I’m pretty sure “Thom” wasn’t referring to Gary Anderson, the former kicker of the Minnesota Vikings (who to my knowledge isn’t running for president) but rather Gary Johnson the former governor of New Mexico (who is running for president).

I think this is exemplifies one of Gov. Johnson’s problems with name recognition. Both “Gary” and “Johnson” are such ordinary, everyday names. There’s a Gary Johnson who is an insurance agent who has an office not far from where I live. His name could just as well be Bob Smith or Bill Jones. If he were elected president, he would be the third President Johnson in U.S. history.

Names like Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum are uncommon enough that they stick in your memory once you have heard or seen the names in the media. I mean really, I have never met anyone who had a name like Mitt or Newt. These names are uncommon enough I don’t even have to hear someone say the last name to know s/he is referring to the former governor of Massachusetts and former Speaker of the House respectively. As for Ron Paul, while in isolation both names are quite common, he has the whole two “first names” thing going on.

Maybe the best thing Gov. Johnson could do is do what another famous Johnson did…

Change his last name to Ochocinco.

There. Gary Ochocinco. That ought to help boost his name recognition!

Disclaimer: The views expressed here at The Liberty Papers either by the post authors or views found in the comments section do not necessarily reflect the views of The Innocence Project nor its affiliates.

In support of our fundraising efforts for The Innocence Project, I have decided to dedicate at least one post per week over the next four weeks to the cause of criminal justice reform – many of which are the very reforms The Innocence Project are working to bring about. As of this writing, you readers have already donated $310 – 62% of our $500 goal! Thanks to everyone who has donated so far or plans to donate. Remember: your donations are 100% tax deductible.

With that out of the way, now I will turn your attention to the topic at hand: Eyewitness Misidentification.

Back almost three years ago to the day, I wrote a post about Troy Davis who had his death row appeal denied despite seven eyewitnesses recanting their testimonies (this case is still winding its way through the courts; here is an update on where the case stands today). As is often the case whether here at The Liberty Papers or at other blogs, the discussion that followed my post was actually a great deal more interesting than the post itself IMHO. Jeff Molby, a person who comments on a somewhat regular basis, really got the discussion going with several Liberty Papers contributors and readers.

The part of the post that Jeff believed to be “misleading” was the following statement I took from The Innocence Project webpage that dealt with the role eyewitness misidentification plays in wrongful convictions:

Eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing a role in more than 75% of convictions overturned through DNA testing.

While eyewitness testimony can be persuasive evidence before a judge or jury, 30 years of strong social science research has proven that eyewitness identification is often unreliable. Research shows that the human mind is not like a tape recorder; we neither record events exactly as we see them, nor recall them like a tape that has been rewound. Instead, witness memory is like any other evidence at a crime scene; it must be preserved carefully and retrieved methodically, or it can be contaminated.

This was Jeff’s response:

Eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing a role in more than 75% of convictions overturned through DNA testing.

That’s a misleading stat. The relevant stat would be the percentage of convictions based on eyewitness identification that were later overturned due to DNA testing.

Comment by Jeff Molby — March 17, 2008 @ 12:51 pm

Perhaps the reason Jeff found the quote was misleading was my fault rather than The Innocence Project’s. The page that I took the quote from goes into greater detail complete with links for further reading. From my reading of their material, it seems to me that the statistics they are dealing with are from their now 266 exonerations. As the discussion unfolded, this forced me to do some additional research outside of The Innocence Project [Thanks a lot Jeff : ) ] to see if I could find more data to support –or refute The Innocence Project’s claim. Fellow contributor and lawyer by trade, Doug Mataconis also weighed in with his thought about the reliability of eyewitness testimony.

The highlights from this discussion are below the fold.

The relevant stat would be the percentage of convictions based on eyewitness identification that were later overturned due to DNA testing.

I don’t completely agree. A very small portion of convictions are amenable to DNA testing. The proper denominator would be the number of convictions that are subsequently tested where eyewitness identification played a role.

The problem with examining the cases tested by the innocence project is that there will be a sampling bias: people who are innocent are much more motivates to seek out avenues for exoneration, and the innocence project will select cases that where they have a higher probability of success to focus their limited resources.

Comment by tarran — March 17, 2008 @ 6:38 pm

The proper denominator would be the number of convictions that are subsequently tested where eyewitness identification played a role.

I would also include those convicts for whom DNA evidence was available, but never tested. If a convict isn’t pursuing all possible means for an acquital, it’s hard to assume he’s anything other than guilty.

