This needs to stop. Now.

Robert Mueller just announced his departure from the Department of Justice.  While doing so, he had this to say about his report:

“If we had had confidence that (Trump) clearly did not commit a crime we would have said so.”

That one sentence shows everything that is wrong about how this ‘investigation’ has been conducted.   Our system of justice is based on the idea one is innocent unless proven guilty beyond credible doubt.  The statement above, however, assumes that unless Mueller’s team could prove Trump didn’t commit a crime, the presumption should be there was some sort of unspecified wrongdoing somewhere.  It is public conviction by insinuation and gossip.

That is a standard of justice none of us would ever want to face.  “Well, your honor, the accused has an alibi and lacks a clear motive, but if we were confident they didn’t kill the victim, we would say so.”   Forcing someone to “prove a negative” is one of the basic logical fallacies.   This latest comment by Mueller is an attempt to revive the dead horse of his report at a time when the circumstances surrounding the start of said report are themselves under increasing scrutiny.  Unbelievable.

As a person, Trump is no saint.  The electorate who put him into office already took that into consideration, and still decided he was a better option than Her Hillariness.  Everything that has transpired since then has been rooted in the fact the Democrats cannot accept that decision.  Nor can they accept the fact their increasingly hysterical efforts to overturn a valid election have failed to bear fruit for going on three years now.  Their behavior shows they are willing to wreck the Republic rather than concede.

And wreck it they still may.  The House Democrats’ flirtation with impeachment proceedings got a boost from a maverick Republican-in-name-only who now publicly agrees with them.  Note carefully, however, that nobody has laid out a specific charge against the president that would justify impeachment.  This is an emotional appeal, not a reasoned argument.  As such, they are spinning up their base.  And to the extent they try to go through with impeachment, they will spin up Trump’s base, who are already convinced the Establishment they rejected in 2016 will never yield power or pursue the real interests of actual Americans.   So with emotions at fever pitch, let’s say the Democrats pass articles of impeachment in the House.  Barring an unexpected revelation, I don’t see the Senate agreeing to convict and remove the president (and, in my opinion, that would be the correct response).  So what happens next?

Let’s all pray we don’t have to find out.  This clown show has gone on far too long already.

The long twilight struggle

Sometime late next year, a young man or woman who was not yet born on September 11, 2001, will raise their right hand and join the U.S. armed forces.  Given the tempo at which those forces have operated the past 17 years, that young person likely will be sent quickly to the Middle East in some capacity.

There, they will form part of the second consecutive generation to fight this “war.”  Unlike my uniformed cohort, they will have no memory of the events that led to them being there.  Nor will they have a concept of a time when the TSA didn’t exist, and the government didn’t conduct constant surveillance.  For them, America has always been at war.

The same will hold true of their contemporaries who stay in civilian life.

So what have we accomplished thus far, at the expense of nearly 7,000 dead and almost $3 trillion?  Very little, it would seem:

…Al Qaeda may be stronger than ever. Far from vanquishing the extremist group and its associated “franchises,” critics say, U.S. policies in the Mideast appear to have encouraged its spread.

What U.S. officials didn’t grasp, said Rita Katz, director of the SITE Intelligence Group, in a recent phone interview, is that Al Qaeda is more than a group of individuals. “It’s an idea, and an idea cannot be destroyed using sophisticated weapons and killing leaders and bombing training camps,” she said.

In fact, a good case can be made that the resilience of jihadi groups in the face of the most technologically sophisticated military force on the planet only underscores the righteousness of their ideas.  In swatting bees with sledgehammers, we’ve only increased the size of the swarm, with no vision of how this is supposed to end:

There is a stunning lack of strategic vision in America today. The range of foreign policy activities, beyond so-called “traditional diplomacy,” extend across military power and include everything from financial aid to information to exchanges of all kinds. These instruments are, however, seemingly applied without synchronization or thoughts about end states. The different bureaucracies often work together only on an ad hoc basis and rarely share collaborative requirements and communications with their respective oversight committees in the Congress.

Our few and feeble attempts to articulate vision have been badly flawed, and rarely considered the cultural and political realities of where we were fighting.  I was in Baghdad when the Bush administration declared our objectives there were a stable, unified, democratic Iraq.  A quick wit in our section soon had those diagrammed with a triangle on a marker board with the caption “pick any two.”

