If you are wondering why I have been so quiet recently…I can sum it up with one word:
I am so bored of this current political season that I haven’t felt the urge to comment on it. Hopefully, I will find the fire again before the elections…however, when I live in a state that has successfully kept my preferred candidate off the ballot and also does not allow write-in votes…color me cynical…it will be an effort to drag myself to the polls in November.
Evil Out
There are many things to say about the Supreme Court’s final decision on the Healthcare bill (Obamacare). To say that I am deeply disappointed in the decision would be an understatement. However, the real issue with this case and the resolution that was reached is not that I am unhappy with the result, but that the opinion is a quagmire of legal opinions that is Judicial sausage and basically meaningless.
Here is the short summary of the core of the case (the mandate):
4 Justices felt that it should be upheld on Commerce Clause reasons, 5 justices felt it should be overturned on Commerce Clause reasons, and 1 justice felt the law should be upheld on Congress’ taxing power. Yes you read that right 10 opinions 5 for and 5 against. That means someone wrote two opinions and then voted to uphold the law (Justice Roberts…I’m looking at you). Does that seem screwed up? Yes it is. If you don’t care about the ins and outs of the opinion and just wanted my feelings about it, then stop reading you are done.
Here is the longer version:
I feel the law was clearly a Constitutional overreach by the Congress based upon the Commerce Clause, which was the power that Congress invoked to pass the law, a point agreed upon even in the majority opinion upholding the law:
Because the Commerce Clause does not support the individual mandate, it is necessary to turn to the Government’s second argument: that the mandate may be upheld as within Congress’s enumerated power to “lay and collect Taxes.” –(excerpt from Judge Robert’s majority opinion on Mandate, emphasis mine)
That point was contested by the four other Justice in the majority, but agreed upon by the four dissenting Justices. Justice Roberts then joined the four left-wing Justices (Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagen, and Sotomayer) to uphold the law. However, that vote left Justice Roberts needing to explain away why the “tax”, which was called a penalty repeatedly inside the bill, was a tax and not a penalty. This has led to some of the strangest language in the majority opinion that I have ever seen in a legal opinion…writing that is notorious for twisted language and doublespeak:
None of this is to say that payment is not intended to induce the purchase of health insurance. But the mandate need not be read to declare that failing to do so is unlawful. Neither the Affordable Care Act nor any other law attaches negative legal consequences to not buying health insurance, beyond requiring a payment to the IRS And Congress’s choice of language—stating that individuals “shall” obtain insurance or pay a “penalty”—does not require reading §5000A as punishing unlawful conduct. –(excerpt from Judge Robert’s majority opinion on Mandate – emphasis is mine)
Notice the two highlighted sections. In case your brain melted trying to parse the first portion, let me paraphrase:
“There is no penalty to not buying insurance other than the penalty you have to pay to the IRS”
Got that? No penalty, except the penalty. To make it even richer let me paraphrase the second portion for you:
“There is no penalty, except that Congress wrote the law to say there was a penalty”
Or to paraphrase Obi-wan:
“This is not the Penalty you are looking for”
So we have what is clearly labelled a penalty by Congress, clearly called a penalty within the opinion, but in order to make his case Justice Roberts needs to call it a tax. So why did Roberts feel the need to go to such mental gymnastics? Why did he stretch and bend the language so much to uphold his opinion? I think the answer is held in a passage from the rest of his opinion:
“It is only because the Commerce Clause does not authorize such a command that it is necessary to reach the taxing power question. And it is only because we have a duty to construe a statute to save it, if fairly possible, that §5000A can be interpreted as a tax. Without deciding the Commerce Clause question, I would find no basis to adopt such a saving construction.” –(excerpt from Judge Robert’s majority opinion on Mandate – once again, emphasis is mine)