Regardless, I think we can agree that the statistic cited is pure garbarge.

Comment by Jeff Molby — March 17, 2008 @ 8:05 pm

If you read a report analyzing aircraft crashes, and the report stated that cracks in the pressure hull had contributed to 75% of crashes, I doubt you would be claiming that that statistic was somehow misleading and that the important question was how many planes flew with similar cracks safely.

It depends on the point you’re trying to make.
Read that sentence again:

Eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing a role in more than 75% of convictions overturned through DNA testing.

Notice that the assertion is about “wrongful convictions” (herein referred to as “apple”), yet their supporting statistic is about “convictions overturned” (herein referred to as “orange”).

We can agree that there are some unknown number of wrongful convictions that never get overturned, right? Isn’t it quite possible that there are other unmentioned factors that bias the sample?

And even if there aren’t, the author goes on to assert that eyewitness testimony is “often unreliable.” He didn’t offer a shred of evidence to support that statement. The eyewitness testimony could be right 99.999% of the time for all we know, because he only examined the convictions that were overturned.

In the context that it was presented, the stat is useless at best.

Comment by Jeff Molby — March 18, 2008 @ 9:46 am

The only wrongful convictions we know of are ones that are overturned. Well, that’s not completely correct; there are cases like the one that’s the focus of Stephen’s post here.

These aren’t apples and oranges. The convictions overturned is a subset of a larger, unknown and unknowable set, all the wrongful convictions. The use of a small sample to come to conclusions concerning larger sets is the heart of “hypothesis testing” which is one of the most highly developed branches of statistics.

You could argue that they are making conclusions about all apples from a sample of golden delicious apples, and I would agree with you. But to claim that this is apples and oranges is a bit much.

With that being said, they are absolutely correct that eyewitness testimony can be quite unreliable. In fact some branches of eyewitness testimony are known to be often unreliable, such as identification of a stranger. There was a series of psychological experiments that demonstrated this; the researchers could consistently get witnesses to finger the wrong man as a person who committed a a simulated robbery merely through having a patsy in the crowd loudly and incorrectly describe one aspect of the thief’s appearance.

Now, again, you could argue that the statistics they present, on their own do not back up this claim. However, the unreliability of witnesses when describing novel people or situations is well known enough that it needs no confirmation anymore than a guy talking about airplane design need to justify his assertion that air pressure can be used to calculate altitude.

Comment by tarran — March 18, 2008 @ 10:35 am

Jeff:

If you actually follow the link, you will see that TIP considers such factors as estimator variables, and system variables. TIP also has made observations about eyewitness misidentification based on the over 100 convictions they have helped overturn. If you look to the right side of the web page, you will find more outside information about the unreliability of the use of eyewitness identification: here’s an Iowa University Study and a website from one of the study’s authors Iowa State Psychology Professor Gary Wells .

If you are skeptical about TIP’s sources, do an independent Google Scholar Search on the topic from 2000 to 2008. You will find that Dr. Wells’ articles are among the top scholarly articles cited by other peer reviewed scholarly articles found by Google Scholar.

On Table 1 of this study which interviewed 64 psychologists who had courtroom experience found in the May 2001 issue of American Psychologist, the very first of thirty variables listed in determining the reliability of an eyewitness is the stress level at the time of the event. The statement next to this variable reads as follows: “Very high levels of stress impair the accuracy of eyewitness testimony.”

This would explain why I could not remember exactly what this man looked like even though he was looking right at me less than 2 feet away; I was scared shitless (to use a scientific term).

The very first page of the same study states the following:

In 1996, the National Institute of Justice reported on 28 wrongful convictions, cases in which convicted felons were exonerated by DNA evidence […] Remarkably, all of these cases contained one or more false identifications.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. The body of research being done concerning eyewitness mistakes is growing. Read these studies as well as a few of your own and then tell me that eyewitness testimony is generally reliable enough to take someone’s freedom or someone’s life.

Comment by Stephen Littau — March 18, 2008 @ 11:56 am

Stephen,

This case, and the issue of eyewitness testimony, reminds me of two classes I took, one in college and one in law school, where the professor engaged in an experiment that showed just how unreliable eyewitness testimony can be.

It should be familiar to anyone who’s taken a criminal justice class of any kind.

