So, Carla Howell got another voter referendum on the ballot in Massachusetts to completely repeal the state’s personal income tax. The last one, in 2002, was defeated, but with a remarkably high Yes vote (55% No-45% Yes). Voter polls show that this year’s ballot issue currently has only about 45% of the voters in the state against it, and about the same number for it, with the deciding margin still undecided.

Howell is spearheading the campaign on behalf of a ballot initiative that would cut the state income tax, currently at 5.3 percent, to 2.65 percent in 2009 and then do away with it entirely the next year.

Howell claims that eliminating the income tax would put an average of $3,600 in the pocket of every taxpayer, every year. … If the income tax is eliminated, the overall state budget, totaling $26.8 billion this fiscal year, would be cut by about 40 percent—reducing it to $17 billion, or what the state government ran on in 1995, according to Howell.

— Gabrielle Gurley, CommonWealth (Winter 2008): Voters get another shot at erasing the state income tax

Let’s watch how Michael J. Widmer, who spent at least ten years of his life drawing a tax-funded salary from the Massachusetts state government and now presides over the tax-exempt Massachusetts Taxpayers’ Foundation, reacts:

The president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, who single-handedly led the charge against the first repeal effort and debated Howell several times, plans on building a coalition of groups to oppose the question this year. … Since the question did so well the last time, Widmer isn't surprised to see that it's bounced back. But Widmer argues that Massachusetts can ill afford to see $12 billion in fiscal 2009 revenues disappear into thin air.

— Gabrielle Gurley, CommonWealth (Winter 2008): Voters get another shot at erasing the state income tax

Please keep in mind that, in the minds of people like Michael Widmer, the Massachusetts state government, and most of the professional blowhards who report and comment on their views, if the government doesn’t take $3,600 a year out of a worker’s paycheck, that money just vanishes into thin air.

You might have thought that money not taken out of your paycheck actually just goes to somebody other than who the government says it must go to — that is, first to the worker herself, and then, secondarily, toward whatever needs projects that worker may have, like her or her children’s education, retirement savings, healthcare, food, rent…. But from the state’s-eye view, those little projects of hers are worth nothing or less; unless that money passes through the hands of political appropriators and government bureaucrats, it may as well not exist, and it’s surely never going to do a lick of good for anybody or anything that counts (in the reckoning of the state).

If nobody is in charge of distributing all the food, how will Paris ever get fed?

Trigger warning. The following video of a local news story may be triggering for experiences of sexual assault.

Stark County Sheriff Timothy A. Swanson:

Will a local television channel try to defame the Stark County Sheriff's Office over yet another story? Swanson said in a prepared statement Monday. Will the truth be told to the citizens or is there just a sensationalist aspect trying to be conveyed while creating another story?

… With the media, there has been a lot of misinformation, Swanson said. We follow all guidelines by the Bureau of Adult Detention to avoid such actions and we following them to the tee.

… Swanson contends that his deputies followed procedures when handling Steffey.

… Each individual knows how difficult it was getting into the profession and the difficulty meeting the requirements set forth day to day in their chosen careers, the release said. They constantly meet the required training, refresh themselves on changing laws, complete any and all mandated requirements placed on them by either the Federal, State or their own agency.

Swanson said there may have been 20 or 30 incidents like Steffey's in the last 16 months, with people in jail who appear to be unstable.

In those situations, they are people who are not taking care of themselves and in those instances we have to take action, he said.

… (For those that watched) the video, (the deputies) acted in accordance to our policies and procedures, he said, and I'm sorry that they have to go through such (a hassle) with the media and be ridiculed for something that they did exactly the way that they are supposed to do it.

— Stark County Sheriff Tim Swanson, quoted by Michael Freeze, for the Massillon, Ohio Independent (2008-03-07): Sheriff's department denies wrongdoing in strip-search case

Further reading:

• GT 2008-03-07: Rapists in uniform #2: four more women come forward
• GT 2008-02-26: Cops are here to protect you. (#2)
• GT 2008-02-05: Rapists in uniform

From the Opelika-Auburn News (2008-03-07):

Westboro Baptist Church, a group known for protesting and picketing funerals and memorials of fallen soldiers, is planning to picket at the Sunday afternoon funeral of 18-year-old Auburn freshman Lauren Burk, according to the group's Web site. Burk was killed Tuesday night. Police are investigating her death as a murder.

Westboro Baptist Church, established in 1955, is an Kansas-based organization lead by Pastor Fred Phelps.