He stated it pretty plainly. In order to avoid making a firm decision on the Commerce Clause argument, which he admits in his opinion he would have to use to overturn the law if viewed that way, the Chief Justice dodged. He decided to avoid making an honest intellectual opinion on the issue of the Commerce Clause and instead twisted himself into a pretzel to uphold the law. Why would he do that if he felt plainly that the law had no basis to be upheld on the Constitutional basis upon which it was argued? The answer to that is also in the above quote:
… it is only because we have a duty to construe a statute to save it, if fairly possible, that §5000A can be interpreted as a tax. –(excerpt from Judge Robert’s majority opinion on Mandate – once again, emphasis is mine)
Here we come to Justice Robert’s primary flaw as a Justice. His firm belief in the legal theory called Judicial Restraint. That is the belief that unless a law is blatantly unconstitutional that a Judge should use the ideals of precedent or Stare Decisis to uphold the laws that Congress has passes. The underlying idea being that if a law is passed by a duly elected body, that it is the duty of a Judge to go to great lengths to uphold that law. Notice my bolded passage in the above quote, “We have a duty”. If you don’t remember Roberts confirmation hearing let me refresh your memory. He talked often about how he believed firmly in precedent and the concept of Stare Decisis. Here is a revealing portion of his Supreme Court nomination hearing in response to a question of precedent and judicial restraint:
Well, again, you would start the precedent of the court on that decision. In other words, if you think that the decision was correctly decided or wrongly decided, that doesn’t answer the question of whether or not it should be revisited.
You do have to look at whether or not the decision has led to a workable rule. You have to consider whether it’s created settled expectations that should not be disrupted in the interest of regularity in the legal system. You do have to look at whether or not the bases of the precedent have been eroded. –(Chief Justice Roberts during his Supreme Court nomination hearing, emphasis mine)
Throughout his hearing Roberts came back to that idea of regularity in the legal system. This is the core of why he did not want to overturn the law on Commerce Clause grounds and instead chose a questionable “levy taxes” justification for the law. To come down hard on a Commerce Clause ruling would force the courts to revisit most of the rulings that have greatly expanded Federal jurisdiction and power since the Great Depression. Overturning the precedent set in Wickard v Fillburn, which set in stone the modern regulatory powers of Congress under the Commerce Clause and has been the basis of most regulatory court decision since. Opening a Commerce Clause Pandora’s Box would “disrupt the regularity” of the legal system. Basically, in the language of the playground, Roberts is a “Big Old Chicken” who “Pussied Out” of making a real decision. To use another common phrase he is trying to “have his cake and eat it to”.
But wait, I can hear my left of center friends crying, “what about Citizens United”? Where was the Judicial Restraint there? Some quick differences. First, the McCain/Feingold law that was overturned in CU had been stated to be unconstitutional when it was signed into law. Remember the infamous G.W. “I know it’s unconstitutional and I expect the Supreme Court to overturn it” signing statement? Second, the law had never been firmly established into the “law of the land”. Third, there were conflicting court rulings about Free Speech and Money in politics. Fourth, many organizations and any individuals could spend unlimited amounts of money on campaign advertising even while the law was in effect. Fifth, when a Solicitor before the court states that they could ban books before an election, the law is going to be declared in opposition of the First Amendment, period. So Roberts could rule clearly on Constitutional matters and would not upset the “regularity” of the legal system.
To sum up: The Roberts opinion that turned this case is not a large surprise coming from a Justice who places too high a value on Judicial Restraint, Precedent, and Stare Decisis. There is no grand conspiracy to his opinion. He wasn’t worried about the image of the court, he wasn’t threatened into it by the administration, and he isn’t playing a grand GOP reelection strategy. Judicial Restraint, that is all. Bad decision…even worse opinion upholding that decision.
Evil Out.
