Dale Everett, Richard Onley, Ian Freeman, Keith Carlsen, and Patrick Shields (from left) discussed efforts yesterday to obtain the release of fellow Free Stater Sam A. Miller from jail. They were not successful. (Cheryl Senter for The Boston Globe)

By Sarah Schweitzer
Globe Staff / May 29, 2009

KEENE, N.H. – From a jail cell in this rural corner of New Hampshire, Sam A. Miller waged a philosophical battle, one milk carton at a time.

The soft-spoken electrical engineer declined food for nearly a month, save for swigs of milk. To eat, he said, would be caving to the tyrannical government powers that placed him here for illegally filming in a courthouse and refusing to reveal his legal name to jail officials. (He says it’s private; jail officials obtained it from a fingerprint trace.)

His resistance has made him a folk hero among antigovernment types who have been making their way to New Hampshire from points across the country since their leaders put out a clarion call six years ago.

The Free Staters, as they are known, hope to lure thousands of like-minded souls to the state, with the goal of paring government to a bare minimum by eliminating things like taxes, speed limits, and zoning laws.

Thus far, just 427 Free Staters have relocated. Yet, here in Keene and in pockets across New Hampshire, Free Staters are making their case in increasingly provocative ways.

“Like Ghandi, like Martin Luther King, we need to educate and enlighten the public,” said Miller, who joined the Free State movement after breaking up with his fiancée.

The actions have ranged from the odd, such as when Free Staters filed another person’s fingernails without a manicurist’s license on a public sidewalk or held an unlicensed puppet show, to the irksome, as when they tried to dig a garden in a downtown Keene park, to the instigative, such as the day they stood on a street corner with a marijuana bud held aloft. Sometimes, they simply veer toward obstinate, wearing hats in a courtroom after being asked to take them off or refusing to remove a couch from a lawn.

When arrests have followed, Free Staters have sought to film the criminal proceedings from beginning to end, including scenes from courthouse lobbies, where filming is not allowed in some cases, such as in Keene District Court. The lobby filming has yielded more arrests (often, with Free Staters going limp as officers approach) and more footage that Free Staters post on websites such as FreeKeene.com, which has proved an effective recruiting tool.

The so-called liberty actions have been met with some bemusement by residents of this gently tolerant city, population 22,800, home to Keene State College, near the border of Vermont. But some say the tactics have taken on a menacing hue, such as when Free Staters have gathered on the streets of downtown Keene with holstered guns on their waists, visible on their waists.

“When they first came to town, there was a welcoming spirit. A lot of people were like, ‘OK,’ ” said Richard Van Wickler, a Keene resident and superintendent of the Cheshire County Department of Corrections. “But unfortunately what happens is that when [Free Staters] take the radical approach, that invites people to get angry.”
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http://reason.tv/…

Should moving a throw pillow get you fined or jailed?

With all the artistry and attitude, it’s no wonder design shows are so much fun. But are the people on those shows putting your life, and even the president’s life, at risk?

Natasha Lima-Younts can’t see how she’s putting anyone’s life at risk. She’s been an interior designer for more than 20 years. She started her own business, and hired dozens of employees. She has an extensive portfolio and magazine features about her work. What she doesn’t have is a state license. That doesn’t bother Yount’s client Angie Stoeker, who loves what Younts has done with her home, but it does bother those who push for licensing laws.

Alabama politicians once threatened unlicensed designers with jail time—moving a throw pillow could get you a year behind bars—and 22 states plus the District of Columbia regulate interior designers. Industry groups lobby for such laws because they say unlicensed designers put lives at risk. “Every decision an interior designer makes affects the health, safety, and, welfare of the public,” says the the American Society of Interior Designers. Another group implies that “confusing floor patterns” and other items installed by unlicensed interior designers cause 11,000 deaths per year.

Reason.tv’s Nick Gillespie went looking for dead bodies, and for an explanation for why the state of Florida launched a legal case against Younts. State regulators demand that she obtain a license, a license she says she doesn’t need, a license that could cost her six years and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Do licensing laws protect consumers from death and destruction or, as the Interior Design Protection Council argues, do they protect licensed designers from competition? Should Younts be stripped of the career it took her decades to build? Should President Obama be worried about his interior designer, the unlicensed Michael Smith? Jump into the throw-pillow fight and decide for yourself.

“Throw-Pillow Fight” is written and produced by Ted Balaker. Director of photography is Roger Richards.

http://www.foxnews.com/…

Drivers across the country, beware – a heftier fine could be coming to a dashboard near you. Faced with rising deficits and dwindling revenues, many states and local municipalities are turning to increased traffic and parking fines to fill their coffers.

In California, the cost of a “fix-it ticket” nearly tripled on Jan. 1, meaning that drivers in the Golden State can pay up to $100 for having a broken headlight – an infraction that didn’t even garner a citation years ago. A bill approved by the state Legislature raised fix-it fines to $25 from $10 and hiked surcharges on regular traffic tickets by $35. Parking tickets and court costs to attend traffic school also increased, by $3 and $25 respectively.

