Category: Justice

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Entrapment Again

“His planning unfolded under the scrutiny and even assistance of undercover agents, officials said. ” NY Times, November 27, 2010, in reference to Mohamed Osman Mohamud, who was recently arrested in Portland, Oregon, for “attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction”.

This horrible person was planning to blow up a bomb at the lighting of a community Christmas Tree expected to attract up to 10,000 people.

Well… was he. Did Osman Mohamud, out of the blue, suddenly decide that he wanted to kill a lot of Americans? Or was he a rather fanatical Moslem whom the FBI recruited for a terrorist act which the FBI undercover informant was “planning”.

The FBI got wind of him months ago when he apparently tried to contact radicals in Pakistan. They got wind of him. Then undercover FBI agents contacted him and offered to help him commit some kind of terrorist act. They demurely “suggested” — on the secret recordings, of course– that he do something less destructive and more symbolic, but he insisted, no, no, he wanted to see innocent people die. That should satisfy those human rights activists who keep complaining about entrapment!

So the FBI undercover agent offered to help him build a bomb. Wait a minute…. Mohamud obtained some of the materials and turned them over to the FBI undercover agent and the undercover agent returned a device to him which he told him was a bomb. The FBI supplied the bomb. Mohamud then drove to the public square at the Christmas Tree Lighting and dialed the number that was supposed to blow it all up. That’s when the FBI arrested him.

So the FBI encouraged Mohamud to commit a crime but when Mohaumd proved too inept to actually commit the crime on his own, the FBI kindly stepped in and provided him with the bomb.

So if an FBI undercover agent went up to a man in a bar– let’s go crazy and suggest a white man– and said “I could get you some top grade heroin” and the man said, wonderful, let’s go, and he was arrested and brought to trial, what would happen? Most judges would refuse to convict. The question is, would the defendant have committed a crime without the intervention of the undercover police officer?  If not, it’s called “entrapment”. It’s why policewomen posing as prostitutes can’t actually bring up the idea of sex for money; the man has to bring it up or the charges won’t stick– it will look like committing a crime was the police woman’s idea. That’s why policemen can’t pose as drug dealers, going around offering drugs to people. It has to be the idea of the person committing crime.

(I feel ridiculous explaining this. I would be very happy to learn it’s not necessary– most people understand why allowing entrapment by the police is a bad idea. )

The police should not be going around trying to create crime by presenting opportunities to people to commit crimes. Among other things, this is offensive to the idea of equality under the law, for the police have no intention of going up to just anybody to see if he or she might be willing to consider committing a crime if offered the opportunity.

No, no, they only approach certain, selected, unlucky individuals. Right now, they certainly don’t seem interested in approaching, say, NRA members, or members of white supremacist militia groups, or vigilante groups, or Scientologists, any of which might have a number of members who could easily be persuaded to commit a serious crime with the right encouragement, and technical assistance. Say, burn down a house, or shoot a few illegal immigrants, or burn down a mosque.

If the police had not intervened, it is by no means certain that Mohamud would have committed any crimes on his own initiative. He might have. He might have remained a blustery, stupid young man who nevertheless never had the guts to actually go out and do something with his big talk. Like a lot of people.  He might have realized he didn’t have the technical skill to build a bomb and given up the idea.

He should perhaps have been charged with being an accessory to attempted murder. The FBI agent, of course, is the conspirator.

Ah yes… and I hear the right-wingers squawking hysterically, “Oh! So you want to wait until a crime has been committed before you lock someone up!”

Well, maybe not.  I think I could go along with the idea.  As long as the FBI approached other militant groups– including America militia groups– as well as potential Moslem extremists.  The fact is, we know that there are many, many more American Nationalist militants than there are Moslem extremists in America.

“So you think the police should have let him build a real bomb and set it off at the Christmas tree lighting?” No, but they should never have assisted him with building a bomb. They already had him under surveillance.  They could have charged him with a minor offence like “uttering threats”.  They should have let him fend for himself and then arrest him if he succeeded in building a bomb, once he had a real bomb in his possession, before he had a chance to use it. If I were a judge, I would ask myself again and again: would a crime have been committed if not for the intervention of the police?

Why should that be frightening? That’s how we do it with every other crime, even murder. Did you forget that there was a price to be paid for freedom and democracy? And one of them is that most of the time people commit crimes before being arrested.

And anyway, didn’t you want the government off your back?