PS – The real irony is that to even consider the mandate at all, the Court had to decide that it was not a tax and therefore could be reviewed before any taxes had ever been levied:
“Today, the Court held that the AIA does not bar the challenge to the individual mandate because the mandate is not a “tax” within the meaning of the AIA.” – from this article
I have been working on a longer piece about voting for about a week now and I just can’t seem to get it finished. It is not a crisis of motivation, I want to talk about ballot access and how the two parties have used limited ballot access to rig the game in ways that third world dictators would envy. It is more a crisis of distraction, not really life distractions…more like political distractions. It looks like this summer and the lead up to the election is going to be really busy news-wise and I seem to be spending my limited productive time falling down rabbit holes of reading and listening to news stories. So in an effort to clear my head to work on other more fulfilling pieces here is a trip down the Conspiracy Theory rabbit hole:
The Koch-fueled right-wing/libertarian Illuminati is going to cause the failure of Obamacare at the Supreme Court by comparing the individual mandate to broccoli, or at least that is the coke-fueled implication of this recent New York Times piece. To be somewhat fair, the piece is mainly tracing the link of using broccoli as a metaphor in the larger health debate. However, there is a clear attempt to tie the debate to the unpopular-on-the-left Koch brothers:
The exchange caught the attention of Austin Bragg, 33, a producer for Reason TV. He proposed a video to his editor, Nick Gillespie. Reason TV and its magazine and Internet outlets are subsidiaries of the Reason Foundation, a libertarian research organization whose largest donors are the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation ($1,522,212) and the Sarah Scaife Foundation ($2,016,000), according to its most recent disclosures. Both finance conservative and libertarian causes.
This is just another in a long series of attempts to use the Kochs and other wealthy individuals as villains in the larger meta-narrative arc of the campaign against President Obama and to explain away public resistance to Left Wing political causes. I wrote a pretty large piece about it back during the 2010 election cycle called Hopping Down the Money Trail and it is a conspiracy that just won’t die. The narrative has taken over the debate about campaign spending and has become a Journalistic Meme.
For example, NPR has been busy running pieces about the “influence” of money in political campaigns, coverage that has increasingly become more hysterical since the Citizen’s United case. They ran a piece this week entitled: As GOP Cashes in, Democrats Search for Billionaires. After making some truly idiotic sweeping generalities with no citation or support, such as:
So why are Democrats losing the money war?
There are several answers. The simplest is supply — there are more rich Republicans than rich Democrats, a lot more.
(On the point of how foolish this statement is, the issue of number and amount of wealth between the parties is subject to much debate and depending upon which metrics you use can result in different conclusions.) The article hit closer to the core of the reason, in my opinion, for why the President is having troubles a bit later:
There’s also another reason that’s harder to quantify.
“A lot of these donors are disappointed in the president,” says Demoratic strategist Carter Eskew.
There have been a number of convincing polls showing an enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans in this election cycle. The conclusion of the article drives home the point of “scary money”. After spending the whole article talking about the amount and wealth of individual donors comes the scary finale:
But we won’t know exactly how big an advantage the Republicans and their outside groups have this year.
That’s because in addition to being unlimited and anonymous — much of the cash won’t be reported until after the election
Anonymous and unlimited. The cabal is “Steelin Ur Electunz” and you won’t even know it until after all is said and done. Fear…Doom…Secrecy…
Here are several of my thoughts about this issue:
Finally two suggestions:
I guess I got back to voting by the end of this anyway…more to come on voting soon.
Evil Out
It may seem like politics and news are what take up my time. While those subjects do consume my thoughts often, I am also a man of many other interests. So I thought I would make a quick post to mention a few things that have been piquing my curiosity recently. These are mostly just for fun, so enjoy.
First, the crew that brought the gamer-centric web show The Guild to browsers everywhere have created a project that presents a large selection of Geek related shows called Geek and Sundry. This project launched back in April, but only recently came to my attention. The show I really enjoy is called TableTop, where Wil Wheaton (yes Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation), plays various board and party games with friends and other webizens of Geek culture. It has really put me in the mood to dig out my board games and introduced me to several new ones that I hadn’t played before. Here is the first episode:
On a more serious note. As a lover of Freedom and someone who believes that consenting individuals should be able to do whatever they want. I support getting rid of prohibition in all of its’ various forms. This includes drugs, food, alcohol, and yes even prostitution. So recently while reading an interesting post comparing the current moral panic over the “Sex Trade” to past moral panics like the Satanist Panic of the 80′s, I ran down the rabbit hole into a blog written by a retired “Call Girl” which talks frankly and openly about societal, moral, and political issues surrounding the sex business. It is an interesting read and brought to light some issues about partial legalization and regulation (like the Nevada system) that I hadn’t considered before. The blog is called The Honest Courtesan and I recommend it if you are willing to challenge many of your preconceptions about the sex industry and those who chose to work in it.
