mycatharsis.com

For all the talk I’ve heard from conservatives (including myself at one time) about judges ‘legislating from the bench’, I can’t understand why there’s no outrage about politicians trying to act as judges from the bully pulpit.  Now our new attorney general (a former federal judge himself)  is appealing to Congress to block inmates who have been found by our Supreme Court to have been sentenced to unfairly long terms from getting a chance to appeal their sentences.

Mukasey, who is to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, said releasing all the inmates eligible under the Sentencing Commission’s guidelines could increase violent crime in communities and clog up courts.

COULD is the key word here.  Yes, I’ll grant that it might increase violent crime, and that should be a cause for concern in a percentage of cases, but that is not at all clear.  And in either case, why isn’t the U.S. Sentencing Commission able to make that determination on a case by case basis? Why must Congress pass a blanket law? But clogging up the courts?  That’s gotta be one of the lousiest excuses I’ve ever heard for keeping inmates who’ve already been found to be unconstitutionally sentenced from getting a chance to appeal that sentence!  “Sure, the Supreme Court has found thousands of people were sentenced in ways too harsh to pass constitutional muster.  But we can’t let them appeal their sentences because it’s too much work for us!”

If Congress blocks the new guidelines for all but the nonviolent first offenders, Mukasey repeated past Justice Department pledges to consider “changes to the current statutory differential between crack and powder cocaine offenses.”

Complete and utter horsecrap, and both sides know it.  Basically Mukasey is saying here, “Congress, if you protect us from the implications of this Supreme Court decision, we promise we’ll CONSIDER doing what the Supreme Court is telling us, by this decision, we must do now.  Yes we’ve promised that before  and done nothing, but we really mean it this time!”  I used to feel bad for saying such cynical things about our government.  But quite frankly, the way this Justice Department has acted under this president, I feel like I’m simply stating fact as opposed to irrational blather.

The decision that has our AG up in arms is Kimbrough v. United States, one of a decreasing number of decisions with support from both sides of the court.  A 7-2 decision with liberals such as Ginsburg and Stevens joining with conservatives such as Roberts and Scalia.  And this decision itself is simply an extension of United States v. Booker, another decision that  drew agreement from both sides of the courts left and right wings.  In other words, these are not highly controversial court decisions, the decision that these sentencing guidelines are ADVISORY and not mandatory seemed to be a fairly easy decision for these justices, no matter who they voted for.

Yes, drugs are most certainly bad, mmmkay?  And crack is as bad as they get, destroying lives with just a few uses.  But keeping thousands and thousands of people locked away for nothing more than making an incredibly bad decision about what to put in their own bodies makes no sense. It’s neither constitutional nor compassionate.  And perhaps if we worried about locking up only the truly criminal, we’d have more resources to put towards important and understaffed areas of law enforcement, such as witness protection.

In President Bush’s America,  nobody.  Literally.

Brought to you by a Republican and Christian president, of all people. Nurtured on a steady diet of Milton William Cooper, Brother Stair, and other shortwave icons of varying sanities during my somewhat nerdy high school years, I always expected Bill Clinton to be the one to usher in this age for us during the 90s.  Boy, was I wrong.  I don’t care if it puts me on their watchlist to say this, but screw the FBI.  No way in hell I’m giving them this information, voluntarily at least.  I’m so glad the same organization that can’t even follow the constitutional boundaries set by George W. Bush is telling me they won’t abuse the information they gather, but for some reason I don’t quite buy that.

The nation that imprisons more people per capita than Russia, China, Iran, or ANY other country in the world now wants to compile a massive database containing all it’s citizen’s physical characteristics. (They claim they’ll only store criminal’s info, but not even this programs supporters could not seriously believe that).   Home of the free indeed!

In an era where we are being subjected to more and more unique ways of privacy invasion, traffic cameras, REAL ID cards, data mining, and more,  the age-old question comes up, “Who watches the watchers?”  Apparently, if you know what’s good for you, no one.  A man in Massachusetts is on trial for nothing more than videotaping an arrest by police with cell phone camera.  This is simply shameful, no other way to put it.  The police should be ashamed for arresting this guy, and the D.A. should be ashamed for prosecuting him.  There is ONLY ONE reason to go to all this trouble.  ONE.  The police and D.A. are worried enough about how their actions look on camera that they don’t want ANYONE recording them.  And for that, they should be ashamed of themselves, quite simply.

About the only positive here is that they are prosecuting based on a Massachusetts state law meant to protect citizen’s privacy.  But for public servants charged with special privileges and powers by  our society to claim they are not subject to citizen oversight, is, well, extraordinarily scary. The potential consequences of accepting the contention that oversight is unnecessary are dire.  Politically motivated prosecutions,  prosecutorial overrreach, police harassment and beatings, etc. Not that they’re inevitable, but enough of this is already happening, and telling our public servants they don’t have to worry about consequences of these actions just cannot be good.  Thank god our President would never make such a claim to be above the law! oh wait …

Radley Balko writes a laundry list of some of the worst outrages perpetrated by our government this year alone.  A list that includes justifying doing nothing as thugs murder American citizens (in the name, of, of course, our war on drugs), prosecuting people for possessing their own PRESCRIBED medicine (not just once, but twice after an appeals court throws out your first conviction AND calls it ‘ridiculous’ and ‘absurd’), teaching children how to tattle on their parents for unclipped lawns, and the inevitable expansion of extraordinary rendition (kidnapping) to include, well, just about anyone.