The tabloids, in Britain, have been offering bribes to officials with FIFA to see if they would take them. Some of them did. My first question is, did they bring up the idea of a bribe or did the undercover reporter?

It absolutely matters. If the reporters were the ones who brought up the idea of bribes, they should first investigate every other FIFA Official to see how many others would accept the offer. It would not be fair to single out only the ones who happened be available to the undercover reporters.

I know– a lot of people are going to go, “well, even if it wasn’t his idea, he still agreed to it and should be locked up for at least 50 years”.

Yeah right. And why is it inevitable that some of the recordings of Mohamud’s conversations with the undercover FBI agent have been “lost”? It is inevitable. It is inevitable. It is inevitable. The police ask you to believe that they just happened to go missing. What a coincidence!

And you don’t want to look like a fool for being soft on crime, do you?

I personally would be quite satisfied if we had a justice system that would immediately drop any charges against an individual if it becomes clear that no crime would have been committed without the active participation or encouragement of the police or police agents or informants. Simple. The police already understand that principle when it comes to prostitution and illegal drugs.

Actually, I would not be satisfied with this because it is an innovation. I would be satisfied with this because it’s what 200 years of jurisprudence has settled on in order to prevent the police and justice system from abusing their powers.

Yes, there will be some crimes committed that would have been prevented under the newer interpretation of the law. But, that’s pretty well how our justice system is supposed to work. Until recently, we in the democratic west, didn’t try to lock people up for thinking about committing a crime.

The reason is that we don’t know who else might commit a crime if offered the same “encouragement” as people like Mohamed Osman Mohamud were offered.

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Excited Delirium and Other Scurrilous Syndromes of the Police State

Have you heard about the new medical condition that causes people in police custody to suddenly die? It’s called “excited delirium” and it is exacerbated by “multiple drug toxicity”. It also, don’t you know, actually gives people “super human” strength. I’ll bet you thought that only happened in comic books!

Now, if you had a number of men who were drunk or high, and loud and abrasive, or experienced a sudden influx of superhuman strength, there are many unfortunate things that could happen to them but one of the least likely– and veritably unknown before the use of the taser– is sudden death.

But if you had an equal number of men who were tasered repeatedly by the police, then thrown to the ground, hand-cuffed, and tasered again, we know you will likely have a few deaths. In those cases, we hereby declare that the deaths are caused by contagious “excited delirium” exacerbated by “multiple drug toxicity”. The superhuman strength is of no avail in these situations.

I’ll bet that right now, if you are a cop with a taser, you are making a point of memorizing the phrase: “excited delirium” and “multiple drug toxicity”.

Some day, those words might save your career.

And I’ll bet you didn’t know that “excited delirium” is not a real condition. It was invented by the taser industry to explain those inconvenient deaths of people being tasered.

*

Lest you think I am anti-cop… I’m not. I’m only against bad policing and police cover-ups.

I just saw a documentary on Frontline about a group of cops in New Orleans called to a bridge in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina because a man was seen with a gun. Now, first of all, this IS America: what’s the problem? Oh wait– he was a black man. Okay, so the cops pull up in a rented cube van, two in the front and about eight in the back where they couldn’t see what was happening. As they are pulling up– I’m not making this up– one of the cops in the front fires a warning shot. Seriously. A warning shot. The rest of the cops in the back think there is something happening so they quickly jump out of the truck and take positions and carefully assess the situation to try to determine where the shots are coming from, how many gunman are involved, if there are any civilians in the line of fire, and how best to ensure public safety in the face of the threat.

Hoo ha! Had you! Just kidding, of course.

Actually, they jumped out of the van, guns a’blazin’, and shot wildly in all directions. Eight people were hit, two of them fatally. Fortunately, no dangerous guns were found. At least, not on the civilians.

Well. Cops are under a lot of stress, you know, what with all the bizarre super humans with excited delirium going around. My theory is that these guys on the bridge were displaying symptoms of “prescient excited delirium with multiple inactivity inversion”.

[Update: 2011-08-05. Apparently, the five officers involved have been convicted of… well, did you think they would be convicted of murder? No. They were convicted of various civil rights offenses, and covering up the shooting. They still complain bitterly that even though Ronald Madison was running away from them at the moment he was shot, he still probably would have had a gun if he could have and would have turned around fired it at police if he had been what the New Orleans police thought he was…. wait–]

Some of these links will be dead by now.  Too bad.

