Tag Archives: ethics

A Tacit Admission?

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Attorney General Merrick Garland (D) has filed his appeal (to the 11th Circuit) of the Federal district judge’s order blocking the DoJ from using certain documents seized in the DoJ’s Mar-a-Lago raid in its criminal investigation. That order parallels the judge’s appointment of a Special Master to oversee and sort through all of the seized documents. Garland’s appeal reads, in pertinent part,

Although the government believes the district court fundamentally erred in appointing a special master and granting injunctive relief, the government seeks to stay only the portions of the order causing the most serious and immediate harm to the government and the public by (1) restricting the government’s review and use of records bearing classification markings and (2) requiring the government to disclose those records for a special-master review process[.]

[R]estricting the government’s review and use of records bearing classification markings.

Garland no longer is willy-nilly calling the documents classified. Might this be his tacit admission that the documents aren’t actually classified?

Why does Garland not want them “disclosed” to the Special Master? The judge’s order here was for more than mere disclosure, too; she ordered the documents delivered to the Special Master for the explicit purpose of the Master’s assessment of whether they are classified. Why is Garland so terrified of an independent review, instead of his “trust me” position?

A tacit switch: the judge ordered the documents turned over to the Master, but Garland’s appeal refers only to disclosing the docs to the Master. Is Garland planning on continuing to refuse to turn them over if the Circuit court rejects his appeal of disclosure?

Progressive-Democratic Party Censorship

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There is a bill, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, wending its way through the Senate that’s intended to let local news outlets band together to get enough scale to negotiate with Big Tech social media on a less uneven footing for payment from those outlets for their use of content that is taken by those social media and republished.

Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) proposed an amendment that would plainly and explicitly prohibit[] payment negotiations from including discussion of content moderation—i.e., that would bar Big Tech from engaging in its penchant for censorship during payment negotiations. Cruz’ amendment wouldn’t even ban content moderation altogether, just during those content payment talks.

The Progressive-Democratic Party Senators voted it down. They blocked even this limited ban on Big Tech censorship.

Senator John Kennedy (R, LA), even as he is a sponsor of the basic bill, is on the right track.

Mr Kennedy said in a statement that he doesn’t understand why Democrats have a problem with the Cruz amendment.

­The Progressive-Democrats want to continue censoring the information us average Americans will be permitted to have. That’s why they have a problem with the Cruz amendment.

Senator Amy Klobuchar (D, MN) has a counter, she claims.

Ms Klobuchar countered that the bill already contained several protections to make sure it is content-neutral and doesn’t allow discrimination.

This is disingenuous. Were she serious about content neutrality—were she serious about no censorship—Klobuchar wouldn’t be opposed to a clear, simple ban on that along with, or replacing, her claimed protections.

On Aid to Ukraine

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Even in Reluctant Germany, the government’s loyal opposition and a number of incumbent officials are calling for Germany to get out of the way and send tanks to Ukraine so that nation can further, and more rapidly, exploit their current battlefield gains and continue driving the barbarian back out.

But. But, but, but.

“We are simply not going to be the first to send Western-made tanks…” a senior German government official said.

I’m reminded of two lines. One is by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, as he channels Sallah: Russians. Very dangerous. You go first.

The other might be by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, sort of channeling Conan: Crush our enemies, see them driven before us, and listen to the lamentation of the women. Except that Zelenskyy is quite a bit more gentile than that, and he’d eschew the lamentation part. That’s what the barbarian from the east does. Zelenskyy, instead, would listen to the cheers of the women.

The IRS as Political Tool

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It’s not the tax collection agency it’s made out to be. We all recall, for instance, the IRS’ Lois Lerner-run Exempt Organizations Unit targeting Conservative tax-exempt organizations, slow-walking or outright denying those organizations tax-exempt status purely for political reasons, without consideration of how well they met statutory criteria for the status.

It’s also been well-publicized that the IRS has been funded for next year to hire 87,000 agents for the ostensible purpose of increasing audits of the Evil Rich, and the agency is buying ammunition and hiring agents who are willing to use lethal force in the course of their “duties.”

This is not unique to the Progressive-Democrat administrations of ex-President Barack Obama and current President Joe Biden. As far back as Lyndon Johnson’s (D) and Richard Nixon’s (R) administrations, the IRS was used to interfere with government-disapproved organizations and citizens.

Today’s IRS is just as bad across a range of…matters.

  • The IRS has disproportionately audited poorer Americans in recent years
  • IRS auditing of wealthier Americans has been declining
  • Nonpartisan projections have found increased audits under the Biden plan will heavily impact middle- and working-class Americans
  • IRS customer service has been declining, and was rated “horrendous” by its own internal watchdog
  • IRS employees have egregiously leaked or failed to protect the privacy of taxpayers’ data
  • Amid backlogs and leaks, IRS paid tax relief to dead taxpayer, prisoners on death row

The solution to this isn’t more legislation for the IRS to ignore, with or without the tacit approval of the administration then in power. IRS history and current behavior means the agency needs to be vastly shrunk.

But shrinking the IRS would be difficult as a practical matter with the current byzantine and heavily biased against some economic strata Federal tax code. IRS size and performance, then, is an argument for greatly simplifying our tax code.

Eliminate the business revenue-centric taxes. Businesses don’t pay much of those taxes, anyway; their customers pay the taxes in the form of higher prices and reduced innovation rates, and business employees and potential employees pay the taxes in the form of slower wage increases and lessened hirings.

Eliminate the personal income tax as currently constructed and have only a single, flat tax rate charged on all income from any source. Do away with subsidies, credits, exemptions, social engineering gerrymandering altogether. The new 1040 could be reduced to the current taxpayer identifying information, a line for totting up all income and reporting the total, a line for calculating the [10%] tax on that total as the total tax due, and a line for the taxpayer’s [sic] signature.

That could fit on a postcard, but with the personally identifying and income data present, I wouldn’t recommend anything less than a sealed envelope. Such a tax regime, though, would allow an IRS-like function to exist with about 14 employees (I exaggerate, but not by much).

Tough to be a political tool with that reduced function and personnel complement, too.

“Misunderstanding” of the Left

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A number of credit card companies, on the demand of the Federal government as washed through the International Standards Organization, are going to start explicitly listing gun sales by lawful gun stores to individual average Americans. Among those credit card companies are Visa, Mastercard, and AmEx.

The Federal government now is going to track us average Americans and build a database of who among us has a firearm.

For what purpose?

…gun control advocates who argue that a separate category for gun store sales will help track suspicious quantities of firearm sales that could potentially lead to a mass shooting.

Because buying a firearm is ipso facto suspicious under the ideology of the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party. But wait—suspicious quantities—what’s wrong with that? This is the camel’s nose. It won’t be long before the Feds decide that one is a suspicious number of firearms to buy. And then one is a suspicious number of firearms to own.

The concern of us average Americans is justified by this misleading claim by New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) as he demonstrates his “misunderstanding” of the tracking.

When you buy an airline ticket or pay for your groceries, your credit card company has a special code for those retailers. It’s just common sense that we have the same policies in place for gun and ammunition stores[.]

Buying “guns and ammunition” is an explicitly protected activity under our Constitution. Buying firearms—keeping and bearing Arms—is an entirely unique activity for us average Americans, quite apart from the ordinary, day to day, activity of grocery buying, or the process of buying a travel ticket. There is no reason to track Americans going about our Constitutionally protected behaviors.

Other than identifying who has firearms for further Progressive-Democrat “control.” This is another effort of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s desired surveillance state.