Monthly Archives: May 2010

Wayne Allyn Root Is Poison For The Libertarian Party

Wayne Allyn Root, the businessman and online gambling advocate who served as Bob Barr’s running mate on the Libertarian ticket in 2008, is casting his lot in with the birthers. As Radley Balko reports, Root promotes on his Facebook page his participation in a “trial of Barack Obama” that took place last week in New York:

CM-Capture-23

What’s this trial all about, you might ask. Well, here’s a description:

With thousands of spectators expecting to attend, Dr. James Manning’s ‘trial of the century’ of Barack Obama on charges of treason, fraud, and sedition begins tomorrow morning at 9 AM in New York City. Co-defendants in the trial are Columbia University and the CIA. In the last days of the run-up to the trial, Manning revealed that he has sources in government that will testify against Obama, Columbia, and the CIA. He also reported explosive information that Barack Obama has used upwards of 20 different Social Security numbers during his life. Witnesses are expected to testify at the trial that Barack Obama was never a student at Columbia University, although he received a degree from the school. Dr. Manning claims that Columbia, therefore, is an accomplice to fraud. Other witnesses are expected to testify that Obama fails the Constitutional test for Presidential eligibility due to the fact that his father was a British subject at the time of his birth and his mother was not old enough to confer citizenship when he was born. A dramatic new revelation, however, may serve to re-emphasize the importance of the trial. The state of Hawaii, according to sources, did NOT accept his birth registration that was filed, despite issuing a ‘statement of live birth.’

This is the same James Manning who became famous last year when he started referring to President Obama as a “long legged mack daddy” and who joined Birther Queen Bee Orly Taitz last year at a protest that nobody attended against Fox News for “covering up” the birther story. Root hasn’t said anything one way or the other about the birth certificate issue that I’ve been able to find, but he does seem to buy at least part of the argument:

FireShot Pro capture #267 - 'Facebook I Wayne Allyn Root' - www_facebook_com_profile_php_id=1162754668

Of course, the possibility that Root and Obama may have traveled in different circles at Columbia, a school that had thousands of undergraduates at the time, does not seem to have occurred to Wayne at all, since he’s expressed this belief before. Why is this important ? Well, this year, Root is running for Chairman of the Libertarian National Committee, and he’s made it clear that this is merely a stepping stone to the 2012 nomination for President. Based on stuff like this, and the impression I got from reading Root’s The Conscience of a Libertarian, which I will be posting a review of in the very near future, I’ve got to completely agree with Radley Balko’s take on this:

I’m not a member of the Libertarian Party, though I’ve spoken to several state conventions over the last couple years. I have my problems with the party, but I’d like to see it do well, in part because for better or worse the LP has a significant impact on how people view libertarianism.

So let’s be clear about this: If Wayne Allyn Root becomes the face of the LP, it will be an unmitigated disaster for the party. It will also likely do quite a bit of damage to the public perception of libertarianism as a philosophy.

This is batshit crazy, off-the-charts conspiratorial hogwash. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticize Barack Obama. Root has chosen to dip into angry-white-guy, “Obama’s a secret Muslim” absolute and utter lunacy.

Libertarians: The man is a nut. Associate with him at your peril.

Indeed.

Originally posted at Below The Beltway

French Burqua Ban: Liberating or Tyrannical?

I can almost guarantee that the overwhelming swap of Liberty Papers readers were sympathetic to the creators of South Park in the recent controversy. In fact, I’m sure some of you are planning on participating in Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.

Given that, I have to request reader thoughts on the French ban of the burqa (a Muslim face-covering for women). My first intuition is a firm “no” against the ban, simply based on my strong emotional attachment to the tenets of freedom of religion as expressed in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

Christopher Hitchens makes the case over at Slate that the ban isn’t a ban at all, but actually a sort of state-mandated liberation of women from the tyranny of Islamic theology:

The French legislators who seek to repudiate the wearing of the veil or the burqa—whether the garment covers “only” the face or the entire female body—are often described as seeking to impose a “ban.” To the contrary, they are attempting to lift a ban: a ban on the right of women to choose their own dress, a ban on the right of women to disagree with male and clerical authority, and a ban on the right of all citizens to look one another in the face. The proposed law is in the best traditions of the French republic, which declares all citizens equal before the law and—no less important—equal in the face of one another.

After reading the article, I’m not sure what to think. Hitchens makes a strong case, but he is a master manipulator of words and verbal gymnastics are on full display in “In Your Face.” What do you think?

