http://www.wesh.com/…

Wesley Snipes was sentenced to 36 months in prison Thursday, the maximum sentence allowed.

Snipes was convicted of three misdemeanor charges for not filing his taxes.

During the sentencing, Snipes did apologize.

“I asked this court to show me mercy and the opportunity to set things right,” Snipes said. “This will never happen again. I am very sorry for my mistakes or my errors.”

He added, “being in the spotlight attracts loving fans, and jackals.”

However, the judge indicated that deterrent was an important factor in tax cases.

“There’s nothing unusual about prosecuting a celebrity,” Judge William Hodges said. “[Snipes] never mentioned the words tax or taxes in his apology.”

Prosecutors, too, sought the maximum sentence to deter others from attempting to avoid tax payments.

“We think it sends a real message,” U.S. Attorney Robert O’Neill said. “Again you have to pay your taxes. If you dispute the taxes you owe, contact the IRS and go through the formal process. To continually just say, ‘I don’t owe taxes, you must show me why I owe taxes,’ it seemed his position was ludicrous.”

Snipes was not forced to surrender immediately. Instead the judge said he can surrender at a later date, somewhere nearer to his New Jersey home.

Snipes’ defense team spent the morning arguing that he should not have to go to prison.

Snipes had appeared confident when he arrived at the federal courthouse Thursday morning.

In the pre-sentencing report, the probation department said that Snipes’ conduct could be construed as trying to obstruct the investigation. The report said that could be grounds to increase Snipes’ jail time.

Snipes had many character witness letters written by friends, including Woody Harrelson and Denzel Washington.

From the beginning I wished he would have argued his case on the basis that taxation is theft and an illegitimate action. His defense was instead that he had come to understand that he wasn’t required to pay. The whole 16th Amendment wasn’t ratified, only corporations and resident aliens are required to pay type arguments are pointless. Time and time again the government court system has ruled those as frivolous. They have the guns so what they judge is what it is… not what the words on paper happen to be. I’m disappointed in his apology. These thugs don’t care that you’ve not harmed anyone… that no real crime has occurred. You aren’t the aggressor, they are. They are in the wrong. God forbid a man should desire to keep the fruits of his labor. That a man wish not to be a slave to the state which by demanding a portion of our income at the threat of violence makes us little more then property of the almighty government. That if they can take 1% they can take 100%… they own it all and let you keep some of it. They claim to own your property, your labor, your life. All this done instituted through violence in order to protect you from violence.

I don’t know what options he has available to him in the legal realm but I think I’d consider taking off to some foreign country which doesn’t have extradition treaties with the USA. That is if he has any money left that he can access. I would have bought a lot of precious metal and stored it overseas before any of this shit occurred.

These stats are taken from my 2007 W-2:

Total percentage of AGI: 33.7628%

Total days spent explicitly for the government: 123.315993

This obviously doesn’t include the matching Social Security funds my employer pays, property taxes I pay indirectly through my landlord, NJ sales tax, state and federal gas taxes, import and export taxes, corporate income taxes, etc.

http://www.wethepeoplefoundation.org Docket 07-680, 07-681
petition for writ of certiorari: A document which a losing party files with the Supreme Court asking the Supreme Court to review the decision of a lower court. It includes a list of the parties, a statement of the facts of the case, the legal questions presented for review, and arguments as to why the Court should grant the writ.
writ of certiorari: A decision by the Supreme Court to hear an appeal from a lower court.

The Statement of the Claim in the complaint says:

1. This Complaint arises from the failure of the President of the United States and his Attorney General and his Secretary of the Treasury and his Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, and the failure of the United States Congress, to properly respond to Plaintiffs’ Petitions for Redress of Grievances against their government, namely: grievances relating to violations of the U.S. Constitution’s war powers, taxing, money, and “privacy” clauses.

