Tag Archives: ethics

Of What are the Senate Progressives So Afraid?

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Or is it that, since they already know all the answers, they have no need for actual facts or discussion of them?

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D, VT) has decided that the massive immigration overhaul bill on which the Gang of Eight are working behind locked doors, only deserves a single hearing before the Democrats vote it up and send it to the House.

Shades of Obamacare.  How’s that working out for us?

Plainly, since Democrats are so embarrassed by this pending legislation that they don’t want it discussed in public in any serious form, it’s a bad bill and needs to be voted down.

Another Victory over Big Government

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Here’s the long and the short of it, as summarized in The Wall Street Journal:

A federal judge this week struck down a controversial set of laws allowing the Federal Bureau of Investigation to seek people’s records without a court’s approval, saying the strict secrecy orders demanded by the laws are not constitutional.

US District Judge Susan Illston (Northern District of California) ordered the government to stop sending national security letters or to stop trying to enforce gag orders related to them, but she stayed her order pending the government’s appeal.

Of course, it’ll go to the 9th Circuit, which means it will go on to the Supreme Court, so the fight isn’t over.  But this is an excellent start.

Illston’s opinion decried these violations of Americans’ individual freedom:

[The] pervasive use of nondisclosure orders…creates too large a danger that speech is being unnecessarily restricted.

She added [emphasis added]:

[T]he statute impermissibly attempts to circumscribe a court’s ability to review the necessity of nondisclosure orders.  …the NSL nondisclosure provisions significantly infringe on speech regarding controversial government powers.  …  As written, the statute expressly limits a court’s powers to modify or set aside a nondisclosure order to [certain] situations….  The statute’s intent…is incompatible with the court’s duty to searchingly test restrictions on speech.

There are two problems with these letters.  One is that they allow searches without a court’s warrant.  The FBI can use them to search for phone data and for financial and electronic records, and all the FBI agent needs is his Field Office Special Agent in Charge to say it’s all jake.  This is a clear violation of our 4th Amendment.

The other problem worsens this exponentially: the FBI can require (or could before Illston’s ruling) the recipient of the letter to keep quiet about his receipt—denying the owner of the records any opportunity to respond to the search before it happens.  This also denies two critical aspects of the 1st Amendment: that right to speak of receipt and the duty of a court to adjudicate any allegation of a 1st Amendment violation.

Illston’s ruling can be read here.

The US Flag Is Litter?

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An Alabama home owners association thinks so.  This is an image of the letter sent to residents of a condo unit (the unit is owned by one of the resident’s parents).

In case it’s hard to read in this post, the typed part of the letter reads

Resident,
It has come to our attention that you have items in plain sight that are not to be visible from the parking lot by rules and guidelines stated in the home owners association bylaws.  Please remove the following listed item(s) as soon as possible to keep the community as tidy as possible.

The hand written part reads

Your flag attached to the stairs has to be removed ASAP!

When the recipients of this clean-up letter posted it on a number of veteran advocacy Facebook pages, the resulting uproar included a flood of communications to the home owners association president and condo property manager, Carol Coffey, objecting vociferously to the demand and to the implication that the American flag is just litter to be swept away.

In fact, such association bylaws that ban the US flag from public display on (condo owners’, for instance) private property are a violation of Federal law [emphasis in the original; a copy of the law can be seen here or here]:

A condominium association, cooperative association, or residential real estate management association may not adopt or enforce any policy, or enter into any agreement, that would restrict or prevent a member of the association from displaying the flag of the United States on residential property within the association with respect to which such member has a separate ownership interest or a right to exclusive possession or use.

Coffey had this to say to justify her clean-up letter:

I served in Afghanistan, I served in Iraq, and I served in Kuwait.  I am not anti-veteran, and I am not a communist[.]

And

In order to maintain the integrity of that asset [the condominium complex], we have certain rules because people could put anything out here if we let them.

Because, she says, the association bylaws are in place to maintain property value, and naturally, the American flag is just any old thing, and it depresses property values.  Coffey also claimed that she realizes there are laws that protect the right to fly the American flag, but said those are for private property and this condo was not private property, because the condos are owned by a community of people—then she said that the “community of people” who own this particular condo consists of the parents of one of the residents, as noted above.

