Real Prostitution

I posted here on the intersection between the relatively benign solicitation of prostitution by "Client #9," Eliot Spitzer and the much more malignant variety practiced by Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats involving FISA:

Spitzer got in bed with a prostitute and paid with his money. Our House Democratic leadership are far worse. They are in bed with trial lawyers and they are paying them with our money - and degrading our national security in the process.

This cartoon identifies Client #10.

Real prostitution . . . it is not a victimless crime.

(H/T Powerline)

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The Protect America Act & Obama

A major piece of anti-terror legislation was passed by the Senate with large bi-partisan support. One of the people voting against it was Barack Obama.









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There is legislation before Congress to correct provisions in FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA, a law originally passed in 1978 in the era before modern communications, today produces the anomaly of requiring warrants for our intelligence personnel to spy on communications between two foreign parties, both on foreign soil. This anamoly was corrected with passage of the Protect America Act, but that had a sunset provision which ran out some time ago. The legislation before Congress would make permanent this correction to FISA and it includes a grant of immunity to those private companies that assissted in intelligence collection in the wake of 9-11 and at the request of the government.

On this latter issue, our nation's spy Chief, Mike McConnell, wrote in December:

The intelligence community cannot go it alone. Those in the private sector who stand by us in times of national security emergencies deserve thanks, not lawsuits. I share the view of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which, after a year of study, concluded that “without retroactive immunity, the private sector might be unwilling to cooperate with lawful government requests in the future,” . . .

There is bi-partisan support in the Senate for the Protect America Act, including in it the grant of retroactive immunity. The bill, which has been under consideration for months, passed the Senate yesterday, with 17 Democrats joining with Republicans in a 68-29 vote. The Senate also voted down an amendment submitted by Senator Dodd and supported by Obama that would have stripped the immunity provision.

The WSJ comments in an Op-Ed today:

Now and then sanity prevails, even in Washington. So it did yesterday as the Senate passed a warrantless wiretap bill for overseas terrorists while killing most of the Lilliputian attempts to tie down our war fighters.

"We lost every single battle we had on this bill," conceded Chris Dodd, which ought to tell the Connecticut Senator something about the logic of what he was proposing. His own amendment -- to deny immunity from lawsuits to telecom companies that cooperated with the government after 9/11 -- didn't even get a third of the Senate. It lost 67-31, though notably among the 31 was possible Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama. (Hillary Clinton was absent, while John McCain voted in favor.)

It says something about his national security world view, or his callowness, that Mr. Obama would vote to punish private companies that even the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee said had "acted in good faith." Had Senator Obama prevailed, a President Obama might well have been told "no way" when he asked private Americans to help his Administration fight terrorists. Mr. Obama also voted against the overall bill, putting him in MoveOn.org territory.

. . . This is a fight Senator McCain should want to have right up through Election Day, with Democrats having to explain why they want to hamstring the best weapon -- real-time surveillance -- we have against al Qaeda.

Read the entire article. The only possible motivations I can see to contest this legislation are to satisfy the hard left ACLU wing who seem to believe the war on terror is a figment of the imagination and the ABA who see a gold mine in suing the telecommunications companies for a vioation of privacy. Obama will probably not admit to those motivations, but he stands firmly in that camp. And once again, the actions of the man who would "reach across the divide" and "unite all Americans" speak far louder than his words.

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Of Federalism & Hookers

The federalization of criminal law is both a waste of resources and a gross assault upon the Constitutional concept of federalism - that the powers of the federal government are limited and there are spheres of governing that can and should be restricted to the states.

Yet the federalization of criminal law continues apace. The latest is legislation approved by the House to make prostitution a federal crime. How we get there is a bit of very well intentioned insanity.

The genesis of this legislation arises out the criminal enterprise of human trafficking – itself already a federal crime. Under federal laws, a person is guilty of trafficking if they hold someone else in "a workplace through force, fraud or coercion." In cases where human trafficking is found, it usually involves prostitution or forced labor. There are highly committed activists who are convinced that trafficking is evil and very widespread. The former is beyond argument, the latter is dubious:

The government estimated in 1999 that about 50,000 slaves were arriving in the country every year. That estimate was revised downward in 2004 to 14,500 to 17,500 a year. Yet since 2000, and despite 42 Justice Department task forces and more than $150 million in federal dollars to find them, about 1,400 people have been certified as human trafficking victims in this country, a tiny fraction of the original estimates. Some activists believe that if all prostitutes were considered victims, the numbers would rise into the predicted hundreds of thousands.

