playing SEALs and robbers.

These days, when you see a picture of a guy in fatigues, carrying an automatic rifle, a pistol in a thigh rig, and doorkicker boots, you usually have to look at the caption of the photograph to tell whether it depicts a member of the U.S. Army's Stryker Brigade on patrol in Baghdad, or a member of the Chattanooga PD SWAT team preparing for a "dynamic" no-knock entry at an American residence.

Now, I don't have a problem with police officers. I know, and respect, many of them, and the profession as a whole is full of decent people who get lousy-to-unspectacular paychecks for dealing with the dregs of society every day.

That said, I am very concerned about the direction into which law enforcement is drifting, especially in the "Special Weapons and Tactics" branch. Don't get me wrong--I don't have a problem with the concept of SWAT. These are the guys that cops call when things go sour, and I am convinced that there's a proper place and purpose for SWAT teams.

The problem here is threefold, however. It concerns the utilization of SWAT teams, their use as budget enhancers, and their mindset.

Utilization is a big issue. Originally, SWAT was established and used only for the hard cases--terrorism, barricaded suspects, and the like. Then the War on Drugs expanded in scope, and then someone in Congress had the genius idea that you can just pad the operational budget of your expensive SWAT team and police department in general by charging property with crimes, because that way you don't have to go through that pesky "due process" business. Find a bag of pot in a car, seize the pot and the car, and auction off the car without even having to charge the owner of the car with a crime. Later on, that concept (called "asset forfeiture") was expanded to encompass anything that might be remotely drug-related, to the point where police can (and routinely do) seize cash from people if they have reason to believe that it was used in drug transactions. The standard of suspicion has predictably decreased to where they seize the cash merely because it's a large enough amount, because why would you have so much cash on you if you're not slinging dime bags at the middle school? Oh, and the burden of proof is reversed, too--instead of the state having to prove that the money was obtained through illicit activity, you're the one who has to prove that it wasn't.

Now, a SWAT team is an expensive budget item. You have highly trained police officers who are issued very expensive equipment. You have to pay the salaries of the officers involved, and their continued training, and in return you get a SWAT team that may find utilization once a week, month, or year, depending on the size of your city and its crime culture.

Naturally, the folks who count the beans and set the policies came up with two ways to make the budget item marked "SWAT" look better on the annual budget request. First, they started utilizing SWAT for jobs other than high-risk situations involving armed subjects. (Not much of a stretch, they said, because when you serve a warrant, you have to assume that the folks inside are armed, anyway.) So now you have SWAT teams serving warrants, too, and they serve them as a SWAT team does, with all the gear and fanfare, lest the chief has to justify just why he needed the money for all the kit if it just gets left at the station every time the boys go out.

Next comes the use of SWAT as a budget enhancer. The War on Drugs is largely about money at this point. What drug cop wants to see an end to it if he'd not only be out of a job (what interest does the DEA have in actually winning the War on Drugs?), but also deprived of a steady source of revenue for the department? You see, under asset forfeiture rules, not only can they seize grandma's house if they find grandson's pot plant under growing lamps in the basement, but they also get a kickback--a portion of the seized assets flow back to the agency which made the arrest and seizure. It has gotten to the point where you have entire departments that are financed solely by asset forfeiture funds--they don't have an annual budget anymore, but rather get their entire annual operating budget from seized money.

Now, every time you tie a financial incentive to the enforcement of a law, it's bad policy. It encourages the enforcers to cast the net as widely as possible. For the police department, it's a no-lose scenario--they get the money to run their shop, and they look good if their arrest numbers are high, tangible and financial proof that they're doing their jobs. Before too long, the mission is no longer "Protect and Serve", but "Find Me Some Cash". The War on Drugs is the perfect alibi to soothe the conscience of the individual officer when he relieves a moving violator of the four thousand dollars in cash he was carrying around for whatever reason when he got pulled over, and it's the ideal moral justification to toss into the faces of those who dare speak up against the practice. (What, you have a problem with the cops taking ill-gotten drug money from the dealers? Are you some sort of doper yourself?)

The problem, of course, is that the state has a piss-poor record when it comes to confining the use of its shiny new powers to the purpose for which they were intended. (Just do a quick Google search on "RICO abuses".) If you hand a club to a police chief or a Federal agent and tell him that he can only use it against terrorists, mobsters, or drug dealers, he will sooner or later try to expand those definitions to justify nearly unlimited use of that shiny new club. Tie a financial reward to the use of that club, and you accelerate the process exponentially.