 

What is “excited delirium”?

I googled it.  Here’s what I found

 (in wikipedia):  Excited delirium is a condition that manifests as a combination of delirium, psychomotor agitation, anxiety, hallucinations, speech disturbances, disorientation, violent and bizarre behavior, insensitivity to pain, elevated body temperature, and superhuman strength.[1][2] Excited delirium is sometimes called excited delirium syndrome if it results in sudden death (usually via cardiac or respiratory arrest), a relatively frequent outcome particularly associated with the use of physical control measures, including police restraint and tasers.[1][2]

Shockingly, African American men seem disproportionately disposed to affliction by this medical condition.

You should read that last line carefully: death is a frequent outcome   “particularly associated with the use of physical control measures…”

How wonderful to be a short-tempered cop and have a syndrome that can be applied to anyone with the indecency to die on you during a tasering.  How wonderful for a corporation to be able to invent and sell a syndrome to explain why people die when using your product.  (Yes, a victim is “using” the product manufactured by Taser International.)

And here’s the bottom line: neither the American Medical Association nor the American Psychological Association recognize “excited delirium” as a real medical or psychological condition.  The standard authority on mental illness, the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) does not list it.   Let the lobbying begin…  What will it take?  A big fat donation to the right “charity”?  Future employment with lavish benefits to a current panel member?  Whatever… it’s not that hard to do.

A real doctor talking about excited delirium.

If you want to believe the police on this one, that is certainly your privilege. IF you want to believe the police would not lie about the actions of the victim, or the necessity for force, or the prudent application of the taser…. I have two words for you:

Robert Dziekanski

In my humble opinion, “excited delirium” is the product of a rather distasteful collaboration between police officers and medical examiners to cover up instances of excessive force used by the police causing death.

More of Bill’s hysterical over-reactions to the use of tasers:

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McPrisons

Congratulations America– you just passed a remarkable milestone this year. Well, actually two years ago. First time, more than one in every 100 adults in the United States is… what? Smart? Rich? Single? A heroin addict? Alcoholic? Educated? A member of the Tea Party? Mexican? Dutch? Drives a BMW? Bikes to work? Has a PHD? Works for the government? What?

In prison.

That’s not one of every 100 males. It’s 1 of every 100 adults.

I would suggest to you that any nation that would incarcerate 1% of it’s population, barring the most ridiculously extreme set of circumstances, which I can’t even imagine, is collectively psychotic. This is an unsustainable circumstance, a cesspool of repression and denial, a cancer of social and political malignancy.

One in every 100 adults is in prison.

This is a society that has completely failed to deal with crime and justice in a responsible way. It is the path of a third world dictatorship, a tin pot fiefdom, a colonial outpost, a medieval manor with witches and heretics and plague.

Put it together with the empty factories and warehouses and plants in Detroit and Buffalo and the mid-western states… this is a country that needs to go back to the drawing board and redefine what it understands as the social contract between citizens and government, between workers and employers, between police and suspects.

So, America, what is the meaning of this? Bad luck? Godless atheism? Religious fanaticism? You are among the most repressive, authoritarian states in history on this issue: you love locking people up.

One in every 31 adults in the U.S. is either in prison or on probation or parole.

Yes, the rate of incarceration in the U.S. probably far exceeds that of any other country on the planet, with the exception of North Korea– and nobody knows for sure about that.

What’s different about Minnesota? It has the lowest incarceration rate in the U.S. at 171 per 100,000. Louisiana has the highest at about 700 per 100,000. I know– the figures don’t jive (“over 100” means 1,000 or more per 100,000, which obviously is not possible if the highest state only has 700). Not sure why. The “over 1 per 100” number is supplied by the Pew Center on the States.

Iniquitous Denmark has 59 people in prison for every 100,000, which is lowest in the world. That’s less than 1/10th the rate in the U.S.

China: 117.

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Portugal Ends its War on Drugs

Apparently, we crazies are right.

Portugal legalized all drug use in 2001, reasoning that:

  • it was more expensive to incarcerate drug users than to treat them
  • interdiction was a waste of money and resources that could be better allocated elsewhere
  • it’s very expensive to build prisons and hire police officers to enforce the law

So they abolished most criminal penalties for possession of drugs.

A nightmare was forecast.

It didn’t materialize. In fact, there were a number of positive developments. No miracles, really, but some positive developments, including a huge increase in the number of drug addicts willing to enter programs to address their dependencies.

