Posts Tagged → transparency
Sorry citizen, that’s “classified” information
One of many signs that America is sinking and sinking more into tyranny is the constant response inquisitive citizens receive from government at every level: “We can’t show you that information, because it is ‘classified’ “.
Transparency is at the very core of a representative government that is owned and run by the citizens. Transparency is how the citizens know what the government employees are actually doing with all of that power that the people have consented the employees to have. When government employees stonewall the citizens and refuse to show what is happening in government deliberations or in arrests of citizens, or in the massive amount of surveillance that government employees are conducting on innocent citizens, or in the elections that the corrupt bureaucrats claim were clean, then the government employees are hiding what they are doing. And when the government is hiding what it is doing, it is no longer accountable to The People.
If the government is no longer accountable to The People, then it is no longer a representative government. We have the textbook definition of tyranny.
This all might seem obvious, but given the incredible volume of government stonewalling and unaccountability across most states, counties, and especially the federal government in Washington DC, somewhere the people working for us in government seem to have forgotten the limits on their power and the duties they have to all of us. There is definitely a breakdown everywhere as government at all levels has accrued tremendous power that citizens increasingly find insurmountable, even when that official power is blatantly misused.
Probably the biggest example of this right now is the treasure troves of classified documents that are being pulled out of Joe Biden’s various homes and offices in Delaware and Pennsylvania. Joe Biden had no legal right to have those classified documents in his possession, he never had the legal ability to declassify them, and yet his Department of Justice and the FBI have deliberately blocked public knowledge of this criminality and treated Joe Biden like he did nothing wrong.
Contrast that with the way President Trump’s home was raided by the DOJ and the FBI last summer. As president of the USA, President Trump could and did declassify a lot of documents. No bureaucrat anywhere had or has any legal way of blocking or turning back the clock on the decisions that President Trump made to declassify documents. Whatever was in President Trump’s home at Mar-A-Lago was declassified by him and was his. And yet he was targeted by a lawless DOJ and FBI, who won’t divulge to the American people exactly what was so “classified” about the documents they say were at Mar-A-Lago. It is a ridiculous stance. No transparency, and no accountability for official malfeasance by DOJ and FBI employees. Who supposedly work for us, and yet who are using the federal government we pay for to help themselves.
“Federal Bureaucrats Gone Wild” might be the humorous title of a movie, but it’s not funny when 350 million people’s rights are at stake because a handful of federal employees think they are above the law. America is suffering from a significant destruction of the 240-year arrangement the people had with their government until just a couple years ago. If it goes on much longer, it will end up being fatal to democracy. And that is called a coup d’etats against the American People, which is patently illegal.
Kevin McCarthy is an evil DC swamp thing
Congressman Kevin McCarthy is a corrupt career politician from the Marxist state of California. To be a Republican from California in 2023, you would by necessity have to be really slimy and corrupt. McCarthy has been in Washington DC for a long time, and his ties to the evil DC Swamp run long and deep. Heck, just look at his shielded face, his hooded eyes. You can easily read McCarthy’s crookedness by his outward facial appearance and body language. In fact, he has a lot of Justin Trudeau’s same body language going on (Canada). And Gavin Newsom’s for that matter (California governor).
These people above all share a common lust for power and control that overrides elementary human decency and empathy. Anyone who wants that much control should never be allowed to have it, and yet, if McCarthy becomes the next Speaker of the US House, then he will have it.
My congressman, Scott Perry, has been wonderfully vocal about McCarthy’s cozy relationship with the DC Swamp, and how McCarthy refuses to make commitments to transparency and accountability that would change the way Washington DC spends our taxpayer money. Thank you, Congressman Perry.
What is really amazing is how weak willed and sycophantic most elected congresspeople are. They each want power and control so badly that they fall all over themselves to elect someone dirty like McCarthy. The people supporting McCarthy for Speaker are not conservatives, they are career politicians in search of wealth and power through a public service job. And this list of lame-os now includes Marjorie Taylor Greene, a freshman congresswoman who has raised hell with Washington DC criminality since the day she arrived.