Then there's the problem of mindset and perception. Gallons of ink have been spilled on the discussion of what some call "The Militarization of Mayberry". Cops usually take offense to that term, saying that they should be allowed the use of any and all gear that lets them get the job done. However, when you use cops as revenue enhancers, and you tell them they're fighting a war, you end up with a police force that is unsuited for its original job, the impartial enforcement of laws. Then the issue is not the gear (which is indeed necessary for commando-style raids), but the necessity of the job that requires the gear.

When you dress like a soldier, carry the same equipment as a soldier, talk like a soldier, train like a soldier (and in many cases, alongside a soldier), and you're told that you're fighting a war, then sooner or later you'll feel like a soldier, and then you'll start acting like one.

The problem with that is that the mission of the soldier and that of the cop are fundamentally incompatible. The soldier is there to kill the enemy and break his stuff. The cop is there to impartially enforce the law with the least amount of force necessary for the job.

Lastly, there's a psychological aspect to cops that look like stormtroopers. When even the non-criminal element of society raises an eyebrow at the sight of a cop who looks like the soldier of an occupying army, then you have a perception problem. Our boys and girls in Iraq and Afghanistan have learned that you can get the population riled up against you if your bearing and appearance are overly aggressive. They're taught to not kick in doors that don't need kicking, to remove the dust goggles or sunshades before talking to locals (making the eyes invisible depersonalizes an individual), and generally try to avoid losing the goodwill of the populace through moderation of force. Now, if our soldiers have learned the value of even these small measures to avoid alienating a foreign populace, why are so many cops still in denial about the cumulative psychological effect of hundreds of incidents where a SWAT team busted into the wrong place, dragged the wrong folks out of bed with the aid of automatic rifles, flashlights and balaclavas, or shot the wrong people dead?

I don't want my police to look like they're an occupying army. More importantly, I don't want to feel as if they are. I don't want to feel apprehension when I see a cop by the side of the road or in my rear view mirror, even though I have no reason because I have done nothing wrong. In a day and age where so many cops are focused on finding something wrong at any price, whether it's for monetary reasons or simply to save face, and where cops openly refer to non-cops as "civilians", I simply don't trust the motives of the officer underneath those blue lights unconditionally. That's mostly the fault of the politicians who passed the laws which made the officer a creator of criminals and a revenue generator rather than an impartial enforcer, but that is the fallout of the War on Drugs, I'm afraid, and it won't go away while we encourage our police at all levels to wage that war. That's because the War on Drugs is a war against ourselves, and you can't win that one, no matter how hard you try.

crossing the border.

I drove my brother down to Boston yesterday for his return flight to Germany. It was kind of odd to come back to Boston after ten years--I didn't have any problem at all finding my way around, but some features were definitely not there in 1997. The Mystic River bridge was a new one to me, for example.

Apparently, MA passed some new and (more) draconian gun law that stipulates a mandatory year in jail for anyone caught with an unlicensed pistol there, loaded or unloaded, in your person or in the vehicle. "Unlicensed" means "not accompanied by both a Massachusetts FOID and a home state permit, and not locked in a triple-locked safe at least two zip codes away from its ammunition." They don't recognize NH Pistol Permits, of course.

This may seem a cowardly cop-out from the guy who once wrote an essay called "A Declaration of Civil Disobedience", but we can't currently afford for me to take an unpaid year-long hiatus, so I grudgingly disarmed before driving into MA.

I don't know that the justice system of a state deserves that kind of title when they are perfectly willing to take a year of someone's life for the offense of having the wrong piece of steel in our possession. Then again, all the states have even higher penalties for possessing the botanical equivalent of a bottle of vodka, so we're already a very long way down the slippery slope of victimless crime enforcement. Sadly enough, part of the reason for that is the cheerful consent of people who defend their gun rights tooth and nail, yet don't bat an eyelash when their neighbor gets hauled in and locked up for ten years because he grew some funny tobacco in his basement.

I hate to be a pessimist, but I look at the way things are going, and I have to concur with Tam. A storm is coming, and it's going to catch a lot of folks in the open.

first in the nation, for the first time.

Finding the polling place in our new home town was easy...all I had to do was to follow the increasingly thick path of yard signs until I reached the parking lot in the middle of the Great Yard Sign Forest.

