GregNews

I’m no lawyer, have no legal training. But I think when you have a highly controversial and terribly politicized case such as the State of Florida versus George Zimmerman either legal team is best served by giving the jury a choice or set of options that they will be able to live with. When State Attorney Angela Corey announced her office would pursue second-degree murder I thought it was a tall order short of some crucial evidence that had not yet been made public. If the facts are thus far all that has been previously shown then Ms. Corey would have had better luck pressing manslaughter, and therefore giving the jury an out or compromise.

Two recent articles seem to emphasize this. First, a Washington Post story reporting a definite close-range shot (perhaps supporting that Martin was on top of Zimmerman), that drugs were in Martin’s system, blood under Martin’s fingernails and abrasions on his knuckles (indicating the was pummeling Zimmerman).

A report from the Sanford police’s lead investigator, Christopher Serino, states that he thought there was probable cause to charge Zimmerman with manslaughter.

The new documents include crime-scene photographs, interviews with witnesses and medical reports, and provide the most detailed look yet at the evidence that prosecutors are using to build their case against Zimmerman, who was charged last month with second-degree murder.

… The documents include information that points to what some have characterized as a sloppy and incomplete police investigation, which initially resulted in no charges being filed. That sparked rallies across the county calling for Zimmerman’s arrest.“It’s a mess,” said a state investigator in one interview in the documents, explaining that he was working on the case apart from the Sanford Police Department.

Again, I’m no expert on law, but I’ve got to think that whenever the prosecution and police department are pointing fingers at one another — one claiming rush to judgment at the scene, the other claiming overstepping prosecution boundaries (manslaughter versus murder) — it’s got to be good news for the defense. If the police and prosecution cannot come to agreement on who threw the first punch, who really provoked whom, who was screaming for help, then how can one expect the jury to come to such conclusions beyond a reasonable doubt?

Good luck with that! Of course, if you pick the right jury emotions will matter more than facts. People tend to self-rationalize facts to fit their feelings.

Next, the typically uber-liberal lawyer Alan Dershowitz issues a scathing attack on the State Attorney Angela Corey:

Now there is much more extensive medical evidence that would tend to support Zimmerman’s version of events. This version, if true, would establish self-defense even if Zimmerman had improperly followed, harassed and provoked Martin.

A defendant, under Florida law, loses his “stand your ground” defense if he provoked the encounter — but he retains traditional self-defense if he reasonably believed his life was in danger and his only recourse was to employ deadly force.

Thus, if Zimmerman verbally provoked Martin, but Martin then got on top of Zimmerman and banged his head into the ground, broke his nose, bloodied his eyes and persisted in attacking Zimmerman — and if Zimmerman couldn’t protect himself from further attack except by shooting Martin — he would have the right to do that. (The prosecution has already admitted that it has no evidence that Zimmerman started the actual fight.)

In other words, the prosecution seems to have hung their hat on the rung that Zimmerman isn’t covered under the Stand Your Ground law, but by Dershowitz’s interpretation, Zimmerman has defense beyond that. The pictures combined with blood evidence on Martin’s knuckles will likely prove Martin was beating Zimmerman. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to stick Zimmerman with a charge that had a better chance of success rather than pressing a jury into an all or nothing corner?

Good stuff from Jonah Goldberg’s new book, The Tyranny of Cliches.

The fundamental problem with social justice is that there are no limiting principles to it. It is an open-ended license for the forces of goodness to do what they think is right forever.

…

November 2007, the UN General Assembly declared that starting in 2009, February 20 would be celebrated annually as the World Day of Social Justice (shop early for those hard-to-find social justice gifts!). The intellectual lodestone inspiring this new holiday was a 157-page report produced by their Division for Social Policy and Development entitled: “Social Justice in an Open World: The Role of the United Nations.” “Social Justice,” the authors of this page-turner declare, “is not possible without strong and coherent redistributive policies conceived and implemented by public agencies.” But that’s downright Jeffersonian compared to the more concentrated and pernicious asininity to follow. They warn: “Present-day believers in an absolute truth identified with virtue and justice are neither willing nor desirable companions for the defenders of social justice.” Translation: If you actually believe in the antiquated notion that rights exist outside the schemes of governments and social planners, if you think that the concept of justice endures beyond the relativistic standards of whatever the forces of goodness say this week, then you cannot be seen as an ally of the great, wise, and noble global social justice coalition.

… Meanwhile, what does social justice bring with it? On virtually every front where social justice claims the high ground, it does so by appealing to the authority of a mirage and grounding its arguments in nothing firmer than an ill-defined sentiment. Intellectually, it has no more weight than a gesture, no more substance than a wish. Yet those who fight for it do not care; indeed, they like it that way, because it prepares the battlefield for them. They promise to deliver a better world but haven’t the foggiest idea how to provide it. The Romans knew how to build roads and toilets; all the centurions of social justice know how to provide is someone else’s money. It’s imperialism fueled by guilt and sustained by smugness.