Next, I have mentioned many times how big a fan I am of Dream Theater. They did something pretty cool in the ramp up to the last leg of their current tour. They offered the fans an opportunity to produce the video that will play behind the band as they unveil a song from their most recent album. I started to work on one myself, but the window was short (only about 3 weeks), I have done very little video editing before, and finding quality open source or creative commons licensed materials to use took a lot of time. So my project never quite reached completion. However, the winning video was pretty decent and will make a great backdrop on stage. Here it is for your viewing pleasure:
Finally, I have made posts before about my love of Webcomics and recently linked to a strip from the excellent comic XKCD. I highly recommend this comic for those who enjoy off the wall science and math related humor tinged with internet and pop-culture references. I was slow to jump on the XKCD. bandwagon, but there is some great humor buried behind the simple drawings.
That is it for today.
Evil Out.
One of the big news items this week is that a Federal judge blocked portions of Florida’s new Voter ID and Registration laws. The portions of the law that were blocked had to do with the new regulations on groups that registered voters. The central regulation the judge was concerned with was reduction in time to turn in registration forms from 10 days to 2 days. Failing to meet that deadline could result in large fines. Also there were new rules that required all volunteers to be registered and several other requirements that would have made it difficult for groups to recruit students and other short-term volunteers. This had resulted in groups like the League of Women Voters and Rock the Vote to halt voter registration drives and challenge the law in court. In a related story, the Justice Department has also told Florida to halt a purge of its’ voter records (meant to clean the records of non-citizens). Probably a good idea for a state that has a history of cleansing voting records of legitimate voters during past purges.
In general I am sympathetic to stance of groups like the League of Women Voters, but mainly for different reasons. The “problem” that Voter ID laws are meant to correct is vaporous at best. While some level of voter fraud happens in every election cycle, the worst offenses are not committed by individuals who vote multiple times. Instead the worst offenses are committed by the party machinery that runs the polling places and alter or remove large numbers of votes. However, the claims that new Voter ID laws are a “Grand GOP Scheme to Suppress Democrat Voters” are also overblown and expose the unfortunate partisan nature of some of the organizations who use that cry as a defense (much the same as identity politic groups claiming Voter ID laws are racist plots).
My reason to oppose Voter ID laws have to do with freedom issues. Put simply, Voter ID laws encourage and require more Government registration of it’s citizenry (“papers please”), disenfranchise large groups who are going to be affected by the laws passed without their consent (“taxation without representation”), and miss the true problem with our election system which is the lock out and marginalization of third party and independent candidates that is perpetrated by the major parties (“a vote for the Gary Johnson is actually a vote for Obama”).
Now you may be asking yourself, “Where is the Cruel Irony?” I’ll give you a minute to think about it while I attempt to distract you:
Here is the cruel irony. An organization (LWV) that readily recognizes and encourages the use of Government Regulation to strangle economic growth is now upset to find itself on the receiving end of Government Regulations that strangle voter turn out. Regulation by its’ very nature reduces the frequency and increases the costs of the activities that are being regulated, whether those activities are business transactions or voting. Many of the same groups that have been calling for more regulation and laws covering economic areas from health care to banking to energy to education and generally mocking concerns that these laws and regulations are going to cause higher costs and less choice and variety have now come to cry out that increased laws and regulations around voting are raising their costs and lowering voter turnout. The same groups that quite un-ironically state:
They include extremely burdensome administrative requirements, unreasonably tight deadlines for submission of completed forms, and heavy penalties for even the slightest delay or mistake. These restrictions are so unnecessarily harsh that they have forced the League of Women Voters and Rock the Vote, among other groups, to shut down their voter registration programs in Florida.