The habit of plastering yard signs all over the roads is still somewhat amusing to me.  Are there really people who have no clue who they're going to vote for right until they drive to the polling place, and who make a decision based on the signs along the way?

"Okay, I'll just vote for whoever has the most signs up.  That's thirty-three for Paul, thirteen for Romney....guess it's Ron Paul today."

Or maybe it's like one of those commercials where they just repeat the name of the place as often as possible so it'll get burned into your memory?

"Huckabee....Huckabee...Huckabee...must vote for Huckabee."

Anyway, voting was (dare I say it?) fun.  Very small-towney, with the polling place set up in the top floor of the local library on Main Street.  I made my little mark next to Ron Paul's name, for what it's worth.  Unless Dr. Paul decides to go independent if he doesn't get the Republican nomination (and let's get realistic--he won't), that'll be the only time I'll get to vote for my candidate this year.  Come November, it'll be nose-holding time once more.

we vote tomorrow.

We registered to vote a few days after we moved in, so we'll be able to vote in the primary tomorrow.  Robin and I are both registered as "Undeclared", which means that we can decide on the day of the primary whether we want to vote in the (R) or (D) primary.

The field on both sides leaves me mostly cold.  On the Democrat side of the ballot, we have a power-hungry shrew whose main bribe is the promise of "free" health care for everyone, a Rorschach candidate who has so little substance that his main thing is the voicing of vague generalities so everyone may project what they want onto him. a blow-dried trial lawyer-turned-Marxist, and a handful of nuts.

On the Republican side, we have a RINO from NY who was for gun control before he was against it, an actor who's a lot like the current President except with a  deeper voice, a former Mass. governor who apparently believes in the wrong Jesus (or believes in him the wrong way), an authoritarian war hero with a temper problem, and yet another former governor of Arkansas who "doesn't believe in evolution", and who apparently believes in the right Jesus (or believes in him the right way), and a handful of nuts.

I think it's not much of a secret that we'll be voting on the (R) ballot tomorrow, and that our two votes are going to go to the only guy in the race who does more than give lip service to the Constitution, even if that means the majority of the population sorts him in with the handful of nuts.  (That would be the Congressman from Texas, Dr. Paul.)

On a side note: something about Mike Huckabee is deeply unsettling to me.  Every time I see him, or listen to one of his speeches, he reminds me of Greg Stillson from Stephen King's The Dead Zone--the "aw, shucks" populist who is a raving nutcase underneath the rolled-up sleeves and the winning smile.  Maybe it's the "I don't believe in evolution" thing, or the fact that he once told his fellow Baptists that "we need to take this country back for Christ", or the fact that he's supported by the Evangelicals (how'd the last candidate you backed work out for you and the country, folks?), but something about Huckabee definitely rubs me the wrong way.

On yet another side note: does anyone else find it amusing that the conservatives openly wonder whether Romney could be loyal to the U.S. and the Constitution before the Mormon church, or whether Giuliani could be loyal to the U.S. before the Catholic church, or whether Obama isn't really a sleeper Muslim who wants to impose Sharia on all of us...but they don't even think about asking that question when an ordained Baptist minister enters the race--one who's already publically stated he wants to "take the country back for Christ"?

Anyway, I have no illusions about Dr. Paul's chances to become the next President--the message of limited government (and by extension, limited government loot) is highly unpopular, and the country isn't buying what he's selling.  But at least we won't have wasted our votes by voting for the lesser of two evils yet again.

bread and circuses.

Where the frak does it say anywhere in the Constitution that the government has the authority to take money out of my pocket and give it to to other folks to make sure their Teevees don't stop working?

I think as inept as folks working in government usually are, some of them know exactly where to spend the cash to keep the masses quiet and docile.  If you shut off the flow of the electronic opium to the lower-income households, the peasants are likely to a.) riot and do other nefarious things outside of the house due to sheer boredom, or b.) actually go to the library, pick up a book, and start forming an opinion that has a more solid foundation than a ten-second newsbite.  Neither of those scenarios are terribly comforting to The Authorities.

what's not a felony these days?

In my admittedly idealistic view, there ought to be only two felonies: laying a hand on someone, and messing with someone's stuff. That's the entirety of the penal code in my perfect society--lots of paper saved, and those two offenses cover everything from murder to rape to thievery of all kinds.

