“And Otherwise…” September 30, 2007
Posted by Webmaster in Black Crime, Hate Crimes.comments closed
KSTP-ABC-5 Minneapolis-St. Paul:
De’Andre June told police he woke up Wednesday morning to find the charred outline of a cross burned in the lawn of his home. June now is accused of burning the cross in the lawn himself.
The 47-year-old Anoka man was charged Friday with falsely reporting a crime. He also is charged with disorderly conduct and obstructing the legal process stemming from an altercation when police arrested him Thursday afternoon on a felony warrant from Hennepin County in connection with a financial fraud case.
According to the criminal complaint, inmates at the Anoka County jail told authorities that June was planning such a ruse.
“Inmates from the Anoka County Jail saw the news story on TV and recognized Mr. June,” said Capt. Phil Johanson of the Anoka Police Department. “(They) said that when he was in jail with them last week, he had made comments that he was going to do something like this to get sympathy from the community and the church for financial gains and otherwise.”
“And otherwise?” Money is an obvious motive, but those two words leave me curious. What else is there? Could it be that he wanted Minnesota’s famously liberal white people and Minnesota’s famously liberal authorities to forget about his other legal troubles? Or maybe he wanted to make white people look bad — if that can be proven, then I think hate crime riders are in order.
Good News from the Internet Censorship Front September 30, 2007
Posted by Webmaster in Censorship, Constitutional Integrity, Legal Profession, Politics.comments closed
The Iconoclast Blog:
It’s no surprise that politicians are rarely conversant with the limits on their legislating found in the U.S. Constitution. But it is worth noting when federal judges have actually read the First Amendment and strike down a law accordingly.
That brings us to Ohio’s constitutionally impaired legislature, which enacted two laws that were touted as ways to protect children on the Internet but in reality would become a new censorship regime.
An Ohio federal judge on Monday struck down the state’s combined “harmful to minors” law on the grounds that it ran afoul of the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech.
2709.31(A) of the law generally says “no person” shall “disseminate” or offer to disseminate to a “juvenile” any material that is “harmful to juveniles.” Ohio’s House Bill 490 amended it by defining electronic dissemination as having “reason to believe that the person receiving the information is a juvenile.”
You can see where this is going. Let’s say that one-sixth of the Internet’s users are minors. That means that for almost any Web site, assuming the audience is representative, the operator has reason to believe that something like one-sixth of them are under 18 years old. (There’s another section that tries to limit that requirement’s sweep, but in practice it wouldn’t amount to much.)
Fortunately, U.S. District Judge [*****] realized this. Rice said the definition of “harmful to juveniles” does not by itself violate the First Amendment and that it does not violate the Commerce Clause.
But he ruled that, in practice, applying that definition to the Internet is overly broad. In particular, he said, sexually explicit conversations in adults-only chat rooms (where a minor sneaks in) could be prosecuted. It would “act as a ban to that segment of speech between adults which is protected by the First Amendment.”
This is consistent with other judges’ rulings on “harmful to minors” or “harmful to juveniles” Internet statutes. The 2nd Circuit overturned Vermont’s; the 10th Circuit overturned New Mexico’s. In this case, Judge [*****] granted a permanent injunction. He had, by the way, already granted an injunction in the case based on the earlier version of the law, but the proceedings essentially restarted after the law was changed around four years ago.
The plaintiffs include the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, and the Association of American Publishers, and it was brought by their trade association called the Media Coalition.
If the appeals court upholds this ruling, the Media Coalition may be able to get attorneys’ fees–which amounted to a requested $488,601 in a similar Internet censorship suit in Virginia. And that’s not even counting proceedings before an appeals court, which has already happened (briefly) in the Ohio case but didn’t in Virginia.
The problem is that when Ohio politicians enact unconstitutional laws, and subsequently lose in court, taxpayers end up footing the bill. It would be a far more just system if politicians were held personally responsible for paying their fair share of a half-million dollar fine for their constitutional ignorance. I’m sure Ohio politicos would have no objection–right?
The writer and the Federal judge are correct. “Harmful to minors” could be defined as anything, and being cognizant of who gets to do the defining these days (I won’t mention the ADL by name), anything conservative gets plonked.
The writer asks why the Ohio state legislature could be so goofy to enact laws that are “constitutionally ignorant.” The downside to legislative term limits and de-lawyerification is that state legislatures these days are full of young, inexperienced non-lawyers who run right into figurative landmines like these. (The same could be said for the city council in Delcambre, Louisiana.) Any lawyer that’s a politician will have better sense than to vote for a bill that s/he knows that even the dumbest judge will strike down for being vague, broad, and therefore a violation of substantive due process. If the Ohio state legislature had enough lawyers, this bill would never have had a chance.
Based on the Curious Assumption That There Aren’t Enough People in America September 30, 2007
Posted by Webmaster in Campaign 2008, Welfare, Social Insurance and Transfer Payments.comments closed
HRC promises a $5,000 “baby bond” for every American newborn, and it would (presumably) accumulate value, and be ready when he or she reaches 18 years of age, for the purpose of college financing or a down payment on a house.
She thinks this is a good idea because:
Clinton said such an account program would help Americans get back to the tradition of savings that she remembers as a child, and has become harder to accomplish in the face of rising college and housing costs.
The irony of that is that government (or quasi-government) action (or inaction, in certain cases) is the reason why college tuition is ballooning, and why housing prices are far higher than they used to be. Decreases in student loan interest rates, and increases in college grants, give college administrators virtual permission to raise tuition. In a sense, when Democrat politicians do those things, it is essentially a payoff to their friends in higher education.
And housing is higher simply because of pure algebra — when the Fed lowers interest rates, mortgage rates go down, which means that a given fixed monthly payment can finance a bigger principal. Therefore, people get pre-approved for larger and larger principle amounts, and bid against each other for the same housing. When you add on top of that that our government’s anti-white racial policies (including immigration) mean that truly livable neighborhoods with a high quality of life and peace of mind are becoming harder and harder to find, this only means that their housing values have ballooned even more.
What HRC is doing here is parrotting “birth bonus” programs in Europe. There, they actually have the problem of their white populations declining in terms of raw numbers. Here, the white population is slightly increasing, though almost all of the population increase for the country at large comes from non-white immmigration and domestic procreation among native non-whites. Because anything that HRC proposes wouldn’t be denied to legal and illegal aliens, and certainly wouldn’t be denied to non-white citizens, her proposal would have the opposite effect as that which is hoped for by these measures in Europe.
