Many Americans are subjected to a ten-minute hate by the opinion molders, but hers has lasted a lot longer., and mostly for her virtues. Not only was she smeared during her unfortunate VP run, complete with a ridiculous makeover by the creepy Beltwayites, but the Republicans attacked her then, and have never stopped, anonymously, of course. The Democrats and their stations and newspapers have never stopped as well, nor have the comedians. The late Burt Blumert said it was because the Dems fear that Obama will be a one-term president, thanks to the Depression, and she was his most dangerous opponent.

Perhaps Palin is resigning to run for president. I hope not. Then the knives will really be out, and the temptations of power much intensified. She allowed herself to be manipulated by McCain’s army of parasites. That is not a good sign. Sarah, don’t run, as I said the last time. Look at what the national political sewer has already done to you and your family. Stay in the private sector. If you want to be involved politically and ideologically, start an organization to promote your ideas. But do it from glorious Alaska, not the DC cesspool. Oh, and stay away from Bill Kristol.

I read the New York Times, that’s where I get the news. Paul Krugman’s on the Op Ed page, that’s where I get the blues.

Bill, I know, could have written some killer lyrics for this song.

When he pulled over he was accosted by Prince George’s County Police  Corporal Steven Jackson, who told him that he was following up on “inquiries” about Leake’s auto insurance. Jackson later claimed that he stopped Leake because the windows of his Cadillac were tinted.

Much about the ensuing conversation, which was captured by Jackson’s dashboard camera, remains unclear. A few minutes into the stop, after Jackson’s backup arrived, the corporal ordered Leake from the car. Puzzled and wary, Leake hesitated, asking why this would be necessary.

“Step out of the car now, or I’ll have you out of the car,” exclaimed Jackson.

“You yelling, but you have to give me a reason to step out of the car,” protested Leake, pointing out that he was trying to comply but his foot was caught on an obstruction.

When Leake finally exited the car, a shaved fraction of a split second transpired before Jackson slugged the taller motorist twice before bull-dogging him to the pavement. During this whole time, as the video clearly shows, Jackson did nothing to provoke the violence; he neither hit nor threatened the officer, nor did he assume a “fighting stance.”

After the two of them hit the ground off-camera, a hissing noise and choking can be heard suggesting that the tax-feeder had pepper-sprayed the driver. Jackson is heard accusing the motorist of hitting him and tackling him.

“You hit me in the f*****g lip,” grumbled Jackson petulantly.

“I did not hit you, man,” Leake replied in a remarkably composed voice. “You hit yourself when you tried to knock me out.”

“Dude, it’s all on tape,” countered Jackson. In his official report, Jackson stuck with his story that Leake “immediately took a combative stance and struck me with a closed fist uppercut to my face”; he then supposedly “continued to fight me and even tackled me to the ground into the next lane of oncoming traffic.”

On the strength of this account — since, as we all know, police never lie — Leake was originally charged with assaulting Jackson, as well as reckless conduct and failing to obey a “lawful” order. Those charges were dropped after the tape made it plain that it was Jackson who slugged the motorist repeatedly before tackling him “into the next lane of traffic.”

That’s right, dude: It was all on the tape.

One would think that Jackson would find himself confronting a perjury charge. One would be wrong, since police apparently have permission to perjure themselves about incidents involving violence.

“When an officer is involved in a violent incident, he’s going to use his best recollection when writing up the statement of charges,” insists Major Andy Ellis, a spokesliar for the Prince George’s County Police. “If there’s a discrepancy, that should be clarified in court.” And, presumably, if it’s the word of a perjurious police officer against that of a mere mundane, well, the “best recollection” of the former would prevail, correct?

Vince Canales, president of the local police union, insisted that the assault on Leake was justified because the video “clearly shows he was resisting arrest.”

Bear in mind that police are taught to treat any uncooperative gesture or behavior, however brief or innocuous, as “resisting arrest”–even displaying a facial expression considered “menacing” by the high-strung, fragile creatures who populate police agencies.

Leake has ample reason to be wary of the police: On one previous occasion he had been arrested for resisting arrest, a charge that was eventually dropped. That spurious, bootstrapped charge is often used to justify petty police harassment of people who haven’t actually done anything wrong.