Motorists in Pensacola, Fla., saw fines for parking in front of a fire hydrant or in a fire lane skyrocket from $10 to $100 – a 900 percent increase – after the city’s Downtown Improvement Board reportedly unanimously approved the hike earlier this month. Statewide, speeding fines also increased by $10 this month, along with an increase of an additional $25 for exceeding the speed limit by 15 to 29 miles per hour.

And in the Boston suburb of Malden, Mass., Police Chief Kenneth Coye urged officers to bring in revenue for the cash-strapped suburb by writing at least one parking or traffic ticket per shift.

“We need to increase enforcement in areas that create revenue … write ‘ONE TAG A DAY,’” Coye told officers in a memo obtained by the Boston Herald.

Coye said tickets are crucial to maintaining quality of life, the Herald reported. He did not return several requests for comment from FOXNews.com.

According to a study in this month’s Journal of Law and Economics, local governments like Malden use traffic citations to bridge budget shortfalls. Researchers Thomas Garrett and Gary Wagner examined revenue and traffic citation data from 1990 to 2003 in 96 counties in North Carolina, and they discovered that the number of citations issued increases in years that follow a drop in revenue.

Karen DeCoster has already given the appropriate statement:

This is how parasitical governments will attempt to survive without making any adjustments to their revenue realities in a Depression: they will feed off of the productive elements in society by using their monopoly of legal aggression and extort cash from peaceful citizens who are forced to use the government’s road monopoly to go about their daily lives.

They keep pushing and they keep pushing. One of these days someone or some group is going to push back.

I’m sure that the residents of these municipalities are completely OK with this whole thing. They did elect the officials which are now raising the fines right? Voting (or not) for someone gives them complete authority over your life it seems.

http://www.usatoday.com/…

Cities and school boards are naming streets and buildings after President Obama, breaking with the tradition of waiting until a president is out of office.

• Ludlum Elementary School in Hempstead, N.Y., on Long Island, was renamed after Obama in November. A school in Portland, Ore., is deliberating a similar change.
• Opa-Locka, Fla., renamed one of its main city streets in December. Hollywood, Fla., is considering doing the same.
• St. Louis made an honorary name change to a busy road that used to divide white and black neighborhoods. The postal address is still Delmar Boulevard, but the city will post signs that also designate the street Barack Obama Boulevard.

The tributes are bound to continue, says Indiana University history professor Edward Linenthal.

“On the one hand, you can say it’s premature,” says Linenthal, editor of the Journal of American History. Obama’s administration has yet to make its own history, he says. “On the other hand, you can argue that what has happened is extraordinary and astonishing in American history … and the naming of streets and schools reflects that sense.”

John Gillis, editor of the book Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, says he does not know of instances of presidents being commemorated while they were in office, let alone before they took office, as some of the changes were.

“This is a trivialization of the serious process of naming,” he says. “This is all hope and no memory. It’s all anticipation and no looking back.”

Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan have been the most popular presidents in the last century for commemorations, Gillis says. Hundreds of schools and civic buildings have been named for them.

Jean Bligen, principal of Barack Obama Elementary School on Long Island, says the idea for the name change came from fifth-graders who had held mock debates before the election and were excited about Obama’s win.

“The children take such pride over the name being changed and knowing they represent such a strong individual,” she says.

Obama is being honored abroad, too. The Associated Press reports that Antigua is renaming 1,300-foot Boggy Peak, its highest spot, Mount Obama.

In Perry County, Ala., where the 1965 killing of a black man by a white state trooper in Marion led to the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, commissioners paid tribute to the president by designating the second Monday in November a legal holiday: Barack Obama Day.

This level of worship is unmatched in US history as I can tell. Especially for someone in office a week. I agree with J.H. Huebert over at LRC blog:

Some libertarians see this as an opportunity for people to be disillusioned when Obama fails, but I don’t. Given these people’s unquestioning adoration for Obama — and his status in their minds as someone as untouchable as Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King — whatever goes wrong will not be his fault, no matter what. Instead, it will be the fault of anyone who has attempted to restrain him in any way. When he fails, they will be ready and willing to give him more power — all that he says he needs.

and:

The children represent him? The myth that our government represents us is bad enough; the idea that people now think we exist to represent our so-called leader is terrifying.

http://www.oaoa.com/…

A police investigation on a fake marijuana grow house may lead to the Odessa American’s website, Odessa Police Lt. Jesse Duarte and Chief Tim Burton suggested.

Duarte said OPD wants to identify posters responding to two previous stories on the raid to see if they can figure out who wrote an anonymous letter alleging a Lotteman Drive house had marijuana growing in it. He said he “couldn’t rule out” the possibility that Kopbusters wrote the letter.

