Category: Common Sense

Wisconsin Raids Speak Volumes

Post author By CS Admin
Post date April 27, 2015
7 Comments on Wisconsin Raids Speak Volumes

Assault on Free Speech in Wisconsin, police abuse, harassment, militarization, democracy, intimidation, collage, photomontage, illustration, editorial, violence

Where’s the outcry among campaign finance “reformers”?

Silence.

In Wisconsin, laws regulating political speech, along with the clamor for stepped-up “enforcement,” have facilitated an awesomely powerful prosecutor to launch dawn SWAT raids, dragging men, women and children out of their beds, stealing their computers and cell phones and ransacking their homes.

For what crime?

Supporting an act passed by the state legislature and signed into law by the governor.

And for having the bravery, or naïveté, to think we live in a free republic where organizing with others to promote ideas about public policy is a noble pursuit.

Not a one-way ticket to Room 101.

Here at Common Sense we’ve been following these dystopian John Doe raids since 2013, when my friend and hero, Eric O’Keefe, refused to be bullied into silence: he violated a gag order to tell the Wall Street Journal and other media about secret investigations tying up 29 conservative groups.

O’Keefe’s courage inspired several suffering the dawn raids to finally speak out. An article by David French in the May issue of National Review tells their stories, which sparked attention last week from Rush Limbaugh and on Fox News’s The Kelly File.

Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm “correctly identified some of the most important communicators of political messages in Wisconsin,” O’Keefe told Meghan Kelly, “and they raided their family homes, with kids at home .… They came in the dark.”

“Put aside whether people should have filed different campaign finance reports, is this an appropriate tactic for any kind of campaign finance question?” he asked.

O’Keefe has fought back, suing Chisholm in federal court. Today, we may discover whether the U.S. Supreme Court will hear an appeal in his case and determine whether a federal district court judge’s injunction against Chisholm’s witch-hunt will stand.

We all know what this is really about. Chisholm was retaliating against individuals and groups that supported Governor Scott Walker’s ultimately successful moves to curb Wisconsin’s public employee unions. It’s a grand example of our age’s real class warfare: between insiders with power and outsiders trying to curb that power.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags David French, first amendment, free speech, police abuse, Wisconsin

Common Sense crime and punishment general freedom individual achievement responsibility

Resist Criminal Attacks

Are you ever too old to stop a mugger? Not if your mobility scooter is ready to go.

This conclusion is informed by the example of 92-year-old Eileen Mason, who was with her 75-year-old friend, Margaret Seabrook, when a mugger tried to make off with the contents of a scooter basket.

The two British great-grandmothers were returning from a lunch club in Wiltshire as the thief approached and targeted the older of the two.

When he grabbed Eileen Mason’s arm and reached for the bag, she shouted “Oh no you don’t” — at her maximum volume.

“I put my scooter into accelerate and turned really fast,” she told the UK Telegraph. “The next thing I know he was on the floor. I thought ‘my gosh.’ Something in me just told me to turn so I squeezed the accelerator and turned and he went flying. He was so evil looking.”

If you like this story, don’t miss the ones about the grandma who used a handbag to stop a jewel-store robbery, or the grandma who trapped a burglar in a shed.

Margaret Seabrook says they want their experience to teach people “not [to] leave things on display in their baskets.…”

That’s one lesson — don’t make yourself an unnecessarily tempting target. But the other thing is be prepared … to defend and evade.

If somebody is gearing up to rob you, be ready to stop him. At least, if you can do so without too much risk to life, limb, or liberty.

Thanks, ladies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags crime, defense, law, responsibility

Common Sense national politics & policies tax policy too much government

Poor, Poor IRS

As Tax Day approaches, you can bet the Internal Revenue Service has readied itself to help taxpayers file their returns.

No?

“It’s abysmal,” admits IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, discussing his agency’s help for Americans trying to decipher a byzantine, ever-changing tax code.

It seems only four of ten citizens ever succeed in getting through to the IRS on the phone, even after waiting multiple hours. Over days. There have been over 5 million “courtesy disconnects” — that’s IRS lingo for its phone system hanging up on you.

To boot, once you get to a real person, that employee can’t tell you much.

The problem? According to the Washington Post, the poor agency lacks the necessary funds because “Republicans on Capitol Hill have slashed the IRS budget.”

Actually, the IRS budget has gone up every year … in nominal dollars. When adjusted for inflation? Well, there has been some decline.

Bemoaning this supposed “era of shrinking government,” the Post assails conservatives in Congress, citing the “cuts” as “punishment for a string of missteps: an extravagant conference for employees in Anaheim, Calif., the targeting of conservative groups seeking tax exemptions, $1 million in bonuses given to agency employees who didn’t pay their federal taxes.”

Punishment seems in order.

But another story puts in perspective this crocodile cry for more money. The Daily Caller recently reported: “The Obama administration has quietly killed an IRS tax preparation program designed to help low-income and disadvantaged citizens, choosing instead to give millions of dollars to liberal groups for the same purpose.”

