The Padilla Precedent

"From this point on, you will enjoy no privileges of rank... no privileges of person. From now on, I will refer to you only as 'human.' You have no other identity."

I have no way of knowing whether that pronouncement, or something very much like it, was uttered by Jose Padilla's captors after he was taken into military custody five years ago. But it certainly summarizes the Bush Regime's view of Padilla, an American citizen (however disreputable) who has been stripped of all legal protection, not only of his due process rights but also of the basic integrity of his person.

Padilla, we were told in 2002, was the key operative in an al-Qaeda plot to detonate a radiological bomb. The "evidence" against him was provided by two identified terrorists -- Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah -- who implicated him after being tortured. A third "witness," Ethiopian refugee Binyam Mohammed (right), likewise named Padilla after being tortured extensively by CIA-aligned thugs in Morocco. Among the methods used to break Mohammed was the expert use of razor blades to make tiny but exquisitely painful incisions all over his body -- including his genitals.


After the bloody-handed simian who defiles the Oval Office designated Padilla an "unlawful enemy combatant," the Bush Regime consigned this American citizen to a Naval brig in South Carolina and systematically worked to destroy his will through psychological torture. A "Declaration" filed by a political hack named Michael Mobbs was presented as the functional equivalent of a grand jury indictment, and a separate "declaration" by Defense Intelligence Agency head Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby was offered to explain why Padilla could not be permitted due process of any kind, including conventional legal representation.

"Any interruption of the intelligence gathering process, especially from an external source [such as legal counsel], risks mission failure," insisted Jacoby. The key to extracting intelligence from Padilla, he continued, was "creating an atmosphere of dependency and trust between the subject and interrogator.... Anything that threatens the perceived dependency and trust between the subject and interrogator directly threatens the value of interrogation as an intelligence-gathering tool."

How are we to know that Padilla was a valuable intelligence source about al-Qaeda, rather than, say, a trivial gang-banger from Chicago whose only serious professional training came at Taco Bell? According to Jacoby, it is enough for us to know that the Grand and Glorious Decider -- and let all stand hushed in awe-struck reverence at the mention of his name -- has "determined" that this is so.

Furthermore, according to Jacoby, "Padilla's capture and detention were the direct result of [similar] effective intelligence gathering efforts" -- you know, like the time those greasy perverts in Morocco took a scalpel to Binyam Mohammed's penis, prompting the victim to say that he would sign anything put in front of him, including a statement implicating a U.S. citizen he didn't know.

Until late 2005, the Regime insisted that Padilla had to be held in military custody indefinitely, because permitting him to be tried in our court system would (let's say it all together) undermine national security. But Bush and his comrades eventually released Padilla for trial when it became clear that the matter was headed for the Supreme Court, and it was possible that the administration could lose. This would imperil the asserted presidential power to designate any U.S. citizen an "enemy combatant" and imprison him in perpetuity.

So the Regime condescended to permit Padilla to have a trial -- on charges that had nothing to do with any of the matters supposedly verified by their "effective intelligence gathering efforts" -- you know, waterboarding, sexual mutilation, that kind of wholesome stuff.

Padilla's trial in Miami is winding down. There has been no mention of a "dirty bomb" plot. Prosecutors have made no mention of Padilla's personal involvement in any terrorist plot of any kind. He may be -- should be -- acquitted.

If so, notes the Christian Science Monitor, the Regime may very well "try to return him to the brig"; if that were to happen, armed insurrection for the purpose of extracting Bush and Cheney from power would not be an inappropriate response. After all, what other recourse would remain if our rulers can simply ignore an acquittal, and imprison a citizen found innocent by his peers?

The former -- seizure of Padilla despite an acquittal -- may happen. The latter -- a righteous armed uprising -- will not, precisely because it is the course of action that would be chosen in such circumstances by the patriots who created our republic. With a scant handful of worthy exceptions, we are not worthy heirs to the Founders' legacy. As the Monitor observed: "Although civil libertarians protested Padilla's detention without charge, there was no significant public outcry."

A likelier outcome would be a guilty verdict of some kind, with the jury thereby validating the Imperious Commander Guy's claim that he can declare any of us to be an un-person outside the law's protection.

This is what the entire exercise has been about all along, and it's why the Regime is determined to keep Padilla imprisoned for life. It would be completely horrifying, and utterly typical of our degenerate culture, if this crucial victory for the cause of Fuhrerprinzip were delivered not by a court or by Congress, but by a jury of common Americans.

I have no brief for Jose Padilla as an individual; he appears to be a standard-issue street thug who got the standard prison-upgrade to minor league Muslim fanatic. But there are gravities of loathsomeness, and Padilla is being used by people immeasurably more evil than he is to accomplish unspeakably vile ends.


Video Extra

The lengthy clip below is from the second part of a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode entitled "Chain of Command." In it we see Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) captured by the militaristic Cardassians, undergoing "enhanced interrogation techniques" intended to help him develop a sense of "dependency and trust" toward his interrogator, the urbane Cardassian Gul (commander) Muldred (David Warner, doing magnificent work through ridiculous make-up).

Patrick Stewart, who played Captain Picard, has long been active in Amnesty International and other groups working against torture. At the time this episode debuted in 1992, some critics reacted with variations on the theme of: "Oh, torture is evil, you say? Well, duh."

It is a cause for sober reflection that a moral conclusion that seemed numbingly obvious in 1992 is now considered akin to sedition when spoken aloud -- and that the Regime ruling us today brazenly employs methods more barbarous than those used by the "Cardassians," who are among the most savage races ever depicted in science fiction.

