28 Saturday Oct 2017
Posted in Legal/Political Columns, Other Columns
≈ Comments Off on Catalonia Illustration : Dialectic vs. Rhetoric in Political Argument
It works like this:
Democracy Discussed:
Dialectic
Pro: The people have decided. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Self-determination. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Freedom. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Natural rights. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Et cetera. Blah, blah, blah.
Con: The law! Muh Constitution. ORDERED Liberty. The poor King… Blah, blah…
Rhetoric
The Sun/Reuters.
Both are effective but one kicks, eh?
27 Friday Oct 2017
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
Tags
This after weeks of half-hearted posturing, “negotiations,” an angry speech from the King, and a 90% vote in favor of freedom. Spain voted, only 40 minutes later, to end the secession effort. Historically, this kind of juxtaposition sometimes leads to war. Let’s hope not in this case.
The debate came after Catalan President Carles Puigdemont on Thursday opted against declaring independence or calling early elections, instead calling on MPs to decide.
A motion declaring independence was approved with 70 in favour, 10 against, and two abstentions in the 135-seat chamber.
The measure calls for the transfer of legal powers from Spain to an independent Catalonia.
But the Spanish Constitutional Court is likely to declare it illegal, and few in the international community will recognise Catalan statehood.
Immediately afterwards, Mr Rajoy called for all Spaniards to remain calm, promising to “restore legality” to Catalonia.
What will the Spanish government do next?
Soon after the vote at the regional parliament, the Senate – Spain’s upper house – made the unprecedented step of approving measures allowing the Spanish government to impose direct rule over Catalonia.
There were 214 votes in favour and 47 against.
Mr Rajoy is now expected to hold a cabinet meeting and decide what measures to take.
It could include the firing of Catalan leaders, and the Spanish government taking control of the region’s finances, police and publicly owned media
Elsewhere the usual types decry the move (for independence) as a “dark day for democracy.” In other words, democratic actions of the people and their leaders, in unison, constitute an affront to democracy. Clear as mud – unless these usual suspects only mean democracy as a cover for tyranny. And, that they do.
No telling how this complex case will play out. I have a feeling we will know very soon. (How many tank divisions does Madrid have??)
For now, I welcome and embrace Europe’s newest country.
The Flag Shop (UK).
27 Friday Oct 2017
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on The Idol vs. The Engine
Nothing to do with cars.
Jesús Huerta de Soto’s interesting and relevant essay excerpts: Classical Liberalism versus Anarchocapitalism: from LRC.
“The state has become the “idol” everyone turns to and worships. Statolatry is without a doubt the most serious and dangerous social disease of our time.”
Because nothing says, “Good Morning, Friday,” like a good old political theory essay.
“We’re all career-sadists, now.” – Unknown Politician.
26 Thursday Oct 2017
Posted in Legal/Political Columns, News and Notes
Tags
The White House released the following statement today as it releases 2,800+ pages of information in the JFK assassination files –AVAILABLE HERE– WHITE HOUSE – Today, President Donald J. Trump took action to ensure release of the remaining President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records. Accordingly, the National Archives and Records Administration will make approximately 2,800 […]
via President Trump Releases 2,800 Pages From JFK Files… — The Last Refuge
26 Thursday Oct 2017
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
Alabama will consider a Bill to abolish the state law requirement of a marriage license. From the 10th Amendment Center (how appropriate) (here, from LRC):
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (Oct. 23, 2017) – A bill prefiled in the Alabama Senate would abolish marriage licenses in the state and effectively nullify in practice both major sides of the contentious national debate over government-sanctioned marriage.
Sen. Greg Albritton (R-Bay Minette) prefiled Senate Bill 13 (SB13) in September. The legislation would abolish all requirements to obtain a marriage license in Alabama. Instead, probate judges would simply record civil contracts of marriage between two individuals based on signed affidavits.
According to the bill summary, SB13 would “eliminate the requirement for solemnization of a marriage for it to be considered valid” and “specify that the judge of probate would have no authority to reject any recording of a marriage, so long as the affidavits, forms, and data are provided. must record certain affidavits, forms, and data regarding the marriage.”
During the 2017 legislative session, Albritton introduced a similar bill. The Senate approved SB20 by a 22-6 vote, and the House Judiciary Committee approved the legislation 10-4 along party lines with some technical amendments. However, it failed to get a vote in the full House. A similar outcome occurred in the 2016 legislative session.