How did fake Republican Liz Cheney go to Congress for just six years at an annual $175,000 salary, and emerge as a multimillionaire? What kinds of illegal, unethical, anti-citizen, anti-America back-room deals did she make to earn that kind of wealth? And it’s not just Liz Cheney, it is the vast majority of the elected officials in Washington that use their official office for personal gain.
Yuck!
So here we are today with RINO Rep. Kevin McCarthy trying to gain the speakership at all costs and with no commitments to advancing Republican values like good government, limited government, accountable government and public employees. I wonder if USA arch enemy China has purchased McCarthy like a sack of potatoes, too.
Like a lot of Americans, I am fed up with the political parties. They do not interest me, because it’s like watching two criminal gangs fight each other. The citizens lose no matter which gang is in charge. What does interest me is limited government, transparent government, accountable government.
Like: Why the hell is the IRS now empowered to track our $600.00 (six hundred Dollar) purchases and incomes, along with enormous destruction of our individual constitutional rights, but We The People have zero control or information over how the federal government, like its IRS, spends OUR money?
Kevin McCarthy is an evil DC Swamp Thing. He cannot be Speaker, and if he does become Speaker through the weakness of most GOP congresscritters, then America is done for, because he will protect the DC Swamp from being changed or challenged or held accountable. And America will never have another opportunity after this Congress to hold DC accountable.
Roe v. Wade was never about abortion
Like so many other far-reaching court decisions, or laws, or executive orders emanating from Washington, DC, Roe v. Wade was originally cast publicly as something it actually wasn’t.
Yes, on its face Roe v. Wade was about abortion, the termination of human life while still inside the mother’s body. But in fact, the way the court’s decision was structured, it was the exuberantly creative legal theory behind the Roe decision that was most important. And it was that legal theory that laid the ground work for so much of the openly political activist behavior we see emanating from way too many judges and federal bureaucrats across America.
Roe v. Wade was decided within a time of great social turmoil and cultural change, and a lot of the contemporaneous political activism pressure from the Left is visible in Roe. Especially the twin evil sisters of moral relativism and intellectual relativism. One example is the in-artfully creative use of the word “penumbra,” a sort of shadowy shadow that reputedly lay over so many different amendments to the US Constitution that clearly listing them all was just too tiring to Roe’s authors. Yes, the Court majority invoked aspects of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, and went on to stitch together a pseudo- logical framework for legal decision (then using the 14th Amendment) making that is still with us today.
Vagueness as a reason for heavy handed policy is now the Left’s standard. “Because we told you to do it” is the way that is spelled out.
Every professor who taught me constitutional law was a liberal, and every single time any one of them delved into Roe, a smirk was on their face. Lots of eye rolling and chuckling accompanied these professors’ analysis of the poor legal reasoning behind the decision. Which meant to me then, and even more so now, that no one with real constitutional law training believed Roe was a legitimate legal decision based on actual logic, law, and fundamental constitutional principles. Rather, all the liberals who exulted in Roe did so because it backdoor-attained a policy goal they could not achieve through the legislative process, and because it established a mush-headed standard for all future legal decisions.
So today, some fifty years after Roe v. Wade-type legal analysis has wafted its way throughout the legal profession, the courts, and the bureaucracy, we see the ultimate and inevitable result of such a “creative” legal approach: Although the Second Amendment says crystal clearly that citizens may both keep and publicly bear firearms, and that this right shall not be infringed, a zillion policy makers and courts blatantly ignore 2A’s plain wording and just start throwing anti-gun policy ideas into the pot. These judges give no respect to what the Constitution actually says; rather, they use their court rooms purely for writing policies that fit their political views. Same goes for ATF bureaucrats.
I blame Roe v. Wade for where our court system is now. And where it is now is not just political policy shops in black robes, but we have defiant leftist activists in black robes, who simply ignore the Supreme Court’s precedents and make their own damned ruling. Even if their damned ruling is totally contrary to a US Supreme Court decision from just weeks or months ago. This approach is junk law, and it calls into question the entire field of jurisprudence. It highlights in just one more way how the Left is hell bent for leather to implement its political policy goals, at whatever cost to America’s legal and cultural fabric.
