Walter Olson, at Overlawyered, responds to the new FTC guidelines on disclosure affecting bloggers.

Come to think of it, I usually link books mentioned using Amazon’s Associates program, but Amazon has not had a sale from one of those in a very long time, as best I can recall. Does that count as disclosing?

Publishers sometimes send me books in hopes I’ll review or at least mention them. I occasionally attend free advance screenings of new movies (typically law-related documentaries) that filmmakers hope I’ll write about. This site has an Amazon affiliate store which has from time to time provided me with commissions after readers click links and proceed to purchase items, though it’s been almost entirely inactive for years. I get invited to attend the odd institutional banquet whose hosts sometimes give away a free book or paperweight along with the hotel meal. I’ve been sent “cause” T-shirts and law firm/support service provider promotional kits over the years, pretty much a waste of effort since I don’t much care for wearing such T-shirts and am not exactly famed for posts that sing the praises of law firms or their service providers.

Under new Federal Trade Commission guidelines in the works for some time, I could apparently get in trouble for not disclosing these and similarly exciting things. In addition, the commission’s scrutiny will extend to areas less relevant to this site, such as targeted Google advertising and results-not-typical testimonials.

Robert Ambrogi at Legal Blog Watch finds it hard to see why the blogosphere has raised such a big fuss about these rules. After all, the rules (to be precise, “guidelines” backed by government lawyers with relevant enforcement powers) make clear that nondisclosure of a single minor freebie will not in itself suffice to trigger liability but instead will be counted “among several factors to be weighed” in evaluating the continuum of behavior by individuals engaging in social media (it seems the rules also apply to Twitter, Facebook, and guest appearances on talk shows, to name a few). FTC enforcers will engage in their own fact-specific, and inevitably subjective, balancing before deciding whether to press for fines or other penalties: in other words, instead of knowing whether you’re legally vulnerable or not, you get to guess.

Olson also quotes Ann Althouse, who identifies the crucial point here quite succinctly.

The most absurd part of it is the way the FTC is trying to make it okay by assuring us that they will be selective in deciding which writers on the internet to pursue. That is, they’ve deliberately made a grotesquely overbroad rule, enough to sweep so many of us into technical violations, but we’re supposed to feel soothed by the knowledge that government agents will decide who among us gets fined. No, no, no. Overbreath itself is a problem. And so is selective enforcement.

What do you suppose are the odds that Obama’s FTC is going to go after Kos for taking “consulting fees” (Kosola) from particular democrat candidates?

John S. Theon, formerly chief of all weather and climate research for NASA, and James Hansen’s former boss, has just released a statement of his personal skepticism concerning the predictions of climate alarmist James Hansen and of climate models.

Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it).

[C]limate models are useless.

My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit. Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy.

But Dr. Theon and Senator Inhofe had better watch out. If James Hansen has his way, they as Global Warming deniers, along with the chief executives of energy companies, would be put on trial “for high crimes against humanity and nature.”

Hansen is a pioneer of a fascinating new political debating technique. You declare that your position is true and that if it fails to be accepted the consequences will be terrible, and therefore anyone opposing you is prosecutable for injuring the public interest by spreading lies.

I can picture certain Constitutional obstacles to such prosecutions myself, but some of the blogosphere’s leftwing nutroots, example: Kirk Murphy at FireDogLake, are calling Hansen’s proposal “a nice start.”

If prosecuting people who object to your theory is a nice start, presumably burning them at them at the stake for heresy or sending them to the death camps in Siberia is the logical finish.

They got the idea from Brussels.

London Times:

The Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant.

The move, which follows a decision by the European Union’s council of ministers in Brussels, has angered civil liberties groups and opposition MPs. They described it as a sinister extension of the surveillance state which drives “a coach and horses” through privacy laws.

The hacking is known as “remote searching”. It allows police or MI5 officers who may be hundreds of miles away to examine covertly the hard drive of someone’s PC at his home, office or hotel room.

Material gathered in this way includes the content of all e-mails, web-browsing habits and instant messaging.

Under the Brussels edict, police across the EU have been given the green light to expand the implementation of a rarely used power involving warrantless intrusive surveillance of private property. The strategy will allow French, German and other EU forces to ask British officers to hack into someone’s UK computer and pass over any material gleaned.

A remote search can be granted if a senior officer says he “believes” that it is “proportionate” and necessary to prevent or detect serious crime — defined as any offence attracting a jail sentence of more than three years. ...

Richard Clayton, a researcher at Cambridge University’s computer laboratory, said that remote searches had been possible since 1994, although they were very rare. An amendment to the Computer Misuse Act 1990 made hacking legal if it was authorised and carried out by the state.

He said the authorities could break into a suspect’s home or office and insert a “key-logging” device into an individual’s computer. This would collect and, if necessary, transmit details of all the suspect’s keystrokes. “It’s just like putting a secret camera in someone’s living room,” he said.

Police might also send an e-mail to a suspect’s computer. The message would include an attachment that contained a virus or “malware”. If the attachment was opened, the remote search facility would be covertly activated. Alternatively, police could park outside a suspect’s home and hack into his or her hard drive using the wireless network.

Police say that such methods are necessary to investigate suspects who use cyberspace to carry out crimes. These include paedophiles, internet fraudsters, identity thieves and terrorists.

The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) said such intrusive surveillance was closely regulated under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. A spokesman said police were already carrying out a small number of these operations which were among 194 clandestine searches last year of people’s homes, offices and hotel bedrooms.

“To be a valid authorisation, the officer giving it must believe that when it is given it is necessary to prevent or detect serious crime and [the] action is proportionate to what it seeks to achieve,” Acpo said.

Residents of Britain live under a legal regime that arrests people for carrying pen knives, for hunting with hounds, and for politically incorrect speech, and which watches its own citizens’ daily activities via 4.2 million CCTV cameras (one for every 14 people). The current British idea of what exactly is a “serious crime” is not likely to provide much protection for individual liberty or privacy.

John Hawkins points to Berkeley, to Canada (where Mark Steyn is on trial), and to Europe as examples of just where we are going to wind up if our liberal friends have their way.

The liberal agenda (today) is, in many respects, the same as it was in the thirties. Whether you call it communism, fascism, socialism, liberalism, or progressivism, the only real difference is how much they believe they can get away with, the way they sell it to people, and the latest trendy name for what they believe.

So, once the liberals pick a policy from their stale program to push, the next step is to get it implemented. This is where liberals have problems because whether a policy makes sense, is practical, or actually improves people’s lives is of secondary importance to them. What is important to liberals is whether supporting or opposing that policy makes them feel good about themselves.

This is why liberals continue to support dysfunctional policies that have been failing miserably for decades and why they often oppose common sense programs that have been proven to work time and time again—because it isn’t about whether it works or not, it’s about how it makes them feel.

In other words, a liberal will almost always prefer a policy that’s extremely expensive, is difficult to implement, helps almost no one, but seems “nice”—to a policy that is cheap, simple to implement, extremely effective, and seems “mean.”

However, since most Americans make decisions about policies based on whether or not they believe the policy makes people’s lives better or worse, liberals have had to become habitually dishonest about what they believe and want to do to get their ideas put into action. ...

Even though this is a center-right country, we do have political cycles and there are times when those cycles favor the Left. When that happens and the Lefties start to get a bit more confident, usually a few liberals at the edges will start talking about what they want to do. At that early point, most other liberals will still vehemently deny their ideological goals to the public out of fear that it will prevent them from getting into power.

However, when the Left gains enough strength to be capable of getting one of the policies they favor implemented, all the liberals who previously denied that they supported it will unapologetically shift on a dime and vote for it en masse—while they rely on their ideological allies in the media and the fact that many Americans are ill informed about politics to cover their tracks.

So, if you want to know what liberals want to do, their words mean absolutely nothing because lying about their agenda has become as natural to them as chasing a cat is to a dog.

Instead, what you have to do is watch what other liberals have done when they have come into power. Look at Canada, where conservatives are being put on trial for hate crimes because they’ve dared to criticize Muslims. Look at European countries, where they have socialistic economies, sky high tax rates, rigid speech codes, and overweening nannystates. You can even look at liberal enclaves in the United States like Berkeley and San Francisco, where members of the military are treated like pariahs and they boo the national anthem.

If you believe the liberals in Berkeley, France, Canada or for that matter in the bowels of the Daily Kos or Huffington Post, are significantly different than, say Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, you are kidding yourself. The only differences are in what they think they can get away with and how honest they are willing to be about their agenda.

In Washington to promote the newly-published English-language translation of his book, Blue Planet in Green Shackles: What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom, Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus wants to debate Albert Gore on Global Warming.

Earth Times:

Klaus, an economist, said he opposed the “climate alarmism” perpetuated by environmentalism trying to impose their ideals, comparing it to the decades of communist rule he experienced growing up in Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia.

“Like their (communist) predecessors, they will be certain that they have the right to sacrifice man and his freedom to make their idea reality,” he said.

“In the past, it was in the name of the Marxists or of the proletariat – this time, in the name of the planet,” he added.

Klaus said a free market should be used to address environmental concerns and said he oppposed as unrealistic regulations or greenhouse gas capping systems designed to reduce the impact of climate change.

“It could be even true that we are now at a stage where mere facts, reason and truths are powerless in the face of the global warming propaganda,” he said.

Mr. Klaus’ statement can be read in full at his web-site here.

Neal Boortz has some choice words for the left.

Sorry, I’m not in the mood for all of this Happy New Year nonsense. This is getting to be about as phony as the 4th of July. (Freedom … right. Like the people of this country are still in love with the idea of liberty.) This is 2008. This is an election year. We’re choosing a new House of Representatives, about one-third of the Senate and a president. This is not the type of New Year you launch with the traditional expressions of optimism. We’re in trouble. An election is coming in 11 months and millions of parasites, led by single females, are getting ready to accelerate the destruction of the concepts of individuality, private property rights, self-reliance, and this very country by putting a hideous, power-hungry, big-government socialist into the White House.

I think I’ve made a bit of a mistake over the past few months. Trying to be a bit to nice to the people I think are destroying this country. I’ve been trying to cut them some slack .. be a little understanding. You know, the compassion thing. Well, something must have clicked during the last two weeks off. No more free passes. Identify the leeches. Call them out. They’re destroying the greatest system of governance this world has ever known, and they should not be allowed to go unchallenged.

If you squandered every opportunity for an education to end up an unemployable semi-literate loser, that’s your problem, not mine. If you’ve destroyed your health with cigarettes and fast food … then by what right do you demand that people who lived their lives more responsibly than you cover the cost of your medical care. You cry about your “right” to health care. You dare to claim a right to the services of another human being to correct problems you created for yourself? Further, if it is more important for you to spend your money on a cell phone, flat-screen televisions, the best new car, meals at expensive restaurants and fancy vacations than it is to spend your money on a health insurance policy .. then you should be on your own. Don’t beg the government to steal from someone else so that you don’t have to change your lifestyle.

They evidently were handing out anti-Gay fliers near their high school. Apparently, expressing negative opinions about homosexuality is a felony in Illinois.

Windy City Times, 5/23:

Two female 16-year-old Crystal Lake South High School students face hate-crime charges after allegedly plastering their high school’s halls and distributing anti-gay fliers directed towards a fellow student in the school’s parking lot.

The actions against their former male friend landed the two girls in juvenile court on May 15, after being arrested by Crystal Lake police on May 11. Both, unnamed due to their ages, also face charges of obstruction of justice and disorderly conduct, and one teen faces an additional charge of resisting a police officer.

McHenry County State’s Attorney Lou Bianchi told Windy City Times that despite arguments being made by many locals about the right to free speech, what the two girls did is clearly a hate crime.

