Coyote Blog

Via the WSJ, discussing the US's Siberian Gulag in the Caribbean:

The Obama administration on Monday announced plans for new Guantanamo Bay military trials and for the first time laid out its legal strategy to indefinitely detain prisoners who can't be tried but are too dangerous to be freed.

President Barack Obama issued an executive order to conduct periodic reviews of the cases of the nearly 50 detainees who will be detained indefinitely.

It used to be that people who had never been convicted of any crime but that certain people in the government considered dangerous were called "free men."

that this military detainment issue was a dangerous one, first in Gitmo, and now with Bradley Manning.   I understand the administration and the Army are pissed at the guy for embarrassing them and potentially giving away secrets to hostile parties, but the guy has not been tried or convicted of anything.  Hell, even if he had been convicted of something, I can't believe he would be sentenced to the punishments he is enduring in what is essentially pre-trial detention.   We are all pissed at Jared Loughner but we haven't treated him this way in detention.

The military is NOT doing anything to improve their case that they should be allowed to handle indefinite detentions, such as at Gitmo, through their procedures rather than civil ones.

The Left seems upset and surprised that Obama would allow such a thing, given his rhetoric on the campaign trail.  I was never surprised -- I wrote on inauguration day that candidates who want more transparency in politics and reductions in Presidential arbitrary authority generally change their tune once in office.  As I wrote then, "It seems that creeping executive power is a lot more worrisome when someone else is in power."  And if that wasn't enough, the Administration's about face on closing Gitmo was another reminder.

Younger readers will be forgiven for not fully understanding just how credulous the American public became during the late 80's and early 90's as the media, prosecutors, and various advocacy groups worked hard to convince us every school was a sort of Road-Warrior-like playground for child predators.  Adult after adult were convicted based on bizarre stories about ritual murder, sexually depraved clowns, and all kinds of other dark erotic nightmares.  In most cases there was little or no physical evidence -- only stories from children, usually coerced after numerous denials by "specialists."  These specialists claimed to be able to bring back repressed memories, but critics soon suspected they were implanting fantasies.

Scores of innocent people went to jail -- many still languish there, including targets of Janet Reno, who rode her fame from these high-profile false prosecutions all the way to the White House, and Martha Coakley, just missed parleying her bizarre prosecutions into a Senate seat  (Unbelievably, the Innocence Project, which does so much good work and should be working on some of Reno's victims, actually invited her on to their board).

Radley Balko has yet another example I was not familiar with.   The only thing worse than these prosecutions is just how viciously current occupants of the DA office fight to prevent them from being questioned or overturned.

I am particularly sensitive to this subject because I sat on just such a jury in Dallas around 1992.    In this case the defendant was the alleged victim's dad.  The initial accuser was the baby sitter, and red lights started going off for me when she sat in the witness box saying that she turned the dad into police after seeing another babysitter made a hero on the Oprah show.  The babysitter in my case clearly had fantasies of being on Oprah.  Fortunately, defense attorneys by 1992 had figured out the prosecution game and presented a lot of evidence against, and had a lot of sharp cross-examination of, the "expert" who had supposedly teased out the alleged victim's suppressed memories.

We voted to acquit in about an hour, and it only took that long because there were two morons who misunderstood pretty much the whole foundation of our criminal justice system -- they kept saying the guy was probably innocent but they just didn't want to take the risk of letting a child molester go.  Made me pretty freaking scared to every put my fate in the hands of a jury  (ironically the jury in the famous McMartin pre-school case was hung 10-2 in favor of acquittal, with two holdouts).

Anyway, one oddity we did not understand as a jury was that we never heard from the victim.  I supposed it was some kind of age thing, that she was too young to testify.  As it turns out, we learned afterwards that she did not testify for the prosecution because she spent most of her time telling anyone who would listen that her dad was innocent and the whole thing was made up by the sitter.   Obviously the prosecution wasn't going to call her, and her dad would not allow his attorneys to call her as a witness, despite her supportive testimony, because he did not want to subject his daughter to hostile cross-examination.  This is the guy the state wanted to prosecute -- he risked jail to spare his daughter stress, when in turn the state was more than happy to put that little girl through whatever it took to grind out a false prosecution.

update: This is a tragic and amazing recantation by a child forced to lie by prosecutors in one of these cases.  Very brief excerpt of a long article:

I remember feeling like they didn't pick just anybody--they picked me because I had a good memory of what they wanted, and they could rely on me to do a good job. I don't think they thought I was telling the truth, just that I was telling the same stories consistently, doing what needed to be done to get these teachers judged guilty. I felt special. Important....

