Rather disappointing to see this POV on the LP's blog. It's not quite 180 degrees bass-ackward from a proper libertarian position, but almost.

It's true that Cynthia McKinney isn't special and shouldn't receive special treatment just because she's a congresscritter. But that's as far as it goes.

It's not true that she should have been charged for her actions -- because nobody should be charged for such actions.

Ms. McKinney was assaulted by a uniformed thug who receives his paycheck in the form of money stolen from the American taxpayer.

She was assaulted by said thug because she had not walked through a metal detector so that said thug could verify that she was not exercising her inalienable and constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms.

The LP should stand up for the right of everyone to not be assaulted, even (or especially) if the assailant is wearing the gang colors of the most powerful criminal organization in the area and attempting to conduct an illegal/unconstitutional search. The LP should even stand up for the rights of congresscritters who are treated as "special" and not subjected to such assaults and searches as frequently as "regular" folks.

Tom,

feeling quite frisky today, are we?

Ms. McKinney was assaulted by a uniformed thug who receives his paycheck in the form of money stolen from the American taxpayer.

all taxation is theft, huh?

The alternative is to leave the Capitol unguarded
with a "open border" around it, I guess. I dont like the Fuzz anymore than you do, but I do think
important american buildings with our elected representives inside like the Capitol and the White House ( complete with Presidents, Senators, and Congresscritters should be watched over.

Kn@ppster:

Ordinarily I would be sympathetic to your viewpoint. But in this instance it is not valid. The legislators are the one's who hired these "thugs" as you refer to them and they are they one who set the rules and gave themselves special priviledges. Cynthia McKinney is well known as an arrogant "pick your favorite expletive". She was not wearing her Congressional pin, as in the rules that Congress itself set. Plus her hairstyle had recently changed. Frankly, if anything happened wrong it was by the "thug" for not fulfilling his obligations. When she tried to evade him, and then attacked him and with no clear identification , he should have tackled her and placed her in custody, handcuffs and all, until she produced a Congressional pin or some other proof of her identity. Once she complied, then, and only then, should he have released her.

I would not normally advocate this, but in this case, Congress set these rules themselves, hired these "thugs", so they should be required to live by the consequences thereof.

Tim,

Even leaving aside the fact that yes, all taxation is theft, your analyis just doesn't work:

"The alternative is to leave the Capitol unguarded
with a 'open border' around it, I guess. I dont like the Fuzz anymore than you do, but I do think
important american buildings with our elected representives inside like the Capitol and the White House ( complete with Presidents, Senators, and Congresscritters should be watched over."

OK, so have Capitol Police to "watch over" the buildings. Those buildings are still public property, and keeping and bearing arms while entering them (which it is the purpose of the metal detector barrier to prevent) IS NOT A CRIME.

Even if the Capitol Police are not thugs by virtue of being paid in stolen funds, they are thugs by virtue of acting illegally. If they were patrolling the halls and intervening to stop assault, robbery, etc., that would be one thing ... but if your job is to spend 8 hours a day, five days a week violating constitutionally protected rights, then You. Are. A. Criminal.

Of course, so is McKinney, although less of a criminal than most -- she votes with Ron Paul 80% of the time, which is more often than any of the Republican members of Paul's "Liberty Committee."

Tom Knapp

Cynthia McKinney's Lifetime Congressional rating as compiled on the Liberty Index.

Personal Liberty, 40%. Economic Liberty, 19%.

Overall lifetime score, 29.5% which ranks her officially as a lifetime statist.

In four different sessions of Congress, her session score dropped so low she officially received the dreaded Authoritarian rating. In five sessions she rated Statist, one session Centrist and one session Liberal.

In any event, she is no friend of Liberty. So I don't have the slightest bit of sympathy for her.

Mark B.,

There are lots of ways to categorize congresscritters, and I agree that McKinney is not especially pro-freedom (few congresscritters are).

However, the Liberty Index (an annual ratings compendium put together by the Republican Liberty Caucus) is an exceptionally poor tool for determining the "libertarianness" of a congresscritter.

For example, last year's Liberty Index (the 2006 one is allegedly complete, but I haven't seen it on the web yet), included nine US Senators on its "top ten most libertarian congresscritters" list. Of those nine, 8 voted last week to amend the US constitution in order to impose federal regulation on the definition of marriage.

In recent years, the Liberty Index has rated John McCain as a "Libertarian" several times (his lifetime ratings is "Enterpriser," the category just below "Libertarian"). Republican leaders such as Trent Lott, Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum (who explicitly rejects, disdains and attacks libertarianism) have appeared on its "top ten."

The "Liberty Index" is not a tool for you or I to find out "how libertarian" a politician is. It is a tool for the RLC to promote the false claim that Republicans are "libertarian" at all.

Regards,
Tom Knapp

Kn@ppster:

I agree with you that the ratings are most likely, indeed most probably, skewed in the direction of pushing more Republicans into the Enterpriser, Libertarian category. Interestingly enough, this actually BOLSTERS my claims about Representative McKinney.

To skew the results to accomplish the objective aforestated, the RLC would have had only one available method. That is, a very selective choice of which votes would be used to compile the Index. They would avoid votes where Republicans en masse voted neo-conservative in support of the administration. Rather, they would choose more obscure votes where members voted on individual conscience. However, such a method would tend to cause ALL members ratings to be skewed higher to at least some extent. So the five sessions in which Representative McKinney scored statist, if they had been scored in a non-skewed manner may very well have ended up scored authoritarian.