“They had the intent to alarm and disturb another, and they were successful in that,” Bianchi said. “In alarming and disturbing, they also committed a hate crime. Their words … were directed against a specific individual of a certain sexual orientation.”

Bianchi would not comment on the exact wording of the flier because it is evidence. However, other sources quote those who have viewed the flier as containing a picture of the male student kissing another male, with the wording “God hates fags.”

A status hearing for both girls will take place on May 22.

Following the May 22 hearing, one girl is being held without bond.

A 16-year-old Crystal Lake girl facing a felony hate crime charge alleging she and a friend distributed anti-homosexual fliers at her high school must remain locked up until her case goes to trial, a McHenry County judge ruled Tuesday.

Citing concerns over the girl’s home environment and her already lengthy juvenile record, Judge Michael Chmiel denied the girl’s request for home detention. Instead Chmiel ordered her held in the Kane County Juvenile Justice Center while the case is pending.

The girl’s record, Chmiel said, features 13 contacts with police, including an arrest for marijuana possession in August. McHenry County court records show that within the past year the girl also has been charged for driving without a license, consumption of alcohol by a minor, possession of tobacco by a minor, trespassing and three curfew violations.

The incident occurred at Crystal Lake High School in Woodstock, Illinois.

The democrat-controlled Congress is currently moving to making “hate crimes” a federal offense.

American politics is often pretty embarassing, but the EU’s obliviousness to the understanding of Liberty achieved by the Enlightenment in America, and its contemptible readiness to surrender the rights of its unfortunate citizens to political correctness, does make one proud to be an American.

Laws that make denying or trivialising the Holocaust a criminal offence punishable by jail sentences will be introduced across the European Union, according to a proposal expecting to win backing from ministers Thursday.

Offenders will face up to three years in jail under the proposed legislation, which will also apply to inciting violence against ethnic, religious or national groups.

Diplomats in Brussels voiced confidence on Tuesday that the controversial plan, which has been the subject of heated debate for six years, will be endorsed by member states. However, the Baltic countries and Poland are still holding out for an inclusion of “Stalinist crimes” alongside the Holocaust in the text – a move that is being resisted by the majority of other EU countries.

The latest draft, seen by the Financial Times, will make it mandatory for all Union member states to punish public incitement “to violence or hatred directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin”.

They will also have to criminalise “publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivialising crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes” when such statements incite hatred or violence against minorities.

Diplomats stressed the provision had been carefully worded to include only denial of the Holocaust – the Nazi mass murder of Jews during the second world war – and the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.

They also stressed that the wording was designed to avoid criminalising comical plays or films about the Holocaust such as the Italian comedian Roberto Benigni’s prize-winning Life is Beautiful . The text expressly upholds countries’ constitutional traditions relating to the freedom of expression.

Holocaust denial is already a criminal offence in several European countries, including Germany and Austria. It is not a specific crime in Britain, though UK officials said it could already be tackled under existing legislation.

In an attempt to assuage Turkish fears, several EU diplomats said the provisions would not penalise the denial of mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman troops in the aftermath of the 1915 collapse of the Ottoman empire. Turkey strongly rejects claims that this episode amounted to genocide.

“Charlie Hebdo Must Be Veiled!”

Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical weekly which was the only publication in France to reprint the Danish Mohammed cartoons, is appearing today before the Correctional Tribunal of Paris facing accusations by Islamic Organisations of France and the Grand Mosque of Paris that reprinting the cartoons was a violation of French laws prohibiting politically incorrect expression.

AP:

Charlie-Hebdo and the publication’s director, Philippe Val, are charged with “publicly slandering a group of people because of their religion.” The charge carries a possible six-month prison sentence and a fine of up to $28,530.

Guardian

New Straits Times

Al Jazeera reports:

In an act of solidarity with Charlie Hebdo, French newspaper Libération printed the contested cartoons once more on Wednesday.

“It is not words which wound, or pictures that kill. It is bombs,” the daily said, calling the trial “idiotic”.

Never Yet Melted 8 Feb 2006

Jonah Goldberg has one, in a time when it is becoming a rare commodity.

The New York Post recently compiled a list of the things that the New York City Council tried to ban — not all successfully — just in 2006 alone.

The list: pit bulls; trans fats; aluminum baseball bats; the purchase of tobacco by 18- to 20-year-olds; foie gras; pedicabs in parks; new fast-food restaurants (but only in poor neighborhoods); lobbyists from the floor of council chambers; lobbying city agencies after working at the same agency; vehicles in Central and Prospect parks; cell phones in upscale restaurants; the sale of pork products made in a processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C., because of a unionization dispute; mail-order pharmaceutical plans; candy-flavored cigarettes; gas-station operators adjusting prices more than once daily; Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus; Wal-Mart.

On Jan. 2 in Washington, D.C., the city council’s smoking ban was extended to bars and nightclubs. Even private clubs, where members pay through the teeth to associate voluntarily, can’t allow smoking on their own property.

In some states, you can’t smoke in your car if young children are present — your own children, that is.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville warns: “It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones. …”

This is a typically penetrating insight, and one with new relevance these days. This country seems to have inverted de Tocqueville’s hierarchy. On countless fronts, the natural pastures of daily liberty have become circumscribed by dull-witted but well-meaning bureaucrats slapping down the paving stones of good intentions on the road to hell.

The rule of thumb for a free society should be that it infringes liberties rarely, but when it does so it is for important reasons. Today, that thumb has been cast down, Caesar-like, pointing in the opposite direction.

We have democratized the small assaults on freedom so that everyone must endure them, while we caterwaul about the tyranny of any real inconvenience that might fall “disproportionately” on the few.

We ban using trans fats for millions but flinch at the idea that some kid might have to endure the Pledge of Allegiance or a moment of silence in school if it conflicts with his conscience.

Everyone must surrender his shoes, his regular-size toothpaste and shampoo at the airport, but we man the barricades to protect a few young Muslim men from being inconvenienced for an extra five minutes at the airport.

Free speech is most restricted where it is most important — in political contests near Election Day — while it is maximized to an absurd level at the fringes of culture and decency.

Of course, there are legitimate objections to infringements of liberty or principle on what de Tocqueville would call the “great things.” What is so disturbing is how few legitimate objections are raised about the “little things.”

And I can’t help but shake the feeling that civilizations fall apart, or get plowed under by the wheels of history, when they fail to understand these distinctions.

One of my favorite sayings is that America can choke on a gnat, but it swallows tigers whole. These days, we seem to be choking on the tigers while our bellies fill with gnats.

The Evening Standard has news of Britain’s Labour Government’s latest crime fighting initiative.

Parents could be forced to go to special classes to learn to sing their children nursery rhymes, a minister said.

Those who fail to read stories or sing to their youngsters threaten their children’s future and the state must put them right, Children’s Minister Beverley Hughes said.

Their children’s well-being is at risk ‘unless we act’, she declared.

And Mrs Hughes said the state would train a new ‘parenting workforce’ to ensure parents who fail to do their duty with nursery rhymes are found and ‘supported’.

The call for state intervention in the minute details of family life followed a series of Labour efforts to reduce anti-social behaviour and improve educational standards by imposing rigorous controls on the lives of the youngest children.

Mrs Hughes has established a national curriculum to set down how babies are taught to speak in childcare from the age of three months.

Her efforts have gone alongside a push by other ministers to determine exactly how parents treat their children down to how they should brush their teeth…

This autumn is likely to see an extension of parenting orders that can force parents to attend parenting classes so that they can be used on the say so of local councils against parents.

For the first time, parenting orders are likely to be directed against parents whose children have committed no criminal offence.

The threat of action against parents who fail to sing nursery rhymes was unveiled by Mrs Hughes as she gave the first details of Mr Blair’s ‘national parenting academy’, a body that will train teachers, psychologists and social workers to intervene in the lives of families and become the ‘parenting workforce’.

We’ve all heard of “the nanny-state,” but really!

Koochiching County (population 13,907) is located at the center of the northern end of Minnesota, bordering the wilderness of Northern Ontario. Its principal claim to fame is probably that county’s leading metropolis International Falls (population 6703) having been fictionalized in 1959 on television as “Frostbite Falls,” home of cartoon characters Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Indus Elementary & Secondary School, located 30 miles west of International Falls, has 194 pupils (79 elementary – 115 secondary) attending grades K through 12 from families residing in western Koochiching County.

I mention all this just to make clear the rural character of the setting of today’s headline news item.

The Associated Press yesterday evening ran the alarming headline: Principal quits after shooting kittens at school, followed by this lead:

A school principal has resigned and could face felony firearm charges after he shot and killed two orphaned kittens on school property last month.

That sounds absolutely terrible, of course. But the reality was rather different.

Principal Wade Pilloud, who resided weekdays in a mobile home on school property, had placed one or more traps underneath the trailer “to catch pests,” WCCO’s version of the story reports.

Since the trap was large enough to kill an adult cat, Principal Pillaud was almost certainly using a conibear trap, rather than a leghold trap. Conibear traps are designed to kill the animal. A conibear trap large enough to kill a cat would have to have been set for something larger than a rat or a squirrel. Chances are that a skunk took up residence under Mr. Pillaud’s trailer, and he was taking action to remove a rather drastic problem.

Unfortunately, Mr. Pillaud discovered he had trapped a (presumably feral) female cat, whose death left orphaned a pair of young kittens. A cat-owner himself, Mr. Pillaud did not want the kittens to starve to death; so, after school, one night last month when all this happened, he took his shotgun, and “put them out of their misery,” as people say in the country.

But several children on the schoolgrounds for after hours activities heard the shooting, and went home and told their parents all about it.

This being the day and age it is, even in rural Northern Minnesota, you have nincompoops.

There were parents who felt, apparently some rather strongly, that there were concerns about the safety of their children,” said Joseph Flynn, an attorney for the South Koochiching/Rainy River School District. “The district’s position is that safety was not compromised.”

John Mastin, acting sheriff in Koochiching County, said Pilloud could be charged with felony possession of a firearm on school property and reckless discharge of a firearm, a misdemeanor.

County Attorney Jennifer Hasbargen said Friday that the case was under review.

Mastin said the shooting put no one in danger but said Pilloud used “poor discretion and poor timing,” especially amid the growing fear of gun violence in schools.

The district put Pilloud on administrative leave after the incident. Flynn said Pilloud agreed to an undisclosed settlement and resigned.

This type of incident demonstrates that nowhere in America is non-suburban enough today to assure the safety of gun-owners from the ritualized hoplophobia of journalists, politicians, and anti-weapons bigots. The NRA and other gun rights litigation centers need to intervene and contest every such case of the marginalizing of gun ownership and the stigmatization of the legitimate use of firearms. Otherwise, ultimately, a gun ban British and Australian-style is inevitable.

Peggy Noonan observes liberals involved in four speech incidents in the past 10 days:

At Columbia University, members of the Minutemen, the group that patrols the U.S. border with Mexico and reports illegal crossings, were asked to address a forum on immigration policy. As Jim Gilchrist, the founder, spoke, angry students stormed the stage, shouting and knocking over chairs and tables. “Having wreaked havoc,” said the New York Sun, they unfurled a banner in Arabic and English that said, “No one is ever illegal.” The auditorium was cleared, the Minutemen silenced. Afterward a student protester told the Columbia Spectator, “I don’t feel we need to apologize or anything. It was fundamentally a part of free speech. . . . The Minutemen are not a legitimate part of the debate on immigration.”

