Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Snowden Won?

surveillance, metadata, Snowden, Edward Snowden

“The phone records program” that Edward Snowden risked life, limb and freedom to expose “had never thwarted a terrorist attack,” the New York Times informs in a somewhat startling bit of reportage published on Monday.

But that isn’t the startling part.

The National Security Administration’s unauthorized metadata phone-records collection program was a wish-list snoop system snuck into practice under cover of the Patriot Act. After the Snowden revelation, Congress halted it, replacing it with a similar operation in 2015, via the U.S.A. Freedom Act. But we have long known that U.S. spies could do most of what they “need” without pre- or post-Snowden versions.

What is startling in the Times article, “Disputed N.S.A. Phone Program Is Shut Down, Aide Says,” is there in the title: the federal government’s top spy agency has allegedly not used the program in its Freedom Act version in months, has even closed it.

And the Freedom Act, up for renewal, may just be allowed to die a quiet death.

Nick Gillespie, at Reason, cautions that “the possible end of the USA Freedom Act doesn’t mean the federal government doesn’t have access to all sorts of tools needed to secretly snoop on you, or that your personal data isn’t being collected in any number of ways you have little control over.” And he cites a recent Reason piece on how Patriot Act survellaince powers have been used to bust up a prostitution ring.

Which shows how terrorism is not the only government target.

And why giving government vast surveillance powers could be used for anything.

Not to mention that niggly problem of abridging the Fourth Amendment rights that had so concerned Ed Snowden.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags metadata, snowden, surveillance

Today

Slavery and Anti-Slavery in America

Post author By Redactor
Post date March 8, 2019
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On March 8, 1775, “African Slavery In America,” the first known essay advocating the abolition of slavery in America, was published anonymously in the Pennsylvania Journal and the Weekly Advertiser. Thomas Paine (pictured) is believed to be the essay’s author.

The first anti-slavery society was formed in Philadelphia weeks after publication, and Paine was a founding member.

Exactly 120 years earlier, a court in Northampton County of the Virginia Colony ruled that John Casor, then working as an indentured servant to Robert Palmer, must be returned to Anthony Johnson as Johnson’s “lawful” slave for life. Ironically, Johnson was one of the original indentured servants brought to Jamestown, had completed his indenture to become a “free Negro” and the first African landowner in the colony. The case marked the first person of African descent to be legally-recognized as a lifelong slave in England‘s North American colonies. The first official chattel slave in English-speaking North America was of African descent, and was owned by a man also of African descent.

Thought

William Cobbett

Nothing is so well calculated to produce a death-like torpor in the country as an extended system of taxation and a great national debt.
Letter (February 10, 1804).

national politics & policies

The Cohen Conspiracy?

Donald Trump, 4d Chess, strategy, Michael Cohen, investigation, Russia

The whole “Russia conspiracy” charge, relentlessly picked at and hyped since Donald Trump’s election in 2016 — and, more relevantly, since Hillary Clinton’s loss — suggests that Trump’s an evil mastermind. The infamous “dossier” that included tales of Russian harlots in a suite Barack Obama stayed in, suggests that Trump’s something of a madman as well as a narcissist.

Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, Esq., in his testimony before Congress, has called Trump a racist, con-man and cheat. Cohen has publicly confessed his many grievous sins and technical crimes, re: bribery of hookers, etc., and generally repented of having served as the Evil Trump’s minion. Cohen has pleased Democrats by relentlessly castigating the president’s character, Igor finking on Frankenstein.

One important take-away, however, is that the biggest charge against Mr. Trump appears untrue. Cohen did not go to Prague to meet with Russians to advance some nefarious business-cum-political deal.

So this is the end?

Sure looks like it, but I am waiting for someone to notice that Cohen’s testimony could be a ruse.

Were Trump truly an evil mastermind, he would have figured that the only way to convince his enemies was to have the testimony of his innocence come from someone who hates him, who says all the right things against him.

In this scenario, Cohen still plays thrall to Trump. He has delivered the poison pill in the sweetest chewable form: his own public defection from Trump.

Is this psyop what’s going on?

Probably not.

But if one sees Trump as both an evil mastermind and a crummy, petty narcissist bordering on buffoon, then what would you believe? Were you right all along . . . but completely played?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 4d Chess, Donald Trump, investigation, Michael Cohen, Russia, strategy

Thought

Mary Wollstonecraft

Nature having made men unequal, by giving stronger bodily and mental powers to one than to another, the end of government ought to be, to destroy this inequality by protecting the weak. Instead of which, it has always leaned to the opposite side, wearing itself out by disregarding the first principle of its organization.

