Quotulatiousness

July 22, 2013

When is an “arrest” not really an arrest?

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Answer: when you try to sue them for false arrest:

The Portland police and City Attorney are making an argument in federal court this month that gives another glimpse into the increasing claims of authority of police in our society. Scott Miller was stopped for jaywalking by Officer Dean Halley in 2010 and admitted that he committed the common violation of pedestrians. The officer however proceeded to handcuff him, tell him “you’re under arrest,” throw him into the back of a cruiser and then drove him a block away. He was in custody for about 30 minutes, but Deputy City Attorney William Manlove is arguing that citizens cannot sue because such acts do not constitute an actual arrest. They are something between a chat and custody, but not an arrest for purposes of legal action.

So, according to Portland, this constitutes just being detained and is effectively beyond any challenge of a citizen. In other words, police can routinely handcuff citizens, lock them in court and even tell them that they are under arrest without being subject to accountability for wrongful arrests.

Deputy City Attorney William Manlove insists that when Miller briefly jaywalked one morning while trying to catch a bus, he could be detained and handcuffed but not treated as an arrested person despite the express statement of the officer. It is an argument that would allow officers virtually unchecked authority in handcuffing citizens and holding them. It is the perfect authoritarian loophole and the city Portland wants to help establish it for future cases.

When Officer Friendly roughs you up, searches your car, and detains you for an indeterminate period of time, in no way does that imply that your rights have been infringed, citizen. Move along … nothing to see here.

July 21, 2013

Sad tale of whiskey theft

Filed under: Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:46

It puzzles me why the alleged thief didn’t just sell the stuff and buy (far cheaper) modern booze with the proceeds.

The owner of an historic inn in Pittsburgh has brought charges against a former tenant she says was supposed safeguard 50 bottles of vintage whiskey valued at more than $100,000 but drank it all instead.

The owner of the South Broadway Manor Bed and Breakfast, Patricia Hill, found 104 bottles of Old Farm Pure Rye Whiskey when she bought the historic mansion and converted it into a bed and breakfast. It had originally belonged to Pittsburgh businessman J.P. Brennan.

The whiskey had been distilled in 1912 and given to Brennan in 1918, she told ABC News affiliate WTAE.

“There were four cases, 52 bottles, manufactured by an old distillery here in the Township that went out of business many years ago,” Barry Pritts, chief of police in Scottdale, Pa., said today.

He said the bottles had been made and sold before Prohibition and then passed down.

H/T to Doug Mataconis for the link.

Reason.tv – Detroit’s Tragedy and How to Fix It

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:12

The key things about Detroit’s bankruptcy are that it didn’t happen overnight – and it didn’t have to happen at all.

Detroit’s long, sad slide started in 1950, when the Motor City’s population peaked at nearly 2 million people. Now it’s around 700,000.

The hollowing out of the city was on gut-wrenching display in two recent exhibits at the National Building Museum, featuring photographs by Camilo Jose Vergara and Andrew Moore.

In fat times and lean, the city’s pols and power-brokers chose to focus their energy, and the residents’ tax dollars on gigantic, big-ticket development scams while ignoring the basics that let cities thrive — or at least survive.

Detroit’s leaders poured money into a never-ending assembly line of sad-sack projects such as the Renaissance Center, the Fox Theater, Comerica Park, Poletown, the People Mover, and Ford Field.

But unlike Pompei and other cities crushed by Nature’s wrath or God’s wrath, Detroit’s destruction is completely man-made and thus can be reversed. The city that midwifed the Model T and the Cadillac, Bob Seger and Eminem, Ted Nugent and the Insane Clown Posse, still has tremendous assets in terms of infrastructure, location, and people.

Like Buffalo, Cleveland, St. Louis, and other dead cities scattered across the map of the industrial Midwest like so many cigarette burns, Detroit can stage its own comeback by reducing crime and picking up garbage; by freeing kids, parents, and property values from an abysmal school system; and getting the government out of everything that isn’t essential.

In other words, Detroit’s leaders only need to do what they should have been doing for the past 50 years. And the city’s dwindling supply of residents needs to keep them honest this time.