On Oct. 2, on Katie Couric’s “CBS Evening News,” in the segment called “Free Speech,” the father of a boy killed at Columbine shared his views on the deeper causes of the recent shootings in Amish country. Brian Rohrbough said violence entered our schools when we threw God out of them. “This country is in a moral freefall. For over two generations the public school system has taught in a moral vacuum. . . . We teach there are no moral absolutes, no right or wrong, and I assure you the murder of innocent children is always wrong, including abortion. Abortion has diminished the value of children.” This was not exactly the usual mush.

Mr. Rohrbough was quickly informed he was not part of the legitimate debate, either. Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post: “The decision . . . to air his views prompted a storm of criticism, some of it within the ranks of CBS News.” A blog critic: Grief makes people say “stupid” things, but “what made them put this man on television?” Good question. How did they neglect to silence him?

Soon after, at Madison Square Garden, Barbra Streisand, began her latest farewell tour with what friends who were there tell me was a moving, beautiful concert. She was in great form and brought the audience together in appreciation of her great ballads, which are part of the aural tapestry of our lives. And then . . . the moment. Suddenly she decided to bang away on politics. Fine, she’s a Democrat, Bush is bad. But midway through the bangaway a man in the audience called out. Most could not hear him, but everyone seems to agree he at least said, “What is this, a fund-raiser?”

At this, Ms. Streisand became enraged, stormed the stage and pummeled herself. Wait, that was Columbia. Actually she became enraged and cursed the man. A friend who was there, a liberal Democrat, said what was most interesting was Ms. Streisand made a physical movement with her arms and hands—”those talon hands”—as if to say, See what I have to put up with when I attempt to educate the masses? She soon apologized, to her credit. Though apparently in the manner of a teacher who’d just kind of lost it with an unruly and ignorant student.

On “The View” a few days earlier it was Rosie O’Donnell. She was banging away on gun control. Guns are bad and should be banned. Elizabeth Hasselbeck, who plays the role of the young, attractive mom, tentatively responded. “I want to be fair,” she said. Obviously there should be “restrictions,” but women have a right to defend themselves, and there’s “the right to bear arms” in the Constitution. Rosie accused Elizabeth of yelling. The panel, surprised, agreed that Elizabeth was not yelling. Rosie then went blank-faced with what someone must have told her along the way is legitimately felt rage. Elizabeth was not bowing to Rosie’s views. Elizabeth needed to be educated. The education commenced, Rosie gesturing broadly and Elizabeth constricting herself as if she knew physical assault were a possibility. When Rosie gets going on the Second Amendment I always think, Oh I hope she’s not armed! Actually I wonder what Freud would have made of an enraged woman obsessed with gun control. Ach, classic projection. Eef she had a gun she would kill. Therefore no one must haf guns.

There’s a pattern here, isn’t there?

It is not only about rage and resentment, and how some have come to see them as virtues, as an emblem of rightness. I feel so much, therefore my views are correct and must prevail.

She missed the proposed Nuremburg Trials for Global Warming skeptics.

Looking for the text cited in that Senate Environment Committee news release this morning, I also came upon this review by Professor Robert M. Carter of Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth.

Carter delivers a devastating critique of the film.

Those raw scientific facts that Mr Gore chooses for use in An Inconvenient Truth are mostly correct. Indeed, much of the material could have been drawn from elementary university courses in meteorology, geography or geology, though one would hope that university treatments would be presented in a more balanced and critical way.

Overall, the film is a compelling account of various natural earth phenomena that have the potential to impact humanity disastrously, and therefore a graphic illustration of the fact that we live on a dynamic planet. Were the film to be stripped of its sententious script, we might be watching an episode in David Attenborough’s recent TV series, Planet Earth.

Hence, presumably, the appeal to audiences: who often break into spontaneous applause at the end of a showing, and thereby reveal both their gullibility to emotional messages and their lack of scientific understanding.

For the problem with An Inconvenient Truth is that it is well-made propaganda for the global warming cause rather than well-made climate science. Nowhere does Mr Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet. Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change. This is not surprising, for no such evidence yet exists.

During his movie, Mr Gore asserts that climate change is now a moral rather than a scientific issue. He is right, though not in quite the way that he might have imagined.

The moral issue concerns the way in which much of today’s environmental “science” – including that regarding climate change, as typified by this film – is presented to governments and the public. Mr Gore clearly believes that his presumed morally superior ends justify any means, including distortion of evidence, and in consequence he nails his colours firmly to the climate alarmist mast.

But then I came upon an example of what struck me as impossible-to-believe exaggeration.

Indeed. And the intellectual dishonesty involved in this is not restricted to Mr Gore’s film, but has become all pervasive.

For example, professional sociologists at the London-based Institute for Policy Research urge that “the task of climate change agencies is not to persuade by rational argument. ... Instead, we need to work in a more shrewd and contemporary way, using subtle techniques of engagement. ... The ‘facts’ need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken“.

Wonderfully damaging material, I thought, but much too good to possibly be true. So I started searching to find if there was the slightest basis for any of this at all, and I immediately found this Institute for Public Policy Research handy how-to publication: Warm Words: How Are We Telling the Climate Story and Can we Tell It Better?

One explanatory diagram

Many of the existing approaches to climate change communications clearly seem unproductive. And it is not enough simply to produce yet more messages, based on rational argument and top-down persuasion, aimed at convincing people of the reality of climate change and urging them to act. Instead, we need to work in a more shrewd and contemporary way, using subtle techniques of engagement.

To help address the chaotic nature of the climate change discourse in the UK today, interested agencies now need to treat the argument as having been won, at least for popular communications. This means simply behaving as if climate change exists and is real, and that individual actions are effective. The ‘facts’ need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken....

What is significant here is that this discourse is immune to scientific argument, since it is simply constructed in a different way. Its currency is not science but ‘common sense’. The prevalence of this repertoire in public media underlines that the task of climate change agencies is not to persuade by rational argument but in effect to develop and nurture a new ‘common sense’....

Much of the noise in the climate change discourse comes from argument and counter-argument, and it is our recommendation that, at least for popular communications, interested agencies now need to treat the argument as having been won. This means simply behaving as if climate change exists and is real, and that individual actions are effective. This must be done by stepping away from the ‘advocates debate’ described earlier, rather than by stating and re-stating these things as fact.

The ‘facts’ need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken. The certainty of the Government’s new climate-change slogan — ‘Together this generation will tackle climate change’ (Defra 2006) — gives an example of this approach. It constructs, rather than claims, its own factuality.

Where science is invoked, it now needs to be as ‘lay science’ — offering lay explanations for what is being treated as a simple established scientific fact, just as the earth’s rotation or the water cycle are considered…

Opposing the enormous forces of climate change requires something superhuman or heroic. Science is not enough — especially when scientists argue among themselves. What is needed is something more magical, more mythical. Many strong and successful brands have a kind of myth at their core — they appear to reconcile things that are normally impossible to reconcile.

The US Senate Committtee on Environment and Public Works released the following yesterday:

A U.S. based environmental magazine that both former Vice President Al Gore and PBS newsman Bill Moyers (for his October 11th global warming edition of “Moyers on America” titled “Is God Green?”) have deemed respectable enough to grant one-on-one interviews to promote their projects, is now advocating Nuremberg-style war crimes trials for skeptics of human caused catastrophic global warming.

Grist Magazine’s staff writer David Roberts called for the Nuremberg-style trials for the “bastards” who were members of what he termed the global warming “denial industry.”

Roberts wrote in the online publication on September 19, 2006, “When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards—some sort of climate Nuremberg.”

UPDATE

And over on the Huffington Post, the same David Roberts bleats that he is being attacked! Though he is willing to admit to “rhetorical excess,” Roberts is not really taking back what he said about crimes and trials. All we Global Warming skeptics are just a bunch of hired mercenary corporate flacks, who know perfectly well that Roberts and the other goofball, tree-hugging, Luddite moonbats are correct about the science, we’re just lying. Oh, sure. Pretty to think so, if you’re a moonbat.

Well, if they are ever going to be putting people on trial for lying about Global Warming, my next posting makes it pretty clear just who it is that will be standing in the dock.

The endless calls for “civility” among the nation’s political and media elite have become so numbing that it’s difficult to get out from under the haze and speak simply about this. But it needs to be said: These people are, morally if not legally, criminals.

EARLIER RELATED POSTING

The Daily Briefing, last year, suggested adding climate-change deniers to Holocaust deniers on the list of persons prosecutable for crimes committed by expressing certain ideas in speech or writing.

David Irving is under arrest in Austria for Holocaust denial. Perhaps there is a case for making climate change denial an offence – it is a crime against humanity after all. Twenty good years of action have been lost courtesy of climate change sceptics, many of whom did not act in good faith – they were protecting and promoting vested interests.

Brendan O’Neill, in spiked, observes that the patience of the elect is wearing thin.

There is a tidal wave of intolerance in the debate about climate change which is eroding free speech and melting rational debate. There has been no decree from on high or piece of legislation outlawing climate change denial, and indeed there is no need to criminalise it, as the Australian columnist suggests. Because in recent months it has been turned into a taboo, chased out of polite society by a wink and a nod, letters of complaint, newspaper articles continually comparing climate change denial to Holocaust denial. An attitude of ‘You can’t say that!’ now surrounds debates about climate change, which in many ways is more powerful and pernicious than an outright ban. I am not a scientist or an expert on climate change, but I know what I don’t like – and this demonisation of certain words and ideas is an affront to freedom of speech and open, rational debate.

The loaded term itself — ‘climate change denier’ — is used to mark out certain people as immoral, untrustworthy. According to Richard D North, author most recently of Rich is Beautiful: A Very Personal Defence of Mass Affluence: ‘It is deeply pejorative to call someone a “climate change denier”…it is a phrase designedly reminiscent of the idea of Holocaust denial — the label applied to those misguided or wicked people who believe, or claim to believe, the Nazis did not annihilate the Jews, and others, in very great numbers.’ People of various views and hues tend to get lumped together under the umbrella put-down ‘climate change denier’ — from those who argue the planet is getting hotter but we will be able to deal with it, to those who claim the planet is unlikely to get much hotter at all. On Google there are now over 80,000 search returns, and counting, for the phrase climate change denial.

Others take the tactic of openly labelling climate change deniers as cranks, possibly even people who might need their heads checked. In a speech last month, in which he said people ‘should be scared’ about global warming, UK environment secretary David Miliband said ‘those who deny [climate change] are the flat-earthers of the twenty-first century’. Taking a similar tack, former US vice president-turned-green-warrior Al Gore recently declared: ‘Fifteen per cent of the population believe the moon landing was actually staged in a movie lot in Arizona and somewhat fewer still believe the Earth is flat. I think they all get together with the global warming deniers on a Saturday night and party.’

It is not only environmentalist activists and green-leaning writers who are seeking to silence climate change deniers/sceptics/critics/whatever you prefer. Last month the Royal Society — Britain’s premier scientific academy founded in 1660, whose members have included some of the greatest scientists — wrote a letter to ExxonMobil demanding that the oil giant cut off its funding to groups that have ‘misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence’. It was the first time the Royal Society had ever written to a company complaining about its activities. The letter had something of a hectoring, intolerant tone: ‘At our meeting in July…you indicated that ExxonMobil would not be providing any further funding to these organisations. I would be grateful if you could let me know when ExxonMobil plans to carry out this pledge.’

Hat tip to Seneca the Younger.

———————————
UPDATE 10/12

Nuremberg Trials Proposed for Global Warming Deniers

Ann Althouse this morning, quotes a colleague asking rhetorically (and disingenously): What is the rational basis for banning same-sex marriage?