In case you don’t know it, when a lower court openly defies the Supreme Court, the entire court system is thrown out the window. We then have nothing but anarchy.
So, when the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two weeks ago, it was not surprising to see the Left melt down, as if their ability to kill babies had in fact been fully deprived of them. After all, when a person sees every branch of government as nothing more than a policy shop devoid of logical process, then everything becomes about winning or losing the policy war. Here the Left feels they have lost, when in fact, all this recent Court decision did was turn the issue over to the various states (No, Barack, there are not 57 states). Where actual voters get to choose how they want their state government to address what should be a sensitive subject.
(The same 1960s and 1970s people who had just protested against American soldiers as “baby killers” in Vietnam then became the biggest champions of killing babies…go figure).
To its proponents and supporters, Roe v. Wade was never really about abortion or babies, it was about introducing a weak-minded, unprincipled, grab-what-you-can “by any means necessary” approach to forming government policy. And in fact one of the main reasons I left my US EPA policy job in Washington, DC, was because I personally witnessed many regulations and rules being formed exactly this way, where (liberal/ Left) agency staff would literally just imagine a bunch of shit and put it in the regulation or rule. Justified or no, or extra cost to industry and consumers be damned. It is a terrible way to run representative government. But it is the way that Roe taught liberals and Leftists to think about government.
As a proponent of good government, where transparency and accountability are everyday occurrences for the taxpayers, I am glad that Roe is gone. Now the politically difficult part of democracy is upon all of us: Figuring out how many babies people can kill, when, and where. Based on my principles, I would expect this democratic process to follow a certain logic path. But we are not dealing with principles here, but rather a passion on the Left for absolute control. And they don’t like losing control. Or thinking hard. Or debating issues with evidence and cross-examination and due process.
Should be interesting going forward.
This election map says it all
If you are shocked at how easily the 2020 election was stolen from the legal voters of America, then take heart. Two can play that game, and IF the Republican Party will only gain its nerve and assert itself half as hard as the Democrat Party, the tables can be turned.
After 300 Democrat Party lawsuits nationwide right before the 2020 election in dozens of states attempting to overturn established election laws, and about a dozen broad daylight unilateral and illegal usurpation of election law jurisdiction and plain-as-day constitutional limits by secretaries of state in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and other states that allowed unsupervised absentee ballots, ballot harvesting, delayed voting until the “right number” of votes are found, and a bunch of other non-transparent “voting” techniques that are all designed to steal elections, it is time for conservatives to quit whining and get with that program.
If you are in a lacrosse or hockey match, and one team is just high-sticking and high elbows right and left and beating the crap out of your team, and scoring on your team as a result, and the referees are not calling the illegal hits, then play the game to the referees. Play to the standard the referees are playing at, not to self-imposed rules that make you “better people” than the other team.
There is no need to be a martyr and to lose the entire game or match because you would not lower yourself to play (cheat) like the other team did. Forget that, play to win! Do whatever it takes, whatever the other team is doing, to win. That is fair. What is unfair is what happened in November 2020, where one political party changed all the rules at the last second, spammed the voting system in a bunch of swing states, and stole the election in a mass of vote fraud, and is now trying to shut down investigations into the obvious fraud.
If the 2020 election was fraud-free and clear, why is one political party doing its utmost to stop transparency into the voting process? In Arizona, the entire Democrat political party is seething around the Maricopa County vote recount, trying to stop it through legal channels, and also to infiltrate it and cloud its legitimacy.
And so, if you look at the map below, you will see that America is almost entirely red. That is, America is almost entirely conservative, patriotic, Constitutional, committed to the rule-of-law etc. Even in supposedly “blue” states like Virginia, Oregon, Washington State, and New York, the number of red voting districts far outnumber the blue ones.
