Your tax dollars at work:
A 1.5-mile barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border was designed to keep cars from illegally crossing into the United States. There’s just one problem: It was accidentally built on Mexican soil. Now embarrassed border officials say the mistake could cost the federal government more than $3 million to fix.
The barrier was part of more than 15 miles of border fence built in 2000, stretching from the town of Columbus to an onion farm and cattle ranch.
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman said the vertical metal tubes were sunk into the ground and filled with cement along what officials firmly believed was the border. But a routine aerial survey in March revealed that the barrier protrudes into Mexico by 1 to 6 feet.
A few feet. $3 million to fix. Seven YEARS to notice…
Sullivan spots a rare example of courage in the mainstream media: an MSNBC morning anchor, expected to begin with a story on the release of a certain spoiled rich whore, scuttled it & lead off with real news instead. Bravo…
Blahblahexecutiveprivilegeblah:
President Bush, moving toward a constitutional showdown with Congress, asserted executive privilege Thursday and rejected lawmakers’ demands for documents that could shed light on the firings of federal prosecutors.
Bush’s attorney told Congress the White House would not turn over subpoenaed documents for former presidential counsel Harriet Miers and former political director Sara Taylor in a fight that centers on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ stewardship of the Justice Department.
In reaction, Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy accused the administration of shifting “into Nixonian stonewalling” and revealing “disdain for our system of checks and balances.”
“With respect, it is with much regret that we are forced down this unfortunate path which we sought to avoid by finding grounds for mutual accommodation,” White House counsel Fred Fielding said in a letter to Leahy and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. “We had hoped this matter could conclude with your committees receiving information in lieu of having to invoke executive privilege. Instead, we are at this conclusion.”
Thursday was the deadline for surrendering the documents. The White House also made clear that Miers and Taylor would not testify next month, as directed by the subpoenas, which were issued June 13. The stalemate could end up with House and Senate contempt citations and a battle in federal court over separation of powers.
Someone needs to explain why this entire concept — that the president has the power to respond to reasonable requests with “Nah, I don’t feel like it an’ you can’t make me, cuz I’m prez! Nyah!” — isn’t so discredited by now that it draws laughs.
Oh yeah, speaking of the fired prosecutors, a former guest-blogger of Radley’s site found out something they had in common. All emphasis mine:
The eight U.S. Attorneys fired by the Gonzales justice department differed markedly from the average prosecutor in their handling of the war on drugs. On average, the eight attorneys prosecuted about a third as many small crack cocaine cases—18—as their colleagues—48—in fiscal year 2006, an analysis of federal data compiled by the U.S. Sentencing Commission shows. But the attorneys were much more vigorous than their non-fired counterparts in pursuit of large powder cocaine dealers.
The eight attorneys pressed forward with 0.5 percent of all crack cases, though they represented 10 percent of all U.S. Attorneys. Carol Lam, the attorney for Southern California, prosecuted only two crack cocaine cases. Paul Charlton of Arizona pressed four and New Mexico’s David Iglesias 23, meaning the three border state attorneys averaged just one fifth of the number of cases their colleagues pushed.
Crack cocaine cases can bog down the federal system because of their small size: the median bust is only 51 grams, more than a hundred times smaller than the median powder bust. Though the fired attorneys placed a low priority on small crack cases, the numbers indicate that they were better at snaring large powder cocaine dealers.
Not to go all tin-foil hat on this, but considering this common factor, ponder the following: Who tends to be caught with crack rock?
As I stated in my post about the recent Supreme Court decisions regarding “campaign finance reform”, IMO there is entirely too much focus on what is said to influence elections rather than how the elected are influenced after the fact. Well, here’s disagreement on that front from somewhere I didn’t expect:
The Supreme Court loosened restrictions on campaign financing this week by ruling that corporations and unions are entitled to run a wider variety of political ads in the final weeks of federal elections.
This was good news for corporations and unions. And bad news for Shannon Tracey.
Tracey is local projects director of Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County, a grassroots group dedicated to repealing the notion of corporate personhood — a legal distinction that grants constitutional rights to businesses and other organizations.