“They’re denying that they wrote the letter, but we have earlier blogs that show that,” Duarte said.

Duarte was one of the investigators involved in the Dec. 4 raid at 232 Lotteman Drive. Duarte and other officers suspected it was a grow house, but when they entered the home they instead found Christmas trees under grow lights and a poster telling them they were being filmed by Kopbusters for a reality TV show.

Kopbusters, according to CEO Barry Cooper, is a new reality TV show that has not yet been available for broadcast but has set out do what they call reverse stings on corrupt narcotics investigators.

Duarte was also involved in the arrest of Yolanda Madden, who Kopbusters claim was framed by police and a police informant who they say planted meth on her. She was convicted of possessing methamphetamine with intent to distribute within 1,000 feet of a park and is serving time in a Bryan federal prison camp.

Duarte said the OPD’s interest in cyber-sleuthing comes from a since-edited post at Kopbusters’ site, nevergetbusted.com, that Duarte said claimed Kopbusters wrote the letter.

Duarte contacted the Odessa American Tuesday to ask how to get the identities of posters on the OA site at oaoa.com.

“We’re following an investigation, and I needed to know some particulars about how your site was set up,” Duarte said.

He didn’t specify any particular screen names he wanted to look up, but he mentioned Kopbusters CEO Barry Cooper and “everyone that is responding” to the two stories.

Neither Duarte, Burton or anyone at the OPD issued a search warrant in connection with the OA website. Burton said however that the site’s posters could be involved in their investigation.

“It (the interest and possible investigation into the OA website) was initiated based upon the events that took place at 232 Lotteman,” Burton said.

Odessa American Editor Laura Dennis said the OA will not release confidential records that indicate e-mail addresses or other information from posters who have registered on the paper’s website to the OPD or anyone else.

“We tell website users that their information is confidential and that it will not be sold or given out. We will stand by that,” Dennis said.

Attorney John Bussian is a First Amendment specialist and is a Freedom Communications attorney. Freedom is the parent company of the Odessa American. Bussian said Tuesday that Freedom recently successfully resisted a subpoena in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., by law enforcement asking the paper to reveal confidential data given to the paper by users who had registered on the paper’s website.

“We have just resisted efforts by law enforcement officers to make the press reveal confidential data provided to us by those posting comments on our websites,” Bussian said. “This is not obstructing justice it is simply asking law enforcement to make the press witnesses of last resort and to demonstrate the things required by the First Amendment before forcing us to reveal these posters,” Bussian said.

Bussian said information given to the OA on the website is confidential.

Yolanda Madden’s father, Raymond Madden, who was in Austin Tuesday, said in a phone interview that he expected the police to want to look into the newspaper’s website. He didn’t seem to be bothered by the prospects.

“They would love to get me,” Madden said. “I mean these guys are desperate.”

Madden hired Kopbusters to help him prove that the OPD framed his daughter. Both Raymond Madden and Kopbusters CEO Cooper claim the OPD raid on the suspected grow house in Odessa proves that the OPD plays fast and loose with the rules because they relied on an anonymous letter to help secure a search warrant.

OPD officials, however, disagree and say that the warrant was legally obtained.

Note the poll on the right.

Here is the story they are referring to.

Barry Cooper called into Free Talk Live Tuesday the 30th, 2008. I’ll post the audio if Ian Bernard posts it tomorrow. Barry has said that the F-bombs in the linked article were fabricated. He apparently told off the reporter after the interview due to him being misrepresented. The reporter reportedly works with the cops.

Krugman Still Wrong After All These Years by Mish Shedlock

Krugman seems particularly proud of a piece he wrote a decade ago. His new remake, Hangover Theorists, is as wrong now as it was then. Let’s take a look.

The hangover theory, which I wrote about a decade ago, is still out there.

The basic idea is that a recession, even a depression, is somehow a necessary thing, part of the process of “adapting the structure of production.” We have to get those people who were pounding nails in Nevada into other places and occupation, which is why unemployment has to be high in the housing bubble states for a while.

The trouble with this theory, as I pointed out way back when, is twofold:

1. It doesn’t explain why there isn’t mass unemployment when bubbles are growing as well as shrinking — why didn’t we need high unemployment elsewhere to get those people into the nail-pounding-in-Nevada business?

2. It doesn’t explain why recessions reduce unemployment across the board, not just in industries that were bloated by a bubble.

One striking fact, which I’ve already written about, is that the current slump is affecting some non-housing-bubble states as or more severely as the epicenters of the bubble. Here’s a convenient table from the BLS, ranking states by the rise in unemployment over the past year. Unemployment is up everywhere. And while the centers of the bubble, Florida and California, are high in the rankings, so are Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas.

So the liquidationists are still with us.

Let’s answer Krugman’s two points in reverse order starting with number 2:

I’m always surprised how simple Austrian economic theory is and yet so many monetarists and Keynesians seem to completely misunderstand it.

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