Raising money has also been tough for little-known Republican presidential candidate Gary Johnson. The former New Mexico governor has called his own fundraising pathetic. Johnson is hoping to jump-start his campaign at a unique political event winding down now in the mountains of New Hampshire. It is the Porcupine Freedom Festival, or Porcfest, and it’s an offshoot of the Free State Project, a movement to colonize the Live Free or Die state with people who believe government should do no more than protect individual rights. (more…)
After sitting in court quietly for around 20 minutes, a court security officer walked up to Beau in the middle of a trial and told him he should remove his hat.
The judge took notice of the hat moments later and called a recess with the ultimatum “If you still have the hat on when I come back, I’m going to hold you in contempt.”
The video picks up during this recess.
He was later brought back before Judge Burke and sent to jail for 5 days for this.
Julian Heicklen, who has been arrested over thirty times for civil disobedience and noncooperation, will be doing jury nullification outreach at Cheshire superior court today from 11:45am-1:15pm. Be sure to come out and meet him.
Cheshire superior court is the same court that a man self-immolated in front of two weeks ago, due to his frustrations with the “justice” system.
The United States Supreme Court just ruled that an individual facing civil commitment for failure to pay child support does not have an automatic right to a lawyer.
“The 14th Amendment’s due process clause allows a state to provide fewer procedural protections to civil contempt defendants than in a criminal case, which is governed by the Sixth Amendment,” said Justice Stephen Breyer.
As someone who has arrested and caused the imprisonment of quite a few people for child support warrants, two questions always floated in my mind.
First, it costs a county roughly $30,000 a year to imprison someone. That’s about $82 a day. During this time the individual obviously cannot work, find work, or do anything productive. The children the individual is supposed to be supporting isn’t receiving any money either. Wouldn’t that $82/day better be spent feeding, clothing, or housing a child?
Second, civil commitment for child support really is a debtor prison. Didn’t this country allegedly abolished them in the 1800’s?
HB147, which expands the application of the death penalty in New Hampshire, unfortunately passed a few weeks ago— but not without a fight. Representative Steve Vaillancourt, a Republican from Manchester and a self-described “Free Stater before there was a Free State movement,” spoke passionately against the bill. You can see the speech 34 minutes into his latest episode of More Politically Alert:
(Vaillancourt mentions that a bill to abolish the death penalty passed the house during the last session. That bill, HB556, was introduced by Keene representative Steve Lindsey.)
Here’s the story that NPR is running on the 2011 Porcupine Freedom Festival.