In both cases, we witnessed what looked like a crime (theft in one case, attempted assault in the other) but was actually a ruse between the professor and a graduate assistant. After it happened, the professor asked the class to recount details about what they saw such as:

- The height of the person who had run into the room
- What color hair they had.
- How tall they were
- Whether they were fat or thin
- What was said

Stuff like that.

Without exception, everyone got at least one crucial detail about the incident completely wrong. And that was mere minutes after it happened.

I don’t practice a lot of criminal law, but even on the civil side it became obvious to me quite early on that when someone gets up on the stand in a courtroom and is asked to recount the details of an event that happened years in the past, they usually aren’t getting everything completely right.

In a civil case, it usually isn’t crucial because documents usually control.

In a criminal case, where someone’s freedom or life is on the line, basing a conviction solely on the testimony of witnesses, without corroborating physical evidence seems foolish.

Comment by Doug Mataconis — March 18, 2008 @ 1:09 pm

You could argue that they are making conclusions about all apples from a sample of golden delicious apples, and I would agree with you. But to claim that this is apples and oranges is a bit much.

Ok, you can reduce the scale of my analogy if you like, but my point is still valid. The subset is non-random* and therefore it is not logically possible to draw conclusions about the whole from that subset; if you want to make a hypothesis from the subset and use that as the basis for further experiments on the whole, knock yourself out. You can’t, however, make conclusions.

*Not only is it not random, it isn’t even mixed up a little. The subset is narrowly defined to only include a single class of cases.

Now, again, you could argue that the statistics they present, on their own do not back up this claim.

That’s what I was doing.

With that being said, they are absolutely correct that eyewitness testimony can be quite unreliable

If you actually follow the link, you will see that TIP considers such factors as estimator variables, and system variables. TIP also has made observations about eyewitness misidentification based on the over 100 convictions they have helped overturn.

I don’t necessarily take issue with their conclusion. I just take issue with the way that stat was presented. It struck me as MSM-style sensationalism.

Even if the stat did speak directly toward their conclusion, they still should have given it some context. “Played a role in more than 75%”? Ok, where does that fall in comparison to other factors? Presumably there are multiple factors in most wrongful convictions, so 75% might not even be good enough for 3rd place for all I know.

Comment by Jeff Molby — March 19, 2008 @ 1:25 am

A Final Thought
Just how reliable are eyewitnesses and their testimonies? Whether or not The Innocence Project is being “sensational” in presenting their data to make their point, I think we can all agree that the courts rely entirely too much on eyewitness testimony – particularly when the eyewitness in question doesn’t know the person who they saw committing the crime. I think we can also agree that the techniques that the police use when interviewing eyewitnesses can be improved to minimize the possibility of convicting an innocent person.

The Innocence Project does have some great ideas for doing just that and some of their reforms have been adopted at the state and county level. To learn more about how The Innocence Project is working to reform eyewitness identification procedures, follow this link. If you believe these reforms and others will improve the system and you would like to help make these reforms possible, I would encourage you one more time to go to our “Innocence Partners Page” and make a tax deductible donation to help us meet our $500 goal (we’re only $190 away!).

Also, a special thanks to Jeff Molby, Tarran, and Doug Mataconis, for contributing so much to a discussion that was so valuable that it deserved to be revisited and reintroduced to readers a full three years later. This is what makes blogging such a rewarding hobby for me.

Liberalism in the United States has, over the past forty years, been usurped by the socialist agenda. Our public schools are little more than indoctrination camps for the pacification of future generations.

At the same time, conservatism in the United States has been usurped by war-hawks and fundamentalist christians. Our funding for education has been marginalized, contributing to the growth of the socialist mind-set among educators and educational administrators, as well as contributing to the general ignorance of the populace concerning historical precedent for current affairs, and critical analysis of future prospects for avoiding past mistakes.

They simply do not have the funds to broaden educational horizons for students, and due to the changes in both liberalism and conservatism, have instead created lock-down facilities much like concentration camps which institutionally discourage free thought, free discourse and the development of critical thinking skills.

The continuation of this trend will erode what little is left of truly American society, turning us into a nation of frightened chattel animals whose sole purpose will be to provide revenue and labor for a totalitarian state, and predatory industry owned by the wealthy few, whose political machinations are directly contributing to this end.

Comment by Ken — February 25, 2011 @ 8:48 am

While I don’t agree entirely* with Ken’s comment, he does raise some interesting points. There certainly is a collectivist mindset that is pervasive in our culture on the Left and the Right and I think Ken has successfully identified them.