I remember going in our van with all my brothers and sisters and driving to airports and houses and being asked if we had been [abused in] these places. I remember telling people [that the McMartin teachers] took us to Harry's Meat Market, and describing what I thought the market was like. I had never been in there before, and I was fairly certain I was going to get in trouble for what I was saying because it probably was not accurate. I imagined someone would say, "They don't have that kind of freezer there." And they did say that. But then someone said, "Well, they could have changed it." It was like anything and everything I said would be believed.

The lawyers had all my stories written down and knew exactly what I had said before. So I knew I would have to say those exact things again and not have anything be different, otherwise they would know I was lying. I put a lot of pressure on myself. At night in bed, I would think hard about things I had said in the past and try to repeat only the things I knew I'd said before.

I thought this a good commentary on the whole Tiger mom thing.  Via Insty [Note I added some paragraph breaks -  sorry Mr. Smith, but I simply cannot abide by paragraphs as long as yours]

But here's the thing.  And here the point has been made easier to make by the curious fact that Tiger Mom is a Yale Law School professor and as Professor Bainbridge has pointed out, it seems almost an epidemic among faculty parents in New Haven.

My fear is that little tiger kittens are not being groomed to make things that you and I can buy if we feel like it.  I'm afraid, call me paranoid if you like, that those little achievers will want to grow up to, well, rule.  Not in the imperial Chinese way, though I take it that is the ultimate inspiration for this model of child rearing.  If my high school understanding of Chinese history is correct, that Empire used to be ruled by a giant bureaucracy into which one got by passing extraordinarily difficult exams, competing against other fanatically hopeful parents who saw it as one of the few ways to get the young persons out of a life of horrible drudgery.  But rather in something more like the imperial Chinese way than my ideal, which is more like Thomas Jefferson's, without the antique and misguided dislike of commerce.

So, if I'm sitting in the middle of my Jeffersonian space, able to order whatever I want, within my budget of course, from Amazon, working at something I like, not taxed to death or harassed by officious officials;  if I can provide for my family and hope to provide a similarly independent life for my offspring, then what's it to me if some mom somewhere wants to drive her children so that someday they will produce a recording or a pill I might want to buy?  Only good.

But if we are sliding toward a world like the one that is, to exaggerate only a little, like that I was taught we should be sliding toward when I restlessly roamed the hallowed halls the The Yale Law School many years ago, then I am not so sanguine.  Then I worry that all this fierce intelligence, all this ambition, all this work are going toward the building of world in which my children will be mere, well, what do you call the people who support those who so intelligently manage things from on top.  Not to mention the unbelievably well educated 35 year old who will tell me someday I didn't score well enough in some algorithm I can't even understand to get my arteries bypassed or my prostate cancer treated.

I want to live in a world, and I want my children to as well, where we are free individuals, and geniuses can sell us stuff if we want to buy it.  When I suspect the little elites of tomorrow are just being made more formidable still, it excites not my admiration as much as my anxiety.

I want to post more later when I have time on the whole notion of giving the US President an Internet kill switch (short review:  yuk!)

But I wanted to correct one bit of sloppiness in a number of posts.  Access to the Internet is not a human right.  If it were, the implication is that some groups of people would have to be coerced to provide Internet access to those who currently don't enjoy it.

The correct way to phrase the issue is "Turning off or blocking the Internet is not a government right."

Here is a simple rule of thumb:  Public officials should have no expectation of privacy when performing their public functions.  Period.  Except for some really narrow exceptions, I can't think of any justification for prosecuting people filming police officers than the officer's desire to avoid accountability.

I grew up in the South and saw the tail end of Jim Crow.  This is how we are achieving the new equality -- in the future, everyone will be treated by the criminal justice system like blacks have been in the deep south.

Apparently, the Dire Straits song "Money for Nothing" has been banned from the Canadian airwaves:

The Dire Straits song "Money for Nothing" was ruled by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council to be "extremely offensive" and thus inappropriate for airing on radio or television because it uses an anti-gay slur.

The decision against St. John's radio station CHOZ-FM in Newfoundland was released Wednesday. In it, the panel ruled that the word "faggot" "contravened the Human Rights Clauses" and its ethics code and is "no longer" permitted "even if entirely or marginally acceptable in earlier days."

This is stupid on its face, and even stupider if the song in question is understood.  If you have never heard the song before, it may seem an odd juxtaposition at first -- why does it alternate between jabs at rock stars on MTV and talk about moving appliances?  Because the song is exactly what it sounds like -- Mark Knopfler overheard some workers in an appliance store watching MTV and heckling the performers they saw for being rich and spoiled and overpaid and not working very hard.

The song is interesting not just because it has a great opening that is fun to play at maximum volume, but because Knopfler is one of those guys on MTV the workers are heckling.  Does he secretly agree with them, is he hurt by them, does he find them funny?   Anyway, the word "faggot" in the piece is essentially aimed at the performers themselves -- they are describing a critique they have received, repeated in all its salty blue-collar flavor.  As such the words feel utterly authentic, perhaps because they are -- Knopfler reportedly grabbed a piece of scratch paper right at the store and started jotting down notes.

