I have blogged before about the fact that--as a purely political issue--it is a mistake for the Obama administration to elevate any news outlet within the US to the level of an enemy , even rhetorically. But it also seems that the Obama/Holder Department of Justice has notched up this strategy another level, with government employees in the DOJ being assigned to surf opposition blogs, record information, and even plant troll comments. From a compilation of current blog reports [h/t Libertarian Republican ]: Are you a conservative or libertarian blogger? Do you take issue with and write pieces that don't mesh with Obama's policies? If you do, Eric Holder, United States Attorney General, is possibly getting feedback on what you've been blogging about. Warner Todd Huston, a freelance writer who has written for Newsbusters.org and Human Events, has discovered that Mr. Holder has hired a whole team of Democratic campaign bloggers to troll the internet looking for anti-Obama ar...

... you usually only read from conspiracy theorists. You know: the Trilateral Commission, the black helicopters, and HIV as a man-made plague... But this is the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury ? When covering America’s interventionist foreign policy, certain departments and agencies come up a lot. The Defense Department, certainly. The CIA, usually. The State Department, the NSA, the list goes on. Rarely does the Treasury Department come up, but maybe it should. Speaking at a conference for the American Bankers Association, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury David S. Cohen went into excruciating detail about his department’s role in ensuring that the American banking industry is on the front lines of fights the world over. And it really is the world over. From propping up Mexico’s government in what he called “a courageous fight against the drug cartels” to preventing Iran from “developing nuclear weapons,” there appears to be no overseas endeavor in which Secretary Cohen doesn’t...

From NYT : A network of private and public surveillance cameras, license plate readers and weapons sensors already established in Lower Manhattan as an electronic bulwark against terrorist attacks will soon expand to a large patch of Midtown Manhattan, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said Sunday as they announced the allocation of $24 million in Homeland Security grants toward the effort. Mr. Bloomberg said the expanded monitoring network would cover the areas between 30th and 60th Streets, from the Hudson to the East River. “We cannot afford to be complacent,” he said, noting that Midtown includes landmarks like Grand Central Terminal, the Empire State Building and the United Nations.... Asked Sunday about criticism of the increased surveillance, Mr. Bloomberg said: “We live in a world where we have to have a balance. We can’t just say everybody can go everyplace and do anything they want.” He added, “Do you really want to work in a building that do...

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...

First it was the injunction to report your friends and neighbors for inaccurate comments about the health insurance debate. Then, of course, there is the program being developed to allow the Federal government to shut down the internet. Now, thanks to the National Legal and Policy Center, we learn that the White House New Media office is using an incredibly wide definition of the Presidential Records Act to harvest data on Facebook and other social networking sites about virtually any reference you make to President Barack Obama: NLPC has uncovered a plan by the White House New Media operation to hire a technology vendor to conduct a massive, secret effort to harvest personal information on millions of Americans from social networking websites. The information to be captured includes comments, tag lines, emails, audio, and video. The targeted sites include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and others – any space where the White House “maintains a presence.” In the course of i...

No, I'm not kidding : WASHINGTON — If you're planning a garage sale or organizing a church bazaar, you'd best beware: You could be breaking a new federal law. As part of a campaign called Resale Roundup, the federal government is cracking down on the secondhand sales of dangerous and defective products. The initiative, which targets toys and other products for children, enforces a new provision that makes it a crime to resell anything that's been recalled by its manufacturer. "Those who resell recalled children's products are not only breaking the law, they are putting children's lives at risk," said Inez Tenenbaum, the recently confirmed chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The crackdown affects sellers ranging from major thrift-store operators such as Goodwill and the Salvation Army to everyday Americans cleaning out their attics for yard sales, church bazaars or — increasingly — digital hawking on eBay, Craigslist and other Web site...

From WSJ : WASHINGTON -- The White House on Monday shut down an email account set up to collect tips from Americans on "fishy" claims about President Barack Obama's health-care plan, as congressional Republicans raised new concerns about why some Americans received an unsolicited email from the White House last week. The White House shut down an email account "flag(at)whitehouse.gov" as congressional Republicans and bloggers continued to raise questions about why Obama officials were collecting negative statements made by ordinary Americans about the president's health care plan and what the administration was planning to do with the information it gathered. And I was having so much fun sending in complaints about myself.