*My biggest problems is comparing the schools to concentration camps. I agree with his overall point but I think “concentration camps” goes a little too far but “indoctrination camps” is just about right on target.

President Obama says he wants a freeze in non-security, discretionary spending. In the unlikely event that happens, it won’t really matter, because to make a real dent in the deficit, it’s necessary to cut spending on the military and entitlements. The president promised big government in the past, and he delivered. I expect more of the same.
However, Obama has truly been a hypocrite on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a candidate, he promised to end them. Tonight we heard more hollow promises. The fact is, as president, he has kept those wars going, and has greatly escalated the war in Afghanistan. As a percentage of GDP, military spending is higher now than it was during any year of the George W. Bush administration.

Unlike President Obama, Libertarians would bring our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and reduce the military budget.

Benedict also saved some much needed criticism for Paul Ryan’s Republican response

On the Republican side, I found Congressman Paul Ryan’s hypocrisy appalling. He claims to want big cuts in government spending. But he didn’t seem to be too worried about cutting spending when Republicans were in charge. He supported the huge Medicare expansion in 2003, and the expensive No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. He supports the expensive War on Drugs. In 2008, he put hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars at risk by voting for the massive TARP bailout, and he even voted to spend billions on the GM and Chrysler bailout.

Just one month ago, Congressman Ryan voted for the tax compromise that included a big increase in unemployment spending, and even extensions of government spending on ethanol.

Republicans don’t want to cut spending — they want to talk about cutting spending.

At Reason.com Veronique de Rugy and Nick Gillespie responded with a post “We Can’t Win the Future By Repeating the Past”

How can we “win the future,” as President Barack Obama exhorted us to do in his 2011 State of the Union address, when our top elected official remains so drearily stuck in the past? And despite the commanding role of what can only be called Sputnik nostalgia in his speech, Obama was not even channeling the distant past in his remarks.

Instead, he served up the equivalent of a microwaved reheating of the sentiments of his immediate predecessor, George W. Bush. That’s some sort of groovy, space-age technological feat, for sure, but we shouldn’t confuse left-over platitudes about cutting wasteful spending on the one hand while ramping up publicly funded “investment” on the other for a healthy meal.

Neal Boortz:

Sure enough, as I told you, Obama replaced the word “spending” with the word “investing”. I’ve gone through this routine with you before, people just react better to the word investing than they do the word spending. Investing good, spending bad. What Barack Obama proposed last night was not investing at all, it was pure stimulus spending. Space and we all know how well the last stimulus plan worked. Where’s the unemployment rate now? About 9.5%? Yeah, that worked. One of the mainstays oval bomb his new stimulus program is this high speed rail boondoggle. Obama said “Within 25 years our goal is to give 80% of Americans access to high-speed rail.” Space you do know, don’t you, that Amtrak has never made money. Amtrak is a constant drain on taxpayer dollars were ever those trains run. And how is it going to be any different with high-speed rail lines. Experts not working for the government or not working for the building trades unions, are pretty much unanimous in their opinions that high-speed rail in our widely disseminated population simply will not work. It high-speed rail doesn’t work between New York and Philadelphia, or New York and Washington DC without losing money, how in the world isn’t going to work between Orlando and Tampa or any other two urban areas in this country. Space the fact is that this whole dream about high-speed rail is nothing but a payoff to unions in order to put construction workers to work building rail lines, joining unions, paying union dues, and allowing unions to make massive political contributions to candidates. Democrat candidates.

Gene Healy at Cato says the problem with the SOTU isn’t the seating:

Bipartisan symbolism’s all the rage on Capitol Hill right now, with members scrambling for a cross-aisle BFF to sit with at the State of the Union (SOTU). Tonight, the lion will lie down with the lamb — or at least Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., will sit elbow to elbow and try not to bite each other.

Maybe these gestures will lead to a nationwide surge of oxytocin — the togetherness hormone — healing partisan rancor across the fruited plain. But that’s highly unlikely, given how polarizing the modern SOTU and the modern presidency have become.

Over at United Liberty, former Liberty Papers contributor Jason Pye warns readers to not be fooled by the president’s favorite buzzword from the SOTU: “investing”

Consider this, in the same speech President Obama was pitching a paltry speeding freeze, he spoke often of investment. Of course, since “stimulus” has become a political non-starter; thanks largely to his behemoth spending bill passed shortly after he took office two years ago, “investment” is the new buzz word for statists to push their wasteful pet spending.

