Monthly Archives: July 2022

Is a PRC-Style Surveillance State Coming to San Francisco?

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Newly installed San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins wants to empower the city’s police to peer over private citizens’ shoulders and watch in, real-time, any private security cameras those citizens might have.

San Francisco’s new district attorney Brooke Jenkins proposed rules that would allow the police department to tap into privately owned security cameras and camera networks to live monitor “significant events with public safety concerns” and ongoing felony or misdemeanor violations.
Additionally, the ordinance would allow police to “gather and review historical video footage for the purposes of conducting a criminal investigation.”

It may be that Jenkins (who pushed hard for Chesa Boudin’s recall and then enthusiastically accepted his job, just as if there was no conflict of interest there) is no better than Boudin, albeit for different reasons than Boudin.

Is the Iron Curtain Come to California?

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It seems that the University of California Los Angeles has decided to move from college’s PAC-12 Conference to the Big 10 Conference, effective with the 2024 academic/athletic year.

It seems also that California’s Governor Gavin Newsom (D) is unhappy about the alma mater of Lew Alcindor, later becoming the NBA great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, joining the exodus from the State, if only functionally and not physically.

Nobody said, “Mother may I?” to Newsom, and that angrifies him as much as UCLA’s decision to go out from a West Coast conference to a more economically sound area of our nation.

I read about it (is how I found out). No big deal. I’m the governor of the state of California. But maybe a bigger deal is that I’m the chair of the UC Board of Regents. I read about it. Is it a good idea? Did we have a chance to discuss the merits (of the decision)? I’m not aware anyone did. So it was done in isolation. It was done without regental oversight or support. It was done without any consideration to my knowledge.

Now, it may be that there is/was a contractual obligation for UCLA to advise the Board of Regents of the school’s discussions and intentions. However, Newsom didn’t mention any of that in his plaint—only that His Nibs wasn’t consulted.

Regarding those more economically sound areas of our nation—in the new era of Name, Image, and Likeness requirements that allow college athletes to personally profit form the use of their NIL material—here is, UCLA’s Athletic Director Martin Jarmond:

…the move was mostly about increasing “exposure” in the NIL era. By opening the school up to potentially more nationally televised games and East Coast markets, Jarmond says they can now provide an enhanced opportunity for student-athletes to find “their voice and their brand and what’s important to them.”

But not so fast: His Nibs is looking for ways to block the move.

Trust me when I say this: We are not going to be looking into. We are already looking into it within (and have been) minutes after reading about this in the newspaper.

No veiled threat there….

Tax Compliance and Pressure

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This time, pressure on another nation to comply with a global minimum tax regime. The Biden administration is unhappy with Hungary for standing in the way of the EU’s agreeing a global (or at least Western World) regime that would contain a minimum tax level. That minimum level was designed to eliminate tax rate competition among nations.

On Friday the Treasury said the US is withdrawing from a 1979 bilateral tax treaty with Hungary.

Eliminating that nearly 45 year agreement actually is a boon to Hungary, though, rather than pressure, since Yellen and the Biden administration have withdrawn a tool for pressuring that nation.

Never mind that pressuring Hungary on minimum tax compliance is economically idiotic—the race to the bottom of tax rates is a race all nations should be striving to win. Or at least those nations that believe their own citizens aren’t drooling imbeciles and actually can make their own decisions concerning what to do with the money lower tax rates would leave in their hands rather than being forced to give their money into the hands of remote bureau- and technocrats.

A Lawless DA

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Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon doesn’t like California’s Three Strikes law, which requires prosecutors to include in their charging documents prior felony convictions—which on conviction for the current crime can seriously extend the penalty for that crime. Pursuant to his dislike, Gascon has refused to charge those prior felonies, and he’s ordered the prosecutors in his office to refuse, also.

Subsequent to implementing that practice, Gascon was ordered by the relevant California State district court to cut that out and to charge in accordance to the Three Strikes law. He appealed and lost at the appellate level. He’s still refusing to charge under the law, and now under two court orders, and he’s appealing the whole thing to the State’s Supreme Court.

Gascon’s rationale?

Gascon on Thursday called the appellate court’s decision “a dangerous precedent” and argued that it amounted to “taking the charging decision out of a prosecutor’s hands.”
“The Three Strikes law imposes Draconian penalties on defendants who were previously convicted of certain prior felonies[.]”

Say Gascon is right on both of those—the charging decision has been taken from the prosecutor, and the Three Strikes law leads to draconian penalties. That’s what the law requires, for good or ill. Gascon’s beef is with the political arms of California’s government; he doesn’t get to simply ignore laws of which he personally disapproves. His role as a District Attorney is to prosecute defendants within the bounds, and according to the requirements, of the law.

The recall of George Gascon must proceed to a successful end, so the good citizens of California can be rid of a prosecutor who doesn’t believe in law or in rule of law.

The Opposite of Courage

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In a Just the News article centered on George Washington University Law Professor, and holder of the university’s Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law, Jonathan Turley’s view that four Border Patrol agents have defamation and denial of due process cases (the four agents face administrative punishments even though the Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Professional Responsibility investigation found they’d done nothing wrong), JtN quoted National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd as saying,

…the president of the United States said that these individuals would pay, and the moment he said that, those investigators had no choice but to find some sort of fault—whether it was criminal or administrative.

On that I must disagree. There’s no doubt the “investigators” might have felt pressure to find a fault, but they also without doubt were not forced to do so. The most pressure that could have been applied would have been to cancel their jobs.

It would have taken a measure of courage to resist the pressure. Choosing their jobs, assuming such a threat was made or implied, over doing the right thing, however, took no courage.

In choosing between doing a right thing and doing a wrong thing, the opposite of courage is cowardice.