Delaware is obediently preparing to bend over and accept the civil rights reaming that is Real ID [as quoth the WNJ ]: Those getting a Delaware driver’s license will soon face increased security measures. That could make life difficult for some – particularly immigrants who are not in this country legally and don’t have the necessary documents. The federal REAL ID Act of 2005, which came in response to the 9/11 Commission’s findings that 18 of the 19 hijackers had obtained driver’s licenses, requires states to revamp their licenses and licensing procedures to meet federal standards. The law was condemned by many states as a costly unfunded mandate – it would cost them an estimated $4 billion to implement it – and 24 states have refused to comply or passed laws limiting their participation. Delaware, which didn’t resist the federal Real ID mandate, is expected to be ready to meet the requirements of Real ID. If you want to read about the serious civil rights, personal privacy, and gover...

... 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...

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.

What does it take to make us all realize what it means to be an American? Apparently, three months of compulsory service for all citizens 18-25. There's a problem with the embed code that I can't debug, so visit EyeblastTV for the clip of Rahm Emmanuel discussing exactly how this wonderful piece of state-sponsored mandatory volunteerism is supposed to work I can't wait to hear my liberal/progressive friends defend this proposal.

From the Senate Finance Committee report on changing the health care system [primary author Max Baucus]: The responsibility for all Americans to obtain coverage would be enforced possibly through the U.S. tax system or some other point of contact between individuals and the government. Every individual would receive a certificate of coverage from their insurer to demonstrate that they are meeting their responsibility. Enforcement of a responsibility to have health care through the tax system has advantages. The biggest advantage is that most Americans already have contact with the IRS through the annual filing of a tax return. Monitoring health insurance coverage through the tax code would take advantage of this existing relationship. One issue to be addressed, however, is how to deal with individuals who do not file a tax return due to their low tax liability. If a premium subsidy for health care was administered through the tax code, the non-filer issue would be significantly d...

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 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...

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...

Red light cameras, anyone? The City of Sarasota has a new idea: pay your automated tickets or we'll foreclose your house. From RC at Big Bend Bikers for Freedom [where the news is generally depressing, because freedom is generally disappearing]: The Sarasota County, Florida Board of Commissioners unanimously voted on Tuesday to move forward on a proposed ordinance authorizing the seizure of the home belonging to anyone accused of not paying a red light camera ticket. The commissioners must now hold another public hearing and vote on the issue before beginning the process of installing the cameras. "Failure to pay any amounts provided for under this article may result in the filing of a lien against the property of the registered owner," the proposed red light camera ordinance states. "Such lien shall be subject to foreclosure as provided by law." Cool, huh?

None of whom are among my favorite Senators, but when they get it right, they deserve the damn credit. [And, oh yeah, Sheldon Whitehouse, who I have to admit I've never heard of.] From the New York Times: WASHINGTON — A Justice Department plan would loosen restrictions on the Federal Bureau of Investigation to allow agents to open a national security or criminal investigation against someone without any clear basis for suspicion , Democratic lawmakers briefed on the details said Wednesday. The plan, which could be made public next month, has already generated intense interest and speculation. Little is known about its precise language, but civil liberties advocates say they fear it could give the government even broader license to open terrorism investigations. Congressional staff members got a glimpse of some of the details in closed briefings this month, and four Democratic senators told Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey in a letter on Wednesday that they were troubled by wha...

From the Associated Press : A film critic is accused of illegally trying to return to the U.S. with nearly $12,000 stashed in a cigar box. Elvis Mitchell's explanation: Oops. He was traveling with the wrong box. Mitchell was entering Detroit in a cab from Windsor, Ontario, on April 26 when a luggage search turned up $11,817 in U.S. currency and 15 Cuban cigars, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Mitchell is in hot water because he didn't declare the cash at the Detroit tunnel or three days earlier when he flew to Toronto from New York. Anyone carrying more than $10,000 outside the country or into the U.S. must report it. I love that last line. We've reached the sheep-like stage wherein, because the government prefers it otherwise, we have to tell Nanny when we want to leave or come back into this country with our own cash . And there will be people--even here--who feel authorized to lecture me that this, along with taking off my shoes and confiscating my la...

Rebecca provided this link in a comment to one of my Blackwater/DEA stories, but since I doubt that most readers click through the comments here that often, I thought it deserves better billing. Besides, as Kris Hermes of Medical Cannabis reports, the DEA explanation is . . . mind-boggling: I was able to speak today with Tami Abdollah, the Los Angeles Times (LAT) reporter who wrote the article associated with the photo of the agent wearing a Blackwater t-shirt. First, Abdollah explained that at the time of the raid (when the photo was taken) she had asked about whether the agent in question was a Blackwater employee, but was not given a straight answer. After the raid, and after the story had been published by the LAT, Abdollah was contacted by Sarah Pullen, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles office of the DEA. Pullen requested that the face of the agent wearing the Blackwater t-shirt be blurred because he was an undercover agent and the photo might jeopardize his apparent anonymity....

... and wouldn't Osama bin Laden be proud? Look what he has caused us to do to ourselves . This is a completely unnecessary quasi-Federal police force that gets scarier every day.

Where is the Senate and Congress? This is a teaser: "No executive in the history of the Anglo-American world since the Civil War in England in the 17th century has laid claim to such broad power,” said David Adler, a prolific author of articles on the U.S. Constitution. “George Bush has exceeded the claims of Oliver Cromwell who anointed himself Lord Protector of England.” It only gets worse from there, you can read the rest of the story here .

Bill Conroy was normal journalist doing his duty when one day two agents of the Department of Homeland Security came to his house and all of that changed . And his life changed forever..... You can read his story here. You know that when our academics and journalists are intimidated and coerced, the end is nigh.

. . . which is not exactly a big surprise. Here's the gist of the inane editorial arguing that the Feds should be allowed to collect DNA from everyone arrested for a Federal crime : DNA is simply the 21st-century version of 19th-century fingerprint technology. In addition, DNA from both a victim and the accused can be invaluable proof of whether a charged or convicted suspect is actually guilty of a crime. Fingerprints can't do that. It is easy to see where civil libertarians can be wary of government compilation of such data. But the good that it can do in law enforcement overrides the fears of potential abuse. Besides, creating a database of everyone's personal health profile would be complicated, extremely time-consuming and expensive. The new federal rules for use of DNA apply only to those arrested or convicted of federal crimes. But 13 states, with California soon to join, have already agreed to start collecting DNA information for those arrested or convicted of stat...