Unfortunately, our society has embarked on a quest to brand as many citizens with the mark of the felon as possible. All manners of things are now felonies, and the list grows longer every day. It's a felony to grow the wrong kind of plant in your yard, to affix the wrong kind of metal bit to the end of your rifle, to buy too many cigarettes in North Carolina if you're a resident of Tennessee, and a myriad of other ridiculous things.

The problem with that, as I've already mentioned on numerous occasions, is that the status of "felon" has some serious negative repercussions for a person. A convicted felon loses, among other things, his or her constitutional right to own a firearm. (I'm not exactly sure why we take away the legal guns from felons, but not their right to worship as they please, or their right not to be placed in double jeopardy, or their right to free speech. Looks like the Brady Bunch is right when they claim that the Second Amendment is somehow more dangerous than the other ones, and deserves to be subject to special restrictions.) Convicted felons also lose their right to vote, and the stigma of a felony record has a way of crippling a person economically, since many employers in all but the most menial career fields will shy away from hiring a felon.

So, once you brand someone with the big "F" on their forehead, you deprive them of the legal right to self-defense, the right to vote, and the unhindered ability to work for a living to the best of their qualifications. That's a pretty severe punishment, and it ought to be reserved for some pretty serious crime. Hell, I'd settle for actual crime, and not the kinds of victimless crimes that are crowding the penal codes at present. A man stealing another's property--that's a crime. A man screwing a metal bit with some holes in it to the muzzle of his rifle, or growing funny tobacco in his garden--that's not a crime, because you can't point out a victim.

Here's the danger inherent in expanding the Big Catalog of Felonies willy-nilly. If I want to disarm folks and then take away their ability to vote against my policies, I don't need to try and take on the Second Amendment head-on. All I have to do is expand the definition of "felon" enough, and I can take the legal right to self-defense--and the right to vote--from anyone. And the great thing about that scheme is that the same law-and-order crowd that would fight me tooth and nail if I did attack the Sacred Second directly will actually assist me with glee.

how un-american.

There's a sort of mass email going around in conservative circles, one of those "send it on" propaganda pieces that pop up every once in a while.

It shows this picture:



On one of the gun boards I frequent, someone posted the above picture, which shows Barack Obama not putting his hand on his heart during recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. The poster also included his own assessment of the situation, which is reproduced here verbatim:

"Barack Hussein Obama's photo (that's his real name)......the article said he REFUSED TO NOT ONLY PUT HIS HAND ON HIS HEART DURING THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE, BUT REFUSED TO SAY THE PLEDGE.....how in the hell can a man like this expect to be our next Commander-in-Chief????"

He titled his post "The future of our beloved freedoms???"

I don't usually wade into this kind of discussion before my first cup of tea in the morning, but I just had to respond to that.

Saying the Pledge and putting your hand on your heart are not indicators for patriotism. Those gestures are easily done, and they cost the person doing them absolutely nothing.

A true measure of one's patriotism is the degree to which one respects the Constitution. While it's likely that Obama is no better than any of the people in that picture who do have their hands on their hearts, it's also pretty damn likely that they're no more patriotic than he is, seeing how at least one of them has voted for stuff that amounts to wiping your butt with the Constitution.

The Devil can cite Scripture for his own purpose, the saying goes. Well, the biggest Statist would-be tyrant can say the Pledge of Allegiance, put a flag pin on their lapel, and wrap themselves in the flag. (Witness the picture as evidence--that's Senator Clinton in the center.)

External gestures have precisely zilch to do with patriotism, especially when they're done at no cost to the person performing them. Just hanging Old Glory out in front of your house doesn't make you a patriot, respecting and defending the Constitution does.

I'm not saying that saying the Pledge of Allegiance or flying Old Glory are un-patriotic actions. I'm merely saying that they're not patriotic actions by themselves. A person who performs them without trying to incorporate the principles for which they stand is no better than a person who buys a Silver Star at the surplus store, pins it on his jacket, and expects the credit and recognition that is owed to the legitimate recipient.

Quote:

Barack Hussein Obama's photo (that's his real name)

Yes, we get it. Obama sounds almost like Osama, hence they must be the same. And Hussein is a raghead name, ergo he's a Muslim, regardless of what Christian church he professes to attend. Thanks for pointing that out to us unenlightened folk.

Of all the reasons why I won't vote for the guy, his name is probably the least important one.