Ohio Police Officer Found Guilty In Shooting Of Unarmed Cyclist

Yesterday, an Ohio jury found a local police officer guilty in the shooting of an unarmed motorcyclist:

TOLEDO, OHIO — A Lucas County jury has found an Ottawa Hills police officer guilty of felonious assault in the May 2009 shooting of a motorcyclist.

After over five hours of deliberations, a jury found that part-time Ottawa Hills officer Thomas Caine White, 27, used excessive force in shooting motorcyclist Michael McCloskey, 25, during a traffic stop on May 23, 2009. White was found guilty of count of felonious assault with a gun specification, charges that could lead to 11 years in prison when he is sentenced.

McCloskey suffered serious injuries as a result of the shooting. He is now paralyzed from the waist down.

Attorneys for each side made closing arguments Friday afternoon.

The prosecution emphasized that this trial was not about all police officers or a specific police department but about the actions of Officer White that night.

Assistant Lucas County Prosecutor Jeff Lingo told the court that slides of the police dash cam video show McCloskey made no movement as if he had a weapon and the he gave no indication of being a threat to White. “He says, ‘Will you please lift the bike off me?’ This is after he’s been shot. He’s still being police to the officer who just shot him in the back. That’s the Mike McCloskey that he faced that night,” said Lingo

Here’s a video from White’s dashboard camera (no sound) which clearly shows the pursuit and shooting of McCloskey, and the fact that McCloskey made no threatening moves at all:

As noted above, Officer White faces up to eleven years in prison for this conviction.

Nation’s Drug Czar Laments Drug War Failure

Here’s the direct quote:

“In the grand scheme, it has not been successful,” drug czar Gil Kerlikowske told the AP. “Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified.”

That’s certainly good to hear, but here’s the chief problem:

This week President Obama backed up that rhetoric by announcing a new national policy that treats drug use as much as a public health concern as a criminal issue.

That seems like Obama is just heightening the drug war while not militarizing it. If he were to take slow steps to rescinding the whole failed enterprise, he would be treating drugs as a public health concern and less as a criminal issue.

Elena Kagan And The Second Amendment

Today’s controversy burning up Memeorandum is a revelation concerning Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s previously expressed views on the Second Amendment:

May 13 (Bloomberg) — Elena Kagan said as a U.S. Supreme Court law clerk in 1987 that she was “not sympathetic” toward a man who contended that his constitutional rights were violated when he was convicted for carrying an unlicensed pistol.

Kagan, whom President Barack Obama nominated to the high court this week, made the comment to Justice Thurgood Marshall, urging him in a one-paragraph memo to vote against hearing the District of Columbia man’s appeal.

The man’s “sole contention is that the District of Columbia’s firearms statutes violate his constitutional right to ‘keep and bear arms,’” Kagan wrote. “I’m not sympathetic.”

The law in question, of course, were the same firearms law that were at issue some 21 years later in District of Columbia v. Heller, which the Supreme Court ultimately struck down in what was actually the first explicit ruling on its part that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to keep and bear arms.

But, in 1987, a similar challenge to the same law suffered a much different fate:

The lower court ruling in the 1987 case, issued by the District of Columbia’s highest court, said the Second Amendment protects only the rights of states to raise militias, and not individual gun rights. The ruling upheld Lee Sandidge’s conviction for carrying a pistol without a license, possession of an unregistered firearm and unlawful possession of ammunition.

The high court refused to hear the case, known as Sandidge v. United States. The memo to Marshall, found in his papers at the Library of Congress, includes a handwritten “D,” indicating that he was among those who voted to deny review.

White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said the position taken in the memo to Marshall reflected the prevailing view of the law at the time.

That is, of course, absolutely correct. Prior to Heller, the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment, though slim, was decidedly against the idea that the amendment protected an individual surprise. Thus, it’s not all that surprising to me as an attorney that a 27 year-old law clerk working for one of the most liberal Justices on the Court at the time would produce a memo arguing that the appeal should be denied.

The question, then, isn’t what Kagan thought twenty years ago when the law was different, but what she thinks now, and she gave at least some clue to that during her confirmation hearings to become Solicitor General:

As a nominee to be solicitor general last year, Kagan told lawmakers that she accepted that 5-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller as a precedent of the court.

“There is no question, after Heller, that the Second Amendment guarantees individuals the right to keep and bear arms and that this right, like others in the Constitution, provides strong although not unlimited protection against governmental regulation,” she said.

Kagan should clearly be questioned on her views about the Second Amendment and the Heller decision, but rather than focusing on something she wrote 20 years ago, I would hope that the Senators focus on what she believes today.

H/T: Vodkapundit

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