn an honest living.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Accountability general freedom government transparency initiative, referendum, and recall local leaders national politics & policies political challengers term limits

The Other Maine Thing

ranked choice voting, democracy, initiative, referendum, election, voting, Paul Jacob, voting reform, Maine

Tuesday’s biggest election news was the victory for Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) in Maine. This is the second statewide vote for this reform, which allows voters to rank the candidates by first choice, second choice and so on.*

Voters first passed it in 2016, but the next year the voters’ “representatives” in the legislature repealed the law, overturning their vote.

Undeterred, RCV supporters filed a referendum and again went out and gathered enough petition signatures to refer the legislature’s repeal to a vote of the people. On Tuesday, Maine’s voters vetoed the legislature, keeping Ranked Choice Voting.

Initiative and referendum sure are helpful.

RCV is not partisan; it requires the winner to have some level of support from a majority of voters and fixes the wasted vote problem. In Maine, however, the Republican Party opposed. On election day, Republican Gov. Paul LePage even threatened not to do his duty and certify the results.

“Paul Jacobs (Vice chair of the [FairVote] Board) whom I once knew and thought was a good American,” a Republican friend posted on my Facebook page, “has helped unleash the hounds of Hell” . . . adding that “now the voters are so confused by the terrible procedure that voting will be a nightmare this Tuesday!”

Yet voters used the new voting system for the first time Tuesday in candidate primaries before deciding Question 1 on their ballot — about keeping RCV. As one Portland voter put it, “It’s pretty easy to do, despite the negative publicity.”

We need more control over government with our vote. And when voters speak, politicians should listen.

It wouldn’t hurt political activists to listen, too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* I’ve discussed the idea in this space many times — there’s more information on how it works here.

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Accountability education and schooling folly general freedom ideological culture local leaders media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies responsibility too much government

Demeritocracy

affirmative action, quota, college admissions, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, racism, discrimination, reverse, justice, fairness

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has a beef with Stuyvesant High School.

It’s about race, of course.

Stuy (as it is affectionately known) is a tuition-free accelerated academic/college prep program open to all city residents based on how well they perform on a specific test.

Unsurprisingly, Asians make up the bulk of the student body.

And de Blasio finds this horrific, a “monumental injustice” — there should be more Hispanic and black students, he says.

In front of black parishioners.

Demagoguery aside, the New York Mayor’s attack is really against the very idea of a meritocracy. The old Progressive vision was to pull from every ethnic group, economic strata, and community the best and brightest, allowing people to advance by study and hard work. Progressives called this “equality of opportunity”; most everybody else, “the American Dream.”

It was the Progressives’ pride and joy.

And today’s progressives are hell bent on destroying it.

They demand “diversity” instead — by which folks like de Blasio mean participation based not on talent and studiousness and sheer academic drive (which some cultures push more than others), but, instead, on today’s primary progressive obsession: skin color.

“My limited tolerance for affirmative action,” writes Richard Cohen in the Washington Post, addressing de Blasio’s excess, “possibly permissible when the poor are advantaged at the expense of the rich — hits a wall in this case.”

My tolerance for “affirmative action” hits the wall earlier: Help the poor afford to go where they can academically earn a spot. (Helping privately would be best.) But do not let race or any other demographic factor put a finger on the merit scale.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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