Read the article. So there you have it. If the facts do not bear out their beliefs, these activists are still too emotionally committed to acknowledge reality. So with full confidence in their motivation, they just change the underlying definitions. And a Democratic Congress says fine. Amazing.

The federal government has no business whatsoever inserting itself as a matter of federal law into the wholly local matter of prostitution. That is a purely local concern. Someone living in Washington should not be paying their tax dollars to prosecute a pimp and his girls in Florida just so an activist can sleep better at night. Raise your hand if you feel it more appropriate for the FBI to intestigate national issues, such as terrorism, rather than play vice cop.

Former Chief Justice Rhenquist spoke to precisely this issue when he said:

The pressure in Congress to appear responsive to every highly publicized societal ill or sensational crime needs to be balanced with an inquiry into whether states are doing an adequate job in these particular areas and, ultimately, whether we want most of our legal relationships decided at the national rather than local level."

And from the same ABA bulletin in which the Rhenquist quote appears:

. . . [A]n increase in the volume of federal criminal cases, driven primarily by additional cases that could as well be tried in state courts, diminishes the separate and distinctive role played by federal courts. The role of the federal courts is not to simply duplicate the functions of the state courts. Although many of the newly federalized laws may be rarely used, their presence on the books presents prosecutorial opportunities that may be exploited at any time in the future. There are many other adverse implications of the federalization of criminal law that [a 1998 ABA Report] treats, including the impact for the federal prison system, local law enforcement efforts, on citizen perception of state and federal responsibility, and on the application of limited federal resources. Where federal and state laws exist for the same crime, a citizen prosecuted for a state crime is subject to a set of consequences appreciably different from one prosecuted for a federal crime, and sentencing options—including the length of sentence and location and nature of confinement—as well as opportunities for parole and probation, will differ greatly.

Read the memorandum here. If you want a snapshot of what happens when there is no real federalism, one need only look across the pond to the UK and the EU

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Interesting News From Around the Web

Cheat Seeking Missles is posting that the court case filed in France against former Sec. of Defense Don Rumsfeld, brought by the French-based International Federation of Human Rights Leagues (FIDH) and the U.S. Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), has been dismissed by the Paris prosecutor’s office on the grounds of official immunity. The suit claimed that Rumsfeld had authorized interrogation techniques that amounted to torture.

Interestingly, the FIDH that brought suit against Rumsfeld has received a significant portion of its funding from that grand experiment in socialism, the EU. The EU regularly uses NGO’s to further their own far left social agenda. The EU have also funded, among countless others, the American Bar Association to campaign against the death penalty in America.

This is just another instance that shows that the EU and a vocal portion of Europe living in their own “irrational” world, as discussed in this piece from The Van Der Galiën Gazette. Actually, I wonder how much of that irrationality flows down to the “street” now days as opposed to the chattering classes. Everything that I read in UK suggests that there is a growing disconnect between the governed and the governing class who own the media and are making skillful use of it not so much as to stifle free speech as to drown it.

Big Lizards has an exceptional post on the Second Amendment issues and how it will impact in the political realm. It’s a very thoughtful post, though I do not share his confidence that the Court will find an individual right to bear arms. My concern is that there are too many activist judges on the Court. It was only two years ago that the activist wing of the Court rewrote the 5th Amendment in Kelo to enhance the power of government. If they can do that, they can certainly find some penumbra somewhere that will allow them to find that the Second Amendment only creates a collective right that can be wholly regulated by the states.

The Glittering Eye considers it a sure sign of the coming apocalypse that he finds himself in complete agreement with Maureen Dowd on Hillary Clinton. The Eye and Ms. Dowd both think Hillary's experience qualifies her to be President about as much as I think Obama’s foreign affairs experience qualifies him for the job. Scott Ott has documented that President Bush, in fact, has the correct slant on Hillary’s qualifications to be the Democratic nominee for President.

The Education Wonks suspects that the Bohemian San Fran’s leftist political leaders – they can be found permanently perched high atop the moral highground – might be secretly motivated by nihilism and a desire to exert ever more restrictive control over the city’s inhabitants. That might be a little bit of stating the obvious, though I am not complaining. When it comes to our neo-liberal, post modernist left, the obvious bears repeating, often and loudly.

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