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New Zimmerman case developments.

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?

Bush secret prisons bad, Obama secret prisons okay.

Marc Thiessen has a list of great questions regarding the Washington Post story about secret CIA prisons. Here’s one:

1. The Obama administration has been openly critical of the Bush administration for its “secret detention” of captured terrorists. Now it turns out the Obama administration been conducting the “secret release” of captured terrorists. How long has it kept the existence of this program secret from the American people, and what is the justification for this secrecy?

These people are such self-rationalizing hypocrites. For eight years we were told Bush equals Hitler because of his War on Terror. Obama utilizes the same tools and not a peep from the left. Amazing hypocrites.

Social Justice’s not-so inalienable rights.

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.

Liberals against liberty.

George Will comments below on the attempt by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) to re-define freedom of speech and fundamentally alter the First Amendment. You can’t make this stuff up. It stinks of your typical edicts from fascist, socialist, dictatorial states, and is wrapped in Orwellian language of “People’s Rights.” People, unless you’re assembling in a group that is, which is succinctly stated in the Constitution. Ah, no bother.

[Rep McGovern's] His “People’s Rights Amendment” declares that the Constitution protects only the rights of “natural persons,” not such persons organized in corporations, and that Congress can impose on corporations whatever restrictions Congress deems “reasonable.” His amendment says that it shall not be construed “to limit the people’s rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, free exercise of religion, freedom of association and all such other rights of the people, which rights are inalienable.” But the amendment is explicitly designed to deny such rights to natural persons who, exercising their First Amendment right to freedom of association, come together in corporate entities to speak in concert.

McGovern stresses that his amendment decrees that “all corporate entities — for-profit and nonprofit alike” — have no constitutional rights. So Congress — and state legislatures and local governments — could regulate to the point of proscription political speech, or any other speech, by the Sierra Club, the National Rifle Association, NARAL Pro-Choice America or any of the other tens of thousands of nonprofit corporate advocacy groups, including political parties and campaign committees.

Newspapers, magazines, broadcasting entities, online journalism operations — and most religious institutions — are corporate entities. McGovern’s amendment would strip them of all constitutional rights. By doing so, the amendment would empower the government to do much more than proscribe speech. Ilya Somin of George Mason University Law School, writing for the Volokh Conspiracy blog, notes that government, unleashed by McGovern’s amendment, could regulate religious practices at most houses of worship, conduct whatever searches it wants, reasonable or not, of corporate entities, and seize corporate-owned property for whatever it deems public uses — without paying compensation. Yes, McGovern’s scythe would mow down the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, as well as the First.

The proposed amendment is intended to reverse the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which affirmed the right of persons to associate in corporate entities for the purpose of unrestricted collective speech independent of candidates’ campaigns. The court’s decision was foreshadowed when, in oral argument, the government’s lawyer insisted that the government could ban a 500-page book that contained one sentence that said “vote for” a particular candidate. McGovern’s amendment would confer upon Congress the power to ban publishing corporations from producing books containing political advocacy, when Congress considers a ban reasonable — never mind the amendment’s rhetoric about the “inalienable” rights people enjoy until they band together to act in corporate entities.

A decade ago, then-Rep. Dick Gephardt said of George Soros’s spending in support of liberal causes: “It is not consistent with campaign reform, but it is consistent with what the Constitution says about freedom of speech.”

As the editors of National Review note, liberals control unions and most of academia and the media. Yet such is their evident lack of confidence in their powers of persuasion they are desperate to control the speech of others.

By proposing his amendment, McGovern helpfully illuminates the lengths to which some liberals want to go. So when next you hear histrionic warnings about tea party or other conservative “extremism,” try to think of anything on the right comparable to McGovern’s proposed vandalism of the Bill of Rights.

I’ll actually say one thing in defense of Rep. McGovern — it’s quite refreshing to hear of any of our elected Congressional leaders propose to actually use the specific procedure intended to change the Constitution: Amendments. Generally, our leaders instead hide behind popularity polls and bills that are typically DOA in terms of constitutionality. Let the man put his money where his mouth is, see an amendment passed in both houses by two-thirds and then ratified by three-fourths of the states. Yeah, it’s hard to pass them. That’s by design though. And thank God for that.

The dangers of bureaucracies, continued.

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.

Madison foreshadowed dangers of unchecked power.

But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

– James Madison, Federalist 51, reflects on the importance of the separation of powers. Would he not have been appalled at the alphabet soup of regulatory agencies which act as nameless, faceless, and unaccountable executive, legislative and judicial factories bypassing the critical tenet of Federalism — the separation of powers?

Pelosi only lies when her lips move.

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.

Rodriguez to 60-Minutes: You don’t know what you’re talking about.

A former CIA chief, Jose Rodriguez, lays the intellectual wood down on 60-Minutes’ Leslie Stahl. I love his point, which many others have noted before, that for some reason the mainstream media and many politicos curiously believe that the morally superior position is to kill terrorists rather than capture them and subject them to enhanced interrogation. I’m all for killing fundamentalists plotting the mass murder of American citizens but it seems rather indefensible to attempt to claim our drone killings of terror suspects is somehow politically correct, but holding them in Guantanamo is not. It makes no sense. And, of course, the whole reason the Obama administration can target those terrorists is because of the intel which Mr. Rodriguez’s CIA programs produced even as the president criticizes it.

