Tomorrow I’m going to the Kentucky Derby. So let’s tap the wisdom of the Agitator crowd!
I will place a $6 trifecta bet on the top three vote getters from this week’s poll. Here are the current odds.
Earlier this week, I called in to Fox News’ Freedom Watch to talk about my latest crime column. I’m not sure why the map on the screen is pointing to Phoenix.
Florida Gov. Charlie Crist has realized he’s probably going to lose the Republican primary in his bid for the U.S. Senate, so he’s dropping out to run as an independent.
Because I’m such a giving person, and because I’m moving in a month, I, Radley Balko, will now tap my decade of life in Washington, D.C. to dispense some free political advice to both major parties and their zombie supporters about how they should react to this news.
For the Democrats: You should talk about how this is a warning sign that extremists are taking over your opponents’ party. Say something like, “If a moderate, sensible public servant like Charlie Crist can be driven out of his own party by these fringe elements, I really worry about our democracy.” If you want to dial up the rhetoric, say something about how Crist’s opponent has been driven up in the polls almost entirely by crazy, angry, possibly seditious protesters of the current administration. If you need help articulating your talking points, see what the GOP was saying about the Joe Lieberman/Ned Lamont race in 2006.
For the Republicans: You should talk about how Charlie Crist is selfish and arrogant, and that if he were a decent man he would respect the primary system. Talk about how he no longer represents GOP values, and how he’s wrong on the issues that are most important to the party today. Say something like, “An honorable man would step aside and respect the wishes of Florida’s Republican voters.” If you need help articulating your talking points, see what the Democrats were saying about the Joe Lieberman/Ned Lamont race in 2006.
For both parties: I know what you’re thinking. “Are the American people really so stupid and blinded by partisanship that they won’t realize we were making precisely the opposite arguments just four years ago?” The answer is: Yes! Yes they are!
I suggest one of two strategies. The first is that you simply ignore your hypocrisy. The public pretty much expects it of you, anyway. The only people likely to call you on your inconsistency are your opponents (who don’t matter) and possibly the media (whom most voters hate even more than they hate politicians). On the off chance you have a molecule or two of honor in your bones and can’t just flip on a dime . . . well first you’re probably in the wrong profession. But here’s an alternate strategy: Come up with some vaguely plausible—but upon any serious examination transparently lame—way of distinguishing your position on Crist from the opposite position you took on Lieberman.
For example, a Republican might say, “But Lieberman was already in the Senate, so he owed it to the people of Connecticut to fight for his seat so the state wouldn’t lose his seniority, experience, and clout on important committees!” A Democrat might say, “Yeah, but Lieberman actually lost in the primary. Crist is bowing out of the primary to run as an independent before he actually lost. So he’s not really bucking the will of the voters the way Lieberman did!”
If all else fails, just say, “The difference is that Lieberman/Crist is/was right, and Crist/Lieberman is/was wrong.”
To your supporters, this will actually sound principled!
So are you both ready? Let the rudderless, hacktastic posturing begin!
Hence, the light posting.
I’ll be driving most of the day today. So I leave you with this.
May the best pun win. I’ll get you started:
He obviously didn’t give her enough ram the first time around.
Here’s Steve Chapman on some of the scaremongering anti-immigration activists are pushing in support of Arizona’s awful new law:
The state has an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants. But contrary to myth, they have not brought an epidemic of murder and mayhem with them. Surprise of surprises, the state has gotten safer.
Over the last decade, the violent crime rate has dropped by 19 percent, while property crime is down by 20 percent. Crime has also declined in the rest of the country, but not as fast as in Arizona.
Babeu’s claim about police killings came as news to me. When I called his office to get a list of victims, I learned there has been only one since the beginning of 2008—deeply regrettable, but not exactly a trend.
Truth is, illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native Americans. Most come here to work, and in their desire to stay, they are generally afraid to do anything that might draw the attention of armed people wearing badges.
El Paso, Texas, is next door to the exceptionally violent Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and easily accessible to illegal entry. Yet it is one of the safest cities in the United States.
In 2007, scholars Ruben Rumbaut and Walter Ewing investigated the issue for the Immigration Policy Center and concluded that “if immigrants suddenly disappeared and the country became immigrant-free (and illegal-immigrant free), crime rates would likely increase.”
I wrote about the “El Paso Miracle” last year. Immigrants—yes, even illegal ones—simply aren’t prone to crime. The process selects for people who want to make a better life for themselves and their families. Not generally the sort more likely to rape and murder. The bill will also likely make actual crime worse because it will make illegals much less likely to cooperate with police.
This part is interesting, too:
Massey says the number of people coming illegally has not risen appreciably in the last couple of decades. But the number staying has climbed, because anyone who leaves faces a harder task returning.
