Category Archives: Op-Eds

Backpage.com: Dismissal is Insufficient — Charge Harris

Ban Censorship (RGBStock)

On November 1, Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Michael Bowman dismissed pimping charges against Carl Ferrer, the CEO of Backpage.com, as well as the site’s controlling shareholders, Michael Lacey and James Larkin, on free speech grounds. The ruling is a victory against Internet censorship, but it’s just a start. It’s time to send a strong message to grandstanding prosecutors who abuse the justice system for self-promotional purposes.

When California Attorney General (now US Senator-elect) Kamala Harris ordered the arrests, she knew better.

Yes, escorts — many of them presumably sex workers — purchase advertising in Backpage.com’s “adult” section. The ads are pretty racy, but based my (minimal) research they do not plainly offer sex for money.

Yes, Backpage.com accepts payment for, and runs, ads.  Presumably they don’t investigate each, or for that matter, any advertiser. Nor are they legally obliged to.  The Communications Decency Act is quite clear: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” Backpage.com has prevailed in court in several cases similar to the California action.

If anything, the site goes the extra mile: Their terms prohibit “[p]osting any solicitation directly or in ‘coded’ fashion for any illegal service exchanging sexual favors for money or other valuable consideration.”  Readers agree, prior to viewing adult ads, to report illegal activities.

There was no case here. Ferrer and company are clearly not pimps under any reasonable definition.

Harris must have known that. Yes, she failed the bar exam her first time out, but she eventually passed, has practiced law for more than 25 years now, and as California’s top government attorney has a staff of other lawyers to advise her. There’s no avoiding the conclusion that she knowingly wasted taxpayer money on an obviously bogus prosecution, presumably to get media face time and burnish her “tough on crime” credentials for campaign purposes.

Worse, she and those who assisted her (including but not limited to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who had Ferrer arrested and extradited) clearly violated United States Code, Title 18, Chapter 241:

“If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same … They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years …”

The US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division should take notice of this case and make an example of Harris. It’s time to bring an end to the era of malicious prosecution for political profit.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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America: Time for an Amicable Divorce?

English: This photo is the ruins of Secession ...
The ruins of Secession Hall in Charleston, South Carolina, 1865. Flickr data on 2011-08-13: Tags: Secession Hall, Old picture, ruins Charleston, 1865, Charleston, South Carolina, Public Domains License: CC BY-SA 2.0 User: paukrus Ruslan (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Every four years, the United States elects a new president. And every four years, the outcome makes some Americans so unhappy that talk of secession — never completely absent from our ongoing political discussion — gets a big bump in the “trending topics” lists.  2016 seems to be shaping up as secession’s best year since 1860.

No wonder: The polarization is pretty clear. The two candidates appear to have finished within about 1/2 of one percent of each other in the national popular vote. Geographically, the west coast and the eastern seaboard from Maine south to Virginia chose Hillary Clinton; the rest of the country, except for four states (Minnesota, Illinois, Colorado and New Mexico) went for Donald Trump.

Maybe it’s time to try this secession thing again, minus the four years of war and the million dead. Activists in California and Oregon certainly think so — they’re already cranking up ballot initiatives to take their states out of the union.

And why not? America never has really been one country in a cultural sense. Not in 1776, not in 1860, not today.

Our smallest state (Rhode Island), if independent, would be larger than at least 30 countries, more than 750 times the size of the smallest country with a coastline (Monaco) and about 3,000 times the size of the smallest independent state in the world (Vatican City).

Our least populous state (Wyoming), if independent, would have more citizens than Iceland, which has governed itself without catastrophe since 1944.

Is there any particular reason why the people of Los Angeles, and the people of Dallas, and the people of Miami, and the people of New York MUST be directly governed by the same executive, legislative and judicial organizations? I can’t think of one.

Yes, I know it’s scary. Who gets the kids? Who gets the house? Who gets navigational rights on the Mississippi?

But just because it’s scary doesn’t mean it isn’t doable. Or even that it has to be particularly hard.

Put a timeline on it. Give the states time to decide on options for going it alone or with others. Give people who don’t want to go with their current states time to move without passports (if we’re too dumb to set up a Schengen-style open borders scenario, which we should).

Create commissions to figure out how to divvy up the tanks and the nukes (which we’ll all need fewer of, since as part of the process we will presumably stop trying to be the world’s policeman).

Complicated? Sure. Impossible? Oh, please — the Soviet Union managed to dissolve without descending into all-out civil war. Is it utopian or naive to think maybe we could carry out the same process at least as well?

One evil empire down, one to go.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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December 2016: A Republic, if You Can Keep it

"Ruins in Richmond" Damage to Richmo...
“Ruins in Richmond” Damage to Richmond, Virginia from the American Civil War. Albumen print. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

As I write this column, nearly 2.5 million people have signed a petition seeking to overturn the outcome of the November 8 national vote and make Hillary Clinton, rather than Donald Trump, the next president of the United States.

The petitioners are asking presidential electors, chosen by the voters of their states to support Trump, to instead “faithlessly” cast their votes for Clinton on December 19.

“Faithless” electors are nothing new. The only electoral vote ever won by a Libertarian presidential slate came from a Virginia elector who couldn’t bring himself to support Nixon in 1972 and instead cast his vote for John Hospers. But they’ve historically been few and far between and have never changed the outcome of a presidential election.

The American political system can stand a few faithless electors casting protest votes now and again. They’re a burp in that system, a noise in the machinery that lets us know it is actually running.

But the American political system cannot survive electors defecting en masse from the clear winner to the clear loser of a national election. That’s not a protest or an act of civil disobedience. It’s an  insurrection.

So let’s be clear on what the petitioners are asking for here:

They want a coup d’etat.

Their candidate lost an election, so they want  a mutinous electoral college to set aside the results and transfer executive power to the loser instead of to the winner.

Emerging from Philadelphia’s Independence Hall at the end  of the 1787 constitutional convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of political system the convention had chosen. “A republic,” replied Franklin, “if you can keep it.”

The pro-Clinton petitioners don’t want to keep it. They would gladly throw out nearly 230 years of imperfect but working method in favor of getting their way just this one time.

In 1860, the presidential election didn’t go the way the southern slave states wanted it to go. But even those states didn’t demand that the result be overturned; they merely chose to show themselves to the door, and only went to war when they found that door barred.

With their appeal for a presidential coup, the pro-Clinton petitioners are flirting with same outcome: Major riots and social dislocations at least, quite possibly outright civil war. Even as a radical libertarian who believes the United States is past, or at least approaching, its “best used by” date, I don’t relish the prospect.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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