End the War on Freedom

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -- H. L. Mencken

From GOP News & Views:

Reading Europe's press, it is really reassuring to see how warmly Europeans have embraced President Bush's formulation that an 'axis of evil' threatens world peace. There's only one small problem. Bush thinks the axis of evil is Iran, Iraq and North Korea, and the Europeans think it's Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Condi Rice. -- Thomas Friedman

Kevin Tuma - Mutant - cartoon commentary on the republocrat party. Hehe.

russmo.com - Notorious Criminals - cartoon commentary on airplane "security". Too true to laugh.

I've changed the left column logo to a link to L. Neil Smith's Bill of Rights Enforcement page. The TRT link moved down below the Hope link. Bill of Rights Enforcement! Now!

Jacob G. Hornberger at The Future of Freedom Foundation - FDR's New Deal Legacy Is the Life of the Lie - FDR's 12 years changed the U.S. forever, for the worse, big time. [Mrs. K]

It is impossible to overstate the unusual nature of American society for more than 100 years after the inception of the federal government in 1787. There were no Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, drug laws, occupational-licensure laws, income taxation, gun control, public schooling, immigration controls, travel restrictions, and foreign aid.

Our ancestors believed that (1) it is morally wrong to use government to take money from a person to whom it belongs in order to give it to someone to whom it does not belong; (2) a person has the right to accumulate unlimited amounts of wealth and decide what to do with it; and (3) people have the right to engage in any peaceful enterprise and to travel and trade anywhere in the world.

That is what it once meant to be an American, notwithstanding the tragic and ultimately costly exception of slavery. That is what it once meant to be free.

Mike von Fremd at ABC News - Under Scrutiny: Dallas Police Face Investigation After Incorrect Arrests - a bunch of Hispanic residents were framed with planted cocaine. The frame was discovered because lab tests showed that the "cocaine" was gypsum, powdered sheet rock. The f.b.i. is investigating. Anybody want to guess how much time the two guilty cops will serve for this? My guess is "zero". They should serve the 99 years that they tried to pull on their innocent victims, at the very least. [brianf]

Ron Paul's Texas Straight Talk - Don't Believe the Hype - "Campaign Finance Reform" Serves Entrenched Interests - comments on the passage by the house of the Shays-Mehan Incumbent Protection Act.

The long-awaited "campaign finance reform" vote finally took place last week, with the House ultimately passing the measure. The debate was full of hypocritical high-minded talk about cleaning up corruption, all by the very politicians of both parties who dole out billions in corporate subsidies and welfare pork. It was quite a spectacle watching the big-spending, perennially-incumbent politicians argue that new laws were needed to protect them from themselves!

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Outrageously, the new reform bill virtually outlaws criticism of incumbent politicians for 60 days before an election. Do you think citizens need to know about one prominent New York Senator's plan to confiscate firearms? Any gun rights group that speaks out between Labor Day and the November election- precisely the time when most Americans are becoming informed about the candidates and the issues- will be violating the law. Do you think voters need to know if a senior member of the important House International Relations committee puts his allegiance to the United Nations before that of his own country? An opponent making this point in a commercial during the 60-day period could end up in jail. Do we honestly think this kind of muzzle should be put on the American people?

Terry Jones at Guardian Unlimited - OK, George, make with the friendly bombs - Let's see. To prevent terror, GW is going to commit terrorist bombing. Makes sense. Yeah. Right. [cowlix]

To prevent terrorism by dropping bombs on Iraq is such an obvious idea that I can't think why no one has thought of it before. It's so simple. If only the UK had done something similar in Northern Ireland, we wouldn't be in the mess we are in today.

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It is well known that the best way of picking out terrorists is to fly 30,000ft above the capital city of any state that harbours them and drop bombs - preferably cluster bombs. It is conceivable that the bombing of Dublin might have provoked some sort of protest, even if just from James Joyce fans, and there is at least some likelihood of increased anti-British sentiment in what remained of the city and thus a rise in the numbers of potential terrorists. But this, in itself, would have justified the tactic of bombing them in the first place. We would have nipped them in the bud, so to speak. I hope you follow the argument.