Had the government not cracked down at the border, he says, “the undocumented population would be half what it is now.” A fence intended to keep illegal immigrants out is serving beautifully to keep them in.
Tomorrow at 8 am ET on the CBC, I’ll be chatting aboot (sorry) childhood obesity, fast food, and Santa Clara County, California’s decision to ban restuarants from giving out toys with kids’ meals.
Listen here.
The Washington Post‘s Jerry Markon reports on the sad, infuriating case of “Baby Emma,” a little girl born in Woodbridge, Virginia last year. Emma’s mother, 20-year-old Emily Colleen Fahland, didn’t want the child, and gave her up to a Utah adoption agency. The child was adopted by Utah couple Thomas and Chandra Zarembinski, who have raised her for the last 14 months.
The problem is that Emma’s father, 20-year-old John Wyatt, wanted to raise the child. Even Fahland concedes he has never wavered from that. The article mentions no allegation that Wyatt is abusive or ill-fit to be a parent. Yet when she went into labor Fahland cut off contact with Wyatt. The hospital where Emma was born refused to even tell Wyatt whether Fahland had been admitted. The next day, Fahland and the child moved to a motel, where she handed Emma off to the adoption agency.
After learning of Emma’s birth (from his lawyer), Wyatt filed custody papers within the time allotted to him by Virginia law. He also filed five days before the Zermbinskis filed adoption papers. That didn’t matter. A Utah court, citing that state’s adoption laws that favor married couples over single parents, simply ignored a Virginia court’s ruling that Wyatt be given custody of his child. Now the Zarembinskis’ lawyer argues—apparently with a straight face—that it’s in Emma’s best interest to stay with the couple, because they “are the only parents this child has ever known.”
It isn’t clear from the article if the Zarembinskis definitely knew before they adopted Emma that the child’s father was claiming custody. But they certainly knew shortly after, and they continued to fight to keep her from her biological parent anyway. It’s hard to feel any pity for them. A kidnapper could make the same argument their attorney is making, provided he was able to elude authorities for a sufficiently long period of time.
Speaking of which, I’m trying to figure out how Fahland—and possibly the Utah adoption agency—aren’t guilty of kidnapping. I’ll concede that I know very little about family law, and perhaps the law is as perverse here as it can be in other areas. But Wyatt is the child’s father. Once Fahland gave up her custody rights, one would think that full custody rights reverted to Wyatt. From the article, Fahland and the adoption agency appear to have conspired to make the handoff before Wyatt was even aware his child had been born, and before he could prevent the adoption from happening. If the roles had been reversed, and Wyatt had swiped the kid out of the nursery and rushed her off to an out-of-state adoption agency to, say, prevent himself from having to pay child support, is there any doubt he’d be charged with kidnapping?
Strangely, New York Times “Motherlode” blogger Lisa Balkin presents this case as if it’s ethically complicated, even implying that the child should remain with the Zarembinskis.
Who do you think should have custody of “Baby Emma”? The stable married couple who are, as their lawyer says, “the only parents this child has ever known,” or the single 21-year-old nightclub worker who has never seen her, though he certainly has tried?
I guess I’m not seeing the moral complexity, here. And I’m not sure what Wyatt’s job or marital status have to do with his parental rights. The child should be returned to her father. Fahland and the adoption agency should pay Wyatt’s legal bills. And in a just world, Fahland would be paying Wyatt child support for the next 18 years.
A Utah Court of Appeals will hear the case at the end of next month.
My crime column this week looks at two recent incidents in Maryland, and what they say about the need for an established, enforceable right to video or audio record on-duty police officers.
Over the weekend, I spoke at the Georgia Libertarian Party’s annual conveniton. My speech was on police militarization, focusing specifically on the Kathryn Johnston and Jonathan Ayers cases.
While I was there, I recorded a podcast with Jason Pye and Brett Bittner for the United Liberty website.
You can listen here.
If the antidote to terrorism and fundamentalist extremism is to refuse to be terrorized, we may finally be making some progress. As noted, there’s “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day,” an appropriately defiant and mocking response to the not-so-veiled threat levied against South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone by an Islamic extremist website.
It started as a college student’s snide response to an Iranian cleric’s assertion that scantily clad women cause earthquakes.
But as of Thursday, it had become much, much bigger.
Jen McCreight, a self-described atheist, feminist and geek “trapped in Indiana,” took issue with Hojatoleslam Kazim Sadeghi’s message during Friday prayers in Tehran, the Iranian capital.