It’s perfectly possible to propose a rational debate on this kind of question, but when one finds that the debate’s proposer has already engineered the grammar of the proposition around so as to make the ordinary status quo appear in the guise of some intended innovation and aggression against the rights of others, it is apparent that there is a certain effort underway to fix the outcome of the debate before it has begun. “How dare some people suddenly compel the legislature and the courts to ban Gay Marriage!”

Of course, we all know that the precise opposite is the case.

Marriage is a human institution existing immemorially, even from times preceding the organization of the state itself, long prior to the creation of individual American states or the United States. The state never created marriage, but merely recognizes marriage as an estate, i.e., as a recognizable status conferring a number of customary privileges and immunities.

That marriage consists of the union of one man and one woman has been its definition for at least the entirety of the Christian era, some two thousand years. The innovation consists of the revolutionary demand that the definition of this most fundamental of human institutions must be modified to confer equality of status on homosexual relations in accordance with the wishes of a contemporary minority.

The increased popularity of monogamous homosexual relationships over the two decades following the arrival of the AIDS epidemic seems to many of us a positive development, but it is far from clear that the fashion would survive the removal of the health threat. Is two decades of anything a sufficient basis to modify the most fundamental institution of human society?

Liberalism has triumphed in the jurisprudential debate about the law’s treatment of homosexuality since the time of the Wolfenden Report. The consensus of opinion these days holds that Mill was correct. Absent some demonstrable harm to others from private action, the state has no right to interfere with the private conduct of consenting adults. Homosexuals have a right to do as they like in private, and the rest of us are obliged to respect that right. We owe them our tolerance.

We do not, however, owe homosexuals our applause and approval.

Just as it is possible to be a law-abiding and unoffending member of the community, and indulge in homosexual acts with another consenting adult in private, it is also perfectly possible to subscribe to religious or other opinions which take a negative view of homosexuality.

Alteration of the definition of marriage to include homosexual liaisons would, in fact, confer both public recognition and approval upon those liaisons in a form which the majority of American are not voluntarily willing to concede.

There is nothing coercive in declining to consent to the adoption of a new and revolutionary definition of marriage. But the forced participation of an unwilling national majority in the public recognition and celebration of unconventional liaisons would be indubitably coercive.

No one is “banning Gay Marriage” by prohibiting homosexuials from conducting whatever private ceremonies or taking whatever personal and private view of their own relationships they like. It is simply the case that a majority of Americans are declining to share those particular views or to recognize those particular ceremonies as meaningful to themselves in the same way.

I obviously disagree with the proposed “state interest” approach to analysis. But if I were compelled to argue in that form, I would observe that a state constitutional amendment defining marriage as it is traditionally understood, as the union of a man and a woman, should be perfectly constitutional. States obviously have a right to define legal concepts and institutions. They have a particularly good right to do so, when they are making no change whatsoever, but merely identifying what has always been understood to be the case.

The obvious line of attack for the left will be via the Equal Protection Clause. But there is no inequality to it. Everyone has just as much right to marry anybody else as he ever did. Arguing that you want to do something different and call it marriage, and you want everyone else to call it marriage, too, and they won’t, and you don’t like it, does not mean you have been treated unequally.

The Washington Examiner editorializes:

Something almost without precedent in America will happen Thursday. That’s the day when McCain-Feingold — aka the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 — will officially silence broadcast advertising that contains criticism of members of Congress seeking re-election in November. Before 2006, American election campaigns traditionally began in earnest after Labor Day. Unless McCain-Feingold is repealed, Labor Day will henceforth mark the point in the campaign when congressional incumbents can sit back and cruise, free of those pesky negative TV and radio spots. It is the most effective incumbent protection act possible, short of abolishing the elections themselves.

How can this possibly be, you ask? McCain-Feingold — named after the law’s main advocates, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Russ Feingold, D-Wis. — bans all broadcast political advocacy advertising that mentions candidates by name, beginning 60 days before the election. President Bush signed and the U.S. Supreme Court shockingly upheld McCain-Feingold three years ago…

None of this would surprise Alexander Hamilton, who argued in “The Federalist Papers” that written guarantees of things like freedom of the press would be purposely misconstrued by ambitious politicians and used as a pretext to do that which the Constitution banned: “I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power.” That is just about exactly what has happened now with the First Amendment and freedom of political speech, thanks to McCain-Feingold.

By election day, it should be clear to all reasonable persons that McCain-Feingold was a serious mistake and, like Prohibition, ought to be repealed.

George W. Bush was conserving all that political capital he was going to use to pass Social Security reform and permanent tax reform. He knew that the Supreme Court would jjust have to strike down McCain-Feingold, so why take the heat? He went ahead and signed it.

The Supreme Court’s astonishing ruling in McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, I woud say, deserves to rank as the absolute nadir of Supreme Court decisions, worse than Kelo, worse than Roe, worse than Dred Scott.

The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 is not only a direct attack on free speech, it is a direct attack on political free speech. If any form or species of speech deserves to be more protected than others, surely it would have to be specifically political free speech.

Senator John McCain, whose name was attached to this abominable piece of legislation, is likely to be a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. Let’s hope it does not escape the GOP’s attention that this potential nominee has a record of conspicuous enmity to both the First and Second Amendments.

More than 5000 current and retired law enforcement officers have joined Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), an organization founded to fight for the abolition of the United States’ current illiberal, ineffective, and socially destructive drug laws.

The enforcement of drug prohibition in the United States costs tens of billions of dollars per year, creates a black market fostering violent crime, and results in the incarceration of enormous numbers of American for victimless crimes. Because of the War on Drugs, the United States has the largest prison population in the world, more than 2,090,000 persons. The US imprisons a larger percentage of its population than any other country in the world. Belarus comes in second.

LEAP has produced an eloquent video which I highly recommend.

Jill Stewart, in the LA Daily News, denounces some of California’s latest absurd legislative proposals.

IN 1966, California voters created a full-time Legislature after Speaker Jesse Unruh promised a dazzlingly “professional” Legislature instead of part-timers earning $6,000 yearly. By 2007, legislators will earn $145,097 in wages and per diem, costing roughly $200 million annually, yet taxpayers get a dubious “product” in return: mountains of pointless laws.

We are drowning in 47,000 new laws enacted since 1966, covering everything from the size of typeface on official notices on employee bulletin boards to the arcane timing dictating when you must use your windshield wipers.

You couldn’t know this, but it’s illegal to throw away your cell phone. Lawbreaker!..

in 2004, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made news. He vetoed 311 bills. His vetoes caused legislators momentary pause. They sent him “only” 961 laws in 2005. Arnold let 729 become law — a “record low” in our times.

He has vetoed bills to strip independence from charter schools, to tell schools what sort of sprinklers to install, to protect grape pickers from eating unwashed grapes. He vetoed Assembly Bill 13 to prohibit “Redskins” as a school mascot, and AB 723 to require “tolerance training” of our kids — by our racially divided teachers. He vetoed AB 391 to pay “unemployment” to locked-out workers seeking raises (noting that “unemployment” checks are for people who lose jobs due to actions not their own — not for clever workers in the midst of negotiations). And many more.

Now, the Legislature is frenetically considering up to 1,700 extra laws before its Aug. 31 deadline — an embarrassing brew of self-serving special-interest claptrap that’s intrusive, abusive, regressive or downright offensive.

Assembly Bill 2641 by Democrat Joe Coto of San Jose, with scads of bipartisan coauthors, is the Legislature’s greedy bid to lure campaign riches from multimillionaire tribes who back the bill. It lets the “Native American Heritage Commission” delay any ground-disturbing activity in California — think of the possibilities! — that unearths remotely arguable “burial” items. It lets this commission, promoting tribal interests, decide what’s a “burial ground” and halt projects.

In this bad dream, landowners must negotiate with designated “descendants” of bones. This “commission” should have no more power over your land than the chamber of commerce. With huge Assembly support, 42-2, it heads to the Senate floor.

Senate Bill 1523, by the bombastically business-hating Democrat Richard Alarcón of Sun Valley, seeks to punish Wal-Mart. It would require any city or county, before allowing a store bigger than 100,000 square feet (Wal-Mart), to order an “economic impact” report. The purpose is to create a costly barrier to a store that’s wildly popular with working folks. With a lopsided Senate Democratic vote of 24-12, it heads to the Assembly floor.

Another odious “Thank God we’re not poor” bill is SB 1578 by Democrat Alan Lowenthal of Long Beach, making it “a crime” to tether a dog to a stationary object longer than three hours. If you’ve spent time in South Central, Richmond or Compton, you know that families tether dogs at home to ward off gangs and dealers. California laws already ban inhumane treatment. This bill springs from spoiled brats earning $145,097. It even exempts the upwardly mobile: In recreation settings, dogs can be tethered all day. (Let the poor eat cake; the rest of us are rafting.) It passed the Senate 21-14, and heads to the Assembly floor.

And there’s AB 2360 from Democrat Ted Lieu of El Segundo, who snapped to it when Tom Cruise enthused over using an ultrasound device to watch his unborn child. This silly bill bans the sale of ultrasound machines to all but professionals. No word yet on preventing parental purchase of tall chairs, boom boxes and furniture with sharp corners. With big bipartisan Assembly support of 63-10, it heads to the Senate floor.

And many hundreds more. If you let them, politicians suffocate you with rules. I’m praying the governor gives us a new record low for California laws in 2006.

Joseph Pearce identifies the real issue underlying Britain’s hunt ban.

The urban proletariat and its Labour Party representatives perceived hunting as a preserve of the rich and as an archaic throwback to the days of feudalism and privilege. In fact, hunting is enjoyed by all social classes in rural England and is an expression of the community spirit that still survives in the countryside, even as it has long since become extinct in the cities. This fact was made glaringly obvious by the sheer enormity of the size of the pro-hunt demonstration by the Countryside Alliance before the ban became law. The rural rich and poor descended on London expressing the unity of the countryfolk of England against the stripping of their ancestral rights by an urban tyranny alienated by the very notion of cultural roots and traditional notions of communitas.

The central issue is not, however, merely a question of tradition versus modernity, though this is doubtless a key and important factor in the tension between town and country. The central issue is connected to what the Catholic Church has termed “subsidiarity.” The principal objection to the banning of hunting is that the urban proletariat had no right to override the wishes of the majority of people in the countryside to pursue their ancient traditions unmolested. No foxes are hunted in Hampstead or in Birmingham. No stags are pursued through the streets of Liverpool or Manchester. What right, therefore, do the people of these areas have to dictate what the people of Much Wenlock or Moreton-in-the-Marsh can or can’t do in the fields surrounding their villages? Why should the tradition-oriented folk of the English shires be forced to conform to the conventions of what Evelyn Waugh described “as our own deplorable epoch”? Why should the civilized remnant of England be forced to practice the new barbarism of our modern cities? These, as I say, are the key questions raised by the banning of hunting.

We have the same thing here already with respect to gun ownership, and our traditional forms of field sport will sooner or later inevitably also face threats of legal prohibition inspired by urban intolerance.
——————————————
Hat tip to Steve Bodio.

Here’s a television advertisement from Greenpeace UK, which alarmingly illustrates the intolerance and appetite for power of Environmentalist extremists.

Gas Guzzler video

Norm Mineta is resigning as Secretary of Transportation July 17th. Good! But not soon enough.

Under Mineta, the irrational prejudice against Americans defending themselves on air flights continued, and politically-correct safety measures reached levels previously unsurpassed. White-haired grannies were scrupulously searched in order to avoid ethnic profiling.

The Mineta regime’s rent-a-cop insanity reached its ultimate expression in 2002, when in Phoenix, 87-year-old WWII-hero and former governor of South Dakota Joe Foss was detained and had his Medal of Honor confiscated.