Building a Better Beast : "Homeland Security" in the US and the PRC

Made in the USA: When Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky was arrested by the KGB about 40 years ago, his guards told him the handcuffs he was wearing were made in America. US investment capital is helping China's thuggish gerontocracy keep its rising entrepreneurial population under surveillance.


Let it not be said that the disastrous and unjustifiable Iraq war has failed to yield commercial spin-offs.

Just as the first Gulf War famously prompted the Chinese General Staff to begin a crash modernization of the People's Liberation Army, the garrison state technology on display in the ongoing occupation of Iraq has inspired Lin Jianghuai, the 38-year-old tech tycoon heading China Public Security Technology, Inc -- a key contractor for the Ministry of Public Security (MSP), Beijing's version of the Department of Homeland Security.

Lin amassed a considerable fortune manufacturing a key component for DVD players. As he followed the progress of the Iraq war, Lin was impressed with the police-oriented hardware deployed by occupation troops, such as the HIIDE (Hand-held Interagency Identity Detection Equipment) system, which is simiar to the Mobilisa "Sentry" identity check device described in this space some months ago.

"I really felt strongly that the police [in China] would absolutely benefit from such technology," Lin recalls. "Bush helped me get my vision."

That's our Bush: Inspiring tyrants from Harare to Beijing.

In pursuit of that "vision," Lin purchased an undistinguished e-commerce business, fused it to a minuscule publicly traded Florida printing company via a "reverse merger," and then renamed the consolidated enterprise "China Public Security," or CPS. Currently traded only in limited fashion, CPS will be traded on the NASDAQ next year, if Lin's ambitions come to fruition. There's no denying that it is a growth stock.

Within a very short time of its creation, CPS attracted capital from two large investment funds in Plano, Texas: Pinnacle Fund and Pinnacle China Fund. Also on board were Roth Capital Partners of Newport Beach, California, New York's Oppenheimer & Company, and First Asia Finance Group of Hong Kong.

China's Ministry of Public Security then awarded Lin's company a contract for developing and deploying a pilot hi-tech surveillance program in Shenzen, a city next to Hong Kong that serves as a computer manufacturing center. At the center of CPS's surveillance system is a "residency card," which is very close kindred to the emerging REAL ID system here in the US.

The computer-readable chip in the Shenzen identity card, reports the New York Times, "will include not just the citizen's name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord's phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China's controversial `one child' policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card."

If the State objects to any element of the individual's life and background, as documented in the card, that individual will not be able to earn a living or participate in the economy.

This system is being described by Chinese authorities as a "pilot program" for a future nation-wide human inventory control apparatus. I can't help but suspect that it's likewise intended to provide a shakedown for the deployment of a very similar system in our own Homeland Security State.

The Pinnacle Fund, as it happens, is a significant investor in US Homeland Security contractors, among them GVI Security Solutions, Inc, which specializes in large-scale surveillance. Not long ago, former Under Secretary of Homeland Security Asa Hutchinson was named to the GVIS board of directors, joining such dubious luminaries as former New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir and Nazzareno Paciotti, formerly of Pinkerton Investigations.

GVIS is just one of numerous corporatist entities looking for easy and secure subsidized profits by building the garrison state both at home and abroad. There will be plenty of work to go around as the Regime builds its own version of the Shenzen Residence Card Information Management System.

The embryo of the U.S. version of that program is the proposed Employment Eligibility Verification System (EEVS) or E-Verify. Adam Thomas of Press Esc offers a tidy summation of how this initiative -- highlighted in a recent White House press release -- will work:

"[E-Verify] will initially require more than 200,000 companies doing Federal business to use the system to establish employment eligibility of new hires and the validity of their Social Security Numbers. Later this system will be expanded to cover all companies and will include photo screening features through agreements to allow E-Verify access to the repository of photographs in the State Department of Motor Vehicles databases."

At the risk of making myself obnoxious on this point as on so many others, I'm constrained to observe that the envisioned role in this scheme played by the State DMVs illustrates yet again that local, independent police agencies have gone the way of the vinyl LP: They're not quite extinct, but might as well be.

Much as it grieves me to do so, I must quote the ACLU's analysis of EEVS/E-Verify: "Under this already flawed program no one would be able to work in the U.S. without DHS [Department of Homeland Security] approval -- creating a `No Work List' similar to the government's `No Fly List.'"



This is being done, of course, as an immigration control measure, and it's propelled by the kind of people -- such as these charming folks -- whose determination to keep Mexicans out of the country is on par with their indifference to the emergence of a garrison state within our country.
Oh, and that's hardly the end of the undertakings outlined by the White House:


*“The Department of Homeland Security will continue to explore effective and cost-efficient means of establishing biometric exit requirements at land border crossings.” (Emphasis added.) As I warned about a year ago, the real point of "border security" under the Homeland Security Regime is to keep us in, not to keep "them" out.

*“Starting January 31, 2008, DHS will phase in a requirement for passports or other secure documents for sea and land ports of entry.” The most tacit but unmistakable intent here is to compel any American who leaves the country for any reason to obtain a "secure" federal ID document; as others have pointed out, this is a necessary step toward the eventual creation of a Soviet-style system of internal passports and checkpoints.

