Monthly Archives: July 2011

Darker Clouds On the Horizon

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Economy, Race, Taxation, Welfare

The dynamics Pat Buchanan describes in his latest column, “Black America vs. Obama?,” might very well be borne out: African-Americans will likely turn on the black president who was forced to slash the oink sector in which they are overrepresented.

Though 10 percent of the U.S. civilian labor force, African-Americans are 18 percent of U.S. government workers. They are 25 percent of the employees at Treasury and Veterans Affairs, 31 percent of the State Department, 37 percent of Department of Education employees and 38 percent of Housing and Urban Development. They are 42 percent of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., 55 percent of the employees at the Government Printing Office and 82 percent at the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency.
When the Obama administration suggested shutting down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants whose losses of $150 billion have had to be made up by taxpayers, The Washington Post warned, in a story headlined, “Winding Down Fannie and Freddie Could Put Minority Careers at Risk,” that 44 percent of Fannie employees and 50 percent of Freddie’s were persons of color.
In Washington, D.C., we have also seen the result of government cuts on African-American leaders who had to approve those cuts.
When Mayor Adrian Fenty stood behind schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, who fired hundreds of teachers, most of them African-American, the wards east of the Anacostia cut him dead. In 2010, Fenty was thrown out by many of the black voters who elected him

Is this is a welcome development? Hardly. (And I fully understand that Mr. Buchanan is hardly making such a claim.)

While coalitions of the aggrieved are good, where here is there a coalition for freedom-loving Americans to pursue? Fifty percent or so of Americans—those who pay the taxes—want the excesses of the oink sector curtailed. The African-American cohort Buchanan cites wants these programs to carry on in perpetuity.

It’s possible that Mr. Buchanan is simply warning that African-Americans are just going to get angrier and angrier.

Positive-Law Arguments For The Anthony Outcome

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Justice, Law, libertarianism, Natural Law

Of course, “Caylee’s Law,” Radley Balko points out, is a horrible idea. Stupid too. However, to neglect real evidence because one is against the death penalty is as horrible and stupid, if not more so. These are separate issues.

Alan Dershowitz has been arguing that the Casey Anthony verdict is an embodiment of “our legal system.” In making this case, Dershowitz alludes, curiously, to the positive law, not to any natural-law aspect of the American legal system, or to this woman’s prosecution.

To support his view of the impetus of America’s legal system, Dershowitz (on Huckabee), for example, touted the Exclusionary Rule as exemplifying his view of the impetus of America’s legal system. (I say “curiously,” because libertarians seem not to be distinguishing positive- from negative-law arguments in support of the jury’s innocent ruling.)

The Exclusionary Rule is a technicality tarted up as a real right. Hardly libertarian—at least not if one is a proponent of the natural law.

In the same vein, a procedural violation of the Fourth Amendment, say, an improper search, can get evidence of guilt—-a bloodied knife or a smoking gun—-barred from being presented at trial. Fail to Mirandize a murderer properly, and his confession will be tossed out. Such procedural defaults are very often used to suppress immutable physical facts, thus serving to subvert the spirit of the law and natural justice.

More minted “rights” are “consular rights.” A procedural default such as the failure to apprise a defendant of his consular contacts is never a violation of a natural right. “Consular rights” are of a piece with Miranda rights and the Exclusionary Rule. Again, these are technicalities tarted up as real rights.

Might these gaps of understanding between libertarians touch on the distinction, in our multi-factioned movement, between the hardcore, life-liberty-property classical liberal, and civil libertarianism and “libertarianism lite”?

Dershowitz is a civil libertarian who once conflated the natural law with the law of the jungle.

UPDATE III: Jeff Ashton: Class Act in the Classless Casey Anthony Case

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Law, Logic, Pop-Culture, The Courts

What a class act is Florida’s Assistant state attorney Jeff Ashton. What magnificent closing arguments he delivered in the case of the through-and-through sociopath, Casey Anthony. What a stellar presentation of evidence, rebuttal of the defense’s pie-in-the-sky’s clashing theories of the crime, and slap shod, ad hoc, invent-as-you-go narrative.

Ashton etched in evidence an identikit of the classic sociopath. Casey Anthony had never told the truth in her short life; had never done a day’s work in her life, and expected constant gratification and thrills at every turn. It’s a great shame that a man with as rigorous a mind as Ashton’s is retiring. I don’t blame him. Reason and reality, increasingly, will be lost on younger juries, who now inhabit a parallel, electronic universe where idiocy is normalcy.

