The local Keene PTA hosted a “Candidates Meet and Greet” on March 4th at Jonathan Daniels elementary school. All eight school board hopefuls showed up to argue their case to an audience of about 50. Eleven of those were pro-liberty activists. Despite climbing tuition costs and a declining student population, many of the would-be board members promised they would bring more of the same if elected. Three of those candidates, Ian Freeman, Conan Salada, and Darryl Perry, brought an altogether different message to the table.
A couple months later, Kelly, Derrick J, and I teamed up with Miami photojournalist Carlos Miller and paid a visit to the court on official court business. Sheriff Foote refused to return calls from us, which is what he was demanding in his order before we’d be allowed on the public property for which we’re all forced to pay. All three of us were arrested and Carlos was threatened by Sheriff Caleb Dodson.
Due to facing multiple charges from multiple arrests, Derrick made the tough choice of taking a plea, but Kelly and I didn’t have the same weight of charges on us and we knew we were in the right and the trespass order was wrong, so we pressed on. County attorney David Lauren met with us and offered a pretty sweet plea deal – he’d drop the charge to a violation level (it was being charged as a Class A with up to a year in jail the possible penalty) offense and it’d be a $250 fine, suspended on condition of good behavior. I was out of jail on a nine-month suspended sentence from my last conviction and if I received another misdemeanor conviction I could go back to jail for the remaining nine months. Despite that looming threat, I refused the plea, as did Kelly, and the matter was to continue to trial.
Now, several months after that hearing, Keene district court’s judge Edward Burke has made the right decision. He has ruled in an order that the no-trespass orders, as applied to me and Kelly Voluntaryist, are unconstitutional and dismissed the cases against us! (more…)
All of a sudden, Grafton is back in the news. Looks like the liberty activist community has been quietly growing there and getting organized – to the point where at a recent town meeting activists voted to put a ballot measure on to reduce the town budget 10%. The aggressors are worried. Here’s the story from local mainstream mouthpiece Valley News:
By Jim Kenyon
Grafton — At last month’s deliberative session, “Free Staters” and their allies scored a victory by getting preliminary approval for a major cut in town spending. On Town Meeting Day, voters will go to the polls to decide whether the proposed budget reduction of more than $128,000 will stick.
The proposal represents a budget cut of either 10 percent or 13 percent, depending on whether the Free Staters’ or Selectboard’s figures are used. Either way, if voters uphold the cut, “it certainly won’t be trivial and people are definitely going to notice it,” said Selectman David Rienzo. “I think it would be better for the town if people rejected the Free Staters’ budget.” (more…)
Dave Ridley gives some critical analysis to recent comment controversies. Mark Warden, a state representative from Manchester, found himself under criticism after remarks made during a hearing were reported on by the Granite State Progress blog and reposted further. Part I, The Hunt for Controversial Comments is On:
This comes in the wake of the controversy stirred by Keene representative Cynthia Chase’s comments regarding actively immigrating porcupines. Ridley ambush interviewed Chase in Concord and published the video last week, which is fairly uneventful as she declines comment and moves on. In a sense, the videographer was throwing a softball by asking, ‘Do people get too focused on controversial comments and not enough on people’s actions?’
LRN.FM is cosponsoring a contest with CopBlock.org and CheckpointUSA.org. You could win a Veho Muvi Gumball 3000 Special Edition MUVI HD Camcorder for your video entry that best demystifies roadblocks. Get details here. Here’s Pete announcing the contest:
Yesterday Truthdig and today Dandelion Salad published an article by Christopher Hedges, who was present at Ft Meade during the hearing in which Bradley Manning delivered his first public statement. Journalist Alexa O’Brien has transcribed Manning’s statement which is also published at Dandelion Salad. Below is Hedges’ entry We Are Bradley Manning:
I was in a military courtroom at Fort Meade in Maryland on Thursday as Pfc. Bradley Manning admitted giving classified government documents to WikiLeaks. The hundreds of thousands of leaked documents exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as government misconduct. A statement that Manning made to the court was a powerful and moving treatise on the importance of placing conscience above personal safety, the necessity of sacrificing careers and liberty for the public good, and the moral imperative of carrying out acts of defiance. Manning will surely pay with many years—perhaps his entire life—in prison. But we too will pay. The war against Bradley Manning is a war against us all.
This trial is not simply the prosecution of a 25-year-old soldier who had the temerity to report to the outside world the indiscriminate slaughter, war crimes, torture and abuse that are carried out by our government and our occupation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a concerted effort by the security and surveillance state to extinguish what is left of a free press, one that has the constitutional right to expose crimes by those in power. The lonely individuals who take personal risks so that the public can know the truth—the Daniel Ellsbergs, the Ron Ridenhours, the Deep Throats and the Bradley Mannings—are from now on to be charged with “aiding the enemy.” All those within the system who publicly reveal facts that challenge the official narrative will be imprisoned, as was John Kiriakou, the former CIA analyst who for exposing the U.S. government’s use of torture began serving a 30-month prison term the day Manning read his statement. There is a word for states that create these kinds of information vacuums: totalitarian. (more…)
At the very beginning of 2012, several activists including myself were 
Shortly thereafter, heroic free-speech attorney 