While pursuing this quixotic endeavor abroad, we have also failed to secure our own borders or effectively increase scrutiny of those entering our country.  The 9/11 hijackers covertly but legally entered the United States.  Now we have a veritable open fifth column of Islamists spreading the influence within the country.  Since many young Americans have been conditioned to believe their nation to be a blight on history, it’s difficult to mount an effective ideological defense.

Our continued thrashing about in the world only underscores our nation’s diminishment.  One measure of “just war” — a pillar of Western thought rarely referenced in the general public these days — is whether a conflict results in improved circumstances.  Can anyone say that Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen… or the United States are better off after a generation of warfare?  Is this likely to change when the sons and daughters of the original military force are the ones doing the fighting?

Seal the borders.  Deport the disloyal.  Bring our troops home.  That’s a coherent proposal, and at least has the benefit of not yet having been seriously tried.  Anything short of that is insanity — defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.  That’s no way to honor the memory of those who died 17 years ago… or the tens of thousands of American servicemen dead or disabled since then.

The true fault line

Our political differences as a nation are not defined by a simple Republican-Democrat binary choice.  The real issue is whether the Constitution means what it says regardless what year it is, or whether is can be folded, spindled and mutilated by every generation’s interpretation of the day.  It should not come down to the viewpoints of nine unelected people to determine how our future unfolds.  But since that’s the reality of how our system now works, selecting the right people for that job is paramount:

If you think things are bad now, just wait a bit. It’s about to get worse, much worse.
A war is coming over the Constitution between those who would defend it and those who find it a nuisance. …

To Brett Kavanaugh’s foes, the Constitution stands in the way of grand designs they have for the federal government and your lives.

They want to control things in your lives — your healthcare, your lightbulbs, your land, your neighborhood, your dishwasher, your electric bill, your employer. That’s why a wartime coalition of Leftist interest groups have mobilized to battle over the future of the Constitution.

Kavanaugh’s foes want the Constitution to mean whatever suits their transformative agenda. Kavanaugh believes the Constitution means what it said when it was written. That it was written in 1787 doesn’t trouble him at all. …

The coming fight over Brett Kavanaugh will feature two sides with almost nothing left in common. Sure, we live in proximity to each other. But one side defends the Constitution and the other side will stop at nothing to replace it.

One side believes words have specific, objective meanings that transcend fads.  They are consistent, predictable and stand the test of time.  The other subverts words to suit their agenda and will even quibble over the definition of “is.”  Who would you rather have governing you?

Reason #427,508

…to homeschool your children, rather than handing them over to the State:

A newly filed federal lawsuit claims that police officers groped 900 students at Worth County High School in Georgia during a warrantless drug sweep that yielded no results.  The human rights group, Southern Center for Human Rights, filed the lawsuit on behalf of the students against the Worth County sheriff over an April 14 incident when 40 officers came into the school with no advance notice, KTLA-TV reported.  …

The lawsuit mentions one girl in particular, using only her initials K.A., who was searched by Deputy Brandi Whiddon. The lawsuit goes into disturbing detail about how in-depth Whiddon’s search of K.A. was. KTLA’s report stated:

“Sheriff Hobby entered K.A.’s classroom and ordered the students to line up in the hallway with their hands on the wall,” the suit said. “Deputy Whiddon took one of K.A.’s arms, placed it higher up on the wall, and kicked her legs to open them wider. Whiddon pulled the front of K.A.’s bra away from her body by the underwire and flipped it up.

“Whiddon also looked down the back and front of K.A.’s dress. Whiddon slid her hands from one of K.A.’s ankles up to her pelvic area. Whiddon’s hands went underneath K.A.’s dress as Whiddon felt up K.A.’s leg. Whiddon’s hands stopped on and cupped K.A.’s vaginal area and buttocks. Whiddon then slid her hands down to the other ankle. Whiddon was wearing gloves, but did not change them before or after her search of K.A.”

The story concludes noting the interim superintendent of schools claims the system did not approve “of touching any students,” but it’s pretty clear the school system also took no action to stop what was going on .

Well, at least some education occurred.  Nine hundred students now know first hand that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution is dead… and has been for a long time now.  Once they graduate high school they can move on to the adult version of that education: the Transportation Security Administration.

Are we smarter than a medieval baron?

I fear we are losing the rule of law in the United States and in the West — the idea that all are equally accountable to external standards and that even the State must respect certain boundaries.  Eight centuries ago today, one of the great expressions of these concepts was signed: Magna Carta.  The nobles who forced King John to concede these principles knew something of human nature.  For all our pretenses at modern superiority, we seem to have forgotten many of the things they knew, and upon which succeeding generations built.