Coincidental to previous posts quoting our founder’s emphasizing Separation of Powers, I found this interesting text in Jonah Goldberg’s latest book, The Tyranny of Cliches:

With the arguable exception of the Civil War (and, of course, the institution of slavery), the lowest point in American civil liberties wasn’t during the Bush years, or the Nixon years. It was during the administration of Woodrow Wilson— who oversaw the censoring of scores of publications, the incarceration of political prisoners, the imposition of loyalty oaths, dissemination of sweeping propaganda, and the wholesale and often bloody intimidation of dissenters. At any time during this period one could have raised the specter of the slippery slope— and many decent people did. But guess what happened next? The country swung back to normal. The American people threw out the progressive Democrats responsible for the bedlam and voted in Republicans who ran on the platform of a “return to normalcy.” It fell to the Republican president Warren Harding to show clemency to the political prisoners held by the Wilson administration. This raises one of the most underappreciated dynamics of the American political system, and of democracy generally.

Regular elections are circuit breakers. They stop— or at least can stop— the acceleration of slippery slope impulses. A change in party power often— though perhaps not often enough— halts the transmission of error. Totalitarian systems have no such circuit breakers— no checks and balances— and, hence, good intentions more easily snowball into evil results.

It is those areas of American life most immunized from democracy and partisanship that are most susceptible to slippery slope problems precisely because they are not democratically accountable. Bureaucracy is a superconductor of bad ideas. No democratic or market-based system would ever shut down lemonade stands; the circuit breaker would kick in long before the cops made some six-year-old girl cry. It is when the circuit breakers are turned off or bypassed— for instance, during a war— that slippery slope problems flourish.

This is so true. After all, Congresses, judges and presidents will come and go, but your nameless, faceless career bureaucrats at the EPA, HHS, CFPB — and an everlasting alphabet soup of federal agencies — last forever. Your federal government added 82,480 pages of regulations in 2010, and 78,464 pages in 2011. This added, in 2010 alone, the equivalent of $231 billion in regulatory costs to private businesses and state and local governments.

I suppose at least it made it to the WaPost opinion page, but it’s an indictment of our mainstream media that they simply refuse to ask Nancy Pelosi any hard questions regarding accusations that she flat-out lied to the American public regarding what she knew about enhanced interrogation, when she knew it, and what she did about it. To whit, nothing, according to former CIA chief Jose Rodriguez.

In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”

“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”

How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”

So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Rodriguez asks, “So Pelosi was another member of Congress reinventing the truth. What’s the big deal?” The big deal, he explains, is “the message they are sending to the men and women of the intelligence community who to this day are being asked to undertake dangerous and sometimes controversial actions on behalf of their government. They are told that the administration and Congress ‘have their back.’ You will forgive CIA officers if they are not filled with confidence.”

Rodriguez compares Pelosi’s actions to the opening scene of the old TV series “Mission: Impossible,” “in which the operatives were told that if anything went wrong, their leaders would ‘disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ That is not how it should work in the real world,” he writes.

It is a big deal for another reason. If Rodriguez is right, it means that Pelosi stood up in a Capitol Hill news conference and lied with a straight face to the American people; that she falsely accused a dedicated civil servant of lying to Congress as part of a political cover-up. Pelosi is hoping to become House speaker again after the November elections. Do we really want someone so ethically challenged to be third in line to the presidency?

There is a simple way to settle this once and for all. Pelosi should formally request that the Obama administration declassify the cable that was sent from headquarters to the field reporting on the details of her Sept. 4, 2002, briefing. If she refuses to do so, it should be taken as an admission by Pelosi that her account of events is a fabrication.

This report is another typical example of the guilty conscience of a wealthy liberal. Having made their bones by legally playing the tax code we have they now seek to relieve their guilt and hand-wringing angst by championing the removal of those very loopholes — but, naturally, not before exercising it one more time.

[WSJ] Billionaire investor Warren Buffett has argued that wealthier Americans should pay more to Washington, a rallying cry that has become a centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.

But NetJets Inc., the private-jet company owned by Mr. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., spent more than $1 million over the past three years to lobby Congress to cut a user fee, benefiting the company’s well-heeled customers, who buy or lease shares in planes. The reduced fee, part of the recent Federal Aviation Administration bill that took effect earlier this month, will save customers of NetJets and other similar companies roughly $83 million over about four years, according to congressional estimates.

The lobbying victory comes as Mr. Obama and congressional Democrats are using Mr. Buffett’s comments to criticize the likely Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, who paid a relatively low federal tax rate of 13.9% for 2010. Last year, Mr. Buffett called it unfair that wealthy investors often face lower effective tax rates than their secretaries, largely because capital gains are taxed at lower rates than salaried income.

Mr. Buffett “was not involved in the effort to get the regulatory correction,” a NetJets spokesman said Tuesday. A spokeswoman for Mr. Buffett, a NetJets customer himself, didn’t respond to messages.

He didn’t lobby for it, but will happily enjoy the benefits of it. How convenient for Mr. Buffett, and how inconvenient for those on their way up wishing to do the same.