Good heavens, man. "The future of our beloved freedoms"? Where was your indignation when they nullified the Fourth Amendment in the name of the War on Drugs? Where was it when they nullified the Fifth through Eighth Amendments in the name of the War on Terror?

But one of the Presidential contenders won't put his hand on his heart while saying the Pledge, and you're all over that...and his un-American name!

If you want to know why the future is looking grim for our freedoms, there's your answer right there.

it's more like a spa visit.

The very same crowd that insists on obeying an "absolute morality" routinely engages in some pretty breathtaking semantic masturbation when it comes to the subject of torture.

Take waterboarding, for example. The logic of the Bush administration and its cheerleaders seems to be as follows:

a.) The CIA uses waterboarding to extract information from enemy combatants.

b.) We don't torture, because we're the good guys (see "absolute morality" above). Therefore, waterboarding is not torture.

Now, I don't know about you, but if you strapped me to a board, tilted me head-down, wrapped my face in cloth or cellophane, and then ran water down my head until my body was convinced that I'm drowning, I'd call that "torture". I bet that the same technique, if used by the jihadists on American captives, would readily be labeled "torture" by most anyone who claims that it isn't torture when the sameself jihadists are the ones strapped to the board. (Yeah, they do far worse to our guys, but that's not the point here.)

I don't have patience for semantic games, and it's a bit insulting for the Bushbots to just stretch the definition of the term "torture". If you use that technique for interrogation, then come flat out and say, "if we catch your jihadist ass trying to cause harm to Americans, you better believe we'll torture you to get you to sing." But don't piss on our collective legs and tell us it's raining, when everyone with half a brain can see that the stream is yellow.

In light of the ongoing efforts of the administration to insist that the sky isn't blue if a blue sky violates the Constitution, I do get a good chuckle out of Conservatives when they accuse Liberals of "twisting language" and practicing "relative morality".

Now, whether torture is proper and necessary under such circumstances is a debate for another time. However, regardless of your position on the use of it to prevent terrorists from harming us and ours, it doesn't do us any good to engage in semantic games.

From the article about the testimony of the new candidate for AG, I'm not getting my hopes up about this guy being any better than Spineless Alberto. I mean, the whole thing reads like a conversation with the Girlfriend With No Opinion Of Her Own.

"I don't know, do you think it is? 'Cause if you do, I totally think it is, too."

what a bunch of yahoos.

So there's this Chinese journalist who posted on a site called Democracy Forum about his government cracking down on democracy activists.

The Chinese authorities contacted Yahoo! (apparently, the journalist had used a Yahoo! address), and the guys over at the Yahoo datacenter couldn't drop to their knees fast enough to service the Chinese secret police. They turned over the journalist's "e-mail account, his computer address, his log-on history and the contents of several weeks of his e-mail."

The Chinese journalist, a fellow named Shi, was then arrested by Chinese authorities, and sentenced to ten years in prison.

That in itself is not red hot news (it happened over a year ago), but now it turns out that the Yahoo folks lied to Congress about their prior knowledge of the nature of the investigation.

Makes me feel less than enthusiastic about using any of the services offered by Yahoo, it does.

On a side note: you know what I find absolutely shameful? There are countries like China and Burma where people get jailed for decades, or shot outright, for demanding the right to a fair and proper vote...and our voter turnout hovers at just over 50% if you average every election since 1960. Austria has a 92% voter turnout on average, Germany sits at 86%, and even 76% of the UK's subjects get off the couch on Election Day.

(Makes you laugh about W talking about a "mandate", or the Libtards blabbing about how "Gore won the popular vote"...a little over half of the vote at 50% turnout means that a quarter of the voting-age population voted for you, which doesn't exactly mean you have half the nation in your corner, to put it carefully.)

Now, you can argue that the system is rigged, anyway--it certainly feels like every two years or so we're being presented with two platters full of steaming poop and then asked, "Which one would you like to eat?" However, the only thing that separates a citizen from a non-citizen in the civil rights department is the right to vote, and those who won't vote are no different from those who can't.

color me un-surprised.

A few years back, I posted this picture. It shows the ex-Soviet Varyag, ex-Riga, a Kusnetsov-class 65,000 ton multirole aircraft carrier, under tow in the Black Sea on its way to its new Chinese owners.

