Category Archives: Law

Spitzer Also Edited The Harvard Law Review

Business, Constitution, Democrats, Ethics, Justice, Law, Natural Law

(The title of the post is a tad unfair to Obama, I know. But editing The Harvard Law Review is clearly no litmus test for purity of intellect or ethics.)

One thing is for sure, Spitzer did not forge his political and fiscal fortunes by means of voluntary exchanges on the free market. The Spitzer piranha didn’t give law teeth; but used bad law to bite business to the bone.

Daniel Gross of Slate had this to say back in 2004:

Spitzer made maximum hay out of the “New York State’s Martin Act. The 1921 legislation, as Nicholas Thompson noted in this Legal Affairs piece, gives extraordinary powers and discretion to an attorney general fighting financial fraud. He can ‘subpoena any document he wants from anyone doing business in the state,’ make investigations secret or public at his whim, and ‘choose between filing civil or criminal charges whenever he wants.’ Extraordinarily, Thompson notes, ‘people called in for questioning during Martin Act investigations do not have a right to counsel or a right against self-incrimination. Combined, the act’s powers exceed those given any regulator in any other state.’”

Spitzer embodied abuse of power. As a government goon, he was an extortionist extraordinaire. “He didn’t simply indict. He issued press releases. When Spitzer published a press release detailing a shocking betrayal of trust by” this or the other “of Wall Street’s most trusted names,” the company would lose billions in market value in a matter of days and would quickly settle with the thug.

I know I’ve defended the naturally licit actions of scum such as Scooter Libby against naturally illicit prosecutions. And yes, I support the decriminalization of prostitution (but not its moral elevation). Yes again: I believe Spitzer’s funds are his to move about, and that his transactions were perfectly licit. So call me inconsistent on this count, but this character is so evil, contemptible, and uncontrollable (and nauseatingly hypocritical), I consider it a mitzvah that he has been removed from office and taken DOWN, if by unjust means.

I want to see Spitzer’s name live on in infamy; he ought to ultimately die disgraced, and if we lived under a just legal system, be prosecuted—but for his crimes against innocent members of the business community. Unfortunately—and I guess I’m nothing if not consistent—I’m with Alan Dershowitz on the following count: Spitzer ought not to be prosecuted for his moral failings. Although I’m filled with schadenfreude at the spectacle of Spitzer, there is no case to be made for his prosecution in libertarian law.

More later on Spitzer’s ho—or rather on the manner in which media have infantilized the girl and turned her into a victim.

Posting Policy For BarelyABlog.com

Barely A Blog, English, Ilana Mercer, IlanaMercer.com, Law

If you intend to post comments to BarelyABlog.com, you must have a valid e-mail address.

Please keep your comments concise—200 words, at most. The forum is moderated and missives edited for style and taste. Please do me (and yourselves) the courtesy of running a spell check. There is just so much editing I have time for (I oversee BarelyABlog.com and IlanaMercer.com). I ask too that you try as best as possible to be grammatical and avoid posting letters in capitals.

Please note that “Barely A Blog” is private property. Posts are published at the proprietor’s discretion. Abuse you host’s hospitality, and your pixelated presence will be terminated. Posts will be deleted if they are misleading, incoherent—ungrammatical, full of spelling mistakes—abusive, libelous or defamatory, off-topic, threatening, profane, obscene, offensive, false, or all of those. It is also possible that your ideas were deemed unsuitable to this classical liberal forum. If your post has failed to appear, assume your comment has violated the specified requirements.

Barely a blog is not the cyberspot for theological debates.

I generally don’t post comments that misrepresent my words, unless I’ve been careless and incoherent, and have failed to explain myself properly. In this case, the writer’s distortion is understandable. Moreover, the companion site BarelyABlog.com was established to generate debate about the essays on IlanaMercer.com, ILANA MERCER’S work. Readers participating on BarelyABlog.com are cordially asked to familiarize themselves with their host’s arguments. If readers prefer to showcase their “argumentation,” or that of the scribes they favor and patronize, we suggest they pay for their own domain. This site is, after all, paid for by the host and her generous donors.