The, ahem, heroic Officer Jackson, on the other hand, went on three months later to shoot and kill an unarmed man in Langley Park. In that incident, Jackson reported that he was trying to arrest 43-year-old Manuel de Jesus Espina for carrying an open container of alcohol, and Espina — like Leake — put up “violent resistance.”

Eyewitnesses insist that Espina put up no resistance as he was beaten with a baton, pepper-sprayed,  and eventually shot by Jackson.

Jackson is on paid vacation (aka “administrative leave”) while the Espina case is under review. If he eventually faces criminal charges in that case, it will probably be a result of the fact that Jackson, at the time he murdered Espina, was moonlighting as a security guard, rather than acting in an official capacity.

Libertarians are not usually reluctant to condemn state crime and war, but for some reason if you make similar observations about the Revolutionary War, or the Civil War (either Lincoln’s, or the CSA’s, criminal actions), libertarians become apoplectic. Case in point: the reaction to my post Happy We-Should-Restore-The-Monarchy-And-Rejoin-Britain Day! “Proud Patriot” in the comments says that I “blame the freedom-loving patriots of the American Revolution for the mass murdering tyrants of the twentieth century”.

Well, some libertarians may want to overlook the typical crimes committed by states anytime there is war, but I don’t. The Declaration of Independence of course led to all the standard evils of war and raising an army-as Hummel noted, “unfunded government debt, paper money, skyrocketing inflation, price controls, legal tender laws, direct impressment of supplies and wide-spread conscription.”

Casual googling leads to all kinds of information on this. E.g.: as noted here:

The absence of a strong, central, colonial government resulted in a vast shortage of funding and human resources. Paper money and bills of credit financed the war, and while the paper money became almost valueless, inflation rocketed. Profiteers took advantage of these conditions to make money while workers held strikes for higher wages. Soldiers were also in short supply, with state militias sometimes competing against the Continental Army for them. Soldiers were generally ill fed, poorly clothed, and lacked weapons.

Around 5,000 blacks served in the colonial army. At first only free blacks were accepted, but the shortage in soldiers led to the conscription of slaves. Blacks fought with whites in unsegregated units. Americans Indians, threatened by colonial expansion, most often fought for the British, and after the revolt ended their claims to land and self-rule were largely ignored.

And here:

As the war dragged on, it became more difficult to find soldiers. States increased bounties, shortened terms, and reluctantly forced men to serve. But conscription was such a distasteful and dangerous exercise of state power that legislatures would use it only in extreme circumstances. More frequently, legislatures tried to reinforce the army with men drawn by incentive or compulsion from the militia for only a few months of summer service. The army’s composition thus reflected a bewildering variety of enlistment terms. After 1779, for example, a Connecticut company might have eight or ten privates serving for three years or the war, and twice or three times that number enlisted only for the summer. Washington’s complaints to Congress have obscured his genius in building an effective army out of the limited service most Americans were willing to undertake.

Here:

During the Revolutionary War, state governments assumed the colonies’ authority to raise their short‐term militias through drafts if necessary. They sometimes extended this to state units in the Continental Army, but they denied Gen. George Washington’s request that the central government be empowered to conscript. As the initial volunteering slackened, states boosted enlistment bounties and held occasional drafts, producing more hired substitutes than actual draftees.

Here:

Even with their powerful new ally, the Americans remained in dire straits. Enlistments were down and conscription, while utilized, was unpopular.

This book mentions the execution of soldiers during the Revolutionary War for desertion and other things — “For examples of soldiers executed without recourse to a trial by courts-martial, see Henry Lee, Memoirs of the War in the Southern Department of the United States ..”

As my friend Manuel Lora wrote me: “In order to be free we shall establish a state, inflate the money supply, control trade and enslave people to work the fields and the killing fields. … Happy 4th of July.”

Update: One commentor on my cross-post noted:

Great article Stephan. I had read that quote from Rothbard before, and I never understood what would compel him to say such a thing. Your point of view here is the right one, in my opinion. How could Rothbard, after accepting that it is justifiable for the state to force an individual to kill or sacrifice his life – even if the supposed cause is just – oppose any of the myriad lesser forms of state compulsion?

