This kind of thing really has to stop:

LIMA — Two robbers who broke into Luther Ricks Sr.’s house this summer may have not gotten his life savings he had in a safe, but after the FBI confiscated it he may not get it back.

Ricks has tried to get an attorney to fight for the $402,767 but he has no money. Lima Police Department officers originally took the money from his house but the FBI stepped in and took it from the Police Department. Ricks has not been charged with a crime and was cleared in a fatal shooting of one of the robbers but still the FBI has refused to return the money, he said.

“They are saying I have to prove I made it,” he said.

Because Ricks had some pot in the house, the government’s position is that they can take the money under civil forfeiture rules — even though Ricks has not been charged with or convicted of any crime. The burden of proof is on Ricks; he must prove the money is legally his, and that he is innocent of wrongdoing. The FBI, the story notes, will likely want receipts; since Ricks and his wife accumulated their nest egg over a working life — he’s 61 — it’s a pretty good bet they don’t have every single pay stub.

Due process? Justice? Neither apply in forfeiture cases. Does this bother you? It should.

The Republican Party would have you believe they’re all about state’s rights and minimal Federal intervention, but this is really only true when it suits them. Case in point: Bush’s EPA has just quashed 17 states’ attempts to reduce further automotive greenhouse gas emissions.

More here.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California said the states would go to federal court to reverse the E.P.A. decision.

“It is disappointing that the federal government is standing in our way and ignoring the will of tens of millions of people across the nation,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said. “We will continue to fight this battle.”

He added, “California sued to compel the agency to act on our waiver, and now we will sue to overturn today’s decision and allow Californians to protect our environment.”

Twelve other states — New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington — had proposed standards like California’s, and the governors of Arizona, Colorado, Florida and Utah said they would do the same.

If the waiver had been granted and the 16 other states had adopted the California standard, it would have covered at least half of all vehicles sold in the United States.

Thank God for Chris Dodd. Reid’s pulled the bill.

Fortunately, Chris Dodd has balls, and is filibustering the immunity bill.

This’ll just be a roundup, since I don’t have time to do the entry I’d meant to do on this.

Romney attempted to answer the broad questions about his faith and how he’d handle it in office recently, and made more than casual attempts to paint himself as a sort of JFK figure in the process. Kennedy, as you may recall, gave a similar speech to the Greater Houston MInisterial Association in 1960 (right here in Houston) wherein he attempted to put to rest worries that a Catholic president would be little more than the Vatican’s proxy.

The primary problem with Mitt as Jack in this situation, though, is the message of either speech. As Maureen Dowd put it:

The problem with Mitt is not his religion; it is his overeager policy shape-shifting. He did not give a brave speech, but a pandering one. Disguised as a courageous, Kennedyesque statement of principle, the talk was really just an attempt to compete with the evolution-disdaining, religion-baiting Huckabee and get Baptists to concede that Mormons are Christians.

“J.F.K.’s speech was to reassure Americans that he wasn’t a religious fanatic,” Mr. [Jon] Krakauer [author of Under the Banner of Heaven, a history of Mormanism] agreed. “Mitt’s was to tell evangelical Christians, ‘I’m a religious fanatic just like you.'”

Fred Clark has more, mostly analyzing Romney’s charming but hopeless and frighteningly wrong cuplet “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.”

That’s a nice bit of parallelism. It pleases the ear even as it disturbs the brain. In a formal sense, the statement is valid. The first part is not true “just as” the second part is not true.

Romney repeatedly says in his speech that his topic is religious liberty and his own faith. Given that, it’s not surprising that he would argue that “freedom” and “religion” are compatible or complementary. But he goes beyond that, arguing that each requires the other — that religion is necessary for freedom and that freedom is necessary for religion.

Let’s deal with the latter assertion first: “religion requires freedom.” There are far too many counter-examples for this to be true. Think of China, where the government denies religious freedom to millions of Christians and Falun Gong adherents and Tibetan Buddhists. Yet despite this lack of freedom, despite this active oppression — and, in a way, in response to this oppression — these faiths are all thriving. This is what the early Christian theologian Tertullian was getting at when he said, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” Religion can survive, and thrive, in the absence of freedom.

and more:

But as potentially troubling and unfactual as the latter part of Romney’s assertion is, the first part of it is worse.

“Freedom requires religion,” Romney said. Had he said, “Freedom requires religious freedom,” then I would agree, absolutely. […]

But Romney did not say that freedom requires religious freedom. He said, “Freedom requires religion.” And that’s a contradictory statement — a very different, and very frightening, thing.

If freedom requires religion, then the a-religious and irreligious, the non-religious and un-religious are the enemies of freedom. Romney believes, in other words, that atheism is incompatible with freedom. Whatever it is he means by “religious liberty,” he does not believe it can safely be applied to atheists.

Keep in mind that this is Mitt “double Guantanamo” Romney talking — he’s made it clear what he wants to do to those he regards as the enemies of freedom.

The Agitator has much to say as we near the 6th anniversary of Cory Maye‘s “crime,” which amounts to defending himself and his child against unknown assailants breaking down the door to enter his home in the dead of night. On the day after Christmas, 2001, Maye was asleep in his home when a drug task force broke into his home with a no-knock warrant. First through the door was Ron Jones, who did not identify himself as a policeman.

Maye shot him dead before the cops managed to make clear who they were, and was quickly railroaded to Mississippi’s Death Row before his sentence was reduced last year on appeal. If nothing changes, Maye will spend the rest of his life in prison for defending his family against a home invader he had no way of knowing wasn’t his drug-addled neighbor.

White House press secretary Dana Perino has no idea what the Cuban Missile Crisis was.

The copyright cartel has managed to get a bill introduced that would create a whole new Federal copyright protection department as well as provide for drastically higher fines and — get this — civil forfiture of computer equipment involved in infringement even if the owner is not convicted. This is a scary mirror of a questionable practice from the ill-considered drug war; under no circumstances should assets be seizable without a finding of guilt.

So much for the Shining City on the Hill, human rights, respect for law, or any of the other qualities we insist make the US different: Evidence of Innocence Rejected at Guantanamo:

U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green, who was privy to the classified record of the tribunal’s decision-making about [German citizen] Kurnaz in 2004, concluded in January 2005 that his treatment provided powerful evidence of bias against prisoners, and she deemed the proceedings illegal under U.S. and international law. But her ruling, which depicted the allegations against Kurnaz as unsubstantiated and as an inappropriate basis for keeping him locked up, was mostly classified at the time.

In newly released passages, however, Green’s ruling reveals that the tribunal members relied heavily on a memo written by a U.S. brigadier general who noted that Kurnaz had prayed while the U.S. national anthem was sung in the prison and that he expressed an unusual interest in detainee transfers and the guard schedule. Other documents make clear that U.S. intelligence officials had earlier concluded that Kurnaz, who went to Pakistan shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to visit religious sites, had simply chosen a bad time to travel.

The process is “fundamentally corrupted,” said Baher Azmy, a professor at Seton Hall Law School who represents Kurnaz. “All of this just reveals that they had the wrong person and they knew it.”

Kurnaz was eventually released, in August of 2006, but only after German Chancellor Angela Merkel made him a priority. There is no reason to believe his five-year plight was unique, and newly declassified documents surrounding his case make it clear that innocents at Gitmo will have a hard time indeed getting released, since the process to “try” them is so heavily biased against them. Detainees are still unable to see all the evidence against them, and in some cases are denied the right to even now who said they were terrorists. It’s Kafkaesque, and is representative of the worst impulses of a power-mad administration.