The horrific Boston bombings already have led to irrational calls for more security cameras and more police officers, with some Democrats absurdly using this tragedy as a reason to stop the slight sequester-mandated cuts in federal spending growth.

Never mind that police spending primarily is a local matter. The bigger questions that Americans have rarely asked, especially following the 9/11 attacks: Do we really want the government to hire new armies of police officers? Do we really want to pay the price for this?

Knowing my views on the growing public-pension crisis, most readers probably think the “price” I’m worried about the nation’s multi-trillion-dollar unfunded pension liabilities driven largely by the “3 percent at 50” pension deals that cost taxpayers millions of dollars for each “first responder” who retires at 50 after 30 years of service.

That’s a huge problem – the result in part of Americans’ irrational embrace of the “more police” logic after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. But that’s not the main source of my concern. My real concern involves our safety and civil liberties given that police officers, and other groups of public employees, have become a protected class that does not have to follow the same rules as the average citizen.

A few years ago the Orange County Register reported on California’s special-license plate program that puts the addresses and license information of many public employees and their family members in a special database that shields them from getting tickets when they drive on the toll roads without paying the toll. That’s somewhat infuriating.

But a series from the Sun Sentinel newspaper in Florida found that “professional courtesy” – i.e., the way police allow other police officers to speed, drive drunk, and violate every manner of traffic law provided they are members of the law-enforcement caste – also has dangerous consequences for the general public.

The newspaper series, announced as a winner of a Pulitzer Prize the same week as the Boston bombing, details the tragedies of essentially giving one group free rein to drive in any manner its members choose. In one incident documented by the newspaper, a 21-year-old girl was driving with her 14-year-old step sister and a deputy accelerated from 24 to 87 miles per hour in 24 seconds as he rushed to aid a fellow officer who had pulled over a driver with – get this – a broken tail light. He T-boned the car, injured the driver, and killed the passenger. The 14-year-old girl’s body was found 37 feet from the accident.

The newspaper found police speeding routinely in excess of 120 miles per hour – not on emergency calls, but simply to get to work or for the fun of it. We’ve all seen it on the highways and there are news stories of tragic accidents with police killing citizens throughout the nation. Many times, off-duty officers drive in the same dangerous manner knowing that fellow officers will give them a pass at the sight of a badge.

Here’s the Sun Sentinel, which reported that 21 Floridians have been killed or maimed by speeding cops since 2004: “Speeding cops are often spared severe punishment in the criminal justice system. Cops found at fault for fatal wrecks caused by speeding have faced consequences ranging from no criminal charges to a maximum of 60 days in jail. Inside many police agencies, speeding isn’t taken seriously until it results in tragedy. Even then, some cops are disciplined but stay on the job – and the road. The dead include seven police officers who crashed at speeds up to 61 mph over the legal limit.”

On the last point: Police unions often point to the dangers of their job. But about half of the police on-the-job fatalities are due to traffic accidents, and a large portion of them are no doubt the result of reckless driving by the officers themselves.

Recently, the Sacramento County sheriff was pulled over for a speeding ticket and he made a big deal of telling the public the police do get tickets. Maybe on occasion, but the “professional courtesy” problem is real and it applies not just to speeding but to every sort of police misbehavior.

Meanwhile, in California in particular, police unions have exempted police disciplinary records of misbehaving cops from the state’s public records law so the public never learns about the bad actors in police agencies – the ones who routinely abuse the public or who are involved in multiple car accidents due to their own speeding.

Police unions continue to push for special privileges – not just higher benefit levels, expanded disability pay, and other such benefits, but exemptions from every manner of oversight. Given the power of the police unions among union-friendly Democrats and law-and-order-supporting Republicans, there is no powerful civil-liberties lobby to stand up against this endless drive for more “protections” for those who patrol our communities.

The nation’s crime rates are at 40-year lows. Many studies have been done on the link between more police officers and crime rates and there’s little if any connection between the two. We cannot create a society that is entirely safe – especially from attacks on “soft” targets such as marathons and other such public events.

And we should not blindly embrace the call for more police without first reading the Sun Sentinel series about the potential downside.

Homicides are routine in Southern California, but this one is different. As Reuters reported, Dorner is “a fugitive former police officer accused of declaring war on law enforcement in an Internet manifesto.” He allegedly shot two officers in Riverside, killing one of them, and also allegedly murdered the daughter of the former police captain who unsuccessfully represented him in the disciplinary proceedings that led to his firing.

This isn’t about police protecting the public, but police protecting themselves. When one of “theirs” is threatened or killed, police act like invaders. And like any invading army, the public can expect collateral damage. While the national media focused on the basics of the manhunt, there have been too-few reports on the casualties of the ramped-up police presence.

“Emma Hernandez, 71, was delivering the Los Angeles Times with her daughter, Margie Carranza, 47, in the 19500 block of Redbeam Avenue in Torrance on Thursday morning when Los Angeles police detectives apparently mistook their pickup for that of Christopher Dorner, the 33-year-old fugitive suspected of killing three people and injuring two others,” according to a Los Angeles Times blog. “Hernandez, who attorney Glen T. Jonas said was shot twice in the back, was in stable condition late Thursday. Carranza received stitches on her finger.”

The quotation from Jonas was priceless: “The problem with the situation is it looked like the police had the goal of administering street justice and in so doing, didn’t take the time to notice that these two older, small Latina women don’t look like a large black man.”

According to reports, Dorner was driving a different color and different make of Japanese truck from Hernandez and Carranza, but whatever. If I were in Southern California this week, I’d keep the Toyota or Nissan truck in the garage given the number of police eager to mete out “street justice.” Police defenders will no doubt argue that this was a fluke, a case of a poorly trained cop overreacting (because he certainly believed his life to be in danger).

But apologists for police brutality will have a hard time with this case. As the Times blog also reported: “About 25 minutes after the shooting, Torrance police opened fire after spotting another truck similar to Dorner’s at Flagler Lane and Beryl Street.” Fortunately, no one was hurt at that one. If there were injuries, the cops would just shrug it off. The second shooting reminds us that this is how police will routinely behave. Police officials will then adamantly defend this behavior even in the federal court system.

For instance, a case that just recently headed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal highlights the disturbing attitude of police officials toward innocent bystanders. The following are details from plaintiffs, in their lawsuit against the city of Sacramento and two of its “finest”:

On April 10, 2009, California Highway Patrol officers stopped a Honda Civic for having illegal taillights. As the officers approached the car, the driver, Manual Prasad, drove away and eventually crashed his car into a wall and started running in a residential neighborhood. Sacramento city police were called and used their helicopter to pinpoint the fleeing man who climbed a tree in a backyard.

James Paul Garcia and six of his friends had the misfortune of being in the yard where Prassad was hiding out. Without any apparent warning and without checking to see if there were innocent bystanders, the officer released a police dog into the yard. Police dogs are trained to attack and hold suspects, but they are not trained to distinguish between suspects and bystanders.

So “Bandit” headed into the yard, spotted the first person he saw (Garcia) and did what vicious police dogs do to people: bit the heck out of him and held him at the ground, as its teeth punctured Garcia’s leg in several places.

The police and the city of Sacramento argue that this behavior did not violate Garcia’s rights and of course sought every type of immunity to delay the case and keep its officers from facing discipline. The city argued that giving an adequate warning could – let’s repeat it now in unison, given that this is the trump card police always use – “jeopardize officer safety.”

In Anaheim a few years ago, police were tracking a burglary suspect through a neighborhood. A young newlywed came out of his house with a wooden dowel to see what the ruckus was about. The officer shot the bystander to death, then handcuffed him as he lay dying. Police officers reportedly were angry at the chief for apologizing to the family.

That case epitomizes the “us vs. them” mentality common among our highly militarized police forces. I wasn’t surprised, then, when years later the Anaheim Police Department acted like an invading army after residents protested some deadly shootings by police (including, apparently, the shooting of an unarmed man in the back).

When police pursue suspects, it is official, acceptable policy for officers to do anything they need to do to protect their own safety, even if it endangers the public’s safety. My advice – if you see police anywhere near you, stay very far away. And hope they don’t mistake your car for a suspect’s car. In their view, we are only potential collateral damage.

Recently by Steven Greenhut: Trying To Reform Government Is Largely a Waste of Time

Updated: Saturday, February 9, 11:30am EST

Americans will rarely witness the kind of full-scale manhunt now going on throughout Southern California and the San Bernardino mountains as hundreds of heavily armed police and federal agents hunt down Christopher Dorner, a 33-year-old former Los Angeles cop and former Naval officer suspected of three murders.

Homicides are routine in Southern California, but this one is different. As Reuters reported, Dorner is "a fugitive former police officer accused of declaring war on law enforcement in an Internet manifesto." He allegedly shot two officers in Riverside, killing one of them, and also allegedly murdered the daughter of the former police captain who unsuccessfully represented him in the disciplinary proceedings that led to his firing.

This isn't about police protecting the public, but police protecting themselves. When one of "theirs" is threatened or killed, police act like invaders. And like any invading army, the public can expect collateral damage. While the national media focused on the basics of the manhunt, there have been too-few reports on the casualties of the ramped-up police presence.

"Emma Hernandez, 71, was delivering the Los Angeles Times with her daughter, Margie Carranza, 47, in the 19500 block of Redbeam Avenue in Torrance on Thursday morning when Los Angeles police detectives apparently mistook their pickup for that of Christopher Dorner, the 33-year-old fugitive suspected of killing three people and injuring two others," according to a Los Angeles Times blog. "Hernandez, who attorney Glen T. Jonas said was shot twice in the back, was in stable condition late Thursday. Carranza received stitches on her finger."

The quotation from Jonas was priceless: "The problem with the situation is it looked like the police had the goal of administering street justice and in so doing, didn’t take the time to notice that these two older, small Latina women don’t look like a large black man."

According to reports, Dorner was driving a different color and different make of Japanese truck from Hernandez and Carranza, but whatever. If I were in Southern California this week, I'd keep the Toyota or Nissan truck in the garage given the number of police eager to mete out "street justice." Police defenders will no doubt argue that this was a fluke, a case of a poorly trained cop overreacting (because he certainly believed his life to be in danger).

But apologists for police brutality will have a hard time with this case. As the Times blog also reported: "About 25 minutes after the shooting, Torrance police opened fire after spotting another truck similar to Dorner's at Flagler Lane and Beryl Street." Fortunately, no one was hurt at that one. If there were injuries, the cops would just shrug it off. The second shooting reminds us that this is how police will routinely behave. Police officials will then adamantly defend this behavior even in the federal court system.

For instance, a case that just recently headed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal highlights the disturbing attitude of police officials toward innocent bystanders. The following are details from plaintiffs, in their lawsuit against the city of Sacramento and two of its "finest":

On April 10, 2009, California Highway Patrol officers stopped a Honda Civic for having illegal taillights. As the officers approached the car, the driver, Manual Prasad, drove away and eventually crashed his car into a wall and started running in a residential neighborhood. Sacramento city police were called and used their helicopter to pinpoint the fleeing man who climbed a tree in a backyard.

James Paul Garcia and six of his friends had the misfortune of being in the yard where Prassad was hiding out. Without any apparent warning and without checking to see if there were innocent bystanders, the officer released a police dog into the yard. Police dogs are trained to attack and hold suspects, but they are not trained to distinguish between suspects and bystanders.

So "Bandit" headed into the yard, spotted the first person he saw (Garcia) and did what vicious police dogs do to people: bit the heck out of him and held him at the ground, as its teeth punctured Garcia's leg in several places.

The police and the city of Sacramento argue that this behavior did not violate Garcia's rights and of course sought every type of immunity to delay the case and keep its officers from facing discipline. The city argued that giving an adequate warning could — let's repeat it now in unison, given that this is the trump card police always use — "jeopardize officer safety."

In Anaheim a few years ago, police were tracking a burglary suspect through a neighborhood. A young newlywed came out of his house with a wooden dowel to see what the ruckus was about. The officer shot the bystander to death, then handcuffed him as he lay dying. Police officers reportedly were angry at the chief for apologizing to the family.

That case epitomizes the "us vs. them" mentality common among our highly militarized police forces. I wasn't surprised, then, when years later the Anaheim Police Department acted like an invading army after residents protested some deadly shootings by police (including, apparently, the shooting of an unarmed man in the back).

When police pursue suspects, it is official, acceptable policy for officers to do anything they need to do to protect their own safety, even if it endangers the public's safety. My advice — if you see police anywhere near you, stay very far away. And hope they don't mistake your car for a suspect's car. In their view, we are only potential collateral damage.

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is a Sacramento-based writer and author of Plunder! How Public Employee Unions Are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives And Bankrupting The Nation.

Steven Greenhut Archives

Recently by Steven Greenhut: I Put My Life on the Line Writing This Article!

Whenever I speak or write about California's pension and public debt problems, I always hear from well-intentioned, conservative- and libertarian-minded people who want me to consider their solutions. Most of their ideas — caps on this kind of spending or that, changed pension formulas, public votes, etc. — are sensible enough, but they always miss the main point.

That is, they misunderstand the nature of government. They think that government is an institution that does all these necessary things and can therefore be reformed. But government is a vast force-based enterprise designed to take as much money from the public and give as much of it as possible to the clients of government. It's a wealth transfer and any genuine services government provides can be done better, cheaper and more humanely in the private sector.

When it comes to pensions, there's no technical problem. In about three seconds, I can craft a non-radical, extremely modest plan that ends unfunded pension liabilities. Starting tomorrow, public employees no longer receive defined-benefit plans and instead get a 401/k-style plan like typical private-sector serfs. What are they going to do, quit en masse and get private-sector jobs? I hear readers laughing now.

Problem solved. The real problem, though, is not technical, but political. The public-sector unions that run this state, and the Democrats and Republicans who do their bidding, would never allow it. As it is, they fight any tiny reform, even for future workers. So why waste any brain cells thinking about big fixes in a state government where legislators not only resist modest reforms but still hatch schemes to expand benefit levels for the elite class of government employees?

Remember — the main goal of government is to get more for them. California’s Democrats argue publicly that the public pension system is a historic success and that the real problem is the stinginess of the private sector. We have to understand this mindset.

In my experience, the average reform-minded person thinks that legislators and even some government employees will come to support sensible reforms when they realize that we're only trying to rein in excesses. They think government should operate more like a business.

They think that if we convince enough people about the waste and abuse, they will rally behind our measures and proposals. After all, the current situation is unsustainable and our reforms will save the government from itself. They are as wrong as they are well intentioned.

The truth is government is like rust. It never sleeps. Government grows for its own sake and it has no intention to stay limited. Every bureaucracy, once taken root, will grow as long as someone feeds it.

Whereas private companies celebrate when they spend less to achieve more, government values the opposite things. Have you ever noticed how government always measures its success in terms of how much money it spends? It's impossible to give government agencies enough money for anything. The more poorly they spend existing money, the better opportunity they have to clamor for more cash: "We never had enough to do the job right in the first place."

When asked once what he ultimately wanted, a union official replied: "More." That's what it's all about. Unions would rather drive the entire economy over the cliff and bankrupt a city or state than give up anything. Government has no bottom line, no customers and cannot be run like a business. Government operates by force and as a result doesn't care how unhappy the public is with its services. You don't like the IRS or local cops, what are you going to do about it? Any business with that attitude would, in the adapted words of Monty Python, be an "ex-business” because no one would go there. Government only has to take your taxes.

Every private-sector job depends on willing buyers and willing sellers. Obviously, people who value free exchange head to the private sector, and the government sector is a magnet for those who operate in an authoritarian kind of world. It's therefore not surprising when government agencies send out press releases celebrating the huge fines they impose on businesses, as does the California Air Resources Board. It’s understandable why Democratic leaders in Sacramento, for instance, drip with disdain toward the private sector.

One could argue that every dollar given to government would be better put inside an incinerator. Have you ever known an incinerator to abuse someone's property rights? Do you know any incinerators that get "3 percent at 50" pensions? Likewise, any effort to reform government is filled with problems. Would you want an IRS that did a better job tracking and monitoring us?

I honestly don't know what we do about the frightening growth in government power, but I do agree with H.L. Mencken, who wrote: "I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time." Don't get me wrong — I appreciate the people who want to fix the current system, but they need to remember that government needs to be stifled rather than reformed.

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is a Sacramento-based writer and author of Plunder! How Public Employee Unions Are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives And Bankrupting The Nation.

Steven Greenhut Archives

Recently by Steven Greenhut: Liberals Are NOT Gun-Haters

America's two biggest groups of scammers have got to be police officers and firefighters, whose union reps routinely tell Americans that their members put their lives on the line every day simply by slipping into their uniforms. They really use that terminology as they lobby for "donning and doffing" rules that give them extra pay for the time they spend slipping into their government-supplied garments.

But the latest data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics once again show that these groups of government employees work in relatively safe professions, with firefighters having a lower death rate than the average American worker and barely edging out cashiers in terms of putting their lives on the line. Most cashiers are killed on the job because of homicides, whereas a quarter of firefighter deaths are from truck accidents — and the numbers have declined, apparently, after concerted efforts to convince these heroes to buckle their seatbelts.

Fishermen, loggers, pilots and farmers/ranchers have the most dangerous jobs in America. Police officers and sheriffs fall below farmers, but above construction workers. About half of their deaths are because of car accidents, often the fault of their own driving habits.

This list looks at the data over a longer period and reinforces the same point. None of the top 10 dangerous jobs are in the government "public safety" area and only one category (trash collectors) is dominated by government employees.

I've known people who work in a number of the most-dangerous professions — taxi drivers, truck drivers, trash collectors, electrical line workers, loggers, fishermen, pilots, roofers, coal miners, farmers — and I cannot ever recall any of them insisting to me personally or publicly that they are "heroes" who "put their lives on the line." Once in a while, I'll hear a farmer insist that it's thanks to his kind that we have food on our table, but even that's a rarity and it’s usually part of a political campaign to keep the environmental crazies from restricting his water or property use.