Rodriquez has written a book, titled “Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Action After 9/11 Saved American Lives,” which offers a detailed defense of the harsh interrogation tactics he authorized in the wake of the catastrophic terror attacks.

“For the first time in our history, we had an enemy come into our homeland and kill 3,000 people. I mean, that was a huge deal,” he told Stahl. “This was a threat. And we had to throw everything at it.”

Rodriguez said the United States intelligence community was faced with a “ticking time bomb situation” and vowed to use every means at their disposal—within the bounds of the law—to prevent another attack.

“We were flooded with intelligence about an imminent attack,” he said. “That al-Qaeda had an anthrax program, and that they were planning to use it against us. And that they were seeking nuclear materials to use in some type of nuclear weapon.”

That is why he authorized the use of stress-inducing interrogation methods—including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and the use of diapers—on high-level terrorist operatives such as 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and top al-Qaeda henchman Abu Zubaydah, Rodriguez said.

The tactics, which he said were not intended to inflict pain, yielded crucial information that ultimately saved lives.

Stahl, who at times during the interview appeared to be in a stress-inducing position, noted that the FBI has disputed the CIA’s claim that the enhanced tactics were effective.

“In fact, what they say is everything important that [Abu Zubaydah] gave up, he gave up to them before the harsher interrogation techniques kicked in,” she told Rodriguez.

“Well, that is just not true,” Rodriguez said. “It’s not true.”

Stahl pressed further, relaying an unfavorable construal of the CIA operation that “was told” to her.

“Here’s something that was told to me. Abu Zubaydah’s stories sent the CIA around the globe. Not a single plot was foiled. We spent millions chasing phantoms,” she said.

Rodriguez emphatically rejected the notion.

“Bullshit!” he said. Abu Zubaydah “gave us a road map that allowed us to capture a bunch of al-Qaeda senior leaders.”

Asked if he had any “qualms” about the use of harsh tactics on high-level terrorists, Rodriguez expressed none.

“We made some al-Qaeda terrorists with American blood on their hands uncomfortable for a few days,” he said. “But we did the right thing for the right reason. And the right reason was to protect the homeland and to protect American lives. So yes, I had no qualms.”

“I am very secure in, in what we did and I am very confident that what we did saved American lives,” he added.

Rodriguez pointed out that under President Obama, few suspected terrorists are captured and interrogated.

“[The] default option of this administration has been to kill all prisoners,” he said, referring to the administration’s preference for unmanned drone strikes. “How could it be more ethical to kill people rather than capture them? I never understood that one.”

Obama has criticized the CIA’s interrogation program under President George W. Bush, accusing American agents of engaging in “torture.”

Rodriguez said that while the president is “entitled to his opinion,” it was highly unbecoming of the commander in chief to challenge the U.S. intelligence community and its efforts to protect the country.

“When President Obama condemns the covert action activities of a previous government, he is breaking the covenant that exists between intelligence officers who are at the pointy end of the spear, hanging way out there, and the government that authorized them and directed them to go there,” he said.

 

Buffett: Tax breaks for me, not for thee.

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.

Taxes for today’s “rich” hit tomorrow’s middle class.

Here’s the President of Americans for Tax Reform Grover Norquist:

During the 2011 debate on combining tax hikes and spending to reduce the deficit by $2.5 trillion, Scott Rasmussen’s polling found that 75% of Americans were convinced that any deal in Congress would actually increase taxes on the middle class.

Even with the president promising to tax only the rich, why did 75% of Americans believe they were the ultimate targets of any threatened tax hike? The history of trickle-down taxation over the last 100 years and the last two Democratic administrations suggests an answer.

The Alternative Minimum Tax was imposed in 1969 because 115 households investing in municipal bonds reportedly paid little or no federal income tax. This tax on the rich who were paying what the president and others call a “fair share” now affects four million households. On Jan. 1, 2013, it is set to hit 27 million more—raising an estimated $120 billion, according to the Obama 2013 budget. In 40 years, a tax on 115 households will have grown to threaten 31 million.

The personal income tax, brought courtesy of the 16th Amendment, also promised to be a tax on the wealthiest Americans. It began in 1913 with a top rate of 7% and hit only those with a taxable income of $500,000 or more. (According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator, that would be $11.5 million now.) Today, roughly half of American families pay the personal income tax.

Politicians at the state level have also played trickle-down taxation. Maine imposed an income tax in 1969, and the tax that once only hit folks earning more than $308,000 in today’s dollars now hits Mainers with a rate of 8.5% and kicks in at $19,950. Almost everyone in Maine is now “rich.”

More recently, Bill Clinton’s promise to tax only the top 2% lasted about six months before the administration demanded tax increases on every single American in the form of a tax on electricity and a tax on gasoline. Mr. Clinton then replaced those taxes with a gasoline-tax increase of 4.3 cents per gallon. Everyone who drove a car was suddenly, magically rich.

Barack Obama’s promise to tax only the rich in the 2008 campaign had a shorter shelf life: He signed his first tax increase 16 days into the presidency—on cigarette smokers, a group whose average annual income is $40,000. One year later, ObamaCare imposed at least seven new or higher taxes that directly hit middle-income Americans—including the individual mandate excise tax, the “medicine cabinet tax” on health savings and flexible spending accounts, and even an indoor-tanning tax.