2. This complaint also arises from the Executive Branch of the United States government in its retaliation against individual Plaintiffs for: Petitioning the government for a Redress of Grievances, namely grievances relating to violations of the U.S. Constitution’s war powers, taxing, money and “privacy” clauses, and for Peaceably Assembling and Associating with other individuals under the umbrella of the We The People Foundation for Constitutional Education and the We The People Congress.

I heard Bob Schulz speak at the Liberty Forum though not his primary presentation. I’ve been familiar with WTP for some time but their 1990’s style website always gave it a dilapidated feel and I never bother to look into what they were doing. I just found out about the lawsuit at the Liberty Forum and he had said they expected the SCOTUS to issue a judgment on whether to hear their appeal. As I suspected they denied their appeal and left the lower courts ruling intact. As far as I understand they said that you can petition the government for a redress of grievances but they don’t need to respond. I’m not so sure the original intent was to say it’s OK that people can ask the government questions without them answering. Otherwise the right to redress the government would be no different than the right of free speech. When I argue with people about the problems of the government, how they do things through force and it’s difficult to combat what they do, and they respond “we are the government” I have to try to describe how the government may supposedly represent us and is physically made up of our neighbors but we are decentralized. We have lives to live. Jobs to work and kids to feed. Their lives and jobs are expanding government and controlling people. We have an uphill battle. There is that quote which goes something like “One activist is worth a thousand layman.” According to Data360.org their is 19,514,000 government employees. That’s at local, state and federal levels. Nearly 7% of the population. Even if you account for freedom moles working within the system at a 1:1000 ratio or even 1:100 or even 1:10… we are outnumbered. I hope things like this help show those individuals that the deck is stacked against us. They have the upper hand and we have to work twice as hard to get things done. We screw up and our boss can be fired in a heartbeat. If a politician does something so blatant to upset those he represents he’s probably got the average of over a year till you can kick him out and than you can almost guarantee that the guy who tries to replace him will be almost the same regardless of what they say.

We need more activists who are on our team to help balance out the field. Hopefully the Ron Paul Revolution will help with that.

