Category Archives: ethics

Reforming FISA

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One outcome of Special Counsel John Durham’s testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committee is an apparently re-energized, at least by many in the Republican caucus and a few Progressive-Democrats, to reform The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. That’s all to the good, to the extent any serious reform actually occurs.

The most important reform of this Act, though, is the complete elimination of the secret Star Chamber that is the FISA Court. Federal Judges have long known how to seal records that legitimately don’t belong in the public’s eye, at least in the moment. The court’s proceedings, though, are, and should be, public.

So it must be for any sort of FISA-related court. Relevant records can be sealed—primarily the warrants FBI agents are seeking, which process is old hat for any legitimate Article III court, as well as State courts—until the warrants are executed. But this FBI has demonstrated that it will openly lie to the FISA court and that it will fabricate evidence in order to get their warrants. That’s on the FBI. What’s on the FISA court judges is their blithe acceptance of further FBI blandishments after the FBI had been caught out in its dishonesty. That makes the FISA court complicit in the dishonesty.

That badly wants the elimination of the secret court. There is no alternative; there must be no secret courts in the United States.

Full stop.

It’s Ours By Right, Dammit!

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No Labels is looking hard at running their own President/Vice President ticket for the 2024 election. The Progressive-Democratic Party is in fury over the possibility, to the extent that its Arizona arm is going to court to try to stop No Labels from registering its candidates in that State.

It [the Arizona chapter of the Progressive-Democratic Party] filed a lawsuit in state court against No Labels alleging that the signatures we collected and the petition approved by Arizona’s secretary of state should be thrown out.

Party’s rationale—and they’re absolutely serious:

No Labels’ presence on the ballot could “make it more difficult to elect Democratic Party candidates,” and “require [the party] to expend and divert additional funds and staff time on voter education to accomplish its mission in Arizona.”

It’s Party’s God-given right to have its members elected; they shouldn’t have to compete for voters.

I won’t be surprised when if Party files a subsequent suit to do away with Arizona elections altogether on the grounds that Party shouldn’t have to expend and divert additional funds and staff time on voter education to get its members elected. Just appoint them, and save all that time and waste.

This is what Progressive-Democratic Party one-party rule looks like.

Side note: it’s only the Progressive-Democratic Party that insists on obstructing competing candidates from even competing. Republicans similarly are concerned about what a third party would do to their own candidates’ chances, but Republicans engage only in jawboning against the third party while preparing to compete against the third party’s candidates as enthusiastically as they are against Progressive-Democratic Party candidates.

More Government Intrusion

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Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D, MI) has proposed a new law that would require firearm sellers to

have a compatible gun lock available for every firearm for sale [and it] shall be unlawful for any person to offer a firearm for sale unless the person offers for sale a secure gun storage or safety device that is compatible with the firearm [and a] penalty of not more than $1,000.

This is the Progressive-Democrat politician seeking to dictate what us average Americans must have in our homes and to dictate to our private businesses what they must sell. That latter, especially, is textbook fascism: “private” enterprises may [sic] produce and sell what they wish so long as that production and sale are compatible with government diktats regarding what production and sale are permissible.

Never mind that, per the NRA (that Left-hated 2nd Amendment organization),

Firearm manufacturers already provide a lock with every gun that is sold, and anyone looking for additional gun locks can get them free through Project Childsafe, an industry program that provides free gun locks to anyone who wants one.

The NRA is being generous, though, to suggest that Rep. Tlaib isn’t educated on this topic. No, she’s a highly talented and intelligent politician, well-educated, and a member of the Elite Left. She knows full well what the firearm manufacturers do, and she’s fully conversant with Project Childsafe.

This is just another Government power grab by the Progressive-Democratic Party, as those personages keep trying to chip away at the individual liberties and duties of us average Americans.

We need to keep this sort of thing in mind through the next 17, or so, months. And beyond.

Project Childsafe can be seen here.