And Manuel Lora on facebook wrote:

The spirit of 76 means that wealthy agrarian families told the king to f*ck off and established their own plutocratic nepotism so that they could own Africans.

Also: Some friends sent me some other useful links debunking the “libertarian” aspects of the American Revolution: First, regarding US independence, see A gentle introduction to Unqualified Reservations (part 2), by Mencius Moldbug (”So: let’s put it as bluntly as possible. At present you believe that, in the American Revolution, good triumphed over evil. This is the aforementioned aggregate. We’re going to just scoop that right out with the #6 brain spoon. As we operate, we’ll replace it with the actual story of the American Rebellion - in which evil triumphed over good”). According to Moldbug everything people know about the American Revolution is BS. He recommends this wonderful piece: Strictures upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia, a devastating attack on the Declaration of Independence and American Revolution written by one of its contemporaries, Thomas Hutchinson, the former Governor of Massachusetts.

And let’s not forget Mencken’s classic The Declaration of Independence in American — an excerpt:

That any goverment that don’t give a man these rights ain’t worth a damn; also, people ought to choose the kind of goverment they want themselves, and nobody else ought to have no say in the matter. That whenever any goverment don’t do this, then the people have got a right to can it and put in one that will take care of their interests. Of course, that don’t mean having a revolution every day like them South American coons and yellow-bellies and Bolsheviki, or every time some job-holder does something he ain’t got no business to do. It is better to stand a little graft, etc., than to have revolutions all the time, like them coons and Bolsheviki, and any man that wasn’t a anarchist or one of them I. W. W.’s would say the same. But when things get so bad that a man ain’t hardly got no rights at all no more, but you might almost call him a slave, then everybody ought to get together and throw the grafters out, and put in new ones who won’t carry on so high and steal so much, and then watch them. This is the proposition the people of these Colonies is up against, and they have got tired of it, and won’t stand it no more. The administration of the present King, George III, has been rotten from the start, and when anybody kicked about it he always tried to get away with it by strong-arm work. Here is some of the rough stuff he has pulled: …

One-week-old Ava Isabella Stinson — all 2 pounds of her — has made quite a dramatic entrance into the world. First her birth. Last Thursday, her parents, Natalie Paquette and Richard Stinson, rushed to a Hamilton, Ont., hospital, where she was born 20 minutes later — more than three months before her due date. She weighed 2 pounds 4 ounces at birth. Then came another complication that doctors couldn’t treat — there was no room at the inn for Ava in the Hamilton area. Lack of any empty beds in a neonatal unit in Hamilton’s McMaster Children’s Hospital forced authorities to prepare to take Ava across the border to Women & Children’s Hospital in Buffalo.

More

Congratulations, Ms. Young, and other pro-IP libertarians. Shame, shame.

Question: if being pro-war is not enough to revoke your libertarian credentials–how about book-banning?

Update: On Masnick’s blog, someone recommended Eugene Volokh and Mark Lemley’s “Freedom of Speech and Injunctions in Intellectual Property Cases” (which I have not yet read).

Out of concern for the church member, Pastor Moran went out to inquire what had happened, only to have the officer, Raymond Berryman, snarl at him to go back inside. According to witnesses, when Moran tried to explain, “I’m the pastor,” Berryman grabbed at his shirt.

According to Berryman’s official account, Moran pushed him and then fled into the church and returned with 40 other congregants. Moran, his family, and others present at the scene dispute this version, insisting that the pastor never touched the officer and went inside to enlist some church members to act as witnesses.

Berryman pursued Moran to the doors of the church and began kicking them. As soon as the doors opened, Berryman broke out the pepper spray and assaulted the congregants.

At the same time, a second officer who had arrived on the scene (tax-feeders, like other armed bullies, specialize in overkill) attacked Pastor Moran, a 42-year-old man with a heart condition, with a Taser and arrested him for “interfering” with a police officer.

The officers likewise threatened to arrest Moran’s wife Maria after she came to his aid following the Taser assault. “My husband has a heart condition and with electrocution who knows what could have happened,” Maria points out.

“They treated him as if he were a drug dealer or a murderer, but he is a pastor that tries to help the community,” complained Moran’s son Miguel, who witnessed the police assault. Although the police insist that Pastor Moran remains in their custody, he was taken to a local hospital for treatment and additional tests following the assault.

