You’ve probably heard about eminent domain abuse.  That’s where the government takes your land and hands it over to another private party….one that is more politically connected.

But you may not have heard about civil forfeiture.  And yet, today, it could very well be the most egregious abuse of private property rights in America.

We all know that one of the many beautiful things about the United States is that citizens are innocent until proven guilty.  But civil forfeiture turns that fundamental principle on its head.

This sounds bizarre, but with civil forfeiture, your property is guilty until you prove it innocent.

Consider the case of Margaret Davis.

As a 77-year-old woman living alone with multiple medical problems, Margaret left her Pennsylvania home unlocked so her neighbors could regularly check on her.  One day while the police were chasing alleged drug dealers through her neighborhood, they all ran through Margaret’s house.  The dealers dropped some of their stash on Margaret’s floor, in plain sight.

Instead of apologizing to Margaret for the traumatic experience, the government seized her house.

Under civil forfeiture laws, Margaret’s property—her house—was guilty until she could prove it innocent to get it back.  And that’s not all.  As it turns out, most state and federal laws allow the government to keep the property they take through civil forfeiture.  So authorities have a big incentive to pursue property over justice.

Predictably, abuse is rampant:

• In Louisiana, police were caught stealing innocent people’s property by making up crimes that never happened.  They used the proceeds to fund ski trips to Aspen.

• In Texas, a government official was caught pumping forfeiture funds into his re-election campaign.

• In Nebraska, officials stole over $124,000 from a resident without ever charging, let alone convicting, him of a crime.

• In Missouri, authorities were caught turning forfeitures over to the federal government in order to avoid a legal requirement that proceeds go to schools.  That way, both groups could split the proceeds without having to share any with the children that were supposed to get the money.

Unfortunately, these are not isolated incidents.  Civil forfeiture is now a nationwide epidemic.  A new report by the Institute for Justice found that the federal government is now holding over a billion dollars in assets seized through civil forfeiture.

And that’s not counting any of the state and local governments.

IJ’s report, available to view and download for free here, is the first to grade the civil forfeiture laws of the federal government and all 50 states.

What grade did your state get?  You can easily search the report by state here.

This is part of a new national campaign started by the Institute for Justice to end civil forfeiture.  We also filed suit in Texas, which has some of the worst forfeiture laws and practices in the country.

We are representing a small business entrepreneur from Houston whose American Dream was turned into a nightmare after his property was stolen through civil forfeiture.  He did nothing wrong and was never accused of a crime.

Our forfeiture campaign follows in the footsteps of our eminent domain work.  In courtrooms across the country, we will keep fighting the government to secure the bedrock American principle of private property rights.

Even though IJ has had tremendous success in courts, eminent domain abuse was stopped in large part by grassroots activists.  We desperately need a similar grassroots backlash against civil forfeiture.  Simply put, we need your help.

Will you work with IJ to help end civil forfeiture?

Please speak out.  Consider blogging and talking about the property being stolen in your state.  I encourage you to make use of the research included in our forfeiture report as well as our forfeiture video.

Should you write something up, please email me the link at bewing@ij.org.  And if you have any questions, or you’d like to be a part of our national coalition of property rights activists, just let me know.

Governments should protect, not plunder, our property.  Common sense and justice demand that this rampant abuse of private property rights must end.

Our fight will not be easy.  But working together, we can stamp out the injustices of civil forfeiture once and for all.

Breitbart wins following Web sites provide outlet to the right

By Perry Bacon Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 31, 2009

Andrew Breitbart blew into Washington recently for what amounted to a victory lap.                             

The Internet entrepreneur spent last week soaking up accolades from conservatives for having offered guidance to the two twenty-somethings who posed as a pimp and prostitute and took a hidden camera into several ACORN offices. The pair filmed workers from the national liberal community group appearing to aid them as they inquired about starting a brothel — a move that has put ACORN on the defensive and made the activists, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, instant conservative heroes.

But in the end it’s Breitbart who may be the biggest winner.

It was the 40-year-old Breitbart who masterminded the strategy of releasing the videos one at a time on his Web site, Big Government, as a way of maximizing exposure of the campaign against ACORN. And it is Breitbart who is being heralded as the conservative movement’s new Web wizard and the answer to liberal sites such as the Huffington Post and Talking Points.