Don’t seem all that concerned that “extremely burdensome administrative requirements” might cause legitimate businesses to “shut down” their businesses. That regulations that are “unnecessarily harsh” have shut down competitive markets in industries like Health Care or Education. I realize that a non-partisan group like the LWV has a historical focus on voting and the hard-won right to vote and do great work in voter registration. Yet that same organization advocates for restrictive job and freedom killing regulations on business and industry. So I have no problem calling out groups like the LVW on the hypocrisy and tone-deafness presented by their own stances.
The Golden Rule strikes again.
Evil Out
In a pretty bald effort to prop up his foreign policy, anti-terrorism, and tough guy images the New York Times ran this sympathetic puff piece touting the “personal” attention the President applies to our Drone Strike program. The opening of the piece is rife with language meant to make you feel sorry for the immense burden POTUS is carrying as he uses remote drones to assassinate the terror threat that could topple our nation (and his Presidency):
Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a dronestrike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.
“He is determined that he will make these decisions about how far and wide these operations will go,” said Thomas E. Donilon, his national security adviser. “His view is that he’s responsible for the position of the United States in the world.” He added, “He’s determined to keep the tether pretty short.”
It is good to know that he has taken the burden of personally approving all assassinations carried out in our name. If you ever doubted that the two parties are for all practical purposes identical in their zeal to wage war and to wrap themselves in jingoistic language to make it seem just fine, then read the story and those doubts will vanish.
A phalanx of retired generals and admirals stood behind Mr. Obama on the second day of his presidency, providing martial cover as he signed several executive orders to make good on campaign pledges. Brutal interrogation techniqueswere banned, he declared. And the prison at Guantánamo Bay would be closed.
What the new president did not say was that the orders contained a few subtle loopholes. They reflected a still unfamiliar Barack Obama, a realist who, unlike some of his fervent supporters, was never carried away by his own rhetoric. Instead, he was already putting his lawyerly mind to carving out the maximum amount of maneuvering room to fight terrorism as he saw fit.
…
A few sharp-eyed observers inside and outside the government understood what the public did not. Without showing his hand, Mr. Obama had preserved three major policies — rendition, military commissions and indefinite detention — that have been targets of human rights groups since the 2001 terrorist attacks.
…
Asked what surprised him most about Mr. Obama, Mr. Donilon, the national security adviser, answered immediately: “He’s a president who is quite comfortable with the use of force on behalf of the United States.”
A great man of peace who will end our endless wars and improve our image abroad indeed. What is most disturbing about this whole situation is not only the secretive and disturbing way it is handled that is reminiscent of the worst “shadow councils” seen often in science fiction:
It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.
This secret “nominations” process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia.
No, what is most disturbing is the precedent that this whole program is setting. Not only for our own future Presidents, but as this technology becomes cheaper and more affordable what this precedent means for other Government agencies that want to start using drones. Agencies like Homeland Security and Local Police Departments who are currently “only” using drones for surveillance. How long before armed drones are authorized for use in our “Drug War”? When do secret panels meet to determine that drones can “take out” dangerous drug cartels without risking our own SWAT professionals?
Or how about the dangerous precedent set by the assassination of an American citizen. When considering that they were going to kill him without going through any proper legal process the Justice Department said, “Go ahead an internal secret review by the Executive Branch is the same as him going through proper court proceedings”:
…Mr. Awlaki’s calls for more attacks, presented Mr. Obama with an urgent question: Could he order the targeted killing of an American citizen, in a country with which the United States was not at war, in secret and without the benefit of a trial?
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel prepared a lengthy memo justifying that extraordinary step, asserting that while the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.
Just to make sure you understood that, re-read the bold section again. Yes, you read that correctly. The Justice Department insisted that in order to kill an American citizen that his 5th amendment right to Due Process was needed…However, they also said that the secret internal deliberations by the Executive Branch (not even secret internal deliberations by the Judicial Branch) would be enough. If you do not see that as a dangerous precedent to give any President or Government in general, then open your pocket Constitution, read the 5th amendment, then re-read that bold segment above again, rinse and repeat until it gets through your thick skull.