Because Detroit is finally out of next times.

Produced by Jim Epstein. Written and narrated by Nick Gillespie. Additional camera by Meredith Bragg.

July 19, 2013

Protectionist law from 1920 strangling economies of Hawaii and Puerto Rico

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Keli’i Akina wants the US government to amend or (better) repeal the 1920 Jones Act:

What’s the best way to destroy the economy of an island or largely coastal region? From the Peloponnesian War to the 1960s confrontation between Cuba and the United States, the answer has been to impose an embargo. In effect, that’s what the United States has been doing for decades to its non-contiguous regions such as Hawaii and Puerto Rico as well as Alaska and much of the East and West Coasts. The culprit in this economically self-defeating practice is a little-understood federal statute called the Jones Act. The 1920 maritime cabotage law specifies that ships carrying cargo between two American ports must: 1) be built in the United States, 2) be 75% owned by U.S. citizens, 3) be largely manned by a United States citizen crew, and 4) fly the United States’ flag.

In 2012, the Federal Reserve Board of New York issued a warning to the federal government that, unless Puerto Rico is granted an exemption from these Jones Act rules, its economy would likely tank. Following suit, the World Bank released a statement announcing that it will cut back its financing of projects in Puerto Rico and begin encouraging investors to look to Jamaica as a new international shipping hub. Puerto Rico’s legislature, governor, and resident commissioner in Congress have voiced loud objections. They join a growing chorus of outrage which includes Alaska, whose legislature has passed a law (Sec. 44.19.035) requiring the governor lobby Congress for reprieve from the Jones Act.

The Jones Act creates an artificial scarcity of ships due to the inefficiency and the extraordinary cost of U.S. ship construction, driving up cargo costs and limiting domestic commerce. Through World War II the United States was a leading producer of merchant ships. Today we build less than one percent of the world’s deep draft tonnage, and the ships produced domestically for the commercial market come at a hefty price.

July 18, 2013

Foodstamps as a form of corporate welfare

Filed under: Business, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:43

Mike Krieger explains how the US foodstamp program can be seen as a form of corporate welfare:

This ridiculously condescending budget put out by McDonald’s in partnership with Visa has been making the rounds today. I’ll allow excerpts from the Gothamist article on it and their corresponding video do most of the explaining, but the key point I want to hammer into people is that food stamps are corporate welfare. They actually are not welfare for the workers themselves, who undoubtably don’t have wonderful lives. What ends up happening is that because the government comes in and supplements egregiously low wages with benefits like food stamps, the companies don’t have to pay living wages. So in effect, your tax money is being used to support corporate margins. Even better, many of these folks who get the food stamp benefits then turn around and spend them at the very companies which refuse to pay them decent wages. Who benefits? CEOs and shareholders. Who loses? Society.

From the Gothamist post by Nell Casey:

Let’s take a look at what else McDonald’s imagines its employees’ expenditures should look like. First off, the site sets employees’ mortgage/rent at $600, which even if we didn’t live in an outrageously expensive city is still a laughably small figure. Next, the site tallies health insurance at a mere $20 per month. Where is this magical land of nearly free independent healthcare? We want Obama’s unicorn to fly us there! Also as a McDonald’s employee, your cable and phone bills should only come to $100 a month (HA!), your electric bill should hover around $90 (for serious?) and apparently if you work at a fast food chain there’s absolutely no need to ever buy any food ever. Maybe they offer employees a lifetime supply of fries?

So tallying up all of these totally realistic expenses, a McDonald’s employee would need to net $2,060 per month to make this budget work. Broken down, that would mean working at least 40 hours per week and making at least $15 an hour pre-taxes to earn the necessary $12.86 an hour. Currently, McDonald’s workers earn an average of $8.25 per hour, barring any funny business.