• 9:00AM Peymon Mottahedeh’s Live Free off the IRS Lies and Abuse. Not a real lecture. It was really an advertisement for his scam. I’ve read plenty of the arguments from the tax protesters. I’ve read the IRS’s responses to many of them. It’s all bogus. The safest and quickest way to end the federal income tax is to assume it’s all legit and get rid of it by lowering spending, getting rid of the federal income tax and IRS and amending out the 16th Amendment. It disappoints me that those in charge of getting speakers for this Liberty Forum got this guy. I wanted presentations not adverts for possible scams.
• 10:30AM Jim Lark’s Knee-Jerk Libertarianism: A Cure for a Common Disease. It was a well spoken discussion on a common problem in the freedom movement and many other belief systems: poor messenger skills. He was very well spoken and very serious in getting freedom fighters to be better at getting libertarian ideas across. Try not to insult, be empathetic and try to not to convince people your right but give them the info to think about why you are right. Here is the audio from the speech: Jim Lark: Knee-jerk libertarianism
• 1:00PM Barry Cooper of Never Get Busted. He has a bit of that sleazy salesman feel but not like Peymon Mottahedeh. He’s not a full libertarian (though he’s running on the Libertarian ticket in Texas District 31) but he has some good practical instructions on how to deal with traffic cops as a user of marijuana and his new movie Never Get Raided goes further including concealing the growing of marijuana and catalogs police tactics. Sounds interesting but I’m not motivated enough to purchase either movie.
• 2:30PM Jim Babka from Downsize DC. Not sure why I attended this one. I already had met him in the elevator earlier that day. I’m subscribed to the Downsize Dispatch, I very regularly use their services to send messages to my representatives and I donate to them monthly. It was interesting none the less (he’s a good speaker so hearing things over again didn’t feel repetitive) and I got myself a bumper sticker. He presented The Onion’s Bullshit is Most Important Issue for 2008 Voters.
• Glen Jacobs was in attendance at Babka’s presentation. After it was over xyz and I got a photo with him. I briefly talked with him about his contributions to the movement. Acknowledging that given his situation I understood why he was unable to publicly participate in the movement but appreciated his work under his pseudonym and that someone in his position (not to say that professional wrestler is widely looked up to but surely more than I, and he’s got more connections) was very valuable. He seemed genuinely thankful. While I have a guess as to who in the community he is I’ll leave it to you to find out.
• 4:00PM F. Paul Wilson’s Awful Lonely at Times: Being a Libertarian from the 60’s On. Those who know me know I’m not much on reading fiction. I’ve never read any of his books nor did I know who he was till just a few months ago when I started listening to Gardner Goldsmith’s radio show. Gardner is a big fan and was ecstatic to be able to hear him speak and hang out. Mr. Wilson was very well spoken and unfortunately didn’t spend much time on his dealings with libertarianism in the 60’s and 70’s. Many there knew of his work and were fans so it’s understandable that he would also talk about his works and how he integrated libertarian ideas into them. Here is the audio of his speech: F. Paul Wilson
• The dinner was alright. I actually preferred the buffet. xyz and I sat with Mike and Sayh(sp?) from the Manhattan Ron Paul Meetup group and a young freelance writer, Sam, who was at the Liberty Forum to get information on private currencies. He originally just wanted to talk with Bernard von NotHaus but decided that if he was going to make the long trip up from Brooklin he may as well check out the whole Liberty Forum. He’s not a libertarian but was very interested in what he was hearing. If I run across him tomorrow I’ll have to give him a copy of the latest Serf City. The keynote speaker was New Hampshire US Senator John Sununu. A good number of people were not all that thrilled that the Saturday keynote was a federal Republican politician. He was booed when he said we need taxes to pay for needed government. He was called out for voting for the original PATRIOT Act He was heckled to do a Q&A when he finished. Which he didn’t… he grabbed his things and left immediately after his speech was over.

http://www.cato.org/…

Key legislators and presidential hopefuls in the Democratic Party have proposed raising the top two tax rates. They’re also suggesting extra surtaxes for war, for alleviating the Alternative Minimum Tax, for Social Security, and for subsidizing compulsory health insurance. Barack Obama and John Edwards advocate taxing capital gains at 28%; Hillary Clinton favors taxing dividends at the surtaxed income-tax rates.

The argument for these proposals has nothing to do with the impact of higher tax rates on incentives and the economy. It is all about “fairness” — defined as reducing the top 1%’s share of income.

This political exercise invariably begins by citing dubious statistics about pretax incomes among the top 1% (1.3 million tax returns) as an excuse for raising tax rates on the top 5%, among others. Echoing speeches from Sen. Clinton, Business Week recently exclaimed, “According to new Internal Revenue Service data announced last week, income inequality in the U.S. is at its worst since the 1920s (before the Great Depression). The top percentile of wealthy Americans earned 21.2% of all income in 2005, up from 19% in 2004.”

These statistics are extremely misleading.

Do all these points Alan Reynolds makes disprove that income inequality in the U.S. is now the worse since the 1920’s? No… but it shows how flexible the numbers are and how easy it is to make them show what you want. With the way our managed economy is being ran it’s no wonder the middle class is disappearing. The system is rigged to go that way.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/…

We were saddened to hear of the passing of activist, film maker, freedom fighter and all round maverick Aaron Russo today, who died today after a long battle with cancer at the age of 64.

Aaron will be remembered fondly for all his achievements, not least of which the excellent America: From Freedom to Fascism, his final movie which exposed the fraudulent basis of the IRS and the Federal Reserve.

I like Trading Places. I’ve watched America: From Freedom to Fascism.   While he wasn’t all that  correct or completely honest in FF2F, I agreed with his fight. The freedom movement doesn’t have a huge number of participants… it’s sad to see one of them go.