I cannot imagine a less offensive use of the word.  There is absolutely no way to read the lyrics of the song and come to the conclusion the word was aimed at gays, or really at anyone else but the author and performer.   I presume by this standard  that Canada expects to ban the entire body of hip hop music?

I could have easily titled this post "the Left and Right converge," because in it I see the Left acting exactly like the religious Right I grew up around in the South that would try to ban any number of books and songs, often out of an incredibly poor understanding of what the story or song was really about.

By the way, the statists among you will be happy to know that this ban only applies to private companies -- the state is still allowed to play the song because, you know, government motives are pure and thereby sanitize any harm that might come from playing this song

Ron Cohen, the CBSC's national chairman, told The Washington Times on Thursday that the decision effectively sets a "nationwide" precedent binding on all private license holders for TV, cable-TV and radio broadcasting. It does not cover the state-run Canadian Broadcasting Corp. or "community and university" stations.

I have seen Knopfler live many times live.  To be fair, Knopfler himself seems to have some sympathy for this position, as I have seen him change the offending word to others in more recent live performances.  I don't know if this is an achnowlegement the word should be changed or he is knuckling under to pressure.    Here is the original video on YouTube.  Here is a live version where faggot is replaced.  Extra bonus cameo - Clapton in a pink suit.
Postscript: It is a fairly commonly-known bit of trivia that the first song played on MTV was "Video Killed the Radio Star."  But this was new to me:

When MTV Europe began airing in 1987, "Money for Nothing," which begins with Sting's opening falsetto whisper "I want my MTV," was the first video played.

Couldn't agree more with the thoughts in this post from TJIC:

I was discussing this with Dan Geer the other day "“ the fact that individual liberty (social, economic, etc.) is the goal, and democracy (political "liberty") is just a tool to get there "¦ and not even a particularly good tool.

I'd be all in favor of a limited constitutional monarchy, if the result was "“ integrated over time "“ more social and economic freedom....

Leftists don't understand this at all "“ they think that the freedom to vote for your choice of bully who will lord it over everyone else is the paramount right, and they don't recognize economic liberty at all.

I said something similar in this post on why I don't necessarily treasure the right to vote.

Now, don't get me wrong, the right to vote in a representative democracy is great and has proven a moderately effective (but not perfect) check on creeping statism.  A democracy, however, in and of itself can still be tyrannical.  After all, Hitler was voted into power in Germany, and without checks, majorities in a democracy would be free to vote away anything it wanted from the minority "“ their property, their liberty, even their life.   Even in the US, majorities vote to curtail the rights of minorities all the time, even when those minorities are not impinging on anyone else.  In the US today, 51% of the population have voted to take money and property of the other 49%.

I go on to discuss what things are more important to a good government than voting.

From Scouting New York

Set into the sidewalk is a small triangle (see my sneaker for size comparison), with the mysterious message: "Property of the Hess Estate Which Has Never Been Dedicated For Public Purposes."

In 1910, the area around Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue was being widened by the city. Over 300 buildings were condemned and razed under Eminent Domain laws, including a 5-story apartment building called The Voorhis belonging to David Hess.

Hess fought the city fiercely to save his building but lost, and by 1914, this small triangle was all that was left of his property. Thinking he'd been suitably beaten down, the city asked Hess to voluntarily donate the minuscule triangle for use as part of the public sidewalk "“ but Hess refused, and had this mosaic installed on July 27, 1922. Though it inevitably became part of the sidewalk anyway, anyone who walked over the triangle couldn't help but be reminded of Hess' battle.

I would like to buy it from the Hess family and erect a triangular pedestal with a suitable statue on top, perhaps Atlas with the globe bouncing away, giving a one finger salute to the city.

Incredibly, Mr. Hope and Change believes he has the power to have American citizens legally assassinated.

I believe it is time for a public information notice reminding everyone the actual text of the First Amendment as it applies to speech:

Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech

It does NOT say:

No citizen may ever experience any negative consequences from their speech

This is the reason the reminder seems necessary

It appears that for a principled defense of property rights, the exercise of religion in America, and limited government we have to turn to ... liberal blogger Kevin Drum

We already know that a large majority of Americans are opposed to building it, but here are the results of an Economist poll on a slightly different question:

Whether or not you think the Islamic cultural centre and mosque should be built near the World Trade Center site, do you think that Muslims have a constitutional right to build a mosque there?

Technically, I think the wording of this question should have been turned around: not whether Muslims have the right to build a mosque on Park Place, but whether the government has the constitutional right to stop them from building a mosque on Park Place.

Still, I think everyone probably understands what this means, and it's just depressing as hell. It's one thing to oppose the mosque just because you don't like the idea, but to deny that Muslims even have a constitutional right to build it? That should be a no-brainer. Of course they do.