The proposed law would maintain a few state requirements governing marriage. Minors between the ages of 16 and 18 would have to obtain parental permission before marrying, the state would not record a marriage if either party was already married, and the parties could not be related by blood or adoption as already stipulated in state law.
Civil or religious ceremonies would have no legal effect upon the validity of the marriage. The state would only recognize the legal contract signed by the two parties entering into the marriage.
In practice, the state’s role in marriage would be limited to recording marriages that have already occurred.
…
Maybe the third times the charm. The government has no business or competence in higher, Sacramental matters.
That wailing sound you hear is from the hardened anti-Western, anti-freedom statists of Montgomery, et al.
*Notes: Marriage, in and of itself, is not a right. Priests do not officiate weddings. And there is a third party (just not the state).
25 Wednesday Oct 2017
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
At least he’s consistent in an inconsistent kind of way. Hick Sheriff Jeff Hobby, who broke the law with his illegal searches/sexual molestation of 900 kids at a high school – based on unwarranted suspicion of drug charges that didn’t exist, was more than willing to break the law to shield his own son from drug charges that did exist:
A Georgia sheriff accused of violating the civil rights of hundreds of high school students when he ordered a massive school drug search is now accused of interfering with a GBI investigation into his son’s recent drug arrest.
In April, Worth County Sheriff Jeff Hobby drew ire from scores parents who accused him and his deputies of violating the civil rights of their children. Hobby ordered a search that resulted in his deputies locking down the Worth County High School for four hours as they searched students’ pockets, waistbands and underwear. Some students said they felt sexually violated.
A grand jury indicted the sheriff and two deputies Oct. 3 in a case involving allegations of false imprisonment, violation of oath of office and sexual battery.
The sheriff now stands accused by the local prosecutor of interfering with the criminal investigation into his teenage son, Zachary Lewis Hobby. The younger Hobby was arrested Oct. 9 and charged with felony possession of marijuana with intent to distribute and criminal trespass.
The sheriff and his wife burst into an interview room at the jail where a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent was questioning their son after the arrest, according to a letter sent to Gov. Nathan Deal by Tifton Judicial Circuit District Attorney Paul Bowden.
“Sheriff Hobby and his wife, who is also an employee of the Worth County Sheriff’s Office, barged into the room ostensibly to invoke the seventeen (17) year old’s Fifth Amendment Rights for him,” according to Bowden.
Zachary Hobby had already been advised of his rights and had chosen to speak to the GBI agent, Bowden wrote. The sheriff’s intrusion into the GBI interview helped protect his son from additional questioning.
“The agent chose to cease the interview at that point since he was inside the Sheriff’s jail,” according to Bowden.
The DA also noted that following the arrest of Hobby’s son he “was housed in the Worth County jail instead of being transferred to a jail not under the supervision of his father.”
Yeeeeeeeeee Haaaaaw!
For those of you outside the State of Georgia: the whole state is not like this; some counties are worse.
Maybe instead of sending him to prison, they could just let Hobby run the FBI or CIA.
Time was when we had real lawmen. CBS.
24 Tuesday Oct 2017
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on Trump, the CIA, and JFK
Tags
CIA, classified files, conspiracy, government, JFK, lies, The People, Trump
The full release of all remaining classified files could come on Thursday. Or, it might not.
My question is, “And?” Or, maybe its, “So what?”
Jason Hornberger predicts that something will remain hidden or redacted: a pretty good prediction:
“Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened.” (Italics added.)
The operative words, of course, are: “Subject to the receipt of further information….”
What is going on here?
Negotiations. The art of the deal. The CIA desperately does not want to show the American people its long-secret JFK-related records. It has asked Trump to continue keeping at least some of them secret notwithstanding the passage of more than 50 years since the Kennedy assassination.
Under long-established custom and tradition in Washington, D.C., when someone asks someone else for a favor, the person who is in a position to grant the favor demands something in return. That’s where the negotiations between Trump and the CIA come into play. Trump wants something in return. We don’t know what — maybe laying off on the Russia investigation — but his announcement last Friday is obviously part of the concluding steps of such negotiations.