Among these “investments” will be more spending for high-speed rail projects, high-speed internet, tax credits, more education spending, energy subsidies, and more spending for our seemingly endless operations in Afghanistan – although he promises that we will soon begin withdrawal from the country, don’t believe it; we’re going to be there for years to come. Obama claims to want a spending freeze, but he also wants to spend more money. On what planet does that make sense?

Former Libertarian presidential nominee Bob Barr called the speech a “yawn”

A little bit of something for everybody; but a really big something for government. This was the essential thrust of this 44th President’s second — and longest, state-of-the-union speech last night. While Barack Obama did not include quite as lengthy a shopping list in his state of the union speech as did his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, his list was long nonetheless.

Even though Obama paid lip service to regulatory reform, community-based education, tax reform, and reform of last year’s health care reform (among many other tid-bits), in virtually every instance, the ultimate solution to which he kept returning was more government spending and increased government prioritization.

Finally, John Stossel offers a State of the Union address of his own (to which I won’t excerpt because the whole thing should be read; I’ll post the video if I can find it).

***UPDATE*** Cato offers a more complete response to the SOTU by getting into some of the details of the speech and other observations.

On the positive side, the mandate section of ObamaCare was found unconstitutional, the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy was repealed, Wikileaks exposed the federal government for the corrupt organization it is, the Democrats took a beating on election day, and the Bush era tax cuts were extended (though with the return of the death tax, extension of unemployment benefits, and other compromises in the bill, I’m not yet sure if this was a good or bad thing).

On the other hand, Republicans gained ground on election day (I’m not optimistic that they have changed much since the last time they ran things), the vast majority of incumbents in both parties were easily reelected, government spending is way out of control, the Fed wants to pump some $600 billion into the economy by printing more counterfeit money, unconstitutional invasive searches continue to take place at airports in the name of safety, both Democrat and Republican politicians consider Wikileaks to be a “terrorist” organization, and President Obama believes he can assassinate American citizens where they stand with no due process whatsoever.

On the criminal justice front, The Innocence Network (part of The Innocence Project) exonerated 29 individuals in 2010 for crimes they did not commit. Back in March, Hank Skinner came within an hour of being executed when SCOTUS halted the process. Skinner’s case continues to wind its way through the courts. In other death penalty news of 2010, Kevin Keith’s death sentence was commuted to life by Gov. Strickland, Anthony Graves became the 12th death row inmate to be exonerated in Texas, a key DNA sample was determined to not be a match for another Texas man, Claude Jones who was executed in 2000, and Texas continues to stonewall inquiries into the likely wrongful 2004 execution of Cameron Todd Willingham. As these questionable death penalty cases pile up, hopefully this will be the beginning of the end of the death penalty in Texas and elsewhere.

In a couple of other cases we never quite got around to at The Liberty Papers but deserve to be mentioned: Cory Maye was granted a new trial by the Mississippi Supreme Court because the trial judge failed to give jury instructions to consider a “defense of others” defense and in Arkansas, the Arkansas Supreme Court ordered a new hearing for the so-called “West Memphis 3” to consider newly discovered DNA evidence and juror misconduct from the original trial (if you are not familiar with this case, I urge you to follow this link as a starting point. The more I have looked into this case the more disturbing I find it to be…a perfect example of what is so terribly wrong with the system).

Hopes for 2011
Rather than offering predictions for 2011, here are some of my hopes:

- I hope that the justice will be served in the above cases.

-I hope I am wrong about the Tea Party Republicans and that they will actually be a force of positive change for more liberty and smaller government

-I hope that Ron Paul decides not to run for president for the 2012 campaign but instead puts his support behind former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson (I’ll get into my reasoning in a future post).

-I hope by this time next year, I’ll have far more successes than setbacks for liberty to report.

Now it’s your turn. How do you feel about the state of liberty in 2010 and how do you feel about the year ahead?

What I’m interested in is hearing from those of you who are flying for this holdiay. What was your experience going through security? Were the TSA agents generally polite and professional (as I’m sure is the case most of the time) or did you witness or experience something you would consider inappropriate or criminal? (if so, did you by any chance record the event?) Did you see any protestors? (if so how many; did you protest?)

For those of you who didn’t fly, did you choose not to fly because of the TSA or for a different reason? Are you willing to fly in the future if these procedures do not change?

Finally, over the Thanksgiving holiday, did your family discuss the TSA procedures and if so, what was their attitudes about them?