Updated : Once you've read this, for a real laugh visit the Delawareliberal thread that (a) attempts to make something substantive out of this report; (b) features Cassandra intentionally missing/misrepresenting the point of this entire post; and (c) illustrating the blandness/blindness we've all come to expect from those who do not see that certain topics of legitimate political discussion are slowly edged toward the dangerous and extremist categories. Particularly revealing is the failure of DL posters to see any problem with the report's repeated insistence that returning disgruntled veterans are likely targets for extremist recruiting, which stops just an intellectual step short of recommending the profiling of discharged soldiers so that we can follow the potentially dangerous. My point below--that there is evidence of dissonant voices/dynamics in the DHS report is, sadly, pretty much beyond them. Next time, just for a few people, I'll try it with one-syllable ...

Waldo suggested in commenting on my recent post about Barack Obama's plan to require Middle and High School students to volunteer that I was "tacking close to the freepers" in my comparison of the plan to corvee labor, serfdom, and slavery. Maybe so. But, then again, the idea of compulsory service learning rubs me so far in the wrong direction that it is difficult for me to restrain the blood shooting out through my retinas. You see, my family has a long tradition of volunteer work. Children are raised with the expectation that they will volunteer their time, their effort, and--when appropriate--their money for good causes. I could go into exhaustive detail, but that would (a) sound suspiciously like bragging; and (b) defeat the other principle we teach our children, that such work should be done with humility and not fanfare. Other families, other individuals, don't necessarily feel that obligation, and that's OK. The essential component of volunteering is .....

From the Obama Transition Site : Barack Obama and Joe Biden will enact a windfall profits tax on excessive oil company profits to give American families an immediate $1,000 emergency energy rebate to help families pay rising bills. This relief would be a down payment on the Obama-Biden long-term plan to provide middle-class families with at least $1,000 per year in permanent tax relief. Now let's get this straight. We're going to place a windfall profits tax on energy companies. We're going to pass out that money to American families as an energy rebate. American families will take that money and pay the energy companies. Hmmm. Let's try this in playground . Johnny has a protection racket. We're going to charge him five dollars in a windfall profits tax. We are going to give each of his 20 victims a quarter each. Then each of those victims will give Johnny a quarter to pay for not being beaten up this week. Johnny will have been punished, and the victims wi...

From the Obama Transition Site : The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year. Obama will encourage retiring Americans to serve by improving programs available for individuals over age 55, while at the same time promoting youth programs such as Youth Build and Head Start. I know there will be people who stand up proudly and say, "There's nothing wrong with requiring our young people to 'give something back' to their community." I will grit my teeth here and not call...

From News.com.au : THE Federal Government is planning to make internet censorship compulsory for all Australians and could ban controversial websites on euthanasia or anorexia. Australia's level of net censorship will put it in the same league as countries including China, Cuba, Iran and North Korea, and the Government will not let users opt out of the proposed national internet filter when it is introduced. Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy Minister Stephen Conroy admitted the Federal Government's $44.2 million internet censorship plan would now include two tiers - one level of mandatory filtering for all Australians and an optional level that will provide a "clean feed", censoring adult material. Despite planning to hold "live trials" before the end of the year, Senator Conroy said it was not known what content the mandatory filter would bar, with euthanasia or pro-anorexia sites on the chopping block. "We are talking about mandatory block...

... and now Radley Balko has confirmed it: In the 1976 case U.S. v. Martinez-Fuerte, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that contra the Fourth Amendment, the government can set up roadblock checkpoints within 100 miles of the nation's borders in order to check for illegal immigrants and smuggling. The Court ruled that if the stops are brief, limited to that purpose, and not fishing expeditions, the minimal invasion to personal privacy is outweighed by the government's interest in protecting the border. The ACLU says that since September 11, 2001, the government has been steadily stretching the limits of Martinez, to the point where the Department of Homeland Security is using that case and the terrorism threat to conduct more thorough, more invasive searches at dozens of checkpoints across the country. With 33 checkpoints now in operation, we're not exactly to the point of "Ihre Papiere, bitte" Berlin yet, but the ACLU does warn that the area of the country 100 miles...