Update: A couple of comments have been logged on this post, and Megan McArdle’s first Bloomberg column also addresses the McDonalds/Visa budget thingy:

Speaking of food, a sample budget put together by Visa Inc. and McDonald’s Corp. is rocketing around the Internet. Most of the commentary suggests that McDonald’s is heartless, and gauche, to suggest how its employees might live on the embarrassingly paltry wages that they are paid. (According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey of 2009-11, median earnings for a fast-food worker were $18,564 a year.) The budget is based on two jobs, which has aroused special ire: Is McDonald’s telling its employees to get a second job so they don’t have to pay them anything?

[…]

Keep in mind that most McDonald’s workers don’t live close to New York City or Washington, the sources of much of the commentary I’ve seen. These are, respectively, the first- and fourth-most-expensive cities in the country. In many areas, the median after-tax household income is not that far from that on the McDonald’s worksheet, and it’s pretty easy to rent a room in a friend’s house for less than $600 a month. Memphis, Tenn., for example, has a median household income of $35,000, which, according to Paycheckcity.com’s take-home calculator, would give a single person about $2,300 a month after taxes. And that’s the median — 50 percent of the city is below that. You should not develop a theory of household finance that declares that the city of Memphis does not exist.

Survival on such a lean budget is possible because people who do it are not trying to live the atomized life of an upper-middle-class college graduate. They band together, sharing rent, cars and cash when needed, handing down clothes and generally spreading fixed costs over as many people as possible.

Should McDonald’s pay enough to support a thrifty-but-not-too-difficult independent lifestyle? Is that now the minimum decent standard for society? Obviously, a lot of people think that they should. Washington’s City Council just passed a “living wage” law directly targeted at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. that aims to force the retailer to pay its workers $12.50 an hour.

What would that look like nationwide? Let’s set the floor a little above the amount in the budget — about $27,500 after taxes, which will allow them to enjoy the full McDonald’s budget, plus health insurance on an exchange. That’s a minimum wage of $13.75 an hour for a full-time worker, almost double the current minimum; obviously, everyone else would also have to be paid more. The minimum that a two-earner household could bring in would be $55,000 a year — not that far from the current median income for a two-earner household.

Even if it were possible to mandate that everyone in the country make almost the median income, this would come with a cost; I’d guess that most economists would agree that such a hike in the minimum wage would cause fairly significant job losses.

The cost of withdrawal

Filed under: Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:14

A couple of days ago, I posted an item on the costs of removing military equipment from Afghanistan (that is, due to lack of direct port access, thousands of tons of gear have to be flown out at an eye-watering $14,000 per ton). The Washington Post had an article yesterday discussing the customs dispute between the US military and the Afghan government which is making the situation even more fraught:

An escalating dispute between the Afghan government and the United States over customs procedures has halted the flow of U.S. military equipment across Afghanistan’s borders, forcing commanders to rely more heavily on air transport, which has dramatically increased the cost of the drawdown, according to military officials.

The Afghan government is demanding that the U.S. military pay $1,000 for each shipping container leaving the country that does not have a corresponding, validated customs form. The country’s customs agency says the American military has racked up $70 million in fines.

If left unresolved, the disagreement could inflate the price tag of the U.S. military drawdown by hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars because of the higher cost of shipping by air — an unwelcome expenditure at a time when the Pentagon is scrambling to cope with steep congressionally mandated budget cuts and the White House is attempting to jump-start negotiations over a long-term security cooperation deal with Kabul.

The Afghan government’s demand for payment is part of a broader dispute over Kabul’s authority to tax entities from the United States, its chief benefactor. As the war economy that for years bankrolled Afghanistan’s political elite starts to deflate, the government is increasingly insisting that U.S. defense contractors pay business taxes and fines for a range of alleged violations.

H/T to Doug Mataconis who also wrote:

We invaded Afghanistan, arguably liberating them from the grip of the Taliban and their al Qaeda allies. We’ve spent ten years or so fighting to protect the government of Hamid Karzai from those same forces. And now they want to charge us to leave? Surely, this is a first, isn’t it? On the other hand, I can see a benefit here. If we knew going into a war that we’d have to pay money to get out at the end perhaps we’d be less willing to start it.

