Rand Paul Reacts to Ferguson: Reform Criminal Justice System, Petty Fines

Rand PaulSen. Rand
Paul
told Politico
 that he didn’t have specific
thoughts on the grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson
for the killing of Michael Brown, but renewed his calls to
demilitarize the police and reform the criminal justice system:

The Kentucky Republican did say the situation reflects an
“undercurrent of unease out there related to poverty, related to
drugs.” He added, “I think part of the answer is trying to reform
our criminal justice system.”

Paul specifically mentioned the issue of so-called “petty” fines
for traffic violations. Petty fines are a $2 million revenue source
for the city of Ferguson. But, as Paul notes, paying them is hardly
inconsequential for the city’s poor residents.

Reason’s Brian Doherty and the Cato Institute’s Walter Olson
have examined
how petty fines feed into the resentment of law enforcement felt by
Ferguson’s poor and minority citizens:

If indeed more people’s usual interactions with police had
anything to do with “protecting and serving” and less with
violently messing up your life for reasons that can seem petty and
pointless, from people whose version of respect is “do
everything I say the way I’m comfortable with or you might
die
,” the atmosphere surrounding what happened in Ferguson
would likely be less toxic.

On the police militarization front, Paul plans to introduce
legislation tackling that issue next year. He told Time
that he will spend the coming weeks going over the details with
other lawmakers:

Some libertarian-minded Republicans have also joined the call to
demilitarize the police, including Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand
Paul, who wrote in a TIME op-ed less than a week after the Brown
shooting that “there should be a difference between a police
response and a military response.” On Tuesday, Paul’s office
confirmed that he will introduce his own bill addressing police
militarization next year. He’s working with retiring Oklahoma
Republican Sen. Tom Coburn on the legislation and will talk to
other senators “over the coming months” to garner support,
according to an aide.

More from Reason on the mayhem in Ferguson here.

Update: Paul has just published his own op-ed
in Time titled, “The Politicians Are to Blame in
Ferguson”. He
writes
:

In the search for culpability for the tragedy in Ferguson, I
mostly blame politicians. Michael Brown’s death and the suffocation
of Eric Garner in New York for selling untaxed cigarettes indicate
something is wrong with criminal justice in America. The War on
Drugs has created a culture of violence and put police in a nearly
impossible situation.

In Ferguson, the precipitating crime was not drugs, but theft.
But the War on Drugs has created a tension in some communities that
too often results in tragedy. One need only witness the baby in
Georgia, who had a concussive grenade explode in her face during a
late-night, no-knock drug raid (in which no drugs were found) to
understand the feelings of many minorities — the feeling that they
are being unfairly targeted.

Three out of four people in jail for drugs are people of color.
In the African American community, folks rightly ask why are our
sons disproportionately incarcerated, killed, and maimed?

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Why Shouldn’t Al Sharpton and Rand Paul Have Breakfast Together?

UNITY TICKETLast week Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)
had breakfast
with the Rev. Al Sharpton, at Sharpton’s request.
The meeting appears to have been productive for both parties.
Sharpton obviously isn’t likely to back Paul for president, but
he’s taking the opportunity to
put pressure
on Hillary Clinton on various civil rights issues
where Paul’s talk has been bolder than Clinton’s. Paul in turn can
build up his civil rights image a little without sanctioning

any
of
ugliness
in Sharpton’s past. Put differently, both men get the
advantages of a meeting without the disadvantages of an
endorsement.

Naturally, Paul’s critics are treating this as an endorsement
anyway. Jennifer Rubin, a medium who channels neoconservative
opinion for The Washington Post, put on her
concern-troll hat
 yesterday and wrote this:

Why is Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) courting Sharpton and
why don’t Republicans denounce him for doing so, just as they do
Democrats?
…If Paul wants to take on criminal justice reform,
more power to him. And if he thinks this will boost him with
African American voters, he won’t be the first pol to try to pick
agenda items that impress slices of the electorate. But in doing
precisely what the administration and so many liberals do—treating
Al Sharpton as a respected and important figure—he does his own
credibility harm.

Somehow I have a hard time imagining Rubin reacting this way if
Paul had broken bread with Dick Cheney or Sheldon Adelson.