*“The Administration is training hundreds of state and local law enforcement officers to address illegal immigration in their communities.” Wonderful! Allow me to find a bucket to hold my joy. This underscores, yet again, the fact that the entire immigration "crisis" has been exploited as a way to build a police state, with the support -- sometimes grudging, but often enthusiastic -- of the very people who would ordinarily put up at least some resistance.

Following the defeat of the immigration "reform" bill in the Senate last June, Michael Savage -- who helped himself to a large portion of the credit for that result -- shared a provocative thought with his audience. Dr. Savage reported that his evening walks regularly take him by a branch office of the Department of Homeland Security, a facility that includes a large motor pool. Recently, he continued, he has seen row after row of newly painted black buses with blacked-out windows. Those buses, Savage gleefully predicted, are being prepared for the day when illegal immigrants will be gathered by the thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, and forcibly deported.

Wanna bet?


Please visit The Right Source and the Liberty Minute archive.

The Coldest Monster, The Cruelest Slavemaster

Abigail Burroughs, seen here before cancer ravaged her body, died at age 21 after pleading unsuccessfully to use a promising drug called Erbitux, then in final clinical trials but not yet approved by the FDA. Months after Abigail's death, the FDA granted approval amid geysers of self-laudatory praise for making the "life-saving" drug available. Rather than tracking down and beating the tax-fattened bureaucrats who helped kill his daughter -- as he was morally entitled to do -- Abigail's father Frank created the Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs.



It's not that often that we can say with perfect confidence that a judicial ruling will lead directly to the needless agonizing deaths of innocent people. The U.S. Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C. handed down just such a ruling (.pdf) in a case brought against the FDA by the Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs.

Bobbing in the porridge of intellectual perversity served by the court is this particularly unpalatable morsel: "[C]reating constitutional rights to be free from regulation based solely upon a prior lack of regulation would undermine much of the modern administrative state, which, like drug regulation, has increased in scope as changing conditions have warranted."

From this single observation we can extract the logic (if that word can be tortured into applying here) of the entire ruling:

*Constitutional rights are a government artifact, "created" primarily by the courts.

*Since "rights" are creations of the State, they can be summoned into existence, summarily abolished, or modified as the government sees fit, in order to serve the State's "compelling interests."

*The fact that certain freedoms have been historically exercised by Americans -- such as the right to seek alternative treatments for life-threatening conditions, a right exercised by Americans without qualification for most of our nation's history (from the colonial period until 1962) -- is of no consequence when the State decides to expand its own regulatory mandate.

*If, in defiance of the foregoing assumptions, terminally ill patients are permitted to exercise ownership over their health by seeking treatments not approved by government, then the entire rationale for the "administrative" State will be fatally undermined. It is better that we let a few innocent people die in agony, than to permit the State's regulatory powers to be undermined in any way.

Not surprisingly, the court tried to buttress this argument by invoking that all-purpose exterminator of liberties, the "War on Drugs."

If there is a "deeply rooted" right to experimental drugs and other treatment, the court sneers, shouldn't there likewise be a "deeply rooted" right to use marijuana and other narcotics, which weren't subject to federal regulation until 1937?


Well, now that you mention it, the constitutional case for regulating drugs of any kind is thin enough to make Keira Knightley look zaftig by comparison. Operating on such a slender pretext, the State has grown obese and murderous. And the war on narcotics, predictably, has expanded into a war on non-sanctioned medical treatment.

For the DC Appeals Court, the default setting is "paternalistic authoritarianism," which is why sees nothing amiss in decanting lines such as this:

"A prior lack of regulation suggests that we must exercise care in evaluating the untested assertions of a constitutional right to be free from new regulation."

The only way this can make sense if one assumes -- contrary to the text and history of the Constitution (particularly the Ninth Amendment), the commentaries of those who drafted it, the recorded debates of those who ratified it, and the common sense invested in each of us by our Creator -- that individual rights, rather than grants of government power, must be specifically enumerated.

In that mental universe, it is freedom, rather than power, that must be justified. This includes the liberty of peaceful, law-abiding people who suffer terminal illnesses, acting with full knowledge of the risks, to make use of promising experimental drugs that haven't yet earned the unqualified approval of the regulatory bureaucracy.

The court complains that, in essence, "the Alliance insists on a constitutional right to assume any level of risk." Well, why the hell not? If someone confronts the prospect of a lingering, painful death from a terminal disease, doesn't that person have the right to take any risk he deems appropriate in seeking to defeat the disease?

According to the court, the answer is "no" -- because it is the State, acting through the legislature and the regulatory apparatus, that makes "value judgments" of this sort, and the suffering individual has no "constitutional right to override the collective judgment of the scientific and medical communities expressed through the FDA's clinical testing process."

The candor with which the court emits such collectivist nostrums is amazing. And undergirding them is the tacit but unmistakable understanding that from the court's perspective, the State owns each of us, and as slaves, we must defer to the State's power to do as it sees fit -- no matter what needless cruelty results.

In a dissent that is as intellectually taut as the majority opinion is flaccid, Judge Judith Rogers italicizes the obvious -- namely, that the "right of a person to save [his] own life," which was entirely ignored in the decision, is the fundamental human liberty. An illustration of the court's alienation from reality is found in the fact that Rogers considered it necessary to fortify this "Well, duh" proposition by supplying quotes from Blackstone and Samuel Adams on the subject.