“It’s awful that the court is continuing to uphold the idea that companies have what should be rights for human beings,” Tracey said of Monday’s decision, in which the justices backed a lower-court ruling that a Wisconsin anti-abortion group should have been allowed to air ads during a 2004 Senate race.
In case anyone who reads this site hasn’t figured it out by now, I also oppose corporate personhood. The sooner it gets realized that a corporation is merely a group of people & not some mythical immortal creature, the better. So, in spirit, I sympathize. Where I think this group goes wrong is in blurring the distinction between the favors corporations get and political speech. Besides, ads are just about the worst way of extracting anything out of the political arena, precisely because it’s so easy to follow the money anyway. The real corruption happens AFTER election day, and due to its roots in the inherent inability of central government to be truly representative, it can only be solved by anti-state means.
Crap like this is actually seen as super-important…
People that truly work for a living aren’t politicians. It’s ridiculous that to organize they have to act like they are.
As I’ve stated before, I personally find the idea of nationalized “single-payer” health care to be misguided, inevitably used as a gift to corporatism & an excuse for further regulation of our lives, and the issue of health care in and of itself to be inherently unsolveable. That said, though I obviously do not agree with his proposed solution, I find myself otherwise in agreement with Ezra Klein’s view of this article: yes, expecting that degree of awareness on medical problems from people not in related professions does strike me as nuts.
When I broke my arm a few years ago, I didn’t know until I had an X-ray done, but either way none of the type of analysis that Mike Cannon mentions came up in my head. My thoughts could generally be boiled down to pre-pain drugs (”God fucking DAMN my arm hurts!!!”), during pain drugs (”Yes, please, more!! Pain, no, la-la land yes!!”), and post pain drugs (”yadda yadda, I don’t care just fucking fix it”). Needless to say, I wasn’t a rational customer.
Y’know that “Rip things in half!!” commercial for some frozen energy drink? Well, the Supreme Court apparently took it literally, and tried that on the 1st Amendment. Observe…
-Issue Ads within 60 days of an election? Sure:
Free speech rights take precedence over government restrictions on political advertising, the Supreme Court ruled Monday in a decision that opens the door for greater influence by interest groups in the closing days of an election. In a 5-4 ruling, the court eased legal barriers aimed at corporate- and union-financed television ads, a decision whose tone suggests greater hostility on the court to federal limitations on money in politics.
The decision upheld an appeals court ruling that a Wisconsin anti-abortion group should have been allowed to air ads during the final two months before the 2004 elections. The law unreasonably limits speech and violates the group’s First Amendment rights, the court said.
The law, a provision in the 2002 campaign finance act, banned corporations and unions from paying for political “issue ads” that mentioned a candidate for federal office within 60 days of a federal election and 30 days of a primary or caucus.
“Discussion of issues cannot be suppressed simply because the issues may also be pertinent in an election,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. “Where the First Amendment is implicated, the tie goes to the speaker, not the censor.”
Seems quite obvious. Election season is clearly the ideal time for people who actually get involved in the rat race to criticize politicians. It comes with the territory of their jobs, toss that and you might as well forget about elections at all. Note the negative spin given to this ruling in the article — “hostility to … limitations on money in politics“, as if it’s the money talking on its own; “interest groups”, as if having an agenda is a bad thing — to hear them tell it, you’d think “campaign finance reform” was the only thing standing between us & tyranny, when in fact it’s yet another example of it. The thing to worry about isn’t the open influencing of elections, but what the elected do when we stop paying attention.
-Nonsensical joke sayings by students not on school property? Nicht gerade nein, aber Hölle Nein!:
A divided Supreme Court on Monday curtailed free-speech rights for students, ruling against a teenager who unfurled a banner saying “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” because the message could be interpreted as promoting drug use.
In its first major decision on student free-speech rights in nearly 20 years, the high court’s conservative majority ruled that a high school principal did not violate the student’s rights by confiscating the banner and suspending him.