New West magazine profiles the American Hunters & Shooters Association, a democrat-front organization, founded by turncoat Gun Rights lobbyist Robert Ricker to compete with the National Rifle Association, and siphon away NRA support in the guise of a sportsmens’ advocacy organization while embracing an Environmentalist agenda and taking a compromising stance on Gun Control.

John Lott has these deceivers’ number.

Blatant violation of traditional Anglo-American liberties, and of the US Constitution, by police and prosecutors simply seizing (without process) the property of persons suspected of a crime is one of the most appalling fruits of the War on Drugs. Horror stories of local cops in Florida driving around in Ferraris and Porsches added to the constabulary fleet after seizure from wealthy tourists, of a Vermont granny losing her home because a visiting grandson was caught with pot, of the Hispanic cleaning woman who had her live savings taken “on suspicion” (what, other than drug dealing, could a Hispanic woman possibly be doing with a large sum of cash?), and so on have been showing up in news columns for the last few decades.

But, now the same highly dubious principle has been extended by Mayor Bloomberg, and the New York City Police Department, to new levels of legal and moral absurdity: for use in enforcing NYC’s Safety Nazi anti-fireworks laws far outside the borders and legitimate jurisdiction of the Cesspool on the Hudson. The Pennsylvania State Police ought to arrest the lot of them for criminal trespass and car theft.

NY Post story

Cato Institute History of American Forfeiture Law

The ACLU is not content with censoring and then pulling the plug on high school graduation speeches in Nevada.

Officials and a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union said Friday that administrators followed federal law when they cut the microphone on Foothill High School valedictorian Brittany McComb as she began deviating from a preapproved speech and reading from a version that mentioned God and contained biblical references.

“There should be no controversy here,” ACLU lawyer Allen Lichtenstein said. “It’s important for people to understand that a student was given a school-sponsored forum by a school and therefore, in essence, it was a school-sponsored speech.”

They are also hard at work on prohibiting the expression of dissent by their own board members.

Several board members of the American Civil Liberties Union expressed concerns at a meeting yesterday over proposed standards that would prohibit board members from publicly criticizing the organization’s policies and internal operations.

“I cannot vote for these proposals, as I have violated them nearly every time I have written an op-ed piece or spoken to the press,” said Mary Ellen Gale, an at-large member.

Bennett Hammer, a board member representing the organization’s New Mexico affiliate, cited examples of decisions in the last few years that he said had embarrassed the A.C.L.U. and contended that adopting the proposals would be yet another of “the things that have made us a laughingstock with the public.”

The board nonetheless voted against motions to strike the controversial provisions from the proposals and instead opted for further discussion.

Emily Whitfield, an A.C.L.U. spokeswoman, said the failure of the motions was not an endorsement of the proposals. “A vote at this early stage would have been a departure from the board’s deliberative process, and to suggest otherwise would be unfair and misleading,” she wrote in an e-mail message.

One of the provisions said, “a director may publicly disagree with an A.C.L.U. policy position, but may not criticize the A.C.L.U. board and staff.”

Another said, “Where an individual director disagrees with a board position on matters of civil liberties policy, the director should refrain from publicly highlighting the fact of such disagreement.”

Shouldn’t these guys change their name already?

History professor Joyce Lee Malcolm discusses, in the Weekend edition of the Journal, the unwillingness of the British government to defend its subjects against crime rising comcomitantly with its determination to prevent their defending themselves.

With Great Britain now the world’s most violent developed country, the British government has hit upon a way to reduce the number of cases before the courts: Police have been instructed to let off with a caution burglars and those who admit responsibility for some 60 other crimes ranging from assault and arson to sex with an underage girl. That is, no jail time, no fine, no community service, no court appearance. It’s cheap, quick, saves time and money, and best of all the offenders won’t tax an already overcrowded jail system.

Not everyone will be treated so leniently. A new surveillance system promises to hunt down anyone exceeding the speed limit. Using excessive force against a burglar or mugger will earn you a conviction for assault or, if you seriously harm him, a long sentence. Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer jailed for killing one burglar and wounding another during the seventh break-in at his rural home, was denied parole because he posed a threat to burglars. The career burglar whom Mr. Martin wounded got out early.

Using a cap pistol, as an elderly woman did to scare off a gang of youths, will bring you to court for putting someone in fear. Recently, police tried to stop David Collinson from entering his burning home to rescue his asthmatic wife. He refused to obey and, brandishing a toy pistol, dashed into the blaze. Minutes later he returned with his wife and dog and apologized to the police. Not good enough. In April Mr. Collinson was sentenced to a year in prison for being aggressive towards the officers and brandishing the toy pistol. Still, at least he won’t be sharing his cell with an arsonist or thief.

How did things come to a pass where law-abiding citizens are treated as criminals and criminals as victims? A giant step was the 1953 Prevention of Crime Act, making it illegal to carry any article for an offensive purpose; any item carried for self-defense was automatically an offensive weapon and the carrier is guilty until proven innocent. At the time a parliamentarian protested that “The object of a weapon was to assist weakness to cope with strength and it is this ability that the bill was framed to destroy.” The government countered that the public should be discouraged “from going about with offensive weapons in their pockets; it is the duty of society to protect them.”

The trouble is that society cannot and does not protect them. Yet successive governments have insisted protection be left to the professionals, meanwhile banning all sorts of weapons, from firearms to chemical sprays. They hope to add toy or replica guns to the list along with kitchen knives with points. Other legislation has limited self-defense to what seems reasonable to a court much later.

Although British governments insist upon sole responsibility for protecting individuals, for ideological and economic reasons they have adopted a lenient approach toward offenders. Because prisons are expensive and don’t reform their residents, fewer offenders are incarcerated. Those who are get sharply reduced sentences, and serve just half of these. Still, with crime rates rising, prisons are overcrowded and additional jail space will not be available anytime soon. The public learned in April that among convicts released early to ease overcrowding were violent or sex offenders serving mandatory life sentences who were freed after as little as 15 months.

And the slackening of law enforcement continues to stimulate the Labour Government’s erosion of the ancient liberties which were always England’s pride.

...a host of actions have been initiated to bring about more convictions. At the end of its 2003 session Parliament repealed the 800-year-old guarantee against double jeopardy. Now anyone acquitted of a serious crime can be retried if “new and compelling evidence” is brought forward. Parliament tinkered with the definition of “new” to make that burden easier to meet. The test for “new” in these criminal cases, Lord Neill pointed out, will be lower than “is used habitually in civil cases. In a civil case, one would have to show that the new evidence was not reasonably available on the previous occasion. There is no such requirement here.”

Parliament was so excited by the benefits of chucking the ancient prohibition that it extended the repeal of double jeopardy from murder to cases of rape, manslaughter, kidnapping, drug-trafficking and some 20 other serious crimes. For good measure it made the new act retroactive. Henceforth, no one who has been, or will be, tried and acquitted of a serious crime can feel confident he will not be tried again, and again.

To make the prosecutor’s task still easier, he is now permitted to use hearsay evidence—goodbye to confronting witnesses—to introduce a defendant’s prior record, and the number of jury trials is to be reduced. Still, the government has helped the homeowner by sponsoring a law “to prevent homeowners being sued by intruders who injure themselves while breaking in.”

It may be crass to point out that the British people, stripped of their ability to protect themselves and of other ancient rights and left to the mercy of criminals, have gotten the worst of both worlds. Still, as one citizen, referring to the new policy of letting criminals off with a caution, suggested: “Perhaps it would be easier and safer for the honest citizens of the U.K. to move into the prisons and the criminals to be let out.”

Just last week, the BBC was reporting on the success of a “knife amnesty.”

The old Andrew Sullivan came back yesterday, when Sullivan expressed shock at the firing by Governor Robert L. Erlich Jr. of Maryland of a Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority board member, Robert J. Smith, for expressing the opinion during a television talk-show discussion of Gay Marriage that there should not be a “special place of entitlement within the laws of the United States for persons of sexual deviancy.”

Sullivan defended Smith’s freedom of speech and opinion vigorously.

Reading this story upset me. A man is fired by the Maryland governor from his job as a member of the state’s Metro transit authority board. His sin? Speaking his mind about homosexuality, in a context which in no way affects his ability to do his job. I deeply disagree with his views and they could have been expressed more civilly, but he has every right to them, and they are indeed intrinsic to his understanding of his own religious liberty. Words hurt no one. Firing him for his views is an act of profound intolerance – by governor Ehrlich, and by my own city councilman, Jim Graham. The gay rights movement needs to practise the same tolerance it is asking for. Leave orthodox Catholics – and Protestants – alone in the expression of their own faith, and their own politics.

Sullivan’s principled libertarianism shows particularly well by contrast with the stance taken by Ilya Somin, one of the commentators at the Volokh Conspiracy, who equates the conventional religious view of homosexuality as “deviant” with racism, and thinks Smith’s firing was justified as:

The DC area has a large gay population and many of them presumably take Metro “trains and buses.” There is good reason to assume that a Metro Board member with Smith’s views would be less likely to enforce policies against antigay discrimination in public transport than one who is not a homophobe. At any rate, since there is unlikely to be a shortage of nonbigoted people willing to take this cushy patronage appointment, Governor Ehrlich was right not to take a risk on Smith.

Hat tip to PJM.

The trial of Oriana Fallaci for the crime of defaming Islam by statements made in her 2004 book The Force of Reason began today in Bergamo, and was adjourned until June 26.

Adel Smith, head of the Italian Muslim Union, brought a lawsuit contending that Fallaci’s book included 18 blasphemous statements, including a reference to Islam as “a pool that never purifies”.

The lawsuit resulted in the 77 year old author being charged with violating a law that forbids defamatory statements concerning a religion recognized by the Italian state, an offence punishable by a fine of up to ₤6,000 (£4,100/$7560).

Smith previously unsuccessfully sued his hometown of Abruzzo to have crucifixes removed from classrooms in public schools.

Oriana Fallaci, who resides in New York and is suffering from cancer, did not attend.

Associated Press

We can apply to doctors Goethe’s famous rueful comment on the German people: “so estimable in the individual and so wretched in the generality.”

story

American pioneers, like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, made a practice of moving whenever a neigbor settled close enough that they could see the smoke from his chimney. Those old boys were smart.

In today’s metropolitan suburbs, regulation has burgeoned like kudzu. One pays more in taxes per annum than most members of my dad’s generation paid for their house. Those taxes are high enough and increase reliably enough that retirement and a fixed income will require moving for most people.

You get to pay something in the neighborhood of a million bucks for a lot of suburban properties these days, and then you need to get (almost impossible to obtain) permissions to remodel or build anything on your (so-called) own property.

Myself, I’m keeping my 300 acre farm in a rural township of Pennsylvania, where I can shoot guns, remodel my house, or erect a 200 foot replica of the Statue of Liberty painted fuchsia, and nobody can stop me.

Just read this eye-opening account from the Washington Post of life in today’s suburban hell:

Marianne and Marc Duffy say their dream home renovation in Chevy Chase has turned into a suburban nightmare. Their neighbors say the Duffys intentionally flouted building rules when they expanded their $725,000 house on Thornapple Street and have no one to blame but themselves.

Yesterday, a Montgomery County appeals board reaffirmed an earlier ruling that the Duffys had rebuilt their house too close to the street and to neighbors. The Duffys say the decision leaves them two choices: Move the house a few feet at a cost of $100,000 or continue an expensive battle in court….

The dispute has shed new light on the inner workings of the county’s Department of Permitting Services, which reversed course at least five times in the case, the Duffys said. The agency issued renovation permits to the couple last year but later pulled them back and ordered work stopped after neighbors complained that the Duffys had actually demolished and rebuilt the house. The couple are renting a house nearby.