In the mean time, everyone please have a safe and happy Thanksgiving!

This brings me to the question I want to pose to readers: what top 3 amendments would you make if you could and why?

Here are my top 3 in no particular order:

1. Rebalancing the Scales of Justice Amendment: The 4th 6th Amendment’s guarantee for the accused to have a court appointed [see comments below] lawyer is a wonderful idea but incomplete. Sure, the accused can be represented by a public defender but does not have nearly the resources available as the prosecution. My proposed amendment would go further than the 4th 6th Amendment and state that the accused would be guaranteed the same resources in his or her defense as the prosecution. For every tax dollar spent to prosecute a dollar would be made available for the defense (whether or not the accused uses a court appointed attorney). This amendment would also guarantee compensation for the wrongfully accused, hold prosecutors criminally and civilly responsible for withholding exculpatory evidence from the jury, and clearly state that a compelling claim of “actual innocence” (due to newly discovered evidence or technological breakthroughs) would be reason enough for a new trial for the previously convicted.

2. Term Limits Amendment: A single 6 year term for president, 2 terms for senators (keep the current 6 year term), 6 terms for representatives (keep the current 2 year term). These terms would be limited for consecutive terms only; if a president wants to make another run, s/he could do so after sitting out a term while senators and representatives would have to sit out a full 12 years (and make them deal with the consequences of their laws as private citizens for awhile) or run for a different office.

3. Accident of Birth Amendment: This would revise Article II, Section 1 removing the requirement that the president must be a natural born citizen and changing the requirement to match that of a U.S. senator. While this requirement might have made sense 223 years ago when the nation was getting started, we are now to a point to where we can do away with it. I don’t like the idea of disqualifying an individual for something s/he had absolutely no control over. Also, this would force the birthers to think about something else other than Obama’s birth certificate : )

Now it’s your turn.

As long as men and women in uniform (State-issued costumes) carry out these violent acts, we think it’s okay, because they’re “protecting us.” But the State gives a false sense of legitimacy to acts that if carried out under other circumstances, would be serial criminal activity.

The government doesn’t do this to us, however, because the truth of the matter, is that it’s merely a reflection of our collective shadow … when otherwise good men and women become agents of savage brutality … turning us all into sociopaths.

This is the price of identifying ourselves with the State.

Read the whole thing. It’s a sad commentary on just how far we as a people have allowed the state to carry out unjustified acts of violence in our name.

A small news item from Tracy, Calif., caught my eye last week. Local station CBS 13 reported: “Tracy residents will now have to pay every time they call 911 for a medical emergency. But there are a couple of options. Residents can pay a $48 voluntary fee for the year, which allows them to call 911 as many times as necessary. Or there’s the option of not signing up for the annual fee. Instead they will be charged $300 if they make a call for help.”

Welcome to the lean years.

…

Indeed, to lead now is to trim, to fire or to downsize services, programs or personnel. We’ve gone from the age of government handouts to the age of citizen givebacks, from the age of companions fly free to the age of paying for each bag.

Did I hear that right? Do we have a return to the Clintonian pronouncement that “The era of big government is over”, where Thomas Friedman has just suggested that we’ve seen the end of the “age of government handouts”? I suppose we’ll see a quick retraction from $3.8T federal budgets down to less exospheric levels.

Wait, let’s step back a bit. I’ve heard nobody else suggest that we’re going to see major cuts in budgets. So what exactly is the issue here? Why would a local government cut funding for something that is so highly visible, so near and dear to city residents’ hearts, and such a vital service? Particularly when I’m sure that the revenue raised by this move will not be exactly world-changing (I’m hearing numbers of between $400K and $800K, when the city is facing a $9M shortfall).

I was struck by something I’ve read over and over at Coyote’s place:

The second thing that governments do is cut their MOST important, MOST valuable operations. In Seattle, it was always fire and ambulance services that would be cut. Because the whole game was to find the cuts that would most upset the public to try to avoid the necessity of having to make cuts at all. Its an incredibly disingenuous process. Any staffer of a private company that made cost savings prioritization decisions like government officials would be fired in about 2 minutes.

It becomes immediately clear that the city of Tracy isn’t doing this to raise revenue — they’re doing this to piss off residents. An easier way to cut the budget would be to scour the books for non-essential services, or bloated departments, or redundancies and inefficiencies in their system. I would find it hard to believe that there’s no padding in the city government. I’ve worked in the corporate world, and I know that during times of heavy growth and good days for the balance sheet, departments sometimes grow fat and happy. But something happens differently in the corporate world when the balance sheets start bleeding red — the departments shrink.

