Category Archives: rights

FISA Revamp

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Congress may be moving to revamp the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which among other things, creates a secret Federal court that empirically allows the Federal government to spy on American citizens in the United States—one of whom was a representative of citizens of Illinois whom they had elected to Congress—without a warrant.

[Congressman Austin, R-GA] Scott said lawmakers on the committee want to address who in government can query the database, who can be targeted and who must sign off on such warrantless surveillance. He also suggested there is some support for adding lawyers to the secretive process to help defend the rights of Americans who are being surveilled without their knowledge.

The problem with those first three…suggestions…is that there already are limits on who can query, who can be targeted, and who must sign off, and each of those limits have been routinely violated by FBI and intelligence personnel. There’s no reason to believe that new limits won’t similarly be blithely ignored.

The problem with that last is even larger: the secret process still would be secret, the lawyers supposedly defending the targeted Americans’ rights would be secret, they would be appointed by the same government that has been abusing FISA surveillance powers right along, and there would be no way for us American citizens to assess the skill with which those “defense” lawyers defend, or even their level of zeal.

It’s promising that there is finally a recognition that the FISA process is flawed in some way.

However, what’s truly required is to abolish altogether the Star Chamber that is the secret FISA Court. Scott made the case for abolishment—although he didn’t intend that—when he told JtN that there was clear evidence that the law’s past safeguards have been breached by the FBI and intel agencies. Given that, there’s no reason to believe those FBI and intel agency personnel won’t “breach” any new safeguards, also.

Juice and Squeeze

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In Wednesday’s WSJ Letters Tirien Steinbach, Stanford Law School’s Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, sought to defend her own behavior in the disruption that prevented an invited guest from speaking at all.

She insisted on asking a key question:

We have to…ask ourselves: Is the juice worth the squeeze?

Steinbach blew up her own case with that question, which she also put to the invited guest speaker as she participated in her school’s censorship and cancelation of his speaking.

Free speech juice always and everywhere is worth the squeeze. We have sufficient laws, already, to deal with actual incitement to riot, actual creation of panic in stressful situations, slander, and so on.

The correct and only legitimate answer to speech to which someone or some group objects is speech by that someone or group, or a perhaps more articulate supporter, to contradict or refute the prior.

That Steinbach is oblivious to this demonstrates her unfitness for her role on Stanford’s management team, even her unfitness to retain such licenses to practice law as she might have.

Trademark Whining

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Jack Daniels has a trademark beef in front of the Supreme Court.

Phoenix-based VIP Products markets dozens of novelty pet products, including the 18-inch “Bad Spaniels” vinyl toy shaped like a liquor bottle, advertised on its website as “Silly and Fun For Everyone!”

Jack Daniels summarized its beef:

Jack Daniel’s loves dogs and appreciates a good joke as much as anyone. But Jack Daniel’s likes its customers even more, and doesn’t want them confused or associating its fine whiskey with dog poop[.]

This is what a Jack Daniels whiskey bottle looks like:

This is what VIP’s Bad Spaniel chew toy looks like:

Jack Daniels thinks that toy, a dog’s plastic chew toy, looks too much like its own liquor bottles and that its customers would be confused.

It’s interesting and amusing—and maybe insulting its customers—that Jack Daniels thinks its customers would be so easily confused between a liquor bottle and a dog’s chew toy.

Illinois and the 2nd Amendment

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In a Just the News article concerning an Illinois district judge’s impending order declaring unconstitutional that State’s Progressive-Democratic Party-run government ban on a broad range of firearms and the requirement for citizens to register with that government those firearms they already possess, there’s this closing paragraph.

In federal court, four cases consolidated in the Southern District of Illinois have a hearing set for April 12. The state filed its response to a motion for a preliminary injunction Thursday arguing the ban addresses dangerous and unusual weapons the Founders of the US Constitution couldnt imagine in the 18th Century. Plaintiffs argue the law violates the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

Which leads me to ask: what would be more dangerous than privately owned artillery and sea-going combat ships? Yet those weapons were privately owned and contributed heavily to the war effort in our Revolution against another government that was, among other things, seeking to disarm us.

For the benefit of those Illinois Progressive-Democrats, here is the 2nd Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Those personages should note carefully that there are no caveats in that short sentence. In particular, there is no caveat for “Arms of which Government disapproves from time to time.”

Gun Control and Racism

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Jacob Gershwin opened his Wall Street Journal piece on gun control with this lede:

Historical, racist gun laws are taking on new relevance in legal battles over modern-day gun regulations, following a Supreme Court ruling that expanded the right to bear arms.

He followed up [emphasis added]:

In the 1700s and 1800s, states across the country passed laws to keep guns out of the hands of slaves, free Black people, Native Americans and Catholics. Such discriminatory gun restrictions would be unconstitutional today, but they have entered the gun-rights debate as judges look to apply the Supreme Court’s decision last June that said gun restrictions must be anchored in historical traditions.

Now, despicably, many Federal and State government “lawyers” are claiming that those old, ugly, and by-design racist and anti-religion—those Evil Catholics—are part of that historical tradition as they continue their efforts to disarm all of us average Americans, in toto. US prosecutors in front of an appellate court:

They [[those racist gun control laws] nevertheless show that the Framers understood that legislatures could make such judgments to categorically disarm groups of people deemed to be dangerous.

Dangerous groups of Americans like those of us who might want to demur from Government behaviors, behaviors like the IRS targeting conservative American political groups, like the Department of Justice targeting mothers disputing with local school boards as domestic terrorists, like the FBI targeting traditional Catholics (those folks again…) as right-wing extremists and “investigating” them.

What prosecutors like those so carefully ignore is that that prior set of laws, that prior “tradition,” was wholly erased from the American body politic—the honest body politic—by the Civil War, the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendments, and the recognition that all Americans are equal under American law—under all American laws.

For those persecutors prosecutors to argue that those racist gun control laws are somehow still part of our historical traditions is for them to ignore critical parts of gun control law history: the part that had post-Civil War South and too many jurisdictions in the North enacting gun control laws explicitly to disarm and keep unarmed and helpless black Americans—freed and newly freed—along with their white supporters against depredations, that ranged from rape through lynching, at the hands of racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists.

Those prosecutors are showing their own invidious racist bent.