Tag: Trump

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crime and punishment general freedom media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies privacy too much government U.S. Constitution

Unlovely Congress

Craigslist, HR 1865, "FOSTA", Trump, Congress, censorship, liability

If you recently tried to post a personal ad on Craigslist, the popular classified-​ad site, you were in for a shock. Craigslist has suddenly discontinued all personals. You can still sell your used rototiller, but forget about telling the world you’re lost in Louisville looking for love.

The company doesn’t want to be prosecuted for helping people find each other en route to becoming partners in outlawry.

Congress has just passed legislation subjecting site publishers to criminal and civil liability when their users “misuse online personals unlawfully.” The president’s signature is expected. Craigslist doesn’t want all that open-​ended liability. “Any tool or service can be misused,” it observes. 

Indeed. If the principle underlying this law were consistently applied, any good or service that facilitates communication (or other human activity!) would expose providers to liability for any illegal conduct abetted by their products. Would curtain manufacturers be exempt? We all know how bad guys plotting evil pull their curtains. Freedom of speech, freedom of casual encounters, freedom of curtain-​trafficking, it’s all at risk.

What about Congress’s goal of discouraging prostitution? 

Will all U.S. prostitutes now retire?

Not if the last several thousand years are any clue. Especially as other sites follow Craigslist’s lead, prostitutes who had escaped the streets thanks to online means of client-​hunting will tend to return to those streets. If so, neighborhoods less seedy and less dangerous thanks to Craigslist etc. will now tend to reacquire such unlovely qualities.

Thanks to (unlovely) Congress.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies Second Amendment rights tax policy too much government

Was the Line Crossed?

Trump, Congress, budget, 2nd Amendment, guns,

Everybody has a limit, a point after which they reach for the nearest weapon and fire.

Or, in normal politics, withdraw support and go on the attack.

But it is not normal politics right now. 

In mid-​March, a Congressman from Long Island expressed his frustration with the Trump administration by saying, “This is where the Second Amendment comes in, quite frankly, because you know, what if the president was to ignore the courts?”

Days after this pol darkly implied insurrection, attacking gun rights became, on our Democratic Congressman’s end of the spectrum, a cause célèbre. Obviously, there remains a strong tension between politically opposing gun rights and the commonsense acknowledgment of the vital political function of the Second Amendment.* Lines are drawn all over the place.

But last week a very different line was crossed.

Donald Trump signed the latest Omnibus whopper. And a few of the gonzo president’s biggest Internet supporters — including the oddest, anarchist Stefan Molyneux — could take no more. Trump’s fatal flaw, Molyneux stated, “is his desire to shovel the money of the unborn into the Great White Shark maw of the military-​industrial complex.” Molyneux identifies “the largest military budget in human history” as what Trump wanted in exchange for betraying his base.

So, you can see where Mr. Molyneux draws the line of support.

Meanwhile, others are wondering about Trump’s own line on trade policy. With much ballyhoo and bluster, he raised tariffs on steel — and then, quietly, exempted most of America’s steel trading partners.

Crazyman? Or genius? 

The line between those two concepts is notoriously gray.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* In my weekend column I noted that “when the populace is armed sufficiently to realistically repel tyranny, the calculations of self-​interested politicians per what they can get away with changes.” Guns can remain holstered, most of the time.

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Accountability crime and punishment government transparency ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies too much government

Smoke But No Gun

meme, FBI, F.B.I., Clinton, election, Trump, crime, cover up, House Intelligence Committee, FISA

The Republican memo soaking up so much attention paints an ugly picture of a republic gone off the rails — but it should not be mistaken for The Facts.

We have smoke, sure. And the smoke can be seen, not unreasonably, as a sign of … a vast insider conspiracy.

But we have only second-​hand information; the “smoking gun” has yet to be presented.

The House Intelligence Committee Report memo relates to the behavior of the FBI and its use of a dossier prepared by a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele. This operative was hired by Fusion GPS, a political research firm, which was under contract first with a conservative website, The Washington Free Beacon, and then with the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton for President campaign. His assignment was to research an alleged connection between Trump and the Russian government.

Steele dug up some interesting stuff, which would have been more persuasive had not some of it been obviously fabricated (I’m thinking of the infamous Russian prostitution story). The dossier got into the hands of the FBI by a circuitous route* and was used, says the memo, to get FISA warrants to electronically surveil a Trump campaign operative, Carter Page. Tellingly, the FBI never told the FISA court the specific origin of the dossier.

To get to the truth, we need more — the FISA warrants themselves, at the very least. 

There may be a proverbial smoking gun somewhere in this mess. The missing-​then-​discovered text messages of two partisan FBI agents do suggest a conspiratorial mindset.

That being said, let’s not jump to conclusions. Alan Dershowitz is right: a non-​partisan investigation is necessary.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Including Sen. John McCain!