The group is also planning to picket the funeral of Eve Carson, UNC student body president who was killed Wednesday morning.

Both funerals are listed on the WBC site's online picket schedule for Sunday.

First the Phelpses came to picket the funerals of men murdered by gay-bashers.

Then they came to picket the funerals of AIDS patients.

Then they came to picket the funerals of soldiers killed in combat.

And now, having given up any pretense of having a particular target other than humanity and simple decency, they’re just showing up to any old random funeral, so long as they know that the news media will be in the area.

What they are doing now is no more, and no less, evil than what they did to Matthew Shepard’s family. I would say that the cruelty here is more bizarre, but it’s not, really, when you understand some basic facts about the Phelpses. They have shown repeatedly, by their words and their deeds, that they thrive on being hated and provoking reaction. There is literally nothing at all that is beneath them, as long as it gets their names and their websites in the news yet again. And it will.

(Via Google News.)

Four more women in northern Ohio have come forward about unnecessary and sexually humiliating strip searches by the Stark County sheriff’s office.

As I mentioned about a month ago, Hope Steffey is suing the sheriff and a gang of male and female cops and prison guards, because a year and a half ago, after she was assaulted and knocked unconscious by her cousin in a domestic dispute, her family called 911 for help, and the cop who arrived decided that the assault victim was giving him too much lip while he tried to Investigate, so he beat her up, arrested her on a bogus disorderly conduct charge, and sent her down to jail where, once handcuffed and locked in a cage, she was held down by a gang of seven cops, including at least two men, and strip searched, over her screams of protest, while the male guards wrenched her (still handcuffed) arms behind her back. After that she was left naked in her jail cell for six hours. Sheriff Tim Swanson maintains that his hired thugs are allowed to use reasonable force to make an arrest and protect prisoners in their custody, where reasonable force is cop speak for grabbing an assault victim who you were supposedly dispatched to help (the cop was there because Steffey had been knocked unconscious by her cousin during a domestic dispute) and then slamming her face-down on the hood of your car, then cuffing her, sending her to jail, gang-rape-searching her with two male officers in the cell, and then leaving her naked in her cell for six hours. The excuse for that last part is that they had to protect her by raping her because she was crazy, by which they mean that she was visibly upset, and if you can be labeled crazy then that means that cops and prison guards can do any damn thing at all to you, no matter how violent, no matter how painful, and no matter how sexually humiliating, in order to protect the hell out of you, whether you want that protection or not.

The strip search was caught on tape and it hit the news. Because of the local and national attention to the case in the news media, four more women in northern Ohio have decided to come forward about similar experiences at the hands of Sheriff Tim Swanson’s rape gang / prison suicide watch. One of them is Valentina Dyshko, who was handcuffed and locked in a cage after she voluntarily turned herself in on a misdemeanor warrant for a miscommunication with the state over which home-schooling text-books the government deems good enough for her own children. When they handcuffed her and threw her in jail, she got upset, and she couldn’t speak English, and by God, she’s obviously a dangerous home-schooling criminal, so she was declared crazy and forced to undergo a strip-search and to wear nothing but a flimsy prison-issued gown that kept falling off her chest. For three days.

Dyshko says video of Steffey’s treatment reminded her of what she experienced 2 years ago inside the same jail.

Dyshko came to North Canton nine years ago, she says, to escape the fear of KGB persecution in Ukraine. Her ordeal inside the Stark County Jail stemmed from a home schooling issue. She says there was some confusion over the use of certain textbooks. It was all a big mix-up, said her attorney Dennis Niermann.

Dyskho was educating 2 of her 8 children at home. She received a notice from the Stark County Sheriff about a warrant for her arrest from the Stark County Family Court. When Dyshko arrived at the Sheriff’s office, she says she was quickly handcuffed and thrown in jail on a misdemeanor charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

After this mother of 8 spent 3 days behind bars, a judge reviewed her case and quickly dismissed the case.

Lawyers for Dyhsko say she had to remove all her clothes because someone inside the jail determined she was suicidal. Dyshko says she’s never been suicidal. She complained to Channel 3 News that the gown she was given in the jail kept falling down, and at times, exposed her naked chest to male guards. She was asked to remove her clothes and her undergarments. What’s the purpose of that? It’s demeaning, said Niermann.

Since the Hope Steffey case made headlines, 4 more women, including Dyshko have come forward to report similar stories. Lawyer David Malik says we’re seeing a pattern where apparently every woman who cries or gets emotional is deemed suicidal.