Those barons who pressured a king to give his seal to a document in an English field 800 years ago could not have imagined the extraordinary impact it would have on human affairs, reshaping not just England but also America and France and even inspiring activists as far afield as Africa and China. This shows that once it had been expressed, the fundamental idea contained with Magna Carta — that restraints are required to limit officialdom’s power — could not be suppressed; the genie could not be forced back in the bottle. More importantly, it shows that freedom must be fought for over and over again. Magna Carta on its own guarantees nothing. How could it? It is merely a piece of paper. Rather, it was the human urge for more liberty, the desire to enjoy choice and freedom and a private life away from the prying eyes and barging elbows of authority, that encouraged future generations to act on Magna Carta, to demand that it be respected and expanded and made into a living, breathing, constitutional reality.

The problem we face today is profound. Firstly, respect for legal rights is in short supply, as evidenced in everything from British governments’ assaults on the right to silence and the ‘double jeopardy’ rule to America’s undermining of the Fourth Amendment through its spying on citizens. And secondly, even worse, the spirit of freedom, the urge within citizens for greater liberty and autonomy, seems weak, too. In short, the two things that guaranteed Magna Carta’s historic, humanity-changing impact — first, the rights it articulated on paper, and second, successive generations’ determination to make those rights real— are waning. And so we are seeing the gains of the Magna Carta era, of the past 800 years of pretty much non-stop struggling for greater liberty, being slowly undermined.

We need a new and serious debate on freedom, on why it’s important and why we need more of it.

To survive, freedom must be valued more than many other things, such as government largesse (which always comes with strings), baldly seeking partisan advantage or an obsession with safety (which brings fearfulness that is exploited by those who would control). Freedom is not obtained merely by the risk of soldiers’ blood. It is secured by the willingness of citizens to assume responsibility for themselves, to adhere to a set of rules that transcend our momentary whims, and to challenge anyone who would dare direct their lives for them.

Second verse…

…same as the first…

Here’s some commentary worth your time and careful consideration.

 

 

Yet another shakedown

Another American citizen has been unceremoniously stripped of his cash, despite not having any criminal charges filed against him:

Maybe he should have taken traveler’s checks.

But it’s too late for that now. All the money – $16,000 in cash – that Joseph Rivers said he had saved and relatives had given him to launch his dream in Hollywood is gone, seized during his trip out West not by thieves but by Drug Enforcement Administration agents during a stop at the Amtrak train station in Albuquerque.

An incident some might argue is still theft, just with the government’s blessing.

Rivers, 22, wasn’t detained and has not been charged with any crime since his money was taken last month.

Is it unusual for Americans to carry large sums of cash?  Perhaps.  But notice carefully that our currency says it is legal tender “for all debts, public and PRIVATE.”  In other words, absent hard evidence of criminal activity (i.e. the kind that stands up in court), it’s none of the government’s business why you have cash nor what you intend it for.  But that’s just part of a story that should make you sit up and take notice:

A DEA agent boarded the train at the Albuquerque Amtrak station and began asking various passengers, including Rivers, where they were going and why. When Rivers replied that he was headed to LA to make a music video, the agent asked to search his bags. Rivers complied.

In other words, we have reached the stage of “your papers, please,” when any government hall monitor can stop you at any time and start prying into your life.

THIS IS NOT THE KIND OF NATION THE FOUNDERS INTENDED.  Nor does it comport with the clear language of the Constitution.  As I first read this, I was thinking if it were me, I would simply (and politely, at first) inform the officer that I’m an American freely traveling about my own country.  And leave it at that.  Any request to search my possessions would be met with “am I being charged with a crime?  If not, then why do you need to search my possessions?”  That’s when I read this:

“We don’t have to prove that the person is guilty,” Waite said. “It’s that the money is presumed to be guilty.”

DEA agents may choose to ask the person whether his or her possessions can be searched in what is called a “consensual encounter.” If the subject refuses, the bags – but not the person – can be held until a search warrant is obtained, he said.

Waite said that he could not provide exact figures on how often seizures occur in Albuquerque but that last week the DEA had five “consensual encounters” that resulted in seizures.

What Orwellian language we have here!  A uniformed (and presumably armed) officer stops you at random and asks your “consent” to dig through your baggage.  Just like the TSA claims you “consent” to being scanned by millimeter wave devices at airports when you pick the lesser of two imposed evils rather than agree to be patted down by perverts.

“Consent” does not exist under the duress of the threat of force.  For the DEA to use the term here is about as appropriate as the rapist claiming after the fact “no, really, she wanted it.”  I don’t make such a comparison lightly, either.