The hard-line cleric, who was standing in for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, said women who dress provocatively – thereby tempting men – are to blame for the world’s temblors…
McCreight, who is pursuing a double major in genetics and evolution, took to her blog, Blag Hag, on Monday, demanding that the world’s women band together in a scientific experiment to test the merits of Sadeghi’s hypothesis.
“Time for a Boobquake,” she wrote. “On Monday, April 26, I will wear the most cleavage-showing shirt I own. … I encourage other female skeptics to join me and embrace the supposed supernatural power of their breasts. Or short shorts, if that’s your preferred form of immodesty.”
She continued, “With the power of our scandalous bodies combined, we should surely produce an earthquake. If not, I’m sure [Sadeghi] can come up with a rational explanation for why the ground didn’t rumble.”
Boobquake’s Twitter account quickly snared more tweets than a bird sanctuary, and its Facebook page had almost 50,000 “confirmed guests” as of Thursday afternoon.
My colleagues at Reason and I plan to monitor this story like regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Via the comments,
the libertarian writer Jim Bovard visited a Maryland Tea Party on Tax Day, and found little more than a different variety of authoritarianism:
…there is scant evidence that most tea partyers have studied the copies of the Constitution they generously hand out to bystanders.
At a Tax Day tea party in Rockville, Md., the speaking venue was draped with a huge banner: “Tired of Big Government?” Members of the “Tyranny Response Team” stood near the front of the rally with their official blue T-shirts. Giant American flags and ones with “Don’t Tread on Me” (with a coiled rattlesnake) were carried around by men with tri-corn hats. Political campaigns busily sold “9/11 Remembrance” bracelets.
And yet, the crowd of 300 seemed most outraged that the US government is not being sufficiently aggressive in using its power.
Ken Timmerman, the author of “Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America” and other hawkish books, declaimed that the US government must take every step to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons…
Running through a litany of President Obama’s greatest failings, Timmerman denounced him for forcing US agents to “stop using enhanced interrogation methods. Has that made us safer?”
“No!” the crowd hollered indignantly.
Jeffrey Kuhner, a local talk-show host, sneered that Obama “has found his inner Muslim” and raged against his bowing to foreign leaders and kings. He complained that Obama has “taken over college loans,” and warned that illegal immigrants could be “the shock troops of Obama’s socialist revolution.” The crowd ate it up.
One of the MCs gushed about how he and everyone else in the crowd loved the police. There was not a word spoken about the video released earlier that week showing a nearby horrendous police beating of an innocent University of Maryland college student.
The rally featured a string of Republican candidates praising fiscal responsibility and denouncing the national debt. One would have thought that it had been 50 years, rather than 15 months, since the Republicans controlled the White House.
There was almost no dissent from any of the 300 attendees. One 50-something man in a faded green T-shirt walked around with a handmade sign declaring, “Stop the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – Bring Our Troops Home Now!” He told me that almost no one he’d talked agreed with his message…
Much more in tune with the crowd was the 20-something woman carrying a sign: “PROUD to be the Military Super Power.”…
None of the speakers criticized the warrantless wiretaps that the National Security Agency began during the Bush administration. The feds’ vacuuming up thousands of Americans’ phone calls and e-mails without a warrant seems to be a nonissue for these folks. Perhaps some tea party leaders hope that Republicans will soon be in position to use such powers to surveil the left…
If tea party activists cannot vigorously oppose torture and other high crimes, then counting on them to stalwartly resist any government policy that doesn’t mulct their paycheck is folly.
America needs real champions of freedom – not poorly informed Republican accomplices. Either tea partyers should become more principled or they should ditch their Gadsden flags and wear T-shirts of the lobbying group that organizes the rally they attend.
There’s obviously not going to be pure ideological unity at these events, and I’d have no problem if the Tea Parties were merely silent on issues like foreign policy, law enforcement, and the war on terror—that is, if people who disagree on those particular issues had come together for the purpose of rallying against government debt, bailouts, spending, and so on. But it’s increasingly looking like the right’s favored big government policies are a fairly important part of the agenda of a fairly large portion of the Tea Party crowd. Advocating for more police power, more foreign policy imperialism, and more power for the federal government to detain, torture, and abrogate basic civil liberties sort of misses the entire message of the original Tea Party.
It also makes a mockery of the media narrative that these are gathering of anti-government extremists. Seems like in may parts of the country they’re as pro-government as the current administration, just pro-their kind of government.
Dear Tea Partiers,
Ask Joe Arpaio to be your keynote speaker, and you’ve lost me.
He’s a power-mad thug with a badge, the walking, mouth-breathing antithesis of the phrase “limited government.”
Yes, this is but one state chapter in your movement. So distance yourself from them.
It’s one thing to have a few idiots and nutjobs show up at your rallies.
It’s quite another to invite one to speak.
