However, it is completely consistent with libertarian principles to want one’s own community to have certain laws and not have those laws be imposed from 1000 miles away by an unaccountable bureaucracy. For myself, I would like to live in a community where adult human beings are allowed to ingest whatever substances they want. On the other hand, I would prefer not to have to drive the kids to school past brothels and hookers.

Does my distaste for open prostitution in my own community make me a hypocritical libertarian? I don’t think so. But seeking to impose my views on you and your community from 1000 miles away through an all-powerful central government does.

Planned Parenthood-donating Prius-lovers in Santa Monica need to let Mormons in Salt Lake be themselves and govern themselves, and vice-versa. There are mini-tyrants on both sides, they are the problem.

Distinctions matter. Current federal law prohibits the sale/use of marijuana anywhere, while guns are legal everywhere. It makes sense for progressives to desire the dispersion of regulatory control in the first instance and centralizing it in the second. Similarly, it’s sensible for conservatives to assert state’s rights regarding abortion rights because it is a settled matter of federal law, while supporting a federal prohibition on gay marriage A) already partially exists, and b) avoids tangled issues about recognition of out-of-state marriages.

Both sides would probably prefer federal law in support of their position but when that isn’t possible correctly conclude that a partial victory than none at all. That’s pragmatic, not unprincipled.

I will say that, as a practical matter, the standards for adherence to principle are far higher for conservatives then liberals because the former devoutly believe in absolutes while the latter, being relativists, loathe them. Your example in reply to Ms. Donnovan perfectly illustrates the point. But it is noticeably lacking a liberal counterpart and I believe you’d be hard pressed to come up with one. Obviously liberals can be as hypocritical as anyone else, and the Attorney General’s weasely ideas about limiting Miranda is an obvious example. But this seems to me to be different in kind — if only because he supports a modification of Miranda, not an exemption, though there are other differences.

Certainly we liberals were, so your question is bizarre as concerns me.

But, there were also numerous people on the right who were too. Glenn Beck has been railing against the federal deficit and Bush’s role in creating it since 2004. Michael Savage – as right wing as they come – called Bush a neo-socialist almost from Day one. Since I listen to all points of views, I know this. Most people on the left – who (just like most on the right) – only want to listen to their own echo chamber of course believe the lie that no one in the Tea Party was angered over these serious concerns when Bush was in office.

People here saying Ron Paul’s philosophy has no merit in the so called “real world,” are simply scared for their security, a la Von Hayek. At least classical libertarians like Paul call a duck a duck. So called liberals of today can’t even admit that they advocate theft and force by the state because they don’t want to come across as immoral or mean. This is why Paul’s consistency vs. everybody else (dems, gop, linos, etc.) is refreshing.

The key rights, properly called such, are:

[a] to habeas: the right to force the government to put you before a court and justify detaining you;

[b] against compelled self-incrimination:

[i] by keeping silent in the face of interrogation on matters that relate to the investigation, or

[ii] by declining to testify at the trial of any criminal charge against you, without the prosecution being able to argue or the court being able to conclude that in declining you’ve provided proof of your guilt; and

[c] the right to have an attorney to help in defending against a criminal charge, including investigation into such a charge, and including the ability to get the court to appoint an attorney if you can’t afford one.

Miranda didn’t make any of those rights.

Miranda has to do with a process for determining whether evidence will be suppressed or allowed at the trial of any charge against you.

Put way simplistically, if the authorities decline or neglect to tell you of your rights to silence and an attorney, then interrogate you, they run the risk that whatever you say in that interrogation and whatever incriminating evidence they uncover from your statements, will be suppressed at trial.

I could go on: volumes and volumes of legal texts and articles, hundreds of thousands of pages and millions of words, have been devoted to the complexity of Miranda in various fact situations.

But in short: lots and lots of successful prosecutions don’t rely in any way on confessions or on what the arrested suspect says in interrogation. There’s an op-ed by an ex-NYC judge in the New York Times that seems to claim the vast majority of successful prosecutions have nothing to do with Miranda. He could be right from the perspective of the bench, because the overwhelming majority of charges result in plea bargains, in which the person charged actually has an incentive to show he spilled his guts, regardless the motive, and because pre-trial suppression hearings cut out the worst abuses of the Miranda ruling, so most cases that go onto a full contest SEEM to have no violations.

It’s not clear what Holder was talking about on the Sunday talkies. I’m guessing but I think that had to have been deliberate, as a way to maybe shut down the right wing nuts and pander to the rabbit center, without over-fueling liberal backlash.

There is in point of fact such a thing as the “public safety exception” to the Miranda rule. Forests have been wiped out and bandwidths exhausted over this exception, so I’ll put it in simpliest form: Cops stop a robbery in progress. Vic says the perp had a gun but no gun is evident. Cops right way say to perp: Where’s the f***ing gun? Tell me now or I’ll blow your f***ing head off! Perp says: Okay okay calm down; I threw over there behind the bulk Twinkies. That’s not going to be suppressed, Miranda be damned; it may work a misfortune on the perp that the cops were scaring the s**t of him to secure public safety, but that’s still an incident of the lawful motive.

If Holder is implying the government has decided to go into some serious research and development on how far to stretch the public safety exception, well then whoop-de-do what in hell do you think we pay prosecutors to advise police and direct investigations for? If it goes too far and that fact comes out at trial — a scenario that is ultimately inevitable, but sufficiently unlikely to occur on Holder’s watch — then it will get slapped down in court [or not, if the court gets further packed by President Palin].

Holder’s also been muttering something about seeking for Congress to do something to help stretch the exception. That sounds superficially improbable, because Miranda is court-made law that derives from rights embedded in the Constitution. You can always amend the Constitution I suppose — didn’t that happen with the E.R.A.? Okay that’s impractical. But if both chambers of Congress pass a bill codifying a stretch of the exception for terrorism suspects and the president signs it into law, that satisfies the “high flow” and avoids the “low ebb” test the Supreme Court set up in the Youngstown case way back in Truman’s day, so it’s possible.

But here’s the deal: no amount of comity between Congress and the administration is going to get the Supreme Court to overturn the right to maintain silence, which is the key right at work here. The dynamic that led to Miranda had an awful lot to do with safeguarding against the abuse of low information citizens and immigrants, whereas the Times Square Dips**t Bomber was maybe misinformation or malinformation but definitely not low information.