DISCLAIMER. By posting comments on BarelyABlog.com, you agree that ILANA MERCER assumes no responsibility for consequences resulting from your access to, and use of, the Content available on IlanaMercer.com and BarelyABlog.com, including Content obtained through linked Internet addresses. Ilana Mercer is not responsible for and expressly disclaims all liability for comments readers post on BarelyABlog.com. Participants on BarelyABlog.com retain all ownership rights in what they post here and agree to relieve ILANA MERCER from any and all liability that may result from those postings. By posting comments on BarelyABlog.com, posters further agree to grant ILANA MERCER a worldwide, irrevocable, royalty-free, license to store, use, transmit, display, publish, reproduce, or otherwise distribute their comments without limitation, as well as to make such additional uses of them as seen fit. No information or content of any kind that you submit or make available to ILANA MERCER, or post to BarelyABlog.com, shall be deemed confidential. Once posted, blog posts will not be removed on request.

BY CONTINUING TO USE ILANAMERCER.COM AND BARELYABLOG.COM, YOU AGREE TO ABIDE BY ALL THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT.

Please be sure to familiarize yourselves with these Terms of Use for IlanaMercer.com and BarelyABlog.Com.

Thanks for your valued contribution.

Update #V: Beware the Police

Constitution, Criminal Injustice, Fascism, Law, Rights, The State

Evidence is mounting for the increasing brutality of the police, especially your local “friendly” state troopers.

Read and watch how this journalism student is carted away and tasered for the offense of questioning John Kerry persistently. Kerry the coward didn’t intervene. Were a Republican present, I suspect the outcome would have been the same. Worse: the students sat there like golems as Meyer was assaulted. What obedient little lap dogs. Whatever one thinks of the 1960s, that generation would have started a riot, then and there. Here’s the account:

“Videos of the Monday night incident, posted on several Web sites and played repeatedly on television news, show University of Florida police officers pulling Meyer away from the microphone after he asks Kerry about impeaching President George W. Bush and whether he and Bush were both members of the secret society Skull and Bones at Yale University.
… Meyer struggles for several seconds as up to four officers try to remove him from the room. Meyer screams for help and tries to break away from officers with his arms flailing at them, then is forced to the ground and officers order him to stop resisting. As Kerry tells the audience he will answer the student’s ‘very important question,’ Meyer yells at the officers to release him, crying out, ‘Don’t Tase me, bro,’ just before he is shocked by the Taser. He is then led from the room, screaming, ‘What did I do?’”

There have been many other incidents, the last of a young man, Brett Darrow, who had the good sense to mount a dashboard camera in his car and film an officer, Sgt. Kuehnlein, threatening to fabricate charges against him. The poor lad was terrorized, but showed remarkable composure.

Here Radley Balko exposes more of the ubiquitous violations perpetrated by our protectors—and worse: the laws that help police conceal crimes against those they swore to protect.

Update # I: The fascists on cable all, left and right, with no exception, agreed with glee that for the police to assault this manifestly non-violent protestor, sans provocation, was A-Okay. It would be poetic justice if the son or daughter of one of the cable capos was tasered and thrown in jail overnight for speaking loudly and waving his or her arms in the air during a debate. You’re a slave if you rationalize this incident. Even if, as one reader claimed, this was a set up (whatever that means), isn’t it obvious that a non-aggressor, who has hurt nobody should never be assaulted, hurt, and incarcerated, not in a free country. Even if he was being provocative.

Balko makes the same point with respect to Brett Darrow: “I’ve heard people make the argument that this kid’s habit of baiting cops into abuse somehow diminishes the excesses he’s captured on tape. I don’t agree at all. His ‘baiting’ thus far has consisted of asserting his rights. Perhaps not as politely as he should, but being impolite isn’t and shouldn’t be a crime. Neither is parking in a commuter lot, or asking why you’ve been pulled over when you haven’t broken any laws.”
America isn’t free.
I do want to give Dick Morris, of all people, credit for showing the utmost revulsion at the brutality of the cops. I have never seen the smarmy smooth Morris grow as livid as he did earlier today on Hannity and Colmes, who both giggled about the incident. Morris called it fascism. A Taser, moreover, is not without its dangers. It can cause permanent heart-muscle damage and even kill. Tasering Meyer was so clearly sadistic, unnecessary, and reckless. It’s obvious that the cops use the Taser very flippantly.

Update # II: Tasers do kill. Here, the cowards are incapable of controlling a wheelchair-bound woman, so they kill her. Ann Coulter once wrote a fine column about the increased deaths associated with women in the police force. Women, being weaker and generally more fearful than men, tend to use lethal force more frequently. The sadist cop who used her Taser for 160 seconds on the victim was female.

Update # III: Some of the responses to the Comments Section, unpublished, alarmed me, in their inability to grasp that this is not about an annoying kid, who might have been playing to the cameras. Rather, this concerns the proper role of law enforcement in a free society. Free people grasp that assaulting a person who has not aggressed against a soul is unconscionable and authoritarian. As I say, if you can’t recognize that, you are a slave—or perhaps you haven’t internalized the fact that you could just as well be on the receiving side of such brutality.