Tracy does not want to cut their budget, and they don’t want to make hard choices. If they really wanted to raise $400-800K, I’ll bet they could find all sorts of hidden fees, taxes, regulatory compliance nightmares, etc to put together that money. But they want to bluff the residents into the false choice of paying more in taxes or seeing vital services taken away. They want local residents to make the tough choices — or maybe just scream to Sacramento or Washington for relief — so they can remain fat and happy.

Thomas Friedman suggests the lean years are upon us. Somehow I have a feeling that my tax bill and our federal debt won’t reflect this.

* Note — the charges don’t apply to every 911 call, they are targeted at calls where medical response is necessary but provided by city personnel rather than an EMT. This does not change the fundamental analysis of the situation, but I want to be clear lest someone suggest I’m not providing a clear picture.

Also Blogging: Bruce at QandO. He went a different route with his response, so I had no need to quote him, but his take is valuable as well, so I suggest you head over and give it a read. And of course there’s Russ Roberts at Cafe Hayek, who is much closer to my line of argument.

“You can feel sorry for the first few sheep slaughtered but then you must start to question the others for staying in line.”

On behalf of all of us who post here, I’d like to thank you, our audience, for your feedback, arguments, discussions, and explanations.

You, our readers, are why we write.

Thanks for reading.

My response was an immediate “to myself and to my family, but certainly not the federal government of the US!” (for many of the same reasons that tarran so eloquently explained). I’m quite certain that this is not a response this talk show host would appreciate. I’m also quite certain that in his view, these corporations are supposed to “provide American jobs” no matter how costly and no matter how much the federal government punishes them with taxes and regulations. To suggest that a business should make its first loyalty to pursuing profits for shareholders would be heretical! These populist propagandists ask such questions of these businesses but fail to ask the question of government “to whom or what does Washington pledge its allegiance?” (Hint: it certainly isn’t to free market principles or liberty).

After thinking about the question a little longer, I concluded that my allegiances are as follows: myself*, my family, and the defense of the principles of life, liberty, property and justice for all**.

Now I pose this question to you, the reader: To whom or what do you pledge your allegiance?

*The fact that I put myself first may be shocking to those who haven’t spent much time studying the philosophy known as Objectivism.

** “Liberty and Justice for All” – This is at least one part of the Pledge of Allegiance I can keep, but when I say “all” I mean all individuals irrespective of color, gender, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, rich or poor. All individuals are entitled the rights of life, liberty, property and justice (justice meaning equal treatment under the law).

Sen. Webb is looking for some recommendations on how to reform the prison system so I thought it would be interesting to solicit some ideas from readers and fellow Liberty Papers contributors. The following is the specific questions Sen. Webb wants to answer:

I am now introducing legislation that will create a national commission to look at every aspect of our criminal justice system with an eye toward reshaping the process from top to bottom. I believe that it is time to bring together the best minds in America to confer, report, and make specific recommendations about how we can reform the process. This commission will be tasked with giving us clear answers to hard questions, including:

Why are so many Americans currently in prison compared with other countries and our own history?

What is this policy costing our nation, both in tax dollars and in lost opportunities?

How can we reshape our nation’s drug policies?

How can we better diagnose and treat mental illness?

How can we end violence within prisons and increase the quality of prison administrators?

How can we build workable re-entry programs so that our communities can assimilate former offenders and encourage them to become productive citizens?

How can we defend ourselves against the growing scourge of violent, internationally based gang activity?

The more specific your answers, the better. I’ll refrain from posting here as I will answer these questions and more in my upcoming post.

When I had the opportunity, I asked James if I could ask him a quick question.  “Sure,” he replied.  The question I lobbed at him was whether or not he would absolutely commit to not increasing taxes if elected governor.

“No problem,” he responded.  “Got a tougher one?”

I pitched the second question a bit harder, but his response came as quickly as the first one.  I asked if he’d commit to not increasing state spending.  “That’s easy,” he said. “You got a tough one for me, now?”

“Okay,” I responded, and threw him a bit of a curveball.  “Would you mind signing a pledge to this effect?”

“I’d love to…,” he stated. Later on, we set up a telephone call to deal with speaking arrangements for an upcoming event and the pledge issue.