— Tom Meyer, WKYC 3 News (2008-02-29/2008-03-06): Strip Search: Four more women come forward with similar stories

And remember, if you are deemed suicidal, government cops and government jailers will take it for granted that the best way for armed Trained Professionals to handle the situation is to hurt you, hold you down, strip you against your will, subject you to an invasive search, and lock you in a cage and leave you there, naked, for six hours at a stretch.

There is absolutely no conceivable excuse for treating anyone this way, ever. Whether man or woman, calm or belligerent, nice or nasty, crazy or sane. This is gang rape, professionalized and excused by Official Procedures. What is becoming clear is that Sheriff Tim Swanson and his goon squad, not only have convinced themselves that this kind of brutality is sometimes acceptable, but also that they have an especially broad understanding of the sort of situation that calls for it. They are a pack of dangerous predators, and their uniforms and badges don’t make them any better than any other gang of serial rapists.

Further reading:

• GT 2008-02-26: Cops are here to protect you. (#2)
• GT 2008-02-05: Rapists in uniform
• GT 2008-02-21: Mississippi Corrections
• GT 2007-12-21: Rapists on patrol
• GT 2007-12-02: Men in uniform

This appeared in the March 2008 issue of Wired:

On the morning of October 27, 1969, a squadron of 18 B-52s — massive bombers with eight turbo engines and 185-foot wingspans — began racing from the western US toward the eastern border of the Soviet Union. The pilots flew for 18 hours without rest, hurtling toward their targets at more than 500 miles per hour. Each plane was loaded with nuclear weapons hundreds of times more powerful than the ones that had obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The B-52s, known as Stratofortresses, slowed only once, along the coast of Canada near the polar ice cap. Here, KC-135 planes — essentially 707s filled with jet fuel — carefully approached the bombers. They inched into place for a delicate in-flight connection, transferring thousands of gallons from aircraft to aircraft through a long, thin tube. One unfortunate shift in the wind, or twitch of the controls, and a plane filled with up to 150 tons of fuel could crash into a plane filled with nuclear ordnance.

The aircraft were pointed toward Moscow, but the real goal was to change the war in Vietnam. … Frustrated, Nixon decided to try something new: threaten the Soviet Union with a massive nuclear strike and make its leaders think he was crazy enough to go through with it. His hope was that the Soviets would be so frightened of events spinning out of control that they would strong-arm Hanoi, telling the North Vietnamese to start making concessions at the negotiating table or risk losing Soviet military support.

Codenamed Giant Lance, Nixon’s plan was the culmination of a strategy of premeditated madness he had developed with national security adviser Henry Kissinger. The details of this episode remained secret for 35 years and have never been fully told. Now, thanks to documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, it’s clear that Giant Lance was the leading example of what historians came to call the madman theory: Nixon’s notion that faked, finger-on-the-button rage could bring the Soviets to heel.

… Kissinger had suggested the nuclear maneuvers to give the president more leverage in negotiations. It was an articulation of the game theory he had studied before coming to power. What were [the Soviets] going to do? Kissinger said dismissively.

— Jeremi Suri, Wired 16.03 (March 2008): The Nukes of October

This is how the State and its exquisitely trained court intellectuals protect you: they steal your money; they use your stolen money to hire armed men who will keep you corralled inside an artificial border; on the basis of their arrogated power over everything inside border, they then throw themselves into ridiculous posturing and pissing contests with other States, over whose artificial borders should go where, over geopolitical prestige and influence, and over politicians’ dreams of a historical legacy; and then, in the name of their own pride, they commission their trained theoretical experts to devise a thermonuclear game of chicken to play for leverage in the Great Game. It was, after all, only the lives of a few hundreds of millions of ordinary people that were hanging in the balance; not like it was anything important compared to the personal honor of Richard Milhous Nixon, or a negotiated settlement that wouldn’t embarrass the United States federal government in front of all the other governments.

… On the most obvious level, the mission failed. It may have scared the Soviets, but it did not compel them to end their support for Hanoi, and the North Vietnamese certainly didn’t dash to Paris to beg for peace. … More than 35 years after Giant Lance, I asked Kissinger about it during a long lunch at the Four Seasons Grill in New York. Why, I asked, did they risk nuclear war back in October 1969? He paused over his salad, surprised that I knew so much about this episode, and measured his words carefully. Something had to be done, he explained, to back up threats the US had made and to push the Soviets for help in Vietnam.

No, it didn’t.