More Political Censorship

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Alphabet‘s CEO Sundar Pichai strikes again. Alphabet wholly owns Google (of which Pichai also is CEO), and Google wholly owns YouTube.

Pichai has just engaged—again—in political censorship:

Social media giant YouTube took down an interview of Democrat presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy, Jr, claiming that chemicals in the water are turning kids transgender.

What makes this especially insidious is that Kennedy is a political candidate for the Progressive-Democratic Party’s nomination for President. Pichai is actively putting his thumb on the scale in an American election by censoring one of the candidates. His excuse for this, through his carefully anonymous Google spokesperson, is this:

YouTube “removed a video from the Jordan Peterson channel for violating YouTube‘s general vaccine misinformation policy, which prohibits content that alleges that vaccines cause chronic side effects, outside of rare side effects that are recognized by health authorities.”

Therein lies an additional act of censorship: no one is allowed to question vaccines (which is not what Kennedy was talking about with his allegations of those chemicals, anyway); the science is settled, Damn it!

Pichai objects to open debate and to the correction of false, mis-, or erroneous information by the provision of other information via free discussion and debate. His behavior provides yet another reason to heavily modify, or remove entirely, social media’s Section 230 protections. Social media has gotten too big, become too central to our nation’s public square, to be allowed to continue to abuse that protection.

IRS Misbehavior

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The IRS wants to be the one to figure the taxes owed by us average Americans, and the IRS wants to do the figuring based on the data the IRS claims to have collected on each of us average Americans.

The Inflation Reduction Act, that travesty that too many Republicans actually voted for and that is a source of the present inflationary environment (among a number of economic problems inflicted by the IRA), authorized the IRS to explore the concept of a mechanism that would have the IRS figure our taxes for us.

Specifically, the legislation required a study by an independent third party examining the idea’s feasibility, as well as a report by the IRS for Congress assessing the study, the cost of such a system, and taxpayer opinions based on surveys.

In no way did the IRA authorize the IRS to go ahead and build such a facility. IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel assured the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee that the IRS that he runs, in fact, was not building such a facility.

No decision has been made on moving forward with direct file solution[.]

And

I don’t know yet whether the direct file solution is the right additional menu item to put in place so that taxpayers that prefer to engage that way can do it. What I’d like to do is have the report issued. And then engage in a conversation with the right set of stakeholders and then figure out what the go-forward is.

Aside: No one on the House committee—to whom that last quote was directed—asked Werfel who he thought were the right stakeholders.

It turns out, though, that the IRS has gone ahead and developed precisely that “We’ll Figure Your Taxes For You; Don’t You Worry Your Little Heads About It” facility.

[T]he IRS had been quietly building an actual prototype of direct file before submitting the report to Congress, as The Washington Post first reported in May. The IRS announced its final report one day after the Post‘s revelation. The IRS system will reportedly be available through a pilot program for a small group of taxpayers by January, when the 2024 filing season begins.

The IRS offered this in response to queries:

[T]he IRS told Fox News Digital that the prototype was built only to help with survey data to gauge the opinions of taxpayers on a direct file system.

Sure. Maybe folks might be interested in some beachfront property north of Santa Fe, too.

Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Mike Crapo (R, ID) had this:

This suggests a pre-determined outcome and flies in the face of previous commitments Commissioner Werfel made to publicly consult Congress on a potential free-file solution, and for the IRS to not act without explicit legal authority[.]

What he said. Congress needs to drastically reduce IRS funding to little more than its payroll needs (which do not include the $80 billion (only somewhat reduced by the debt limit deal) appropriated for all those extraneous new IRS “auditor” hires). Since the IRS—with Werfel’s acquiescence, if not active permission—is going to misuse the funds it’s allocated, those funds need to be cut off.

Also: Did Werfel lie to Congress when he said no such a thing was in progress? Or was he merely incompetently oblivious to what was going on in his IRS?