The case has pitted the Duffys, both securities lawyers, against a group of prominent opponents, including two journalists—Mayer, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, and her husband, William Hamilton, a Washington Post editor—as well as lawyer Michael Eig and his historic preservationist wife Emily Hotaling Eig, former ABC News reporter Jackie Judd and real estate agent Kristin Gerlach. Both sides had lawyers but recently decided to represent themselves.

Neither side has signaled a willingness to give up the fight, while acknowledging the strain the protracted battle, including six days of hearings, has put on their lives.

The dispute has roiled the neighborhood, sparked contentious discussions at Town Council meetings, generated letters to local newspapers and debates on talk radio, and fueled discussions about liberal conspiracies.

Moral? Don’t live near pretentious suburban liberals.

Walter Olson (at Overlawyered) links Steve Bodio on simply astonishing new forms of pet ownership regulation adopted, at the behest of a sinister new alliance of NIMBY liberals and Animal Rights activist groups.

In the case of Albuquerque, New Mexico, Steve Bodio quotes the following membership alert received from a dog group he belongs to:

City Councilor Sally Mayer is again proposing sweeping changes that would drastically limit fanciers’ ability to breed and own dogs, while doing little to address the city’s problems with irresponsible ownership. The proposal is currently set for a vote at the May 1st city council meeting. Fanciers are encouraged to attend the meeting, which will be held in the Council Chambers on the basement level of the Albuquerque/Bernalillo County Government Center building at One Civic Plaza NW, Albuquerque. The meeting beings at 5pm.

“The proposal, known as the HEART ordinance (Humane and Ethical Animal Regulations and Treatment), contains draconian regulations, oppressive fees, and allows the government unfettered access to animal owner’s homes and personal information. Worse, the measure was put forth based on “findings” that were established without any studies being conducted and without any input from responsible dog owners and breeders.

“The measure’s restrictive provisions include:

• An annual $150 permit for each unaltered dog or cat over six months old.

• A $150 litter permit, which expires six months after the date of issue. Breeders would be limited to four litters per year.

• A limit of four dogs and two cats per household (or six cats) unless residents purchase a $50 multiple companion animal site permit.

• Allows one adjoining property owner to petition for the revocation of a multiple companion animal site permit. (I will come back to this one)

• Prohibits anyone with an intact animal permit from having a multiple companion animal site permit. [WHAT DOES THIS MEAN??]

• Requirements that owners microchip or tattoo their dogs and cats.

• Prohibiting crating of dogs outdoors and tethering for more than 1 hour per day.

• Mandates owners provide “environmental enrichment” defined as “toys and other safe products.that will stimulate mental, physical and grooming activities.”

• Requires any animal that is picked up by animal control to be spayed/neutered, even if the owner has an intact animal permit and immediately reclaims the animal.

“In applying for any permit, dog owners would be forced to comply with a long list of provisions, including submitting to property and record-keeping inspections.

“The proposal would also put severe restrictions on animal service businesses such as dog groomers and doggie daycares. Of interest to all dog owners, these businesses would be required to provide a list of all their clients and their contact information to the city. Generally the government must get a subpoena from a judge for client lists and company records.

“It is critical that local fanciers immediately contact Albuquerque’s city officials and convey their strong opposition to this ordinance. Area purebred dog owners, including members of the Rio Grande Kennel Club, are working to oppose the ordinance and to support fair and reasonable animal control legislation that does not penalize responsible owners and breeders. However, more help is urgently needed!

“What You Can Do:
AKC encourages dog owners to contact their city council member and express your opposition. To find out who represents you on the Albuquerque City Council tp://www.cabq.gov/council/ccmaps.html. It is extremely important that council members hear from their constituents!

“For more information, contact:

Patte Klecan
Rio Grande Kennel Club”

IT PASSED.

As Steve reports in the same posting, he had already run into the same thing in Bozeman, Montana.

And Los Angeles, he also reports in another posting, has passed a draconian dog ordinance:

Los Angeles County has passed an ordinance that requires all dogs to be sterilized and microchipped, effective June 3, 2006. It applies only to those dogs kept in unincorporated areas, but cities such as Los Angeles are being urged to enact similar requirements. Should the cities follow suit, 10 million people will be soon be so regulated, more than the population in forty-four states. Dogs may be exempt from this requirement if they are registered with an approved registry and are either titled, entered in an approved competition annually, or owned by an individual belonging to a dog club with enforced breeding restrictions. Animal rightists are currently fighting to further tighten these exemptions’ details. Required intact licenses for breedable dogs cost $60 per year; altered ones cost $20. Litters must be reported to the county, as must every puppy buyer’s identity. Additional requirements and penalties of this sterilize and track program may be found at http://animalcontrol.co.la.ca.us/html/Main1.htm. LA County says it’s hiring additional animal control officers to go door to door to enforce this anti-breeder ordinance.

And Chicago is proposing the same thing, says the Sun-Times:

Owners of Chicago’s estimated 600,000 dogs would be required to microchip their pets, limit tethering, pay stiff fines for letting them roam free and choose between neutering and sharply higher license fees, under a sweeping crackdown proposed by an influential alderman.

Grooming, boarding and doggie day-care facilities would be licensed and subject to strict operating standards under the legislative package championed by License Committee Chairman Eugene Schulter (47th).

A lifelong dog lover whose deceased Irish terriers Kerry and Conner were “part of the family,” Schulter said he’s driven by a desire to “create a safer and better environment” for Chicago’s dogs.

This alliance between the Aninal Rights extremist groups and conventional liberal politicians to microchip, sterilize and regulate out of existence the family dog is cause for real alarm. What if, for reasons of your own, you wanted to breed your mixed breed animal? What if you raise dogs, as Steve Bodio does, from an exotic foreign breed, not yet recognized by the AKC?

Steve Bodio identified one Sportsman’s Group trying to fight them on this: the Sportsmen’s and Animal Owners’ Voting Alliance.

George Weigel in Commentary has a must-read essay, discussing Europe’s current unhappy position: faced with growing Islamic aggression and intolerance based in unassimilable immigrant communities, while simultaneously experiencing a continuing assault on her own identity and traditions by authoritarian secularism.

The aggressors in Culture War A are radical secularists, motivated by what the legal scholar Joseph Weiler has dubbed “Christophobia.” They aim to eliminate the vestiges of Europe’s Judeo-Christian culture from a post-Christian European Union by demanding same-sex marriage in the name of equality, by restricting free speech in the name of civility, and by abrogating core aspects of religious freedom in the name of tolerance. The aggressors in Culture War B are radical and jihadist Muslims who detest the West, who are determined to impose Islamic taboos on Western societies by violent protest and other forms of coercion if necessary, and who see such operations as the first stage toward the Islamification of Europe—or, in the case of what they often refer to as al-Andalus, the restoration of the right order of things, temporarily reversed in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella.

The question Europe must face, but which much of Europe seems reluctant to face, is whether the aggressors in Culture War A have not made it exceptionally difficult for the forces of true tolerance and authentic civil society to prevail in Culture War B.

The Telegraph supplies a story indicating just how marginalized firearms and hunting have become in Britain.

A deer hunter who took his photographs to a supermarket for processing was shocked to find himself reported to police.

Although the sport is legal, Tesco gave his details to officers who questioned him for several hours.

Last night the store was accused of “demonising” people who participate in field sports.

“Peter Williams”, who asked for his real name not to be published, said he was “made to feel like a terrorist”. Tesco has no ban on photographs of shooting and its privacy policy says: “We will never pass your personal data to anyone else”, but it contacted the police without telling Mr Williams.

Mr Williams, who is in his early thirties, from north Devon, took his film to Tesco in Barnstaple. Staff deemed photographs of him with his gun and a deer he had shot “inappropriate”, although he had broken no animal cruelty or firearms laws.

Mr Williams said that he was “utterly shocked and stunned” when two policemen arrived at his house on a Sunday morning with a set of prints given to them by Tesco.

After questioning him, the police accepted that he had a firearms certificate and had not broken any laws. Simon Hart, the chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, which campaigns on rural issues, said: “This is one of the most disturbing and ridiculous examples of ignorance and demonisation, of which Tesco should be ashamed.”

Mr Williams asked the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC), of which he is a member, to demand an explanation from Tesco. Sir Terry Leahy, the chief executive of Tesco, replied that staff had acted appropriately: “On being asked to view the prints, our store’s management team decided that there was cause for concern and as such contacted the police.”

A second letter on behalf of Sir Terry said: “Tesco does not discriminate against any lawful section of the community… We are confident that the actions of our staff were… within the law.”

Last night a spokesman for Tesco said: “We are sorry for any upset or distress caused to the gentleman. However, if our staff are concerned about the content of photographic material it is right that they should seek advice from the appropriate authorities, in this instance, the police.”

A spokesman for Devon and Cornwall Police said: “With any allegation of a possible criminal offence which is referred to the police, we have a duty to the community to make inquiries, particularly with any issues involving firearms.”

John McCain tells Don Imus:

I would rather have a clean government than one where First Amendment rights were being respected which has become corrupt.

video

Some of us don’t share Senator McCain’s point of view that any particular problem justifies the abrogation of major provisions of the Bill of Rights.

Connecticut, once the land of steady habits and Yankee common sense, has become another state inhabited by suburban numbskulls ready to react to every news meme with coercive action at the state level. The Connecticut legislature on Thursday responded to the progressing peril of portly pubescents by banning carbonated soft drinks, including diet sodas (!), from all elementary, middle, and high schools, starting in July.

Reuters:

Connecticut’s state legislature voted on Thursday to ban sales of sodas and other sugary beverages in state elementary, middle and high schools as part of an effort to stem teen obesity.

Gov. Jodi Rell has pledged to sign the bill, which would make Connecticut the fourth U.S. state with a strong law in schools to trim the growing American teenage waistline.

The ban includes all regular and diet sodas, along with “electrolyte replacement beverages” such as Gatorade. The only drinks allowed to go on sale in schools would be bottled water, milk or 100-percent fruit and vegetable drinks.

“The bill clearly won’t solve all food and beverage questions that lead to the increase in excess weight and obesity that we are seeing among children and adults in our society, but it’s a good start,” said state Rep. Andrew Fleischmann.

The House approved the bill on Thursday by a slim 76-to-71 vote margin largely on party lines in the Democrat-controlled state Legislature. Last week it passed the Senate 24-to-8.

Republicans proposed multiple amendments that were all voted down and said the issue should be left to local communities and not decided by the state.

It’s becoming just as bad as California back there.

The partisan, politically-motivated prosecution of Rush Limbaugh reached an ignominious conclusion today, when the amiable conservative talk radio personality’s prosecutors agreed to dismiss charges against Limbaugh in 18 months, if he underwent a face-saving recovery program, and coughed up $30,000 (pocket change for the celebrity) to cover the state’s costs for the unprecedented three year prosecutorial fishing expedition.

Limbaugh was charged with “fraud to conceal information to obtain a prescription,” pled not guilty, and was released on a derisory $3000 bail.

AP

The left, with characteristic intellectual dishonesty, is blowing smoke, running headlines saying “Rush Limbaugh Arrested” or “Rush Limbaugh Turns Himself In.’’ Tomorrow, Rush Limbaugh will be free, with no more charges hanging over him, richer and more successful than his liberal persecutors, and still in possession of the largest AM Radio audience of them all. How’s Air America making out, lefties?

George Will is absolutely right. Rather than have these kinds of legislators disgrace the Republican Party, it would be much better to just surrender the House back to the democrats. If people are going to vote for things like this, let’s make sure they’re wearing the right Party emblem.