Coffey had this whine, also:

I think they are persecuting us without knowing all the facts.  And here’s one thing that really bothers me…this person got the letter from our management team and instead of coming to the board and expressing his concern, he went and posted something on two or three veteran’s sites without all the information and without us knowing anything about it, and now we’re being threatened—that’s not right.

That’s valid as far as it goes; she shouldn’t be getting threatened.  But.  In most (all?) other legal matters, a fundamental doctrine is that ignorance of the law is no excuse.  And she’s already said she knew the law; it wasn’t a matter of her not “knowing anything about it.”  She sent her clean-up letter anyway.

Since she already knew her letter was…invalid…it’s also hard to see what good spending time protesting to her about her letter would have done, especially since that time would have violated her ASAP demand.

The right answer is to stop “considering” waivers, but to correct her homeowners association bylaws so as both to not conflict with Federal law and separately to recognize that our flag, in its own right, is a proper item to display.

A Foreign Tax on American Investors in America

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The European Commission earlier this month proposed a new financial-transaction tax for 11 participating states, including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Austria, Slovenia, Portugal, Greece, Slovakia, and Estonia.  These produce roughly two-thirds of the EU’s economy.

It’s an enormous tax, too, in a market where spreads are on the order of pennies, even fractions of pennies: 0.1% for trades in bonds and shares, and 0.01% for derivatives transactions, and it would apply to both buyers and sellers

as long as either of them is based in one of the participating states, or if the financial instrument being traded was issued in any of these countries.

As damaging as this tax is, they’re not done.  The tax is intended to suppress trading:

[The European Commission’s] own impact assessment estimates that the number and volume of trades in shares and bonds could drop by around 15%, while derivatives transactions may drop by as much as 75%.

Never mind that this activity—especially its volume—contributes to the liquidity of the instruments and so contributes to holding down their price to buyers.  Which facilitates more general investing in companies—their source of funds for R&D, plant expansion, even hiring.

But wait, there’s more: they’re claiming the right to tax folks outside their jurisdiction—we Americans, investing here in the US, for example, as a result of those domiciliary and passing-through aspects.

This tax will hurt us: Paul Jiganti, Managing Director of Market Structure and Routing Strategy at TD Ameritrade Holding Corp, estimates that

a typical [American] customer who pays $9.99 to buy 1,000 shares priced around $35 apiece could see that charge rise sevenfold, to around $70 on the trade.

Which will have the EU’s desired outcome.  Jiganti was caught by surprise by all of this:

To be honest, I thought that cooler heads would prevail.  I thought the US government would take care of it before it really became an issue.

For all of Treasury’s sharp words about the tax, though, don’t expect any real action.  President Barack Obama, Treasury’s boss, has never met a tax he didn’t like.  He’s not going to oppose this one in any meaningful way.

What’s Being Kept Hidden?—Update

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In response to Senate Republicans holding up his SecDEf nominee’s confirmation yesterday, Obama released (at least part of) his answer.

Obama didn’t make any phone calls the night of the Sept 11 attacks on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, the White House said in a letter to Congress released Thursday.

“During the entire attack, the president of the United States never picked up the phone to put the weight of his office in the mix,” said Senator Lindsey Graham (R, SC).

He didn’t talk to anyone in Libya, he didn’t talk to his own Secretary of State, he talked to no one in his own defense establishment—not his Secretary, not any of his generals.

Ann Althouse speculates on why he’s tried to keep all of this hidden.

I think he is ashamed. Here’s what I’ve been assuming happened: It looked like our people were overwhelmed and doomed, so there was shock, sadness, and acceptance.  But then the fight went on for 7 or 8 hours.  The White House folk decided there was nothing to do but accept the inevitable, and then they witnessed a valiant fight which they had done nothing to support.  It was always too late to help.  It was too late after one hour, then too late after 2 hours, then too late after 3 hours….  When were these people going to die already? After that was all over, how do you explain what you did?

It’s not only shameful for the man, this timidity, this defeatist attitude, if accurate, is shameful for our country.  And it’s a reason our enemies—Iran, northern Korea, the People’s Republic of China, Russia—so plainly don’t take anything our government says seriously.