Tag: Dianne Feinstein

Categories
government transparency ideological culture national politics & policies

Last Week’s Least Credible Answer

Diane Feinstein, Kavenaugh, Supreme Court

So, who was lying, last week, at America’s big show trial — er, Senate Judiciary Committee hearing?

Professor Christine Blasey Ford or Judge Brett Kavanaugh?

Many Americans took sides. I cannot. Both said believable as well as scarcely believable things, but I’m with that minority who admits not to know what to believe.

Except for one thing: I am pretty sure I know who told the biggest whopper.

Senator Dianne Feinstein.

Democratic senators, especially Kamala Harris (D‑Calif.), repeatedly pressured Kavanaugh to himself demand an FBI investigation to clear his name. It all seemed Orwellian: to make the accused insist on an investigation into allegations he had denied. It was also odd, considering, as Kavanaugh reminded his inquisitors, that he had repeatedly accepted any investigation the committee desired.

They just wanted him to demand it.

All of which is nuts, since the Committee possesses subpeona power, and can do an investigation itself.

But the weirdest aspect? The FBI had already checked Kavanaugh’s background, had performed an official investigation. But since Senator Feinstein had not tipped the agency off to Professor Ford’s confidential accusation — had effectively sat on the letter — the FBI hadn’t covered that precise avenue of inquiry.

And then, after the hearings were nearly over … the leak. And the bouhaha.

When asked whether she leaked Ford’s epistle, Feinstein said No. When asked if her staff did, she said she … hadn’t asked them.

Oh, come on.

Not as believable as either Ford or Kavanaugh.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

PDF for printing

 

Categories
Accountability First Amendment rights folly media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies too much government U.S. Constitution

Our Royals Are Not Amused

Dianne Feinstein, First Amendment, free speech, censorship

“You created these platforms,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D‑CA) informed the top legal minds at Facebook, Twitter, and Google, “and now they’re being misused.”

“And you have to be the ones who do something about it — or we will.”

Take that as a threat.

But also take it as the grand moment when the Establishment showed its hand.

Consider: Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (a Google product) are “media platforms.” So are books, libraries, newspapers and newsstands. Imagine being a king right after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Very quickly, the world changed. 

People thought differently. And they began demanding change from government. The sovereigns had to make room for subjects-turned-citizens.

Royalty and aristocracy did try to regulate the new platforms of information and opinion. Censorship was all-​too-​common. The rulers killed upstarts for writing the wrong things, saying the wrong things.

So, which side would you be on, Mrs. Feinstein?

That is Scott Shackford’s basic take on this. I’m with him.

I just wish to expand: in my lifetime the media platforms of newspapers and television were regulated. Heavily. Mergers and business purchases were subject to government permission; the electromagnetic spectrum was licensed rather than treated as private property, and the actual content of radio and TV shows were regulated by the FCC.

And the Feinsteins of Washington got awfully secure in their positions. Had the regulation of American media done its trick?

Enter new media, uncorking the bottle of opinion.

No wonder the Establishment is scared.

We shouldn’t let them regulate political content on the Internet. Demand, instead, the opposite: a complete repeal of the regulation of business management — and non-​criminal content regulation — of all media platforms

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
ideological culture Second Amendment rights

The Gun Anti-Fetish

Would-​be gun-​grabbers like Sen. Dianne Feinstein and CNN’s Piers Morgan don’t just hate and fear all guns. They fear some scary-​looking guns more than others, and keep bringing them up even when not appropriate.

Take America’s most popular rifle. After every horrific mass shooting Feinstein and Morgan call for banning (or at least heavily regulating) these “assault weapons.”

Following the naval yard shooting the other day, Feinstein pronounced, “There are reports the killer was armed with an AR-​15, a shotgun and a semiautomatic pistol when he stormed an American military installation in the nation’s capital and took at least 12 innocent lives. This is one more event to add to the litany of massacres that occur when a deranged person or grievance killer is able to obtain multiple weapons — including a military-​style assault rifle — and kill many people in a short amount of time. When will enough be enough?”

It turned out that the killer brought only a shotgun to the massacre — a weapon endorsed by our current Vice President, as Jacob Sullum reminds us — and used two handguns acquired during the spree. No AR-​15 in evidence.

Sullum also notes that CNN justified Morgan’s post-​naval-​yard-​shooting anti-​AR-​15 diatribe in an off-​hand way, as if facts didn’t matter.

So, what matters?

The taboo. The anti-fetish, the magical thing reviled — the obsession with the scary look of an evil gun, over its actual use.

Why?

For lots of politically-​centered people, policy is more about symbolism than anything else. For such folks, talk of principles or about overall crime statistics or unintended effects means nothing. To understand their notions, bring in the anthropologists.

Or the shamans.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.