If in November Republicans lose control of the House of Representatives, April 5 should be remembered as the day they demonstrated that they earned defeat. Traducing the Constitution and disgracing conservatism, they used their power for their only remaining purpose—to cling to power. Their vote to restrict freedom of speech came just as the GOP’s conservative base is coming to the conclusion that House Republicans are not worth working for in October or venturing out to vote for in November…

..The 211 Republicans who voted for big-government regulation of speech will have no principled objection. How many principled Republicans remain? Only 18. The following, who voted against restricting 527s:

Roscoe Bartlett (Maryland), Chris Chocola (Indiana), Jeff Flake (Arizona), Vito Fossella (New York), Trent Franks (Arizona), Scott Garrett (New Jersey), Louie Gohmert (Texas), Jeb Hensarling (Texas), Ernest Istook (Oklahoma), Walter Jones (North Carolina), Steve King (Iowa), Connie Mack (Florida), Cathy McMorris (Washington), Randy Neugebauer (Texas), Ron Paul (Texas), Mike Pence (Indiana), John Shadegg (Arizona) and Lynn Westmoreland (Georgia).

On this remnant of libertarian, limited-government conservatism a future House majority can be built. The current majority forfeited its raison d’etre April 5.

Ohio State University at Mansfield librarian Scott Savage suggested several books for a freshman reading program, including David Kupelian’s The Marketing of Evil, which title associates a number of cases of the evolution of the American moral perspective, most notably the way in which homosexuality is viewed, to calculated and astute marketing by the organized left, and some other conservative titles.

A firestorm of argument over book choices erupted (primarily over the Kupelian book, of course), and events culminated in a unanimous faculty vote to file sexual harassment charges against the conservative librarian. Accordingly, three professors duly filed a complaint of discrimination and harassment against him, saying that the book suggestions made them feel “unsafe.”

Ace broke the story. Eugene Volokh comments. And Morgan at the excellent group blog YARGB summarizes and adds further details.

David Schmidtz at Cato discusses which forms of inequality matter, i.e., which deserve intervention and redress. Replies from Peter Singer, Tom G. Palmer, and Jacob Hacker will be forthcoming. The essay is excerpted from his new book, The Elements of Justice.

The key philosophical point: that there is a prior moral question about which inequalities are ours (i.e., society’s) to arrange, lies outside the specific scope of this essay’s focus.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Eric at Classical Values identifies the typical maneuver employed by statists to expand the definition of crime:

Existing laws don’t “work”! New laws are needed! I’m confused about what seems to be a recurrent pattern in this country. When there are laws against something, and these laws are not enforced, instead of enforcing the existing laws, there’s always a demand for new laws.Tougher laws.

It’s as if there’s some magical belief system that the tougher the law is, the stronger it is, and the more likely that human conduct will be deterred. Enforcement of existing laws never seems to enter anyone’s mind.

The point here is not whether I happen to agree with the laws. It’s just a recurrent pattern. The drug laws started as a tax measure in 1914, and ever since, they have become ever more draconian. Examples aren’t really needed, although the latest trend (now that they’ve run out of drugs to make illegal) is to criminalize precursor ingredients. So Americans are no longer allowed to buy cold medicine over the counter—all because it might be used to manufacture illegal drugs. What’s next? Glassware which might be used to cook drugs…

The pattern seems to be pass laws, ignore them, wait until the problem is huge, then pass draconian laws, plus new laws against conduct which resulted from the previous climate of non-enforcement.

It has long been illegal for felons to buy or possess guns, and to buy, sell, or transfer a gun to a felon. But felons buy guns all the time illegally. Which means that we need a crackdown on what? On perfectly legal purchases of guns by ordinary citizens.

Add to this the trend of sending in SWAT teams to perform routine law enforcement, and it’s fair to wonder whether the goal is to create a police state.

I hate police states—and I’m just wondering whether neglecting to enforce the law is one of the precursor ingredients.

At the University of Illinois:

CHICAGO—The editor in chief of a student-led newspaper serving the University of Illinois has been suspended after printing cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad that, when published in Europe, enraged Muslims and led to violent protests in the Middle East and Asia.

Editor in chief Acton Gorton and his opinion editor, Chuck Prochaska, were relieved of their duties at The Daily Illini on Tuesday while a task force investigates the internal decision-making and communication that led to the publishing of the cartoons, according to a statement by the newspaper’s publisher and general manager, Mary Cory.

Inside Hoover House, a scurrilous joking note about the Prophet Muhammad was taped to a dorm room door. A Muslim resident was outraged. It was the kind of incident that could have sparked serious trouble.

But a deputy dean at the University of Chicago says the culprit defused the situation by writing a note of apology.

“While his desire to make a statement was not intended to be directed at any one individual, that he had demonstrated insensitivity,” said Deputy Dean Cheryl Gutman.

The head of the University of Chicago’s Muslim Student Association says it was apparently an act of stupidity, not blind hatred.

“I think an apology is very important, just to say that he didn’t mean what he was doing, and like I said, it was an act of ignorance,” said Mohammed Hasan…

..Since the apology was made, and the Muslim student accepted it, the university chose not to punish or evict the other young man. The University of Chicago considers the incident closed.

Details remain unclear as to whether disciplinary action will be taken against a Hoover House resident who posted a homemade sketch of the Muslim prophet Muhammad on the door of his suite two weeks ago.

Accompanied by the caption “Mo’ Mohammed, Mo’ Problems,” the drawing prompted strong reactions from Muslim students on campus and, more recently, attracted the attention of free speech advocates.

Katie Callow-Wright, director of undergraduate student housing, said that although details on the status of the case could not be discussed, the process of addressing such complaints involves a series of discussions and careful review.

“When a resident reports an incident or concern to their resident staff or the Housing Office, the resident staff gather information by talking with students and, if necessary, other staff to understand all of the facts of the situation,” she said. “This is an informal process, and can sometimes entail several individual meetings or conversations.”

Callow-Wright added that the appropriate Resident Heads (RHs) would hold individual meetings with the student who allegedly violated community standards.

“Depending upon the situation, a meeting with a student or students might then take place in the Office of Undergraduate Student Housing,” she said.

asks the Liberator Online in the February issue.

Before you answer, consider:

In January, an Atlanta man was arrested and handcuffed for selling a subway token at face value. Donald Pirone observed another passenger having difficulty with a token vending machine, so he gave him a $1.75 token. After the man insisted on paying him, Pirone was cited by a transit officer for a misdemeanor, since state law prohibits selling tokens—even at face value. A MARTA spokesperson denied that handcuffing a customer for helping another customer was excessive. “There are customer service phones for people who are having trouble getting tokens out of the machine,” she said.

Meanwhile, in late 2005, an Ohio man spent three days in jail because he didn’t put identification tags on his family’s pet turtles and snakes. Terry Wilkins broke a state law requiring owners of native reptiles to tag them with a PIT (personal-integrated transponder). The tags, which are the size of a grain of rice and can be inserted under the animal’s skin, contain a bar code readable by a scanner. Wilkins refused to tag the animals because he said PIT tags cause health problems in small reptiles.

It goes on. In Kentucky, Larry Casteel was arrested for not attending a parenting class for divorcing parents, as mandated by state law. He spent the night in jail. In New Jersey, police are giving tickets to people who leave their cars running for more than three minutes in store parking lots. Stopwatch-wielding police hit the offenders with a $200 fine for violating the state’s anti-idling law. In northwest Georgia, 49 convenience store owners were arrested for selling legal products to customers. The owners—mostly of Indian background—sold cold medicine, baking soda, table salt, matches, and lantern fuel. Police said the ingredients could be used to make methamphetamine. In Burlington, Vermont, police are ticketing people for not removing keys from the ignition and locking their cars. Police said the state law prevents car thefts. Violators are fined $79.

So—are you still sure you can get through a day without violating a law? If so, don’t worry. Legislators are making more things illegal. In New York City, a city council member wants to make it a crime to ride a bike without a registration number tag. Violators would face up to 15 days imprisonment. In Illinois, a state senator wants to make it a crime not to have a carbon monoxide detector installed in your home. In Pennsylvania, a state senator filed a bill to allow police to fine drivers $75 if they don’t clean snow off their car. In Virginia, a state legislator wants to make it illegal to show your underwear in public. Girls (or boys) with low-rider pants would get hit with a $50 fine if their thongs show.

Novelist Ayn Rand once wrote: “There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws.”

Have we reached that point? Is it impossible to live without breaking laws? Before you answer, better check to make sure that your pets have transponder tags, that you didn’t leave the keys in your car, and that your underwear is not showing.

Theodore Dalrymple, who has moved to France, finds appalling the ever-increasing extinction of Liberty in Britain:

I have lived under a Latin American military dictatorship where daily life was freer than in Britain today. Of course, you couldn’t go out into the street and shout “Down with Señor Presidente”, at least not without dire consequences; on the other hand, you were considerably less surveyed, supervised and harried as you went about your business than you are in contemporary Britain.

Dean Wolstenhome, Greyhounds Coursing a Hare

The self-styled I-Team (“I” for investigation, get it?) of KGO-TV in San Francisco hit pay dirt Superbowl weekend. While couch-potatoes all over America swilled beer, munched pretzels, and watched steroid-enhanced gladiatorial combat over the pigskin spheroid, Ted Baxter discovered that a tiny minority of Americans were still afield in California pursuing the ancient sport of coursing.

Coursing is a very old and traditional form of hunting, whose literature goes back to the 2nd century A.D., cultivated both in Christian Europe and in the Islamic Middle East, consisting of the reduction to possession of game (typically, the hare) by the pursuit of gazehounds, i.e., dogs which hunt by sight. Some breeds typically used in coursing are greyhounds and saluqi.

Ted, of course, was engaged in a more modern, and far less sporting, type of hunting: the pursuit and elimination of the unpopular minority by a pack of fools and bigots down a trail of prejudice, guided by curs like Ted himself. Ted Baxter in this case being an orthodontically-gleaming opportunist named Dan Noyes, who preens and congratulates himself publicly for his reporter’s instinct (I’d call it something else), and for telling a compelling story.

The compelling story consists of the survival of a “blood sport” within the Bay Area, an esoteric and little-known activity, incomprehensible to the urban masses, with the controversial feature common to all blood sports, including fishing, of the death of the quarry, at least on those occasions—often in the minority—when the pursuit is successful. To city boys like Ted, meat is produced in government-supervised nutrition factories, where it is processed, packaged, and then shipped to convenient supermarkets. The death of an animal is unthinkable. As one city-dweller once said to me: how could you be so heartless as to kill an animal, when you can eat a hamburger at McDonald’s?

Ted Baxter’s indignant news story, which opines: “That’s got to be a tough way to die for a rabbit.” implicitly imagines that aging jack rabbits retire to nursing homes, collect old age pensions, and die in bed.

Ted has no idea that, in California, jack rabbits breed year round, producing a litter of up to 8 leverets every six weeks or so. Females nurse the young for only two or three days, and then go back to making more jack rabbits. Crash production is essential, because the life of the jack rabbit is characterically short. Few jack rabbits live to the ripe old age of one year. The jack rabbit is a principal staple of the diet of coyotes, bobcats, foxes (red, grey, and kit), minks, martens, fishers, ferrets, mountain lions, bears, weasels, and numerous species hawks and owls and snakes; and are commonly killed by motor vehicles and by domestic dogs and cats.