Today

The First American Bicameral

Post author By Redactor
Post date March 7, 2019
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On March 7, 1644, Massachusetts established the first two-chamber legislature in the American colonies.

One hundred thirty years later, to the day, British forces closed the port of Boston to all commerce.

national politics & policies Popular

A Congress-Proof Wall?

NEA, 1976, National Emergenncy Act, Congress, standards,

When members of Congress run for the Presidency, they often talk a good game about acting within the boundaries set by the Constitution . . . but maybe we should roll our eyes, at least a bit, when senators like Elizabeth Warren and Corey Booker complain about President Trump’s Executive Order plan for building his infamous Wall.

A workaround like that seems like an overstepping of constitutional bounds, sure. But, as Peter J. Wallison wrote for the Wall Street Journal on Saturday, congressional protest suffers from a rather big problem.

Congress enacted the National Emergency Act in 1976. Since then, presidents have declared 57 emergencies . . . with nary a peep from Congress. And, since “Congress has provided no standard to judge whether an actual emergency exists,” congressional carpers have hardly a constitutional leg to stand upon.

But it gets worse.

Congress doesn’t even have much leverage in the “power of the purse” — for it has given much of that away, too.

For example, when “a Democratic Congress created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010,” writes Wallison, “it provided that the agency would be funded entirely by the Federal Reserve, not through annual appropriations from Congress.”

This interests me, especially, since I quoted Senator Elizabeth Warren ballyhooing her support for this very program at Townhall last weekend. She thinks she did something smart in supporting that regulatory body.

But like so much other ultra-clever legislative conniving, she placed it outside of congressional control.

With genius moves like this, congressional Democrats may have great difficulty restraining President Trump.

Serves them right, of course. But not us — it does not serve the people at all.

We need constitutional limits.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 1976, Congress, National Emergency Act, NEA, standards

Today

Svetlana Made a Break for It (And Paul made his debut)

Post author By Redactor
Post date March 6, 2019
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On March 6, 1967, Soviet Premiere Joseph Stalin’s only daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, defected to the United States. She later took the name Lana Peters, upon marriage to William Wesley Peters. The marriage was short-lived.

The March 6 date also marks term limits advocate and initiative organizer Paul Jacob’s birthday. He was born on the anniversary of the births of Michaelangelo, Cryano de Bergerac, and Alan Greenspan. He is also, obviously, the reason this site, ThisIsCommonSense.com, exists. (It continues, however, only through the continued support of readers like you.)

Thought

Arthur Latham Perry

What is called the Progress of Civilization has been marked and conditioned at every step by an extension of the opportunities, a greater facility in the use of the means, a more eager searching for proper expedients, and a higher certainty in the securing of the returns, of mutual exchanges among men.

initiative, referendum, and recall

Meet the Mob

citizen's initiative, democracy, mob, North Dakota, initiative

North Dakota faces a serious problem: The Mob.

“The point of being a republic is so that Mob doesn’t rule,” warned Chris Berg, host of Point of View on Fargo, North Dakota’s Valley News Live. “If you live in a true democracy that’s where Mob can rule.”

Berg called citizens petitioning issues onto the ballot for a vote “a mob-rule system . . . that allows us to change the actual constitution of our state.”

Not sure which constitution one might work to amend except for the “actual” constitution. But I do see a clearly articulated concern with mob rule.

“A republic, my folks, is what we live in,” continued Berg, juxtaposing the ballot initiative process as “a pure democratic system.”

But ballot measures are no more pure democracy than are acts enacted by the legislature. Both can be challenged and overturned if they violate constitutional rights.

The focus of Berg’s anti-initiative worry is Measure 1, an ethics amendment passed last November and derided by Berg as “a bunch of Hollywood money to change North Dakota.”

True, Measure 1 did receive support from folks outside North Dakota, including groups supported by Hollywood stars.

Those financial backers were well known to North Dakotans, 54 percent of whom voted for the measure.

And freedom means the right to associate with fellow Americans across state lines.

Responding to Berg, Dustin Gawrylow, managing director of the North Dakota Watchdog Network, said the citizen initiative process was “the best way to keep legislators honest and in tune with the people.”

After all, without “a way for the people to actually set the rules for lawmakers,” the people would be ruled by . . . the capitol mob.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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