This means that if the red voting districts have the same 150% voter turnout that the blue voting districts had in the 2020 election, and that 97% of that 150% voter turnout goes to the Republican candidates, then the Republican Party should win handily just about everywhere. Even in states that supposedly have a Democrat Party voter edge. And especially in the swing states that so magically had Democrat Party-dominated cities vote at about 150% voter turnout in November 2020.
This would not be cheating, per se, it would simply be following the lead of the Democrat Party and doing just as they do. Everyone following the same rules of the game, the same referees.
And it means that when some federal investigators show up to view that 150% voter turnout, your county sheriff and dozens or hundreds of deputies not only physically stop the investigators from viewing the ballots, they arrest them for attempted vote tampering themselves. Holding a couple dozen communist anti-America federal employees without bail in East Succotash County Jail for a few months will probably send a strong message to communist-occupied Washington, DC, that our votes will not be stolen or rigged. The only unknown here is whether or not the Republican Party actually wants to win elections, or are they happy to be the powerless perpetual minority?
If every red voting district nationwide has the same 150% voter turnout that the Democrat Party claimed in many swing state cities, the Republican Party should do great in the 2022 election.
America just experienced an insurrection, not an election
With all of last week’s midnight ballot dumping, deliberate vote miscounts, and voting software “glitches” relentlessly coming to light, we are faced with the fact that America did not have an election last week. Rather, we experienced a massive nation-wide vote fraud scheme aimed at literally taking over the American government under the guise of having an election.
This is not an election, it is an illegal insurrection against the laws, people, and sitting government of America.
Last Tuesday’s election was not open, it was not fair, it was not legal. The more people dig, the more fraud is found. A fraudulent election is not a legal election, and an election that is not legal does not count.
One of the most incredible things ever in American electoral history happened this year. Both the national media (Big Media) and the Silicone Valley technological and social media firms like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube (Big Tech) have waged an open war against transparency and information flow. The blatant de-platforming of people, censorship, and blocking of certain information by Big Media and Big Tech is nothing other than partisan electioneering on behalf of one political party and one candidate, the Democrat Party and Joe Biden.
The media is entitled to First Amendment protections when they act as the media. But when the media becomes an active and aggressive participant in the effort to elect one person and to protect one political party, then the media is no longer the media. It has become a political antagonist, a partisan actor, whose actions are regulated just like every other political donor. The undeclared, unregulated in-kind donation value to the Democrat Party and the Biden Campaign of Big Media and Big Tech must be in the billions of dollars. This is hugely illegal and hugely criminal.
Big Media and Big Tech are right now waging what can only be called an all-out war against the flow of information that shows voting fraud and that casts material doubt on their collective claim that Joe Biden won last week’s campaign. In every way possible, Big Tech and Big Media are de-platforming, hiding, shadow-banning, and suppressing people and information that runs contrary to their attempt to coronate Joe Biden as the inevitable winner of last week’s election. Nothing about this effort is honest, or fair, or careful. When a US Postal Service worker files an affidavit about what he has seen with his own eyes and heard with his own ears, Big Media and Big Tech immediately attack his character and also spread the lie that he recanted his affidavit.
CNN’s Jake Tapper has gone so far as to begin to threaten the livelihood and career of every single person who has served in the Trump Administration, by personally identifying them and broadcasting their home address and other personal information, for the express purpose of having other people attack them physically.
Do you, dear reader, believe that this is the legal function of the media? To serve as an information hub to direct a physical and legal and personal war against American citizens who are otherwise lawfully engaged in their jobs and careers?
Folks, we are witnessing an illegal attempted takeover of the United States government through a fraudulent election by one political party and its allies in media and technology firms. They are trying to physically intimidate everyone who stands in their way. We are right now way far away from any kind of election at this point, and we are now seeing a substantive effort to take over the government and to eliminate all opposition, all people, who disagree with it. This is a war effort, not a debate about policy or even legalities.