July 17, 2013

Nonsense on stilts – Civil libertarians “caused” 9/11, so we have to curtail civil liberties

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:02

While some pro-surveillance folks may be content to hint that the world is a far more dangerous place if we don’t let the NSA have access to everyone’s electronic communications, there are others willing to go a lot further:

    And so, when a law enforcement task force of the FBI found out in August of 2001 that al Qaeda had sent two dangerous operatives to the United States, it did … nothing. It was told to stand down; it could not go looking for the two al Qaeda operatives because it was on the wrong side of the wall. I believe that FBI task force would have found the hijackers — who weren’t hiding — and that the attacks could have been stopped if not for a combination of bad judgment by the FISA court (whose minimization rules were later thrown out on appeal) and a climate in which national security concerns were discounted by civil liberties advocates on both sides of the aisle.

Got that? Anyone advocating for basic civil liberties is to blame for 9/11. Holy fuck. This kind of thinking is about as anti-American as I can think of. As we’ve discussed, protecting civil liberties is at the core of the American way of life. “Give me liberty or give me death” is the phrase that Patrick Henry chose, and apparently Stewart Baker believes the American motto should be “you’re all going to die if you fight for civil liberties!” Shameful.

[…]

    Forty years later, though, we’re still finding problems with this experiment. One of them is that law changes slowly while technology changes quickly. That usually means Congress has to change the law frequently to keep up. But in the context of intelligence, it’s often hard to explain why the law needs to be changed, let alone to write meaningful limits on collection without telling our intelligence targets a lot about our collection techniques. A freewheeling and prolonged debate — and does Congress have any other kind? — will give them enough time and knowledge to move their communications away from technologies we’ve mastered and into technologies that thwart us. The result won’t be intelligence under law; it will be law without intelligence.

Basically, shut up with the debate, just let us go back to spying on fucking everyone. If we actually have to “debate” and “protect the Constitution,” some “bad guys” might talk without us knowing about it. And then we’ll all die.

[…]

He then tries to flip the whole thing around and argue that supporters of civil liberties are actually anti-technology, because they’re trying to limit the government’s use of technology. That’s ridiculous, since many of the loudest supporters of civil liberties come from the tech and innovation communities. No one thinks the government shouldn’t make efficient use of technology — but that’s very different from saying it’s okay for the government to either convince or force companies to cough up all sorts of private data on everyone or risk the wrath of the US government. That’s not a fair fight. The government has the power to compel people and companies to do things that they would not do otherwise, though I guess an extreme authoritarian like Baker either doesn’t realize this or doesn’t see it as a problem.

At the end, he makes a bunch of claims about how it’s the US government’s job to “protect” everyone — though I’d like to see where that’s laid out in the Constitution. As mentioned above, he makes some valid points that other countries are just as bad, if not worse, but that’s hardly a compelling argument, because that just allows others to flip it around, and claim that the US has no moral high ground, since it’s ignoring the civil liberties of the public — something that Baker notes he directly supports in this testimony — for some vague and impossible promises of “safety.”

July 16, 2013

The authoritarian wing of the same-sex marriage campaign

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:28

A. Barton Hinkle wonders if gay couples can live and let live:

It was a great day when the Supreme Court struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act and threw out a California case that could have undermined gay marriage in the Golden State. On that day, gay and lesbian citizens won something profoundly important: acknowledgment of the right to live as they choose, without interference from others who think they know better.

Now the question is: Will gay and lesbian citizens acknowledge that everybody else has the same right? Some certainly will. But others are challenging the notion – and thereby undermining the case for their own hard-won victory.

David Mullins and Charlie Craig, for instance. The gay Colorado couple have filed a discrimination complaint against the owners of Masterpiece Cakeshop, who declined for religious reasons to make them a wedding cake. The Colorado attorney general’s office has taken their side. So, regrettably, has the ACLU.

And they have company: Similar complaints have been brought against bakeries in Oregon, Indianapolis, and Iowa; a Hawaiian bed-and-breakfast; a Vermont inn; a Washington florist; a Kentucky T-shirt company; and more. As gay marriage gains ground, cases such as these likely will flourish.

