The Freedom Bulletin

I was watching the O’Reilly Factor last week, and I was not a fan of the nasty things that Bill and his guest, Dick Morris, were saying about Ron Paul. Apparently Cenk Uygur, the host of The Young Turks, feels the same way.

O’Reilly and Morris were calling Paul a hypocrite for complaining about the lack of media coverage of his campaign, while turning down an invitation to appear on the Factor. Paul’s spokesman explained (reasonably, in my opinion) that he couldn’t make it because he was busy campaigning in New Hampshire.

Then O’Reilly said, ”From the very beginning, and we’ve had Ron Paul on this program, I have said to Mr. Paul’s face that some of his positions are insane. That you can’t be an isolated nation the way he wants to be, that bad guys will come and get us unless we get them first. We all know this, except Ron Paul doesn’t.”

Morris added that Paul supporters ”better love Obama because if he ever gets the nomination, they get him for four more years.”

Uygur responded on his own show, ”Ron Paul has been on this show many times…That’s the one politician, agree or disagree with him, that is definitely not afraid of a debate.”

Judging by their comments, Bill O’Reilly and Dick Morris represent the bad kind of conservatism, the kind that automatically goes along with tradition and rejects all different, radical ideas (actually, there are a lot of liberals like this, too). Ron Paul, however, represents true conservatism, the kind that respects the values that America was founded upon: limited government and individual liberty. True conservatives would agree with Paul that the military should only be used to defend our nation from attacks, not to preemptively go to war against anyone who might attack us, as O’Reilly seems to want.

Cenk Uygur is not a conservative, but as Christopher Guzman at CAIVN pointed out, at least he realizes that people of all political persuasions should have the chance to make their views heard.

The New York Daily News has a good story today about a man named Danny Colon, who spent 20 years in jail for two murders that he did not commit. In June, he was finally freed once and for all, when his conviction was overturned by an appeals court and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office (incidentally, the same office that dismissed the attempted rape charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn) decided not to retry him.

On the day his torturous two-decade legal odyssey ended, the squawking sea gulls of Coney Island sounded like a choir of seaside angels to Danny Colon.

“Not like the gulls at Green Haven, circling for food,” said Colon, who spent 16 years inside that state correctional facility. “It’s different sitting on the beach.”

Read the rest here.

Photo by Stephen Jaffe/IMF

Andrea Peyser at the New York Post seems to have something against not only Dominique Strauss-Kahn, but also his wife, Anne Sinclair. Because Sinclair has stood by her husband through all his trials and tribulations, Peyser calls her a “dingbat” and a  ”pathetic doormat” (more than once) and asks “If he could possibly respect her…Can any man respect a woman who allows herself to be used, and reused, like a wrinkled Kleenex?”

As someone who has, admittedly, only been watching this case in the media, I have a lot of respect for Anne Sinclair, and I would imagine Strauss-Kahn does as well. He did publicly thank her after his charges were dismissed, saying, “I am most deeply grateful to my wife and family who have gone through this ordeal with me.”

In addition to being the wife of DSK, Sinclair is a famous journalist in her own right, as well as the granddaughter of Picasso’s art dealer. The two were married in 1991 when they were about 42 years old, and they have no children together, although both have children from previous marriages. Although DSK has a well-deserved reputation for being a womanizer, he has, to his credit, been honest about this to the public and to his wife – warning her before they got married that he was an “incorrigible skirt chaser” - and she doesn’t seem to mind too much. Over the years, Sinclair used her wealth to help finance her husband’s political career and purchase various expensive homes for them to live in, and she came to his rescue when he was arrested in New York, posting his $5 million bail and finding a luxurious townhouse for him to stay at while under house arrest. She has been perhaps his most stalwart supporter, proclaiming his innocence when he was first arrested, appearing at his side at every court hearing, and voicing her anger at the people who turned their backs on him.

I don’t see what’s wrong with any of this. Many people look down on Strauss-Kahn because of his numerous affairs, and possibly also because his and Sinclair’s relationship does not fit the popular (and anti-feminist) ideal that a man should protect and provide for his wife. Successful in her own right and much wealthier than her husband, she seems to love and accept him the way he is, regardless of what the public thinks of him. In other words, she seems to think for herself instead of submitting to society’s ideas of what men and women should be like.

I’m not sure why Peyser equates this with being a “pathetic doormat” and “allowing herself to be used.” Would it be better to mindlessly go along with what society tells women they should value in a man? Quite the contrary. Anne Sinclair is a very admirable person. She is more of a feminist than the hordes of people who automatically condemned Strauss-Kahn as a rapist, and far more intelligent, classy, and respectable than a mean-spirited tabloid columnist like Andrea Peyser.