When people stop using words, they reach for their swords, and at this point Big Media, Big Tech, and the Democrat Party are aggressively eliminating the opportunity for using words to resolve this conflict. Words they oppose are censored out of the public square. They are trying to crush all resistance to their control of everything in America. This is an insurrection, which is illegal under existing American law.
The existing Insurrection Act allows the sitting, lawfully elected president of the United States, to quell this warfare before it becomes bloody battles in the streets of America. Mister President, I encourage you to invoke the Insurrection Act and bring stability to America, end this illegal mutiny against the sitting government, and bring calm and honesty to the effort to count all LEGAL votes that were cast in last week’s election.
America is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and just because some other people decide they will commit a crime and then crush all dissent and transparency with an iron fist does not make them legitimate. Their behavior makes them mutineers, insurrectionists, traitors.
Save our Republic, Mister President, or say goodbye forever to the free America that existed as of just a few days ago.
Note*: For readers who think I am either totally nuts, or partisan (ha ha that would be funny), or mislead, or confused, or emotional, or any other number of possible causes for this post, you are encouraged to step outside the mainstream media box in which you are probably getting your information. Go to the Epoch Times and see what they have to say about the election fraud and questions we are living with right now.
SB 619 captures tug of war between big government and the citizenry
SB 619 is PA state senator Gene Yaw’s fix to a problem that should not even exist. And yet, this bill is being greeted by so-called environmental advocates as some sort of “attack” on environmental quality and environmental protection.
Senate Bill 619 is about one simple thing: Making Pennsylvania state government regulators spell out exactly what is, and what is not, an environmental spill that is so bad that it contaminates waterways and is a violation of our state “clean streams” law.
You would think that in late 2019, 243 years after the founding of America, all state governments would be run by responsible adults who are committed to the wellbeing of their fellow citizens first and foremost. A commitment like that would first and foremost be to the rule of law and the due process rights that undergird and frame everything that is American representative government. Simply put, the government cannot willy nilly decide for itself, based on ambiguous, general, opaque, undefined, arbitrary standards, what is an environmental contamination, and what is not an environmental contamination.
In representative government, We, The People are entitled to know our boundaries, where the borders are to our behavior, and where the government gets to step in and correct us. This understanding keeps us from making decisions in good faith that end up getting us entangled with government enforcers who hit us with fines and penalties for making an incorrect decision.
Presently, and unbelievably, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has no clearly defined standards for what qualifies as a reportable spill and contamination into a waterway. PA DEP’s entire standard is, get this, for real: “We will know it when we see it.”
Folks, I am not exaggerating, I am not making this up. This is how much infinite latitude the state government has now and wants to maintain. This means that literally every time something – a cup of coffee, a can of paint, a bucket of mine sludge, or any miniscule part thereof – falls from its original container into the environment, and into or next to a waterway, it must be reported to PA DEP. And PA DEP reserves the right to fine whoever is responsible, irrespective of whether or not that spill involved anything dangerous, toxic, or at such a small dilution that it is de minimus in its effect.
In practice, this means that PA DEP both chases its tail going after ridiculously unimportant “spills” that pose no threat to anything, which underserves the citizenry who underwrite PA DEP’s budget, and that the agency also holds a huge arbitrary hammer over the head of every single citizen, contractor, and industrial or commercial operator in or passing through the Commonwealth. While being arbitrary is bad enough, reports from the field – you know, the little people who actually work outside getting stuff done for the rest of us consumers – is that plenty of PA DEP staff use that arbitrary standard in capricious ways. These PA DEP staff are, simply put, empowered to be vindictive and petty little tyrants whenever they want to be.
To their shame, the opponents of SB 619 are acting as if the bill is some sort of assault on environmental quality, when it is not, not even close. The PA Fish & Boat Commission is actually on record opposing SB 619 because it allows for “interpretation” in the law. This is embarrassingly bad government to say things like this. Needless to say, the private sector opponents of SB 619 say even worse and less accurate things than the PFBC has written.