Look on the bright side, a review of these help-groups found their advice to have a mere 49 percent error rate.

This is Common sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags big government, IRS, tax, tax policy

Common Sense folly media and media people responsibility

Who Are the Bigots Now?

political, editorial, collage, photomontage, illustration, gender, rape, Rolling Stone, women's studies, campus, violence

“Why did Rolling Stone … so massively screw up” in “falsely accusing a University of Virginia frat of gang-raping a freshman girl?” asks Alex Griswold of The Daily Caller. “[I]f you work for liberal magazine The New Republic, the answer is that they were too right-wing.”

Most of my online friends are with Griswold, excoriating and ridiculing TNR’s Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig’s questionable analysis of the piece in question. Before I pile on, let me just say what is right about her analysis in “Rolling Stone’s Rape Article Failed Because It Used Rightwing Tactics to Make a Leftist Point…”

She ably summarizes a world view.

“The left tends to view oppression as something that operates within systems, sometimes in clearly identifiable structural biases” while the “right,” she insists, “tends to understand politics on the individual level,” which she imputes to “a general obsession with the capital‑i Individual.”

That, she thinks, is why “the right” pokes at “specific details of high-profile cases like those of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.” If the leftist critique doesn’t apply there, she thinks “rightwingers” hope, they thereby disprove the left’s systemic oppression thesis.

Note how she just assumes the accuracy of the left’s approach; she just ignores how often lefty journalists get actual “big-picture” stats wrong. For example, on the subject of “rape culture,” they routinely suppress discussion of accurate stats on false rape charges by women against men.

Worse yet, she honestly does not see how her “leftwing” media comrades have prejudged coverage of recent race-based and rape-involved cases, doing injustice to individuals.

Is this mere media bias?

No. It’s the very definition of prejudice. It’s bigotry.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags ethics, feminism, journalism, journalistic ethics, journalists

Common Sense general freedom national politics & policies political challengers

Defeat the Machine

Standing with Rand, as Sen. Rand Paul (R‑Ky.) announced yesterday his candidacy for the U.S. Presidency? A banner: “Defeat the Washington Machine — Unleash the American Dream.”

I know and like Rand, both personally and politically. I love that message.

Yet, today, I come not to praise Dr. Paul but to use him as an example about political reality, nuts and bolts.

Like Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, Dr. Paul inherited a tremendous leg up in politics. All three have access to extensive networks of supporters and funding. But, “they didn’t build” those networks, not in toto. They are standing on the efforts of family members — a husband in Hillary’s case; parents for Paul and Bush, plus a Bush brother president.

The Kentucky senator’s father, Dr. Ron Paul, served 23 years representing a Houston, Texas, U.S. House district and ran for president three times.

I’m not whining. And I’m certainly not proposing a new area for the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to police. I’m glad, frankly, for Rand’s parental good fortune. (Mother, too.)

I am simply identifying the built-in advantages that come with holding political power … and the potential danger it unleashes: an entrenched, unaccountable, unrepresentative government.

Like we have.

The solution to powerful political dynasties? More competition. More participation. More activity and organizing, more money raised and spent and more messages expressed. Fewer limits and regulations blocking fundraising.

Easier entry into the political marketplace of ideas.

Is that what the IRS and the FEC have been working toward? Facilitating our opportunity to “Defeat the Washington Machine”?

Be that the case, or no, I’m happy to note that Rand Paul, in his kick-off, endorsed term limits.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 2016 Presidential race, election, presidential term limits, Rand Paul, Ron Paul

Common Sense First Amendment rights tax policy too much government

Feinstein No Einstein

Government’s job is to protect our lives and liberties. But how best to accomplish this? Should books be banned? Websites blocked?

Diane Feinstein thinks so.

Sen. Feinstein (D‑California) wants to ban The Anarchist Cookbook from the Internet. The book, which came out in 1971 with lots of radical ideas, including notoriously unreliable instructions for making bombs, is now a website. Perhaps the quality of the “cookbook” has helped us survive against the anarchist threat these last five decades.

Today, the threat is not anarchist but Islamist terrorism. So of course Sen. Feinstein also wants the Al Qaida magazine Inspire “off the Internet.”

Government censorship, anyone? Free speech, Senator?

Now, I don’t approve of the bombing and murdering of innocents for any cause. So I am not at one with deadly anarchists or deadly jihadists. Count me as among their enemies.

But, at the risk of being called a “liberal,” I don’t think we should defend ourselves against anarchists or jihadists or other terrorists just any old way. For both moral and strategic reasons, we ought not be killing innocents by drone strike, along with those simply declared guilty, without any lawful process at all.

Likewise, we ought not abridge our own cherished principles and the rule of law.

Including the First Amendment.

After all, that’s what government is supposed to be protecting in the first place.

The fact that Feinstein seems so comfortable with simply “banning” books and magazines and websites suggests an illiberal, unAmerican attitude. An attitude that threatens to do more damage to the homeland than any “cookbook” or pro-terrorist magazine or website ever will.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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