Seriously, this is from a man who probably does not think you have the Constitutional right to choose your own doctor. Why are Republicans ceding the high ground on this to Democrats? Well, it turns out that is the theme of my new column this week in Forbes.

...prospective mosque-banners would argue that I simply don't understand how utterly, deeply offensive the proposed location of this mosque is to them. But that is not the case. I am offended as well by what might be a laudatory memorial to a terrorist incident. But the question for me is, do we have a right not to be offended?

The irony is that for the last decade or so, conservatives have fought the political correctness movement over exactly this issue. Conservative commentators, rightly I think, were up in arms over the "hate speech" trial of Mark Steyn in Canada, and more recently the cancellation of Ann Coulter's Canadian speaking tour. In both cases Canadian government and university officials argued that Steyn's and Coulter's criticisms of radical Islam were too divisive, too defamatory to Muslims, and in general too offensive to be allowed public voice....

This is what truly floors me about the Ground Zero controversy: Republicans all over the country are standing up and begging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Barack Obama to void the property rights of a private entity, shut down the construction of a church, and do so to protect some mythical right not to be offended, a right that, until recently, conservatives argued did not exist. Do Republicans really want to encourage the federal government to tear up property rights and First Amendment protections, all in the name of hurt feelings? If conservatives set this precedent today, they are almost certainly not going to like how it is used tomorrow.

Postscript: I notice something in this poll that I have seen several times lately.  Traditionally, poll results for independents always fell somewhere between Republicans and Democrats.  In this poll, as in several others I have seen, Independent responses actually fell outside of these bounds.  Increasingly independents are shedding the "moderate" label and actually pacing the two political parties.  I find this encouraging, though it is probably too much to hope for that this is the leading indicator of some type of radical ideological restructuring of the Coke and Pepsi parties.

No time today to comment, so I will direct you over to John Stossel who has more on this really awful piece of legislation.

Update: More in the Washington Examiner.  And here is a rare bit of honesty, where a Democratic Congressman admits the law is about keeping Republicans from being elected.  Team Coke wants to keep Team Pepsi from advertising.

Its pretty clear from this summary of the Obama administration legal brief that the Administration has no idea what its own immigration policy should be.  I don't agree with all of the author's statements (for example, I am not a fan of e-Verify, as it just reinforces to me that the government has gotten itself in the business of licensing labor) but its a pretty interesting summary of just how muddled the Obama administration is on this topic.  While I don't support our newest immigration law here in AZ, its easier to see why states like AZ feel the need to take some independent leadership on the topic.

In this brief, the Obama administration is challenging an earlier AZ state law that requires, as a condition to retain one's business license, that companies use e-Verify to check new employees legal work status  (here and here).  Unfortunately, Obama's head of Homeland Security (and thus all immigration-related activities) actually signed the law into being and the administration wrote a brief in favor of the law just 9 months ago, about the same time Congress reauthorized e-Verify without doing anything to strike down AZ implementation practices).  I am not much of a legal scholar, but states use compliance with Federal programs all the time as minimum requirements for retaining business licenses -- e.g. non-payment of Federal taxes can cause one to lose his state business license, but no one has ever argued that is an illegal intrusion of states on federal powers.  If the Feds want to argue all of these provisions are unconstitutional, fine by me.  Anyway, the article linked above is highly entertaining.

Postscript: Here is the e-Verify post one must post in his business to be legally compliant:

This is fairly Orwellian for those of us who believe that all people have the right to work, irrespective of the country they were born in, and this right does not flow from any national government and therefore does not stop or start at any border.

The title is from a quote by Representative Peter King, lamenting that the Feds might actually have the gall to Mirandize an American citizen who has been arrested.

Miranda warnings are not actually required per se, but statements by un-Mirandized suspects will generally be tossed out of court.  So I think the whole Miranda thing is overblown, but Representative King's words tend to summarize for me the slippery slope of civil rights exceptions.  Someday, you too may be the "but still."

On top of Mr. King's statement and our local Sheriff's continuing proclivity to walk into businesses and zip-tie everyone with brown skin until they can produce birth certifications  (yes, he did it again last month and again the other day) comes Joe Lieberman's new bit of law and order paranoia.  Apparently, after watching a 24-hour festival of 1970's Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson crime dramas, Lieberman proposed:

Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Scott Brown (R-MA), joined on the House side by Reps. Jason Altmire (D-PA) and Charlie Dent (R-PA), today introduced a little publicity stunt in legislative form called the Terrorist Expatriation Act, making good on Lieberman's pledge to find a way to strip the citizenship of Americans"”whether naturalized or native born"”who are suspected of aiding terrorist groups. It does so by amending the Immigration and Nationality Act, which lays out the various conditions under which a person may renounce or be deprived of citizenship....

Finally, note that the bill's definition of "material support" for terrorist groups explicitly invokes the criminal statute covering such actions.  Which is to say, revocation of citizenship under the new bill is triggered by committing a particular federal crime. Except that the Immigration and Nationality Act only requires that one of the predicates for revocation be established by a "preponderance of the evidence." So in effect, the bill takes what is already a crime and says: Proof of guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt" is no longer a prerequisite for the imposition of punishment for this crime.

"Preponderance of the evidence" is the same standard under which McDonald's lost several million dollars because its coffee was too hot.

This is from the national ID card portion of the Democrat's immigration proposal:

Tough penalties will be put in place for fraud in procurement of a fraud-proof social security card.

Jim Harper has a thorough analysis of the proposal at the link.  My fear is the Republicans and Democrats will one day realize how similar they are on this issue and agree to an authoritarian compromise.

I don't know that I have ever seen a clearer example of the disconnect of thinking between libertarians and authoritarian political thinking than in this brief paragraph from Dahlia Lithwick.  She is writing about a court case reviewing whether it should be a crime to deny police your identification.  She writes, making fun of libertarians:

It would be easier to credit the Cato and ACLU arguments if we didn't already have to hand over our ID to borrow a library book, obtain a credit card, drive a car, rent videos, obtain medical treatment, or get onto a plane. So the stark question then becomes this: Why are you willing to tell everyone but the state who you are? It's a curious sort of privacy that must be protected from nobody except the government.

Really??  It is strange to her that we would treat privacy uniquely with the one and only organization in this country that can legally use force against us, legally take our money without our permission, and legally throw us in prison?  Is she really so blinded by a love for state authority that she can't tell the difference between a transaction at Blockbuster, which we can choose not to patronize if we don't like their terms of sale, and an interaction with police, where there is not even a hint of it being an arms-length, consensual, balanced interaction.

There is an largeand growing body of evidence that police take advantage of their power mismatch with citizens and abuse their power in multiple ways, large and small.  These abuses have likely always existed, but were covered up by police officers standing up for each other.  Only the advent of portable video cameras has started to really document what really goes on in these interactions.  Just read a few posts at this site to get a flavor.  And cops sure don't like when you ask them for their ID, as they hate anything that might impose accountability on them:

And in today's daily contempt-of-cop story, Ft. Lauderdale Police Officer Jeff Overcash did not appreciate a man asking him for his badge number, so he pulled out his handcuffs and arrested him.And it was all caught on video.

The video shows Brennan Hamilton walking up to Overcash in a calm manner with a pen and notepad in his hand. Overcash, who is leaning against his squad car with other cops, then pulls out his handcuffs and arrests Hamilton.

Overcash charged him with resisting arrest without violence and disorderly intoxication.

Alex Tabarrok makes a good point.   Based on these arguments, Lithwick must be A-OK with Arizona's new immigration laws, right?

Update:  It is interesting that while sneering at slippery slope arguments, she proves their merit.

The slippery-slope arguments"”that this leads to a police state in which people are harassed for doing nothing"”won't really fly, although I guarantee that you'll hear more and more of them in the coming weeks.

But in the immediately proceeding lines she wrote:

Is there something about stating your name or handing over a driver's license that differs from being patted down or frisked, which is already constitutional for Terry purposes?I, for one, would rather hand over my driver's license to a cop than be groped by one.

This is a perfect illustration of the slippery slope, almost textbook.  Libertarians certainly opposed current pat down and frisking rules, but since these are legal, Lithwick uses their legality to creep the line a little further.  And then the legality of these ID checks will in turn be used to justify the legality of something else more intrusive.

Arizona used to be a state that defended private property rights.  But in a single bill,  SB1070, we have thrown out private property in favor of community property.   We have officially established the principle that the state can tell us who can and can't be on our private property.

A. IN ADDITION TO ANY VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW, A PERSON IS GUILTY OF TRESPASSING IF THE PERSON IS BOTH:
1. PRESENT ON ANY PUBLIC OR PRIVATE LAND IN THIS STATE.
2. IN VIOLATION OF 8 UNITED STATES CODE SECTION 1304(e) OR 1306(a).

Trespassing used to mean presence on property without the owner's permission.  Now the owner's permission is irrelevant, and trespassing is redefined as being present on private property without the government's permission.  The state takes this new definition so seriously that no parole may be given for people who violate the law.

Conservatives gave up on the sanctity of contracts in this context years ago, making it illegal to hire the person of one's choice for a job if that person does not have the proper licenses and paperwork from the government.

Remember, Conservatives traditionally are not anti-authoritarians anti-big-government, they are just in favor of use and expansion of government authority in other contexts than those favored by Liberals.

It is increasingly hard to have an immigration discussion here in Phoenix.  The vast majority of residents are absolutely convinced, despite evidence to the contrary, that they are in the middle of an apocalyptic version of the Mariel boatlift and have found themselves surrounded by Tony Montana's ready to carve them up save for Sheriff Joe Arpaio's brave intervention.

You never meet anyone who has actually had a problem with immigrants, and most like the immigrants, even the illegal ones, they know.   The other night a friend of mine said that we were all victims - I asked, "how?"  Everyone seems to have stories of immigrant hijinx, but they are all like the stories of the lady who put her cat in a microwave -- it happened to someone else.  And we do have stories of immigrant crimes on TV, but like shark attacks and extreme weather events, we overestimate their frequency because only certain outliers at the edges of the normal distribution get reported.

As an aside, one of the interesting things about the immigration debate for those of us who have read US history is how amazingly similar current arguments against particularly Mexican immigrants  (the commit crime, they don't integrate, they take jobs from Americans) are identical to arguments used against the Irish, Italians, and most eastern Europeans at one time or another.   I heard a woman at a part a while back of Slav background talking about how here immigrant grandparents were different than these Mexicans.  I told her that the exact same arguments she was using were used against Easter Europeans in the early 20th century, and in fact, and in fact the first real immigration quotas in this country were meant to keep her ancestors out.

As a result, I tend to grab the pro-immigration side in debates, even though I think there are some sensible reasons it probably has to be restricted or restructured, just because I really don't like the vibe coming from the immigration opponents around me.  When people take positions out of irrational fear and loathing, I am hugely reluctant to make any sort of common cause even if some of our concerns overlap.

Bruce McQuain argues that the main barrier to his advocating open immigration is the welfare state, and I am sympathetic to that argument.  I still, however, think we are smart enough to have a safety net and allow much more open immigration.  Bruce Pick has some sensible suggestions, and I published my own plan here.

And, as a final thought, the locals are never, ever going to convince me to their side when they trot Joe Arpaio up to the podium to make their case.  I have opposed the current immigration law in Arizona less because of any immigration issues and more because Joe does not need any more arbitrary authority.  I like what Radley Balko wrote the other day:

Dear Tea Partiers,

Ask Joe Arpaio to be your keynote speaker, and you've lost me.

He's a power-mad thug with a badge, the walking, mouth-breathing antithesis of the phrase "limited government."

Yes, this is but one state chapter in your movement. So distance yourself from them.

It's one thing to have a few idiots and nutjobs show up at your rallies.

It's quite another to invite one to speak.

Yours,

Radley Balko

More good stuff here.

Immigration is a thorny issue. But when we stand around and say "we don't want you here", I have to break ranks. When they say "these immigrants are damaging our economy", I have to break ranks. I don't have all the answers as to how to fix the problem, but I know that I refuse to close our country to people who want to live the American Dream. We have to enforce our laws, but when our laws are contrary to the very fabric of America, those laws need to change.

Why does supposed housing advocate Bertha Lewis celebrate a man's eviction so his land can be given to a wealthy private developer?

Bertha Lewis, a housing advocate who supported the project, bid Mr. Goldstein "good riddance."

"Low- and moderate-income people had to wait years for housing while he obstructed the Atlantic Yards project," she said.

Maybe because her organization cut a deal to provide the developer a patina of public service in exchange for big bucks for her organization.

Of course, Lewis is much more than just a "housing advocate who supported the project," she was the CEO of ACORN, a group that signed a contract with Bruce Ratner "to publicly support the [Atlantic Yards] Project by, among other things, appearing with the Developer before the Public Parties, community organizations and the media as part of a coordinated effort to realize and advance the Project." In return, Ratner pledged to include a certain amount of "affordable housing" in the project, units that ACORN stood to make a fortune from marketing and managing. As the New York Post reported, "Anita MonCrief, a former ACORN official-turned-whistleblower, estimates the anticipated deal could bring the group $5 million to $10 million annually over multiple years."

And the money didn't stop there. In 2008 Ratner bailed ACORN out to the tune of $1.5 million dollars after the news broke that Dale Rathke, brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke, had embezzled nearly $1 million from the group back in 2000 and the national leadership had covered the crime up for eight years. The financial fallout from that scandal threatened to ruin ACORN until Ratner stepped in with a $1 million load and a $500,000 grant. This desperately-needed cash kept ACORN alive and allowed it to keep providing cover for Ratner's corporate welfare and eminent domain abuse.

Lewis's role reminds me a lot of money laundering.  Call it progressive laundering.  The Brooklyn Yards project is simply a total money grab by a powerful developer who got the state to seize land and hand it over to him for development.  To hide the naked cronyism here, the developer cleverly cut a deal with ACORN such that about 0.1% of the development was dedicated to low-income housing and ACORN was paid off to advocate for the project as a low-income housing project, when in fact it is 99% an upscale development to benefit a politically-connected developer.