I can't recall ever telling people that, by writing this article, I am a hero of the First Amendment. As annoying as my profession may be, I don't know any journalists who would argue such an absurdity.

By contrast, police officers and paid government firefighters — as opposed to the largely noble group of volunteers, who provide this service to the public for free, despite the harassment they receive from firefighter unions who try to put them out of business — always insist that they are heroes. They do so in their public pronouncements and especially during union negotiations. They love to have press conferences and hand out heroism awards to fellow union members. They often tell me that it’s thanks to them that I am safe to enjoy my life.

During negotiations, firefighters and police routinely invoke the memory of 9/11 for their own personal gain. I remember when Laguna Beach, Calif., firefighters — who have a cushy gig on the Southern California coast — plastered photos of 9/11 all over a fire truck as they lobbied for higher pay during their dispute with the city manager.

In the California Legislature this year, Democratic leaders quietly pushed ahead legislation that would have declared that any retired cop or firefighter, no matter how old, would be presumed to have died of a work-related injury if he or she died from some common ailments such as blood disorders, heart disease or cancer. The purpose was to give huge payouts to their survivors. The bill was softened then vetoed, but it shows the lengths to which the unions will go to play the hero card for self enrichment.

A few years ago, I wrote about a bill that would have exempted firefighters from criminal negligence for on-the-job behavior. It, too, died, but there's no special protection that these heroes won't seek. Police unions lobby to assure that even the most abusive among them don't have to suffer any penalties, even in instances where they shoot unarmed members of the public in the back.

Heroes are people who display great courage and selflessness to protect others. Here, we see people who are extremely well paid for services that entail only modest risk, and then rig the legal system so there is no accountability if they misbehave. They increasingly follow bureaucratic rules designed to protect "officer safety," assuring in essence that they are forced to endure virtually zero risk during their work day. Is that heroism?

In 2011, Alameda, Calif., firefighters stood around and let a man drown to death. They said they couldn't go into the 60-degree San Francisco Bay water because they didn't have the proper cold-water training. Many believe they were selfishly withholding "services" as a way to make a point about proposed budget cutbacks. When asked by a local TV station whether he would go into the water and save a drowning child, division chief Ricci Zombeck said: "Well, if I was off duty I would know what I would do, but I think you're asking me my on-duty response and I would have to stay within our policies and procedures because that's what's required by our department to do."

Is this the answer of a hero or a bureaucrat? My first LewRockwell article was about a similar event in Philadelphia, where police and firefighters stood around eating and joking as a suicidal man jumped into the water. Despite the assembled minions of well-paid uniformed government workers, it took some unpaid bystanders to risk their lives and try to save the jumper.

Unfortunately, the public seems to buy this nonsense. When I was on the Stossel show discussing such issues, a California union spokesman, Dave Low, argued that cops and firefighters receive big pensions because they die soon after retirement. But fortunately I had already done the research. According to the union-controlled California Public Employees Retirement System, police are the longest-living public employee category followed closely by firefighters. They live well into their 80s, enjoying those millionaires' pensions that their unions have secured for them.

Enough is enough. Police and firefighters work in professions that are not particularly dangerous and they live longer lives than most people. Most of this work can be replaced by the private sector. There are no categories of hero. Individuals in all professions and all walks of life engage in heroic acts. The truth will set us free — and might just lighten our tax burden also.

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is a Sacramento-based writer and author of Plunder! How Public Employee Unions Are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives And Bankrupting The Nation.

Steven Greenhut Archives

Recently by Steven Greenhut: Rose Parade Military Propaganda

Throughout the blog-o-sphere, I've been reading about how much liberals, such as those in the Obama administration and the Democrats who run our state government in California, hate guns. The term "gun-haters" can be found in countless articles written by conservatives about advocates for gun control, with one publication listing myriad “gun-hating” organizations.

No doubt, the politicians and groups named in these articles and lists are advocates for gun-control measures, but they absolutely, positively do not hate guns. In fact, these folks love guns. Their entire political philosophy is based on their adoration of big guns and small ones, without which they could accomplish none of their goals.

Readers can see where I'm headed. Our enemies in the gun-rights battle don't hate or dislike guns per se, but hate the idea of average citizens having access to them. I've never heard a gun-controller complain about the way police are now outfitted with military-style uniforms and granted firearms worthy of an invading army. No one seems to complain about the military's immense firepower and its stockpiling of even nuclear weapons.

Obviously, I'm playing a semantic game, and semantic games can be annoying. (I get tired, for instance, of readers emailing me to complain that I used the term government "worker" rather than government "employee." I get their semantic point, but government employees do actually work for their money even if the work they do is wasteful, unnecessary and coercive.) My semantic game, by contrast, illustrates a valuable point. This current "gun" debate isn't about whether guns are good or bad or whether we love them or hate them but about which particular groups of people are entitled to own them.

The founding publisher of the Orange County Register used to refer to the public-school system as "gun-run schools." His point was that the current school system is based, ultimately on the use of guns by the authorities. If we don't pay our taxes or follow compulsory-education laws, then well-pensioned officials in uniforms show up at our door with weapons to haul us away to jail. If we resist or run away, those authorities will shoot us.

I personally don't like guns, yet I purchased two shotguns and would use them if necessary. It's no different than my lawn tractor. I don't particularly like it either — with those dangerous spinning blades that could cut off my legs — but it beats trying to cut my six acres of two-foot-high grass with a scissors. I don't like target shooting, so the guns are simply a tool. In the popular view, though, I am a gun-lover because I believe in the right of average folks to own them.

A liberal gun-banner might personally dislike firearms also, but that person's support of firearm ownership by the authorities ought to put them in the category of gun-lover also. A true gun-hater would be someone who wanted to ban all weapons from all people and all governments — a naïve notion given the unfortunate flaws found in human nature.

Without the authorities toting guns, liberals couldn't force us to do all the things they constantly are forcing us to do. Conservatives don't want us to resist their plans either, but at least they are more consistent — they want the government to be armed to the teeth, but they are willing to allow the rest of us to be armed also, although to a lesser degree.

Conservatives are aghast whenever some lefty legislator, media celebrity or politician is caught using a firearm (or when their paid bodyguards tote such arms). I agree that such behavior is ridiculous, but it isn't really hypocritical when a so-called gun-hater is caught depending on a gun for their personal safety. As good progressives, they believe that they are members of an elite that has special privileges the lesser folks should not have.

I know cops who won't go anywhere off-duty without a weapon even though they disdain the idea that the rest of us should have similar protections. Never mind that private citizens are more responsible with their weapons than government officials, perhaps because government officials know they have immunities that the rest of us do not enjoy.

I'm sure the “gun-hater” moniker won't go away, but let's at least remind Americans whenever possible that the opponents of public gun ownership don’t hate guns. They hate the public.

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is a Sacramento-based writer.

Steven Greenhut Archives

Recently by Steven Greenhut: Getting Serious About Ron Paul

I’ve been watching a rerun of the Rose Parade, which I’ve always enjoyed — especially when I lived in the San Gabriel Valley and would go visit the floats after the parade and look at the remarkable workmanship. I used to complain about cities that would subsidize the floats, but other than that, it’s a nice event.

But this year it struck me as, in part, a propaganda event for the military.

There was the “freedom isn’t free” float sponsored by the Department of Defense, followed by the appearance of a B2 bomber from the sky.

Certainly, nothing is even close to “free” when the DOD gets near it.

Don’t Americans ever get tired of that cliche? And where exactly are all our freedoms that we’re spending so much to protect these days? I can’t think of anything I can do legally here in California without getting government permission or paying a tax.

Yet parade-goers cheered wildly and the TV commentators fawned over the float.

There was the “canines with courage” float celebrating those dogs who “serve” in the military. They mentioned a new memorial that is going to celebrate those dogs, just as American cops now have grandiose funerals whenever one of those vicious police dogs gets killed in “the line of duty.” (Unlike the poor household dogs that cops routinely kill when they show up at people’s houses. This has become an epidemic in some departments.

The Rose Parade featured a contrived event where a woman was told she won a prize and got to pose in a photo and it turned out that she was posing with her husband, a returning Afghanistan war veteran, This surprise was milked for full mileage by the TV network.

Then there were assorted other military vehicles, marches and floats that celebrated the military.

No wonder we can’t ever get a rational discussion of US military policies or budgets.

At least we’re not marching huge lines of military hardware like they did in the Soviet Union, but maybe it’s not so different. Military displays have long been a part of football games. As George Will wrote, football epitomizes the two worst things about American life — committee meetings and violence. So I’m not surprised about that, but the Rose Parade?

What does it say about our society when even a New Year’s event is punctuated by military displays? Nothing good, I’m sure.

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is editor-in-chief of CalWatchdog.com, author of Plunder! How Public Employee Unions Are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives And Bankrupting The Nation!, and a columnist for The Orange County Register.

Steven Greenhut Archives

by Steven Greenhut

Recently by Steven Greenhut: Conservatives Side With Pepper-Spraying Thugs

I can’t forgive myself for voting for Arnold Schwarzenegger for governor during the 2003 recall. I selected a “winnable” loser rather than Tom McClintock, a principled conservative who knew what policies to pursue to right California’s sinking fiscal ship. If everyone who voted for Schwarzenegger under the belief that McClintock couldn’t win had voted for McClintock, who’s now a congressman, perhaps he would have won the governorship.

The Schwarzenegger vs. McClintock race springs to mind as Ron Paul, the quirky Texas congressman with unwavering libertarian principles, pursues the GOP nomination for the presidency. Paul is not a dynamic personality, but he has a firm grasp of the issues. Currently, he is near the top of polls for the Iowa caucuses, and his national support has remained strong.

We know that none of the other Republicans will seriously slash the size of government, even if they have Republican majorities in Congress. None of them will bring the troops home, regardless of how costly those wars have become or how contrary they are to the traditional Republican belief of nonintervention in foreign affairs.

Despite encouraging rhetoric from some candidates (i.e., Rick Perry’s description of Social Security as a Ponzi scheme), the “serious” candidates will not try to swap U.S. entitlements with private alternatives.

None of them will address the Federal Reserve, which, according to Paul, makes it easy for the feds to print the money needed to finance their free-spending ways. At best, a winning mainstream Republican will tinker around the edges of reform, perhaps limiting government just enough to let the economy heat up again.

Even if Paul pulls off the upset of the century, he may not have the skills or congressional support to succeed. He can be obtuse, such as the time when he was asked about his favorite Ronald Reagan legacy and gave a boring answer about the money supply. But despite his many flaws, he at least he understands that the nation’s problems center on its gargantuan government.

Too bad everyone knows he can’t win.

Media Blackout

Comedian Jon Stewart once featured a devastating segment (YouTube below) on the media coverage of the primary race. Paul had high poll numbers but the talking heads wouldn’t mention his name. They talked about the hapless Jon Huntsman, who was barely registering on the polls, but didn’t mention Paul. After one blogger took him to task for writing about the presidential candidates without mentioning Paul, Jonah Goldberg, editor of National Review Online, responded: “The reason I didn’t mention him is precisely the reason [he] suspects: I don’t take Ron Paul seriously as a presidential contender because (in my opinion) he isn’t one. He is the Right’s version of Ralph Nader.”

Conservative writer Warner Todd Huston wrote recently that Paul is not a serious candidate because he has not built a serious statewide organization, which might be a legitimate argument except that Huston hurled unfounded accusations at Paul, charging his minions with anti-Semitism and surrender in the face of “Islamofascism.” His diatribe against the mild-mannered physician/candidate touches on why most conservatives won’t take him seriously – Paul’s foreign-policy views.

Foreign Policy

To the hawks who dominate the modern GOP (and the Democratic Party, too, lest you wonder why the president’s foreign policy differs little from his predecessor’s), Paul’s focus on reducing military commitments and concentrating on defense rather than on nation-building is the equivalent of appeasement in the face of Nazism, which is the analogy Huston used.

You’d think it a waste of time to hammer a candidate with no chance of winning. But those conservatives committed to military expansion abroad and who have little concern about the “war on terror’s” effect on civil liberties at home don’t want to take chances. The lefties dislike him too, as Bob Schieffer’s rude interview on “Face the Nation” last weekend showed.

Nevertheless, Paul might just win Iowa. I was active in the caucuses there years ago. It’s a socially conservative state. But the libertarian Paul is making inroads. In these dire economic times, more voters are noticing that government growth, debt spending and the economy are paramount.

Paul might not have a good campaign ground game going, but Herman Cain doesn’t have much of a ground game, either. That didn’t stop Cain from getting weeks of serious national media coverage. His campaign was derailed by sexual harassment allegations, and by his painfully embarrassing answer to an newspaper editorial board’s puffball question about President Obama’s Libya policy. Cain knew nothing about the topic as he aimlessly searched his empty mental Rolodex for answers. Cain’s collapse came after Perry’s infamous “oops” moment during a GOP debate when he was asked which three federal departments he would eliminate, but he couldn’t think of a third one.

Anyone But Mitt

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is the flavor of the month, as GOP primary voters search for anyone but Mitt Romney, whose slick personality and fairly liberal policies turn off grass-roots activists.

But Gingrich has malleable principles himself, and he is dogged by personal scandals.

It’s hard to be impressed by any of the other Republican candidates, who range from the hopelessly establishmentarian (Rick Santorum and Huntsman) to the fringy (Michele Bachmann, who has been dubbed the winner of the “Who’s Crazier Than Sarah Palin” contest by comedian Conan O’Brien, because of some of her rhetoric).

When you look at the Republican lineup or at the out-of-his-depth former community activist who went from state senator to Oval Office in four years, it’s hard to make the case that Paul is somehow not serious. In reality, Paul “can’t win” because the political establishment knows how serious he is about his limited-government views.

Even in the most optimistic scenario, Paul is a long shot. But the country’s problems are so deep that perhaps it’s time to take a chance on someone with the right answers, regardless of the odds. Unless, of course, you’re still celebrating the way that Gov. Schwarzenegger saved California from disaster.

Jon Stewart segment on Ron Paul:

Ron Paul interviewed by Bob Schieffer:

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is editor-in-chief of CalWatchdog.com, author of Plunder! How Public Employee Unions Are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives And Bankrupting The Nation!, and a columnist for The Orange County Register.

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by Steven Greenhut

Recently by Steven Greenhut: But America IS A Police State

If you want to know which of your friends or neighbors believe in a free and humane society and which ones believe in a police state, show them the now-gone-viral video of a riot-gear-clad University of California-Davis police officer dousing a peaceful group of Occupy protesters with pepper spray as they sat, arms linked, in the campus quad. Most of us react in horror at what we saw, and at the absurdly dishonest explanations from the campus police chief. But some people think the protesters got what they deserved and even called for heavier-handed tactics.

Police officials — and these days, campus security guards have gained the power of full-fledged police officers, complete with those massive pensions and all the usual protections from accountability — claimed that the officer felt that his life was in danger when they he methodically walked down the line of protesters and assaulted them with the spray. "If you look at the video you are going to see that there were 200 people in that quad," said Chief Annette Spicuzza, who was placed on leave (i.e., additional paid vacation) Monday after a backlash against the brutality. "Hindsight is 20-20 and based on the situation we were sitting in, ultimately that was the decision that was made."

That’s what police always say no matter the situation. But in this age of video, we can see for ourselves that the officers were in no danger. Multiple officers effortlessly moved in and around the protesters. The burly officer who sprayed the kids strutted slowly in front of them in a way that belies any sort of danger, real or perceived. He, too, was put on administrative leave after the video went viral, along with another officer. Without the video, you know what would have happened — nothing. The lies would have become the official record. This is why police officers have become zealous in their confiscation of video cameras and arrest of people who record them doing their jobs.

Such brutality is par for the course for today’s militarized police and campus security departments. What’s really disgusting is the natural instinct of so many conservatives to stick up for the police. They don’t like the Occupy protesters, so they willingly back brutality against them, without considering the possibility that conservatives at some point might be on the receiving end of this aggression. Then again, this common, vulgar form of modern conservatism almost always sides with the state, even as it champions the empty words of limited government.

A blog called Extreme Conservatives wrote the following, "Sorry libs… You can quit your squawking and take your leftie-indoctrinated butts back to class. The UC Davis pepper spray incident was standard police procedure. On Friday a group of UC Davis students blocked the campus walkway with arms linked and started chanting, ‘From Davis to Greece, F*ck the police!’ Moments later the little darlings were doused with pepper spray. This was only after several attempts by campus police to get them to move. Of course, the liberal media only played the part where the students were sprayed down. But after two days of leftist outrage we find out that this was standard police procedure."

The idea that this is "standard police procedure" is exactly what makes the video so horrifying. It doesn’t make it acceptable behavior. That’s why so many viewers were offended by it. The cop struts in front of the students and sprays them with massive amounts of pepper spray. He’s not in any danger. This is just standard procedure, ma’am. We treat everyone that way!

According to Rick Hahn from Accuracy in Media, the problem here was, of course, the liberal media, which failed to provide proper context. Hahn, who is identified as having worked for the FBI for 32 years, made the usual law-enforcement case that the cops were really in danger: "Many of the protesters were seated with arms interlocked. This means police would have had to physically engage them. The fact that the protesters were seated leaves police trying to disengage them from one another at a balance disadvantage. The cops have to bend over or crouch down to try to physically disengage any one individual, bring him or her to their feet and affect the arrest. The fact that the protesters had interlocked their arms was surely an effort to avoid any one individual being removed for arrest. There’s no way of knowing how strongly the protesters would have fought disengagement, but the fact is, they were inducing, baiting if you will, physical confrontation from the police."

Scott Spiegel, writing in Conservative Outpost, joined a growing chorus of conservatives who seemed to want the police to behave even more brutally toward these "animals" and who have a rather authoritarian view of the world: "When cops say move, you move — even if you’re curled in a fetal position on the ground with flowers in your hair listening to Cat Stevens and nursing orphaned kittens. The UC Davis police could have acted a lot more brutally, including prodding or beating protesters with batons. The occupiers should consider themselves warned: Trust fund brat refuses to move, trust fund brat gets spray tanned. Protesters in the UC Davis videos can be heard chanting ‘Shame on you!’ at police after the incident. Actually, shame on patsy mayors like Michael Bloomberg and Jean Quan for not empowering police to clear out these animals ages ago."

For insight into the modern conservative rabble, one ought to read FreeRepublic. It’s beyond irony. One commenter expressed disbelief at the sight of police backing away rather than engaging the protesters: "Do you get a chill up your spine like I do when you see the police slowly back away as if they are backing down from an impending violent standoff?" Others seemed eager to see violence: "A Billy-club to the ribs would have been just as effective at removing the bums and we would be hearing all this crying about pepper-spray!" Granted, these are anonymous commenters, but they reflect widespread sentiment.

I disagree with most of what the Occupy protesters are saying, quite obviously, but when I see lines of riot-gear-clad officials standing in front of these unbathed wretches, my heart goes out to the wretches. They need a lesson in economics and politics. The policies they advocate — to the degree that many of them have any well-defined grievances — range from the silly to the disastrous. They are inconsistent, foolish and hypocritical. Many of them are lazy freeloaders. Such is life. They do create filth and chaos in public parks, but if one cannot protest in a public park, there are not many places to have a protest. It’s in everyone’s best interest for the authorities to provide as much latitude as possible for protesters of any political persuasion. We still do pretend to live in a free society, right?

Whatever the bigger picture, this was a clear case of abusive and heavy handed behavior by the campus police. The president of the university was right to call for an investigation and the officer and the chief need to be removed from their positions, not just given meaningless and indefinite paid leave. And now it’s time for Californians to take a closer look at issues of police conduct and secrecy. In recent years, Democrats and Republicans have made those issues off limits thanks to their close association with the police unions.

Maybe the Occupiers can become productive and lead a real movement for civil libertarian reform. I know it won’t happen, but who can live in California without embracing a little wishful thinking?

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is editor-in-chief of CalWatchdog.com, author of Plunder! How Public Employee Unions Are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives And Bankrupting The Nation!, and a columnist for The Orange County Register.

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by Steven Greenhut

Recently by Steven Greenhut: Let’s Finally Dispense With ‘Hero’Nonsense

Six Fullerton cops, responding to a phone call alleging that someone in the downtown area might be breaking into cars, approached a 130-pound homeless man named Kelly Thomas, grabbed his backpack and, according to eyewitnesses, began Tasering him and beating him into a pulp. He died a few days later at a local hospital.

According to eyewitnesses, Thomas, although schizophrenic, did nothing to warrant arrest, let alone a savage beating. He was a local fixture around the bar scene, a gentle figure who bummed cigarettes and slept in the park. Videos made by bystanders showed pure aggression on the part of the cops, while locals expressed horror and Thomas cried out for his dad as he was being beaten.

In my column about this apparent act of police thuggery, I quoted Jim Ewert, general counsel of the California Newspaper Publishers Association, who calls California a "secret police state." Some readers no doubt find this description to be too much for their tender sensibilities. So I want to recount some of the ways the authorities have behaved during and after the incident, and then ask this question: Does this typical behavior better reflect the policies of a free society or a police state?

1. Officers responded to a nonviolent call with overwhelming violent force.

2. Police confiscated the video camera of a bystander who was standing nearby taping the ongoing incident, thereby limiting the ability of the public to see what actually took place and obliterating the freedom of the person doing the taping.

3. The offending officers were allowed to review the official videotape recorded on a bus-depot camera before filing their police reports. This allowed them to get their stories straight before going on the record. Here we see a horrendous double standard — the rules for the authorities are different than the rules for the subjects.

4. The district attorney's office has refused to release the official video, arguing that it would taint a jury.

5. The DA has been busy downplaying the incident in the local media, arguing, for instance, that the police had no intent to kill, as if anyone really thought they had premeditated a murder. DA's rarely if ever file charges against police officers for police brutality. I've dealt with this particular DA in the past during other use of force issues and he always is quick to exonerate any police misbehavior in such cases. The DA doesn't seem concerned that his statements would taint a jury.

6. The law is written in such a way that even if the DA were serious about cracking down on police brutality, he would be hard-pressed to do so. An officer is allowed to use deadly force if he believes that his life were in danger, and of course such officers always claim that their lives were in danger, no matter the facts involved in the case.

7. The police department has released disinformation to suggest that Thomas got what was coming to him. The Fullerton PD spokesman released a report claiming that the officers had suffered broken bones in the scuffle, which was not true. The department released a menacing photograph of Thomas that does not actually appear to be Thomas, according to those who know him.

8. It took the department 30 days to put these thugs on administrative leave — i.e., paid vacation. The department refuses to release the name of the killers. State law makes it illegal for the city to release any information about the accused killers and their previous misbehavior.

9. The six Fullerton PD officers refuse to be interviewed by the DA. Unwilling to deal with the tough questions, the police chief went out on medical leave — the precursor to a tax-funded disability retirement. Try going on paid medical leave if you were too stressed after the police were questioning you!

10. After dozens and then hundreds of local residents showed up downtown to calmly and peacefully protest the killing and the cover up, city officials described them as a lynch mob and as terrorists. So officials act like a true mob and like true terrorists and are coddled by officials, but when the public gets upset and acts in a calm and appropriate and All American manner, they are depicted that way.

11. One councilman, a former police chief who hired the Fullerton cops in question, said on national television that the police did not necessarily kill Thomas. He said that the facial injuries — i.e., his face was beaten so severely it was not recognizable as Thomas — do not mean that the police caused serious harm to Thomas. He said the public shouldn't jump to conclusions about what killed Thomas. Thomas was walking around and healthy, six cops beat and Tasered him and then he dies. But according to officials, that doesn't mean that the cops had anything to do with the death. What would the police have said had a gang beaten up a cop who later died?

12. The local civil rights activists, who are paid by local cities and police departments to fight hate crimes and stand up for the downtrodden, are calling for more training of the police, more taxpayer-funded Kumbaya sessions and for more "outside" investigations handled by people with a history of whitewashing police abuse.

13. Some in the local mainstream media have been making excuses for the cops and making fun of the local blog that has done all the legwork on this story.

14. The state attorney general, who could be called in to investigate the killing, is being advised by one of the most thuggish police union officials I've ever encountered. She is trying to earn more police support as she potentially seeks higher office.

15. Police officials and unions are of course circling the wagons and claiming that we cannot judge the split-second decisions made by officers in the heat of the moment, even though six large armed police were up against one tiny unarmed man and it was the police who started the altercation — one that lasted much longer than a few split seconds.

16. The police union hired an attorney to send a threatening letter to a blogger who had been covering the incident, knowing full well that most bloggers don't have the wherewithal to fight these threatened SLAPP (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation) suits.

17. FYI, Fullerton police have been subject to various scandals involving officers — ranging from theft to drug use to sexual misbehavior in a squad car and official sources have offered a variety of excuses, mostly related to the stresses of the job. There's a clear pattern of special treatment for officers compared to the treatment received by the public.

The only difference in Fullerton from the many other instances of police thuggery I have covered in California is that the public doesn't seem to be buying the excuses and seems genuinely mad at what has happened.

But a recent story in Sacramento reports on how Elk Grove police fired an assault rifle at point-blank range at a handcuffed man in the back of a patrol car. The district attorney, of course, found that the officer feared for his life and did nothing wrong.

And reports this week show that BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) officials shut down all cellular service after believing that people angry at the police killing of a man on July 3 would be using their cell phones to organize a protest. Perish the thought that anyone be allowed to hold a non-violent protest on BART property.

This is the same BART where an officer, Johannes Mehserle, shot to death an unarmed and prostrate man named Oscar Grant in the back. Mehserle received a two-year slap-on-the-wrist sentence for involuntary manslaughter and has been treated as a martyr by police unions angered that a DA would dare prosecute a killer cop. This was the first time in California history that a cop was prosecuted for murder for an on-duty killing, in case any readers think that this prosecution undermines my point.

Meanwhile, police are increasingly arresting onlookers who videotape police doing such things. Without the videotape Mehserle would be on the job and there would be no angry Fullerton residents protesting. No wonder the cops are grabbing our cameras.

Efforts in the Legislature to open up police records go absolutely nowhere as union-loving Democrats and law-and-order Republicans unite to do the police bidding. The courts continue to rule in favor of police secrecy, as this case involving cell phones and this one involving disciplinary records reveal. City council members not only fear the political power of local police unions, but retired police officers frequently win posts on the City Council.

Since 9/11, the public generally sides with the cops, especially in Republican areas such as Orange County.

Police can use deadly force at will. They can confiscate cameras and keep their own official videos away from public view. They can intimidate and harass writers. They can count on their departments to cover up for them. They know the "outside" investigators, mostly their colleagues and allies in the law enforcement community, will do the same for them. They can count on the media and the public to excuse them.

Yet some people blush at the term Police State.

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is editor-in-chief of CalWatchdog.com, author of Plunder! How Public Employee Unions Are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives And Bankrupting The Nation!, and a columnist for The Orange County Register.

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by Steven Greenhut

Recently by Steven Greenhut: WikiLeaks No Threat to Free Society

Not only did Alameda firefighters and police stand around, watch and do nothing as a suicidal man, Raymond Zack, spent an hour in the San Francisco Bay, neck deep in water, they didn't even go into the water to retrieve his lifeless body after he died. They left that work to a bystander. To make this incident even more infuriating, police and fire officials defended the inactions of their employees and blamed budget cuts and city policy for this inhumane behavior by those who often claim to be selfless protectors of the public.

At least we can dispense with all the hero nonsense from public safety "first responders" who use the hero card whenever they are negotiating for higher pay, better pensions and other bigger budget items. When it comes time to actually act like heroes, they often act like bureaucrats. Certainly, as a deadly fire in San Francisco Thursday that claimed the life of at least one firefighter shows, these jobs can be dangerous (although they don’t come near the top of the most-dangerous-jobs list). But the Alameda tragedy is an increasingly common situation as officials put their own safety, comfort and bureaucratic priorities above everything else.

Per the MSNBC report: "Interim Alameda Fire Chief Mike D’Orazi said that due to 2009 budget cuts his crews did not have the training or cold-water gear to go into the water. u2018The incident yesterday was deeply regrettable,' he said Tuesday. u2018But I can also see it from our firefighters’ perspective. They're standing there wanting to do something, but they are handcuffed by policy at that point.'"

For God's sake, blaming budget cuts is reprehensible especially given the large chunk of local budgets that firefighting services consume. Simple decency required some effort — rather than standing around and gawking by these highly paid professionals — to save a troubled man. The bystander who fished out his body didn't have cold-water gear (let alone a big pension from the fire department), but she jumped into the water any way and acted like an actual human being. The water was a bit chilly (54 degrees) but it’s not Alaska.

The article quoted a local resident who made the sensible point: "This just strikes me as not just a problem with funding, but a problem with the culture of what’s going on in our city, that no one would take the time and help this drowning man." And it's a huge cultural problem within any firefighting department that would put budgetary complaints and red tape above doing their basic human mission of saving someone in harm's way.

The Alameda police showed even deeper bureaucratic inhumanity. "Certainly this was tragic, but police officers are tasked with ensuring public safety, including the safety of personnel who are sent to try to resolve these kinds of situations,” Alameda police Lt. Sean Lynch told the San Jose Mercury News. "He was engaged in a deliberate act of taking his own life. We did not know whether he was violent, whether drugs were involved. It’s not a situation of a typical rescue."

This response is typical from police agencies. First they say that officer safety is their first priority. Then they blame the victim. Well, if you're not going to do your job and endure even an iota of risk, then let's stop playing up the risks to officers. And helping suicidal people and troubled people of all sort is part of the job of a police officer, one would think. No one, of course, will be held accountable for any of this, which is how it works in the public sector, and especially with public safety agencies.

The whole scene sounded like something from the Three Stooges, except with tragic results. According to the MSNBC report, "The Coast Guard was called to the scene, but the water was too shallow for its boat. A Coast Guard helicopter arrived more than an hour later because it had been on another call and had to refuel."

When asked if he would save a drowning child in such waters, Alameda Fire Chief Ricci Zombeck offered this bureaucratic and maddening answer to an ABC news reporter “Well, if I was off duty I would know what I would do, but I think you’re asking me my on-duty response and I would have to stay within our policies and procedures because that’s what’s required by our department to do.”

Obviously, then, we are safer without these departments. A heroic bystander might at least jump in the water and try to save your kid while the professional, well-paid, highly pensioned “hero” is forbidden by policy (and a bureaucratic attitude) to do so.

The firefighters, cops and Coast Guard, with all their personnel and top-of-the-line equipment, were incapable of even trying to save the life of a man who stood neck deep in water for an hour. Something definitely is wrong with this picture. It reminds me of another incident in Philadelphia I wrote about for LewRockwell.com a few years ago:

"In a videotaped u2018rescue' along the Schuylkill River last May [police and firefighters] did nothing other than watch for a half-hour or so as a troubled man clung to the side of a bridge, then jumped off and drowned. … [T]hey were joking around as the tragic event transpired. It took a roller-blading passerby and another bystander to attempt a rescue. … And the officials wouldn't touch [the dying man] or try to resuscitate him until the rubber gloves and other safety equipment was on the scene. They left the dirty work for the brave volunteers. This infuriating response didn't merit a rebuke from the police commissioner, who actually praised the assembled cops for their efforts after a public outcry ensued."

Instead of getting punished, Alameda officials will get rewarded — with additional training dollars. But who really believes that even if that money had been available and the policy been different that these first responders would have done the right thing? The local resident was right. The problem is a deep cultural one, something I see to be endemic in the government agencies that always claim to protect and serve us.

Police and fire agencies are bureaucracies and, as such, they end up functioning in a similar manner to the Department of Motor Vehicles, the IRS and any other alphabet soup agency you can name. As writer Thomas Sowell put it, "You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing."

And so normal people stand around wondering how we can end up with such a bad outcome — a needless death — while the bureaucracies, stuck as they are on procedure, tell us they acted appropriately.

It's about time the public starts rethinking our public safety policy and starts wondering whether the creation of big costly bureaucracies, encumbered by ridiculous rules and designed mainly around the convenience and safety of those working in the agencies, is the best way to protect the public's safety.

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is editor-in-chief of CalWatchdog.com and a widely published opinion writer. He is the author of the book, Abuse of Power, and his latest, Plunder!.

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by Steven Greenhut

Recently by Steven Greenhut: Firefighters Fiddle While Roseville Burns

The response by pundits to the latest WikiLeaks classified-document dump has reminded me of a preacher who decries pornography, but who also insists on reading the dirty magazines page by page so that he can better understand the depth of the world’s depravity. If WikiLeaks’ actions were so wrong, why is there such widespread interest in these cables, often by the same people vociferously criticizing their release?

Clearly, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has done our nation a service by publishing at-times embarrassing accounts of how the U.S. government conducts its foreign policy. This is a government that claims to be of the people, by the people and for the people, and which has grand pretenses about projecting freedom worldwide, yet it wants to be able to keep most of the details of its actions away from the prying eyes of the public.

There’s no evidence that any information released will endanger anyone, and the U.S. government reportedly refused Assange’s request to work with him to scrub any names that could be compromised. Officials will always trot out the "endangering lives" or "protecting security" argument so they don’t have to reveal what they are doing, how they are doing it, or any misconduct or mistakes they have made while doing it. That’s human nature. I’m surprised by how readily most Americans, liberal and conservative, are content with allowing so much of their government to operate in secrecy, even though open government is the cornerstone of a free society.

Cablegate separates Americans into two categories. There are those who agree with our founders that government power is a corrupting force, so government officials need to be closely monitored. And there are those who have nearly blind trust in the public-spiritedness of those who run the bureaucracies and rule us.

Put me in category A, which is why I applaud WikiLeaks and its efforts to provide the information necessary so Americans can govern themselves in this supposedly self-governing society.

"How can the American system be regarded as participatory if the most potentially explosive government conduct is hidden?" writer Sheldon Richman asked in a Christian Science Monitor column. "Are ‘we the people’ really in charge or not?" That’s the question of the hour.

I’m most astounded that some journalists interviewed have been so half-hearted in their defense of Assange. Journalists know that government officials fight the release of virtually every piece of information, especially that which casts them in a less-than-favorable light. I’ve received police reports with nearly every word (other than "is," "are" and "by") redacted. I’ve had information requests dismissed and ignored, even for information that is unquestionably part of the public record.

Officials obfuscate and delay and then force the average citizen to go to court to get files that are supposed to be ours, as citizens. They know that few people can afford the legal fight, and there’s little cost for refusing to adhere to public records laws.

This is the nature of government. If it weren’t for anonymous sources and leaked information, the journalism business would serve as a press-release service for officialdom. We’re all better off because courageous people leak important documents to the media. That’s true even when leakers have a personal agenda in releasing the information.

The New York Times reports that the leaked diplomatic cables "contain a fresh American intelligence assessment of Iran’s missile program. They reveal for the first time that the United States believes that Iran has obtained advanced missiles from North Korea that could let it strike at Western European capitals and Moscow and help it develop more formidable long-range ballistic missiles." That seems like useful information if we, the people, want to monitor our political leaders’ decisions about how to deal with those two rogue nations. No wonder Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad joined Republicans and Democrats in denouncing WikiLeaks.

We learned that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wanted to collect personal and financial information about foreign leaders, which gives the public valuable insight into this presidential hopeful’s view of civil liberties and personal privacy.

Even conservative writer Jonah Goldberg, who wondered why Assange hasn’t been "garroted in his hotel room" after the previous WikiLeaks release of documents relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan described U.S. forces shooting at a group that included civilians, found worthwhile information in the latest documents: "And what these documents confirm is that President Obama’s foreign policy is a mess."

Despite that useful insight, Goldberg is still angry at Assange, who "is convinced that he has revealed the hypocrisy and corruption of U.S. foreign policy, when in reality all he has revealed is that pursuing foreign-policy ideals is messier and more complicated in a world where bad people pursue bad ends."

The public is better off that we can debate Goldberg’s point, rather than remain in the dark about these matters.

Liberals have been as bad as conservatives in denouncing Assange as treasonous. This is not surprising, given how committed they are to a massive government that manages our lives.

Bill Anderson, writing for the libertarian Web site Lewrockwell.com, reminds readers that 19th century Americans largely embraced the view that "politicians were corrupt, governments generally wasted tax dollars and that elected officials could not be trusted." The Progressive movement then came onto the scene to advance its reforms, by which a gifted intelligentsia would rule for the public good. Open government is anathema to such elite rule, as the public gets to see that the elites are mere human beings with all the same temptations and foibles as everybody else.

WikiLeaks has helped demystify the inner workings of our government, sparking a much-needed debate over various U.S. policies across the world and reminded Americans that free societies depend on an informed citizenry. And the disclosures even provided some levity, as we got to read some honest assessments of puffed-up world leaders. We should thank Assange rather than malign him, and we should eagerly await his next release.

Reprinted with permission from the Orange County Register.

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is editor-in-chief of CalWatchdog.com and a widely published opinion writer. He is the author of the book, Abuse of Power, and his latest, Plunder!.

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by Steven Greenhut

Recently by Steven Greenhut: Sacramento Bee Stokes Phony CrimeWave

I hear endlessly from firefighters who typically earn pay and benefit packages of $175,000 a year here in California that they are heroes who put their lives on the line to keep us and our property safe. Yet, so often when tragedy strikes, these heroes act in ways that certainly are not heroic.

For instance, on Thursday a major fire consumed a good part of the Roseville Galleria, one of the largest malls in northern California, while firefighters basically waited outside to allow the fire sprinklers to do the job.

As the Sacramento Bee reported, a "troubled" 23-year-old man walked into a game store, claimed he had a gun, ordered everyone out and set fire to the store. Everyone was evacuated from the mall without incident, according to the Bee, "But because he left a backpack behind, and because no one knew if it contained explosives, firefighters waited outside while a bomb squad went in looking for the back pack."

The authorities figured the sprinklers had the fire under control, but when the bomb squad got into the building they found out that "the fire apparently smoldered and grew" and then "it burst out of control, roaring through portions of the mall roof and sending the bomb squad retreating … . The result was a fire that raged into early evening." It caused massive damage including a roof collapse.

The Fire Department heralded its decision to withhold firefighting from the mall. As the department spokesman said, "As it turns out, it was a good decision from the firefighter safety standpoint." As we see here and in virtually every other case involving fires and police efforts: The safety of the firefighter or officer is the primary — at times it seems, the only — concern of public safety officials.

I had previously written for LewRockwell about a "Dateline NBC" show depicting a man who was about to commit suicide from a bridge in Philadelphia. Dozens of assembled police and firefighters watched and even joked as the man stood in a precarious position. As I wrote, "They [police and firefighters] had a long time to bring a boat under the bridge from a nearby police boathouse as [Matthew] Beaufort threatened to jump. Only after the two volunteers dragged the drowning man onto the shore did Philly’s finest begin to take their rescue equipment down to the river. And the officials wouldn’t touch Beaufort or try to resuscitate him until the rubber gloves and other safety equipment was on the scene. They left the dirty work for the brave volunteers." I also wrote about how during some mass-shooting situations, "The officials were unwilling to endure risk, so they surrounded the building and waited while innocents died en masse."

This is reality. We should at least dispense with all the talk about heroism. In the world of government "public safety" work, it’s all about protecting the safety of the officials. A hero is someone who risks his life to save others. I understand the desire to minimize risks and especially unnecessary risks for firefighters and police, but the whole point of these jobs — as we’re told endlessly by public safety unions and politicians that court them — is that they are first responders who are supposed to endure some risk. Why else do we have them? Why do we pay them such high salaries?

In the law enforcement world, the officer-safety cult has led to senseless deaths of citizens. Police don’t save deadly force for extreme situations. Rather, they would rather use deadly force if they fear any threat to themselves at all — which explains why heavily armed and armored police often kill people who have only small knives after they step within 20 feet of them. That’s what cops are taught to do. Call it necessary if you want, but don’t call it heroism.

One conservative talk radio host on Friday (Eric Hogue in Sacramento) complained about people who second-guessed the firefighter response in Roseville. And of course many people have been chiming in and defending the "heroic" firefighters who — altogether now — "put their lives on the line every day protecting us."

Apparently, Americans are desperate for heroes, even ones who only occasionally act heroically and who are paid handsome sums for their heroism ($100,000 retirements at age 50, three-day work weeks, paid while sleeping, salaries with overtime that often top $200,000). There’s not much sacrifice going on here. But perhaps the more the public sees the response, or non-response, to fires in places such as Roseville, the less apt they might be to continue with this silly hero worship.

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is editor-in-chief of CalWatchdog.com and a widely published opinion writer. He is the author of the book, Abuse of Power, and his latest, Plunder!.

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by Steven Greenhut by Steven Greenhut Recently by Steven Greenhut: Plundering California

In what can only be viewed as an attempt to build public support for the hiring of more park rangers, the Sacramento Bee on July 25 published an overwrought front-page story — complete with two inside-the-A-section jump pages — warning about a crime wave that supposedly is threatening safety at the state’s parks.

Crime is hitting record levels. Business owners are bemoaning their “vulnerability” and a former ranger warns the newspaper that “the entire system is teetering on the brink.” Staffing at the ranger system is flat even as the state has added parks to the system. As the Bee puts it, the net result is “crime last year reached record per-capita levels.”

But there’s no reason to be alarmed — unless one is a Bee editor and happens to look closely at the level of alarmist reporting. The series doesn’t document a crime wave so much as it details how the Nanny State criminalizes even the most modest rule-breaking. We don’t see a rash of violence or assault, but the increased willingness of law enforcement to treat smoking, drinking, rafting without life preservers, noise-making and trespassing as crimes, rather than as the normal rule-breaking that has been found at parks since time immemorial.

The clues that this series is nonsense come early. The big front-page photograph shows a park ranger pulling over “a raft crowded with youngsters, none wearing life jackets” at Folsom Lake. The youngsters look like teen-agers or young adults, not vulnerable little kids, and they are hanging onto a large flotation device. The other photo shows a “top-ranking law enforcement officer at Huntington and Bolsa Chica state beaches” confiscating and dumping a small bottle of liquor taken from a middle-aged man.

Nothing the teens were doing seemed particularly dangerous. One has to be a true scold to think of rafting without a life preserver as a crime. Certainly, having a small bottle of liquor is against the park rules, but it hardly amounts to terrifying criminal activity and it makes one wonder why this requires the efforts of a “top-ranking” officer.

Yes, some serious crimes take place at state parks, just as some serious crimes take place wherever people are gathered anywhere in California. But the article strains to find terrible things to report. Its prominent bullet-point list of matters that rangers had to contend with over the last year includes “car surfing” at Folsom Lake, as young daredevils jump off a car roof and into the lake — a stupid and dangerous activity that nevertheless endangers only those who do it. It refers to “grave-robbing” — or, more accurately, people who remove Indian artifacts, such as arrowheads, from a park. (Even the language the Bee uses is designed to hype the problem, given that grabbing an arrowhead, although wrong, hardly amounts to what most people think of as grave robbing.) It points to “illicit sex in parks” and to “The death of a 24-year-old rescue volunteer crushed by his vehicle while responding to an accident.”

Illicit sex — Is it possible to have licit sex in a park? — is a fact of life. The death of the rescue volunteer was tragic, but this was an accident, not the mark of a crime wave. Even the article seems to admit that this is much ado about nothing. Under the heading, “Trespassing leads offenses,” the Bee writes: “The most frequent state park crimes may appear benign but hint at a growing disregard for park rules.” That sounds like something that comes right out of the State Park Peace Officers Association press room.

One of the big increases in crime — park rangers reported 35 incidents of marijuana cultivation on state parks versus 30 incidents 11 years ago. And so it goes … park rangers extinguish “illegal campfires,” try to clamp down excessive noise, prosecute nudists who, by the way, had long been allowed to do their thing at a small section of San Onofre state park. In one example of this crime wave, an officer caught someone smoking marijuana, only to find that the marijuana was legal given that the person had a card to legally smoke the stuff. Good grief.

The Bee described an assault on the “coast’s sensitive tide pools” — i.e., people who take starfish or snails back with them. In a normal day and age, kids would be urged not to take shells from the beach, but in this day and age these are considered serious environmental crimes that demand an increase in law enforcement staffing.

Actually, the article finds that there are surprisingly few serious crimes that take place at California’s state parks. Mostly, the Bee and its friends in the law enforcement unions want more “boots on the ground” to catch average folks who might decide to have a bonfire and drink some wine. The article also champions the volunteer park busybodies who approach and correct park-goers who aren’t following the rules. Perhaps this is indicative of the new California. The old California championed “doing your own thing” and enjoying the outdoor lifestyle. But nowadays everything here is about laws, rules and regulations — why should the lifestyle at beaches, mountains and lakes be any different from any other aspect of life in this highly taxed, carefully monitored and absurdly regulated state?

The article points to parks stressed to the breaking point, but then argues that “crime drives down usage,” which is like that old Yogi Berra complaint about a restaurant that is so crowded that no one goes there any more.

By the Bee’s logic, I might as well declare that a crime wave has descended on my neighborhood given that the neighbors regularly drive five miles over the speed limit, jaywalk, drink beer while they walk the dog and make a little noise during pool parties. Somehow, in the spirit of individualism and freedom, I prefer to deal with these matters on my own rather than hire additional police officers to patrol the street, hand out tickets and look around in our yards.

I live by Folsom Lake and like to go floating on the American River. The vast majority of people I see there are well behaved and safe, even if they occasionally break a minor rule or two. Last time I went to the river, we all had to wait while a surly park ranger — how much is he paid and what is his pension? — searched our stuff to make sure no one was bringing along a six-pack of beer. If someone snuck in the beer that would be against the park rules, but does it really point to a crime wave?

If anything, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for Californians to enjoy themselves without government snoopers making sure we don’t do anything fun. Go to any park and the list of “don’ts” is increasingly long. This is more a story of the criminalization of generally harmless recreational behavior and of the security-state mentality — which sees more police, more cameras, more searches and more rules as the answer to everything, lest anyone do anything wrong.

As I wrote in an Orange County Register editorial a few years ago, “Southern California still has the international reputation as being a fun-in-the-sun place. The reality has been whittled away by government officials and police agencies that have been cracking down on life’s innocent pleasures. The stories abound. Beaches now are mostly smoke-free zones. Don’t you dare try to enjoy some wine at the beach on a quiet evening! Cities have tried to get rid of beach fire rings. We heard one story about police staking out a local park July Fourth and ticketing people watching fireworks, given that parks are supposed to be closed after dark.”

A broken rule is hardly a crime wave. It’s too bad the Bee failed to make that distinction.

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is a senior editorial writer and columnist for the Orange County Register. He is the author of the book, Abuse of Power, and his latest, Plunder!. Visit his blog.

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by Steven Greenhut by Steven Greenhut Recently by Steven Greenhut: Watch Who You Call Extremist

The economy is struggling, the unemployment rate is high, and many Americans are struggling to pay the bills, but one class of Americans is doing quite well: government workers. Their pay levels are soaring, they enjoy unmatched benefits, and they remain largely immune from layoffs, except for some overly publicized cutbacks around the margins. To make matters worse, government employees — thanks largely to the power of their unions — have carved out special protections that exempt them from many of the rules that other working Americans must live by. California has been on the cutting edge of this dangerous trend, which has essentially turned government employees into a special class of citizens.

When I recently appeared on Glenn Beck’s TV show to discuss California’s dreadful fiscal situation, I mentioned that in Orange County, where I had been a columnist for the Orange County Register, the average pay and benefits package for firefighters was $175,000 per year. After the show, I heard from viewers who couldn’t believe the figure, but it’s true. Firefighters, like all public-safety officials in California, also receive a gold-plated retirement plan: a defined-benefit annual pension that offers 90 percent or more of the worker’s final year’s pay, guaranteed for the rest of his life (and the life of his spouse).

Government employees use various scams to boost their already generous benefits, which include fully paid health care and cost-of-living adjustments. The Sacramento Bee coined the term “chief’s disease,” for example, to refer to the 82 percent (in 2002) of chief’s-level employees at the California Highway Patrol who discovered a disabling injury about one year before retiring. That provides an extra year off work, with pay, and shields 50 percent of their final retirement pay from taxes. Most of these disabilities stem from back pain, knee pain, irritable bowel syndrome, and the like — not from taking bullets from bad guys. The disability numbers soared after CHP disbanded its fraud unit.

As I document in my new book, Plunder!, government employees of all stripes have manipulated the system to spike their pensions. Because California bases pensions for employees on their final year’s salary, some workers move to other jurisdictions for just that final year to increase their pay and thus the pension. Even government employees convicted of on-the-job crimes continue to collect benefits. Municipalities have adopted Defined Retirement Option Plans, or DROPs, in which the employee earns his salary and his full defined-benefit retirement pay at the same time, with the retirement pay going into an account payable upon actual retirement. And as average Americans work longer to sustain themselves, public employees can retire in their early fifties with their plush benefits.

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Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is a senior editorial writer and columnist for the Orange County Register. He is the author of the book, Abuse of Power, and his latest, Plunder!. Visit his blog.

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by Steven Greenhut by Steven Greenhut Recently by Steven Greenhut: Breaking the Code of Silence

My idea, put forward in last week’s column, to break California into four separate states was met with an overwhelmingly positive response, which leads me to believe that Californians might have an amicable geographic breakup that allows our various regions to go their separate ways. This week, I’m writing about another political divorce, albeit one sure to be full of bitterness and custody disputes. It involves the future of the Republican Party and the conservative movement, following the GOP’s well-deserved November election drubbing. Based on a revealing debate among Orange County bloggers last week, I can guarantee that this is going to be one nasty split.

Quite simply, as the vanquished GOP struggles to find its voice and reach out to voters, some party activists and right-wing leaders have decided that the real problem isn’t just President Barack Obama, but the small-"l" libertarians who still remain within their midst. Local activists, writing in an establishment GOP Web site, accused me of "jumping the shark" — i.e., of no longer being relevant — because of my July 4 column that poked fun at U.S. military adventurism and the possibly illegal policies of U.S. spy agencies. But it’s not about me, really. The article, written by GOP/Red County honcho Chip Hanlon, uses my column as an example of the supposed extremism and America-hating found within the libertarian movement and takes pot shots at former GOP presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul.

Hanlon goes for the easy straw man: "They argue — with the benefit of hindsight — that we should never have gotten involved in World War II, that Abraham Lincoln is one of history’s worst war criminals … . Their ‘philosophy’ is really pretty simple: Libertarians hate government, period, and the government they hate the most is their own. … When their full belief system is known, however, support of Libertarians like Paul cannot be defended. But folks like Paul are learning, becoming better at hiding their extremist views."

The GOP establishmentarians mocked the (mostly calm) libertarians who commented on such mischaracterizations. One of the Republicans actually blamed libertarians for the GOP’s defeat, as if we’re the ones who had spent the last eight years abusing presidential and congressional powers. Like totalitarians, they invited us to renounce our "extremism," make a public apology and join their cause to limit government, which is akin to a drunk calling on members of Alcoholics Anonymous to join him at the bar if they really want to fight alcoholism.

The GOP can’t claim to fight for smaller government. The Bush administration set spending records, doubled the national debt, vastly expanded Medicare entitlements and waged a costly Iraqi adventure that has caused tragic losses of life. Some of us are tired of believing empty GOP promises, and prefer to look at the dismal record. Some GOP folks claim to be critics of the Bush-era GOP excesses, but I was at the GOP convention and watched them cheer John McCain and even Karl Rove.

Since the election, the same GOP that has sung hosannas to the empty vessel of Sarah Palin has gone out of its way to depict supporters of Paul as cultlike camp followers. Unlike Palin’s acolytes, we don’t like Paul because he’s good-looking or tells folksy stories or goes moose hunting or has really cool glasses. We simply like most of the age-old ideas he espouses, as he’s one of the few national figures who still espouses them. It’s about the ideas, not the personality. Yet we’re the crazy people here?

Let’s face the obvious. Republicans in Orange County and elsewhere want us to get the hell away from their movement and to stay away. I left the GOP last year for the Libertarian Party and highly recommend it. Sure, the LP is ineffective and a bit odd, of course, but it’s better than being stuck in an unhappy marriage with a mean-spirited, abusive and angry loser of a spouse.

Maybe the Red County reaction is proof of the long-awaited and much-needed end of the old Reagan coalition, which was comprised of small-government types, social conservatives and military hawks. The GOP is still home for social conservatives and military expansionists, but there’s nothing left of value for believers in liberty. And I am so sick of all the Reagan idolatry by that side. I like Reagan, but he did, in fact, expand government. His legacy shouldn’t be off-limits to criticism.

Ironically, it wasn’t that long ago that our ideas were the conservative mainstay. We believe that government should be small and accountable and should stick to protecting the life, liberty and property of American citizens. We believe in maintaining a strong defense, but not in seeking dragons to slay around the globe. Traditional conservatives throughout the history of the nation were highly suspicious of federal power, especially federal law-enforcement powers. Modern conservatives defend the federal government’s use of waterboarding and the Bush administration’s aggressive internal security expansions.

Who are these people to dictate the political mainstream? The Red County bloggers accuse libertarians of being extremists, and used guilt-by-association tactics to smear libertarians, yet when I pointed out that one prominent writer at the blog, and someone who has joined in the "libertarians are extremists" commenting, has ties to a form of fundamentalist Christianity that wants our society run by Old Testament law, they got all huffy. He says he no longer is a Christian Reconstructionist, which is fair enough. But they miss my point: If I’m held accountable for every view by every libertarian, then they should at least be accountable for views they have expressed in the past and currently publish on their site.

I spent some time on Red County following this dust-up and found one occasional columnist arguing, "Domestically, we should rewrite our sedition law, the Smith Act, to the original 1940 standards in order to resist the attempt to establish Islamic law in America. We should follow Russia’s lead in not allowing further building of mosques or Islamic schools in America until Saudi Arabia reciprocates. … Our response to an Islamic challenge could well result in vastly expanded Christian political dominance in America. … If secular America fails to step up and recognize the incompatibility of the Islamic ideology, Christian America certainly will."

Does re-establishing 1940s-era sedition laws and abridging religious freedom sound mainstream to you? Red County also features a diary that called for handcuffing, prosecuting and sentencing to "hard time" corporate executives who hire illegal immigrants — yet another moderate, mainstream position!

I used to do Republican political organizing at the Iowa caucuses, and many of the Republican activists I dealt with were racist, angry nutcases. I recall one local GOP activist I had to contend with who advocated the murder of abortionists. Given the common Mexican-bashing among GOP activists, maybe it’s fair to say the conservative mainstream holds racist views. Didn’t a prominent conservative congressman propose nuking Mecca?

Every movement is filled with people who have some, er, unusual views. I can do the same thing as Hanlon: mock and mischaracterize the conservative worldview and dredge up the many crazy things I’ve heard from right-wing kooks over the years. Maybe we should all just read the loopy Free Republic Web site to see the level of discourse on the mainstream GOP Right just as Red County points to comments on libertarian sites as proof of where the libertarian mainstream lies. Their goal clearly is to silence our views by engaging in a game of gotcha, not engage in serious debate.

Let’s just end the fighting. Those who believe in truly limiting government, in domestic and overseas affairs, should realize that we are no longer part of the conservative movement and certainly not welcome in the Republican Party. We’re not loved or wanted. Don’t despair. I can guarantee that it’s far more entertaining watching Republicans lose elections from a distance than from within their crazy, immigrant-bashing, warmongering, torture-endorsing, government-expanding, civil-liberties-trouncing hothouse.

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is a senior editorial writer and columnist for the Orange County Register. He is the author of the book, Abuse of Power. Visit his blog.

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by Steven Greenhut by Steven Greenhut

The lady sheriff doth protest too much, methinks. So too doth the union boss, who unleashed the dogs of war against the district attorney. Forgive my bad Shakespeare imitation as I write about the latest law enforcement dispute. Let’s just say the Bard of Avon and the sheriff’s department of Orange County have something in common: a large trove of drama, tragedy and farce.

Sheriff Sandra Hutchens and Association of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs President Wayne Quint were both furious — Wayne had steam coming out of his ears, according to one associate — at District Attorney Tony Rackauckas, and more specifically at his press spokesperson, Susan Schroeder, for a few matter-of-fact comments she made after a recent mistrial. When asked why the office was not going to retry the excessive force case against a deputy who used a Taser on a handcuffed suspect, she gave an honest answer: "We argued in closing arguments that we felt there was a code of silence — what is it? A thin blue line. We’re very disappointed. … It’s very important for the District Attorney’s Office to have ethical and law-abiding law enforcement officers."

The D.A. believes OC deputies had "blue amnesia" — they lied, or conveniently "forgot" critical facts — when testifying in a case involving one of their own. It’s the latest incident in a string of cases involving sheriff’s deputies who allegedly covered up for their misbehaving colleagues, ranging from the D.A.’s allegations of departmental perjury and witness tampering following the John Chamberlain jail murder in October 2006 to the possible cover-up by sheriff’s officials of a deputy, Gerald Stenger, accused last year of child molestation.

The jury voted to acquit the Taser-happy cop, Christopher Hibbs, by an 11-1 verdict. According to Rackauckas, speaking at a press conference on May 12, it did so because the key witnesses changed their stories.

Deputies painted a clear picture of Hibbs and his Taser abuse in an internal investigation and before the grand jury. But they told differing accounts of the event once the trial got under way. The public knows that cops frown on "ratting out" one another, even though this undermines the rule of law. While a "code of silence" is no surprise, the sheriff’s overreaction to a few words certainly is surprising.

There’s little that would shock me coming from union chief Quint, a guy who once publicly threatened to release criminals in the neighborhood of a rival union official. But the personal attacks he unleashed on Schroeder — a vitriolic letter sent to deputies statewide with a big photo of her, along with demands for her resignation — were indecent. (Quint said, "Since the communication was to my membership which consists of 1,850 fully sworn peace officers the likelihood of targeting Ms. Schroeder for harassment is a ridiculous assumption." He obviously hasn’t followed the many news stories of police abuse or been on the receiving end of one of those "we hope you don’t get pulled over" e-mails.)

"My concern is when the association sends out this letter telling hundreds, maybe thousands, of deputies that this is a person we dislike and here is her picture, then there may be repercussions to this," Rackauckas said. "[I]t might invite harassment." On her departmental blog, Hutchens wrote that "Recent statements by a prosecutor about a ‘code of silence’ as part of a ‘thin blue line’ are an affront to all in law enforcement. In my 30 years in law enforcement I have never heard a prosecutor make such an irresponsible claim." One will find little outrage over the details of the alleged perjury, however.

"Why are they so offended by what I said?" Schroeder asked. "Why aren’t they offended by what the deputies did?"

Those are my thoughts exactly. Responsible leaders would assure the public that blue amnesia isn’t tolerated and leave the personal criticisms to behind-closed-door meetings. At least Rackauckas did the right thing. He stood by Schroeder and laid out the facts to the sheriff’s department, the union and the media. The facts make Schroeder’s case.

On Sept. 13, 2007, Deputy Christopher Hibbs and Deputy J.C. Wicks observed a suspicious-looking man in a trench coat walking the streets at 2 a.m. in Anaheim.

The suspect, a parolee named Ignacio Lares, ran away and, with the help of an off-duty Los Angeles officer who was in the area at the time, they caught him. Hibbs used a Taser on Lares, who was resisting being cuffed. Other officers show up. Wicks writes up the police report and includes the Taser incident in it, which is required under department policy. No problem.

The cops catch a fleeing bad guy, use a Taser to subdue him and file a report.

But then in December, Hibbs is about to be transferred to Villa Park. As part of that hiring process the higher-ups get wind of locker room banter about the possible misuse of a Taser. As it turns out, Hibbs didn’t just use the Taser once on Lares that night, but he used it at least one other time while Lares was handcuffed in the back of the squad car. After an interview with Deputy Chris Thomas, an officer who arrived on the scene, the sheriff’s department concluded in a memo: "Thomas saw Hibbs attempting to question the subject, again, handcuffed in the back of the unit, and when the subject refused to answer or was belligerent, Hibbs used his Taser to ‘drive stun’ the suspect. According to Thomas, he used the Taser several times."

Or as the boys in the locker room jokingly mimicked the sound of a Taser (according to one deputy’s testimony): "What’s your name, what’s your name, clack, clack, clack, clack. Tell me your name, clack, clack, clack, clack." Lares reportedly was crying and pleading for mercy. At the grand jury, deputies were clear about what happened that night. Thomas, for instance, said he did not see anything that justified the use of the Taser in the back seat of the car and explained that "it was in my mind that this is enough, we have to stop this."

But as the case moved toward trial, the sheriff’s department — which handed information about the Hibbs incident and cooperated with the D.A. — called the D.A. and said that the witnesses were going "sideways." According to an internal affairs interview, Thomas said he "could only hear the sounds of a deployed Taser, but he did not actually see Hibbs deploy it." At the grand jury, Thomas thought that the Taser use had gone too far and testified that there was no obvious reason for it, but in his new interview he suggested that "there had to have been justification for it."

At the grand jury, Wicks said he could see Lares through the window and never heard him struggle or do anything that would justify the Taser use. At the trial, Wicks said he couldn’t see Lares or inside the vehicle. At the grand jury, Sgt. Robert Long testified that department policy requires that the person who uses a stun gun must document it in the report, but at the trial he claims that there is no such requirement. The sergeant who wrote the memo explaining what Thomas saw, Robert Gunzel, testified at the trial that his report wasn’t based on facts, but on assumptions. At the trial, the deputies even changed their minds about where they were standing when Hibbs used the Taser.

After the D.A.’s press conference last Tuesday, Hutchens and Quint calmed down, happy that Rackauckas said the code of silence accusation applied only to specific cases and not to accepted departmental behavior. But Hutchens and Quint were long privy to the details of this case.

They know about Stenger and Chamberlain and everyone knows about convicted witness-tamperer and ex-Sheriff Mike Carona.

Yet they decided to protest so much that anyone would suggest there’s a code of silence in the department and so little about the alleged bad behavior by their deputies. Methinks this problem might be bigger than any one wants to let on.

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is a senior editorial writer and columnist for the Orange County Register. He is the author of the book, Abuse of Power. Visit his blog.

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by Steven Greenhut by Steven Greenhut

Environmental activists have blamed every conceivable ill in society on global warming — from the spread of disease to increased risks of forest fires to environmental despoliation and the retreat of glaciers. If you read the "enviro" literature, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any problem worldwide that might not be exacerbated by the Earth’s changing temperature. I dismiss most such claims, or at least treat them skeptically, given that the goal of the alarmists is obvious: to scare humanity into ceding more of our freedom and our money to the politicians, government administrators and activist groups that promise to save us.

Yet there is one massive and ever-present problem that environmentalists have not yet tied to global warming: the global financial meltdown, which has threatened the world economy much the way supposedly melting polar ice is supposedly shrinking polar bear habitats. This is one crisis, however, that might actually be directly tied to global warming. I exaggerate a bit. Actually, theoretic man-made global warming didn’t cause the housing bubble, but land-use policies implemented, in part, to fight global warming, do have a direct link to the housing bubble, the subsequent deflation of that bubble and all the wreckage that has followed.

This is the largely untold story of the ongoing economic crisis. It’s not nearly as far-fetched as it sounds.

We’ve all been reading about the main causes of the economic bust. It’s elementary economics, really. Science-fiction writer Jerry Pournelle puts it in simple terms: "I’ve been telling you for years: you can’t pump money into the housing market, and keep lowering the interest rates, without creating a bubble; and eventually the bubble will burst." Cheap money and loosened home-lending standards, pushed by politicians who wanted to make homeownership affordable even to people who clearly were not financially ready to buy and maintain a house, created an unnatural demand for housing. Demand went up, and prices soared. All Ponzi schemes come to an end, and now you’ve got wide choices among Southern California houses that cost not much more than a decent luxury car.

We know that. But let’s look more closely at what happened. For example, answer this question: Why did prices go up when demand shot up? That’s easy. Demand exceeded supply. Now for the follow-up question: Why didn’t supply keep up with demand? It takes awhile to build houses, and government restrictions on land use made it far more difficult for that new supply to be built as demand soared.

In reality, the housing bubble did not get particularly inflated in many parts of the country. The bubble was almost exclusively a feature in big urbanized markets, and not just any big, urbanized markets. The bubble was inflated mainly in those metropolitan areas — i.e., San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, etc. — that embrace Smart Growth, the trendy and widely implemented idea that government should limit suburban growth (sprawl, as it is pejoratively called) and insist that new growth be crammed into urban growth boundaries.

"’Easy money,’ by itself, does not explain what caused the unprecedented housing bubble in California," writes Wendell Cox, a former Los Angeles transportation planner and a well-known housing and transportation consultant who battles the Smart Growth folks for Heritage Foundation and other market-oriented think tanks. "If u2018easy money’ were the sole cause, then similar house price escalation relative to incomes would have occurred throughout the country. Take, for example, Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston. These are the three fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the developed world … . Since 2000, these metropolitan areas have grown from three to 15 times as fast as Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and San Jose. … This is where the demand would have been expected to produce the bubble. But it did not. House prices remained at or near historic norms and average house prices rose one-tenth that of the California coastal metropolitan areas."

I heard Cox last week at the American Dream Coalition conference in Bellevue, Wash. (I spoke on local Smart Growth initiatives, and Cox offered a presentation via satellite from Paris). He noted that even economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman agrees that land rationing causes home-price increases. In fact, it’s so obvious, I’m surprised a liberal Nobel Prize winner, as Krugman is, would recognize as much.

Don’t get caught up in the politics of it, though. Think economically, in terms of any product you choose. Let’s say money became available to virtually anyone to buy a new car, but that carmakers weren’t able to build many new cars to fulfill the demand. Car prices would go up and up. The same thing would happen with anything. Remember the short-lived bubble for — it’s hard to believe, but true — "scarce" Beanie Babies?

I looked at home-price data for some decent-size Midwestern cities over the period of bubble and bust that we experienced in California. The trend line was shocking — prices went up steadily but modestly year after year. In California markets, the prices spiked and then fell. In California, there wasn’t enough supply — and it takes too many months to get approvals to fill the demand.

Certainly, some of the California markets that experienced the biggest bust, such as the Central Valley, the Inland Empire and the high desert, are not Smart Growth havens. But, as Randal O’Toole, a land-use expert for the Cato Institute, explained to me, these are markets that served as the blow-off valve for the highly restrictive Bay Area and Southern California urban markets. In other words, average folks couldn’t afford homes in restrictive Orange County and Los Angeles, so they moved out to places such as Perris and Moreno Valley. Those are among the communities particularly hard hit by the bust.

California and other progressive states have been pushing tough land-use rules for years and for myriad reasons. But there’s no doubt that global warming concerns have provided recent impetus for stringent restrictions. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law last year Senate Bill 375, a "Smart Growth" bill that withholds transportation funds from localities that do not embrace limits on suburban development. That was a follow-up to Assembly Bill 32, designed to battle global-warming-related emissions. In fairness, we shouldn’t blame global-warming hysteria entirely for these problems, but it deserves a good share of the blame.

Global warming might someday harm the polar bear. But the policies politicians have implemented to deal with this issue have had a good bit to do with the financial suffering Americans are facing today. Next time someone complains about the ill effects of global warming, add this one to the list.

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is a senior editorial writer and columnist for the Orange County Register. He is the author of the book, Abuse of Power. Visit his blog.

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by Steven Greenhut by Steven Greenhut

When it comes to foreign affairs, Americans are used to debating progress or setbacks in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or on the Israeli invasion last month of the Gaza Strip. We’re used to thinking about death and destruction thousands of miles from home and, as a result, tend to debate these matters based more on glancing impressions, quick reads of newspapers and Web sites and sound bites rather than personal knowledge or the knowledge of those who live in the countries at issue.

What if I mentioned that thousands of people have been killed — 7,337 at last count — since 2007 in open warfare just a short drive from here? Or that the grisly violence has reached close to areas within the readership of this newspaper? What if I noted that the violence has altered the lives of many of our neighbors, friends and co-workers, who have family members who dwell in the heart of the war zone? What if I added that, because of this war, we place our lives in jeopardy by simply visiting some of our favorite vacation spots? Would that cause you to think twice about your foreign-policy priorities?

I am referring, of course, to Mexico, which has turned into a horror show in the past couple of years. There’s been sporadic news coverage of these events. But the average American — and the average politician, for that matter — doesn’t seem attuned or interested in a human tragedy that’s starting to spill not just across the border, but deeply into the American interior, to cities such as Dallas, Atlanta and Sioux Falls, S.D., where Mexican drug gangs have murdered and abducted people.

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Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is a senior editorial writer and columnist for the Orange County Register. He is the author of the book, Abuse of Power. Visit his blog.

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by Steven Greenhut by Steven Greenhut

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I love cars, but I also love it when the market weeds out the lousy carmakers.

Being a libertarian, I’m often accused of being pro-business, which is absurd. I’m a believer in free markets, and an essential tenet of free-market thinking is that businesses must be free to fail if they are insufficiently responsive to the needs of the consumer. I love it when lousy businesses fail. Unfortunately, politicians from both parties often try to use taxpayer subsidies and government-enforced protections to help out their favorite businesses or to keep them from falling into the "wrong" hands.

For instance, Missouri’s Democratic senator and Republican governor both recently tried, unsuccessfully, to use their influence to stop the sale of St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch to Belgian-based booze giant InBev. Anyone who has ever tasted the flavorless pale-yellow concoctions sold by the company known for its Clydesdale horses would be shocked that anyone would want to buy the firm responsible for them, rather than tar-and-feather those who ran it.

I’m interested in beer, but passionate about automobiles. Yet even when it comes to cars, I would in no way want the government to interfere in the market process. Instead of worrying about the ongoing plight of the Big Three American automobile manufacturers, I celebrate it. Companies that have operated more like regulated utilities than entrepreneurial organizations deserve to have tough times. Companies that prefer bean-counters to creative managers and that mortgage their future to give in to absurd union demands deserve to lose market share and to face sinking stock values. Companies that care about other things more than they care about the consumer deserve to fail. Good riddance to them. Better companies will rise up to fill the void, even if they are based in India or China.

"Who shot General Motors?" asked author Roger Lowenstein in a July 10 column in The New York Times. His answer: "The immediate cause of GM’s distress, of course, is the surging price of oil, which has put a chill on the sale of gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles and trucks. The company’s failure to invest early enough in hybrids is another culprit. Years of poor car design is another. But none of GM’s management miscues was so damaging to its long-term fate as the rich pensions and health care that robbed General Motors of its financial flexibility and, ultimately, of its cash."

Toyota, which will soon be the world’s largest auto company, is concerned that U.S. government officials will bail out the ailing Michigan-based corporate giant. Toyota officials say they wish GM the best because of the need for competition, but it’s easy to understand the Japanese company’s real fear: political meddling that will hamper better-quality overseas makers and politicians who will exploit nationalism with some absurd "Buy American" campaign. But political meddling will only reward those companies that have made the worst decisions. Why should the government punish those companies that have done the best to serve the auto-buying public?

GM, Ford and Chrysler all deserve their current fate. Ford officials recently announced that they would start designing more fuel-efficient cars. "What we really need to do is tell people that we’re back in the car business," said Ford’s president of the America’s Mark Fields, according to an Associated Press article last week. Yet I recall Ford’s smugness when it was raking in huge profits from its mega-SUVs and full-size pick-up trucks and ignoring the automobile side of the business.

I’ve got nothing against big trucks, but I have everything against foolish corporate officials who are incapable of anticipating market changes. Somehow, Toyota and Honda managed to bring out new lines of smaller cars as gas prices headed north of $4 a gallon. But don’t worry, Ford — which is now losing money, and might soon face Chapter 11 — will start coming up with new cars we might someday want to buy! But it takes quite a while to bring new products to market. Chrysler, by the way, isn’t in any better shape — which will not surprise anyone who has recently looked at the firm’s ungainly offerings. As the blog, The Truth About Cars, explained, Chrysler’s plan is to "become a distributor of cars made by others. Someone. Anyone." That may not be a bad idea, given that GM has been introducing some critically acclaimed new models that are basically European Opels or Australian Holdens. If you can’t come up with a good design in Detroit, you might as well go elsewhere. But corporate innovators tend to do better over time than followers.

Part of the problem, in my view, is that U.S. automakers cannot improve their situation overnight because it takes a long time to create a good reputation for long-term quality and reliability. Even if, say, the latest Pontiac model is better than a comparable Honda, a buyer still might go with the Honda given that brand’s exceedingly high resale values, which are a reflection of Honda’s reputation for building cars that rack up 300,000 miles. In fact, part of the domestic automakers’ current financial gloom is directly the result of their inattention to long-term resale issues.

Last month, Ford wrote off more than $2 billion in losses because the residual values of its returned leased vehicles are so much lower than predicted. With leasing, a buyer pays the difference between the selling price and the residual value (the estimate of what it will be worth when the lease is up) plus some financing and other costs. Domestic manufacturers generally have worse lease deals than imports because of lower residuals/resale values (that means you have to pay a higher amount between the sale price and the residual), but they have been hammered in recent months because the big SUVs and trucks they have so long relied upon are now virtually worthless as buyers turn them in at lease end.

It just keeps getting worse for the Big Three. But, again, this is good news for consumers. First, when the manufacturers can’t get rid of their cars, buyers can negotiate better deals. Just as the subprime housing mess is a blessing for home buyers (it’s only a crisis for sellers and the banks that stupidly handed out loans to the credit-unworthy), the falling value of domestic vehicles is good news for anyone who still wants that Expedition or Tahoe. Second, there’s nothing like failure to force companies to change their ways and make products that respond to the fickle consumer. If the domestic manufacturers were government agencies or regulated monopolies they would behave as such agencies. They would continue to provide less-than-desirable products, offer shoddy service and increase their prices whenever they overspent their budgets. Governments and government-enforced monopolies can do that because consumers have no options. GM has tried to act like a government, but it can’t ignore that the day of reckoning is coming.

The key to capitalism is competition and the potential for failure. That’s why most carmakers keep offering more features and better products each model year. If they don’t, they will lose out to other makers. If they don’t fear failure, then they won’t desperately seek to win over the buyer. In some ways capitalism is an anti-business philosophy, because there’s nothing businesses hate more than fierce competition and the threat of bankruptcy.

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is a senior editorial writer and columnist for the Orange County Register. He is the author of the book, Abuse of Power. Visit his blog.

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As the nation braces for a long and grueling presidential contest, what are the chances that either candidate — Democratic Sen. Barack Obama or Republican Sen. John McCain — will talk about the one crucial issue at hand? I’m not referring to some bogus threat from Iran, or a dubious climate cataclysm, or a "crisis" in health care, the mortgage industry or other aspect of an economy that’s perfectly capable of fixing itself if left to its own devices.

America’s big problem is the rapid, unstoppable expansion of government at every level. This isn’t just a problem of affordability — as in making sure there are sufficient tax dollars to sustain the growth. It’s a problem of liberty. The bigger government gets, the more it extinguishes the choices made by individuals. We all enjoy fewer freedoms as regulation grows, the number of government agents expands, taxes increase, programs grow, wars continue and laws proliferate. It’s as simple as that.

Obama and McCain both act as if government is a magical force that can shower goodies, ranging from free health care to permanent security, on the American people. They both view government as something unquestionably good and noble, although they prefer different aspects of Leviathan. But, as George Washington explained, "Government is not reason; it is not eloquence, it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." Dangerous or fearful — those are your choices, whether or not modern Republicans (who claim to believe in limited government, but have been most effective in expanding it) or Democrats want to admit it.

Because America’s founders understood that government always is about coercion, they created a system that was designed primarily to limit the size and power of that government and to create competing levels of government to check one another. They knew something Americans since have forgotten: The biggest threat most of us face is from our own government, not foreign invaders.

Over the years, government has grown well beyond the imagination of Washington and the other founders. It’s gotten so big because of majoritarianism, as voters have learned to vote themselves benefits at others’ expense. And it’s grown big because of fear. Government officials are adept at scaring people, by using real, perceived and exaggerated threats to convince the public to give away more precious liberties.

The Bush administration has kept the public so scared of terrorists that there have been too-few complaints as it has centralized executive power. As I tell my conservative friends, "The next Democratic president will enjoy using all those powers the Bush administration has vested in the president’s office!" By contrast, the Democrats are busy scaring the public about imperfections in the health care system, as a pretext for a government takeover. Both parties embrace limited versions of the other party’s priorities, so we all lose, whoever is in power. Sure, Obama gilds his scaremongering with lovely words, while McCain — well, everything about him is downright scary!

It’s time for Americans to grow up. Throughout this nation’s history, there always have been domestic and international threats. There always will be. There always have been economic crises and other problems. There always have been those Americans who are willing to suspend our freedoms just a little to deal with whatever those threats may be. As Benjamin Franklin reputedly said, "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Well, at least Americans are deserving of the increasingly tyrannical government they are getting, if that’s any consolation.

For those of us still more concerned about being free rather than coddled, the best advice is to resist all the fear-mongering, regardless of whether it is Republican fear-mongering or Democratic fear-mongering. Both parties are toxic these days, and neither one values liberty as an end in and of itself.

My editor often says that everyone is 25 percent libertarian. That’s true. Everyone values freedom on those things that touch their own lives. The problem is the 75 percent of the time they don’t value it. Most Americans want to be left alone, but they want to commandeer government to plunder, control and regulate the other guy. Americans need to understand, "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have." (That quotation, misattributed to Thomas Jefferson, actually came from Gerald Ford, who left the nation with little else of value.)

Be scared — but of your own government, not of whatever it is officials are selling. Be leery of officials at every level, whether it’s a local redevelopment director telling you that it’s OK to take someone’s property to wipe out "blight" (based on whatever broad and debatable definition the director offers), or a secretary of state telling you that the government needs to suspend habeas corpus to battle terrorists, real or not.

"At every point, opportunists latch onto existing fears and strive to invent new ones to feather their own nests," wrote the Independent Institute’s senior fellow Robert Higgs in a 2005 article. "Thus, public-school teachers and administrators agree that the nation faces an ‘education crisis.’ Police departments and temperance crusaders insist that the nation faces a generalized ‘drug crisis’ or at times a specific drug crisis, such as ‘an epidemic of crack cocaine use.’ Public-health interests foster fears of ‘epidemics’ that in reality consist not of the spread of contagious pathogens but of the lack of personal control and self-responsibility, such as the ‘epidemic of obesity’ or the ‘epidemic of juvenile homicides.’ … In this way and countless others, private parties become complicit in sustaining a vast government apparatus fueled by fear."

But perhaps H.L. Mencken said it best: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Government is not always like an ordinary mugger, who puts a gun to your head and demands your wallet (although some government officials operate that way). It often comes in the form of a slick salesman, exploiting the natural imperfections of society — "Hey, there’s inequality, poverty and crime in our midst!" — to convince you to give him more power and money to uplift, improve, equalize, protect, enhance or empower.

The promises of the security state and welfare state never come to pass, just like those old Soviet five-year plans never met their targets. Indeed, government often creates the opposite result of its grandiose promises. But by the time anyone notices, it’s on to a new round of promises, a new batch of fears.

Just remember that government always is about coercion — whether the promises are uttered by a likable and uplifting candidate who offers change or by a crusty old war hero who promises whatever it is he is promising this week. Fear them, but don’t let them scare you.

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is a senior editorial writer and columnist for the Orange County Register. He is the author of the book, Abuse of Power. Visit his blog.

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They are a special class of people, basically exempt from the laws the rest of us must follow. This isn’t a small number, either. Drivers of one of every 22 California cars and light trucks on the road have this special immunity, which should cause our government leaders and law enforcement authorities — always eager to protect us from any perceived problem — to demand a fix to this real public safety threat. Think about what this means: a million drivers who can endanger our lives with near impunity. I can hear it now: “There ought to be a law!”

But instead of pushing for a fix, most legislators are trying to expand the program so that even more people can have the special “we’re above the law” license plates. What gives? The answer is sickeningly obvious. The Special People are those who work for law enforcement or other government agencies or are their family members.

Now you get it. Government officials are zealous about dealing with problems caused by average citizens, but they are far less interested in dealing with the excesses of fellow members of the privileged, government elite. There are rules for “us” and rules for “them” — us being the subjects and them being the rulers. Feel free to pound the table in anger now!

How did we get to this sorry place?

In 1978, the state started a program to protect the confidentiality of peace officers so members of the public couldn’t find their addresses on Department of Motor Vehicle databases. Over the years, the program has been expanded from one set of government workers to another. It now applies to corrections employees, social workers, nonsworn personnel who work in juvenile halls, parole officers, parking enforcement employees and on and on. Even county supervisors, city attorneys and city council members can be exempt from the state’s traffic laws.

Even after the Register article exposed this outrageous situation, an Assembly committee voted to expand this special privilege to firefighters, animal control officers and veterinarians. Assemblyman Mike Duvall, R-Yorba Linda, explained his vote to the Register in this way: “I don’t want to say no to the firefighters and veterinarians that are doing these things that need to be protected.” That attitude explains why our society is moving in this direction. No one — not even a self-proclaimed believer in limited government — will stand up to groups of workers who have become as demanding, self-righteous and arrogant as those found in the French bureaucracy.

Americans used to be better schooled in the views of our nation’s founders, who believed that government should be strictly limited and highly accountable. The Constitution, after all, is designed to protect the People from their rulers. These days, and especially after 9/11, Americans have become compliant and dangerously obedient to the authorities. Hence, they keep getting rolled. You know something’s amiss when museum security guards, court workers, DMV employees and retired parking officers are part of the special-license caste.

The special-plate program works this way: The addresses are kept secret, so toll-road operators and parking enforcement cannot easily track down violators. The Transportation Corridor Agencies, which runs the toll roads, does not legally have access to the confidential addresses. The Orange County Transportation Authority has to go through additional hoops to get the addresses and admittedly doesn’t pursue toll violations too zealously.

In one instance reported by the Register, one couple had racked up almost $35,000 in penalties from OCTA for driving on toll roads without paying. Regarding moving violations, when police see these special plates they either don’t pull the drivers over or they don’t ticket them if they do. The cops call this “professional courtesy.” Officers know that those with the special plates are “their own,” and officers are quite open about refusing to ticket other members of the Brotherhood. They scratch each other’s back. “It’s a courtesy, law enforcement to law enforcement,” Sgt. Tom Lee of the San Francisco Police Department, told the Register. “We let it go.”

Well, such “courtesies” are functions of police states, not free societies. In a free society, the government serves the people. No one is supposed to be above the law, not even animal control officers and their spouses. Assemblyman Todd Spitzer, R-Orange, calls the situation immoral, unfair and unethical. He has proposed legislation that would limit the practice. Spitzer deserves kudos for this effort, but I wouldn’t expect the legislation to go far given the deference afforded public-sector union members and law enforcement in the state Capitol.

The whole thing is a scam. This confidentiality of plates is defended on grounds of safety — even though there’s no example of anyone’s safety having been jeopardized and even though so many of the workers who receive the protections are not in even remotely dangerous professions. Plus, the original rationale for the protection has evaporated. As the Register noted, “updated laws have made all DMV information confidential to the public.”

Pound that table again!

Wouldn’t it be nice if the government, for once, put the public’s safety above the concerns of its own workers and its own bureaucratic prerogatives? These days, the focus always seems to be on the safety of the government workers (FYI, no government job is in the top 10 list of most-dangerous occupations), even though the government’s entire raison d’être (hey, French is appropriate, given the subject matter) is to protect us. Public-choice theory is correct — government workers function mainly to promote their own self-interest, and not to promote what some navely believe to be the public good.

Sadly, as the government expands, America is becoming a society where the public “servants” are now the masters. Government workers earn higher salaries than their cohorts in the private sector and far higher benefits — with a massive public unfunded liability (debt) as a result. The taxpayer eventually will be forced to clean up the fiscal mess. These same government employees have special protections from accountability. There’s the Peace Officers’ Bill of Rights, civil service protections and government unions, the last of which instill fear and trepidation into the hearts of politicians.

And now we learn that members of this coddled and powerful group (and their family members) don’t even need to follow the basic traffic laws that apply to the rest of us. If you’re not angry, then you must be a member of the special caste.

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After speaking to a group of veterans in South Carolina last April as part of his "Straight Talk Express," Sen. John McCain was asked by an audience member when the United States would send an "airmail message to Tehran." The senator stopped for a moment, then reminded the audience of "an old Beach Boys song, ‘Bomb Iran.’" Bomb, bomb, bomb … bomb, bomb Iran. He sang those words to the tune of "Barbara Ann."

No doubt, McCain, the eventual 2008 Republican presidential nominee, was just trying to be funny (albeit in a stupid way for a man who hopes to one day have his finger on the nuclear trigger) after being asked a provocative question, but long gone are the days when a misstatement or joke will fade into oblivion. The video cameras were rolling, the liberal group MoveOn.org began running ads using the clip, and anyone with a computer can still watch the senator sing that silly song by going to YouTube.com and typing in "McCain" and "Bomb Iran."

This is, indeed, the first YouTube election, in which the voting public need not wait for the newspaper, TV news shows or even the traditional Web sites for information about the candidates. There’s no need to read what a politician said during a campaign stop. There’s no need to rush home from work to watch the network news coverage, or to catch the latest debate or sit through those annoying talking-head cable shows, where guests hector each other.

One need only go to YouTube to watch the highlights or even replay entire broadcasts. The whole campaign is at your fingertips, and the implications are astounding.

Because anything a candidate says at any time will be around forever online, candidates must choose a way to adapt. McCain good-naturedly brushed off his behavior as a joke, which was the right thing to do. The problem for him is that the episode reinforces one of his weaknesses: the perception that he is a warmonger with a short fuse. As the general election heats up, and his foes put together effective ads that compile some of his loose-tongued statements, the senator might not be able to shrug this off so easily. This is the first election where every campaign will have so much readily available video ammunition, that it’s far from clear how it will shape the race.

Even better than the "Bomb Iran" clip on YouTube is one you’ll find on the site under the heading, "John McCain is Dr. Strangelove." You’ll find a simple but cleverly done short video that juxtaposes clips from the 1964 black comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb with clips of Sen. McCain at a Florida rally. There’s a clip of a dour McCain saying, "There will be other wars. And right now we’re going to have a lot of PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder] to treat, my friends." It’s immediately followed by George C. Scott’s Gen. Buck Turgidson saying, "Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed." Back to McCain: "We’re going to have a lot of combat wounds that have to do with these terrible explosive IEDs." Then back to Scott: "No more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops!"

It’s a hilariously funny ad that in about a minute confirms one’s sense that a President McCain might blow up the world. As the Slim Pickens’ bomber-pilot character rides a bomb down to its Russian target, screaming "Yee haw," the video cuts to McCain saying that the Iraq war was a good idea and that America might have troops there for "maybe 100 years."

In the new world of YouTube elections, any mischief-maker with a cheap software program and some clever ideas can produce something like this. I don’t know how many people have seen this particular ad, but in the Internet world of linking and e-mailing, these ads could make some difference, especially if a popular site such as the Drudge Report picks it up. Certainly, video clips of Bill Clinton acting petulantly toward reporters after the South Carolina primary changed the course of Hillary’s campaign.

In the YouTube world, there’s no way a candidate can get away with saying one thing in Ohio and the opposite thing in Mississippi without facing a barrage of clips highlighting the flip-flopping. I remember the devastating video depicting Mitt Romney as a flip-flopper — an image he could never evade. No longer can a candidate run an ad that caters to a special-interest group without expecting that ad to find its way into the mainstream. During his campaign in the Iowa Republican caucuses, former Baptist minister Mike Huckabee ran a "nonpolitical" ad celebrating the birth of Christ and featuring what appeared to be a cross floating in the background. The ad appealed strongly to Iowa’s Christian conservatives, but hurt Huckabee’s ability to reach beyond the religious right as news shows and commentators examined it.

Every little faux pas can turn into a big problem. Type in "Hillary" and "cackling" in the YouTube.com search box, and you’ll find scores of videos — some raw, some edited — of Hillary Clinton’s bizarre, Tourette’s-like habit of cackling wildly at questions that aren’t designed to evoke laughter. No big deal. We all have our weird tics, but this one plays on Hillary’s weakness: the sense that she isn’t really human. One Fox News segment available on YouTube combines a variety of cackling episodes and then inserts a robotic female voice saying, "Humorous remark detected. Prepare for laughter display at 2, 1, go." At "go," Hillary lets loose with a loud cackle.

From a journalist’s standpoint, the greatest benefit of this new world is that I can see the actual video for proper context if I missed it the first time around. I had read about an exchange in the Hillary-Obama Ohio debate in which she ridiculed the media for going easy on Sen. Obama. NBC’s Brian Williams asks Sen. Clinton a detailed question about the North American Free Trade Agreement and its impact on jobs, and she responds: "Could I just point out in the last several debates I seem to get the first question all the time. I don’t mind. I’ll be happy to field them, but I do find it curious, and if anybody saw ‘Saturday Night Live,’ you know, maybe we should ask Barack if he is comfortable and needs another pillow."