To those who accused me of generalizing from a few isolated incidents, I suggest you bring yourselves up to speed, fast. Under the auspices of the Drug War, our militarized feds conduct daily “no-knock” raids, barge into homes, confiscate property, and rob people of their liberty—sometimes of their lives.

The Tyranny of Good Intentions by Paul Craig Roberts is highly recommended as well. As I wrote in “Remember Reno”:

“Back in the day, the law was intended as a bulwark against government abuses. It has now become an implement of government, to be utilized by all-knowing rulers for the ‘greater good’—the founders’ Blackstonian view of the law has been supplanted by a Benthamism that encourages ambitious prosecutors to discard a defendant’s rights.
Add the aggravating circumstances of a highly militarized federal law enforcement that shares the judiciary’s contempt for the Rights of Englishmen, and is abetted by a public dimmed by statist schools and media—and one has a recipe for disaster.”
I’ll leave you with another startling visual from rural America of a man being violated by police for no reason other than that THEY CAN.

Update # IV: More evidence that “‘To Protect and Serve’ often translates into harass and control”:
• Salty Burger Lands McDonald’s Employee in Jail
• The Case of Monica Montoya

Update # V: I confess that I’ve become quite fearful of the liberties these government goons seem to take—the brazen “I’m your boss, you serf, free to do with your body as I please” attitude. When I venture down the road to the gym, for example, I always make sure I don’t forget my driver’s license. It’s hard not to speed in this torqued-up devil, but I do my best.
It’s quite uncanny how, no matter how hard free men and women have illustrated what the issue here is, slaves of the state on this blog have demonstrated an inability to grasp what liberty means. Freedom is the unassailable right to raise your voice, flail your arms—even make a harmless nuisance of yourself during a debate; fascism is when those acts could get you assaulted, injured, even killed. That’s all there is to it! The cops who’ve written in supporting the vile conduct of their colleagues enforce my fears.
Incidentally, when Sean and I went down to our local police station to get our carry-concealed licenses, the cop spat bitterly: “Yes, you ex-South Africans like your guns.” I was naïve then, imagining, somehow, that he’d be happy we were proponents and practitioners of the magnificent 2nd Amendment.

Updated: Rugby Racism?

Africa, Law, Race, Racism, South-Africa

As the diversity doxology has it, justice will be achieved when racial and ethnic groups are reflected in academia and in the professions in proportion to their presence in the larger population. The absence of such perfect representation is blamed on endemic white racism.

The doctrine is based on one big post hoc fallacy—reasoning backward is a logical error. If B (lack of representation) then A (racism) is an error, as in WRONG! Consider: in professions and academic pursuits where mathematical precocity is a factor, white Americans trail Asian-Americans. And white Gentiles lag behind Ashkenazi Jews. By logical extension, these realities must imply a systemic bias against whites, which is nonsense on stilts. But reason and race baiting are mutually exclusive, so long as those baited are white.

Naturally, no one ever demands that the NBA or the 100-meter dash be made to better reflect the general population.

Rugby is, traditionally, an Afrikaner sport. Afrikaners have always loved and excelled at it. Now TIME magazine is inferring racism from the fact that there are more whites than blacks on the South African national team.

Look at the complexion of, say, the Kaizer Chiefs soccer team. To be fair, in its hissing fit, TIME does qualify its racism taunts with the following information:

“Then again, rugby has never been the first-choice game among the black majority, and in South Africa’s national soccer team, only one or two white players make the cut. ‘You can tell a mostly white high school when you drive by its rugby field,’ Cronjé says. ‘Black schools have soccer fields.’”

The aim, very plainly, is not to leave the Afrikaner anything of his traditions and history. Witness the haste with which the ANC government is expunging South Africa’s past by renaming places across the country. This jocular account of bestowing on old South African boulevards names like Arafat and Che Guevara is courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, a chief cheerleader for the new dispensation in my old homeland.

(More on the New South Africa in our Archive.]
Update: Against the contention made in the Comments Section that “Affirmative Action is an ideology that has been hijacked”: The equal-rights-for-all principles instantiated in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were subverted over the decades by judges and federal administrators, and replaced with “affirmative action in favor of blacks.”
As Harvard scholar Richard Pipes averred, in the book Property and Freedom, the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “gave the government no license to set quotas for hiring personnel by private enterprise or admitting students to institutions of higher learning, yet the federal bureaucracy acts as if it had.”