17 mile trip in 78 minutes. Cost to rider $5. Cost to taxpayers $22.
Category Archives: Libertarian/Political Stuff
Thank Goodness
Oklahoma State Senator Ralph Shortey has proposed legislation banning food products made from or containing aborted human fetuses.
Freshman Sen. Ralph Shortey said his own Internet research led him to believe such a ban is necessary and prompted him to offer the bill aimed at raising “public awareness” and giving an “ultimatum to companies” that might consider such a policy.
Shortey said he discovered suggestions online that some companies use embryonic stem cells to develop artificial flavors, but added that he is unaware of any Oklahoma companies doing such research.
Whew. I know I’ll feel better the next time I grab a sandwich in Oklahoma. Hopefully he’ll address tooth fairy licensing next.
Create Value
From Adam Gurri, via Cafe Hayek.
The point is, our goal should never be to “create jobs”. Our goal should be to enable people to contribute something valued by other people. The value is the point, not the work. If someone finds a way to provide value to hundreds of millions of people and it requires no more effort from them than batting their eyelashes, that would be a win.
It is all about value. Value is why raising the minimum wage does harm, not good, and why we need to put less power in the hands of the likes of SEIU, not more.
Land of the Free?
Johnathan Turley writes that, well, maybe not so much.
While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit.
These countries also have constitutions that purport to guarantee freedoms and rights. But their governments have broad discretion in denying those rights and few real avenues for challenges by citizens — precisely the problem with the new laws in this country.
The list of powers acquired by the U.S. government since 9/11 puts us in rather troubling company.
Company like Syria, China, Cuba, Pakistan, and Iran. You know, free countries.
Read the entire thing.
More stuff to keep you up at night
Via the ACLU, a story about, well, a court ruling on something affecting somebody, somehow.
Then we among the general public, including journalists from all the major media outfits in Boston, listened and heard nothing, as the prosecutors, our lawyers and the judge conversed secretly, in plain sight. I have no idea what they said. I still don’t know, because my colleagues, lawyers at the ACLU of Massachusetts, are prohibited by court order from telling me.
So all I know is what I saw. As Donald Rumsfeld said, there are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. After the proceedings this morning, I’m left with little of the former, and a whole lot of the latter two.
The known knowns: the scrum of lawyers, defense and prosecution, addressed the judge. I saw the judge speak to the lawyers. Then I saw our attorneys return to their bench, closer to where I was sitting, out of earshot of the sidebar. But the ADA stayed with the judge. He spoke to her, with his back to the courtroom, for about ten minutes. Our attorneys didn’t get to hear what he said to her, didn’t have a chance to respond to whatever the government was saying about our client, about the case. It was frankly shocking.
After those ten minutes of secret government-judge conversation, our attorneys were invited back to the sidebar, whereupon the scrum of lawyers spoke with the judge for another ten or fifteen minutes. Then they dispersed. The judge uttered not one word to the open court. And that was it.
Stunned, I followed a group of reporters outside and listened as Attorney Krupp attempted to answer their questions. It was then I realized that the judge had impounded all the court records related to the case, and mandated complete secrecy governing the proceedings. The public wasn’t even to know whether our motion to quash had been approved or denied.
If you don’t think this is frightening, you’re an idiot and a sheep. Unfortunately, there are far to many idiot sheep who can somehow find their way to the voting booth.
Serious Reservations
When our Dear Leader signed the latest defense bill in to law, he expressed serious reservations about the power of the executive branch. His reservations? That the bill tried to limit the Executive’s power to detain people without due process.
President Obama ended 2011 by signing a major defense bill, despite what he called “serious reservations” about provisions regarding interrogations of terrorist suspects, sanctions against Iran, and relations with Russia.
“Some in Congress continue to insist upon restricting the options available to our counter-terrorism professionals and interfering with the very operations that have kept us safe,” Obama said in a statement issued from Hawaii, where he is spending his end-of-the-year vacation.
All this Change ™. He’s continued the ‘failed policies’ of the previous administration.. and in some cases went further (for all his faults, George W. Bush didn’t assassinate a US citizen, The One did.)
People who continue to support this administration for any reason related to civil rights are fools.
This Can Happen To You
This story highlights a couple of things:
- The war on drugs leads to horrific violations of individual rights.
- Allowing the government to confiscate property from people suspected of drug law violations is a crime
- A dog ‘alert’ is not probable cause.
When Pompton Lakes police seized Darren Richardson’s car on a rainy September afternoon, they told him it was headed for an impound lot. When they returned it three weeks later, he says, the 2004 BMW belonged in a junk yard.
The instrument cluster and leather dashboard were gone. The caramel-colored seats were torn up. The gear shift was ripped out and stray wires hung limp everywhere. Geico, Richardson’s insurance company estimated the damage at $12,636.42 — more than he paid for the car — and declared the vehicle a “total loss.”
According to police reports, the damage to the black BMW 325i came in the aftermath of a traffic stop during which officers detected a “strong odor of raw marijuana” inside the vehicle. Searching for a cache of drugs, members of three different police agencies and a detective from a federal drug task force spent two days tearing the car apart, the reports said.
So what did police find after their $12,000 search?
Absolutely nothing.
Now to me, it doesn’t matter what they found, but it’s important to lots of other people, who think it’s just fine to ignore individual rights if we get bad guys. (See also: TSA). Those people are ignorant sheep.
Before you get indignant, mouthing off to a cop isn’t a crime, and in some cases is our duty.
If anyone thinks any officer will be held responsible or that the state will reimburse the insurance company after the investigation, I’ve got some nice waterfront property for you. They will find the officers acted appropriately, maybe even congratulate them.
Alliances
Check out some of the “unlikely” supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act.
Think about the tight relationships between unions and the current administration.
Remember that when it’s time to vote next year.