My view? A movement to roll back mass incarceration,
overcriminalization, and police militarization is more likely to
succeed if it has support on both the left and the right. Sharpton
has influence on the left, Paul has influence on the right, and
both are open to cooperation. The sane question to ask here isn’t
whether either one of them is a good guy; it’s whether their
meeting can actually contribute to that movement in a significant
way.

I’m not sure it will. It’s just a breakfast, after all. But I
can’t imagine how refusing to meet would have helped any
of those causes.

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And The Award For “Americans’ Favorite Government Agency” Goes To…

Submitted by Simon Black via Sovereign Man blog,

Gallup recently conducted a poll asking Americans to rate thirteen of the most visible agencies/quasi-agencies of the United States government.

These included:

  • US Postal Service (USPS)
  • Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
  • Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
  • Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
  • National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
  • Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
  • Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
  • Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
  • Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
  • Secret Service
  • Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
  • Federal Reserve Board
  • Veterans Administration (VA)

[Curiously the Social Security Administration wasn't on the list.]

Gallup asked the survey participants to rate each one of the agencies as excellent, good, fair, or poor.

Now, you can probably imagine that few people are going to rate the IRS particularly highly. But of the 1,020 random adults who participated, the most favorably viewed agency was… 

The United States Postal Service.

Think about that for a moment.

The USPS’s own balance sheet shows a negative equity of MINUS $44 billion.

 

They lost $2 billion in the last quarter alone, their net loss so far this fiscal year is a whopping $4.1 billion, and they continually suck taxpayer funds into a never-ending black hole.

 

In fact, the United States Postal Service ranked dead last in terms of potential revenue growth when compared to 24 other postal agencies around the world according to a study published by global consulting group Accenture.

 

And according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, Americans find banks, utility companies, and even some airlines to be easier to deal with than the US Postal Service.

And yet, despite all of this, Americans still prefer the US Postal Service to nearly every other government agency.

This pretty much tells you everything you need to know about government.




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Scorching Demand For 5 Year Treasurys: Indirect Bid Highest On Record

If yesterday’s 2 Year stopping through auction was best described as “blistering”, then today’s $35 billion sale of 5 Year paper, which again stopped through the When Issued 1.614% by a whopping 1.9 bps, was nothing short of a scorcher.

Oddly enough, in a time when demand considerations should be sparking a lack of primary market demand for paper, investors just can’t get enough “high quality” collateral – that or they are just more focused on the global slowdown and not big fans of the latest “US is decoupling” thesis – and as a result while the Dealer bid was quite possibly a record low 25.1%, it was the Indirects that stunned with their aggressive bid, taking down a record 65% of the auction, leaving just under 10% for Direct bidders. Finally, the Bid to Cover left little to the imagination: soaring from last month’s paltry 2.36, it jumped to 2.91, the highest print since March. Needless to say the entire curve buckled tighter on the news, with the yield on the 10 Year printing at a day’s low of only 2.279% as once again all the “economic recovery” shorts are left scrambling.

At this rate we may run out of superlative adjectives for the upcoming 7 Year auction which will complete this week’s bond issuance.




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Political, Public Pressure to Prosecute in Brooklyn “Accidental” Police Shooting of Black Man in Dark Stairwell

Associated Press reports on some political pressure to actually
hold accountable legally the police office Peter Liang who
shot and killed 28-year-old Akai Gurley
in the dark stairwell
of a Brooklyn housing project. By police accounts, the officer and
his partner were not investigating any specific violent crime,
merely on patrol.

NYPD Commissioner William Bratton described the killing as
“accidental” but doesn’t seem to be claiming the gun went
off by, say, the officer accidentally dropping it.

The officer, the facts of how guns work suggest, had drawn his
gun, had his finger on the trigger, and pulled it, in the direction
of things and people he could not see and said nothing to, by
available accounts of the killing. This makes “accident” a perhaps
infelicitous way to describe what happened, even if Liang did not
knowingly and willingly intend to kill Gurley, who had done nothing
criminal or threatening prior to the killing.

After the city’s medical examiner’s office declared the incident
a “homicide”—merely meaning the death of a human caused by the
action of another human being, not in itself with any specific
legal implications—local politicians are calling for more action
than just a shrug and an “it was an accident,”
Associated Press reports
:

City Councilwoman Inez Barron and Assemblyman-elect Charles
Barron met with officials in the Brooklyn district attorney’s
office on Monday. Afterward, Charles Barron told reporters he
thought the shooting of Akai Gurley last week warrants a criminal
charge for Officer Peter Liang.

He said Liang’s use of a police weapon “was reckless
endangerment, it was criminally negligent homicide.”

Whether charges are filed would be up to Brooklyn District
Attorney Kenneth Thompson, who has called the shooting “deeply
troubling” and said it warrants “an immediate, fair and thorough
investigation.” His office did not immediately respond to a request
for comment on Monday….

Liang, 26, has been placed on modified duty. Under standard
policy, police internal affairs investigators won’t be able to
question him until prosecutors have decided whether to file
criminal charges.

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Lying to a Lover Could Become ‘Rape’ In New Jersey

Today in criminalize all the
things
: a New Jersey lawmaker wants to make it illegal to lie
to someone in order to tempt them into sex. Assemblyman Troy
Singleton’s (D-Burlington) bill would create the new crime of
“sexual assault by fraud”, defined as “an act of sexual penetration
to which a person has given consent because the actor has
misrepresented the purpose of the act or has represented he is
someone he is not.”

“I truly believe that we have to look at the issue of rape as
more than sexual contact without consent,” Singleton said. “Fraud invalidates any
semblance of consent just as forcible sexual contact does. This
legislation is designed to provide our state’s judiciary with
another tool to assess situations where this occurs and potentially
provide a legal remedy to those circumstances.” 

No no no just no: we do not need a legal remedy for
people having bad judgement. Is it a shame that some people
misrepresent themselves to get people to sleep with them? Sure. But
not every aspect of social and sexual relationships can be a matter
for government concern. What’s next, making it a misdemeanor to use
outdated photos on your Tinder profile? Criminalizing push-up bras?
Throwing people in jail who say they’ll call the next day but
don’t? 

The situation Singleton says spawned his proposal involves
Mischele Lewis, a woman defrauded by a man claiming to be a British
military official. The pair had sex and Lewis also paid the man,
William Allen Jordan, $5,000 for an alleged security clearance.
When Jordan turned out to be a scam artist, Lewis pressed charges
and he wound up pleading guilty to defrauding her. Justice
served, right? Not in the warped worldview of New Jersey
prosecutors, who apparently can’t stand the idea that some areas of
interpersonal dynamics aren’t within their prosecutorial reach.

The state originally wanted to charge Jordan with sexual assault
by coercion—a charge a grand jury refused to indict him on. Now it
seems Singleton has stepped in to try and ensure they won’t be
disappointed again. His proposed crime of sexual assault by fraud
would be punishable by 5 to 20 years in prison. Singleton said he
wants to allow for judicial discretion because “we don’t want
unintended consequences.”

But giving the state broad discretion to adjudicate lies between
lovers would yield a hotbed of unintended consequences, not to
mention the (obviously intended, yet despicable) consequence of
furthering the creep of law enforcement into all areas of our
lives. Furthermore, it’s not necessary to broadly criminalize
deceiving someone into sex to hold people accountable in cases like
a recent notorious one in California, wherein a man snuck into a
sleeping woman’s room after he saw her boyfriend leave and sexually
penetrated her. The woman awoke, assumed it was her boyfriend, and
went along with it until she saw the man, at which point she fought
back and fled. The man was legally liable for starting sex with her
while she was asleep and thus unable to consent—i.e., committing
rape, no extra statute needed. 

“Rape-by-deception” has been “almost universally rejected in
American criminal law,” according
to Yale Law Professor Jed Rubenfeld
. Yet it’s “a live and
intensifying issue.” In 2010, Massachusetts tried to pass a bill
criminalizing having sex with someone after “having obtained that
person’s consent by the use of fraud, concealment or artifice”; it
was rejected. California passed a rape
by fraud law
in 2013, following the case described just above.
Tennessee also prohibits all “intercourse induced by deception,
accomplished by fraud, and obtained by ruse,” as do Alabama and a handful of other
states. 

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Oil Rebounds On Reports OPEC Will Cut Supply, Seek Stricter Compliance

Less than two hours after Venezuela noted that no supply cut had been pre-agreed, The Wall Street Journal reports…

  • *OPEC MEMBERS SAID TO MOVE TOWARD CUTTING OIL SUPPLY: WSJ

And oil prices are jumping. However, a big below the surface shows this story is more about stricter compliance than an actual supply cut.

 

 

As WSJ reports,

OPEC members are inching toward a compromise that could lead them to cut oil supply, as the producer group prepares for one of its most closely watched meetings in years this week.

 

Saudi Arabia, the de facto leader of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, is likely to side with calls for the group to adhere more closely to its self-imposed production ceiling at Thursday’s meeting of OPEC oil ministers, according to a Gulf official familiar with the Saudi position.

*  *  *




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Michael Brown’s Parents (And Al Sharpton) Address Media: Investigation Was ‘Broken’ – Live Feed

Having shifted from a call for calm (“we want peace”), to understandably emotionally proclaiming “burn this bitch down,” right after the decision last night (noting “profound disappointment”), Michael Brown’s parents are preparing to make a statement (along with Al Sharpton)… claiming that the investigation was ‘broken’ but once again calling for peace.

 

  • *ATTORNEY: ‘A FIRST YR LAW STUDENT’ WOULD CROSS-EXAMINE BETTER
  • *ATTORNEY SAYS: WE OBJECTED TO THIS PROSECUTOR & THIS PROCESS
  • *ATTORNEY SAYS: ‘WE COULD FORESEE WHAT THE OUTCOME WOULD BE’
  • *ATTORNEY SAYS: ‘THIS PROCESS IS BROKEN’
  • *ATTORNEY: WANTS LAW REQUIRING POLICE TO WEAR BODY CAMERAS
  • *GRAY: DECISION `A REFLECTION OF THOSE WHO PRESENTED’ THE CASE

 

Live Feed…

* * *

On Sunday November 23rd the following statement was released by Mike
Brown’s Mom, Lesley McSpadden, and her husband, Louis Head:

Louis Head

However, after the announcement of a non-indictment there was a considerable change in sentiment: 

“You motherf**kers think this is a joke” – “Burn this b*tch down”!




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A Tale Of Two Credit Markets: New Auto Loans Highest In 9 Years As New Mortgages Slump Near Record Lows

Remember when three weeks ago, everyone was stunned as the Manufacturing ISM soared to new 3 year highs, continuing this summer’s trend of blistering manufacturing, which was largely attributed to a burst of automotive production? Now, courtesy of the latest Q3 household credit report by the NY Fed, we know just how it was funded. According to the report, some $105 billion in new car loans were issued is the third quarter, the highest amount since 2005, and just $20 billion shy of an all time high.

That’s the good news. The bad news as Equifax reported two months ago, new subprime loan origination is trending at about 31% and rising. And what’s worst, is that recently both Moody’s and Fitch joined forces in making up for their past oversights, and “slammed subprime auto bonds” suggesting this latest bout of subprime driven euphoria boosting the US manufacturing sector may not last. Or it very well may: after all the central banks are always on the lookout for new things to monetize.

 

But while US consumers just can’t get enough of car loans, they are increasingly giving up on that other, levered purchase: mortgages. As the next chart shows, mortgage origination, while rebounding modestly from recent record lows, is still at levels that otherwise would suggest a broad economic recession.

Perhaps when all else fails, US households can just live out of their financed cars.

Source: NY Fed




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U.S. Drone Strike Math – 41 Terrorists Targeted, 1,147 People Killed

Screen Shot 2014-11-25 at 10.38.14 AMWhile I haven’t covered the topic of drones very much as of late, it was a core topic at Liberty Blitzkrieg several years ago. The most recent, relevant piece I published on it was during the summer of 2013 and titled: The Truth About Drones.

Here’s an excerpt:

A lot of Americans have an impression that drone strikes are less damaging to civilian populations that conventional airstrikes. This would be false. In fact, earlier this month I highlighted an article from the Guardian that demonstrated how in reality drone strikes are 10x more likely to harm civilians per incident. Now, thanks to a recently leaked document we find that many more civilians including children have been killed in these strikes than many of us would like to admit. In fact, of the 746 people killed in drone strikes in Pakistan from 2006-2009, an incredible 20% were civilians and 94 (13% of the total) were children.

I strongly believe that the reason so many Americans blindly support the widespread use of drones is due to the mistaken belief that they are precise and result in few civilian casualties. It’s important to get some of the facts out to the public in order to have a more informed debate on the matter.

In the latest news, the Guardian reports that:

continue reading

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