Tim Fernholz’s response:

It all seems so flippant. Even given the conservative predilection for smaller governments and the ubiquity of Grover Norquist’[s] conservative loyalty oaths, is it wise for any potential chief executive to completely tie their hands, especially in a time of recession? It speaks to a rigid ideological prism rather than the attitude of addressing problems on their own merits.

Now here’s where the awesome idea comes from (emphasis added):

Most of America’s successful conservative executives would have violated both of those pledges; it’s as foolish a set of strictures as if Democrats demanded that their candidates sign pledges to raise taxes and increase spending.

The idea isn’t as foolish as Fernholz suggests.  According to the Americans for Tax Reform website, “The idea of the Pledge is simple enough: Make them put their no-new-taxes rhetoric in writing.”  For the sake of simple honesty, I’d love to see candidates running on tax-and-spending-increase rhetoric.

If today’s Democrats (along with Republicans such as Senators Snowe, Collins and Specter) wish to outspend even the Republicans on corporate bailouts and stimulate the economy with trillions of dollars we don’t have, why not at least be honest about it?  Here’s an applicable rewrite of Grover Norquist’s gubernatorial pledge for candidates running on a big-government platform:

I, ____, pledge to the taxpayers of the State of ________, that I will support and sign any and all efforts to increase taxes.

I also like the Republican Liberty Caucus pledge.  Here’s the new Slavery Compact:

Decrease liberty, not promote it; expand government, not shrink it; increase taxes, don’t cut them; create programs, not abolish them; despoil the freedom and independence of citizens, increasing the interference of government in their lives; and absolutely disregard the limited, enumerated powers of our Constitution, not promote them.

If politicians are going to legislate and govern expansive and ever expanding government programs, it sure would be nice to see some honesty in advertising as they run for public office.

Trevor Paglen is an author, and Dr. of Geography, who developed a fascination for the “black” side of the military some years ago; and started snooping.

His first book on the subject “I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me“, was basically a recounting of his experiences in trying to figure out what mission patches for classified projects meant.

…snipped a video…

His new book is “Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World.“; in which he extends and develops on the methods and means from the first book, into an expanded view of the black world, focused on geography (and specifically logistics, and how they are related).

…snipped another video…

If you haven’t watched them yet, go back to the original post and watch the videos; and be prepared to be amazed at just how much can be inferred about black projects, by simple things like unit patches, and public records.

Amazed, and/or horrified (or perhaps simply resigned and amused), if your job is (or used to be) to keep such things secure…

Which brings me to the fun part of this post.

Dr. Paglens publishers saw my original post, and have graciously sent me a review copy of the book; which I plan to read and review this weekend.

In addition, they’ve offered a signed copy of the book to one of my readers, to be decided by blog contest (smart publicists these ones).

So, here’s the rules and parameters of the contest:

1. Submissions accepted as comments to the contest post on my blog, from now through Monday morning 12:01 AM

2. At 12:01 I will pick what I think are the top five posts if we get ten or more, or top ten if we get 20 or more. I will them put them up for a vote to the readers of the anarchangel blog, (and copy the stories here, but it would be a little complicated to have two polls) open from the time I post the stories, until 5pm Monday evening (at which time I will also be posting a review of Dr. Paglens book).
3. Entries will consist of one each of the following:

   a. Your best, funniest, most interesting, or scariest (from a security perspective) patch, flash, sign, symbol, or insignia story; preferably with a pic, but at least with a very clear description and detailed story.

   b. Your best, funniest, most interesting, stupidest, or scariest (from a security perspective) security story. It can be infosec, comsec, psec, prosec, opsec, doesn’t matter.

4. Stories do not have to be military or governmental in nature; though I suspect most of the best and funniest will be (governments are even better at absurdity than big corporations), so make it good
5. Multiple entries from a single individual will be accepted; and if the stories are good, are in fact encouraged.
6. All entries must be true and correct to the best of your knowledge (notice the out I gave you there).
7. First hand stories are preferred, and will be given more credit; but a sufficiently good second or third hand story will certainly be considered.
8. All entries should be either declassified, or sanitized sufficiently to avoid compromise; or in the case of non-military security stories to avoid compromise or disclosure of private or confidential (or higher) information.

Also, although I’m generally not a linker or memer, I would ask that if you find this interesting, please link it up, and forward it around. I’d really love to see what we get.

If there are enough entries, or if people post some REALLY GREAT after the deadline, I might even throw in a consolation prize myself afterwards.