It is because of the centrality of this right that "the Alliance's liberty claims are not grounded in the abstract notion of personal autonomy, but rather in the specific right to act to save one's life," Rogers observes. "While the potential cures [that haven't completed FDA testing] may not prove sufficient to save the life of a terminally ill patient, they are surely necessary if there is to be any possibility" of doing so, she contends.

The basic defense of the institution of government is that it is necessary to protect the life and liberties of the individual. Yet in this case, the State is found "interposing itself between a terminally ill patient and [that patient's] only means of prolonging [his] life," a practice that "runs counter to the common law's historical prohibition on interfering with rescue."

Interposition, in the Common Law tradition, was a practice intended to protect the innocent from the lawless violence of others -- not to forbid the innocent to take action to save themselves.

Rogers' dissent is already justly famous for its meditation on the lethal irony of contemporary judicial doctrine regarding "rights":

"In the end, it is startling that the oft-limited rights to marry, to fornicate, to have children, to control the education and upbringing of children, to perform varied sexual acts in private, and to control one's own body even if it results in one's own death or the death of a fetus have all been deemed fundamental rights ... but the right to try to save one's life is left out in the cold despite its textual anchor in the right to life."

The problem here is one not properly perceived by either party in this case, or by either faction on the court: The 1973 Roe v. Wade decision effectively nullified the right to life, not just for human individuals within the womb, but for any class of people who can be written off as non-"viable." Roe did not specify that human "personhood" begins at birth; it simply said that it doesn't occur anytime prior to birth:

"We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer."

In 1982, the lethal logic of Roe was used to justify the eugenic murder of "Baby Doe," an infant born with Down's Syndrome and a defect of the esophagus who was allowed to starve to death rather than undergo rudimentary surgery that would have saved his life. The assumption was that the newborn -- who was unambiguously a human person -- was not "viable" because he would suffer from severe retardation unless he was murdered.

A similar approach was taken in the case of Baby Jane Doe, a New York infant born with spina bifida whose parents declined to seek relatively simple surgery to close the spinal lacuna -- and then set about the task of killing the girl by degrees through calculated, and State-authorized, lethal neglect. The girl's spinal column later healed itself, prompting the parents to seek appropriate medical treatment. But in those cases, a clear precedent was established expanding Roe's license to kill to include vulnerable people who are fully born.

Given this history, it beggars comprehension that the Abigail Alliance's legal strategy in seeking to vindicate the right to life was based on a novel reading of Roe and its (if you'll excuse the expression) offspring: The intention was to demonstrate that (in Judge Rogers' words) the Supreme Court "has developed a sizable body of law regarding the right to a potentially life-saving medical procedure" -- that is, "therapeutic" abortion -- "when the life or health of a pregnant woman is on the line."

Trying to extract a life-affirming line of reasoning from Roe is like seeking to obtain grapes from thorns, figs from thistles, or wisdom from Sean Hannity. It simply cannot happen,because everything reproduces after its kind, and Roe was the grand ancestor of every contemporary manifestation of the Culture of Death, including the capricious denial of medicine to desperate, terminally ill people.


Please visit The Right Source, and check out the Liberty Minute archive.

From Liberty to Force

Thought Criminals: Mark and Deborah Kuhn display the "desecrated" flag that provided the pretext for their arrest.


"[America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.... She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.... [America's] glory is not dominion, but liberty."

John Quincy Adams, July 4, 1821 (emphasis added)



To exercise force abroad, the State must resort to coercion at home. Our present circumstances are somewhat unusual, given that Washington's imperial designs are being sustained with rented troops and borrowed money; this has obviated, at least for a while, the demand for War taxes, exacted from both our treasure and our blood. The day rapidly approaches when such impositions will be made. For now it's useful to contemplate how the war in Iraq is helping cultivate tyrannical habits of mind among the State's armed enforcement agents. U.S. soldiers carrying out the occupation of Iraq routinely break down doors in the middle of the night in search of insurgents and other troublesome individuals.

Here's how the routine is described by Sergeant John Bruhns, who served in Baghdad and Abu Ghraib (the town, not the gulag):

"You run in. And if there's lights, you turn them on--if the lights are working. If not, you've got flashlights.... You leave one rifle team outside while one rifle team goes inside. Each rifle team leader has a headset on with an earpiece and a microphone where he can communicate with the other rifle team leader that's outside.

You go up the stairs. You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall. You have junior-level troops, PFCs [privates first class], specialists will run into the other rooms and grab the family, and you'll group them all together. Then you go into a room and you tear the room to shreds and you make sure there's no weapons or anything that they can use to attack us.

You get the interpreter and you get the man of the home, and you have him at gunpoint, and you'll ask the interpreter to ask him: 'Do you have any weapons? Do you have any anti-US propaganda, anything at all--anything--anything in here that would lead us to believe that you are somehow involved in insurgent activity or anti-coalition forces activity?'

Normally they'll say no, because that's normally the truth," Sergeant Bruhns said. "So what you'll do is you'll take his sofa cushions and you'll dump them. If he has a couch, you'll turn the couch upside down. You'll go into the fridge, if he has a fridge, and you'll throw everything on the floor, and you'll take his drawers and you'll dump them.... You'll open up his closet and you'll throw all the clothes on the floor and basically leave his house looking like a hurricane just hit it.

And if you find something, then you'll detain him. If not, you'll say, 'Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening.' So you've just humiliated this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family and you've destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred homes." (Emphasis added)

Apart from relatively minor details, what Sgt. Bruhns describes here is not that different from a no-knock raid carried out by a paramilitary drug enforcement squad. The element worthy of our particular attention in the Iraq example is the focus on "anti-U.S. propaganda," a description that could apply to any criticism of the occupation. It is fairly common for Iraqis to be detained for possessing "anti-U.S." materials.