What makes this whole program and the way it is handled truly scary is that it relies on the theory of “Top Men”:
The idea that experts can handle and control this situation and that they alone know what is best for all of us. One last quote from the NY Times article really brings this point home to me:
But the control he exercises also appears to reflect Mr. Obama’s striking self-confidence: he believes, according to several people who have worked closely with him, that his own judgment should be brought to bear on strikes.
TOP. MAN.
He alone can do this, he alone knows what is best, he alone can suspend constitutional rights. All good as long as you believe he is a TOP MAN, but what happens when the next TOP MAN gets into office and he isn’t the one you approve of. Ponder that and remember why it is dangerous to constantly give away your rights to a Government even one that is run by TOP MEN.
Evil Out
A little over a year ago US Special Forces took out Osama bin Laden, my response at the time was basically a big shrug of the shoulders. I stand by that. It took us ten years, two ongoing wars, thousands of American lives, tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani lives, and sacrificing many of our civil liberties to assassinate him in an act of vengeance as opposed to capturing him and bringing him to America to stand in front of the American justice system for his crimes. Needless to say many of the citizens of Pakistan were (rightfully) outraged at an American military operation on their sovereign soil.
A year later one of the key members of the operation to get bin Laden, Dr. Shakil Afridi, has been sentenced by a Pakistani court to 33 years in prison for treason. Of course, the outrage by our Government machine is heated from condemnations by Secretary of State Clinton to congressional committees voting to slash foreign aid from Pakistan. Now Pakistani and American foreign relations have been rocky for years, but this is one place where I think the blame for this lies squarely at the feet of our own intelligence operations and the faux outrage from those in our Government is chest pounding at its’ worst.
Despite the cries from our politicians and many citizens, what Dr. Alfridi did was an act of sabotage or treason against his own Government. Imagine for a short moment a bizarro world where a crack team of Russian Spetsnaz launched a midnight raid on Los Angeles to extract a notorious criminal who had committed an atrocious crime within Russia, but had hidden in our country for years and our own Government had offered little or no effort to turn him over to Russian authorities. The cry of outrage from our own citizens over Russian military units operating within our borders would be loud. Now imagine that one of our own American citizens had aided the Russians in locating the criminal…The outcry for him to be brought into our courts for treason would also be loud.
As far fetched as that sounds, that is exactly what we did in Pakistan and those are the actions taken by Dr. Afridi. An act against his own country in support of a foreign power. Espionage or treason by any rational definition. So I can understand why the Pakistanis have moved to bring him to trial and why he was sentenced. From the NPR article above is a good section dealing with this:
Whatever the motive, the former chief of Pakistan’s premier intelligence service, the ISI, says Afridi got what he deserved. Javed Ashraf Qazi says his crime was that he kept hidden from Pakistan what he was doing for the Americans.
[JAVED ASHRAF QAZI]: “Then it is espionage. It is betraying your country. It is working on the quiet for a foreign intelligence agency. This would be a crime in any country of the world.”
It would be a crime anywhere. It is unfortunate for the Doctor that he was caught and put through this. However, the fault for his being held to trial is the direct result of our own intelligence agencies dropping the ball and compromising one of their intelligence assets in a rather callous disregard for his life and safety. A move which could have the effect of making it harder for US intelligence agencies to garner aid and support from locals. This opinion piece lays out the argument pretty well.
We need “insiders” within foreign countries and terrorist networks to work for the CIA and DOD – to provide us with critical information – this is critical for our continued success in preventing attacks against the U.S. and our interests. But through the White House failure in this case it has jeopardized our ability, as intelligence officers, to do our job – to obtain through foreign individuals protected information…in other words, the White House has done severe damage to our ability to spy.
If we are going to conduct operations on foreign soil and recruit locals to do our dirty work, we should at least have the decency to protect them once we are done with them. Instead we are going to stamp our feet and protest another sovereign country’s ability to deal with those who commit treasonous acts. The next time an American faces charges of espionage or treason for acts committed while aiding foreign Governments remember how we responded to similar actions by those we have acted against.