When the Soviet Union broke up, Varyag was transferred to the ownership of the Ukraine, who lacked the money and desire to finish construction (the hull is structurally complete, but she lacks engines, a rudder, and all her electronics.) The Ukrainians put the hull up for auction, and in 1998, a Chinese company bought the Varyag for $20 million, in order to "turn her into a floating hotel and casino in Macau."

Riiiiight. That's exactly what I thought, back when I read the news article that came with that picture a few years ago.

Turns out the Varyag never made it to Macau, and she's not been turned into a casino, either. She's currently dry-docked in a People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) shipyard in Dalian, where the hull has been sandblasted and painted PLAN gray. The only official statement from China issued on the Varyag is that she's being "maintained for military purposes." She's now the Shi-Lang, PLAN pennant number 83. (Admiral Shi-Lang was the Chinese commander that conquered Taiwan in 1681.)

I'm shocked, I tell you. Shocked.

Now, what exactly they're going to do with that hull is still a mystery. They're certainly taking notes for their own carrier program. They're probably going to use her as a training vessel for carrier air operations. Maybe someday we'll even see her sporting new Chinese-made electronics, weapons systems, and propulsion.

I'm not one of those folks who think we're in danger of being invaded by a billion Chinamen any time soon (we are, after all, their biggest trading partner), but I think that things are going to get pretty interesting in that region a few years hence. Taiwan just developed a domestic line of ship-to-ship missiles, and I doubt that the Japanese Navy would let their shiny new Aegis cruisers gather dust at the dock if and when the Chinese start asserting regional dominance.

hugo, you blew it now.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez is cranking up his efforts to transform still-prosperous Venezuela into a Latin American version of East Germany. Taking a break from nationalizing the oil industry and scaring off foreign investors, Hugo has now shifted his benevolent gaze towards the average Joe on the street.

In his opinion, Venezuelans drink too much, and they're too desirous of consumer goods. It all doesn't fit in with his vision of the "New Man", a proper socialist who eschews all luxuries and distractions for the benefit of the collective. Venezuela's government announced new heavy taxation of booze and luxury goods, which will really give legs to the black market there. Once the taxation policy fails to curb the boozing (and we know it will), there'll be an outright ban on booze and bling...which will, of course, be just as futile.

Look, Hugo: it's the twenty-first century. You can no longer keep information in your country or out of it, because we now have all sort of instantaneous global communications options. No matter how much you go pimping the "New Man" ideal, human nature is what it is, and part of what makes us what we are is the desire to acquire things. Your countrymen and -women can turn on the TV or go on the Internet, and see how the rest of the civilized world has a good time quaffing Martinis and delicious beer while wearing blue jeans and riding to the liquor store in chrome-bumpered Hummers. People aren't buying the "New Man" thing anymore.

It's amazing how every single crusader for socialism thinks that it hasn't worked yet because the right people (namely, them) haven't been in charge. Since the inception of that insidious ideology, no nation has ever prospered under it. Socialism simply doesn't work, because it contradicts the human desire to own stuff, and because it negates the biggest productive force in any society, which is self-interest.

It'll be interesting to see how quickly Hugo can turn a relatively prosperous nation awash in oil revenue into a communist hellhole. It'll get really interesting once he decides to stop asking people to be "New Men" and starts telling them. At gunpoint.

Because that's the only way socialist systems can prolong their existence long enough for the Dear Leader to live a lifetime of power and privilege--they have to start building fences to keep people from voting with their feet, and then they have to break out the guns to ensure compliance. (Notice that all socialist and communist nations in history share one characteristic--they place more restrictions on people leaving than they do on people coming in.)

Alas, Hugo Chavez will soon find out that the best way to piss off the proles is to try and take away their booze, their car keys, their tasty foods, and their CD collections--in other words, everything that makes a guy get up in the morning and go to work. Sheesh--even the Soviets may have rifled through their citizens' drawers on a daily basis, but at least they left the liquor cabinets alone.

standing up for your imaginary rights.

How can you defend your rights effectively if you have no idea what they are?

Southwest Airlines are in the news again. Apparently, a guy was asked to take off his shirt, or be refused transportation. The flight attendant deemed the words "MASTER BAITER" too offensive for the rest of the paying customers on the plane.

Now, the interesting part is where the t-shirt wearer complained that the airline was infringing on his right to free speech.