More here.

Update: Wow, you have to check out this email from Bertha Lewis.  Just remember, when reading it, that she is talking about a man who just wanted to stay in his own home that he owned, and didn't want to be evicted just so the New Jersey Nets could have a new stadium in Brooklyn at taxpayer expense.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bertha Lewis <[EMAIL REDACTED>
Date: Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 8:04 PM
Subject: Daniel Goldstein and the 7 year itch
To: [RECIPIENTS REDACTED]

Finally, the itch that was Daniel Goldstein has been scratched and scratched out.   After almost seven years of flawed strategies, smear campaigns, stupid tactics, disingenuous rhetoric and total disregard for people who have lived in the downtown Brooklyn community for years before he even thought about coming here; finally he got what he really wanted.  A Deal.  Not for the community he claimed to love so much, but for the only beneficiary of his community of one, himself, Double Dealing Danny Goldstein.  How utterly despicable for him to be in the newspaper  today whining that he did not have enough time to move, and had nowhere to go because he was being stiffed by the State and Forest City Ratner, when low and behold, all the time, he was negotiating, not for the community , but for himself.  Well good riddance and don't let the door hit ya'.  Low and moderate income people have had to wait years for housing while he obstructed the Atlantic Yards Project that could have been well over half done by now.  He never had to worry about housing so he did'nt care how long other people had to wait.  Behold, the Gentrifier.  He has slandered and denigrated not only me but my organization and my members relentlessly.  What benefit has he delivered to the community?  None except for his own pocket.   Well, the housing at Atlantic Yards will be built, and the day after he moves out, which I hope will be sooner rather than later, the building that he squatted in these past years should be razed to ground immediately, and salt poured into the soil, so that never again can the likes of one of the biggest shakedown artists in Brooklyn return.  We will still be here, we will still be fighting for the all the people that Danny spurned and used for his own enrichment.  We hope that now everyone in Brooklyn and New York can see him for what he really is and can see what his actions cost Brooklyn.  I hope whatever he settled for was worth the pain and misery he caused to so many people who just wanted a decent place to live in Brooklyn and who just wanted a decent job and a place for their family.  Now that the flim flam man is gone, they can finally see it on the horizon.

--

Bertha Lewis

I wish I had the book in front of me, but in one of the collections of Ayn Rand's essays (either the Virtue of Selfishness or Capitalism:  The Unknown Ideal) she quoted a bit of the 1968 Democratic Party platform, which called for all kinds of fake rights, the most hilarious being the right to vacation or leisure.

Well it turns out that absurd corruptions of the concept of individual liberty are never unthinkable, just ahead of their time:

Brussels has declared that tourism is a human right and pensioners, youths and those too poor to afford it should have their travel subsidised by the taxpayer"¦

"Travelling for tourism today is a right. The way we spend our holidays is a formidable indicator of our quality of life," [European Union commissioner for enterprise and industry Antonio Tajani], said"¦

Tajani's programme will be piloted until 2013 and then put into full operation"¦ it is expected the EU will subsidise about 30% of the cost.

This is a pretty useful primer. The "keep quiet" and "refuse searches" portions are good advice.  Most of us hesitate to follow this advice as we think, "well, I am innocent and have nothing to hide and being silent and refusing searches just makes me look guilty."  The fact of the matter is that there are times -- either due to poor incentives (see "the Wire"), misunderstandings, or bad officers -- where the state is looking to make a case on anyone where they think it could fit.  Don't give them any extra information that might help them make it fit on you.

Update: And for those with a deep and abiding trust of police, see here.  Or this.  How Maryland police make a routine traffic stop:

Libertarians vote for Republicans when they get tired of Democrat's authoritarian meddling in economics.  Libertarians vote for Democrats when they get tired of Republican's tough-on-crime/terrorism/sex/drugs civil rights violations.  But what to do when Republicans like Bush expand government like Democrats, and Democrats like Obama show little respect for individual liberties:

Google and an alliance of privacy groups have come to Yahoo's aid by helping the Web portal fend off a broad request from the U.S. Department of Justice for e-mail messages, CNET has learned.

In a brief filed Tuesday afternoon, the coalition says a search warrant signed by a judge is necessary before the FBI or other police agencies can read the contents of Yahoo Mail messages--a position that puts those companies directly at odds with the Obama administration.

Yahoo has been quietly fighting prosecutors' requests in front of a federal judge in Colorado, with many documents filed under seal. Tuesday's brief from Google and the other groups aims to buttress Yahoo's position by saying users who store their e-mail in the cloud enjoy a reasonable expectation of privacy that is protected by the U.S. Constitution.

The government theory in the case seems pretty bizarre to me.  I guess the folks who have been trying to convince me to use PGP aren't so paranoid after all.