“…as you would have them do unto you.”
Words to live by.
Evil Out
Who will guard the guards themselves? Who Watches the Watchers?
A perennial question first posed by The Roman poet Juvenal about 2000 years ago. Well I am glad to herald the continuation of a grand undertaking of one man that will be continued as his ability to watch the watchers fades. The work of David Packman and his exemplary blog, Injustice Everywhere, has been picked up and will continue thanks to the people at the Cato Institute.
The new blog is now PoliceMisconduct.net. If you want to see a record of cops behaving badly around the country this is place to go. It is important that we as citizens keep an eye on the people who we charge to protect us. Since our Government is an extension of our individual responsibilities and rights, every action taken by the men and women we sanction as police officers is our responsibility. PoliceMisconduct.net is where you can go to see what atrocities and horrors are committed in your name. It is becoming easier for citizens to blow the whistle on the bad behavior of the “men in blue” with the explosion of portable recording devices and the hyper speed and global reach of the internet. With these tools hopefully the culture of privilege, violence, and militarization that has infested the police force over the years can be broken and stories such as the killing of Kelly Thomas or the execution-style killing of Rekia Boyd will one day be historical references of the police that once were.
To those who complain that these stories don’t represent all police, or that these are the actions of a few bad apples, I repeat the oft-used phrase “With great power comes great responsibility”. Having your actions monitored is a small price to pay to help root out the problems in police culture. Hopefully by shedding light on the problems around the country the culture of the “Thin Blue Line” can be broken and those “bad apples” can be removed.
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty—power is ever stealing from the many to the few…. The hand entrusted with power becomes … the necessary enemy of the people.” — Wendell Phillips
So read the blog and do your duty for Freedom. When you see misconduct report it, or if you read about misconduct in your locality be an agent to help hold those responsible to account.
Evil Out
…are in the power of the tongue; those who love it will eat its fruit. — Proverbs 18:21
“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.” – C.S. Lewis
Here is the tragic tale of Carlos DeLuna, a man who was put to death for a crime committed by another man. While it is not the first such case, it is the most recent and one of the most well documented that I have seen. Here is the heart of the story:
Carlos DeLuna was arrested, aged 20, on 4 February 1983 for the brutal murder of a young woman, Wanda Lopez. She had been stabbed once through the left breast with an 8in lock-blade buck knife which had cut an artery causing her to bleed to death.
From the moment of his arrest until the day of his death by lethal injection six years later, DeLuna consistently protested he was innocent. He went further – he said that though he hadn’t committed the murder, he knew who had. He even named the culprit: a notoriously violent criminal called Carlos Hernandez.
The two Carloses were not just namesakes – or tocayos in Spanish, as referenced in the title of the Columbia book. They were the same height and weight, and looked so alike that they were sometimes mistaken for twins. When Carlos Hernandez’s lawyer saw pictures of the two men, he confused one for the other, as did DeLuna’s sister Rose.
At his 1983 trial, Carlos DeLuna told the jury that on the day of the murder he’d run into Hernandez, who he’d known for the previous five years. The two men, who both lived in the southern Texas town of Corpus Christi, stopped off at a bar. Hernandez went over to a gas station, the Shamrock, to buy something, and when he didn’t return DeLuna went over to see what was going on.
DeLuna told the jury that he saw Hernandez inside the Shamrock wrestling with a woman behind the counter. DeLuna said he was afraid and started to run. He had his own police record for sexual assault – though he had never been known to possess or use a weapon – and he feared getting into trouble again.
“I just kept running because I was scared, you know.” When he heard the sirens of police cars screeching towards the gas station he panicked and hid under a pick-up truck where, 40 minutes after the killing, he was arrested.
At the trial, DeLuna’s defence team told the jury that Carlos Hernandez, not DeLuna, was the murderer. But the prosecutors ridiculed that suggestion. They told the jury that police had looked for a “Carlos Hernandez” after his name had been passed to them by DeLuna’s lawyers, without success. They had concluded that Hernandez was a fabrication, a “phantom” who simply did not exist. The chief prosecutor said in summing up that Hernandez was a “figment of DeLuna’s imagination”.
