Michael I. Niman on Rudy:"Giuliani’s disdain for freedom of speech is best exemplified by the case of Robert Lederman, an artist who specializes in drawing caricatures of Giuliani as a dictator and depicting his policies as transforming New York into a police state. Lederman was arrested 40 times during Giuliani’s reign for displaying his art at political demonstrations and on the streets of New York. Lederman was never convicted of a crime. . . .

"Under [Rudy's Zero Tolerance] policy, New Yorkers were handcuffed and dragged off to jail for drinking beer on their front stoops —the New York City equivalent of hanging out on the porch. Marijuana possession arrests increased by well over 4,000 percent. Eventually almost 70,000 people sued the city for police abuses such as strip-searching suspected jaywalkers. In 1999, James Savage, the president of the New York City police union, referred to Giuliani’s zero tolerance policy as a “blueprint for a police state and tyranny.' . . .

"Fashion-wise, [Rudy's Street Crimes Unit] had more resemblance to Guatemala’s notorious military death squads, wearing 'We Own the Night' t-shirts, and shirts citing Ernest Hemingway’s 'There is no hunting like the hunting of man” quote—quite a variation from standard issue uniforms.

"This is the police unit that became notorious for shooting African immigrant Amadou Diallo 40 times as he reached for his wallet after being ordered to show identification. When New Yorkers took to the streets to protest the shooting, Giuliani told the press that people were protesting due to 'their own personal inadequacies.'

"Eventually the Giuliani-sanctioned machismo infected other units in the police department. When undercover officers asked a man on the street to sell them marijuana, the man, Patrick Dorismond, took offense to being called a drug-dealer and got into a scuffle with the unidentified officers, who shot him dead. Giuliani issued a knee-jerk defense of the killers, telling the press that Dorismond was 'no altar boy.' Salon.com pointed out that, in fact, he was an altar boy."

Thanks to Scott Horton.

Radley Balko writes:

In an apparent attempt to drum up support for war with Iran, neocon bulwark Michael Ledeen points readers to pictures of an Iranian drug bust, and comments:

Terrifying pictures, to be sure. For me, the most revealing thing about them is that the police feel obliged to wear masks while conducting a drug bust in the capital. tells you something about the relationship between the people and the state.

Oh, where to begin. Perhaps here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here

In addition to Scott's interview with David Beito, I also recommend Scott's interview with Jim Bovard on the new frightening (and overlooked) changes to the Insurrection Act.

Here's my thoughts on the Warsaw Ghetto and LSD.

Here's my thoughts on Waco, OKC, and the other mid-April massacres at Columbine and VA Tech.

Roderick Long has made one of the strongest set of arguments I've ever seen.

I'm not voting, of course. But I want to see the Republicans lose, and yet I doubt it will do any good. Likely, things will continue to get worse, and I think the libertarian benefits of gridlock are overstated. There are downsides, too, in fact.

See more on my take here, as well as in this addendum.

In Saddam Hussein’s war crimes trial for the 1988 Iraqi “Anfal” campaign that gassed Kurdish villages, his defense lawyers have argued that Iraqi forces were really attempting to strike Iranian forces and the Iraqi Kurdish pesh merga militias that were in and supported by the hamlets. In other words, the lawyers are asserting that the innocent Kurds who were killed were collateral damage in an effort by the Iraqi government to rid its territory of Iranian fighters and their Kurdish allies during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. Curiously, this defense sounds similar to Israel’s defense of killing more than one thousand Lebanese and perpetrating widespread destruction of Shi’ite neighborhoods, apartment houses, water services, electrical power stations, ports, factories, roads, and bridges in Lebanon in its efforts to punish Hezbollah. Yet Saddam Hussein is on trial for war crimes and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is still in office.

Read the rest of Ivan Eland's newest op-ed.

Bill Walker over at LewRockwell.com nails it, as he takes on the economic, cultural and other arguments for leviathan to"do something" about illegal immigration:

Libertarians should have learned by now to be a little suspicious when politicians offer to solve our problems with the use of minefields and secret police. Especially when it’s the same politicians who created the problems in the first place.

We laugh at the stupidity of our ancestors, who sincerely believed that Irish were all lazy drunks, Jews had low IQs, Chinese could not be doctors, etc. We now know that Irish are very productive drunks, Jews have inherently high IQs (the fact that their mothers make them study hard can’t have anything to do with it, of course), and only Chinese or Indians can be doctors or scientists (math courses are too much work for white students). However, as with any other area of life, these things are more accurately discovered by market processes rather than by a large secret police bureaucracy.

There are two legitimate worries about immigration. One is that the Mexican culture will produce millions who will vote for more government. This is a little funny, because it wasn’t illegal immigrants who voted us into socialism; it was our own English-speaking great-grandfathers who voted for FDR. Mexicans don’t even control their OWN country’s policies; Mexican (or any Third World nation’s) politics is always dominated by the faction that gets the most US foreign aid.

I highly recommend that everyone read the whole thing.

Keith Halderman has recently pointed out the partisan nature of criticism of government abuses. I discuss this issue in my new LRC article, in memory of the Waco disaster 13 years ago and in reflection of the bipartisanship of American tyranny.