It's not China. Not quite. You can get Delawareliberal, the Boston Tea Party, and even Just a Girl in Short Shorts, but you cannot check your email, use Google Images, or visit Outright Libertarians. You can't go on eBay. You can, however (just checking) backdoor your way into dozens of very, shall we say, explicit sites. But you can also access Delaware Libertarian, or else you wouldn't be reading this. This is a common phenomenon: schools with heavily but stupidly gated internet access (and this one has, believe it or not, a 121-digit password). You can get into chat rooms as long as you dummy in through at least three different sites. What is the point?

During my years in the Virginia Army National Guard it was an annual event to see the infantry companies of the 1st Brigade, 29th Infantry Division (Light) going through Civil Disturbance Training with riot shields. On a variety of occasions our troops were called out in natural disasters (primarily floods), and had to provide security against looting in areas that had been evacuated. That part of the mission always worried me, even though I could accept the necessity. The key part of this use of military force in a civilian setting, however, is that when our National Guard elements were so used, we were mobilized by the State of Virginia, under the command of the Governor, and paid by the State instead of the Feds. This is a critical factor, along with the fact that 90% or better of the soldiers were citizens of the State in question. Now, however, the Federal government is openly prepared Regular Army units for use on American soil. From The Army Times : The 3rd Infantry Division’s...

... is pretty much what Tom Tancredo's new Anti-Jihad legislation is about. Yes, it is absolutely chilling [as you can find digested in Fausta's Blog ] that Sharia Courts are now operating in the UK with full judicial sanction to handle everything from financial disputes to divorces to domestic abuse. Tancredo wants to prevent that by making the advocacy of Sharia law in the US a deportable offense for non-citizen Muslims. What a great idea, Tom! We'll fight a radical Islamic idea that would strike at the very foundations of our Republic with the designation of certain political ideas as being so unsuitable for political discourse that we will use the power of the State to deport those who don't think correctly. That will certainly save a country founded on the rights and freedoms contained in the Bill of Rights.

At least that's what the NCCo instant ticket program for unsightly yards and properties really appears to be for. Last year, New Castle County collected $74,425 in fines for people violating code . But going through all that pesky red tape--you know, actual charges and a judge and all that--was apparently too time-consuming or too costly (kind of like those damn FISA surveillance rules), so authorities implemented the instant ticket . Here's how this new, highly efficient system works: Step one: some neighbor rats you out for an inoperable car parked in your driveway. Step two: an inspector shows up and writes you a $50 ticket. Step three: you either plead guilty and send in the money, or plead not guilty and send in the money. [Not much difference there, huh?] Step four: an official from the same organization that wrote you the ticket rejects your appeal [because, after all, that inspector doesn't have to worry about that funky old presumption of innocence thing]. S...

So please, if you value liberty, visit Big Bend Bikers for Freedom and take two minutes to read his words.

...if we just made cars that could not travel faster than 75 miles per hour. That's the suggestion from Kent Sepkowitz in the New York Times : SPEEDING is the cause of 30 percent of all traffic deaths in the United States — about 13,000 people a year. By comparison, alcohol is blamed 39 percent of the time, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. But unlike drinking, which requires the police, breathalyzers and coercion to improve drivers’ behavior, there’s a simple way to prevent speeding: quit building cars that can exceed the speed limit. Kent also thinks you should get automatic speeding tickets: Imagine, for a moment, if E-ZPass kept track of exactly when each car entered one toll booth and exited another, which would allow local governments to do some basic math, dividing distance traveled by time spent. If this calculation showed you to be a speeder, the authorities would send you a traffic ticket. At this point I was thinking, "Who is this jerk...

... and not American citizens. But Becky beat me to it . Ask yourself why Asian stock markets and bourses are celebrating this morning, and why anybody thinks its good for the average homeowner . You don't have to be a Libertarian to realize that both Senators McCain and Obama are pandering on this issue (but it helps).