We keep hearing about ISIS, Russia, China, Iran… the list of State-approved enemies is virtually limitless these days, each with their own periodic Two-Minutes Hate.  But none of those groups are stopping Americans, in America, to randomly question their actions.  Certainly none of them are seizing Americans’ life savings under some judicial fiction designed to give it an artificial odor of legitimacy.  So I’ll conclude with the statement I made just a few days ago: when the government can simply seize your cash, with no due process at all, you are NOT free.

Maybe it’s time we figure out who our our real enemies are.

Land of the free? Hardly.

With all the issues our government could legitimately be addressing, would it surprise you to know it’s tied up contesting whether or not a couple score classic Land Rovers are legally here in the U.S.?  The simple waste of government resources (time and manpower) would be bad enough.  But these vehicles were seized from their owners — who had no idea why the government even cared — in armed raids.  You know, the kind of SWAT action that has now become as American as apple pie and baseball.

Jennifer Brinkley had a typical summer morning planned on July 15: get up, get dressed, and take her son to tennis practice. That changed when six body armor-clad Department of Homeland Security agents and local police officers showed up at her North Carolina home and blocked her driveway. They were there because of an arbitrary law promulgated 26 years ago to guard the prerogatives — and profits —of automakers and car dealers. Specifically, they were there to take Brinkley’s truck.

“They wouldn’t even tell me why it was being seized,” said Brinkley, who lives near Charlotte. Though she didn’t understand what was happening, she reluctantly complied with the agents’ request. “If you’re a law-abiding citizen, what can you do?” she said.

Around 6 a.m. that same day in Yakima, Wash., and Mobile, Ala., Homeland Security agents and police came to the homes of Mike Rodeiger and Jack Montgomery, respectively, with warrants that ordered more truck seizures. Montgomery, an attorney, said they threatened to arrest him for obstruction of justice if he or his family took photos of them.

“It was disgusting,” said Montgomery, an attorney who asked Jalopnik to alter his last name for this story, out of fear that the incident could harm his legal practice. “It’s beyond weird. Weird would be a nice word for it. This is thuggery.”

There is nothing about owning a vehicle that can justify heavily armed paramilitary agents showing up unannounced, with all the risks that entails to both the citizens and the agents.  As you read the entire article, think carefully about the fact the government currently is trying to expand its regulatory power still further: this time, over the Internet.  And note this: the FCC has refused to release their proposed regulations to the public before voting on them.  Like Obamacare, the attitude seems to be that they have to pass the bill so we can find out what’s in it!

Government of the people, by the people and for the people?  That’s so 19th Century!  Know your place, peasants!!  Your betters know better!

Gangster government

Surveys show Americans are overwhelmingly angry with the direction of their country, and with what seems to be a never-ending list of of examples of corruption, cronyism and  general criminality in both intent and neglect:

— An IRS that not only puts its thumb on the scale of national elections, but knowingly seizes the savings of innocent people then refuses to give it back.

— An incoherent policy on Ebola that lets medical volunteers return to the country and roam free, but requires military troops ordered to West Africa to be quarantined for three weeks — despite assurances they aren’t supposed to be working directly with patients there.  (Oh, and Italy is none-too-happy that this quarantine is done in their country, not ours).  Add to that, the State Department apparently has (or is, despite denials) considered importing non-citizen patients to the U.S. for treatment.

— An electoral process that increasingly is being shown to be nothing more than a sham to prop up a semblence of legitimacy for a government that seems anything but.

— A well-entrenched “deep surveillance state” that apparently not only pokes into any electronic space it cares to, with no accountability, but has the ability–and does–plant documents that can later be used to discredit critics.

— A fundamental restructuring of health care delivery in this nation passed on a strictly partisan vote, with little debate or discussion of the details, and to this day a stonewalling on information about how it is being implemented.

And none of this includes many still-unanswered questions about Benghazi, Fast and Furious, or the size, scope and real beneficiaries of “Quantitative Easing” and other Federal Reserve interventions in the economy since 2008, etc, etc, ad infinitum.

At this point, can any American outside the well-connected Beltway elite say they are served by this government?

At this point, given the structural rigging of the system on multiple levels, can any American believe a mere election — even one projected as a “wave event” — is really going to change anything?  The roots of the IRS foreiture programs were passed in 2000, under a Democratic administration (Clinton).  The massive assaults on the Bill of Rights known as the Patriot Act debuted under a Republican (Bush the Younger).  And many of the current administration’s critics are fellow Democrats who feel betrayed that in reality nothing has changed under “the One” — if anything, the abuses have only gotten worse.

