IF you are ever on a jury in a marijuana case, I recommend that you vote “not guilty” — even if you think the defendant actually smoked pot, or sold it to another consenting adult. As a juror, you have this power under the Bill of Rights; if you exercise it, you become part of a proud tradition of American jurors who helped make our laws fairer.
The information I have just provided — about a constitutional doctrine called “jury nullification” — is absolutely true. But if federal prosecutors in New York get their way, telling the truth to potential jurors could result in a six-month prison sentence. Read More
More than one million Iraqis have died as a result of the conflict in their country since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, according to research conducted by one of Britain’s leading polling groups. Read More
Here’s the hurricane: In reality, no less than $29.616 trillion is the total emergency assistance provided by the Fed to foreign and domestic entities during the Global Financial Crisis. Let’s repeat that: $29 trillion. This astounding number is over twice U.S. gross domestic product, the nominal value of all goods and services produced for the year 2010. Read More
“* I heard from two different sources that at least one busload of protesters (around 40 people) was forced to spend seven excruciating hours locked in tiny cages on a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept. prison bus, denied food, water and access to bathroom facilities. Both men and women were forced to urinate in their seats. Meanwhile, the cops in charge of the bus took an extended Starbucks coffee break.
* The bus that I was shoved into didn’t move for at least an hour. The whole time we listened to the screams and crying from a young woman whom the cops locked into a tiny cage at the front of the bus. She was in agony, begging and pleading for one of the policemen to loosen her plastic handcuffs. A police officer sat a couple of feet away the entire time that she screamed–but wouldn’t lift a finger.
* Everyone on my bus felt her pain–literally felt it. That’s because the zip-tie handcuffs they use—like the ones you see on Iraq prisoners in Abu Ghraib—cut off your circulation and wedge deep through your skin, where they can do some serious nerve damage, if that’s the point. And it did seem to be the point. A couple of guys around me were writhing in agony in their hard plastic seats, hands handcuffed behind their back.
* The 100 protesters in my detainee group were kept handcuffed with their hands behind their backs for 7 hours, denied food and water and forced to sit/sleep on a concrete floor. Some were so tired they passed out face down on the cold and dirty concrete, hands tied behind their back. As a result of the tight cuffs, I wound up losing sensation in my left palm/thumb and still haven’t recovered it now, a day and a half after they finally took them off.” Read More
The treatment of Bradley Manning is inhumane. The US government is essentially torturing a man for being a whistle-blower of their sinister activities. Read More
The federal criminal code has grown so large it ensnares everyday citizens who have no idea they are violating the law, a bipartisan group of legal experts told a House panel. Read More
When I was in high school I always stood and always recited the Pledge of Allegiance because that was what I believed we were supposed to do. It was all I had ever known and I was just following what everyone else did. Some other students refused to participate though and they caught a lot of hell for it and I often felt that they didn’t deserve to be berated by teachers for refusing to participate since that was simply them exercising their freedom of choice.
When I got older though and I began to look at life and government differently, I realized a few things. Read more…
The REINS Act would require an up-or-down, standalone vote in Congress and the President’s signature on all new major rules before they can be enforced on the American people, job-creating small businesses, or State and local governments. Major rules are those that have an annual economic impact of $100 million or more. Read More
US Attorney General Eric Holder is in hot water again over Operation Fast and Furious, in which federal agents with the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives lost track of hundreds of guns they had encouraged firearms dealers to sell to suspected traffickers. It’s the big sequel to BATFE’s Operation Wide Receiver in which multiple guns were sold to suspected cartel buyers under BATFE surveillance in 2006 and 2007.
But the plot thickens, and goes in a direction that probably shouldn’t be surprising: Documents obtained by CBS News strongly suggest that BATFE agents had intended to use Fast and Furious guns to support their demands for tighter administrative regulations on gun sales, particularly requiring dealers to report the sale of multiple rifles to the same person within a certain time period.
Where to even begin unraveling this one? Read More
What began as an attempt to restrain foreign piracy on the Internet has morphed into a domestic “kill switch” on First Amendment freedom in the fastest-growing corner of the marketplace of ideas. Read More
Student loan debt is the latest economic crisis du jour. The standard pundit blames the students, and in some respects their vitriol has a semblance of validity. Read More
It just doesn’t seem like you get much justice when it comes to dealing with the government, especially when you’re defending yourself from it.
Most have experienced this before, whether they realized it at the time or not, and it is remarkable that we have not conceived of something better, at the very least cried out against the injustice. When the government gets you in its sights, often the easiest thing to do at the time is comply and hope it goes away. What exactly are we talking about here you ask? Read more…
In sum, police departments are pressured to show productivity, and these kinds of arrests are relatively safe and easy, involving “clean,” high-quality arrestees. Moreover, these arrests provide good training for rookies, deliver overtime pay for cops, allow supervisors to account for their underlings, and act as a net to get as many people into the system as possible, all at a cost borne entirely by the victims — the arrestees. Read More
An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State 2011 Edition
An evaluation of the U.S. federal regulatory enterprise by economists Nicole V. Crain and W. Mark Crain finds annual regulatory compliance costs hit $1.752 trillion in 2008.
Given 2010’s actual government spending or outlays of $3.456 trillion, the regulatory “hidden tax” stands at an unprecedented 50.7 percent of the level of federal spending itself.
Regulations are killing the efficiency of the private sector.
We now have concrete evidence that Wall Street and Washington are running a secret government far removed from the democratic process. Through a freedom of information request by Bloomberg News, the public now has access to over 29,000 pages of Fed documents and 21,000 additional Fed transactions that were deliberately hidden, and for good reason. Read More
A bill put forward by Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) would do what libertarians and conservatives have long wished for: effectively end the Federal Reserve.
The National Emergency Employment Defense (NEED) Act of 2011 would place the Federal Reserve, a private, qusai-governmental institution that controls the nation’s monetary policy, under control of the U.S. Treasury. It would also implement new rules for the financial industry, in hopes of ending the worst abuses that created the 2008 financial collapse and the ensuing recession. Read More
Advocating for a controversial legal tactic known as jury nullification can get U.S. citizens prosecuted for jury tampering, according to one Manhattan prosecutor who’s pursuing that very charge against a 79-year-old former chemistry professor. Read More
Border Patrol agents pursue smugglers one moment and sit around in boredom the next. It was during one of the lulls that Bryan Gonzalez, a young agent, made some comments to a colleague that cost him his career. Read More
The first video is of students being pepper sprayed and arrested by police while peacefully protesting. The second video is the student response to the chancellor as she walks to her vehicle and leaves. The silence is stunning and telling. If you have not seen these videos, you must watch them.
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