Former members of the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Party have been arrested on charges related to a 1971 murder of a police officer.

Police say they have new evidence including a fingerprint recovered from a lighter in 2003 using new techniques and forsenics from a shotgun and buckshot - yet they lost the shotgun in question for several years. And, oh yeah, there’s testimony from an informer.

An unidentified informant, who was provided with immunity from prosecution and financial assistance for housing relocation, identified the men responsible for the attack in 2005.

Ya, I bet he’s reliable and trustworthy…

Two of the men arrested had the charges thrown out in 1976 because the judge said police tortured them.

PSL and Anarkismo detail the flimsy evidence, attempts to trash the Panthers legacy, and more.

Hey, could they have done it? It’s possible I suppose, but this case, with torture, lost evidence, compromised informants, and new charges filed decades later is stinky indeed.

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Apple subpoenaed bloggers over reports that had been posted about a new Apple product claiming they weren’t entitled to First Amendment protections. (Say what? And why wouldn’t they be entitled such protections.)

Happily, the court sided with the journalists and told Apple to pay their court costs plus a 2.2 multiplier.

In a crucial, maybe landmark part of the decision

The Court upheld the rights of online journalists to protect their confidential sources and putting them on par with traditional print journalists. In its ruling, the appeals court said that bloggers and webmasters are no different in their protections than a reporter and editor for print publications.

This should serve as a warning to other companies who might also wish to shred freedom of the press to serve their short-term gain and greed. Why anyone thinks Apple is an enlightened company is beyond me. Recently there’s been options manipulations involving Jobs, a flaky product (the Macbook) that locks up randomly and their response primarily has been to stonewall, now this ugly attempt to curb constitutional freedoms. Yuck.

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Several members of Earth Liberation Front face lengthy prison terms, possibly life, for their role in several environmentally motivated firebombings and destruction of buildings. The goverment says they are “terrorist” thus the possibly extremely harsh sentences. Ordinary arson just gets you a few years in prison. But if the arson is politically motivated then it becomes way more serious legally.

AlterNet has a thoughtful piece on this using it as a way to discuss if and when violence is ever justified.

The Question of Violence sometimes gets discussed in political circles. Should violence be used? If so, when? Hey, the US was founded on violent revolution, so our founding fathers apparently thought it justifiable sometimes. But that doesn’t mean that a fringe group adopting it as a tactic won’t end up in prison or dead. As Saul Alinsky famously said in the 60’s about the Black Panthers, it’s lunacy to say all political power grows out of the barrel of a gun when the other side has all the guns. But there’s also state-sponsored violence (and lots of it) and sometimes people choose to fight back using “any means necessary” calling it self-defense. So when does that become justifiable?

I’m guessing the defendants were influenced by or are fellow travelers with Green Anarchy and the ideas of John Zerzan.

Their central precept is not that civilization needs to be reconstructed, but rather that it needs to be overthrown in its entirety and never replaced. Things started to go wrong, they contend, when humans first domesticated plants and animals.

Well, the door to the Garden of Eden is closed. We can’t go back. And maybe Eden wasn’t all that idyllic in the first place. The best way to create mass change is by creating mass movements, and that requires mass organizing. That’s the flaw I see in anarchist thought. If you want to be without rules and hierarchies, then mass action can’t happen because there’s no structure to organize it, guide it, and make it happen.

The article closes by wondering if the defendants will eventually be seen as abolitionist John Brown is now, as a symbol of a movement that grew in power until it changed the country, even though they paid dearly for it.

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John McCain was completely for the war when not opposing it. He says the extreme Religious Right are abhorrent except when for when he praises them.

Repeat as needed on most any issue.

website (with videos)

blog

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Ed Brown of New Hampshire was convicted of federal tax evasion. He’s barricaded himself in his home saying he’s ready for an ‘armed standoff.’ Supporters, generally of the homegrown prickly libertarian type that New Hamphire readily produces, are rallying around him.

He claims income taxes are illegal, a oft-tried and never successful defense. Wesley Snipes recently got indicted for attempting the same kind of thing. Taxes may be unfair, they may be onerous, but claiming they are illegal makes CPA’s like my wife wince because such defenses are doomed to failure.

Brown has accused at least one person who was helping him of being a government agent and threw him out of his house. Paranoia strikes deep, indeed. This caused the editor of the Keene Free Press to say she no longer wants to be out at his house even though she supports him.

Background

Let’s hope police wait him out, and that’s there no assault on the house.

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