Skip to main content

You really do need to care about how the sausage is made

Witness what even the News Journal called "a debacle" yesterday when Representatives Rebecca Walker and Helen Keeley decided that, despite legions of people signed up to testify for and against a bail modification bill, even limiting participants to 60 seconds was too much lip-service to the concept of citizen input:

Rep. Jeff Spiegelman had seen enough, noting that lawmakers had only minutes earlier been handed a thick booklet of information about the bill and had no time to do their “due diligence.’ He called for a tabling of the bill so a full and fair hearing could be held.
Keeley objected, urging members to send the legislation to the full House with the promise that differences would be ironed out before she called for a full vote.
Yep, Walker calls for a hearing the same day that HB 35 is up for public comment and is then surprised to find herself in trouble.  Keeley decides that committee members neither need to read their materials nor hear from citizens before voting on the bill.

Thankfully, the whole committee voted down these idiots.

But as you watch this all happen in Legislative Hall, you begin to understand why none of our lawmakers is really all that gung-ho for transparency.

If we actually watched them "do their jobs" we'd most of them for incompetence or arrogance.

Comments

Anonymous said…
In one of the previous articles it stated that abolishing the death penalty would save money. How does frying someone save money over housing, feeding, educating, entertaining them for 20, 30, 40 years?
March 14, 2013 at 12:21 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...
44 comments
Read more

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...
22 comments
Read more

Soda tax debate reveals fundamental progressive assertions about your lack of individual rights and the "responsiblities" of the State

I thought it would be at least amusing to use the Delawareliberal comments as sub-headings regarding each category of what is wrong with the proposed tax on sodas and juice drinks. But there are so many different little strands of each comment that it would be impossible to pull them all out. So, instead, I'm going to let you read them in more or less the order they appeared, and note the assumptions. pandora: I’m perfectly okay with taxing sodas and juice drinks. Mainly because they’re total crap, and one of the main reasons our country’s children are overweight. They are also dirt cheap. Assumptions here: (1) Because "I" am perfectly okay with a new tax it should be imposed on everybody; (2) it is the government's responsibility to keep children from being obese; (3) the cheapness of the product to be taxed justifies charging people more for it. John Manifold: Soda fattens your kids [and you and your husband], shortens their lives, costs more than water [a...
31 comments
Read more