From Time Magazine:

The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.

Wow. Pretty impressive.

It has long been my opinion that drug abuse in Canada and the U.S. should be treated as a public health issue, not as a criminal issue. With the vicious gang wars in Mexico making the news the last few years, the massive increases in costs of prisons and law enforcement, and the stunning persistence of large scale drug abuse, one wonders what it would take to prove to people that our current drug policies are ineffective.

We have no excuse– a vast majority of citizens already believe that prohibition (of alcohol) was a monumental failure, and help incubate the development of powerful criminal organizations. The only reason large numbers of citizens continue to believe that marijuana and cocaine are different from alcohol is because alcohol was the drug of choice for “respectable” middle-class citizens. They didn’t mind feeling righteous about telling “others” that using intoxicants for pleasure was wrong– as long as it wasn’t their intoxicants.

The same hypocrisy is applied today to psychotropic drugs which provide similar but milder effects, can also be addictive, are often revealed to be ineffective at treating various alleged neuroses, but earn millions for drug company shareholders because they can be patented.

Without a doubt, legalization would result in many people continuing to abuse drugs. How is that a different result from spending billions on interdiction?

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Secured Confessions

“Still, our team pressed ahead and, together with agents from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, we tracked down many of the Qaeda members responsible for the attack, secured confessions from them and prosecuted them. We were aided by courageous Yemenis from the country’s security, law enforcement and judicial services who shared a commitment to justice and an understanding that ignoring Al Qaeda would only embolden it. We left Yemen with most of the terrorists locked up. ” Ali H. Soufan in the New York Times, October 11, 2010

Isn’t that amazing? They “tracked down” the terrorists who then “confessed” to the crimes, were prosecuted and imprisoned. Case closed, Perry Mason. On to the next injustice!

Listen to the glibness of “secured confessions from them”. What do you think that means? I guess Al Qaeda is not as hard-nosed as some people make them out to be! They were arrested. They were put in cells. The interrogator from the CIA or FBI said, “all right now — tell us the truth!” And the Al Qaeda member wept. Do I have to? All right…

I’m guessing that most people don’t pause at that “secured confessions” and wonder just what that means. I’m guessing that most people would just assume that the evidence that these men were responsible for the attack on the Cole is overwhelming and definitive.

I’m guessing that most people don’t wonder why confessions were necessary if this gentleman, identified as an FBI agent, had clear and convincing evidence.

I’m guessing that most people don’t wonder how the confessions were obtained– these men were held in Yemen, a Muslim state governed by Sharia law, whose elections are rated as “partly free” by international bodies.

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Teresa Lewis

Teresa Lewis apparently has an IQ of about 70, which, according to some definitions, is borderline developmentally delayed. She met a couple of men in a line at Wal-Mart and, in exchange for sex and money, persuaded them to come to her trailer and kill her husband with two shotguns she purchased for the purpose. She also persuaded her daughter to have sex with one of the men.

The NYTimes Account

Within hours of the deed, she had confessed all to the police and was subsequently sentenced to die.

Some people who support the death penalty object to the execution of a woman. Why? If you like to have people killed– don’t fool yourself: that’s what it is– then why should you object to a woman being executed just because she is a woman?

The fact that the authorities want to execute a woman of borderline intelligence is obscene and repulsive.

The fact that the two men who actually pulled the triggers got off with life sentences is unjust.

Her defense lawyers argue, as a mitigating factor, that Lewis is afflicted with “dependent personality disorder”. Hallelujah, thank the Lord, we have a label!

Do the readers of the story in the New York Times and elsewhere automatically believe that this is a real mental illness and that she could be treated and possibly cured of it given time and effort? Why? Just because some two-bit lawyer with the connivance of some amateur psychologist decided that there must be such a thing as “dependent personality disorder”? And that this is not the same thing that we more commonly know as “needy”? Oh no– needy won’t cut it.

“Ladies and gentleman of the jury, we ask you to find her not guilty because, even though it is proven that she hired someone to kill her husband and son, she was, after all, very needy at the time.” No no. It’s, “my client was confused. She had lost control of her life. She could no longer make rational decisions, because she suffered from Dependent Personality Disorder.”

Teresa Lewis should be spared execution because capital punishment is an act of savagery and revenge, not because she is woman.