I believe that Mark and Deborah Kuhn of Asheville, North Carolina are the first U.S. citizens to experience arrest and detention by military personnel for the supposed offense of publicizing "anti-U.S." sentiments -- in this case, a U.S. flag displayed upside-down and decorated with an anti-Bush display.

As previously recounted in this space, the Kuhns' display was noticed by Staff Sergeant Mark Radford of the North Carolina National Guard, who took offense and, more importantly, took it upon himself to visit the Kuhns and upbraid them for it.

After failing to over-awe the Kuhns, Radford contacted a "fellow National Guardsman" and Iraq veteran -- 25-year-old Brian Scarborough, a newly minted Buncome County Sheriff's Deputy.
Apparently these two heroes decided to show the Kuhns how they take care of business in Baghdad, Hooo-ah.

The foregoing was not intended to mock people who have worn the uniform honorably; such individuals are entitled to respect and, where appropriate, our gratitude. It is my intention to mock Radford and Scarborough, however, since their behavior was that of bullies whose instincts are similar to those who belong to street gangs and other criminal cliques.

This point has been made before, but it bears repeating: Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of law enforcement officers either have or will serve in Iraq. When they return to domestic duty, they will retain certain habits of mind they acquired or refined in combat. Coupled with the ever-increasing militarization of the police, this is a dangerous thing. When this is combined with resentments of the "stab-in-the-back" variety, the results could be catastrophic.

Buncome County Sheriff Van Duncan, who seems to be pretty typical of the new breed (he places a lot of emphasis on "community policing" and expanding the manpower pool), generously conceded that the Kuhns "are allowed to do" what they did with their own flag. However -- and there is always a "however" with people like Duncan -- "if it weren't for young men like Deputy Scarborough, we wouldn't have those rights."

The unpalatable truth is that "young men like Deputy Scarborough" are an acute danger to our rights, and the indispensable tools of those who seek to exterminate our rights.

This isn't because the Brian Scarboroughs are depraved, for the most part; it's because they've been suckled on the Regime's ideology, in which "freedom" is not valued as highly as force, and establishing the state's dominion, rather than protecting individual liberty, is the objective of government.




Please be sure to check out The Right Source and the Liberty Minute archive.

Briefly Considered: Here Comes the Wrecking Ba'al

"Then they [the prophets of Ba'al] called on the name of Ba'al from morning till noon: `O Ba'al, hear us!' they shouted. But there was no response; no one answered. And they danced around the altar they had made. At noon Elijah began to taunt them. `Shout louder!' he said. `Surely he is a god! Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy traveling. Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened.' So they shouted louder and slashed themselves with swords and spears, as was their custom, until the blood flowed. But there was no response, no one answered, no one paid attention." I Kings 18:26-27 (NIV)


It is fortunate that some conscientious soul removed all of the sharp objects from the studio before CNBC's Jim Cramer, who is among the most histrionic evangelists of the Fed's loose money policies, suffered the following breakdown:





Cramer -- like the pagan priests of Ba'al -- is overwrought with anguish because of the indifferent silence from his deity, in this case the Federal Reserve and its current avatar, Ben Bernanke. The Fed has the power to conjure "money" from the ether (in the digital age, most fiat "money" remains purely ethereal anyway), and Bernanke has expatiated on the supposed virtues of official counterfeiting at great length and with considerable passion.

Yet the divine Fed withholds the much-desired benison, even as the sub-prime mortgage industry collapses like a federally constructed highway bridge, crushing lenders and borrowers beneath the weight of its accumulated corruption, and wreaking collateral damage on the entire consumer economy.

As with everything Cramer does on his "Mad Money" program, his August 3 seizure was largely theatrical, and inspired by a desire to cover his posterior. He "went outside of character" to "talk about the humanity of the situation" -- specifically, the 7 million people who accepted former Fed Commissar Greenspan's invitation to take out mortgages on "teaser rates" beginning in 2005. Cramer believes that they will soon lose their homes and suffer ruination.

"I want my conscience clean ...when -- I think `when' not `if' -- things unravel in the way that I've spoken," Cramer explains. Having staged his perfunctory fit of conscience, Cramer has since returned to form, hymning the praises of loose money and speculative investment.

I suspect that Cramer remembers what happened to the original Prophets of Ba'al at Kishon Valley. His fit of conspicuous agony for the "forgotten man" would thus be meant to immunize himself against the possibility of being pitched over the precipice with the other pagan Fed-worshipers when the ruination he foresees really gets underway.


And awaaaaaaay they go: The Prophets of Ba'al experience a brief and invigorating lesson in applied physics before suffering death through deceleration trauma.


















A brief personal note....

I wish to offer my thanks, once again, to those who have contacted me to express their care and concern for Korrin and our family, and particularly those who have generously donated to us; as time permits I intend to express my thanks to each of you personally.

Korrin has been hospitalized for a month, and she has been relocated to a more distant facility to get specialized treatment. I won't be able to see her as often, but her prognosis is very good. I wish to emphasize that her condition, while life-changing, is not directly life-threatening. It has been very difficult for our children to spend nearly the entire Summer without their mother. Once again, to those who have offered prayers and offered financial and material help to our family, thanks and God bless you.