He makes his point early in the video, but the whole thing is worth watching. During the question period, topics such as higher education and patents come up. He gives a great accurate description of Copernicus’ discovery, which is a story that is almost always simplified beyond recognition. And he has numerous other historical anecdotes about discoveries and who funded what.

H/T to Kelsey A.

My principal criticism of “patriotism,” however, is directed to parents who inculcate their children in such self-destructive nonsense: why do so many mothers and fathers love the state more than they do their own children?

As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, apparently no one is immune, not even the Amish, who in some communities were living something akin to the high life before the bust hit:

“People wanted bigger weddings, newer carriages,” Mr. Lehman says. “They were buying things they didn’t need.” Mr. Lehman spent several hundred dollars on a model-train and truck hobby, and about $4,000 on annual family vacations, he says. This year, there will be no vacation.

It became common practice for families to leave their carriages home and take taxis on shopping trips and to dinners out.

And there was more:

Some Amish families had bought second homes on the west coast of Florida and expensive Dutch Harness Horses, with their distinctive, prancing gait. Others lined their carriages in dark velvet and illuminated them with battery-powered LED lighting.

Even the tradition of helping each other out began to unravel, Bishop Hochstetler says. Instead of asking neighbors for help, well-to-do Amish began hiring outsiders so they wouldn’t have to reciprocate. “Factory work doesn’t eliminate fellowship, but it does not encourage togetherness,” the bishop says.

However, there is nothing like a good bust to set things right again.  They aren’t kidding when they call it a “correction.”

In Indiana, a back-to-basics movement appears to be taking root. More patches of produce have sprouted behind Amish homes this summer. Restaurants are entertaining fewer Amish customers. Mr. Lehman says neighbors “are more considerate of each other now.”

Some men have started their own businesses close to home. Mr. Lehman makes mattresses in his workshop. Harlan Miller, a 34-year-old father of five who was laid off in February, started making fruit butter, which he sells at a local market. Freeman Miller (no relation), 54, who was laid off after 30 years in manufacturing, builds wooden caskets for pets.

“We were all going way too fast,” Freeman Miller says. “This has made everybody stop and realize we’re just pilgrims here, the Almighty is in charge.”

Seems the hypocritical conservatives are at it again in Kentucky.  On Friday night [6/19/09] many of those tea party attending conservatives will be forking over the big bucks for Trey Grayson, who will likely be Rand Paul’s main opponent in the Republican senate primary.  When Rand came to this area to speak, not one local member of the Republican county committee showed up.  Yet when Grayson (a former Democratic delegate for Bill Clinton) shows up, these supposed champions of small government line up to meet him.

Before Rand Paul got the treatment on 6/19, JB had written me earlier about Paul’s treatment in Kentucky:

Well we haven’t been three weeks removed from that GOP pep rally, or Tea Party, where the Republicans told us they were opponents of big government and deficit spending, and the Republicans in Paducah and all across Kentucky are showing their true colors.

Since an AP story mentioned the likelihood Rand Paul was going to seek the Republican Party nomination, the GOP has gone into attack mode.  The same mode we Ron Paul Republicans saw during the convention process.

Rumors of Paul’s candidacy have been circulating for months.  Paul’s anti-tax and fiscal restraint would make him a strong candidate versus the GOP’s preferred nominee, state senate president David Williams.  In the last legislative session, Williams passed four new tax increases, raided the state retirement fund, passed mandatory registration for ATV owners, and helped kill gun rights legislation.

Such a record could never work against a principled opponent of government like Paul, so they now have gotten the secretary of state (a former delegate for Bill Clinton in ‘92—turned Republican) to run for the senate seat.  Since the secretary of state has no voting record, they hope to make him appear to be everything a voter can ever want (conservative, moderate, libertarian, etc.)

Of course, him being a former Democrat does not bother the establishment Republicans.  The state Republican Party’s web site has a positive article on their man.  In fact the district chair has taken a swipe at Paul and said he will support his party’s chosen candidate.

The ritual behind the concession is an interesting one. Any time there is a close (essentially tied) election, the perceived loser after the initial count can concede or he may call for a recount or for a series of legal challenges. He does this in the hope that enough of the opponent’s votes might be invalidated or enough of his votes might be “discovered” during the recount process.