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Brian David Mitchell: the Defenseless Insanity Plea

Added November 9: once again we have prosecutors in the U.S. seeking psychiatric treatment for a suspect so that he can be held responsible for crimes committed while he required psychiatric treatment….

It would seem to me that a judge receiving this motion should immediately rule that the prosecution has implicitly acknowledged that the defendant is not responsible for his actions, therefore not guilty.

Brian David Mitchell is clearly delusional. He should be locked up… in a psychiatrist facility, to protect both himself and the public.

The fact that he may be insane doesn’t really matter in America nowadays. This “kind-hearted”, “compassionate”, “Christian” nation is so dead set on savage retribution that it will let nothing stand in it’s way anymore.

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Russell Defreitas and Obama’s Depressing Flag Lapel Pin

It is absolutely necessary that you believe there are dire threats against the United States out there and that only the institutional powers of the United States law enforcement agencies, along with Dick Cheney, can keep you safe:

But as time went on, more was revealed about the plot and the unlikelihood of its success (the fuel pipeline, for example, had safety mechanisms that would have prevented cascading explosions), as well as the level of government involvement (the informant had played a somewhat enabling role in pushing forward the plot). Ny Times, August 1, 2010

Yes, yes. And it turns out that one defendant appears to be somewhat inept:

Mr. “Russell Defreitas can’t mastermind his way out of the on-off switch on a video camera,”

That’s his own lawyer speaking.

And once again we have the specter of government infiltrators actually running the conspiracy– isn’t this “entrapment”? Yes, it is. Absolutely it is.

Feel safer? Mr. Defreitas is going to spend a long, long time in prison, mainly because he is a fool. There is not a politician in the United States who would countenance anything but the most draconian sentence imaginable. Do you hear me, Americans? You live in a nation where not a single politician of note has the guts or courage to state the obvious. Not a single one of your leaders, Democrat or Republican is willing to consider for even one second the possibility of saying what he really thinks about all this.

You’re laughing? I hear you laughing. Who cares about a man like Defreitas who sounds foreign anyway. But these same leaders are the ones who manage your economy and the environment and wars and intelligence and safety. And there may come a day when we all pay the price for the same lack of courage and conviction.

Obama’s depressing flag pin:

Yes, he had to do it. If he didn’t put the flag pin in his lapel, someone on Fox News would have zoomed in on the lapel and stared into the camera, oozing insider confidence, and whispered to his audience: “is it asking too much for our president to be even a little patriotic?” And Obama would have had to say on TV “I am patriotic” leading the viewer to wonder why he thought anyone thought he wasn’t patriotic. And so it goes. And so you Americans, so proud of your fantastic culture, your Coors beer, your jack-ass videos, your right to train your children to use rifles… we in Canada salute you.

 

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I just happened to be wandering around Kursk one day with 1 million men and a few tanks and…

At the end of World War II, German Field Marshal Erich Von Manstein surrendered to the British and was incarcerated at a camp in Bridgend (somewhere in England) for about 8 years. His health, apparently, was a concern, so he was released early from an 18-year sentence (after a mere 4 years). Then he lived for another 20 years, during which he apparently enjoyed the confidence of the new, democratic West German government.

Von Manstein had lots of friends, including Churchill and General Montgomery. They testified to his good character. Von Manstein, you see, was one of those “honorable” Prussian generals who only wanted to serve his country with courage, dignity, and good grooming.

How he suddenly found himself in Stalingrad with a million Germans with guns and tanks remains a mystery to this day.

Von Manstein wrote in his biography that if Hitler had only left the generals alone to manage the war in the East, Germany would have won the war. What a shame. Isn’t that what comes to mind when you read a statement like that? What a shame.  If only…

Aside from the fact that it probably wasn’t true– Russia was not France– you would think Von Manstein would have been glad– given his avowed personal reservations about Nazism— that someone prevented Hitler from taking over the world. Especially since it couldn’t be him, what with duty and honor and all that.

Like Rommel, Von Manstein claimed he never carried out many of Hitler’s criminal directives and that appears to be partly true. Other than the one to kill 5 million Russians and bomb Stalingrad to the ground, of course.

So conservatives love to point to a guy like Von Manstein because, from a certain, twisted perspective, he seems to represent the idea that war-making can be ethical, uplifting, spiffy, and delightful. What fun it would have been if that parvenu Hitler hadn’t spoiled the party!