It is because of the developments mentioned above that I have been somewhat austere in writing new posts. This will soon change, and I appreciate your patience.

Please be sure to visit The Right Source and the Liberty Minute archive.

The Imperial Collapse

As is usually the case, Merle Haggard gets it mostly right:

Why don't we liberate these United States,
We're the ones that need it the most.
Let the rest of the world help us for a change,
And let's rebuild America First.

Our highways and bridges are fallin' apart;
Who's blessed an' who has been cursed?
There's things to be done all over the world,
But let's rebuild America First.

Who's on the Hill and who's watchin' the valley?
An' who's in charge of it all?
God bless the Army an' God bless our liberty,
And back-dump the rest of it all.

Yeah, men in position are backin' away: Freedom is stuck in reverse.

Let's get out of Iraq, an' get back on track, and let's rebuild America First.



The deterioration of our infrastructure, a pre-existing condition of which the lethal collapse of the I-35W bridge is a particularly painful symptom, is not a result of inadequate "public financing," as many insist. "Public" -- meaning "government" -- financing always results in skewed priorities.

Given that the I-35W bridge, like the estimated 70,000 or "unsound" or otherwise infirm bridges across the nation, was built and maintained by the State, how can its collapse be considered an example of "market failure," rather than an illustration of the inefficiencies of statism?

To put the matter as plainly as possible: A Regime that spends so much on large-scale destruction of infrastructure abroad is probably not to be trusted with the task of maintaining sound infrastructure at home. The big money and political profit are to be found in reconstruction, after all -- something understood very well by those pioneering the new form of corporatism called disaster capitalism.

Where the hoi polloi sees catastrophe, disaster capitalists -- both those employed directly by the State, and those who work for it as nominally private subcontractors -- see job security. Government, after all, is the only entity that profits through failure, so we shouldn't be surprised to see it fail so spectacularly and so often -- or to see a growing segment of the politically wired-in population learning to capitalize on those failures.

Catastrophe -- or opportunity? It depends on whether you're a private producer, or a statist parasite.


There has been much discussion of the estimate offered by the American Society of Civil Engineers that it would cost $1.6 trillion over five years to upgrade public infrastructure nation-wide. That figure -- give or take the random hundred billion dollars -- is not substantially larger than some estimates of the final costs of the Dullard Dictator's war in Iraq (assuming that we ever get out of Iraq, which would permit us to tally up "final" costs).

From that juxtaposition can flow any number of facile slogans, of the "Less money for bombs, more for bridges!" variety.

Of course government spends much more than necessary on bombs and other instruments of wholesale destruction: The State is in the business of coercion, after all, and this won't change no matter how much is spent on infrastructure. In fact, as the irreplaceable Bill Kauffman points out, the Interstate Highway System (IHS)-- the "greatest public works project in history" -- was conceived as a wartime measure, born as a Cold War institution, and grew to maturity through large-scale dispossession of millions of helpless Americans.

The IHS, writes Kauffman, was "a socialist melding of industry and military that did more than almost any other act of government to uproot Americans. Like so many of Leviathan's projects, the IHS was conceived in wartime. In 1944, Franklin Roosevelt's Interregional Highway Committee recommended that the federal government build a 41,000 mile interstate system."


Collectivist Clown Car: IHS propaganda cartoon didn't mention the costs of federal-state "cooperation" -- such as hundreds of thousands of Americans being uprooted and chased from their homes through "eminent domain."



General Eisenhower, who had been tremendously impressed by Hitler's autobahn, embraced FDR's plans: In 1956, Ike signed into law a measure to create the "National System of Interstate and Defense Highways," which was intended to build an American version of Hitler's highway system. The same year brought the creation of the Highway Trust Fund, a malodorous mass of patronage funds stolen at the gasoline pump and used for numerous dishonest purposes -- from masking the size of the budget deficit to paying bribes to sundry constituencies.

The Trust Fund, in fact, is used for practically every purpose except infrastructure maintenance -- such as fixing a bridge known to have serious structural problems, as the I-35W bridge did.

In building Eisenhower's autobahn, Congress exploited one of the Constitution's murkier passages -- the one authorizing the Legislature to establish "post roads" -- and the document's most tragically misconceived provision, the Article V power of eminent domain. Kauffman describes the results:

"The Interstates ... forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands of persons. They uglified vast stretches of America. And hardly anyone in a position of power raised a peep. Scattered farmers, New Englanders, and poets tried to slow down the Interstatists, but they were crushed as thoroughly as a car windshield pulverizes a June bug. The Interstate's bulldozers proved as unstoppable as Soviet tanks rolling into Hungary. Resistance was almost always futile.... By the late 1960s, Interstate construction was displacing 57,000 people per year; 87 percept of the buildings demolished [to facilitate construction] were residences. In one 20-year stretch, 100,000 California houses were destroyed."

I would be interested to learn if more homes were destroyed by Eisenhower's IHS than by the Allied military campaigns he supervised in Europe.

It was during this period that a now-familiar trope was created: Comedy sketches and cartoons began to depict the plight of the intransigent homeowner standing athwart "progress" by refusing to sell his home to permit a freeway to go through. Generally skits and melodramas of that sort invited the audience to shake its collective head in condescension, sympathizing with the non-conformist but understanding that the individual simply must yield to the needs of the Collective Good.

"So shut up and move, demanded the architects of the hugest public works project in history to those protesters who stood on the quaint principle of property rights," continues Kauffman, who concludes with an ironic flourish. "I mean, really: What kind of Commie could possibly dissent from so grand an achievement as the Interstate Highway System?"