The idea that “counting every vote” provides a definitive conclusion to an election is one of the many great myths and gossamer clouds upon which democracy is perched.

In any large scale election where the voters number in the thousands, there is no such thing as an election being decided simply by counting every vote. Every close election on such a scale comes down to deciding which votes to count and which votes not to count in a subjective selection process founded upon a variety of legal challenges and judgments:

“Should the provisional ballots be counted?”

“Which of the provisional ballots should be counted?”

“Have the mail-in ballots been counted?”

“Are these ballots cast for this guy or for that guy?”

“The judge will allow these votes to be counted, but not those votes.”

And on and on. It’s not about counting every vote, but about getting a judge to declare which votes should be counted.

So, in reality, many close elections are really just ties with no clear outcome. The 2000 election was a perfect example. Clearly, neither candidate was a clear winner over the other. And yet, this is a very difficult problem for the theory of democracy to contend with. If neither candidate is truly preferred, how can one of the candidates claim to rule with a mandate from the people? And say by some imaginary miracle, one candidate was shown to have one more vote than the other. Why should this be a license to rule over others?

Yet, we see this happen all the time. As soon as a “winner” is declared, the voters fall into line and simply accept the legitimacy of the newly elected candidate while the winner himself declares himself to be the trustee of all the people who possesses a mandate to govern according to his platform. Never mind the fact that, in many cases, the winner was barely able to prove a plurality, much less a majority. Yet, the proponents of democracy quickly look the other way, when even by their own standards, the election results can’t be shown to fulfill the democratic pillars of “majority rule” or even “one man, one vote.” The new winner is illegitimate by their own standards, but this fact is always disregarded in favor of the myth over the inconvenient reality.

By framing a situation with words such as free, liberate, slave, exploit, and sweat shop, even though the words are not very accurate, the stage is already set. I’ve never taken a journalism or public policy class, but this has got to be 101 stuff. The media, politicians, and bureaucrats know what they are doing when they use words in this way.

That’s right; it’s probably not the first thing teens are thinking about. But teenagers work too — even if only at an after-school, weekend or summer job. And like everybody else, they need to know the basics to understand how their tax system works.

With that in mind, DOR announces the first release in a new “Teens ‘n’ Taxes” video series designed to educate teenagers about their tax responsibilities. The first video is set on a teenager’s first day on the job — and discusses the Form W-4, Employee Withholding Allowance Certificate, she needs to fill out.

As part of the department’s mission to educate younger residents about the tax system, Teens ‘n’ Taxes — like the successful DORM (Department of Revenue Media) video series for college students, — will be distributed to Massachusetts schools and posted on YouTube, Twitter and other social networking sites.

Nothing like teaching kids that they, too, shall be subjected to the same tyranny. Equality for all!

Update: Here’s the video.

An assertion of this sort is evidence of the anti-intellectualism that has metastasized across academia and spread to other venues of expression. Universities have become so dominated by an insistence upon the inviolability of the “turfs” of various disciplines as to make one unworthy to speak on matters of which he or she has not been certified to utter opinions by fellow academics. There was once a time - many decades ago - when a “liberal arts” education was regarded as a means of introducing people to a wide range of subject areas that would permit them to think and speak intelligently on various matters affecting their lives. Collective thinking - which now permeates college campuses - rejects such an idea, conferring subject matter monopolies according to one’s acknowledged “expertise.”

When my “In Restraint of Trade” book was first published twelve years ago, an academic reviewer from a respected history department spent most of his time acquainting his readers with the fact that I taught in a law school and not a history department. The review ended up being little more than a strident defense of turf, and a condemnation of my efforts to focus attention on matters unfamiliar to historians.

I enjoy watching Jonathan Hoenig every Saturday morning on Fox News’ “Cashin’ In” program on investment analysis. He is a consistent advocate of free-markets, individual liberty, and private property. He recently stated that humans “must think in order to survive,” but that we have recently been “outsourcing” this function to others. Such a practice now prevails on university campuses, and helps to explain why academia is a source of so little original and meaningful thinking. Don’t wonder about what anything means: the “experts” whose jobs are dependent upon advancing the agendas of the political establishment will explain it all to you!