It sounds terrible and barbarous to some busy-body old lady, left-wing state legislator from Berkeley, like Loni Hancock to whom Ted went running to tattle, that jack rabbits do sometimes suffer the unenviable fate (as Ted notes) of being slain by the jaws of the greyhounds. But, once Comrade Hancock introduces (see her blog), and in theory passes, her bill banning coursing in California, the jack rabbit saved by her efforts and those of noble Ted Baxter (and Channel’s 7’s crack I-Team) gets to run only a short distance further down the sunny California meadow, and, whoops! down come a great big red-tailed hawk which slays him with his talons, and tears him to pieces with his beak. Or up comes the hungry coyote, whose jaws are not readily distinguishable from those of greyhound.

The elimination of this ancient, complex and honorable tradition will, in reality, spare few pangs to jack rabbits.

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Steve Bodio also comments on this classic manifestation of the well-known tolerance of California’s Bay Area.

Fred Siegel at the New York Post understands the vulnerability of a modern Europe lacking all conviction, faced with Islam’s passionate intensity:

EUROPE’S future may hinge on the outcome of the Danish cartoon affair. It has long seemed almost inevitable that either Islam would be Europeanized or Europe would be Islamized. The European reaction to date suggests that the latter seems more likely…

Europe may have given up on imperialism, but the same can’t be said for the Islamic world. The 2003 report “Dialogue between Peoples and Cultures in the Euro-Mediterranean Area” bears a striking cover that sums up the Arab view of the relationship with Europe: It’s a medieval Arab map of an upside-down Europe at the feet of a commanding Arab North Africa.

The Arab world understands Europe’s weaknesses far better than the other way around. Muslim spokesmen usually describe criticism of Islamism as “racist” — as if religious ideology were a biological given.

They’ve also learned how to game Western liberalism. When criticized for denying the Holocaust, they defend themselves as exercising their free-speech rights. But they drop the free-speech bit when insisting that images offensive to Muslims be barred and argue instead on the grounds of multicultural sensitivity. (That argument gets strong backing from most of the European left, which, looking upon Muslims as the new proletariat, insists that Islamophobia, not Islamofascism, is the great issue of the day.)

None of this should be unfamiliar to Americans, who’ve seen the same game play out on U.S. college campuses. But what’s happening in Europe is campus political correctness enforced by violence and the threat of war.

Islamists insist that Europeans must desist from criticizing Islamism because that will only alienate the moderates — a game familiar to anyone who remembers the Black Power movement. In fact, one of the biggest losers in this game is moderate Muslims in Denmark — who are afraid of being squeezed between zealots on one side and a right-wing backlash on the other. They have urged Rasmussen not to give in. But if European governments can’t stand up to extremism, how can moderate Muslims?

Like the Czechs of the 1930s, the Danes of today have become a bellwether of Europe’s willingness to confront thuggery. Will Europe once again fail the test?

At least the lines have now been draw so clearly that only fools, knaves, cowards, Eurocrats and appeasers can deny the obvious.

says Zeus to Mohammed in the France Soir cartoon, which ran today, after its managing editor Jacques Lefranc was fired by Raymond Lakah, the paper’s Franco-Egyptian owner for publishing the twelve Prophet Mohammed cartoons from Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten. Erik at ¡No Pasar¡n! is covering the European response.
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BBC
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It did seem strange that the controversy over the rather bland Danish cartoons should break out again so vigorously recently in Islamic countries and Islamic European communities. Counterterrorism Blog explains how this came about.

The irrationality of a tax-subsidy-created insurance system which typically gives you free (or at least low cost) health care when you are employed and prosperous, and which then shifts drastically-increased insurance costs to you as soon as you are out of work, is a nasty problem which perennially provides democrats with talking points and opportunities to try seducing the public into supporting its vision of a government-supplied free lunch.

Miraculously, this country actually had enough intelligence to reject HillaryCare once, but neither Hillary nor socialized medicine schemes are going away anytime soon. Today’s lead Journal editorial identifies the actual problems and points out precisely the correct solutions.

the President wants to fix defects in the market for health care. This is an area where he can do a great deal of good at little cost to the Treasury. And it’s high time. The inefficiencies of the current system are a drag on wage growth that’s being felt now even by the United Auto Workers union. And health care costs may partly explain why many Americans don’t feel as good as they might about the current economic expansion.

Longer term, it’s also increasingly obvious that the U.S. is approaching a tipping point where the reforms needed to preserve an innovative, market-based health system may become politically impossible. That’s because almost half of our health-care dollars are already spent by government. Do nothing and the inevitable growth of Medicare alone will lead us far down the path toward government-rationed health care a la Europe or Canada.

Even the half of our national health-care spending that remains a “private” responsibility bears little resemblance to an efficient market. That’s because the vast majority of Americans with private insurance get it from their employers, a relic of World War II when companies adapted to wage and price controls by offering insurance as a benefit to attract the best employees.

A tax exemption for employer health spending was later codified and will be worth about $126 billion this year. This enormous subsidy has created a system of overgenerous employer-provided plans that give individuals little incentive to pay attention to costs. It’s also unfair to people who aren’t lucky enough to get insurance from their employers, and therefore must pay for it with after-tax dollars.

So the first principle of reform must be to equalize the tax treatment of individually purchased and employer-provided insurance. Health Savings Accounts, which were part of the 2003 Medicare bill, are already a step in the right direction, since they mate a high-deductible insurance policy with a tax-free savings account to help pay pre-deductible expenses. Mr. Bush is usefully going further by asking for the premiums on the HSA insurance policy to be tax-free as well.

Equally important is creating a national market for individual insurance. Right now employers large enough to “self insure” can do so mostly as they see fit. But individuals and small businesses who want to buy insurance are at the mercy of state regulators where they live or operate. In overregulated states like New York and New Jersey, residents can pay 10 times as much for insurance as they would in neighboring states, and might not even be able to buy the high-deductible insurance necessary for an HSA. Individually purchased insurance also isn’t portable across state lines, contributing needless anxiety to normal life decisions like moving or switching jobs.

The Founders put the Commerce Clause in the Constitution precisely so Congress could act against internal restraints on trade such as today’s 50-state insurance market. We hope Mr. Bush endorses and fights for the bill from Representative John Shadegg of Arizona that would let individuals buy insurance from vendors in any state, no matter where they live.

The overall goal here is to move from the inefficiency and insecurity of the employer-dependent system to one where all workers have portable, individually owned insurance. A good analogy is portable 401k retirement plans, which are more appropriate to the mobile nature of the modern economy than traditional pensions. They are also more secure, as the increasing number of defined-benefit pension plans in default (United Airlines) amply demonstrates.

Achieving this won’t be easy, especially given the ideological stake that so many politicians have in a government-run system. They like the leverage of determining payment rates to hospitals and doctors, not to mention being able to take credit with voters for providing more benefits. But there is no free lunch in health care, any more than there is in any other part of the U.S. economy.

Health care is either going to be allocated by prices or by government, which in the latter case means price controls and waiting lines. Though it represents one-sixth of the U.S. economy, health care is the one industry in which the purchasers actually have no idea what anything costs. An individual market for health insurance would allow more freedom of choice while making consumers more cost conscious.

Market-based health-care reform could be a big political winner for Mr. Bush and the GOP. Americans have shown themselves averse to rationing via brute force, both in their rejection of HillaryCare and in the backlash against HMOs. And while the opponents have skillfully played on fears, consumer-driven plans—which let individuals “ration” care for themselves—have proven popular when they’ve been offered. Just last week the insurance industry announced that enrollment in HSAs had tripled in 10 months to three million people.

That’s a small part of the entire market, but an important start. Policy inertia on health care will inevitably lead to more government and Canadian or British-style waiting lists. But there’s still a chance to change course. Republicans in Congress should join Mr. Bush in seizing it.

The BBC reports that the Crown Prosecution Service has decided not to pursue the case for homophobic remarks brought by the Thames Valley Police against 21 year-old Oxford University student Sam Brown, who in unexplained circumstances said to an officer: “Excuse me, do you realise your horse is gay?”

Mr. Brown was arrested under section 5 of the Public Order Act. He was jailed overnight, and declined to pay an 80 pound fine, which resulted in the referral of the case for prosecution.

When my wife and I go to the cineplex in a nearby California municipality, it is not easy to park legally. All legal street parking (and the great majority of spaces in the nearby municipal parking garage) features two hour limits. Any ordinary movie, with promotional and coming attraction trailers, more often than not will run longer than two hours. Arrive anytime past early morning, and the extra time slots (located on remote upper garage floors) will typically all be occupied.

A cynic will readily guess that this particular municipality, like many others, deliberately makes legal parking impossible in order to use parking tickets as a form of supplementary taxation. Anarchists like myself often just tear up tickets issued by dollar-snatching localities that we do not live in. But, as the Wall Street Journal warns, the days when this kind of payment compliance was semi-voluntary may be nearing an end:

A growing number of routine municipal fines and fees—including unpaid parking tickets, library fines, and trash-collection charges—are starting to damage consumer-credit scores.

In the face of budget crunches, major cities, including New York, Chicago and Miami, are hiring private collection agencies to chase down small debts that are frequently shrugged off by consumers. Since an outstanding account handled by a private collection company can wind up in a credit file, more consumers are discovering that niggling government fees—like unpaid speeding tickets or dog-catcher fines—are marring their credit. It’s up to each city to decide whether such information will end up in a consumer’s credit file.

Claude DaCorsi, a management consultant in Portland, Ore., used to pride himself on his near-perfect credit rating. But during a recent routine credit check, he discovered his credit scores had plunged to “below average.”

The reason: Two late library books, including a picture book taken out for his two-year-old son. The library had turned over the $40 late fee to a private collection agency.

Mr. DaCorsi, who says the black mark affected his interest rate on a home loan, has since barred his children from visiting the library. “We go to Barnes & Noble now,” he says. “We can get books there without fear of retribution.”

A handful of cities, including San Diego and Chicago, have worked with collection agencies since the late 1990s. But the trend is spreading rapidly around the country as strapped local governments look for creative ways to boost revenue without raising taxes and fees. Over the past few years, local governments in places including Seattle; Anchorage, Alaska; Austin, Texas; and Florida’s Miami-Dade County have contracted with private agencies to collect late parking tickets and court fees. In New York City, Baltimore and Dallas, libraries use private collection firms to recover fines. New York state recently hired a collection company to pursue overdue E-ZPass toll bills…

Local governments are also using collection agencies to track down some more-unusual fees. In Florida, some municipalities have used a private agency to track down swimmers who fail to pay “beach rescue” fees after they are rescued by lifeguards. San Diego courts have used collection agencies to collect fines issued to people caught riding the trolley system without tickets, according to AllianceOne, a Pennsylvania-based collection firm that works with court systems around the country…

Some cities are using collection agencies to chase down debts that are over a decade old, which can lead to surprises for consumers. Last July, Phillip Remstein of King of Prussia, Pa., received a notice in the mail from a collections company requesting $53 for a Philadelphia parking ticket issued in 1993. “It was ridiculous,” says Mr. Remstein. “I didn’t hear from them for 12 years and suddenly they want to collect?”...

Even when the dollar amounts involved in the fines are small, any collections activity in a credit file can do serious damage to a credit score. “It’s a very serious negative item on your report, on par with a tax lien or a bankruptcy,” says Maxine Sweet, vice president of public education at Experian. “You will definitely pay more for your credit, in higher interest rates and higher down payments.”

A library fine reported to a credit bureau, for example, can knock as much as 100 points off a credit score, making it difficult for someone with previously good credit to get the best rate on a loan, consumers and industry experts say. (Credit scores calculated by Fair Isaac Corp., the leading provider of such scores, typically range from 300 to 850; any score above 700 will generally get you the best rate on a loan.) Collections activity can stay on a report for seven years.