Can you imagine something so horrid as there being two sides to a story, some “interpretation” about what happened, and not having just one omnipotent government agency position, take it or take it, because you can’t leave it, because the government agency has 100% of the say in what happened, and you can’t figure it out until some government employee tells you? Is it really so terrible to rein in our government agencies and require them to live by defined standards like the rest of us have to live? Like our Federal and State Constitutions require? Like a whole bunch of other states already have?
SB 619 simply asks PA DEP to establish criteria and standards so that the citizenry and the industries they work in can know when they are following the law, and when they are not. It asks government employees to live by the rules everyone else must live by. It asks government to not engage in arbitrary and capricious behavior, which undermines everything our Republic and our Commonwealth are about. You know, that liberty and freedom stuff that seems so insignificant to the self-appointed guardians of environmental quality. One thing is clear: My fellow environmental professionals may care about the environment, but they do not care about democracy or good government.
This bill is not about environmental quality, it is about democracy, the role of government, good government, government transparency and accountability, and limits on government power. It represents the tug of war going on nationwide between people who want unfettered big government power, and those of us who want government to live within the Constitutional boundaries everyone else lives in.
SB 619 needs to be implemented now.
(c) 2006 Bonnie Jacobs
“Red Flag” ERPOs are violent, dangerous, un-American
In the 2002 movie “Minority Report,” police identify and swiftly SWAT-team-style arrest potential criminals before they have committed a crime, even if they are not in the act of committing the crime. That lack of due process, the discarding of the American core value of the presumption of innocence, and the mis-use of quacky, uncertain technology to concretely deprive citizens of their liberties for crimes they did not yet commit, and possibly only imagined, is at the movie’s heart.
Like the 1949 book 1984, in Minority Report an an all-seeing, all-controlling government squashes individuality, individual rights, and free thought by criminalizing “thought crimes,” even thoughts that have not actually been implemented in the physical world. The gist of both the 1949 book and the 2002 movie being that coercive government power can be easily mis-used and that it is at the core of illegitimate governance that justifies civilian resistance and disobedience.
So, welcome to Minority Report and 1984 in your life, right now, in the form of “Red Flag,” “Extreme Risk Prevention Order” and the politically named “Gun Violence Restraining Order” (there is no such thing as ‘gun violence’). These risky programs are being slowly enacted and implemented in states across America in the name of safety.
Theoretically, both ERPOs and GRVOs are designed to get out ahead of a gun owner and send in the SWAT team before that gun owner possibly commits a crime with a gun. Like the ill-fated “No Fly List” bar to gun ownership, both ERPOs and GRVOs are designed to empower police to quickly bypass the natural due process safeguards our federal Constitution explicitly grants to each citizen, behind a screen of secrecy and unaccountable government employees, in the name of immediate if poorly defined security.
The problem with these programs is that they are failing everywhere for reasons that anyone with a shred of common sense had been and would normally employ when assessing the possible risk-benefit value of laws encouraging police to go all cowboy on people who have not actually committed a violent crime. In every place where ERPOs and GRVOs have been implemented, police have aggressively gunned down in cold blood totally innocent citizens, often in their own homes, and always in circumstances where the citizen was either not armed or was only armed because the police had acted like violent, illegal home invaders that an armed citizen would normally resist.
Their results have been exactly the opposite of stopping violence, as ERPOs and GRVOs actually encourage violence; but it’s by the government against the citizen, which ERPO proponents want.
These programs are the anti-gun activist’s dream come true, as the true purpose of ERPOs and GVROs is to generally stigmatize all gun ownership and all individual gun owners by creating an automatic suspect class. Almost all of these programs enable pretty much anyone to call the police and “SWAT” some gun owner the person doesn’t like, doesn’t agree with politically, has a property line dispute with, wants to make an example of etc. “SWATTING” is where someone calls in a bogus threat to a local police department, identifying someone who is actually innocent and unsuspecting that in mere minutes his door is about to come crashing in with a heavily armed SWAT team who thinks he is holding a hostage with a gun to the head.
- ERPOs and GRVOs are the legalization and encouraging of SWATTING.
- ERPOs and GRVOs are dangerous; they promote violence, especially against innocent people.