As they do, they will lend credence to the otherwise ludicrous assertion by social conservatives that there is a “homosexual agenda.” It will remain absurd to suggest gay people are trying to turn straight people gay. Changing other people’s sexual orientation has always been a conservative project, not a liberal one. But it will cease being absurd to suggest that requests for tolerance are actually demands for approval – and that those who claim to celebrate diversity actually insist upon ideological uniformity.

State of play in the surveillance state

Filed under: Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:38

If you’re just getting back from an extended vacation with no access to the news, “George Washington” at Zero Hedge has a cheat-sheet on spying that you might want to have a look at:

Lots more at Zero Hedge.

QotD: American justice

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

The defining characteristic of English law is its distribution of power between prosecutor, judge, and jury. This delicate balance has been utterly corrupted in the United States to the point where today at the federal level there is a conviction rate of over 90 percent — which would impress Mubarak and the House of Saud, if not quite, yet, Kim Jong Un. American prosecutors have an unhealthy and disreputable addiction to what I called, at the conclusion of the trial of my old boss Conrad Black six years ago, “countless counts.” In Conrad’s case, he was charged originally with 17 crimes, three of which were dropped by the opening of the trial and another halfway through, leaving 13 for the jury, nine of which they found the defendant not guilty of, bringing it down to four, one of which the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional and the remaining three of which they vacated, only to have two of them reinstated by the lower appeals court. In other words, the prosecution lost 88 percent of the case, but the 12 percent they won was enough to destroy Conrad Black’s life.

Multiple charges tend, through sheer weight of numbers, to favor a result in which the jury convict on some and acquit on others and then tell themselves that they’ve reached a “moderate” “compromise” as befits the reasonable persons they assuredly are. It is, of course, not reasonable. Indeed, the notion of a “compromise” between conviction and acquittal is a dagger at the heart of justice. It’s the repugnant “plea bargain” in reverse, but this time to bargain with the jury: Okay, we threw the book at him and it went nowhere, so why don’t we all agree to settle? In Sanford, the state’s second closing “argument” to the strange, shrunken semi-jury of strikingly unrepresentative peers — facts, shmacts, who really knows? vote with your hearts — brilliantly dispenses with the need for a “case” at all.

Mark Steyn, “A Dagger at the Heart of Justice”, National Review, 2013-07-15

July 15, 2013

Edward Snowden as the modern Prisoner

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:34

Justin Raimondo responds to Melissa Harris-Perry’s open letter to Edward Snowden:

Why didn’t Edward Snowden agree to be jailed, abused, silenced, and quite possibly tortured? This is what Melissa Harris-Perry wants to know.

Harris-Perry is one of MSNBC’s minor weekend anchors, a professor currently at Tulane University who started out retailing her academic pretensions as a sometime guest on the Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes shows: her job was to inject fancy words like “discourse” and “paradigm” into the standard lefty-“progressive” boilerplate propaganda we’ve come to expect from that venue. With a magisterial tone bordering on the parodic, and complete protection from having to defend her views against any contrary opinions, Harris-Perry soon carved out a niche for herself as a dogged defender of the Obama administration, no matter what the circumstances. So when Snowden emerged as the biggest whistleblower in American history, exposing the existence of a secret surveillance apparatus that snakes into every aspect of American life, she sprang to the Dear Leader’s defense and delivered an “open letter” to Snowden that underscores why no one needs to take her seriously

[. . .]

Listening to Harris-Perry’s tirade, I wondered whether I had stumbled on a heretofore unknown episode of The Prisoner, the cult classic 1960s television series written by and starring Patrick McGoohan, in which a former British intelligence agent who has committed some unknown treason finds himself imprisoned in a place known as The Village. McGoohan’s pioneering series presents a prescient portrait of the anesthetizing Prozac-ed out mass culture of America today: the Village, with it’s pastel houses, outfitted with every comfort, are set in a garden-like “controlled community,” where calming voices are carried on the wind and daily medication prevents coherent thought. Everyone is subject to 24-hour surveillance, and cameras are everywhere. Each episode tells the story of one unsuccessful escape attempt after another, while McGoohan – the prisoner – probes ever deeper into the true nature of the Village. We don’t know what crime he’s been imprisoned for, but the clear implication is that it’s something big, almost Snowden-like. I’m surprised no one has brought up the McGoohan connection: the story lines are parallel if not identical. Snowden seems to be fleshing out McGoohan’s scripts in the front page headlines of every newspaper.