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Accountability crime and punishment general freedom government transparency ideological culture moral hazard national politics & policies Regulating Protest tax policy too much government

Still at Large

IRS, drain the swamp, Trump, Lois Lerner, tax, tax man

Blogger Paul Caron, dean of Pepperdine Law School, still counts the days since we learned that the IRS was blocking applications for nonprofit status from right-​leaning groups at the behest of former IRS honcho Lois Lerner.

Now years later, the agency can still arbitrarily victimize any one of us. Nor have Lerner and other bad guys been brought to justice. Lerner collects a six-​figure pension, instead.

And so, on Day 1699, Caron highlighted Kimberly Strassel’s proposal that President Trump make 2018 “the year of civil-​service reform — a root-​and-​branch overhaul of the government itself. Call it Operation Drain the Swamp.” Exhibit A? The IRS and civil “servants” like “Lois Lerner, the IRS official who used her powers to silence conservative nonprofits.” 

And on Day 1709, Caron called our attention to Lerner’s attempt to suppress a deposition she gave in June “for a civil suit that victims [of IRS targeting] brought in 2013.” Lerner thinks we have no right to know why she felt justified in discriminating against applicants for tax-​exempt status based on their political viewpoint.

Unfortunately, not everyone cares about justice as much as Caron. 

Consider an obtuse Washington Post editorial pretending that the IRS didn’t really target conservative groups. Instead, “conservative groups, their allies in Congress and the IRS itself all bear responsibility” for the appearance otherwise.

And the aftermath.

Uh huh. If only victims of the abuse of power would stop being so indelicate as to object! 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability First Amendment rights general freedom media and media people

Pravda in the Izvestia

Donald, Trump, fake news, Krugman, press, media,

Back in the USSR’s heyday, the joke about the two major newspapers, Pravda (meaning “truth” — and published by the Communist Party) and Izvestia (meaning “news” — and published by the Soviet State), was that “there’s no Truth in the News and no News in the Truth.”

Nowadays, in Trump’s America, we have fake news. And one reason Donald Trump won the presidency was his defiant stance against the “lying press.”

Which is why, when Trump announced, last week, his intent to give out awards to the news media for their top “fake news” stories of 2017, he was playing to his base. This week he announced his picks. It did not exactly bowl everyone over.

Indeed, I am going to skip most of it, noticing only that the press whined a bit and picked at the list on technical grounds, and that Sen. Flake gave Trump some flak.

But Trump’s pick for First Place is worth thinking about.

And the Duranty* goes to … New York Times economist Paul Krugman!

What for? The Nobel Laureate’s insane and unhinged prediction immediately after Trump’s win: “We are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight.”

An embarrassing play for Doomsayer Attention, which has been “trumped” (so to speak) by new record stock market highs.

Of course, a global depression may be in the offing — but it probably won’t be Trump’s fault, and Krugman is totally resistant to acknowledging that dire event’s likely structural causes (debt, Fed policy).

But note: prophecy isn’t “news,” and in announcing the award Trump characterized his win in 2016 as a “landslide.”

So save a Duranty for Trump.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* My term, not a “Newsy” or “Fakesy,” and named, of course, after Walter Duranty, the Times’ Pulitzer Winning Fake News apologist for the Soviet Union and Stalin, back in the 1930s.

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Common Sense

A Revolutionary Turn-around

Trump, Democrats, liberal, anti government, small government, influence, virtue signallng,

Donald J. Trump, 45th President under the Constitution of these United States, may be re-​establishing some constitutional order.

“The president has the power to veto half-​baked legislation,” explains Josh Blackman at the National Review. “If Trump returned a bill to Congress, stating in his message that it failed to include sufficient guidelines, there would be a paradigm shift in Washington, D.C.” And, in recent speeches at the Federalist Society, Blackman notes, administration lawyers appear to be advancing just such a shift:

  1. Congress must no longer delegate legislative power to the executive branch;
  2. Informal “guidance documents” must no longer be used to deprive people of the due process of law; and
  3. The courts’ rubber-​stamping of executive diktats must end.

Couple this agenda with Trump’s just-​in-​office executive order instructing that two old rules be stricken for every new rule concocted, and we could be witnessing an almost-​revolutionary turn-​around here. 

Why is this happening?

Not, I think, because Trump is an originalist or strict constructionist. “Donald Trump did not campaign for president as the guy who would reverse the mostly unbroken, century-​old trend of the executive power assuming more and more power in the face of an increasingly self-​marginalizing Congress,” Matt Welch reminds us over at Reason.

Maybe it is because Trump has been so roundly scorned and rejected and rebelliously opposed by Democrats in general and the far left in particular — including, especially, most major media figures — that the mogul-turned-politician’s many and obvious left-​leaning proclivities have been made … politically useless. His opposition on the left has sent him right … to good policy.

On this issue, anyway.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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