But all that aside, it strikes me there is a need for legislative action here to cement electronic privacy.  A couple of weeks ago, Julian Sanchez had a good article describing the crazy state of electronic privacy law -- its worth a read because it is hard to excerpt, the rules being so Byzantine.  But here is one snippet:

Suppose the police want to read your e-mail. To come into your home and look through your computer, of course, they'd need a full Fourth Amendment search warrant based on probable cause. If they want to intercept the e-mail in transit, they have to go still further and meet the "super-warrant" standards of the Wiretap Act. Once it lands on your Internet Service Provider's server, a regular search warrant is once again the standard"”assuming your ISP is providing access "to the public." If it's a more closed network like your work account, your employer is permitted to voluntarily hand it over. But if you read the e-mail, or leave it on the server for more than 180 days, then suddenly your ISP has become a "remote computing service" provider rather than an "electronic communications service provider" vis a vis that e-mail. So instead of a probable cause warrant, police can get a 2703(d) order based on "specific and articulable facts" showing the information is "relevant and material" to an investigation"”a much lower standard"”provided they notify you. Except they can ask a judge to delay notification if they think that would impede the investigation. Oh, unless your ISP is in the Ninth Circuit, where opened e-mails still get the higher level of protection until they've "expired in the normal course," whatever that means.

Unfortunately, this aggressive approach to the Fourth Amendment seems to be well embedded in the Obama administration:

Yesterday a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation can recover damages under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for illegal eavesdropping on telephone conversations between its officials and its American lawyers. U.S. District Judge Vaughan Walker rejected the Obama administration's argument that the state secrets privilege barred the foundation's lawsuit. Although Barack Obama ran on a promise to use the privilege less promiscuously than his predecessor, his Justice Department, like Bush's, claimed that even acknowledging the warrantless wiretapping of Al Haramain would endanger national security.

Al Haramain learned about the surveillance after the government accidentally gave its lawyers a classified document discussing it, but the foundation was not allowed to cite that document in making its case. Instead it relied on public statements by various federal officials that Walker concluded were sufficient to show the surveillance had occurred. Since there was never any serious question that warrantless surveillance of communications involving people in the United States violated FISA, the government lost its case once Walker refused to let it hide behind the state secrets privilege. "Under defendants' theory," he noted, "executive branch officials may treat FISA as optional and freely employ the SSP to evade FISA, a statute enacted specifically to rein in and create a judicial check for executive-branch abuses of surveillance authority....Because FISA displaces the SSP in cases within its purview, the existence of a FISA warrant is a fact that cannot be concealed through the device of the SSP."

This story was interesting, in a creepy Orwellian sort of way, in that it has turned out to be really, really hard to bring suit against this administration for this crime because people have a hard time demonstrating in court that they have standing to sue.  In effect, one has to show that he has been wiretapped to then sue that the surveillance was illegal, but the information to prove that one has been wiretapped is classified and therefore unavailable.  Only an accidental leak allowed this case to proceed.

From the Telegraph, via  Q&O:

Barack Obama's administration has authorised the assassination of the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a rare move against an American citizen.

I am reminded of what I wrote on the day of Obama's inauguration:

I will be suitably thrilled if the Obama administration renounces some of the creeping executive power grabs of the last 16 years, but he has been oddly silent about this.  It seems that creeping executive power is a lot more worrisome when someone else is in power.

But don't worry, separation of powers has been respected:

The decision to add him to the US hit list required a National Security Council review because of his citizenship.

You see, before Obama can unilaterally order an American citizen killed, he has to review the decision with, uh, a group of people he appointed and that work directly for him.  From Bruce McQuain:

But who the hell is Barack Obama to arbitrarily and unilaterally waive Constitutional due process (oh, that's right, he's a Constitutional law professor, isn't he?) and order the assassination of a US citizen?  And as an aside "“ where are all the liberal voices who spent every waking hour worrying about George Bush's eavesdropping and loudly denouncing it, forever and ever, amen?  Why are they, for the most part, silent on the subject of assassinating a US citizen?

Hollywood delivered for Obama in the last election, and he is ready to pay them back.  The world's most open and honest administration is again using closed hearings and executive fiat to force legal changes that likely would create a firestorm of controversy in a normal legislative process.

It's hard to know, then, which is more appalling: the fact that the Obama Administration has conducted the ACTA negotiations in secret, or that it has indicated that it plans to adopt the final Agreement as an "Executive Order," one that does not require submission to or ratification by the Senate (or any Congressional action whatsoever) to become effective. ...

But even this summary makes it clear that, once again (see Clinton Administration) the Democratic Party has caved in to Hollywood's demands regarding intellectual property enforcement. As David Fewer of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic and the University of Ottawa noted, "if Hollywood could order intellectual property laws for Christmas what would they look like? This is pretty close."