I'm not defending the prude coffee-and-peanuts-slinger who dynamically interpreted the dress code for the airline that day, but last I checked, Southwest was a private company, federal subsidies or no. On a private airplane, access to which is granted via private contract, there are no "free speech rights". The airline can refuse transportation to anyone for any reason, as long as they don't violate the contract into which they engaged with Mr. Master Baiter when he purchased his ticket--and I'm willing to bet you dollars to donuts that it doesn't contain a "free speech" clause in favor of the passenger. If they don't want to transport you for any reason at all--as long as it doesn't violate the aforementioned contract, or federal anti-discrimination laws--they can do so. Mr. Master Baiter, in turn, has the freedom and undisputed right to take his current and future transportation business elsewhere.

That's the way the cookie crumbles. On private property, you have exactly the rights afforded to you by the host through contract or good will. Free speech does not apply in someone else's living room...or on someone else's Boeing 757. Don't like it? Buy your own plane, or give your business to someone else.

vote buying, once more.

Via pdb, we find out that Hil wants to give five thousand dollars to every newborn child. pdb rightly points out that those five grand per kid sum up to twenty billion dollars per year, every year. That money doesn't just materialize out of thin air, of course--it has to be confiscated from productive citizens first.

Like someone in the Comments section at pdb's blog points out, there'll be a jump in the purchases of $5K spinning rims among new parents. Hell, can you think of a better incentive for welfare mommas to pump out even more kids? Not only do they get increased payments from Uncle Sugar for each additional kid they can't feed to begin with, but now they'll get a nice lump sum payment on top of that, too. If I was in the habit of voting for whoever promises me the most money out of my neighbor's pocket, there's no way I wouldn't vote for Hil.

bad form.

The Blogosphere is all over Iranian President Mahmoud Acnefacejihad, who made some pretty outrageous statements during his speech at Columbia University.

I have mixed feelings on the issue.

Sure, the guy is nuttier than a shithouse rat. He's a Holocaust denier, he wants to see the Jews wiped off the map, his Army's Quds Force is actively supporting Iraqi insurgents and probably actively participating in killing American soldiers, and he's putting together nukes in his basement while thumbing his nose at the League of Nat...err, United Nations.

That said, I think it's rude and boorish of Columbia University to invite the guy and then insult him--no matter how deserved those insults are. If you think he's that abhorrent, don't invite him, and don't give him a pulpit. Once you invite someone into your house, the laws of hospitality dictate that you not only treat them well, but also protect them to the best of your ability. Inviting someone with the sole purpose of insulting and denigrating them is just plain bad form. Again, it doesn't matter how much he deserves it--if you want to tear a guy a new one, you don't pretend to invite him over for beer and brats just so you can do it in your house and with a sympathetic audience on your side.

There's no difference between Columbia inviting Karl Rove and throwing him to a hostile crowd of "Bush is teh Hitler" college kids, and doing the same to old Mahmoud.

so long, general motors.

The UAW is on strike! That'll show those fat cats over at GM.

You know, I'd pay good money to see the faces of the union folks if the GM high poobah held a press conference this evening and said, "You know what? Fuck it. We're packing it in. We can't make a shitty econobox cheaper than the Koreans even after they pay for shipping their cars to the US, because everyone in our American plants thinks they need to have a lifetime job making $38 an hour for wrenching on the same bolt a thousand times a day. I've had it."

let there be health care for all.

"A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the enthusiastic support of Paul."

So the cat is out of the bag, officially. Senator Clinton unveiled her "Mandatory Health Care" proposal, once again proving that you can be a U.S. senator and not have the faintest clue about economics.

Some of the highlights:

--She'll offer federal subsidies for those who can't afford their own health insurance.

--She'll require insurers to insure anyone who applies for coverage.

--She'll bar insurers from charging higher premiums for people who have increased health care costs.

Now, any freshman economics major at Harvard can point out the flaws in that plan, so I have to surmise that Clinton either has nobody on staff who reads Wall Street Journal on occasion, or she's fully aware of the implications of her plan and decided to push it anyway. (That makes her either really daft or really deceitful...take your pick.)

"Federal subsidies" is a Thesaurus term for "everybody's wallets". Subsidies don't materialize out of thin air, they have to be taken from the paychecks of working folks. That means everybody with a paycheck gets to subsidize the health insurance of everybody without a paycheck, thereby removing a major incentive to actually get up in the morning and earn a paycheck.