So the question is this: if Americans are so angry, where IS it?  What the pollsters are calling ‘anger’ comes across in reality as frustrated resignation.  If I’m wrong, America, prove it.  Where are the protests?  Where are the crowds descending on Capitol Hill and City Hall?

Refuse to comply with unconstitutional and arbitrary abuses of power.  Go confront the officials who perpitrate them.  Now is the time for action, not words.  We seem to forget that we outnumber them.   The reason the criminals in office are flooring the accelerator on their various schemes is that the nation has given them no reason to think there will be pushback or consequences.

Show them they’re wrong.  Or shut the hell up the next time a pollster asks you if you’re angry.  We were founded as a nation on the belief that “when any government becomes destructive of these ends (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness), it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, establishing new government…”  Either alter or abolish this trainwreck, or admit to yourself you accept it, however grudgingly.  Just remember that such acceptance makes you an accomplice.  People have resisted far more entrenched tyrannies.  So what’s your excuse?

NO INCUMBENTS, PLEASE!

A tale of two countries

In “the land of the free, home of the brave,” if the government thinks you have too much cash on hand for an ordinary serf citizen, it reserves the right to relieve you of it:

For almost 40 years, Carole Hinders has dished out Mexican specialties at her modest cash-only restaurant. For just as long, she deposited the earnings at a small bank branch a block away — until last year, when two tax agents knocked on her door and informed her that they had seized her checking account, almost $33,000.

The Internal Revenue Service agents did not accuse Ms. Hinders of money laundering or cheating on her taxes — in fact, she has not been charged with any crime. Instead, the money was seized solely because she had deposited less than $10,000 at a time, which they viewed as an attempt to avoid triggering a required government report.

“How can this happen?” Ms. Hinders said in a recent interview. “Who takes your money before they prove that you’ve done anything wrong with it?”

The federal government does.

I’ve written before about these types of “civil forfeiture” laws, and how they are an example of the way our militarized social policy (i.e. the ‘war on drugs’) has eroded basic freedoms.  Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?  It’s come to this: if a bureaucrat deems your financial transactions to be unusual, they can just take your money.  This is freedom?  Other nations have certainly noticed this and raised an eyebrow.  Why haven’t we?

Between forfeiture and the rampant abuse of eminent domain, no American should feel secure that their own government won’t simply try arbitrarily to take away years of work and savings.  This nation simply is not as free as it thinks it is.  The irony is that other nations we’ve been conditioned over generations to believe are hopelessly less free than us may, in fact, now be doing better on this score:

…the Vietnamese view of capitalism is based on their experience, while the American view, sadly, may be based on our own. The Vietnamese have their recent experience with the lies and deprivation that always accompany communism to contrast with the growth and opportunity that a newly opened free market has provided. Many Americans, on the other hand, look at our free market and see that it’s not all that free sometimes, and that a lot of what passes for capitalism is really what Jason Mattera calls Crapitalism, a politicized crony-capitalism in which insider connections and government subsidies and compulsion play a bigger role than they should.

Vietnam has a flat tax that makes life easy for small businesses; America has a convoluted code that requires professional help to understand — and that is administered by a politicized IRS that people don’t trust anymore. The Vietnamese see small businesses as essential to the country’s future; the American government is made up of politicians who meet objections to their policies by saying things like “I can’t be responsible for every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America.”

But the Vietnamese advantage may boil down to this: Free markets are new there, whereas America has had them for a long time. Scientist Thomas Ray once said that every successful system accumulates parasites, and the free market in America has been successful for a very long time. Established businesses get tied down with regulations that keep out new innovations — like Michigan’s GM-backed anti-Tesla law that bars carmakers from selling directly to the public — while politicians line up to line their pockets with taxes and fees and campaign contributions.

Don’t believe the rhetoric and the rah-rah that ‘Merica is the world’s greatest bastion of freedom, capitalism and self-governance.  Instead, take a good look at what’s going on around you — even if it’s not happening to you… yet… — and ask some hard questions about how we got here.  Who benefits from the way things are run now… from “Crapitalism?”  Why are Americans tolerating the level of lawlessness we currently do?

I’m not quite to the point of believing elections no longer matter here (though I’m getting there rapidly), so I’ll close with this: once you’ve asked the questions above, act accordingly next week.

NO INCUMBENTS, PLEASE!