Tag: Politics

Yeah, I Don’t Buy It

Bureaucracy, Politics

Here’s a piece about former-AG Blondie and the power hierarchy she inherited at the DoJ:

She inherited an agency riddled with holdovers, careerist prosecutors, and institutional muscle memory tuned to the prior regime’s priorities. Her mandate, executed with the cold ferocity of a Florida prosecutor who once stared down the Clintons and lived to tell it, was never to play the long public game of show trials. It was to do the lethal, invisible labor: purge disloyal elements, redirect investigative task forces, shutter the foreign-influence shops that had become political protection rackets, and…most critically…build the factual scaffolding of cases that could survive judicial scrutiny once the political headwinds shifted. That is precisely what she delivered.

And:

First-term chaos taught the lesson: the Senate-confirmed loyalist who survives confirmation must serve as the institutional wrecking ball. The public demands scalps; the law demands airtight cases. Bondi supplied the latter while the former were still being assembled. Those who call her tenure “incompetent” reveal either their ignorance of how the executive branch actually functions or their desire to keep the machine broken so it can never be turned against its former masters. She was never meant to be the permanent face of the Justice Department. She was the architect who laid the rebar and poured the concrete under fire. The structure now stands. The new tenants can furnish it with indictments. That is not failure. That is lethal, disciplined statecraft.

Yeah.  Unfortunately, while I may be ignorant of the big-league governmental powerplays and what have you, I’m not ignorant of the need to look after the interests of ordinary folk, i.e. the voters, who put this lot in power to do all the above, but also to address and right the wrongs perpetrated by the previous bunch of scumbags on ordinary people.

How difficult would it be for the AG to look at, say, the case of Patrick Adamiak — you know, the innocent man railroaded by the ATF (who fall under the DoJ, lest we forget) — and get him out of jail?  Or to withdraw the dozens upon dozens of criminal cases that are still being prosecuted by the DoJ despite the cases being prima facie contrary to both new policy and the law?

Doing both the above may be difficult, but when you are the CEO of an outfit, it’s easy to say to a small task force, “Find all the cases that are being prosecuted but shouldn’t be;  set out a legal (or Constitutional) rationale for nolle prosequi, and I’ll sign the authorizations.”  That’s called “delegation” and it’s what good managers do.

And Pam Bondi didn’t do that.

Let’s just hope that her successor does.

And One More Unnecessary Law

Immigration, Legal Stuff, Politics

I noted in the above two articles that we shouldn’t need more laws to underline what is either Constitutional precept or else self-evident.  Here’s the third example:

No law currently prevents Congress members from having dual citizenship

Act for America is pressuring Congress to pass legislation to ban people with foreign citizenship from serving in the House and Senate.  The Virginia-based national security advocacy group said the lack of a prohibition on Congress members with dual citizenship was a “dangerous loophole.” 

“This bill should never have been necessary,” Act for America said. “From the founding of this republic, the expectation was crystal clear: those entrusted with making laws for the United States must owe their complete and undivided loyalty to America.”

The Constitution sets qualifications for service in Congress, which are a minimum age (25 years old for the House and 30 years old for the Senate), a period of U.S. citizenship (7 years for the House and 9 years for the Senate) and residency in the state represented. However, it does not restrict foreign citizenship.

Actually, from my own memory of the naturalization process, one of the steps towards becoming a U..S. citizen is formally renouncing under oath one’s previous citizenship.  One would think, therefore, that the issue should be moot, and not require a law which underlines the regulation, but it appears that one would be wrong.

And as much as I dislike the appearance of yet another fucking law to join the raft of laws already in situ, I would truly support legislation which would require that all Congress members be required to surrender their non-U.S. passports in public — i.e. as part of their swearing-in ceremony — with failure to do so resulting in immediate disqualification and a by-election to bring someone else into office.

Hell, I think I’d support that such a law be applied to any level of government, federal, state or local.  (Congressional staffers and similar remora also come to mind, by the way.)

Let’s have our republic run by actual Americans, and not something-Americans.

I should point out that no freshly-minted U.S. citizen ever jettisoned their native passport with the alacrity that I did.  I couldn’t wait to get rid of the fucking thing, just as I heartily tossed my (cut-up) Illinois Firearms Owner ID (FOID) card into the Mississippi River on my final trip from Chicago to Texas.

So Much For Privacy

Big Brother, Government Thugs, Technology

Here’s one guaranteed to make us all feel better:

Dubai police snooped on a private WhatsApp group to snare an airline worker who shared images of a building damaged in the Middle East crisis.

Authorities accessed a closed chat between colleagues, downloaded evidence and then lured the man to a meeting and arrested him.

He is in custody facing charges including publishing information deemed harmful to state interests which carries a maximum sentence of two years.

Radha Stirling, chief executive of Detained in Dubai, said: ‘Dubai Police have now explicitly confirmed they are conducting electronic surveillance operations capable of detecting private WhatsApp messages.

‘Individuals are being tracked, identified, and arrested not for public statements, but for private exchanges between colleagues.

‘Companies like WhatsApp must answer urgent questions about user privacy.

‘If private communications can be detected and used as the basis for arrest by overreaching or hypersensitive states, users worldwide need clarity on how their data is being accessed.’

According to the police report, authorities stated the clip was detected ‘through electronic monitoring operations’.

So much for “privacy” and “end-to-end encryption”.  The question — now that the cat’s out of the bag — is quite simple:  did the Dubai feds hack into WhatsApp, or did WhatsApp just hand the encryption key over to them?

We all know that in Arab nations, personal freedoms have about as much permanence (and relevance) as an ice cube in the desert when it comes to their governments.

