Here’s another one of those no brainer cases where the question of guilt or innocence could be determined once and for all in a death penalty case if the state would only allow the condemned the opportunity to have DNA test run at no cost to the state. The Innocence Project makes the following plea to all who are concerned with matters of justice on behalf of Thomas Arthur who is scheduled to be put to death by the state of Alabama:
Thomas Arthur is on Alabama’s death row, convicted of a crime that another man has since confessed to committing. Despite this confession and many other irregularities that have surfaced, the state has set his execution date for March 29, just weeks away.
After the confession, the Alabama Supreme Court stayed Mr. Arthur’s execution and remanded his case to the trial court for an evidentiary hearing. The court ordered limited DNA testing of the wig that all parties agree was worn by the perpetrator. Although DNA was found on the wig, the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences lacks the technology to develop a profile. Thomas Arthur and his attorneys want to re-test the wig, using more advanced DNA technology. But the state of Alabama won’t allow it, even though the defense is willing to pay for the testing!
It is unacceptable that the state of Alabama is prepared to put a potentially innocent man to death rather than let him conduct a simple test that could prove his innocence. Write Governor Robert Bentley and urge him to allow Thomas Arthur’s legal team to conduct the DNA testing that could spare his life.
To petition Gov. Bentley with a prewritten message, follow this link. It will only take a couple of minutes if that.
When the state can kill one of its citizens, it’s important that the state turns over every rock first. In the case of Thomas Arthur, there is a rock and I don’t think asking the governor to turn it over is too much to ask.
In case you by some miracle hadn’t noticed it yet, tens of thousands of web sites around the country and around the world, are “going black” or putting up banners explaining that they are not available or there is no content today etc… In protest against the “Stop Online Privacy Act” and the “ProtectIP act”, which are currently (or were recently), being promulgated in congress.
We don’t have a problem with anyone who does. It’s important that people understand what SOPA and PIPA are (or were), and most folks are sadly unaware of the kind of stupid and harmful things that our government does.
Google and Wikipedia are two of the most important and most used sites on the net; and by participating in this protest, they will very certainly make a lot more people aware of this issue.
But “going black” isn’t what we do here.
We talk about political and social issues here; in particular about liberty and freedom. We try to inform people about the important issues, events, and principles of liberty and freedom; and then talk about them in as free and open a way as we can.
I personally think that going black would be entirely against what we are about here; and while it might help to draw more attention to the problem, it wouldn’t help us inform you, or help us begin the conversation about the issue.
… and of course, you can’t go to wikipedia day to find out about it…
So, I personally, would like to do something that is in the spirit of protesting the idiotic and harmful nature of these pieces of industry lobbying masquerading as legislation…
…And share a few things:
That’s the best explanation of why the freedom to share (within fair use of course, copyrights ARE important) is important; and why legislation like PIPA and SOPA are not only stupid and harmful, but entirely antithetical to the American system of ordered liberty.
And then there’s this piece by my friend (and bestselling author, buy his excellent books please) Larry Correia:
“for all of the people out there on the internet having a massive freak out about the government potentially damaging something they love… WELCOME TO THE PARTY.
You think this is something new or unusual? Nope. This is just about a topic that you happen to be familiar with. If you fall into that camp, I want you to take a deep breath, step back, and examine all of the other issues in the past that you didn’t know jack squat about, but your knee jerk reaction was to say “there’s a problem, the governement has to do something!” Well guess what? The crap the federal government usually comes up with to fix these problems is similar to SOPA. In other words, the legislation addresses a perceived problem by instituting a bunch of stupid overregulation and taking away someone’s freedom.
You think people need access to affordable medical care and shouldn’t be denied coverage? Well, you got used and we got the bloated ridiculous mess that is Obamacare. You saw a news report about how big business defrauded people and said congress should do something? Well, everyone in the business world got screwed because of Enron by completely useless new arbitrary crap laws, and a few years later we got into an even bigger financial crisis which the arbitrary crap laws we spent billions conforming to did nothing to prevent. No, because that financial crisis was caused by people saying that there was this huge problem that needed to be fixed, so more people who couldn’t afford to pay mortgages could still buy houses, and the government simply had to do something to fix this problem!
Any crisis… Any problem… You ask the feds to fix it, you get this kind of answer. Almost never do the laws fix the actual problem. Instead the government gets bigger and gains a few more powers and it doesn’t fix the issue. When the problem gets bigger, then the government gets bigger and gains a few more powers that actually make the problem worse. Oh look! Despite all of these laws the problem has gotten even bigger? Whatever should we do? Why, I know! Let’s pass an even bigger law that takes away more individual freedom and gives the government more control!
Repeat, repeat, repeat.
Any topic, any situation, any problem.
They address it, you lose freedom and they gain more control. Some of you are only offended today because this particular law hurts something you enjoy. The rest of the time? Screw it. You can’t be bothered to pay attention. Or worse, people like me who are up in arms over an issue are just cranks or anti-government crackpots.”