Bottom line is, you are correct in your assertion that the Index is skewed for the benefit of Republicans, but it is not totally without merit, IF you take it with a discerning eye.

I actually like their chart, better than the original Advocates chart, in that it makes it harder to be scored a pure Libertarian, but I would agree that an outside group doing the scoring, rather than Republicans, would be better. Ideally, EVERY recorded vote taken in Congress should be scored for purposes of the chart.

The headline to this post is extremely misleading.

Does a grand jury's decision not to indict imply the target of the grand jury investigation got away with a crime?

I suppose I will have to say what others are unwilling to say, even though it is obvious. Congresswoman McKinney, black. Most of D.C. population, black. Grand Jury, black. Officer McKenna, white. Indictment, no.

Got the picture???

Mark,

I'm not sure I agree with your assessment of RLC's methodology in creating the "Liberty Index." It's actually a matter I plan to study with respect to both that index and the one produced by the "Freedom Democrats."

A quick first take, however: The RLC lists the votes it graded on for its 2005 index. Among those are several votes on which I contend that there is either a) no basis for deriving a "libertarian quotient" from voting either way, or b) a basis for argument that the RLC's position was the anti-libertarian position, not the libertarian position.

Those particular votes is that they were, in fact, cast largely along party lines, and that the RLC "bump" applied to the Republican side of the party-line vote.

The opposite is also almost certainly true -- that there were votes cast along party lines which would have "bumped up" Democrats, but which were not graded on the Liberty Index -- IMO, precisely because they would have done so.

For example, take income tax.

When congress considers a cut in the top rate, it's a tax cut, i.e. it's libertarian. Republicans vote for it and get a bump up on the RLC's index. Democrats vote against it and get a bump down.

On the other hand, when congress considers increasing the threshold of exempt income, it's a tax cut, i.e. it's libertarian. Democrats vote for it. Republicans vote against it ... and the RLC ignores it.

I think the truth is that we're probably just not going to find more than one or two congresscritters of either party who are really very libertarian. After that, it's a matter of prettifying one's preferred pigs.

Regards,
Tom Knapp

Mark B.,

It's uplifting to see such a strong faith in the jury system.

Are you privy to the Grand Jury transcripts? Do you even know who the witnesses were? Do you know the racial composition of this Grand Jury. Do you know their political/social/religious backgrounds?

There are many facts which may have been testified to in the Grand Jury proceedings that we are completely unaware of. The statistical data of predominately black juries' disposition to convict black defendents and sentence them to death on capital crimes would seem to run contrary to your allegations.

Just what are you basing these assumptions on, other than unsubstantiated racial generalisations which are hurtful to America?

There is a time when pure cynicism is healthy and now is one of those times. We already went through this whole thing once with O.J. Simpson. Jury didn't even make a pretense of deliberating, spending only three hours or so before handing O.J. his walking papers. D.C.'s population is extremely poor for the most part and are long time patrons of the Federal Government.

I HAVE seen the available evidence and there was definately grounds for obtaining an indictment. I am not talking about a conviction mind you, just the indictment. If the circumstances of the incident were more nebulous, I would have accepted the Grand Juries refusal to indict, but the incident and available evidence was clear cut. There refusal was about race not the actual evidence. Just as wrong as when 1960's white juries refused to convict white defendents who killed black victims.

Unfortunately, there is still plenty of racism in the United States. It exists equally on both sides. Plenty of racist attitudes with blacks against whites as well as whites against blacks. I won't pretend it doesn't exist.

I believe strongly in equal protection before the law. Due to racist overtones, Cynthia McKinney got undue favoritism, not equal protection.

I can only hope that her voters punish her in 2006 as they did in 2002. She was voted out of Congress when her behavior became unacceptable to even her extremely left leaning handpicked voters. Perhaps it will be so this time. You would think that having gotten that rare second chance in politics in 2004 she would have moderated her behavior, but guess not.

Mark B.,

You persist:

"I HAVE seen the available evidence and there was definately grounds for obtaining an indictment."

Indictment for what?

That her assailant assaulted her before she defended herself is, so far as I know, undisputed.

The fact that he was wearing a badge, far from making her self-defense an arrestable offense, merely puts him in more hot water, under USC Title 18, Chapter 242 (Violation of Rights Under Color of Law), since her assailant's purported purpose was to conduct an illegal search for the purpose of illegally preventing her from keeping and bearing arms.

Mark,

I may well have had problems convicting OJ, if i'd been on that jury. It seemed to me that the LAPD had a cavalier attitude regardintg the 4th amendment, as well about telling the truth under oath when queried about the warrantless intrusion.

When Van Adder looked straight into the eyes of the defense attorney and said that "OJ wasn't a suspect" when they decided to go warrantless over his house's fence, but instead, they feared for his safety; he was lying.

OJ could have been on the moon at the time of the homicides, and the first police response in the investigation would have been to look for the contract hit.

This isn't racist, horrible murders of estranged spouses often turn out to have been committed by the spouse, but the LAPD should not have been cowboys, and they certainly should not lie under oath about their investigation of a crime scene.

It poisoned a great deal of the state's case, and cast a huge shadow of doubt over the trial.

An ugly double murder like Simpson/Goldman gets the phone ringing of whichever judge is on call that night, and a quick description of the crime would have received a verbal affirmation to engage in a search. In a city like LA, the whole process can probably be completed in less than a half hour.

This showed that LAPD had learned nothing since Daryl Gates had been run out as police chief, and that they still felt themselves to be above the law.