In the series, the Village employs its agents, who are constantly trying to entrap McGoohan into confessing to his alleged crimes, and giving up some Big Secret he supposedly possesses, but he resists. Harris-Perry, in her faux concern for the issues raised by Snowden’s exposure of massive government spying on innocent Americans, is straight out of an episode of The Prisoner, in which an agent of the Village tells him to give up his secret because his “level of celebrity” will somehow protect him. Really? Not, I suspect, if Harris-Perry and her fellow Madam Defarges over at MSNBC have anything to say about it.

I agree with Harris-Perry on one point: it is valid to discuss Snowden, his politics, his personal journey from agent of the state to enemy of the state, but unlike her I don’t think this detracts at all from the actual content of the documents he has made available to Glenn Greenwald and the staff of the Guardian newspaper. Greenwald tells a very interesting back story to all this in his talk given at the “Socialism” conference, in which he relates how and under what circumstances he met Snowden, and how that meeting inspired him to think about how real change comes about.

Expensive military gear to become piles of scrap

Filed under: Economics, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Strategy Page explains why billions of dollars in military equipment will be scrapped in Afghanistan:

It’s going to cost some $14 billion to deal with $26 billion worth of American equipment in Afghanistan. Half that cost will be for shipping gear out, but the other $7 billion will be the cost of equipment not worth shipping home and either destroyed or donated to the Afghans. About 78,000 tons of gear will be destroyed, including over 2,000 armored vehicles. Some has to be moved, given to the Afghan security forces, sold locally or destroyed. About 9,000 MRAPs will be sent back to the United States.

Unlike Iraq, where heavy stuff, like armored vehicles and trucks, could simply drive to a nearby port and put on a ship, Afghanistan has no ports. The nearest ones are in Pakistan and the road trip is expensive and dangerous because of the theft and the threat of attacks (by terrorists or gangsters seeking “protection” fees). So a lot more gear will be flown out of Afghanistan, which is quite expensive. The current plan calls for 28,000 vehicles and 20,000 shipping containers of gear are to be moved by the end of 2014.

The U.S. and NATO supplies coming in (or going out) via railroad from Western Europe, go through Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, to Afghanistan. This approach costs $400 a ton to move material to or from Afghanistan, versus three times that to truck it in from Pakistani ports, or $14,000 a ton to fly stuff in, or $10,000 a ton if you just fly material in from a friendly (Persian Gulf) port. For example, $600,000 MRAPs (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) cost $140,000 to fly in from the Gulf. Some 2,000 of these MRAPs in Afghanistan are no longer needed by the United States or the Afghan forces so are being cut up for scrap in Afghanistan.

July 14, 2013

“The very definition of grand strategy is holding ends and means in balance to promote the security and interests of the state”

Filed under: Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:18

At the Anti-War blog, John Glaser looks at the ongoing costs of empire:

In Foreign Affairs, Michael O’Hanlon and Bruce Riedel suggest a cost-saving measure for America’s empire in the Middle East: opening more U.S. military bases in the region. Instead of relying as it has on expensive “aircraft carriers in and near the Persian Gulf,” the U.S. should move its military presence back onto land in at least three different Gulf states.

The primary purpose of having U.S. military bases peppered throughout the Middle East has traditionally been to exert control over geo-politically vital oil-rich countries and to allow for a rapid and coordinated use of military force at Washington’s command. As a Top Secret National Security Council briefing put it in 1954, “the Near East is of great strategic, political, and economic importance,” as it “contains the greatest petroleum resources in the world” as well as “essential locations for strategic military bases in any world conflict.”

O’Hanlon and Riedel don’t even consider the legitimacy of America’s military presence in the Middle East; for them, it is a natural law that can’t be questioned. So when faced with strained budgets that can’t support a sprawling, costly, and unwarranted empire, they try to figure minor cost cutting measures around the edges instead of reevaluating our military postures as a whole.

A CSIS report last year took a different tack, arguing that “disappearing finances; rising alternative power centers; declining US military predominance; lack of efficacy of key non-military instruments of power; and reduced domestic patience for global adventures,” all require a rethinking of U.S. grand strategy with an eye towards roll-back.

    The very definition of grand strategy is holding ends and means in balance to promote the security and interests of the state. Yet, the post-war US approach to strategy is rapidly becoming insolvent and unsustainable – not only because Washington can no longer afford it but also, crucially, because it presumes an American relationship with friends, allies, and rivals that is the hallmark of a bygone era. If Washington continues to cling to its existing role on the premise that the international order depends upon it, the result will be increasing resistance, economic ruin, and strategic failure.

That first sentence there is one of the most honest you’ll ever see from an elite DC foreign policy think tank. U.S. foreign policy is ultimately promoting “the security and interests of the state.” It isn’t for your sake. It benefits the government and the private interests aligned with it.

The Zimmerman trial

Filed under: Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:21

I haven’t written anything about the Zimmerman trial in Florida, and (I just checked) haven’t linked to anything about it either. I don’t watch TV, so I managed to avoid the round-the-clock coverage on US networks, too. As a result, I’m less surprised at the jury’s decision than a lot of people seem to be. For my fellow (in this case) low-information readers, Doug Mataconis wraps up the trial:

… I really don’t see the kind of instant trial analysis that was occurring on each of the cable networks covering the case to be of any value. Indeed, I think that kind of analysis tends to cloud the way that viewers see the case because, unlike the jurors, they are being exposed not just to what unfolds when the camera shows witness testimony but also what they analysts, both pro-defense and pro-prosecution, are telling them. The feeling was reinforced as I watched this case being discussed on social media over the past three weeks and it became apparent to me that many people had already made up their minds about Zimmerman’s guilt or innocence and were viewing the case accordingly. Rulings that Judge Debra Nelson, the presiding Judge, made that were in favor of one side or the others were viewed as being part of some conspiracy. Even when she denied the Defense’s Motion for Judgment of Acquittal at the end of the State’s case, something that happens in pretty much every criminal case given that Judges are loathe to take a case out of a jury’s hands unless there’s simply no evidence to support guilt, it was seen by Zimmerman supporters as a sign that he was the victim of a judicial set-up.

Now, while I didn’t watch all of the trial, I have watched portions of it, and read about day-to-day events elsewhere to form some basic impressions. Based on that, I’ve got to say that I don’t find this outcome surprising. From the beginning, my general impression was that the prosecution’s case was weak, especially for 2nd Degree Murder, which I never thought was an appropriate charge to begin with since they never seemed to be able to prove the intent element of that crime. Indeed, several of the witnesses that the State called, from police investigators to at least two of the neighbors that acted in response to signs of a struggle outside their homes that fateful night, seemed to be more helpful to Zimmerman’s self-defense claim than they were to establishing the elements of either the primary charge of 2nd Degree Murder or the lesser included offense of Manslaughter. Additionally, the prosecutors chose to put into evidence several statements that Zimmerman had voluntarily given to the Sanford Police Department about the incident that night, including a video he participated in the day after the incident in which he walked through his version of what happened the night before with investigating detectives. While there were some minor inconsistencies between several of these statements, none of those inconsistencies seemed extreme enough to doubt his credibility and all of them were consistent with the basic outline of his story that Martin attacked him first, they ended up on the ground with Martin punching him, and that he only ended up shooting Martin when he thought his life was in jeopardy. Additionally, several of the State’s witnesses just seemed to hurt their case — including their so-called “star” witness Rachel Jeantel, who was on the phone with Martin moments before his encounter with Zimmerman, and Medical Examiner Shiping Bao, whose testimony came across very badly compared to the expert that the Defense had hired, Dr. Vincent Di Maio, a nationally recognized pathologist.

In the end, as always, it was the state’s burden to prove that George Zimmerman was guilty of the charges against him beyond a reasonable doubt. By the time the case came to an end, there seemed to be a general consensus among observers that they had not done so, most certainly not with regard to 2nd Degree Murder and that the odds of getting a Manslaughter conviction seemed to slip away as well. Although I had assumed for a long time that Zimmerman would have to take the stand in his defense in order to fully be able to relate the self-defense theory to the jury, that proved to not be necessary are at all thanks largely to the fact that the prosecution had put all of Zimmerman’s previous statements to law enforcement into evidence. So, it was no surprise when he told the Judge shortly before the defense rested that he would not be testifying. There really wasn’t any need for him to do so and, in terms of the risks of cross-examination, the risks were far too great. Instead, his attorneys put on a defense that poked holes in the remaining parts of the state’s case. Additionally, while both sides put on strong closing statements, defense attorney Mark O’Mara’s was a tutorial in the touchstone of criminal defense attorneys, reasonable doubt, and it was obviously enough to convince the jury. Adding all of that together, we had a case where the state simply failed to meet its burden notwithstanding being represented by a trio of attorneys who were quite skilled, and quite passionate in presentation of the case the were given.

Update: An actual Florida lawyer asks for the media to do a few simple things:

3. HLN, get rid of Nancy Grace and Jane Velez-Mitchell. They are not legal commentators helping the public understand our important, essential, and treasured criminal justice system. Neither are many of their guests who should never be asked back. There are 95,000 lawyers in Florida, there is no reason a lawyer from another state who doesn’t know Florida law needs to be on daily telling everyone “I don’t practice in Florida, I don’t know Florida law” just because they can yell. Their daily display of drama may be what you believe to be the “First Amendment,” but it is also pathetic, and making people dumber and angrier.

4. CNN needs to send Sonny Hostin and Gloria Allred packing. First of all Piers Morgan, this is a criminal trial in Florida. Why is the only guest you continue to have on is someone from California that doesn’t practice criminal law and is known for representing, at press conferences, women victims? What could she possibly have to offer about this case?

And CNN, especially Anderson Cooper, get rid of Sonny Hostin. This woman was a prosecution shill from the beginning of this trial, struggling to say anything positive about the defense. Last night, after the verdict, she said “justice took the day off.” She wasn’t there to provide commentary, she was shilling for the state. She should have disclosed from the beginning that she desperately wanted a conviction, that way it would have been easier to listen to her biased commentary. She’s terrible and should never be asked to appear in the media again when there is an important trial.

5. The media, especially TV, needs to start vetting their guests. I know these are lawyers with agents, but they’ve never been in a criminal courtroom, or at least not since they spent a year as a prosecutor in 1978. Can you not find lawyers that actually know what they are talking about? Piers Morgan is asking Gloria Allred what she would do in opening in the Zimmerman case? I have a better question, Gloria, when is the last time you gave an opening statement, in any case?

July 13, 2013

What is the real inflation rate?

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:11

The official US inflation rate is around 1% annually. That doesn’t seem quite right to a lot of people who seem to be spending more money for the same goods:

… what Bernanke will never admit is that the official inflation rate is a total sham. The way that inflation is calculated has changed more than 20 times since 1978, and each time it has been changed the goal has been to make it appear to be lower than it actually is.

If the rate of inflation was still calculated the way that it was back in 1980, it would be about 8 percent right now and everyone would be screaming about the fact that inflation is way too high.

But instead, Bernanke can get away with claiming that inflation is “too low” because the official government numbers back him up.

Of course many of us already know that inflation is out of control without even looking at any numbers. We are spending a lot more on the things that we buy on a regular basis than we used to.

For example, when Barack Obama first entered the White House, the average price of a gallon of gasoline was $1.84. Today, the average price of a gallon of gasoline has nearly doubled. It is currently sitting at $3.49, but when I filled up my vehicle yesterday I paid nearly $4.00 a gallon.

And of course the price of gasoline influences the price of almost every product in the entire country, since almost everything that we buy has to be transported in some manner.

But that is just one example.

Our monthly bills also seem to keep growing at a very brisk pace.

Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row, and according to USA Today water bills have actually tripled over the past 12 years in some areas of the country.

No inflation there, eh?

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