Tag Archives: rights

Surveillance States

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That’s what New York and California are becoming, only instead of using cameras, they want to use our banking institutions.

Visa Inc, Mastercard Inc, and American Express Co should begin tracking gun sales and flagging suspicious purchases to law enforcement, similar to how financial institutions look out for money laundering, the attorneys general of New York and California said.

And

The three leading credit-card companies should take a front-line role in trying to prevent mass shootings and reduce the risk of gun trafficking, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and New York Attorney General Letitia James, both Democrats, said Friday in a letter sent to the companies.

Because honest Americans buying firearms are similar to money launderers: buying guns is inherently suspicious, claim these Progressive-Democrat AGs and their States’ governments.

On the other hand, in pressing for this government-mandated financial institution surveillance, California and New York Attorneys General Rob Bonta and Letitia James (both Progressive-Democrats) wrote,

If tracking MCCs could stop just one mass shooting or derail one gun trafficker aiming to flood the streets with guns, the change would be justified.

Do they mean, for instance, then-US Attorney General Eric Holder’s Operation Fast and Furious, which ran guns to Mexican drug cartels?

Special Master

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The Federal judge, Aileen Cannon—an actual Article III judge, not the magistrate judge who issued the suspect search warrant—overseeing the outcome of the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago has granted the Trump team’s request that Special Master be appointed to sort through the seized documents and determine which should be returned to former President Donald Trump’s possession, and which can be retained by the DoJ.

I have questions.

What deadline was set for DoJ to deliver all of the documents (subject to DoJ’s inevitable appeals, which will only further the slowdown in DoJ’s “investigation,” a slowdown that DoJ claimed would result just from the Special Master’s appointment) following the appointment?

What sanction will be applied when DoJ misses that deadline?

What proof is being required of DoJ that all of the documents its FBI confiscated have been turned over to the Special Master?

What proof is being required of DoJ that it has retained no copies at all of the documents it confiscated?

Cannon also ordered DoJ to stop reviewing and using the seized documents as part of its criminal investigation until the special master can complete a review. What proof is being required of DoJ that it has stopped reviewing and using? Will the documents have to be (provably) held by a third party pending completion of the Special Master’s review?

It also would be illuminating to force DoJ to release its own “filter team” sorting outcome so the rest of us could compare that outcome with the actually unbiased Special Master’s outcome.

Contempt for our Constitution

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President Joe Biden (D) has canceled thousands of dollars of student loan debt with a few swipes of his Executive Order pen. Lay aside the amorality of that, and lay aside, too, the enormous cost of his move.

It’s blatantly illegal.

January 2021…the Department of Education issued a legal memo saying the education secretary “does not have the statutory authority to cancel, compromise, discharge, or forgive, on a blanket or mass basis, principal balances of student loans, and/or to materially modify the repayment amounts or terms thereof.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) Biden didn’t have the power to cancel student debt.

That has to be an act of Congress…the president can’t do it. That’s not even a discussion.

Only the Congress can specify the spending—or lack of spending—that the Federal government engages in. No President can do that unilaterally.

It’s also a cancelation of existing contracts, both without consultation with and acceptance by the contracts’ counterparties, it’s done without compensation to those counterparties. These are Federal loans to the students, though, doesn’t that make the Federal government the counterparty? No. It’s We the People, the taxpayers, who floated these loans and who will lose from their unilateral modification. The Federal government only acted in our name.

It’s what we have an elected legislature for, and a legislature that is the sole source of legislation, and the House of Representatives in particular that is the origin of spending bills.

I’m reminded of the remark made by a future philosopher: I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further.

This is Biden’s Woodrow Wilson-esque contempt for and disregard of our Constitution. That document and statutes that implement it are to be themselves laid aside whenever they’re inconvenient.

Banning on a Maybe

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Dr Drew Montez Clark, a black Republican Conservative running to flip Florida’s Congressional District 20 from Progressive-Democrat to Republican, saw his Twitter account banned the night before the originally scheduled Republican Primary election for the district was scheduled to occur.

Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s CEO, let it happen, probably not directly, but through the corporate culture he inherited from Jack Dorsey, and which he has actively cultivated since becoming CEO.

Clark’s account was restored “hours later,” but the move had already been made, and the night had already passed into that election day.

Agrawal’s excuse—Twitter’s statement—for the cancelation is instructive.

Twitter uses proactive, automated systems to detect content that might violate our rules, part of our work to improve the health of conversations on the service. In the case referenced, our automated system detected a false positive. The account has since been reinstated.

Might violate. Sometime in the future. Our rules. But we’re not saying which one or ones.

Mind you, Clark’s Twitter commentary hadn’t actually violated any of Twitter’s rules; Agrawal’s excuse statement makes that clear. But it might, later, violate some as yet carefully unnamed rule(s), so Agrawal let it be taken down preemptively by one of his bots. Or by one of his humans, and he’s hiding behind that bot. Thinking we’re too stupid to understand that his bots are programmed by his human employees.

Fortunately, in this specific case, Agrawal’s Twitter…misbehavior…had no effect, as Clark was running unopposed, and his primary wound up being canceled.

But wait until the November election, when Clark is actively facing the Progressive-Democratic Party incumbent. Agrawal already is on record as saying his Twitter will interfere with Twitter accounts of those of whom he disapproves.

Turley is Right

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He’s also wrong. Jonathan Turley, Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law at George Washington University, in his op-ed regarding AG Merrick Garland’s dishonest (my term) leaks about the DoJ/FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago wrote, in part,

Someone is clearly lying. The Trump Team said that it was cooperating and would have given access to the government if it raised further objections. The Justice Department has clearly indicated that time was of the essence to justify this unprecedented raid on the home of a former president. Yet, Attorney General Merrick Garland reportedly waited for weeks to sign off on the application for a warrant and the FBI then waited a weekend to execute that warrant. It is difficult to understand why such communications could not be released in a redacted affidavit while protecting more sensitive sections.

Someone clearly is lying. One of the someones is empirically demonstrated to be Merrick Garland. Time plainly was not of the essence with those blatant, carefully considered delays in getting the warrant and then in actually executing it.

Whether Trump is also lying—both could be; press pontifications notwithstanding, this is not an either/or situation—could be just as empirically demonstrated: release the affidavit, wholly unredacted. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart surely has a copy in the court records that he could release should Garland continue to be intractable. That Trump is calling for the affidavit’s unredacted release is indicative of whether he’s lying. That Garland is resisting the affidavit’s release, even in redacted form, also is indicative of whether Trump is lying.

But Turley also is wrong.  [R]elease[]…a redacted affidavit while protecting more sensitive sections.

There are no “more sensitive” sections in the affidavit. There are no serious investigations that could be compromised by release of the unredacted affidavit. None in progress by an FBI that routinely lied to the FISA courts to get secret warrants. None by an FBI that falsifies evidence in pursuit of warrants. None by an FBI that colluded in the manufacture of a Russia collusion hoax by trading on a fake dossier. None by an FBI that attempted entrapment by faking a kidnap-the-Governor case.