Unfortunately, one has to accept the fact that, like Rommel, and Beck, Von Manstein didn’t really seem to have that big of a problem with Hitler as long as he was winning. The ethical issues only seemed to come up when the possibility of war crimes trials appeared on the horizon.

That’s the problem with the entire “conservative resistance” to Hitler– they almost all supported him regardless of his policies as long as he was winning. The problem with the Jews? Well, you had to obey orders or you would be shot. Except that the Italians weren’t very good at obeying those orders and they didn’t get shot.  They were elbowed aside by people like Von Manstein so the real Fascists could get he job done: round up those Jews.

When Hitler started to lose, like Kurt Waldheim, the good generals  suddenly seemed to realize that the concentration camps were a bad idea. “I knew it! I knew we would get in trouble for that…”

Would Nazi Germany have defeated Russia if Hitler had left it up to the Generals? Maybe. Suppose the Generals had decided that a two-front war was not viable– suppose they would have concentrated all of their fire power on Russia. And suppose they would have prepared better and started in April instead of June…. Suppose they had seized the oil fields in the Caucasus before attacking Stalingrad?

But even the generals did not anticipate the T-34 tank, in the huge numbers the Soviets were able to muster, or the millions of soldiers they could eventually hurl into the war.

More importantly, they had anticipated that Russia would surrender after massive defeats on the battlefield.  Russia was not going to surrender under any circumstance.  There was no “there” there, for the “victorious” generals to arrive at.  Just desolation, destruction, and eternal resistance.

Von Manstein vs Rudolph Hess

Hess: left Germany in May 1941, years before most of the worst Nazi atrocities were committed.

Von Manstein: fought to the end of the Reich.

Hess: betrayed Hitler who ordered that his plane be shot down.

Von Manstein: loyal to the fuehrer to the end.

Hess: wanted to negotiate a peace deal with Britain, possibly with the aim of turning the Reich’s full force upon the Soviet Union.

Von Manstein: I was just following orders, except when I didn’t. Critical of the officers who attempted to assassinate Hitler.

Hess: life in prison.

Von Manstein: released after serving 4 years of an 18-year sentence.

… because of his health. He died in 1973.

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Property

Is the right to own property the “most basic right” of any democracy, as some Tea Party leaders insist? Could something like that be any more true than, say, that the right to be paid a just wage is “the most basic right” of any democracy?

Maybe. Maybe not. But the first question that comes to mind is, what is property?

Original sin? Marxism as an economic philosophy may be dead, but a lot of Marx’s observations about the nature of work and property still seem acute. In a nutshell, the real value of “property” comes primarily from the labour invested in it. So the thing of real value is not a thing, but the work of our hands.

So if someone has a lot of property and they want to protect their right to that property, the first question is, what right does the person have to that property in the first place.

Most likely — this sounds glib, but it’s probably true– it was stolen in the first place. From neighbors. From neighboring tribes. From the people living above the oil deposit. From the native peoples who hadn’t developed a culture of putting “no trespassing” signs and fences around their property. Property comes from the exploitation of natural resources, forests, fish, water– how does anyone obtain the sacred right to take exclusive possession of a tree?

Since property has no value in and of itself, when someone says they want to guard the right to private property, they are really talking about monopoly. It’s nobody’s “private” property– it’s always public. What I want to be sacred is my fence around it.

This is not to say I am against the general arrangement of things we have worked out in modern capitalism. Our system works pretty well as a way of distributing real wealth (the product of labour). It’s the perversion of this system — the tax breaks, monopolies, lax regulation– that make the system unfair.

All corporations claim to love competition but no corporation really wants it, and only the government has the power to ensure that there is competition, and the idiots who think the government should stay out of the marketplace actually seem to believe we would be treated better by McDonald’s, BP, Exxon, Monsanto, Archer-Daniels-Midland, and General Foods than we would be by Nancy Pelosi.

“What I don’t like from the president’s administration is this sort of, ‘I’ll put my boot heel on the throat of BP,’ ” Paul said. “I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business.”

Rand Paul, criticizing the Obama Administration for being “too tough” on BP, Washington Post.

Republicans at Work: “A ‘teacher’ told my child in class that dolphins were mammals and not fish!” a third complains. “And the same thing about whales! We need TRADITIONAL VALUES in all areas of education. If it swims in the water, it is a FISH. Period! End of Story.

National Republican Party Website voter feedback, quoted by the Washington Post.