You could hear grumbling in the audience and see Sen. Obama look at her in a bemused way. It was priceless — a scene that could never come across in a newspaper article. You had to see it. Actually, you can see it, by going to YouTube.com and typing in "Hillary" and "Pillow."

Readers used to have to wait for the morning newspaper, then the radio or the TV for their latest news. They got only what the editors chose to provide. The Internet opened up a wild world. There’s not only news available from every conceivable source, but original studies and reports, the kind of things that in the past were available only to journalists. TV news has been around for ages, but it’s never been this accessible, and now every person is a potential cameraman, who can capture a campaign-destroying sentence with a $200 camera. We’ll see what it means in the long run, but in the short term, political candidates need to be careful what they say.

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is a senior editorial writer and columnist for the Orange County Register. He is the author of the book, Abuse of Power. Visit his blog.

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I’m not sure how the Free State Project is going in New Hampshire, but the Police State Project appears to be advancing rapidly here in California.

The latest installment: A state court of appeal has basically outlawed home-schooling. As the Los Angeles Times reported, "Parents who lack teaching credentials cannot educate their children at home, according to a state appellate court ruling that is sending waves of fear through California’s home-schooling families."

The judges — two Republican appointees and one Democratic appointee — argued that "parents do not have a constitutional right to home-school their children. … Because parents have a legal duty to see to their children’s schooling within the provisions of these laws, parents who fail to do so may be subject to a criminal complaint against them, found guilty of an infraction, and subject to imposition of fines or an order to complete a parent education and counseling program." The court made it clear that parents face a loss of custody if they don’t comply, arguing that "the juvenile court has authority to limit a parent’s control over a dependent child … ."

The ruling is shockingly totalitarian, as it echoes this point: "In obedience to the constitutional mandate to bring about a general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence, the Legislature, over the years, enacted a series of laws. A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare."

The “loyalty to the state” phrase captures the essence of the decision.

As such, the court stated that the California government has the right to regulate and supervise schools and to ensure that all students of the right age attend school. California law, it explains, requires "public full-time days school … unless (1) the child is enrolled in a private full-time day school and actually attends that private school, (2) the child is tutored by a person holding a valid state teaching credential for the grade being taught, or (3) one of the other few statutory exemptions to compulsory public school attendance …"

This is where we get into a gray area, given that the California education code doesn’t directly address the legality of home-schooling. Some observers have argued that home-school advocates and others are overreacting to the decision, and are unnecessarily scaring home-school families. One blog, called Ace of Spades, writes that the Times got it wrong and that the court’s decision is rather narrow: "Parents without teaching credentials can still educate their children at home under the various exemptions to mandatory public school enrollment provided in 48220 et seq. of the Cal. Ed. Code. The parents in this case lost because they claimed that the students were enrolled in a charter school and that with minimal supervision from the school, the children were free to skip classes so the mother could teach them at home. There is no basis in law for that argument. If only the parents had attempted to home-school their kids in one of the statutorily prescribed methods, they would have prevailed."

After following this issue for several years, reading the court’s decision and talking to some knowledgeable sources, I’m convinced the Times got it right and that home-school families are facing serious troubles unless the decision is overturned at the state Supreme Court or the Legislature intervenes. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger released this statement Friday: “Every California child deserves a quality education and parents should have the right to decide what’s best for their children. Parents should not be penalized for acting in the best interests of their children’s education. This outrageous ruling must be overturned by the courts and if the courts don’t protect parents’ rights then, as elected officials, we will."

The problem with the blogger’s argument is that those statutory guidelines parents are supposed to follow aren’t at all clear. In fact, state officials have in the past argued that home-schooling is indeed illegal in California. Back in 2002, the state Department of Education interpreted the law as outlawing home-schooling and then-Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin sent letters to school districts urging them to treat homeschoolers as truants. The new superintendent, Jack O’Connell, put the kibosh on that heavy-handed approach, but there’s been no clarity on the issue and no laws have changed. The only thing that has changed is an anti-home-schooling zealot has been replaced by an official who believes that home-schooling is a legitimate educational choice.

Home-schooling advocates argue that “a parent or legal guardian working exclusively with his or her children” is exempt from compulsory education requirements, but the teachers’ union and many officials will continue to argue otherwise given the vagueness in the law. What’s needed is a clear legislative fix, but the Democratic Legislature is closely allied with the teachers’ unions, so home-schoolers fear that any attempt to protect home-schooling would end up outlawing it. Home-schoolers have adopted a work-around: They fill out an affidavit certifying that they are teaching their kids in a private school, charter school or independent-study program.

So an uneasy truce has existed, where home-schoolers go about their business and the government mostly leaves them alone. But this case has brought the issue to the forefront. The blogger cited above argues: "If only the parents had attempted to home-school their kids in one of the statutorily prescribed methods, they would have prevailed.” But the parents in this case enrolled their kids in a private home-schooling program, which is one of the common ways that home-schoolers operate. “The scope of this decision by the appellate court is breathtaking," argues Brad Dacus, of the conservative Pacific Justice Institute in Sacramento. "It not only attacks traditional home-schooling, but also calls into question home-schooling through charter schools and teaching children at home via independent study through public and private schools."

The San Francisco Chronicle quoted Michael Smith, president of the Home School Legal Defense Association, saying: “California is now on the path to being the only state to deny the vast majority of homeschooling parents their fundamental right to teach their own children at home.” And the newspaper further reported: “Leslie Heimov, executive director of the Children’s Law Center of Los Angeles, which represented the Longs’ two children in the case, said the ruling did not change the law. ‘They just affirmed that the current California law, which has been unchanged since the last time it was ruled on in the 1950s, is that children have to be educated in a public school, an accredited private school, or with an accredited tutor,’ she said. ‘If they want to send them to a private Christian school, they can, but they have to actually go to the school and be taught by teachers.’”

There seems to be broad agreement from both sides on the meaning of the case.

The decision is being appealed, and the state is unlikely to enforce the decision in the meantime. Even if it stands, home-schoolers are unlikely to face an orchestrated campaign by the state government to force their kids into public schools or approved private schools (at least under the current regime). But the decision does leave them open to efforts by local school districts — which are driven to pump up their average daily attendance numbers to boost their budgets — to treat them as truants. It will lead to excesses, given that California state law allows parents to lose custody of their children for truancy issues.

I’m sorry if that’s overly alarming, but the only thing worse than unnecessarily scaring people is not scaring them enough.

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is a senior editorial writer and columnist for the Orange County Register. He is the author of the book, Abuse of Power. Visit his blog.

by Steven Greenhut by Steven Greenhut

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The Pacific Justice Institute in Sacramento sent along a statement about a disturbing California Court of Appeal decision finding that parents have no right to homeschool their children. Parents who do not send their kids to the school deemed appropriate by the state may face criminal charges and fines. Remember when former Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin tried to criminalize homeschooling? Here we go again. It’s ironic, given how badly the government miseducates students, that officials are so determined to criminalize this basic freedom. This really shouldn’t shock anyone who realizes the degree to which government at all levels runs our lives.

Here’s the PJI statement:

Home Schooling Found Unlawful by California Court of Appeal

Los Angeles — In a stunning decision affecting thousands of families in California, the California Court of Appeal has issued an opinion finding no legal right to home school. “Parents who fail to [comply with school enrollment laws] may be subject to a criminal complaint against them, found guilty of an infraction, and subject to imposition of fines or an order to complete a parent education and counseling program,” wrote Justice H. Walter Croskey whose opinion was joined by the other two members of the appellate panel.

The opinion was issued February 28, 2008, in a case titled In re Rachel L, which reversed a Superior Court Judge, Stephen Marpet, who found that “parents have a constitutional right to school their children in their own home.” The parents of Rachel L. enrolled her in Sunland Christian School, a private home schooling program. In his opinion, Croskey, 75, described what he called the “ruse of enrolling [children] in a private school and then letting them stay home and be taught by a non-credentialed parent.”

Despite this statement by the Court, it should be noted that Sunland Christian School has been in full compliance with the requirements of the law for more than twenty years. “We’ve never been given an opportunity to represent our case in the Court of Appeal,” said Terry Neven, the president of the school. “Consequently, we are excited that PJI will represent us before the California Supreme Court so that the rights of home schooling families are preserved,” he stated further. In a section titled “Consequences of Parental Denial of a Legal Education,” the Court said that “parents are subject to being ordered to enroll their children in an appropriate school or education program and provide proof of enrollment to the court, and willful failure to comply with such an order may be punished by a fine for civil contempt.” “The scope of this decision by the appellate court is breathtaking. It not only attacks traditional home schooling, but also calls into question home schooling through charter schools and teaching children at home via independent study through public and private schools,” stated Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute “If not reversed, the parents of the more than 166,000 students currently receiving an education at home will be subject to criminal sanctions,” he continued.

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is a senior editorial writer and columnist for the Orange County Register. He is the author of the book, Abuse of Power.

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What kind of society rips a 17-year-old autistic boy from his loving home and places him in a state-run mental institution, where he is given heavy doses of drugs, kept physically restrained, kept away from his family, deprived of books and other mental stimulation and is left alone to rot?

Certainly not a free or humane one.

Yet that’s exactly what has happened to Nate Tseglin, after a teacher called Child Protective Services, the county agency charged with protecting children from many forms of abuse and given power to remove children from their family homes in certain circumstances. The teacher reported seeing self-inflicted scratches on Nate’s body and complained about the doctor-approved arm restraints his parents used to keep Nate from hurting himself. Nate remains in Fairview Developmental Center (formerly Fairview State Hospital) in Costa Mesa, labeled a danger to himself and others, while his parents fight a lonely battle to bring their son back home.

Isn’t there anyone out there who can help them?

After the complaint, social workers intervened and decided that the judgment of a psychologist who examined Nate’s records but never even met the boy trumped a lifetime of treatment and experiences by his parents, Ilya and Riva Tseglin. Without prior notice, "the San Diego Health and Human Services agency social worker, with the aid of law enforcement, forcibly removed a struggling and terrified autistic boy … from his home, while his mother and father, who are Russian Jewish immigrants, and Nate’s younger brother stood by helplessly," according to the complaint the parents, who have since moved to Irvine to be near Nate, filed with the court.

The forced removal came after the Tseglins came to loggerheads with the government over Nate’s proper treatment. The parents are opposed to the use of psychotropic drugs and argue that Nate has had strong negative reactions to them. They point to success they’ve had with an alternative, holistic approach that focuses on diet and psychiatric counseling. The government disagreed, so it took the boy away from home and initially placed him in a group home — where he had the same negative reaction to the drugs that his parents predicted would happen.

Of course, once social workers are involved in a family, they are reluctant to relinquish their power — something I’ve found in every Child Protective Services case I’ve written about. And even though the court determined "the evidence is clear that the parents have always stood by and tried to help their son," the court sided with the government. That’s another common theme from these closed family-court proceedings — the social workers’ words are taken as gospel, and the parents are treated like enemies and given little chance to defend themselves.

The details are complicated and discouraging. But, essentially, the parents were cut out of any decision-making regarding their son. They were given only short visits with him. After he ran away from the group home, the government transferred Nate to a mental hospital. The Tseglins say the drugs the hospital gave Nate caused him to have a "grand mal" seizure, and his health has continued to deteriorate while he languishes in a government mental facility. When they visited him over the summer, they found his face swollen. He faded in and out of consciousness and was suffering from convulsions. They believe he has been beaten and are worried about sexual abuse, given that he is housed with the criminally insane.

The Tseglins claim Child Protective Services has told them they have the "wrong set of beliefs" and even threatened to force them to undergo court-ordered psychological evaluation. The agency at one point suspended the parents’ visitations as a way "to assist them in coming to grips regarding their son." The Tseglins, as former citizens of the Soviet Union, have good reason to be fearful of the authorities. But they tell me that they experienced nothing of this sort in the former communist nation. If their descriptions are correct, then the Soviets weren’t the only ones who know how to create a totalitarian bureaucracy.

The family’s legal argument is persuasive:

"Riva and her husband have cared for Nate, in their home, for his entire life, until he was dragged kicking and screaming away from his parents. … The court found that it was very impressive that the parents ‘were able to maintain Nate in the home for the better part of a decade when he was having some severe behavioral difficulties.’ … The court found further that when the parents put Nate on a ‘more holistic approach’ and ignored the professional opinions, that ‘for a period of time, Nate responded very well to that.’ Even though Nate subsequently deteriorated, the court found that he fared no differently using the more traditional medical approach.’ …

"In short, this case turns on value judgments, such as whether it is preferable for Nate to be maintained in his own home, subject to occasional physical restraint, surrounded by the love and devotion of his parents and brother, or whether Nate should be placed in a locked facility, subject to occasional physical restraint and constant chemical restraint, surrounded by strangers and a burden to the California taxpayer. … The real issue in this case is that the agency and some medical personnel believe their opinions regarding Nate’s treatment are better than the parents’ choices, and have sought the judicial intervention to override the parents’ decisions regarding their son."

In a free society, individuals and families get to make those judgments and decisions. As the Tseglins argue, "Riva has a right to raise her child, Nate, free from government interference, as long as he is not at risk of physical, sexual or emotional abuse, neglect or exploitation."

Sure, the state can and does intervene when parents are accused of abusing or neglecting their children. There are many problems and injustices even in those cases, but at least it’s understandable when the government intervenes to protect a potentially threatened child. But in this case, the state is simply saying that it knows best, that no matter how diligently a boy’s parents have worked to provide the best-possible care for him, that officials get the final say. And the government’s choice of mandatory incarceration seems harsh and cruel, which shouldn’t surprise anyone, given the basic nature of government.

At last check, autism is not a crime. It’s time to free Nate Tseglin and return him to the love and care of his parents.

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is a senior editorial writer and columnist for the Orange County Register. He is the author of the book, Abuse of Power.

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Candidates from both parties have been braying the same old line we hear during every presidential election: This is the most important election of a generation, or perhaps even a century. So much is at stake that you, the harried voter, need to hang on every word every candidate utters during the televised debates. Do you want the candidate who is "standing up for regular families," or the one "who speaks the truth and who will restore America’s moral leadership," or the one who understands that our nation "embodies the belief that tomorrow can be better than today"? Such big issues and tough choices!

Certainly, whoever becomes president gains an enormous amount of power for good or for ill. Someone (thankfully) has to replace President George W. Bush, who has specialized in the "for ill" category. Last week, for instance, U.S. intelligence agencies released a report rebuking the administration’s rationale for increased belligerence toward Iran. The report showed that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003, yet the president declared that the new information would in no way change U.S. policy. Hey, why let new facts get in the way of a policy?

No wonder so many Americans are ready for a new administration. But the new boss can be just as bad, or even worse, than the old boss, so proceed with fear and trepidation.

Yes, this is an important election. But even when the candidates do talk about things that are real issues (the Iraq war, abortion, health care, Social Security), they dish out pabulum designed not to offend any particular interest group. The race isn’t just about public policy, but about the deepest issues of "faith." Mitt Romney is trying to defuse concerns about his Mormon religion. Mike Huckabee has told Iowa voters that he is the "Christian" candidate. It’s hard enough figuring out what these candidates believe about taxes and the Constitution, let alone about their theological thinking.

American voters have to be a hardy bunch to sort through the information and pick the right candidate. The weak field of candidates, by the way, should be reassuring to those who cling to that old adage that "anyone can grow up to be president in America." Nevertheless, someone eventually will win the race. Here are some quick thoughts about the 17 Democratic and Republican candidates vying for their respective parties’ nominations. Consider it help in picking your poison.

Bring on the Nanny State

Should the federal government vastly expand its reach into our private lives? If you believe that, then no candidate would express your views better than Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. "We need a new beginning on health care," she said. "We need to stand up to the drug companies and the insurance companies and provide health care for every single man, woman and child, at a price that people can afford, and we’re going to give them the help to do that."

Reagan without the principles

If you like the Reagan look (with a lot more hair gel), and the Reagan-like conservative platitudes, but aren’t concerned that the candidate probably doesn’t believe much of his own rhetoric given his incessant flip-flopping, then former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is your clear choice.

Pat Robertson meets Hillary Clinton

For those who like the Nanny State, but prefer that it be served up in the cadence of a preacher, then I’d suggest Mike Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor and a Baptist minister. Writes National Review’s Jonah Goldberg: "Huckabee is a populist on economics, a fad-follower on the environment and an all-around do-gooder who believes that the biblical obligation to do ‘good works’ extends to using government — and your tax dollars — to bring us closer to the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth."

Give class warfare a chance

Do you think your biggest problems are the result of Evil Corporations and think that America is a land dominated by irreconcilable differences between the haves and the have-nots? You ought to start walking precincts for former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C. "In today’s Two Americas," he said, "it is no coincidence that most families are working harder for stagnating wages when there are nearly 60 lobbyists for every member of Congress." Edwards has a solution to that non sequitur — more government.

Authoritarianism with a not-so-friendly face

If you want the trains to run on time, and aren’t too worried about minor issues such as civil liberties, then Rudy Giuliani should be a top choice. The Republican former New York mayor once summarized his views this way: "Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do."

‘Wilsonianism’ with a friendly face

Those who like grand big-government crusades will love Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. Obama said recently at a South Carolina church that "we can create a kingdom right here on Earth," thus reflecting his belief in Great Society-type programs. But he’s not hesitant to use U.S. military might, either. In 2004, he told the Chicago Tribune that he would be willing to attack Iran if it obtains nuclear capabilities. And he promises to use U.S. might to fix problems in Africa.

Follow the Constitution

Those who truly believe in limited government and noninterventionism will have only one choice, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas. As he rises in the polls (7 percent) and raises millions of dollars, the long knives have come out for him from "mainstream" Republicans trying to portray him as a kook. But as the self-effacing Paul recently said to Salon magazine, "The message is so powerful, in spite of my shortcomings."