- ERPOs and purposefully anti-gun-named GVROs are a direct threat to all American citizens, because due process is thrown out the door from the very beginning.
- These are back door channels to criminalizing gun ownership, mass intimidation and big government control over peaceful, law abiding gun owners.
- They are purposefully vague, potentially random, and are more than anything a NAZI Gestapo tactic to bully law abiding gun owners into relinquishing their guns out of fear of being dimed out for some imagined, fake crime.
Why are ERPOs and GRVOs happening? They are becoming popular because due process has gone out the window since Obama was elected in 2008. Obama ran an increasingly abusive government without a shred of respect for the rule of law or due process, and his big government admirers everywhere followed in his step. The result has been that any part of any government anywhere, at any level, that is controlled by Democrats has 360 degree unfettered reach and scope. And on the flip side, any part of government run by Republicans is automatically suspect and subject to endless questioning and investigation and blocking by over-reaching federal judges and bureaucrats.
It is how the Mueller investigation has worked, with its vague accusations of “obstruction” against people who had not and could not have committed any crime in the first place. Without a crime, there can be no obstruction. Roger Stone has been bankrupted for the ‘crime’ of being a political supporter of a president Mueller hates.
This is how the communists took control of Hungary and probably other European nations. They used unproven accusations, which became procedural abuses, to ensnare political opponents, who were then railroaded in the criminal justice system. Just as Mueller has done to his victims.
Democrats today are employing the same exact tactics as the European communists to gain political power the voters would never grant them at the ballot box. These tactics should be illegal and punishable by existing law, but the opposition party, the GOP, is spineless and weak, filled with self-dealing careerists. The culture change following in the wake of Obama’s anti-individual rights big government power grab has shifted in favor of anti-freedom control freaks. They like ERPOs and GVROs, because they suit their tactics, and the Republicans either enable them, empower them, or sit out the fight because there is no money to be made in it.
Do not allow ERPOs, GRVOs, or their derivations into your community or state, because these are undemocratic breaches of the public trust in a government that is supposed to serve its free people.
As a post script, the other big problem is what happens with someone’s legally owned guns when they are confiscated by police. Quite often they are stored under terrible conditions that either badly damage or destroy the firearms. And often the police refuse to honor the law and return the firearms to the citizen after he has been cleared. Moreover, the police often steal or sell confiscated guns, and there is little or no recourse for the citizen to be justly compensated for what has been essentially an unconstitutional taking of private property by government.
America should be going in the direction opposite of ERPOs, GRVOs, and their secret courts where accused people have no right to defend themselves and are presumed guilty. Our founding principles of limited government power, government transparency, and government accountability demand it.
Galileo before the Inquisition’s Secret Court. Is American due process really going backwards to the Dark Ages?
PGC: Great, Old Agency Unused to Modern Limelight
If there is one take-away from my many years in federal and state government jobs, it is that agency staff cultures change slowly. In Pennsylvania, a great example of this is one of my favorite agencies, the Pennsylvania Game Commission. PGC is an agency that is used to doing things the way it wants, often relying on its impressive history as evidence for its present day independence and independent culture.
PGC is presently in the headlines because of a $200,000 payment to its former executive director, Carl Roe, now very recently departed of the agency.
I thought it was an amicable departure; maybe not. PGC staff say this is a settlement to avoid a possible lawsuit. Critics of the payment include the governor’s office, the PA Comptroller, the PA attorney general, and many elected officials. They say this is a sidestep around the state’s prohibition of severance payments, made between a board of directors and an executive director who were actually very cozy with one another.
This is sad, because PGC is a storied agency, a trend-setter in the area of wildlife management, wildlife science, habitat management, and public land acquisition. Something I like is that PGC has uniformed officers who stand in front of Hunter Trapper Education courses filled with 10-18-year-old kids, and tell them that they have a Second Amendment right to own firearms. Few states in America have such a wonderful role for their uniformed law enforcement officers. We are fortunate to have this agency with this culture, and it is for this reason that I oppose merging PGC with DCNR. Ranger Rick and Smokey Bear are not going to purvey that valuable message.