In Washington, the burly, white-haired Breitbart –who runs his Web sites from his basement in Westwood, Calif., near Hollywood — was shuttled between on-air television interviews and meetings with conservative activists. Talk radio host Laura Ingraham praised him as an “Internet mogul,” and he was invited to speak at both the Heritage Foundation think tank and a black-tie conservative dinner, where he spoke only minutes before former vice president Richard B. Cheney.

“They’re able to frame the narrative and we’re always on defense,” Breitbart said to a group of conservative activists as he complained about what he called the “Democratic-media complex” — Democratic pols, Hollywood and traditional mainstream media. “The Republican Party has never had a long-term strategy on fighting the narrative. The narrative should be fought on college campuses, it should be fought through the media and it should be fought in Hollywood, and the conservative movement is AWOL on all three.”

Read the full article here.

THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

– Thomas Paine, The Crisis, December 23, 1776

For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?”

– Esther 4:14

These are interesting times. Under President Obama and the most liberal Congress since 1965, the United States government is expected to borrow a trillion dollars per year for the next decade while the size and power of our federal government will grow at the expense of our liberties. 

In this environment, Democrats in Congress are working on a bill to give President Obama emergency control of the Internet (S.773) which would permit the President to seize control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.  Meanwhile, the President has appointed Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law professor, to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.  Prof. Sunstein support controls on free speech on the Internet.  He views the Web as a Wild Wild West that needs taming and wants new laws to corral wayward bloggers. His book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (not to be confused with Noodge) urges employing the force of government to make us all better persons (“New Soviet Man” anyone?).  In his latest work, On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done, the Harvard professor, now top Information apparatchik, worries about “…institutions (being) harmed by the rapid spread of damaging falsehoods via the Internet.” 

Of course, one man’s “falsehoods” might be another man’s facts.  Czar Sunstein’s extreme concern likely grows out of his acute understanding that our postmodern President simply speaks reality into existence; words are reality in the Obama White House.

Into this breach come the bloggers.  There are about 120 million blogs today.  Many of them are political, most are not.  

America’s political bloggers trace their heritage, their place in the body politic, to the Colonial era.  Most of today’s political bloggers would have been quite comfortable defying the British Stamp Act of 1765, were they around 244 years ago.  The Stamp Act was designed to impose government content control on the then 23 newspapers which served about two million Colonialists.  Not one Colonial newspaper bought the properly stamped paper.  In fact, the political content of the papers increased, to the alarm of the British authorities. On the eve of the Revolution, there were 31 papers in the Colonies, by the time of the Constitution’s ratification, there were 92, and by 1835, there were 1,200 newspapers serving 15 million Americans. 

Political bloggers became a force to be reckoned with in 2002 with Sen. Trent Lott’s comments on Sen. Strom Thurmond and again in 2004, when Little Green Footballs took down Dan Rather and Mary Mapes (ironically, Mapes writes for the Huffington Post now) over CBS’ airing of forged Air National Guard documents purporting to show that President George W. Bush avoided service in Vietnam.

With many blogs attracting more readers than daily newspapers while newspaper circulation plummets and experienced journalists are being laid off, we can see why Professor Czar Sunstein is worried – no longer do like-minded liberals in the major media have a lock on what passes for truth in the news. (This brings to mind the cynical critique of the former Soviet Union’s main papers, Tass (News) and Pravda (Truth) “Ni pravda Tass. Ni tass Pravda.” “There is no truth in Tass and there is no news in Pravda.”)

There’s a certain urgency in today’s blogosphere – an understanding that we are at a critical juncture in our nation’s history.  Conservative bloggers, mostly unpaid – concerned moms, talented lawyers, activist students – are acting as a potent counterforce against the attempted rapid remaking of America under Pres. Obama’s direction.  As such, today’s bloggers are the most visible manifestation of the Conservative Movement.  And this, as the Republican Party largely tracks aimlessly in opposition to President Obama, but without any apparent objective, other than to regain power for power’s sake in numb repetition of the errors of 2006 and 2008.

Were Thomas Paine and Alexander Hamilton (Publius) around today, they would surely be blogging right alongside the likes of the paid and unpaid authors of NRO’s The Corner, Michelle Malkin, RedState, Hot Air, Big Government, Big Hollywood, Flopping Aces, Infidels are Cool, Riehl World View, Red County, Ace of Spades HQ, Flashreport, Right Wing News, and many others.

Let the blogs bloom, for they have come for such a time as this.