Four years after DeLuna was executed…
You often never know the truth in these kinds of cases, most death row inmates claim to be innocent. However, there were many mistakes made in this case:
There is more, but those facts alone show the careless disregard that was taken in the case where a man was going to lose his life.
There are many reasons to oppose the death penalty, but one that is often cited is the idea that we have never executed an innocent man. That has never been the case, even in modern times, and this example is not the only one. The first and most obvious problem with the death penalty is that there is no margin of error, once someone has been executed you cannot simply undo the process if they are later proven innocent. When we have over 2000 modern criminal cases that have been overturned, including some criminals on death row, it becomes more and more likely that we have been executing innocent men who might one day have been proven innocent. Had DeLuna simply been sentenced to Life in Prison he most likely would be walking around a free man now after this recent investigation came to light.
If you are concerned at all about innocents being executed then cases like DeLuna’s should make you pause. There are other reasons to oppose the death penalty not the least of which is that a Government that has the power of life and death will abuse it. Like the CS Lewis quote above, you may believe that the death penalty is a moral action until it directly effects you.
Remember DeLuna the next time you hear that horrible criminal X has been executed for unthinkable crime Y. One day that power of life and death could be directed at you or someone you know and care about regardless of innocence or guilt.
Evil Out.
“Taxes, after all, are the dues that we pay for the privileges of membership in an organized society” — FDR
A classic quote by a person considered by many to be a great president. It calls to the idea that there are many benefits provided to us by modern society that are unobtainable without the power of the Government. Ignoring for now the horrors that have been done by Government over history and the uses of Taxation to suppress and violate human rights. There is just one small problem with the underlying analogy of the quote. That is the comparison of Dues to Taxes. Dues (and Fees) are voluntary transactions. Taxation is not voluntary. Taxes are only collected at the point of a gun. The threat of force by Government agents underlies all collection of taxes. Otherwise there would be no need for agencies like the IRS and there would be no criminal or civil penalties for tax avoidance. If someone attempts to collect Dues or Fees at the point of a gun or with the threat of force they would be committing Robbery or Extortion. This is why many consider the collection of Taxes by the Government to be an immoral act while they would consider it a fair thing for a Government to ask for Dues or Fees for services.
You might be wondering why I brought this up…it came from a Facebook post that crossed my wall that was referencing a fight in the Wichita City Government to “save” the Public Bus system. To keep from reducing the number of routes the city council voted to delay other projects in order to funnel funds into the failing system. The Wichita Transit system is facing close to an $800,000 budget shortfall and without grants from the Federal Government and this shuffling of funds by the City Government would have to close routes and reduce running times. Ideally they could raise rates to cover their expenses, but the last time they did that ridership fell (even though total income rose). This is a classic case of Fees (Dues) vs. Taxes. Rather than either pairing down the system to fit the income stream or raising Fees to more closely match the cost of business, the City Government opted to use Taxes to shore up the system.
The problem with this method is that it does not deal with the underlying structural problems of the system. Expenses are too high for the incoming revenue. Until those two numbers are in balance the City Government is simply using the force implicit in Taxation to take money from those who do not use the system and funnel it into transit. There are many ways they could look at lowering expenses, reducing routes being the simplest. Another that crossed my mind would be shrinking the size of the buses to match the actual levels of ridership could lower operating costs and generate revenue by selling the over-sized buses for more reasonable sized ones. Perhaps opening bus routes to licensed private companies for Fees based on the ridership of certain routes. Those Fees could then be used to subsidize the Government run buses that would run the lesser used routes. I’m sure there are many others options that could help solve this problem rather than using Force to simply delay dealing with the problem.
A simple story and a common one in our highly centralized and Government controlled society, but it highlights the basic fallacy that we are simply paying “Dues” for the convenience of modern society. I would like to leave you with another quote that I think outlines this issue and where the real problem lies in “paying for the privileges” of “organized” living.
”Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” — Frederic Bastiat
Evil Out