Less is more

The best choice for those who believe that a president should have limited ambitions is former Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn. Michael Crowley wrote in the New Republic: "If Fred Thompson is as lazy as reputed …, he’d have stuck a Post-it note to his wall back in 2002, reading ‘Saddam?’ and then never quite gotten around to invading. Which, in retrospect, may not have been such a bad thing."

Follow the shiny object

U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, is the right choice if you are yearning for old-fashioned socialism with a conspiracy-theory twist. Kucinich’s Web site includes a section on "saving capitalism." As "Share Guide: The Holistic Health Magazine" explains, Kucinich "is a dynamic, visionary leader who combines a powerful activism with a spiritual sense of the essential interconnectedness of all living things."

Straight-talking warmonger

If you like the idea of cutting through all the Washington BS, but don’t mind a candidate who in many ways epitomizes that same BS, then you might want to hop on Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain’s straight-talk express. McCain, after all, is best known for his campaign to erode the First Amendment by strictly limiting political speech (and protecting incumbents) in the name of campaign-finance reform, and for his constant push for more war.

The real Bill Clinton Clone

Some voters still pine for Bill Clinton, yet are getting the sinking feeling that his wife is a different sort of politician. The choice for them is New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, the former Clinton appointee who embodies Clinton’s focus on small initiatives (i.e., a Green Jobs program) combined with the embrace of a handful of conservative policies (i.e., support for the Second Amendment) designed to win over centrist voters.

The Mexicans are coming!

Voters who are solely concerned about the issue of illegal immigration should look no further than U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo.

The Chinese are coming, too!

Those who worry about the "invasion" of Mexicans AND also stay up at night, fantasizing about a trade war with China should put U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-San Diego, at the top of the list.

Opting for an also-ran

If you want to support a candidate who offers no new ideas, little money to seriously compete in the primaries and no chance of winning, then you have four clear choices: Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., lecturer Mike Gravel (a Democrat) and professional candidate-for-any-office Alan Keyes (Republican). And you think third-party candidates are ridiculous?

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is a senior editorial writer and columnist for the Orange County Register. He is the author of the book, Abuse of Power.

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How often do you have knock-down, drag-out fights with your neighbors about what church to attend or what car to buy? Never, right? The reason: You are free to attend any church you choose or buy any car that you prefer. So is your neighbor. In a world of free choice, you might have a friendly or even heated argument at the picket fence (or concrete wall, this being California!) over systematic theology or the virtues of Hondas vs. Mazdas. But, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who wins the argument. Your neighbor can’t force you to become Catholic, and you can’t force him to choose an S2000 over an RX-8. You each do as you please.

Now compare that situation to the world of government action and politics. For some reason, many folks believe that decisions made in a democratic manner — i.e., by voting — are preferable to those made in the world of private transactions. But political decisions entail one side winning and imposing its will on the other side. When 55 percent of your city’s voters choose to float a bond measure to fund a community center, the other 45 percent of the voters also are forced to endure the traffic and pay for the project. It is a winner-takes-all situation.

That win-or-lose nature of the process becomes even more contentious when we’re dealing with deeply held social, religious and cultural issues. Religious conservatives like to talk about (and wage) what they call the "culture war." Personally, I have no interest in fighting any type of war with my neighbors. But in their view, they are the guardians of traditional values who are battling it out with leftist elites who want to impose a new set of cultural values on the nation. In the view of their opponents, the conservatives are trying to cram their sectarian values down everybody else’s throat. Both sides have a point, as each side does use the government to promote certain values.

The latest ongoing culture-war battle involves gay marriage. Conservatives, who claim to believe in states’ rights, are promoting federal bans on same-sex marriages. Liberals, who tend to favor federal solutions, are claiming that pro-gay-marriage states such as Massachusetts have the right to set their own marriage terms.

There is one way to keep this battle from becoming as nasty and divisive as other such battles. In a column in the Nov. 26 New York Times, Evergreen State College Professor Stephanie Coontz revived the sensible libertarian argument for privatizing marriage: "Why do people — gay or straight — need the state’s permission to marry? For most of Western history, they didn’t, because marriage was a private contract between two families. The parents’ agreement to the match, not the approval of church or state, was what confirmed its validity."

It wasn’t until modern times (the late 1800s) that the state began to dictate the terms of marriage, Coontz explained. In the 1950s, she added, the state used the "marriage license as a shorthand way to distribute benefits and legal privileges." But these days, with so many prevalent family situations and obligations, a marriage license no longer is the easiest way to sort out financial and familial obligations. The easiest way to sort out such matters is through private contracts, not by having the state impose one particular vision of marriage on everyone.

"Each state has tended to promulgate a standard, one-size-fits-all formula," argues the Cato Institute’s David Boaz. "Then, in the past generation, legislatures and courts have started unilaterally changing the terms of the marriage contract. Between 1969 and 1985 all the states provided for no-fault divorce. The new arrangements applied not just to couples embarking on matrimony but also to couples who had married under an earlier set of rules. Many people felt a sense of liberation; the changes allowed them to get out of unpleasant marriages without the often-contrived allegations of fault previously required for divorce. But some people were hurt by the new rules, especially women who had understood marriage as a partnership in which one partner would earn money and the other would forsake a career in order to specialize in homemaking."

Why not just let individuals choose their own terms of marriage, based on the dictates of their religious group or their conscience? Advocates for state-sanctioned marriage argue that marriage is a public good that needs to be protected. Well, good marriages are good for the nation, no doubt, but it’s not as if states can make people more moral by imposing certain rules on them. People already live in every sort of moral and immoral way, inside and outside of marriage. That’s the nature of humankind. And, in my experience, the public usually gets the opposite of whatever it is that the government tries to impose. I’d argue that the best way to encourage solid marriages is to let individuals choose the terms of them. Most people will no doubt opt for a rather traditional model.

I’m a traditionalist on such matters, but it’s not up to me to decide how other people should live. My marriage is not dependent on the state, but on my church (I’m Eastern Orthodox), which would never approve of gay marriage. But some other religious groups do. What they do is not my business, as I am not a member of them. Public "benefits" and legal responsibilities should be handled by contract, not state decree.

Opponents of this arrangement argue that marriage is necessary to handle important family obligations. But, as Anthony Gregory wrote for the libertarian Web site LewRockwell.com, "If people wish to consider themselves married to each other, let them do so, draw up any relevant private contracts to handle the details of the arrangement and live their own lives in peace. If third parties wish to consider any given pair (or larger number) of people married, that should be their choice. No one, heterosexual or homosexual, would have any special rights under the law. Hospital visitation rights and other such matters would be handled contractually, and decided by the private individuals and institutions involved — not the state. No one would have to see the government give marriage licenses to some but not others, and no one would have to see the government legitimize any marriage he or she doesn’t personally approve."

A final argument from opponents: People will choose all sorts of odd marriage arrangements, such as polygamy, or perhaps even those "line" marriages detailed in Robert Heinlein’s novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Perhaps they will, but some people already choose odd types of relationships. I doubt that, all of a sudden, after marriage is privatized, significant numbers of Americans will wake up and say, "Heck, what I really want is to be involved in a group marriage," or, "Gee, I wonder whether Fido would like to tie the knot?"

Conservatives are most likely to oppose this idea, but they ought to consider this point: Given changing cultural attitudes, it’s only a matter of time before gay marriage is approved by the government. Isn’t it better to embrace this private route than to let the Left use the state to transform another cultural institution? Then again, modern conservatives have become as accustomed as modern liberals to viewing the state as the arbiter of all things moral. And although privatization is the right idea, too many people have too much vested in continuing the culture war.

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is a senior editorial writer and columnist for the Orange County Register. He is the author of the book, Abuse of Power.

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"If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. … The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom, and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is. … I think that libertarianism and conservatism are traveling the same path."

~ President Ronald Reagan

That quotation was appropriately reprinted on the first page of the official program for the Conservative Leadership Conference in Reno last weekend, an event that sought to rebuild the largely frayed conservative/libertarian Reagan coalition in time to spare the country from a Hillary Clinton presidency. I spoke to the group about my exit from the Republican Party, but after listening to other speakers and attendees gathered for the three-day event, I must conclude that Reagan’s words no longer ring true.

Conservatives and libertarians are marching to different drummers, going on different paths going in opposite directions. The libertarians still are committed to "less government interference" and "less centralized authority," but conservatives these days are more interested in building an all-powerful central government to wage war on real and perceived enemies at home and abroad. Conservatives use the word "freedom" while they wax poetic about American military might. But the policies they promote show no sign of trusting individual Americans to live their lives as they please and every sign of trusting the government to do what is best. During the Cold War, an inspiring leader such as Reagan was able to keep internal peace, as both factions battled their mutual enemies: the Soviet empire and tax-and-spend Democrats. The former is gone, and the latter is still with us, but many libertarians have come to realize that they are as far apart from their conservative "allies" on the big issues of the day as they are from their liberal adversaries.

There were shades of this GOP crackup throughout the conference. Friday morning, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who, along with Newt Gingrich, crafted the Contract with America, which enabled Republicans in 1994 to seize control of the House for the first time in 40 years, gave a speech that was a clarion call for liberty. He blamed the ensuing Republican sell-outs on the willingness of GOP politicians to put political gain (what’s in it for me now?) above public policy (what will advance freedom in our country?). He compared the private sector, which is based on freely chosen deal-making, with the public sector. "Divisional labor works when people mind their own business," he said. "Government is about minding other people’s business. … Governments exist to make you do what you would not do voluntarily."

That was a rousing talk. A little later, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney pilloried Hillary Clinton for complaining that America is an "on your own society" rather than "shared responsibility society." He chided her: "Out with Adam Smith, and in with Karl Marx." That was fine rhetoric, although he then offered one word that summarized his view of governing America: "Strength." Not freedom. And when an audience member asked him whether he, as president, would allow states to follow the will of their voters and approve medical marijuana, he gave an over-my-dead-body answer (to boisterous applause, by the way). "No," he said. "Marijuana is a gateway to drug use, a plague to our children and a plague to our country." So he’s for freedom and states’ rights, unless he doesn’t approve of what you or your state’s voters decide to do with that freedom!

That contrast was nothing compared with what attendees witnessed Saturday morning. Grover Norquist, a prominent conservative activist from Americans for Tax Reform, called on the reconstitution of Reagan’s "leave us alone" coalition. The members of that group — gun lovers, home-schoolers, small-business owners, taxpayer advocates — didn’t necessarily like each other, he said, but they united in their desire to pursue their lives without excessive meddling from the government. "We don’t have to agree on secondary and tertiary issues," he said. "Ours is a low-maintenance coalition that wants to be left alone in the zone that matters to them, and that’s what matters." By contrast, the Democratic coalition is what he calls the "takings coalition — the unions, trial lawyers, the dependency movement, coercive utopians and radical environmentalists" who are promoting "a list of rules slightly longer and less tedious than Leviticus." These groups can work together as long "as more money is coming into the center of the table." His solution: Starve the beast through tax cuts and expand the coalition of Americans whose primary goal is to be left alone.

That’s my thinking. But immediately after Norquist’s talk came Duncan Hunter, a San Diego congressman and GOP presidential candidate. While Norquist championed a coalition of people who want government to leave them alone, Hunter championed a government that was about bossing everybody around. "It is in the interests of the United States to expand freedom," he said. "If you don’t change the world, the world will change you." And, boy, did Hunter offer plans to change the world. He vowed to take on China and Iran, to continue what he viewed as a successful war in Iraq, to crack down on illegal immigration and to expand government spending on the military. He talked about "duty, honor, country" but not about liberty. The crowd — at least the conservative faction — roared its approval.

"That was the scariest s— I’ve heard in a long time," I whispered to libertarian writer Doug Bandow, who apparently agreed. Writing in his blog, Bandow contrasted Hunter with Norquist: "Very different was … Hunter, who wants to slap tariffs on Chinese imports, expand the military, close the border and go to war to do good around the world. His trade critique sounds like something out of communist central planning … . With his import limits he would follow the example of the disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariff, which wrecked international markets and helped bring on the Great Depression. Worse, though, he wants to use the U.S. military to ‘expand freedom around the world,’ when Washington’s principal responsibility is to defend America’s national security. Undertaking glorious international crusades with other people’s lives is Wilsonian liberalism, not responsible conservatism."

Hence the divide. We also saw it the night before when religious conservative Alan Keyes gave a dinner address. He was greeted by a standing ovation by conservatives as he entered the room, while a few of us in the libertarian faction rolled our eyes, grabbed our cigars and quietly headed to the bar.

Libertarian GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul actually won the conference straw poll with 32 percent of the vote, but his nearly one-third support conforms to my sense of the gathering’s two-to-one conservative vs. libertarian breakdown.

As I cleared my head on the gorgeous southward drive east of the Sierras along U.S. 395, I was left with only one conclusion: All the king’s horses and all the king’s men won’t put this Humpty Dumpty coalition together again.

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is a senior editorial writer and columnist for the Orange County Register. He is the author of the book, Abuse of Power.

DIGG THIS

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton is one of the most loathsome modern American politicians, given her barely disguised support for massive government programs, her grating schoolmarm personality and her aggressive political behavior, yet I’m left hoping that she obliterates any of the front-running Republican candidates and has long-enough coattails to expand Democratic control of the Senate and House of Representatives.

Unless Republican candidate Ron Paul — the only supporter of liberty in the bunch of GOP ne’er do wells — somehow propels his impressive Internet campaign into an improbable electoral victory, there is nothing else, but a Clinton victory, that will save the Republican Party and help rebuild the nation’s long-suffering freedom movement.

How can an enemy of freedom help freedom?

Well, when you’ve got a headache, you take an aspirin. When you’ve got the flu, you take something a little stronger. When you’ve got cancer, you need chemotherapy, which kill cancer cells but can come perilously close to killing the patient. It’s a sad truth, but the Republican Party has the political equivalent of cancer. The party is immune from internal reform. Only the nastiest medicine imaginable can save it, and four (but probably eight) years of Clinton, backed by a Democratic congressional majority, is pretty tough medicine.

Columnist Joe Dumas, writing for the Chattanoogan.com, captured the party’s problem succinctly: "It should come as no big revelation to anyone inside or outside of the Republican Party that the GOP has lost touch with its conservative roots. Massive deficit spending that would make Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter blush; foreign adventurism beyond the wildest dreams of Woodrow Wilson or Teddy Roosevelt; more big-government programs than FDR or LBJ (Google ‘Medicare expansion’ for a massive example) … the Republican Party of the early 21st century is clearly not your father’s or grandfather’s GOP."

Yet the party’s leaders, and a good bit of the grass roots, are in denial. They still think the candidate who can best imitate Ronald Reagan’s speech-making (Mitt Romney), or who has the best celebrity credentials (Fred Thompson), or who can best exploit national security issues and 9/11 (Rudy Giuliani) can stop the Hillary Express. But the problem goes well beyond superficial concerns. The GOP has a substance problem — none of the major candidates has the right ideas.

All the candidates, except for Paul, stand up for this foolish, unconstitutional, nearly genocidal war (1.2 million Iraqis have been killed since its start) and they continue to stand up for the police-state policies that have become the hallmark of the federal security state since the 9/11 attacks.

Sure, Democrats want to turn the health care system over to the equivalent of a federal Department of Motor Vehicles, and their overriding concern is how to regulate more and get more taxes out of society’s productive members. But monitoring the populace and waging war are equally destructive of the nation’s founding principles. I voted for George W. Bush (I’m sorry, really sorry) in large part because of his promises to pursue a less interventionist, "more humble" foreign policy. Yet look what happened after he took office, after 9/11 and after he placed neoconservative ideologues in top "defense" positions. Look at how so-called conservatives have gone along with this shift.

Throw in the Republican support for lighter versions of Democratic socialism — e.g., Bush’s Medicare prescription drug program, Romney’s government-heavy health care, Giuliani’s support for gun bans — and what’s the point?

The GOP presidential front-runner is Giuliani, perhaps the only politician on the national scene more ruthless, unprincipled and power-mad than Clinton. Remember when he tried to have the New York Legislature declare martial law after 9/11 so that he could stay in power indefinitely? There’s a reason for the Mussolini comparisons. What the media call Giuliani’s "unconventional" personal life certainly contradicts the party’s support for family values. He had his marriage to his first wife annulled after 14 years after he claimed to discover that they were actually second cousins rather than third cousins. As the Washington Monthly reported, "Giuliani informed his second wife, Donna Hanover, of his intention to seek a separation in a 2000 press conference. The announcement was precipitated by a tabloid frenzy after Giuliani marched with his then-mistress, Judith Nathan, in New York’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, an acknowledgement of infidelity so audacious that Daily News columnist Jim Dwyer compared it with ‘groping in the window at Macy’s.’"

The worst thing about Rudy: his love of government power. He showed it as a prosecutor, as he hauled supposed white-collar wrongdoers out of their Wall Street offices in handcuffs in front of the TV cameras, and as mayor as he defended even the most egregious abuses of police power, used his power to crack down on trivial offenses (jumping subway turnstiles, jaywalking, loitering). He constantly exploits 9/11 and his role in it and has earned tens of millions of dollars giving speeches about that fateful day. This Giuliani quotation, from a 1994 speech, sums up his philosophy: "Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do and how you do it."

There is one upside if Rudy wins the nomination and faces off against Hillary: a bare-knuckles, take-no-prisoners, political sleaze-fest between two junkyard dogs. Can you imagine the wonderful TV ads? It is a political journalist’s dream come true. Yet a Giuliani victory — indeed, a victory by any of the top GOP candidates — would cement the party’s totalitarian tendencies. Even the party’s social conservative wing, its most powerful grass-roots force, is ready to bolt if socially liberal Giuliani gets the nomination. Religious Right notables such as Focus on the Family’s James Dobson and former presidential candidate Gary Bauer met recently in Salt Lake City to discuss backing a third-party candidate. These folks are no friends of liberty, either. Still, their defection could assure that increasingly likely Clinton victory.

President Hillary Clinton is tough medicine, for sure, but the patient is on life support.

Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is a senior editorial writer and columnist for the Orange County Register. He is the author of the book, Abuse of Power.