What Trump has done with his announcement is send a clear message to the CIA: “Give me what I want and I’ll give you want you want. Otherwise, I will let all your cherished long-secret records relating to the JFK assassination be shown to the American people.”
Make no mistake about it: A deal is about to be made. The CIA will cave. It will end up giving Trump whatever it is he wants. Trump is in the driver’s seat because the CIA cannot afford to permit the American people to see the records it wants to continue to be kept secret. And once the CIA gives Trump what he wants, he will cave and give the CIA the continued secrecy it so desperately needs. All this will happen by this Thursday, the date set by law for release of all the JFK records that Trump has not blocked.
Think about it: The CIA has asked the president to continue secrecy of records that are more than 50 years old or, apparently, some relating to secret correspondence between the CIA and the Assassination Records Review Board back in the 1990s.
The CIA’s ground? “National security” of course, the two most important and meaningless words in the American political lexicon.
National security? Really?
Whatever definition that one might put on that nebulous term, no reasonable person can honestly believe that the release of 50-year-old records are going to result in the United States falling into the ocean or even that the communists are going to take over the federal government.
The CIA says that releasing its decades-old JFK records will reveal secret “methods” of intelligence gathering.
Really? What, like the CIA was using typewriters instead of computers and pay telephones instead of cell phones?
What is amazing (or not) is the extreme nonchalance of the mainstream media to the CIA’s request for continued secrecy. That should be big news. It’s essentially an admission of guilt, given that it is absolutely ludicrous to think that “national security” would be threatened by the release of the CIA’s long-secret JFK-assassination-related records.
Does any of this really matter anymore? Another question of mine: “What if?”
What if the files reveal the CIA was directly behind the assassination (with or without a second shooter), acting on behalf of the central bankers, with the Cubans as a convenient cover? What if the dream conspiracy turns out to be fact? Then what?
Nothing is what. None of the surviving conspirators (if any) would be rounded up and tried for treason. The CIA would not be disbanded. The Fed would continue stretching the economy beyond the point of no return. The media would say little. The people would care less – if they even noticed.
This, assuming it happened to be true, might have been Earth-shattering in 1977. In 2017 it’s a non issue, behind the Kardashians’s latest … whatever.
How many CIA and other government programs have been revealed to be criminal deceits? What’s one more?
I’d like to see all the information, good, bad, or ugly. But, whatever I’m looking for, a change isn’t it.
National Archives.
23 Monday Oct 2017
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
I’ve recommended Harvey Silverglate’s book before, here. Now, read what he knows, personally, about America’s favorite Special Prosecutor: I’ll leave the case entrapment to your clicking, on the SP in general:
Yet despite the constitutional issues, the most serious problem with a special counsel is that when a prosecutor is appointed to examine closely the lives and affairs of a pre-selected group of targets, that prosecutor is almost certain to stumble across multiple actions that might be deemed criminal under the sprawling and incredibly vague federal criminal code.
In Mueller’s case, one can have a very high degree of confidence that he will uncover alleged felonies within the ranks of the inner circle of the President’s men (there are very few women to investigate in this administration). This could well include Trump himself.
I described this phenomenon long before Trump began his improbable rise, in my 2009 book “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent” (Encounter Books, updated edition, 2011). I explained how federal “fraud” statutes were so vague that just about any action in the daily life of a typically busy professional might be squeezed into the elastic definition of some kind of federal felony. Harvard Law Professor (and, I should note, my former professor and subsequent longtime friend and colleague) Alan Dershowitz has beaten me to the punch, making the case in a raft of articles and on TV and radio that none of the evidence thus far leaked to or adduced by investigative reporters constitute federal crimes.
But Mueller’s demonstrated zeal and ample resources virtually assure that indictments will come, even in the absence of actual crimes rather than behavior that is simply “politics as usual”. If Mueller claims that Trump or members of his entourage committed crimes, it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily so. We should take Mueller and his prosecutorial team with a grain of salt. But a grain of salt seems an outmoded concept in an age when both sides – Trump and his critics – seem impervious to inconvenient facts. The most appropriate slogan for all the combatants on both sides of the Trump wars (including, alas, the reporters and their editors) might well be: “Don’t confuse me with the facts; my mind is made up.”