The Eisenhower autobahn is an unmixed blessing, we are told, because it helped make "these United States" into One Nation. The IHS offers undeniable advantages: It is useful to know that one can get nearly anywhere in the U.S. by navigating a handful of interstate highways, and the system has been a boon to commercial interests.

But the IHS is a two-way street where accessibility is concerned. It opened new avenues for the regulatory class and activist judges to insinuate themselves in the daily affairs of Americans, generally on the pretext of regulating "interstate commerce" -- which, thanks to the IHS, encompassed practically everything. The system also enhanced the power of Washington to regulate and, eventually, seize outright control over local police and sheriff's departments. And, speaking in purely aesthetic terms, I can't say that the homogenization of American communities brought about because of the IHS is a good or welcome thing.

And now, a little more than a half-century following its birth, the IHS is showing its age in dangerous and frightening ways. There is a certain symmetry in the fact that Eisenhower's "National System of Defense and Interstate Highways" is disintegrating at the same time our military -- having been used for every purpose except national defense -- is collapsing under the burden of Washington's imperial foreign policy.

Please be sure to visit The Right Source, and the Liberty Minute archive.

"To Punish and Enslave"

The Cult of Nationalism Punishes a Patriot: Mark Kuhn, the fellow on the ground with his hands cuffed behind his back as his wife looks on in disbelief, offended the tender sensibilities of local jingoists by flying the American flag upside down. Note the arrogant, triumphalist posture of the enforcement officer -- one of at least five dispatched to corral this non-violent thought criminal -- who is straddling the helpless man.



"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more—we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago


Just as a person is defiled by what goes out of the mouth, rather than what goes into it (Matthew 15:11), the US flag is defiled by what is done in its name, rather than what is done to the physical symbol. This is splendidly illustrated in the photograph above, in which we see the arrest of a peaceful man who had committed no crime against persons or property, but whose patriotic display of the U.S. flag engendered a violent response from local adherents to the cult of nationalism.


Mark and Deborah Kuhn of Asheville, North Carolina are devoted activists who pursue political change using non-violent means. The message on their answering machine -- which I've heard twice, in unsuccessful attempts to contact them directly -- offers the greeting: "Peace and love."


Mortified over the violent, corrupt, and increasingly degenerate nature of the regime that rules us, the Kuhns displayed, on their own property, a U.S. flag -- an item they had legally purchased -- displayed upside-down. This is a universally recognized distress sign, and the Kuhns' intent was to underscore the plight of our country, which is being destroyed by the regime.


This was, in brief, a patriotic protest, which is why it attracted the malign attention of a servant of the regime.


On July 18, the Kuhns report, they received a visit from a police officer who asked them if everything was all right. He was reportedly polite and professional, and told them that there was no statute or ordinance forbidding them to display the flag upside-down. In the interests of clarifying their point, the Kuhns attached a small sign to the flag explaining the purpose of the display, and another handbill calling for the overdue removal of George W. Bush from the White House.


Shortly thereafter, an individual clad in fatigues and driving a car with US Government license plates -- the latter being the unmistakable token of a parasite -- paid a visit to harass the Kuhns about their display.


This vigilant fellow was Staff Sergeant Mark Radford of the 105th Military Police Battalion of the North Carolina National Guard. Acting as a dutiful spitzel, this self-appointed guardian of nationalist purity contacted a friend at the Buncombe County Sheriff's Department. Early on the morning of July 25, Debuty Brian Scarborough swaggered up to the door and demanded that the Kuhns take down the flag, which they did. Scarborough then demanded that the couple present ID and accept a citation for "flag desecration" -- which is forbidden by a pointless and facially unconstitutional ordinance that had fallen into desuetude.


"We refused," recalled Deborah. "We said, `Why should we show you our ID -- are you arresting us?' so we walked back into the house and closed the door."


Were Brian Scarborough a sentient being, rather than state enforcement agent, he would have let the matter drop. It's likely that even ten years ago, the typical Deputy Sheriff in this situation would have simply asked the couple to take down their flag, tipped his hat, and left it at that.


But this is the era of the "New Police Professionalism," and Scarborough is an agent of the Homeland Security State. He was clad in the majesty of the regime, and the Kuhns had refused to submit to his will. Accordingly, he kicked the door, punched out the glass (thereby cutting his hand, a consequence he was apparently too dim to foresee), and forced open the door.


Scarborough would later insist that Kuhn inflicted that injury by slamming the door on his hand. He lied, of course: Several eyewitnesses confirm that the Deputy cut himself breaking in to the Kuhns' home.


Having committed an act of criminal trespass, Scarborough then compounded that crime with assault by making threats of violence against the Kuhns, as Deborah reported in a frantic phone call to 911. Her gesture evinced a touchingly misplaced faith in the possibility of casting out Beelzebub by the power of Beelzebub: Once the police learned that one of their own was in trouble, five additional squad cars converged on the scene.


This was done to deal with an unarmed, non-violent couple who had displayed their flag in a way incompatible with the tenets of aggrieved nationalism.


Scarborough seized Mark, thereby committing aggravated battery; Mark escaped and fled outside, where he was pursued by several police as astonished neighbors gathered.


One of the officers produced a taser and threatened to shoot Mark with it -- an act that should be considered assault with a deadly weapon. The same hero made the same threat against Deborah.