One outrageous assault on liberty might be an aberration, two might be a curiousity, but three times or more is quite simply a pattern.  All levels are government are represented, from federal agencies to state goverment to local prosecutors and even schools.  These are actions typical only of a government out of control and accountable to no one.  If you want to know why thousands think Ron Paul might well be our only hope to avoid tyranny, this article is a fine place to start.

The CIA admits to destroying interrogation tapes, and their reasoning?

They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy, several officials said.

I don’t think you have to be particularly partisan or have any kind of axe to grind to read this only one way. They destroyed the tapes because they were worried the actions on the tapes might be construed as illegal! Is there really ANY other way to read that?

Obviously, we all know destruction of evidence is illegal, and we could all be in big trouble for doing something similar.  Even our men and women in blue are not immune, as a female Atlanta police officer is currently suspended, and quite possibly facing much worse legal jeopardy, for destroying evidence of her husbands revolting acts…

Tanya Crane has been suspended with pay because officials believe she burned photographs and negatives of her husband with the girls.

We need to get as mad about the first situation as we are about the second, at least that’s what I think …

I should know better by now, I suppose, but when I saw the headline ‘Florida schools randomly drug testing students’ on the DrudgeReport, I figured this was just one school doing something a bit out of the norm, something schools have certainly been known for lately, with ‘zero’ tolerance policies, suspensions for hugs, etc.  Sure, the idea of school as parent AND law enforcement is pretty radical, but when you have thousands of schools, one or two of them are always going to go a bit crazy with their newfound power.

Like I said, I should have known better.  John Walters, head of the DEA and a true radical among radicals (he once called growers of marijuana ‘violent criminal terrorists’), thinks enough of this type of expansion of government power to make a personal visit to the Tampa area to tout it!

This president and his administration tried to coin the phrase ‘compassionate conservatism’ to describe his administration.  Unfortunately, for them and us, they instead had another phrase coined about them, ‘big government conservative’.  A phrase in pretty common use now, and one I had never really heard used much before the last few years.   For a little perspective, it was only in 1995 that the Supreme Court ruled drug testing of athletes only to be constitutional.  As is inevitable, the creep of government power only works one way, and in 2002, that was expanded, again by the Supreme Court, to include ALL students involved in ANY extracurricular activity.

Anyone want to place bets that random drug testing of innocents will stay relegated to the realm of students only? Obviously, drug testing is currently common in the workplace, but how long before the government comes knocking at your door wearing a latex glove and handing you a cup?

if they’re wanted for crimes in the U.S., according to the Times of London. Add this to the fact that we have the worlds largest prison population, we’re one of only four countries to execute juveniles, and by far the largest population of juveniles serving life without parole.  Ugh.

So … if we can do it, I’m assuming they can come here and kidnap us as well? After all, if they do, what the hell can we say?

Completely unnecessary, despite the assurances of President Bush’s head of the Office of the Special Counsel, Scott Bloch, that that was the ONLY reason he called Geeks On Call to wipe his hard drive.  A simple reformat/reinstall is enough. A 7-level wipe is only necessary to remove data you never want to be recovered.  However, if your first vocation is not computer support, I could understand someone’s natural reaction to a virus being to wipe your computer clean.   However, one thing you learn doing computer support is to first learn WHY someone wants something done, as opposed to just doing it.  Usually you’ll know a more efficient or better solution.

What really gets me, is why did he call an outside outfit in the first place? It makes very little sense. It was his office pc, so it’s not like he was working at home on his laptop and thought he couldn’t get his support people to help him out.  It’d be both quicker AND cheaper to call the guy two offices down than to setup an appointment with an outside company.  And frankly, you’d think he’d have had to do it without his IT staff knowing about it in any way.  At least in my experience, I’ll have to admit to having some territoriality about other IT staff working on computers that are our responsibility. If it truly was a virus, a logical first call would be to your own tech support team, usually because you’re not sure WHAT’s wrong, or the virus software installed by your computer people is reporting a virus exists. He’d have to have at least a passing knowledge that he had a tech support team available at work to do exactly what he needed.  And, as a lawyer, he’d also have to have an even stronger understanding of the concept of “appearance of impropriety” than suspicious bloggers such as myself.  Perhaps that appearance was what he was trying to avoid by doing an end-run around his own tech support team, and whatever reporting requirements federal IT employees have, and contracting that work out to a private outfit.

Either way, it clearly seems the ‘it’s a virus’ story is neither the real, nor full, story.