Yours,
Radley Balko
PS: Hating immigrants? Not a winning issue. Or, for that matter, a limited government issue.
Researchers at the University of London used a suction device to create bruises on 11 subjects. They then took sequential photos of the bruises over nine days. They showed the photos to 15 forensic experts and asked them to order the photos chronologically. Forensic experts regularly testify about the age of bruises down to the hour, providing chronologies that allow prosecutors to give a suspect a window to have committed a crime. Or, alternately, to attempt to put a the crime at a time for which the defendant has an alibi.
But these particular 15 experts didn’t fare so well. The results:
Lead author, Margaret Pilling, an Honours Medical Student at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, said: “The greatest accuracy, from forensic experts, occurred in very fresh bruises (between 0 and 12 hours) however there were still a number of significant misjudgements in this age range.
“The median difference between the estimated age and the real age was 26 hours – a considerable disparity. We conclude that forensic experts’ estimates of bruise age from photographs are, at best, unreliable.”
“Long Hard Times To Come,” By T.O.N.E.-Z and Rench. Bluegrass meets hip-hop. Really.
This is also the theme song from the terrific new FX series Justified. If you liked Deadwood, you should give the show a try. Timothy Oliphant is great, though he basically plays Seth Bullock transported to modern-day Kentucky, employed as a U.S. Marshall.
It doesn’t seem so outrageous when it happens in Britain, because the write-ups are filled with those quaint British affectations.
“Stab-jacket!” “…on their patch…” “…cup of tea!”
I’ve long had a theory that most people don’t find libertarianism so much as it happens to them. They find themselves on the receiving end of some sort of government incompetence or abuse, or they know someone who is, and it starts them on the road to a generally more skeptical view of state power.
Steven Hatfill, the government scientist whose life was turned upside down when he became a suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks, is now talking about what happened to him. Hatfill was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing and given a settlement, but only after years of harassment and abuse at the hands of the federal government.
Jim White at FireDogLake has relevant excerpts from Hatfill’s recent interview on the Today Show, and from a David Freed feature on Hatfill in the April issue of the Atlantic.
“I love my country,” Hatfill, 56, told Lauer. But, he added, “I learned a couple things. The government can do to you whatever they want. They can break the laws, federal laws, as they see fit … You can’t turn laws on and off as you deem fit. And the Privacy Act laws were put in place specifically to stop what happened to me. Whether we’re at war or have been attacked, the foundation of society is that you hold to the laws in place. I used to be somebody that trusted the government. Now I really don’t trust anything.”
Boo was driving Hatfill to a paint store a week later when FBI agents in a Dodge Durango, trying to keep up with them, blew through a red light in a school zone with children present. Hatfill says he got out of his car to snap a photo of the offending agents and give them a piece of his mind. The Durango sped away—running over his right foot. Hatfill declined an ambulance ride to the hospital; unemployed, he had no medical insurance. When Washington police arrived, they issued him a ticket for “walking to create a hazard.” The infraction carried a $5 fine. Hatfill would contest the ticket in court and lose. The agent who ran over his foot was never charged.
“People think they’re free in this country,” Hatfill says. “Don’t kid yourself. This is a police state. The government can pretty much do whatever it wants.”
But remember folks, all the government does is protect your rights. The people who criticize the government are the real threat to your liberty.
Earlier this week, I posted a link to a gay rights advocacy group’s account of a lawsuit filed by 78-year-old Clay Greene. According to Greene, when his 20-year partner Harold Scull fell ill,Sonoma County, California refused to allow Greene to visit him. Greene claims the county then forcibly entered Greene into a nursing home, terminated the couple’s apartment lease, then auctioned off all of their assets.
I noted in the post that the story was only one half of a lawsuit, and now, in response to numerous complaints as the story spread across the Internet over the weekend,Sonoma County has issued a response, which you can read here. The county says Scull’s initial hospitalization, described in the lawsuit as the result of a fall, was actually due to domestic abuse on the part of Greene. The county says Scull filed a report to that effect, and that the abuse was documented by hospital workers. But the letter adds that no criminal charges were filed against Greene.
I’m not sure what to make of that. I’m not familiar with California law on the matter, but while a report of domestic abuse may be enough to keep Greene from visiting Scull in the hospital (and for that to be a sensible decision), without criminal charges, I don’t know how it allows the county to forcibly intern Greene in a nursing home and auction off all of his belongings. Then again, if the initial lawsuit neglected to mention the domestic abuse report, it’s possible that it also overstated or miststated the county’s actions with respect to Greene’s property and nursing home stay.
I’ll be on John Stossel’s Fox Business Channel show tonight at 8 PM ET.
Scott Bullock of the Institute for Justice and I will discuss asset forfeiture.
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