Mark submitted and was handcuffed. As the arrest unfolded, Staff Sgt. Radford, a REMF with nothing better to do than harass local civilians, drove past the Kuhns' home and heckled them: "Go to jail, baby!"


Mark and Deborah were arrested on the flag "desecration" charge (which is not a crime against persons or property), two counts of "assaulting a government employee" (based on Scarborough's self-serving lies), and resisting arrest. They were bailed out of jail by their son, who posted $1,500 bond.


I cannot improve on Mark Kuhn's summary of his experience, which resonates with Alexander Solzhenitsyn's lament, as quoted above:


"If Americans don't wake up to the martial state we're in, the cops, the police, the sheriffs, the state police will all come to our door and take us away if we allow this to happen -- it's time for America to wake up."



How DARE he express his political opinions in public? Alan McConnell, a 74-year-old activist from Silver Spring, Maryland, is dragged off to jail by Jabba the Cop and two Stormtroopers for the supposed offense of selling political buttons at a farmer's market.





Kuhn is convinced his case is not an aberration. I wholeheartedly agree.


Witness the arrest of Alan McConnell of Silver Spring, Maryland, on ginned-up trespass charges after the 74-year-old activist continued to sell pro-impeachment buttons at a local farmer's market. Local town officials insisted that McConnell was "aggressive," that his buttons were divisive, and by selling them he was making people "uncomfortable." So they instructed the police to issue a no-trespass order which was in fact a bill of attainder intended to shut down McConnell's commerce.


The results can be seen in the photo above, as well as the fact that this elderly patriot faces six months in jail and a $1,000 fine for refusing to permit the local Politburo to deny him his right to express his opinions in a free marketplace.


Colorado resident Steve Howards likewise learned that peacefully expressing his political views was a crime. His antagonist wasn't the local Politburo: It was the Chief Commissar himself, Dick Cheney and the U.S. Secret Service (or SS).

During a chance encounter with Comrade Cheney outside a mall in Beaver Creek, Colorado last June, Howards approached the Vice President and in a voice of polite disapproval said: “Your policies in Iraq are reprehensible.” He then walked away.

Now, you just know this wasn't going to go unpunished.

After all, an SS spokesdrone told the Vail Daily News after the incident, Howards had drawn attention to himself by his "odd actions near Cheney"; he "wasn't acting like other folks in the area."

Indeed: Where others were awed into paralyzed deference by Cheney's malignant majesty, Howards remembered that he is a citizen, and acted like one. Such things just aren't permissible, of course.

A few minutes after his encounter with Cheney (and doubtless following the mental and spiritual equivalent of a cleansing shower), Howards was tracked down by a Secret Service agent, handcuffed in front of his 8-year-old son, and accused of “assaulting the Vice President.” Jailed for three hours and released on a $500 bond, Howards was charged with the lesser offense of harassment, a charge that was eventually dropped. After all, the point was made: Criticizing our rulers to their faces will be treated as a criminal offense.

“I was incredulous this could be happening in the United States of America,” recalls Howard. “This is what I read about happening in Tiananmen Square.”

Howards, to his considerable credit, has not let the matter drop. He has filed a lawsuit (.pdf) against Virgil D. "Gus" Reichle, Jr. (that's how the name is spelled in the complaint), the SS agent who assaulted and arrested him -- and who actually threatened to have his eight-year-old son turned over to the oh-so-nice people at Child Protective Services. (Howards' son, incidentally, escaped that fate by running away in terror and finding his mother; it's amazing he wasn't arrested for resisting arrest or some other spurious charge.)

Not a real police vehicle ... yet: An evil Decepticon disguises itself as a sleek Camaro bearing an eerily appropriate permutation of the familiar police slogan (below).

All of the foregoing accounts describe the local police (and the SS, collaborating with local police) as enforcers of political orthodoxy, rather than defending persons and property.


They were acting as the security "Organs" of the Regime, not as peace officers defending the rights of peaceful, law-abiding citizens.


It's not difficult to imagine how the incidents described above would be perceived had they occurred in Venezuela or Iran -- and in those benighted countries, incidents of this sort (and others much worse than these) are common.


The point, of course, is that things of this sort are becoming common here, where they should never happen at all. We've not yet reached the dismal situation described by Solzhenitsyn, but if he were living here today he'd have little difficult recognizing the familiar odor of incipient totalitarianism in our Homeland Security State.


A bonus illustration of the prevailing lunacy:


Monica Montoya, a 25-year-old mother from Roselle Park, New Jersey, cheerfully cooperated with the police when they asked her to interpret for an accident victim. For reasons nobody has explained, she ended up being handcuffed and dragged to a squad car, pleading with the officer to allow her to contact the babysitter tending her six-year-old daughter.

Montoya was charged with "obstructing justice" and "resisting arrest" -- which makes no sense at all, given that -- once again -- she was assisting the police, which apparently is enough to get innocent people arrested in our embryonic Reich.


A personal note --


Once again I must offer deep and heartfelt thanks for the astounding generosity you have displayed toward my family. I appreciate beyond expression your prayers, kind thoughts, and donations; God bless you.

Korrin is in her fourth week of hospitalization. This is the longest of the five stints she has had in the hospital since April 2006, and her prognosis is not promising. I hope she'll be well enough to come home -- we have five small children who miss her terribly, six if you count her childish husband -- but right now it's just as likely that her hospitalization may continue for quite a while longer. Please keep her in your prayers.