But lest we get all smug and complacent, I’m willing to bet that a similar situation is in place pretty much everywhere — and the United States is no exception.

Amateurs Vs. Professionals

Diplomacy, Marxists, Politics, Wars & Other Fun Games

In which some smart guy compares the hard-headed and realistic professionalism of Trump’s foreign policy towards Iran vs. that of the feckless Obama administration.

While then-Secretary of State John Kerry famously treated Iranian negotiators like esteemed colleagues, Vice President JD Vance just treated them like a landlord dealing with a delinquent tenant who thinks he owns the building.

I’d like to think that was Kerry’s underpinning philosophy — simple foolishness and a massive misread of the room — but then I’d have to think that Fuckface’s dealings with Iran didn’t involve in-depth discussions with Barack Traitor Obama, who always had another, more malevolent attitude towards his adopted country.

The fact of the matter is that the Obama administration sold the United States out to Iran — with cash as well as white-glove treatment — and it’s taken us this long to reverse that ghastly policy.

No Immunity

Legal Stuff

I think I’ve been ranting about this topic since I were but a Baby Blogger, even pre-Pussification-Instalanche-fame/infamy.

To recap:  under Hammurabic Law (which pre-dates the Hebraic Pentateuch  by a couple of centuries or so), if a judge freed an accused murderer, only for said murderer to go on to commit another murder, then the judge would face the same fate as the murderer (once captured), i.e. execution.  I don’t have access to any relevant stats, but I cannot help but think that judges became extremely leery about giving some obviously-violent scrote a slap on the wrist and sending him home for tea with his Mum, instead of helping him up the stairs to the gallows.

Then some legal  asshole  mind said, “Oh noes!  This is a terrible idea!” and thus was born an even worse idea, that of “qualified immunity” whereby a judge who made a piss-poor decision was now shielded from any kind of retribution.

Kevin Finn at American Thinker  puts it far more eloquently than I:

Politicians, bureaucrats, and judges routinely issue rulings and enact policies that carry enormous ripple effects on society — yet they are insulated from the human and financial costs incurred when those choices prove misguided. We see this being played out in the criminal justice system, where decisions about release, bail, and sentencing directly shape public safety.

Judges exercise considerable discretion in pretrial releases, sentencing guidelines, and immigration-related detentions. Meanwhile, politicians shape the statutory frameworks that govern these processes, from sanctuary policies to sentencing reforms. When an individual with a documented history of violence is released and later commits additional crimes, the consequences fall squarely on their victims, their families and communities. The decision-makers themselves face no equivalent personal stake. Federal judges enjoy lifetime tenure, which brings its own issues. State judges may face infrequent retention elections, and elected officials can pivot to new priorities or blame systemic factors.

Then later down the page of said article comes this little ray of sunshine:

Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia has publicly broached a direct and startling, albeit satisfying response to this dynamic. In a recent statement addressing sanctuary policies, he advocated treating politicians who enact or defend such measures as accessories to crimes committed by those shielded under them — charging them with complicity in resulting murders, rapes, or other offenses. “The easiest way to get rid of sanctuary policies,” he argued, “is to start charging the politicians that support sanctuary policies as accessories to murder, rape, and pedophilia.”

His formal legislation targets fiscal accountability — codifying oversight mechanisms like the aptly-named Florida Agency for Fiscal Oversight (FAFO), allowing recommendations for removal of local officials for financial abuse, malfeasance, or misfeasance — the accessory principle he mentioned suggests a broader framework. Were this to be applied thoughtfully to criminal justice, it suggests that judges or politicians whose actions foreseeably enable violent recidivism could face similar scrutiny, transforming enablers into accountable parties rather than distant observers.

Once again, Florida has beaten Texas to the punch — as least as far as I know — because if ever there’s an idea which should resonate with all right-thinking Texans, it’s this one.

I have little reason for optimism that this worthy initiative will become law — nobody wants to be shielded more for their actions than a politician, and lawyers [with some considerable overlap]  will likewise strive with might and main to protect their own, both using all the political- and legal legerdemains at their disposal.  Politicians, at least, have some accountability in that they are exposed to electoral consequence;  but judges, as noted above, face little such accountability other than at the local level.

But the very horror that would greet Ingoglia’s initiative imposed at the federal level makes me think that it’s a really good idea, and very much an idea whose time has come.

And I’m pretty sure that King Hammurabi would agree with me.

Un-Constitutional, Illegal And Nonsensical

Anti-Gun Nannies, Bureaucracy, Government Thugs, Rights, The Gun Thing

…and yet the National Firearms Act (NFA) is still with us, becoming evermore ridiculous, evermore illogical, and always (still) un-Constitutional.

Here’s the best history of the disgusting thing I’ve ever seen which — as with so many of the bullshit laws and bureaucracies that still bedevil us to this very day — stemmed from the diseased liberal New York mind of the sainted Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

And the Act’s very vagueness of terminology makes it almost unique among our forest of laws in its ability to turn any gun owner into an instant felon without him knowing about it until the AT-fucking-F agency thugs drag him away in chains.  And said feature alone should make it legal poison, except that the Department of (alleged) Justice is too busy fucking around with irrelevancies like the Epstein files.

Kill the NFA.  Kill it stone dead, and then abolish the ATF in toto, because the government has no business in the alcohol, tobacco and (especially) the firearms business.  I might make a teeny exception for the oft-elided “E” — explosives — part of the agency’s nomenclature, but those first three initials?  X marks the spot in the back of the neck, for each of them.

Otherwise?  Line ’em up.