The student himself said he wasn’t intending to specifically promote drug use, just trying to get on TV. That’s beside the point though; even if he DID intend on it, he was across the street & had never actually showed up to school prior to the event. The students were over there because they were let out to observe the Olympic torch going by. The question here was NEVER “does it promote drug use?”, but rather “does the school have the authority to regulate student speech outside of school property?”. Whether the sign said “bong hits for Jesus”, “Screw the baby seals”, or “what is the sound of one hand clapping?”, for the purpose of the actual constitutional issue, is COMPLETELY irrelevant. In effect, the Supreme Court has just ruled that students are held to the same standards outside of the hallways of their school as inside, and cannot make statements that don’t fulfill some propaganda goal.
There’s a common thread here, and a troubling one. That thread is the right-wing assumption that the 1st Amendment SOLELY applies to overtly political speech, and any non-political expression can be tossed on a whim. I don’t know which Constitution they’re reading, but I don’t see an asterisk there.
Edit @11:43 EST 062607: I figured some people might say “but there’s no mention of schools in the 1st Amendment”. Well, you’re right on that, it doesn’t mention schools. However, at the time “public” school actually meant PUBLIC, and not government-controlled. Due to the current status quo of political involvement in education, any school system that operates off of tax dollars is in effect acting on the behalf of the State.
Their ability to make rules of conduct within the halls is a no-brainer, as it’s necessary for their purpose; one can question the rules themselves (as has been done before with regards to the black armband’s to protest Vietnam in the past) but not their power to make them. The reason that, within my understanding, this ruling went against the 1st Amendment was that it extended the boundaries of that power to an unreasonable point, all for the purpose of defending a government propaganda campaign that the student himself was not even seriously challenging. Just because you’ve violated the 10th Amendment doesn’t mean you can ignore them all.
Consider this an entry in the category “things that only I would ponder because I’m weird”: Is this Onion article meant to spoof how these type of stories are covered in the real papers, or to make fun of the types that protest like those in the article? I hope it’s the first one, because if it’s the latter, IMO, it turns from funny to downright stupid off the strength of that alone.
Found this interesting:
A walk down Main Street in this New England town calls to mind the pictures of Norman Rockwell, who lived nearby and chronicled small-town American life in the mid-20th Century. So it is fitting that the artist’s face adorns the 50 BerkShares note, one of five denominations in a currency adopted by towns in western Massachusetts to support locally owned businesses over national chains.
“I just love the feel of using a local currency,” said Trice Atchison, 43, a teacher who used BerkShares to buy a snack at a cafe in Great Barrington, a town of about 7,400 people. “It keeps the profit within the community.”
There are about 844,000 BerkShares in circulation, worth $759,600 at the fixed exchange rate of 1 BerkShare to 90 U.S. cents, according to program organizers. The paper scrip is available in denominations of one, five, 10, 20 and 50.
In their 10 months of circulation, they’ve become a regular feature of the local economy. Businesses that accept BerkShares treat them interchangeably with dollars: a $1 cup of coffee sells for 1 BerkShare, a 10 percent discount for people paying in BerkShares.
Named for the local Berkshire Hills, BerkShares are accepted in about 280 cafes, coffee shops, grocery stores and other businesses in Great Barrington and neighboring towns, including Stockbridge, the town where Rockwell lived for a quarter century.
“BerkShares are cash, and so people have transferred their cash habits to BerkShares,” said Susan Witt, executive director of the E.F. Schumacher Society, a nonprofit group that set up the program. “They might have 50 in their pocket, but not 150. They’re buying their lunch, their coffee, a small birthday present.”
Great Barrington attracts weekend residents and tourists from the New York area who help to support its wealth of organic farms, yoga studios, cafes and businesses like Allow Yourself to Be, which offers services ranging from massage to “chakra balancing” and Infinite Quest, which sells “past life regression therapy.”
It’s not pegged to a non-paper commodity, so they’re not exactly going whole-hog here, but it’s clever enough worth note.
Pretty much the same legislation, same result, same ridiculously inconsistent reasoning for it I pointed out last time. His new nickname should be “The Predictable One”.