The flip side of the culture is what is often described as a “bunker mentality” among the agency’s staff, and this payment to Roe probably fits in with that view.
Most agencies are careful to avoid controversy, especially controversy that does not have a strong basis. This payment does not appear to have a strong basis, so it is an unnecessary controversy that is likely to damage the agency’s standing among lawmakers and executives, as well as the general public and hunters who otherwise happily buy hunting licenses to support their favorite agency. It comes at a time when the agency is already under the gun from oversight legislation (HB 1576, which does not address actual problems, but rather imagined problems unrelated to PGC and PA Fish & Boat Commission).
Don’t get me wrong, I like Carl Roe, and PGC has also driven me nuts at times. I clearly recall the day he was brought on to the agency as an intern. Me, then PGC executive director Vern Ross, PGC biologist Gary Alt, Carl Roe, and senior PGC staffer Joe Neville drove together up to Bellefonte to participate in the swearing-in of a new PGC commissioner. Carl struck me as a bright, quantitatively-oriented, inquisitive, experienced manager. Over the years since that day I have had many opportunities to meet with Carl, and he has always impressed me as a stalwart and intelligent promoter of PGC, hunters, trappers, and wildlife conservation. This huge payment lightning rod situation just does not make sense in that context.
But on second thought, this payment does make sense if the insular agency culture managed to eventually penetrate into Carl’s otherwise solid judgment. That has been a phenomenon witnessed among other new PGC staff; the broad “something-is-in-their-water” observation that people’s personalities changed dramatically once they joined PGC. Other evidence of an insular culture was recently brought to my attention: Four of the agency’s biologists (all of whom have some or all of the deer program’s oversight) have graduate degrees from the same school and they studied at the same post-graduate field station. And no, they ain’t from Penn State, or any Pennsylvania university, for that matter, dammit.
I fear for PGC, because at a time when the agency is already under scrutiny from HB 1576, this new payment debate threatens to add fuel to the flames, and add a straw onto the camel’s back. Part of the culture driving these problems is the same kind of culture that can cause the roof to suddenly come down. Careful there, boys, careful.
*******UPDATE:
So, as has happened before, these essays get read, and I get phone calls and emails. People calling me usually do not want to post on the blog, being afraid of attribution, and frankly, what some other people want to post here is not always worth keeping. So here is the gist of what came over the transom in the past half hour: Things between Carl Roe and the PGC board were not chummy. The payment to him is seen as a real money-saver. I am unsure how an at-will employee like an executive director has any real legal recourse, unless he is fired for his religion or political views, things that are a) hard to prove and b) unlikely. Also, I neglected to mention that Roe had, indeed, given away about $300,000 in agency funds to Hawk Mountain (GREAT PLACE, but not necessarily deserving of big PGC money) and other groups. This unaccountable and unapproved largesse caused real friction between Roe and the board, not to mention the rest of the stakeholders whose donations to and purchases from PGC are expected to be spent in a pecuniary fashion.
Benghazi…the Government failure that just won’t go away
President Obama calls the uninvestigated, unrequited, unavenged murders of unprotected American embassy personnel in Benghazi, Libya, a “false scandal.”
Benghazi isn’t going to go away. It is a far worse scandal than the 1980s Iran-Contra arms smuggling scandal. Benghazi is worse because it involved illegal gun-running by American staff, and because now staff with direct knowledge of the events surrounding Benghazi are being submitted to monthly lie-detector tests to make sure they are not leaking information.
Obama will learn that it’s the attempted coverup that is usually worse than the original crime.
And what’s with a guy who pledged transparency and accountability in 2009, but now has so much illegal wiretapping and snooping against American citizens going on that he has to run around jailing people who want to whistleblow on his illegal actions?
What happened to Carter Ham and Admiral Gaudet?
American liberty hangs by a thread, and I find it distressing that so many people are much more loyal to a single political party than they are to the US Constitution.