“I cannot believe that Conservatives continually seem to lack the critical reasoning skills necessary to see through stuff like this. It is almost as if individuals think that if they believe something long enough it will magically become true. “
Well said, Freedom Warrior. This bogus story was news to me, but the reference to the “county as the highest form of government” and the obvious faking of the date of the 1996 case as a 2006 case tipped me off immediately, so I just plugged the case number into google, and the story began falling apart.
In the early 1990s I read a book about a California “militia” man, one of whose acolytes robbed a bank and killed a sheriff or a CHP officer. I can’t remember the name if it, or the characters involved, but the author was a reporter for the Sacto or Modesto or Fresno Bee newspaper. It was fairly sympathetic to the the Militia man, but it showed a lot of the belief systems of the militia and tax freedom subculture.
For those who have been taken in by this story, as a primer to these sorts of beliefs, there is a good compendium at:
Idiot Legal Arguments: A Casebook for Dealing with Extremist Legal Arguments
By Bernard J. Sussman, JD, MLS, CP
http://www.adl.org/mwd/suss1.asp
How dare we call them on the hoax!
(I notice this to be a recurring theme in any of the threads tagged "WOD".)