Archive for 2014

GREAT MOMENTS IN MEDIA SELF-AWARENESS:


Wait’ll Joe discovers which network employs him, and what its mission statement is.

ANNALS OF THE POLICE STATE: 11-year-old boy mistakenly held at gunpoint, handcuffed by Vallejo, California police.

THE WISCONSIN GESTAPO:   George Will’s latest column is a terrific condemnation of the Gestapo tactics used by the prosecutors pursuing a “John Doe” investigation of conservative issue advocacy groups in Wisconsin:

Wisconsin’s sordid episode began, appropriately, with a sound of tyranny — fists pounding on the doors of private citizens in pre-dawn raids. While sheriff’s deputies used floodlights to illuminate the citizens’ homes, armed raiders seized documents, computers, cellphones and other devices. . . .

Liberals inveighing against “dark money” in politics mean money contributed anonymously to finance political advocacy. Donors’ anonymity thwarts liberals’ efforts to injure the livelihoods of identifiable conservatives by punishing them for their political participation and thereby deterring others from participating.

O’Keefe’s persecution illustrates the problem his lawyer David Rivkin calls “dark power” — government power wielded secretively for vengeance and intimidation.

There is literally no reason to treat conservative groups who engage in “issue advocacy”– i.e., talking about issues they believe are important–as common criminals, busting down their doors in the middle of the night with battering rams and scaring their families.  There was no reason any searches of computers or papers could not have been conducted in daylight, when the kids were at school.  The only reason to use these tactics was to intimidate.  This fact alone reveals the true purpose of this investigation:  to use a special Wisconsin law, allowing secretive and broad investigatory power to intimidate vocal conservative groups in the state and chill/stop them from exercising their First Amendment rights.  This is a disgusting abuse of power and I hope, once this civil rights action is adjudicated on the merits, that the prosecutors are forced to pay for their abuse of power, not only financially, but with a loss of their licenses to practice law.

WHERE DID MALAYSIAN FLIGHT 370 GO?:  According to this fascinating piece in The Atlantic, Inmarsat’s data suggesting that the plane went south toward the wide open Indian Ocean seems implausible:

Until officials provide more information, the claim that Flight 370 went south rests not on the weight of mathematics but on faith in authority. Inmarsat officials and search authorities seem to want it both ways: They release charts, graphics, and statements that give the appearance of being backed by math and science, while refusing to fully explain their methodologies. And over the course of this investigation, those authorities have repeatedly issued confident pronouncements that they’ve later quietly walked back.

The biggest risk to the investigation now is that authorities continue to assume they’ve finally found the area where the plane went down, while failing to explore other possibilities simply because they don’t fit with a mathematical analysis that may not even hold up.

After all, searchers have yet to find any hard evidence—not so much as a shred of debris—to confirm that they’re looking in the right ocean.

Read the whole thing.  I personally believe Lt. General Thomas McInerney, who has claimed he has intelligence sources that have confirmed the plane landed in Pakistan. 

WHO’S CRAZY? The Obama administration’s strategy on Benghazi “isn’t intended for the country at large so much as it is for the Washington press corps. The goal is to convince reporters that by investigating Benghazi they are doing the bidding of crackpots and political hacks. The White House is betting that journalists are more cynical about House Republicans and their motives than they are about the Obama administration’s mendacity on Benghazi. There’s some evidence that’s right.”

About 50 years worth.

EVEN IF HE WAS A SPY, IT DOESN’T CHANGE WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE NSA’S BULK DATA SEIZURE PROGRAM: Was Edward Snowden part of an intelligence operation?

I am glad we know what we now know about the NSA’s domestic data seizure programs  But it is possibilities like this that keep me from praising Snowden or considering him a hero. There is much we don’t know, and likely never will as neither side has much incentive to tell the truth about this.

THE WEEK IN PICTURES: GRADUATION EDITION: At Power Line.

THE IRS SCANDAL, DAY 366: At TaxProf Blog.

READER BOOK PLUG: Allen Mitchum’s The Reprisal is now free on Kindle.

SYRIAN REBEL Kamal Labwani wants an alliance with Israel.

Once, Israel was blamed for everything. But Israel is not our enemy anymore. We see how Israel opened its doors to our injured. We see how Syrian children are treated in Assad’s prisons and how they are treated in Israeli hospitals. Israel gave food while Assad starved his own people. Syria has only one enemy now: the Assad regime backed by Iran and Hezbollah. I meet with Syrian dissidents and military leaders daily and have seen how, after decades of brainwashing, their mentality has begun to change.

Guys like him rarely acquire hard power in the Middle East, and they certainly stand no chance in Syria now, but his point of view really is beginning to spread. It’s got to be hard to keep up the anti-Zionist hate in the middle of a scorched-earth war between Assad and Al Qaeda.

LEARNING ABOUT LIBERTY UNDER THE PALMS: Join me for the Cato Summer University at Rancho Bernardo.

I will be speaking on “Why the Declaration of Independence Was Right: Demystifying Natural Rights,” “The Modesty of ‘Radical’ Libertarianism,” and “Our Republican Constitution: Why Popular Sovereignty Requires the Judicial Protection of Human Rights.”