Laws are like spiders’ webs… Yesterday, Clinton and Libby. Today Manafort. Maybe tomorrow, you. But, then, you ain’t done nothing wrong. Right?
20 Friday Oct 2017
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
I heard talk of a real budget coming from and for D.C. soon. It’s been a while. In that time, the makeshift measures have done wonders – assuming everyone wants the country bankrupted.
Real federal spending in fiscal 2017, which ended on Sept. 30, was higher than in any year in the history of the United States other than fiscal 2009, which was the year that President Barack Obama’s $840 billion stimulus law was enacted.
Fiscal 2017 also saw the second highest real federal individual income tax totals of any year in U.S. history, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today.
Total federal tax revenues were the third highest in U.S. history.
While it was collecting the third highest total tax revenues in U.S. history, the federal government ran a deficit $665,712,000,000 because of its high total spending.
Republicans have controlled the House of Representatives since 2011, after winning a majority of seats in the 2010 election. They have controlled the Senate since 2015, after winning a majority in the 2014 election. In fiscal years 2016 and 2017, a Congress in which the Republican Party controls both houses was responsible for enacting all federal spending legislation.
Total federal spending in fiscal 2017, according to the Treasury, was $3,980,605,000,000. Total federal tax revenue was $3,314,893,000.
Prior to this year, the highest level of real federal spending was the $4,024,794,600,000 in constant 2017 dollars (adjusted using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator) that the Treasury spent in fiscal 2009.
In the years after 2009, real federal spenpding hit its lowest level ($3,633,572,490,000 in constant 2017 dollars) in fiscal 2014. In fiscal years 2015, 2016, and 2017 federal spending has been on the rise again—reaching this year’s $3,980,605,000,000, the second highest spending level in the nation’s history.
On the tax side, federal individual income taxes hit their all-time peak in fiscal 2015, when the Treasury took in $1,598,265,180,000 in constant 2017 dollars in individual income taxes.
Record taxes and they still run record deficits and debt. We can call 2017 the year of the Beast’s Billion…
Check this graph (in constant, inflation-adjusted dollars):
CNS.
Now, imagine an overlay of the debt doubling about every 8 to 10 years. Next up! $40 Trillion!!!
The Swamp drains the Country.
18 Wednesday Oct 2017
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on Just Say ‘No’: The War Epidemic
Tags
"war" on drugs, America, crime, culture, drugs, Jeff Sessions, law, Senate, War
AG Jeff Sessions testified today before a gang of clowns Senate panel. They discussed A LOT. They talked about Russia. Then Russia again. This was followed by further talk about Russia.
Then they talked about drugs, specifically opioids. They say we have an epidemic of abuse and fraud in America. And, the low-caliber, tax-feeding nature of these discussants aside, we really do.
Last year something like 70,000 people died from taking and/or abusing opioids – either the doctor blessed kind or the cartel brews. That’s a lot of bodies: about 280 times as many people killed by “assault rifles” and about 6 times as many people killed in all murders combined; about twice as any people as were killed by “assault” automobiles. Yes, yes, 70,000 is less than 1/10th of the numbers killed annually by either sugar or abortion, but this is about Sessions’s comments on the dope.
Sessions channeled his inner Nancy Reagan: Just Say ‘No.‘ Seriously.
His full (and I mean 3+ hours FULL) comments, here:
U.S. Clown Show Senate/YouTube.
All this has me thinking – this is a very serious and deadly subject. Maybe we should declare a war. The War on Drugs™! We’ve never tried anything like it so what could it possibly hurt?
After all: our war on poverty completely eradicated all poorness and suffering; our war on terror has eliminated all violence throughout the Middle East and from places like New York, London, Nice, Berlin, Orlando, Paris, and Minneapolis; our wars in Korea and Vietnam removed all traces communism from Asia; and our war on monetary policy has forever halted the down parts of the business cycle. And, all of these were achieved quickly and for very low cost.
As a first step I would recommend making drugs illegal.
As an interim measure I might make a dog and pony show of pretending to crack down on powerful special interest groups. Maybe a few show trials.
The last thing I would do is try to figure out why on Earth 70,000 citizens and residents of the greatest nation in the history of the world would feel desperate enough to resort to mind and body-killing narcotics as their (perceived) only way out. No sense in that.
Just say ‘No.”
PERRIN LOVETT 
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