Hunter's Trial Moved to Tomorrow
"I just got a call from my lawyer, and they are moving my appearance to Wednesday [May 26, 2004] at 3 PM at the Municipal court."
The Municipal Court only handles misdemeanors, so apparently the felony charge is dropped or bargained down.
On the other hand, abruptly shifting the date forward at the last minute looks like a blatant attempt to short circuit the travel plans of those supporters of Mr. Jordan who had arranged time off work for the Thursday trial. I'd say that Mr. DeSanto is extremely worried about publicity.
Maybe he's afraid someone will ask publicly why the authorities have kept Mr. Jordan's property which had nothing to do with the charge: a limited edition collector's item, and nice laptop computer...
# Bill St. Clair at The Mansfield News Journal - We have right to bear arms - they printed my letter about Hunter's trial, removing one word from the L. Neil Smith quote, and forgetting to add the comma I told the lady about on the phone.
# The New Zealand World Herald - Alaskans challenge US airline screening system - they're not trying to shut down CAPPS II, more's the shame, but they want to eliminate the secrecy. Bravo! [sierra]
# Robert Higgs at The Independent Institute - Has the U.S. Government Committed War Crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq? - of course they have, but the winners get to make the rules in an Amerika where those in power no longer have to care about the law. [sierra]
At a series of trials at Nuremberg from 1945 to 1949, more than a hundred defendants were tried. At the most important trial, which placed before the bar of justice the top surviving leaders of Hitler's government, twenty-two men were indicted on one or more of the counts listed above; nineteen were convicted on one or more counts; and three were found not guilty. Of those found guilty, twelve were sentenced to death by hanging; three were sentenced to life in prison; and four were sentenced to prison for terms that varied from ten to twenty years. No appeals were permitted.
If today the U.S. government were to put itself on trial, on the same basis it employed to try the Nazis at Nuremberg, for actions taken in Afghanistan and Iraq in recent years, it might have to convict itself--if only for the sake of consistency. Justice is no respecter of person. Can anyone sincerely maintain that what was a crime for Hermann Goering and Alfred Jodl is not equally a crime for Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney?
# Vin Suprynowicz at The Las Vegas Review-Journal - 'Find out the objective truth' - why newspaper reporters should report all sides of stories they cover, not just the opinions that seem plausible.
When the system breaks down is when lazy or smug reporters fall into the trap of assuming there are only "two sides" to an issue -- that quoting Bush and Kerry will always give you the full range of available analysis.
The problem is the Republicrat and the Demopublican may both want to raise school taxes to win the endorsement of the teacher union -- so who does that leave to argue that the government schools are actually rendering each generation progressively stupider and less literate, that the nation was more literate and more freedom-loving before the current "public school" institution was imported wholesale from totalitarian Prussia by Horace Mann and the gang in the 1850s, that the proper solution might be to close them down entirely?
(It leaves New York state teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto, actually. And Isabel Paterson. And Marshall Fritz.)
The problem arises when we try to get our mainstream press to run serious, in-depth analyses of the positions of people who contend the public schools do more harm than good; that government-mandated pertussis vaccinations and thimerosal do more harm than good; that HIV does not and could not possibly "cause AIDS" (see esteemed research scientist Dr. Peter Duesberg); that high tax rates and the welfare state they support do our society -- and especially the poor -- more harm than good; that the income tax and/or the drug war are unconstitutional as currently enforced (and federal judges are viciously wrong when they won't allow juries to hear extensive presentations of those constitutional arguments in their courtrooms), etc.
#
The Washington Post -
Bush's Remarks on Iraq at the Army War College 
- the transcript of
last night's speech, which I did not watch. Iraq sovereignty on June
30, elections in January. New prison to be constructed and Abu Ghraib
to be demolished. "May God bless our country."