I was going to write something roughly similar to this, but Larry beat me to it… and I’d rather share what he wrote, because it’s good, and because I can.
I am a cynically romantic optimistic pessimist. I am neither liberal, nor conservative. I am a (somewhat disgruntled) muscular minarchist… something like a constructive anarchist.
Basically what that means, is that I believe, all things being equal, responsible adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want to do, so long as nobody’s getting hurt, who isn’t paying extra
Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is unquestionably one of the most infamous famous speeches in American history. In listening to the speech today, I found the following passages that aren’t as often quoted to be some of the most powerful lines in the speech.
In a sense we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
America has come a long way since King delivered this speech. Racial and ethnic minorities have made great strides thanks to courageous individuals like King who made a stand for liberty and justice (and in King’s case, paid with his life) and we are all better off for it.
Here is the rest of the speech. Listen and be inspired.
Meet Democrat presidential candidate Vermin Supreme. The man wears a boot on his head, advocates a mandatory dental hygiene program, ponies for every American, and harnessing the energy of zombies to wean America off of foreign oil. Best of all, in his closing statement (following his singing!), Vermin tries to turn his political rival Randall Terry gay because Jesus told him to.
There are plenty of folks saying today that while California might be — on its own — in the top 10 largest economies in the world, our political system far more closely resembles that of Greece. High spending and an inability to live within our means despite some of the highest taxes in the nation.
Thankfully, the fine folks at the “Restoring California Coalition” have decided to throw their weight behind the solution: the Millionaires Tax! And additional tax of 3% of income on taxable income over $1M, and of 5% on taxable income over $2M. (I’d point out that this would raise STATE tax brackets in those cases to 13.55% and 15.55%, respectively, well beyond any other state).
And of course, they’ve chosen as their poster child for the tax a representative sample of the average California high earner:
Now, I’ve got little love for Kim Kardashian. I fail to understand how someone has parlayed — as Joel McHale of The Soup is so fond of saying — a big ass and a sex tape into a fashion/fame empire. In fact, it’s not even a big ass and a sex tape that were the key; a lot of women probably have those. It’s more that she’s the offspring of a famous lawyer… A lawyer who was only famous because a major athlete/actor allegedly brutally murdered his wife and her boyfriend.
Any world where Kim Kardashian can be said to “deserve” her fame is a bit sketchy to me. In fact, my thoughts on her are oddly similar to those of Wil Wheaton:
That said, though, I don’t hate Kim Kardashian. I don’t know Kim Kardashian. While her onscreen persona is a bit vapid and useless, she’s obviously smart enough to have parlayed her fame into more fame and more money. She at least figured out the cardinal rule of fame: strike hard while the iron is hot. I don’t believe that we, as a society, should punish her because bored housewives find some escapist fantasy following the Kardashian family’s latest doings. And further, I don’t believe that we should, as a society, use her as the public scapegoat as a representative sample of “the rich” when she’s nothing of the sort.
The real “rich” that will be hurt by this tax are businessmen, and as much as the left scoffs at the idea of “job creators”, anyone in this state who has worked for a startup sees the reality: most of those businesses wouldn’t exist without the blood and sweat of the guys at the top — who often forego income, sleep, time with family and stability for years to build a company that eventually rewards them quite handsomely.
But even worse in this analysis is the fact that California has tried a Millionaires Tax rather recently, and the results weren’t exactly as planned:
In 2004, voters narrowly approved Proposition 63, the Mental Heath Services Act (MHSA), which imposed an additional 1% tax on personal income above $1 million. The funds generated from this “millionaire’s tax” were intended to expand county mental health programs. Taxpayer and business groups opposed the measure for a couple of obvious reasons. First, California is already a high tax, high spending state that didn’t need any more revenue. Second, as we predicted, Prop 63 would exacerbate California’s income tax volatility.
Although the final vote for Proposition 63 was tallied more than four years ago, evidence suggests that California’s most wealthy have continued to vote on this measure — with their feet. A recent survey from TNS Research, an international business research firm, found the California counties of Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego had the 1st, 4th and 6th highest number of millionaires in the country. However, even as the national population of millionaire households grew by 5.9% in 2007, Los Angeles County lost about 7000 of these households. Orange and San Diego Counties lost millionaire households as well.
So the net result was that the millionaires left. Further, this tax intended to improve county mental health programs largely had trouble spending the money. The above article (a tad outdated from 2008, to be sure) pointed out that the calls at the time were to pull the unspent $2B+ and allow it to be reallocated to general revenues.
This is bad policy, and it will only work to damage the California economy at a time when we’re already reeling from the housing bust. Following that by making Kim Kardashian the poster child for your movement is cheap and opportunistic, which might not be so objectionable if she represented the “average” California millionaire — but she doesn’t. Of course, I can’t claim it’s a bad tactic — given the moron voters in this state, it might actually work.
California has problems. Those problems require hard solutions, but instead we have people here who think we can simply paper over it by soaking the rich. After all, they just need to pay their “fair share”*. » Read more