The biggie, however, is the thing about requiring insurers to take anyone who applies, and then preventing them from charging higher premiums for higher health care costs.

Those costs don't just magically evaporate, of course. If the health insurance company has to take the 50-year-old smoker with Stage 1 lung cancer, and they're prevented from recouping some of the costs that person is sure to rack up in the next few years, then there are two possible options for the insurance. They can either fold altogether, because they're unwilling or unable to eat the costs involved in charging a lung cancer patient the exact same premium as they do a marathon runner who's never sick, or they can avoid violating the law by defraying the cost of the cancer patient's treatment. The only way to do that is to raise insurance premiums for everyone across the board, so everyone still pays the same amount. That brings us back to the previous point, as this would in effect require everyone to pay for everyone else's health care. I cannot for the life of me figure out how forcing me to pay for the consequences of someone else's bad lifestyle choices is "fair".

That plan would almost instantly decrease the availability of health care, make its administration subject to a new and exciting federal bureaucracy (how would you like to make your doctor's visit just like trips to the DMV?), increase the cost of health care to everyone except those who can't (or won't) work, and completely remove all incentives for moderation of consumption when it comes to health care.

You can't wish, vote, or legislate yourself free money. Someone has to pick up the tab in the end, and that someone is invariably the demographic who has something to loot--namely the folks who pull in a paycheck every week or two. The rest of the population will have no trouble voting themselves "free" health care.

Me, I'd rather have a crown or root canal treatment available at $600, than no crown or root canal treatment available at $0. Then again, I have at least a faint grasp on economics, something that seems to be a disqualifying property for a Congressperson.

interesting statistics...

From the D.C. Downsizer Dispatch comes an interesting bit of information regarding the "45 million Americans without health insurance". That number is used by the proponents of socialized medicine to advance the idea of spending a few hundred billion dollars of taxpayer money on a single-payer system boondoggle.

"The most commonly heard estimate for the number of Americans without health insurance is 45 million. That's a whopping, scary number. Alas, it is also highly misleading. John Stossel of ABC News has used research by the U.S. Census Bureau to expose the deeper truth behind this scary number. It turns out that . . .

* 37% of the un-insured live in households earning more than $50,000 a year (and 19% live in households earning more than $75,000). Can people at these income levels afford major medical insurance? Yes. Should they be subsidized by you and me? No. Subtract this group and the number of uninsured people drops to roughly 28 million.

* 20% of the un-insured are non-citizens. Should you and I pay to insure them through a top-down federal monopoly? We think not. Subtract this group and the number of un-insured people drops to roughly 19 million.

* 33% of the un-insured are already eligible for existing government programs. No new program is needed for people who are already covered by current programs. Subtract them and the number of uninsured people drops to roughly 4 million. This is much more likely to be the true size of the problem."

Remember that next time someone uses the "45 million uninsured" figure in a discussion about health care.

the good ol' boy system.

Apparently, New Jersey has a problem with corrupt public officials.

Huh. Of all the places...

In my opinion, there's only one just punishment for an elected official who uses his or her office for personal gain in such a fashion. It involves a short length of rope, and a tree.

the right to kill and eat deer.

The spirit and intent of the Second Amendment protects AR-15s and HK91s before Marlin .30-30s and bolt-cranked aught-sixes. The ability to go and shoot deer and such is just a fringe benefit of the ability to be a counterbalance to an armed government.

Next time some Fudd mouths off about how "you don't need an assault rifle to hunt", remind them of the fact that they're just hanging on the coat tails of the rest of us. If the Supremes ever uphold Miller in all its implications, it would mean that the government can ban deer guns, but not military weaponry.

a political quiz.

I suppose this picture could be a very short political quiz of sorts.

If you see an American hero keeping us safe from terrorists, you may lean towards the conservative side of the aisle.

If you see (and feel discomfort at the sight of) a machine gun with high-capacity magazines that nobody should be allowed to own save the military and police, you may lean towards the liberal side of the aisle.

If you look at that picture and have an instantaneous reaction of revulsion at the sight of one of the King's Men patrolling with a taxpayer-funded automatic weapon whose ownership is denied to the citizens that paid for it, in the middle of a city where possession of even a rimfire smallbore pistol is illegal for citizens, then you may lean towards Libertarianism.

(If you look at the picture and see mainly a G36K with an Aimpoint and double-clamped magazines, you are, of course, a gun geek.)