Having bombed Dublin and, perhaps, a few IRA training bogs in Tipperary, we could not have afforded to be complacent. We would have had to turn our attention to those states which had supported and funded the IRA terrorists through all these years. The main provider of funds was, of course, the USA, and this would have posed us with a bit of a problem. Where to bomb in America? It's a big place and it's by no means certain that a small country like the UK could afford enough bombs to do the whole job. It's going to cost the US billions to bomb Iraq and a lot of that is empty countryside. America, on the other hand, provides a bewildering number of targets.

Mike Godwin at Cryptome - The DMCA and What's Worse - Mr. Godwin's remarks at a November 2001 Cato Institute panel on copyright issues. His talk makes it clear to me that the DMCA is exactly like the "assault" weapons ban or any gun "control" measure. It's a ban on instruments that could be used in a criminal manner, completely divorcing criminal activity or intent from possessing tools that could possibily be used in a criminal manner. Mr. Godwin goes on to talk about the Hollings abortion, er... SSSCA bill. You know, the one that would create pre- and post-ban computers. [grabbe]

The thing that I want to point out here is that the movement of the industry in that environment was away from copy protection, partly because consumers complained and partly because consumers actively had created this aftermarket for tools that defeated (that is to say, circumvented) copy protection. And there was a kind of arms race between the major software vendors and the copy-protection-defeating utility vendors as copy-protection schemes became more complex. There was a very high degree of evolution of copy protection before finally it collapsed of its own weight. And the general trend, at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, was for software to be relatively unencumbered by copy protection, if not outright unprotected.

Now, as we know, Microsoft since the 1980s has utterly collapsed in the absence of strong copy protection. They have spiraled down the economic drain, and we pity them. You know, I pass Mr. Gates on the street with his cup every now and then and I put a dime in, or a quarter sometimes.

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In 2000, [Stephen] King conducted a couple of experiments in online fiction publishing. The first one was a novella, called "Riding the Bullet," which was issued in Windows-based copy-protected formats. That event started my legal mind working: I imagined that Stephen King, who has expressed some contempt for Windows machines in the past, couldn't actually read his own story on his Macintosh laptop. Now, of course, he probably knows what he wrote. Still, he might want to check the formatting or check the copy editing or something.

But it occurred to me that if I showed up at Stephen King's house in Maine, and got past the guard dogs, and knocked on his door and offered him a tool that allowed him to strip the protection away from this Windows proprietary format and get the text out and read it directly on his Mac laptop, I would have committed an offense under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Because you are prohibited from distributing tools that circumvent access control or copy protection.

Now, you might think, well, isn't there a defense under the Act if there is no underlying copyright infringement? Well, as has been explained in other panelists' remarks, no, that is not a defense. In other words, even though I could reasonably argue that, if anyone has the right to circumvent copy protection and look at Stephen King's copyrighted work, Stephen King does -- it doesn't matter. It is not a defense.

That is an absurd result. And the reason for this absurd result is that the DMCA uncouples the enforcement of anticircumvention provisions from the balances that are built into the substantive copyright law. And Julie Cohen of the Georgetown Law Center has addressed those, I think rather eloquently, in her remarks when she talked about leaky rights -- even when the term of copyright for a work is in force, we expect a certain amount of noninfringing copying, and a certain amount of de minimis copying. Another way of looking at this issue is to say that we normally invoke penalties in the copyright context for serious, damaging infringers, and not against noninfringers, and not against de minimis infringers. That has been the history of our copyright law until relatively recently.

Cameron W. Barr at The Christian Science Monitor - 'Aggressive pacifists' put their faith on the firing line - Christian Peacemaker Teams talk to Israeli soldiers in occupied Palestine attempting to convince them of the error of their ways. Unarmed. [lew]

Ray Thomas at Sierra Times - From the Barrel of a Gun - Bill of Rights Enforcement via commentary on the arrest of Rick Stanley in Denver. [kaba]

Office holders, elected or appointed, who violate their oaths of office, which includes a pledge of support for the Constitution, should be punished, even to the extent of being removed from office. If this were done, they would not be so quick to pass unconstitutional laws. Maybe they'd even start reading them before voting on them.

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