One criticism of Ashton: His slurping of bottled water was annoying; he ought to have been supplied with glasses of water for his hard work.

Another is his theory of the day of the crime. It was well-done, but a little narrow for the morons in the jury box to grasp. Mommy dearest departed with her daughter, who was never again seen alive. It is, however, possible, even likely, that this wanton woman, a sociopath—who kept telling her parents she had a job, a babysitter, but had neither and was lying and stealing to keep herself in the loop of club life—lost it with the child, and climbed into her in a fit of rage.

The murder of Caylee Anthony was no accident, but it could have been committed in an unplanned manner too. Casey is clever, but she is also a bitch in rage (and in-heat). The child was probably spirited and willful, and this woman (now letting down her hair, primping and preening as though on a red carpet) had had enough of her child’s willfulness, and of the responsibility her (pretty liberal) parents attempted to foist on their difficult daughter.

“I have never been able to figure out why someone would cover up an accident by putting three pieces of duct tape over the nose and mouth of a child and then dumping him in a swamp. When children die of accidents, people call for help; that’s how it works in the real world, not in fiction.” (Ashton on CNN)

Rather than do the job with which they were entrusted, and deduce a logical sequence of events from the powerful evidence provided by the prosecution, the Millennial moron juror interviewed took elements of the profile and the evidence as discrete, atomistic items rejecting her duty to apply some deductive thinking. As I’ve said, short of a YouTube clip, nothing would have convinced these clods of the Anthony woman’s guilt.

Casey’s victory is about “winning”… in the Age of the Idiot.

[I can’t find transcripts of Closing. Can anyone send these?]

UPDATE I: I give your Dean Eckstadt, alternate juror. He instantiates most everything I said about the Millennials, some of who sat on this case. “Like, from the pictures, she seemed a good mother to me. Like she’s innocent. Like, it is what it is.”

I called this justice in the age of YouTube and I told you that there is something deformed about many younger Americans’ mindset and mentality, some of whom debuted on the jury. I’ve witnessed it in the young people with whom I am forced to deal in my interactions—narcissistic, informal, disrespectful to their elders and betters; they conflate how they feel with how things should work, they are the center of the universe, lazy, often incompetent, slow, can’t follow any logical, sequence or algorithm, conflate the personal and the professional. On and on. In short, Dean Eckstadt.

Behold another such specimen: Russel Heuckler. Not as young but as limited.

UPDATE II (July 11): “In Florida, there are two possible penalties for first-degree murder — life in prison without parole or the death penalty.” Also, as I understand it, there are two phases to a trial. The other, highly opinionated, young female juror doing the rounds, indicated that what weighed on her ability to deliberate was the fact that the prosecution had sought the death penalty. She was, however, prohibited from judging the evidence with the recommended penalty in mind. Moreover, the jury did not have to recommend the death penalty. When the sentencing phase commenced, they could have recommended life in prison. Not unexpectedly, Mike Huckabee was not apprised of this distinction. The man is a simpleton. Always has been.

In any event, the jurors currently proudly touting their exquisite sensitivity had flouted the Judge’s instructions in the matter of distinguishing the deliberation from the penalty phase of a trial. To these simple, Millennial minds, everything was enmeshed. And, of course, there was no footage of the act…

UPDATE III (July 11): And Greta keeps a straight face. I give you the YouTube youth vote on Jury Duty.

The Uncertainty Chant

Barack Obama, Business, Debt, Economy, Inflation, Regulation, Taxation

In “You Can’t Fix Stupid,” I counted the ways of Barack Obama’s stupidity, as far as the natural laws of economics go. Today he did me one better, claiming that “uncertainty over the debt ceiling has hindered hiring in the private sector.” The horrible jobs reports, in other words, were a function of market fears that the US would halt the borrowing and bankruptcy trends. That’s certainly novel. Let’s not forget that Republicans feed this folly by advancing, as a counterargument, the same tack: we have no certainty in capital and other markets, therefor no one will hire.

Nonsense on stilts: There is ample certainly; certainly about economic gloom-and-doom to come. Given the indicators in the US—OPD (Outstanding Public Debt) almost equaling GDP (Gross Domestic Product), the first is growing faster than the second—businesses have to become as lean as possible.

The uncertainty mantra is a mindless one. There is plenty of certainty: certainty about a dark future. A business that is to survive needs to streamline and become super efficient. It has to hunker down and stay in survival mode. So should you.