August 11, 2005

Restraining Orders for Abusive Grandmas?
By Carey Roberts

The women's shelter activists have devised a nuclear first-strike weapon in their jihad to stop domestic violence. Insiders call it the TRO -- the "temporary restraining order."

Here's how the ploy works. A woman who feels in the slightest way abused goes to a judge to request a restraining order (called an Order of Protection in some states). This is usually done at an "ex-parte" hearing, meaning the hearing is done in secret and the judge does not bother to invite testimony from the alleged abuser. The judge seldom demands any hard evidence to back up the woman's testimony. Because abuse is defined broadly in most states, the woman's request is given a rubber-stamp approval.

Ten days later the woman goes back and requests that the temporary restraining order be made permanent. That decision has a devastating impact on the family: the father is permanently vacated from his house, the mother is awarded full custody of the children, and he is ordered to begin child support payments. Obviously this Kafkaesque system is ripe for abuse. And that's exactly what Arlene Soucie of Illinois, proud grandmother of two, recently found out. (Read the rest here)

Global Struggle against Violent Extremism:
Marketing Gimmick or Ominous Turn?
By Robert Higgs

Say good-bye to the GWOT and, so far as the Bush administration is concerned, good riddance, too. This acronym for the “global war on terrorism”—often rendered “global war on terror”—an unpronounceable monstrosity with all the charm of the verbiage in a Pentagon planning document, never caught on with the public anyhow. So nothing is lost. The question is: what does the administration seek to gain by relabeling its efforts as the “global struggle against violent extremism”? Is the shift to a new slogan nothing more than that, or does it signify a move toward a different approach to the government’s ongoing exploitation of the “opportunity” the president’s most influential advisers perceived in the events of 9/11?

The government’s successive labels for its actions in response to 9/11 have attracted ridicule from the start. “War on terror” made no sense: you can’t drop a bomb on an emotion. “War on terrorism” scarcely made any more sense, inasmuch as terrorism is not something you can blast with a howitzer, but a tactic available to countless millions of determined persons in one form or another. Evidently none of the government’s public-relations geniuses ever saw any merit in the more sensible phrase “war on terrorists.” In due course, the GWOT came along, attracting it own share of ridicule (“gigantic waste of time,” and so forth). It did have the merit of emphasizing the worldwide reach of the government’s actions, giving fair warning that nobody on earth can occupy a neutral zone, that anyone on the planet might be visited by a Predator drone’s Hellfire missile if he raised sufficient suspicions at Langley. (Read the rest here)

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Libertarian Commentary on The News
By Nathan A. Barton © 2005

We are supposed to be in the "dog days" of August, when little happens. But the in-box seems to fill up with news, anyway, and we have to keep in mind that even small events can have a big impact. We'll see some examples, today, in this news and commentary.

World War against the Islamicists

UK Bans Hizb ut-Tahrir
BBC News/Townhall News
British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that his government would deport foreigners found to be "fostering hatred" and ban a Muslim radical group called Hizb ut-Tahrir. The group, whose name means "Party of Liberation," was founded in the 1950s in Jerusalem. Today, wrote Ariel Cohen in a 2003 study for the Heritage Foundation, Hizb "is a clandestine, cadre-operated, radical Islamist political organization that operates in 40 countries around the world, with headquarters apparently in London. Its proclaimed goal is jihad against America and the overthrow of existing political regimes and their replacement with a caliphate (khilafah in Arabic), a theocratic dictatorship based on the Shari'a (religious Islamic law)." Hizb says on its website it hopes to bring the Islamic nation "to her rightful place as the first state in the world, as she was in the past, when she governs the world according to the laws of Islam."

Clearly, in the US, this would be a violation of constitutional rights - but since the UK has no true constitution, the Blair regime can get away with it. Should they? Some more research is indicated, and the potential impact: (Read the rest here)

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