While the country is all in a dither about Hurricane Irene, Ron Paul, as usual, has his own, liberty-minded point of view on the issue:

“We should be like 1900; we should be like 1940, 1950, 1960. I live on the Gulf Coast; we deal with hurricanes all the time. Galveston is in my district. There’s no magic about FEMA. They’re a great contribution to deficit financing and quite frankly they don’t have a penny in the bank. We should be coordinated but coordinated voluntarily with the states. A state can decide. We don’t need somebody in Washington.”

Watch the video from MSNBC.

Maybe it’s just me, but the past couple of months seem to have been better than average for defendants…or depending on how you look at it, worse for prosecutors.

A couple of days ago, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned the murder conviction of a businessman named Thomas Toolan III, who was convicted in 2007 of stabbing his ex-girlfriend, Elizabeth Lochtefeld, to death on Nantucket. The case received a good deal of publicity, and the court concluded that jurors were not properly questioned on their exposure to the media coverage. It also didn’t help that Nantucket has a population of around 11,000, making it difficult to find jurors with no personal connection to the case.

Justice Margot Bostford wrote, “Given the nature of the publicity, especially in combination with the circumstance of the trial taking place within the small island community of Nantucket and the victim’s connection to it, we simply cannot say with confidence that the defendant was tried by an impartial adjudicator and found guilty based solely on evidence presented at trial.”

Read more at the Wall Street Journal, Cape Cod Times, and Boston Globe.

Google agreed today to pay $500 million to the federal government because it allowed Canadian pharmacies to use its advertising services. The problem, according to the government, is that the drugs from Canada sold on these websites are not subject to FDA approval and might even be available without a prescription.

But in a truly free society, this should not be a problem. Companies should not be able to deceive their customers by exaggerating the benefits or hiding the risks of their products. But this doesn’t mean that people should only be allowed to have the medications that the government has determined are safe. People have a right to buy medications from other countries if they want to, including those that are risky or unproven, and people certainly have a right to make their own decisions about what medications to put into their bodies, with or without a doctor’s input.

The investigation into Google is just another example of how the FDA – in particular the Durham-Humphrey Amendment, which made it illegal to obtain many medicines without a doctor’s permission – unjustly takes away people’s liberties.

Photo by Philippe Grangeaud, via the Socialist Party on Flickr

Dominique Strauss-Kahn is officially free. At a hearing at 11:30 this morning in New York County Supreme Court, Judge Michael Obus granted the District Attorney’s motion to dismiss the sexual assault charges against him. Before the hearing, he denied a motion by the lawyer of his alleged victim, Nafissatou Diallo, to disqualify the D.A.’s office from the case and appoint a special prosecutor. Diallo’s lawyer, Kenneth Thompson, then appealed this ruling. But an appeals court quickly agreed with Judge Obus’s decision. Although DSK is still facing a civil lawsuit by Diallo and an investigation into another attempted rape accusation in his homeland of France, he must be very relieved indeed to have the New York case, and the possibility of a 25-year prison sentence, go away.

This is what DSK had to say about the dismissal of the charges:

“These past two and a half months have been a nightmare for me and my family. I want to thank all the friends in France and in the United States who have believed in my innocence, and to the thousands of people who sent us their support personally and in writing. I am most deeply grateful to my wife and family who have gone through this ordeal with me. … We will have nothing further to say about this matter and we look forward to returning to our home and resuming something of a more normal life.”

According to his lawyer, William Taylor, he will get his passport back tomorrow and will travel to his house in Washington before going home to Paris.

And of course, there were lots of protesters outside the courthouse shouting and holding signs that said things like “DSK woman hater,” “DSK U Dirty Dog,” “Strauss-Kahn International Rapist,” “More like the great abuser,” “Money buys rape in America,” “No matter how rich you are rape is still rape,” “The war on women in NYC must stop,” “We will no longer tolerate our status as second class citizens,” and “We demand safety and justice for all women & girls in NYC.”

Apparently these people do not understand that defendants have a right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The evidence against Strauss-Kahn was absolutely not enough to justify calling him a rapist. And for the people complaining about a supposed “war on women,” I don’t get how it amounts to a “war on women” for the D.A. to investigate the case and then dismiss the charges when there is not enough evidence. True feminists believe that men and women should be treated equally, which means making an impartial decision about people’s credibility without regard to their gender. To automatically trust a woman’s word over a man’s is just as sexist as the reverse.

I am glad that DSK is free. I hope that he will be able to return to a somewhat normal life, repair his reputation which was so unjustly destroyed, and perhaps even participate in finance or politics again.

Sources: NY Post, NY Daily News, NY Times, LA Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian