Remember where civil forfeitures took us? Corrupt cops pulling over ‘rich looking’ out-of-state cars, to simply confiscate cash —or even the car itself— from their drivers. Our senators think the idea was so good, they’re extending it to our national forests.

For a recap:

“Civil asset forfeiture has allowed police to view all of America as some giant national K-Mart, where prices are not just lower, but non-existent — a sort of law enforcement ‘pick-and-don’t-pay.” — Henry Hyde, in Forfeiting Our Property Rights

Using a mangled form of legal reasoning —Jefferson Madison, and even Hamilton are whirling in their graves— under civil forfeiture the government “sues” the piece of property (the car that a citizen drove before the police stopped them and confiscated it) and now the citizen carries the burden of proof to show the car wasn’t ‘aiding a crime’. Yeah, believe it or not, thats exactly how it works.

“. . . civil forfeiture had been so abused in drug cases — with reports of cops driving around Porsches of suspected drug offenders –that a group of conservative and liberal congressmen drafted a bill to reform the process. The late House Judiciary Committe Chairman Henry Hyde, R-Ill. and then-Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., joined with Rep. (and current Judiciary Committee Chairman) John Conyers, D-Mich., and Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., to sponsor the Asset Forfeiture Reform Act that was signed into law in 2000. The law increased the government’s burden of proof before it could engage in the pre-trial confiscation of the property of the accused.” —John Berlau

Most other people thought that unrestrained civil forfeiture was bad; but our Senators thought we needed to revive the idea. Buried in its thousand-or-so pages, the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 (S. 22) has provisions that provides for potential civil forfeiture when a person picks up, moves, takes, trades, sells, or gives away a “paleontological resource.” You can loose your car for the kids picking up a neat rock.

This Act creates civil penalties (including confiscation of property) for: 1) the excavation, removal, or alteration of a paleontological resource located on federal lands; 2) exchange or receipt such a resource, if the person knew or should have known such resource to have been illegally removed from federal lands; or 3) selling or purchasing a paleontological resource, if the person knew or should have known such a resource to have been illegally removed from federal lands. —The Partnership for America

That’s just for starters on casual hikers and campers; the penalties increase for researchers, universities and students who are legitimately collecting. As the Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences points out, the law makes a crime —possibly five years in prison— for simple label errors or recording mistakes that every museum has.

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The problem is not Democrats. It’s not Republicans. The problem is 1,000 pages of garbage —written by special interests— that nobody in Congress has read through. Again.

Call your Congress critturs and ask them to defeat this monster.

Hat tip to 84Rules who wrote “Excellent Dilbert Cartoon: Sums Up The Democrat Controlled Congress Nicely.” For extra points, how is this Congress —spending itself into oblivion— one bit different than the “The Republican Controlled” Congress that was spending itself into oblivion.

Until that time, the caption should be:

“Dilbert Cartoon Sums Up Congress Nicely”

84Rules got close, but Scott Adams absolutely nailed it.

Now that our President indicates he will ramp up the effort in Afghanistan, will he continue —like Bush did— to pour money into making it unwinnable? Or will Obama actually make a Change® from his predecessor and consider ending the War-on-Poppies-in-Afghanistan?

Since the US invasion in 2001, the American and Afghan governments have made the poppy-growing areas of Afghanistan, which produce 90 percent of the world’s opium, a major front in the war on drugs. Yet despite eight years of efforts to eliminate the crop, farmers keep growing poppies, and the crop still reaches the black market….

Eradication is not just an ineffective strategy, but also hurts the security interests of Afghanistan and Western governments. While the United States invests $1 billion in eradication efforts each year, the Taliban profits by purchasing poppy from farmers who have no one else to sell to, and selling it to the black market. Also, the eradication policy fuels anti-Western hatred when farmers become sympathetic to insurgent groups after the US and Afghan governments burn or spray their only source of income.

The eradication policy remains in place even though it is widely recognized as a failure. Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s new envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, last year called the eradication program “the single most ineffective program in the history of American foreign policy.” —Boston Globe

That is $1 billion a year we spend to prop up the Taliban, $1 billion a year we spend to create enemies, and that is $1 billion a year we spend —ultimately— against our own soldiers.

In 1974 Turkey was faced with many of the same problems Afghanistan faces today;

. . . once upon a time the drug trade also threatened the country’s political and economic stability. Just like Afghanistan, Turkey had a long tradition of poppy cultivation. Just like Afghanistan, Turkey worried that poppy eradication could “bring down the government.” Just like Afghanistan, Turkey — this was the era of “Midnight Express”– was identified as the main source of the heroin sold in the West. Just like in Afghanistan, a ban was tried, and it failed.

As a result, in 1974 the Turks, with American and U.N. support, tried a different tactic. They began licensing poppy cultivation for the purpose of producing morphine, codeine and other legal opiates. Legal factories were built to replace the illegal ones. Farmers registered to grow poppies, and they paid taxes. You wouldn’t necessarily know this from the latest White House drug strategy report– which devotes several pages to Afghanistan but doesn’t mention Turkey — but the U.S. government still supports the Turkish program, even requiring U.S. drug companies to purchase 80 percent of what the legal documents euphemistically refer to as “narcotic raw materials” from the two traditional producers, Turkey and India. —Anne Applebaum

This is not the time to act stupid and claim people are “for” illegal drugs because they aren’t “against” them or don’t support harsh sentences. Illegal drugs are a scourge, but what we are doing is worse than doing nothing. We know beyond any standard of proof —studies, documentation, and the real world around us— that the ‘drug war’ has failed at every level, and is making the situation worse. Worse for the Afghans and worse for US troops.

Long ago Clayton Cramer crunched the numbers to show we can license poppy growing, buy up the entire crop, and cut the funding out from under our enemies. . . for the same amount we are spending to alienate the population and fund the Taliban. This supposedly is a war —decent folks from Shenandoah County have died in this conflict— so perhaps we should try doing something effective instead of doing all the ‘nice’ and politically correct playacting.

It’s time to finally end “the single most ineffective program in the history of American foreign policy” and get on with winning the war. We must —and can— crush the Taliban and Al Qaeda, but not if we are also financing them and recruiting their soldiers and supporters.

You can’t make this stuff up. Pete Townsend should get a commission.

Meet the new boss, same as . . . Etcetera etcetera

Graphics tip via Instapundit.

A tale of pro-freedom Democrats and nanny-stater Republicans.

A while ago I wrote of a ‘trick’ or ruse to get more votes on the anti-restaurant legislation, a law called a smoking ban. As predicted, Senator Ralph S. Northam now confirms the ruse:

Also, for the readers curious about the rumors that came up a couple of weeks ago involving a certain Republican’s ‘tweet’, I just wanted to make clear that I never contemplated leaving the Democratic Party.

Nah, he never contemplated it, just told Republican Party leaders he would . . . if the they backed his anti-choice bill. Which they did; they fell for the ploy and voted against free choice and against individual liberty.

Both sides showed their contempt for Virginia citizens.

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To some our representatives’ credit, they didn’t vote a party line, and it wasn’t just Republicans. While some on ‘the right’ demonstrated they sure aren’t, some of ‘the left’ demonstrated they weren’t interested in regulating every aspect of our lives, and voted against nannyism.

Delegate Albert Pollard writes an explanation of his pro-choice vote opposing the restaurant regulation.

When I walked in, the place was filled with smoke and quite frankly pretty gross and not at all appetizing. And guess what? I walked out of the restaurant, waited for my colleague and then we found another place to eat.
This ability to choose distinguishes the ban in private restaurants from Governor Kaine’s ban on smoking in publicly owned buildings, which in my mind is very reasonable.—The Smoking Ban (emphasis added)

Thank you Delgate Pollard.

Nobody expected the Brave New World to creep in on cat-soft feet; warm, cuddly, and welcomed. What we envision is a narrative of struggle before the bad guys take over. Dystopia might be the setting of many books and film, but our expectations of overwhelming, repressive change are from conflict gone bad.

In post-apocalyptic versions we get Omega Man, Nineteen Eighty Four, Mad Max, or the Terminator after some huge war. In Fahrenheit 451, Enemy of the State and Brazil the bad guys have taken over politically through some ruse. We tend to believe repression is a product of some group overcoming and controlling a complacent majority, like the Soviet Union which rose in revolution spun off from World War I. Or like communism in China, originally opposing Japanese invaders, and taking on an evil life of its own afterwards.

What is not part of the social narrative is that we would voluntarily create these terrible conditions ourselves.  We don’t believe that we would make a society where life is deplorable and characterized by misery and oppression.

Yet why should it not be this way? The National Socialist Party gained control through ordinary elections , and so did the Baathists of Iraq.  It may not be common, but there are many examples that it’s possible.

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We now know that Ralph Nader used deceit to destroy the reputation of the most fuel-efficient and most sustainable car on the US production line. Nader’s acts led the auto makers to abandon the ‘small and efficient’ concept, which left them economically stranded a decade later during fuel shortages. We now know that Nader’s claims were false; the car was as safe as any other. And we know he knew.

So it’s no surprise that Naderites were the leading lobbyists for the “Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008″ (or CPSIA); a ‘child safety law’ that will destroy more American industry. It’s no surprise that their poster child (a child who tragically died of lead poisoning) would not have been saved or helped by this law, but died from eating an item that is not effected by this law. They knew that.

Nor should it surprise anyone that the core of this law is not about lowering lead or pthalate limits. The core of the CPSIA is to make paperwork and create paper-trails; to mandate extensive testing whether it is needed —whether it is meaningful— or not and to extensively document those tests and the production lots. This new law mandates ‘how’ a business operates, what steps they must take, what labels they must attach, label size, its location and its listings; not whether the product is safe or not.

At its heart, the CPSIA creates burdens. As an economic policy, it adds a tolerable overhead cost to bulk manufacturing, something no longer common in the US. Since test cost is spread over the volume of units, a $5,000 test per item will not make those millions of  ‘Happy Meals’ cost one cent more. When applied to a hand-knit sweater, it adds $5,000 to the cost of that one sweater.

Justice is supposed to be blind, not half-witted. Source certification means nothing to the CPSIA, so a sweater knitted from absolutely lead-free and pthalate-free yarn must still be tested for lead and pthalate content. Plain wooden blocks, free from lead, must be tested anyway. A child’s mini-bike fails the test because an internal part of a valve on it’s tires contain traces of lead, as does the wire to its spark plug; are children really chewing on those parts?

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Warm, cuddly, and welcomed, Brave New World creeps in on its cat-soft feet. The CPSIA passed both houses almost unanimously before the President signed it. From Virginia, every Representative and every Senator voted for it. Republican or Democrat, they all made the wrong call.

They may have been well intentioned, but its a bad road that’s paved with good intentions, and laws are not intentions: this one is bad.

More reading from the experts

The Common Room, a stay-at-home mother and researcher. The best link collection.
The Fashion-Incubator, Kathleen Fasanella’s Lessons from the Sustainable Factory Floor
Walter Olson, Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute , Founder and Editor of Overlawyered!Jonathan H. Adler, Professor and Director, Center for Business Law & Regulation, Case Western
Virginia Postrel of the Dynamist

Jobs have been lost when we cannot afford lost jobs, prices have been raised when we can least afford it, and those that need help the most are the people most hurt. We should eliminate childhood dangers, we should reduce exposure to harm; but this CPSIA is not the way.

Sen. Mark Warner (D- VA), 202-224-2023
Sen. James Webb (D- VA), 202-224-4024
Rep. Robert J. Wittman (R - 01), 202-225-4261
Rep. Glenn Nye, III (D - 02), 202-225-4215
Rep. Robert C. Scott (D - 03), 202-225-8351
Rep. J. Randy Forbes (R - 04), 202-225-6365
Rep. Tom Perriello (D - 05), 202-225-4711
Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R - 06),202-225-5431
Rep. Eric I. Cantor (R - 07), 202-225-2815
Rep. James P. Moran (D - 08), 202-225-4376
Rep. Rick Boucher (D - 09), 202-225-3861
Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R - 10), 202-225-5136
Rep. Gerry Connolly (D - 11), 202-225-1492

Call Warner, Webb, and your Representative today. Every one that was serving voted for it, but they all need to help straighten out this mess. Tell them you want the CPSIA fixed —now— before more damage is done.

First week of the new law. Not much change in Shenandoah County.

Ray Bradbury’s novel about a ‘future’ where firemen burn books will never come to pass. The book was an attempt to combat the mindlessness of electronic pacifiers; the numbing isolationism of iPods, Bluetooth, and Blackberry videos; and the censorship of ideas —not of official censors— but the thousand cuts of religious, racial, ethnic, and political correctness, all banning one part each.

But as I said, Bradbury’s vision is wrong. Oh, there’s much that is correct, but he got too much detail wrong for the story to be prophetic. Bradbury even missed the title; the ignition temperature of books (paper) is ‘Fahrenheit 844’ or its equivalent ‘Celsius 451’. It still would have been a good read.

It’s for the children.

The new battle cry for oppression, in this case, children’s safety is the supposed reason to drown a swathe of American —and Virginian— small businesses and industry in regulation and testing costs:

Census data indicates that approximately ninety-eight percent of the domestic manufacturers of toys, dolls and games fall into the Small Business Administration’s traditional definition of small business (less than 500 employees), approximately eighty one percent of manufacturers of such products have fewer than twenty employees, and over fifty percent have fewer than five employees.

Moreover, the testing and certification requirements affect companies that have not previously been regulated (or did not realize that they could be regulated) by the Commission, such as book publishers and craft makers. These entities too are dominated by small businesses . . . 64 percent of craftspeople worked alone, and nearly all of them employed fewer than 5 people.

There has never been an instance of lead poisoning from a book. Never; yet Congress mandated testing for each and every edition of children’s books. There has been no recall for lead in American-made products for over five decades, that’s fifty years, two generations; all recalls for lead have been products of China. Yet every crafter and toymaker —even using lead-free components— must pay for testing each and every model.

In Shenandoah County, the public libraries are simply ignoring the CPSIA. Thrift shops in Mt Jackson and Woodstock are not: based on news articles they are discarding all painted objects, but are unaware of other provisions in the new law. Interesting to me is that the second-hand stores already inspect for safety: they scan lists of recalls, and check clothing and other items for choking hazards like wire or string, chipped paint or cracked surfaces, removable parts, etcetera.

As always, The Common Room covers this subject the best, but Overlawyered covers it as does the  Ace of Spades !   Goodwill Industries legal staff has prepped their stores for discarding “metal jewelry, books published before 1985, soft plastic toys for infants made before Feb. 10, toys with small parts or that break easily, cribs, car seats and clothes with rhinestones, metal or vinyl snaps, zippers or appliques.” The cost will be the equivalent of closing a small store; it means some Goodwills will close and lay off employees.

Shut down craftspeople and individual clothing makers, burden small businesses, and put the handicapped out of work; only to pass the pork-laden Stimulus Package in order to “create new jobs”.


Are we really that stupid?

The rich can buy or rent happiness; the working class and poor must pursue their own. The King of Rome is one such story.

Charles H. Hudson was one of a family of four children, born in the 1870s in the rough section of Derby, an industrial English city.  Charlie worked as a gas lamp lighter and also made baskets and pots to sell from his house at 56 Brook Street, now demolished.  He raised pigeons, and in his back yard was his pigeon loft.

In the West End of Derby lives a working man
He says “I can’t fly but me pigeons can
And when I set them free
It’s just like part of me
Gets lifted up on shining wings”

Although homing has been known for centuries, the sport of homing pigeon racing was new in Charlie’s time.  It can be a cheap hobby; a novice can pick up a promising wild bird or an extra from a fancier, and then breed their own.  But it can get be expensive too —even today it can be a expensive hobby with prices from “free to $250,000″— where fanciers buy the best stock and there are bets on the outcome.

Pigeon racing is a sport with “a single starting gate, and a hundred finish lines“, their home lofts. In 1913, some of the wealthier fanciers agreed on a long-distance race from Rome.  For a substantial fee, each owner put their bird(s) in a basket, and the race Committee took them to Rome where they would all be released at the same time.

Charlie Hudson scraped up enough for the entry fee and packed off his best bird. In Rome on the race day, the thousands of pigeons were all released and they all streaked straight for home . . . and ran into a storm over the Alps.  The news came back that all the birds were lost.

All of them except —in the end— Charlie’s pigeon.

No other English birds survived. Of 1200 Belgian pigeons that entered the race, 62 straggled home.

Come on down, your majesty
I knew you’d make it back to me
Come on down, you lovely one
You made me dream come true

Hope against hope; the plain and honest dreams of a working man.  The King of Rome.

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Charlie Hudson never sold his prizewinner, but continued the hobby, and those pigeon’s genetics are found among racing homers today.  Pigeons only live 3 to 5 years in the wild, but up to 35 years in ideal domestic conditions.  The King of Rome died sometime prior to 1946; Charlie died in 1958.

Derby native Dave Sudbury wrote a song —the verses above come from it— about the King of Rome. Sudbury subsequently also wrote a great childs book on the story, now probably illegal due to the CPSIA.  June Tabor  and Garnet Rogers have recorded the song, a song that one critic says “Makes me cry every [bleeping] time.”

Depite neuroscience and the ability to map brain functions with modern instruments, we know little more today than we did in 1913 as to ‘why’ pigeons navigate their way over the earth.  Scientific speculation ranges from magnetic particles that sense direction to ’smelling’ their way home.

Pigeons are one of the few service animals that get stuffed and mounted after death; “GI Joe“saved thousands of Allied lives in WWII and is mounted in an Army museum.  In a like way, the King of Rome was mounted and Charlie donated him to the Derby Museum, where he is displayed today.

$850 billion, 1419 pages, 100 megabytes . . . and nobody who counts has read it.  Read the Stimulus.

The House Democrats have previously promised that all conference reports would be made publicly available for 48 hours before consideration:

“unless the text of such agreement has been available to the managers in an electronic, searchable, and downloadable form for at least 48 hours prior to the time described in such clause.“

With the actual text released at 11 p.m. last night, the House Committee (Democrats all) voted to break that promise to the American people.  In this ‘new era of ethical government’, Washington lobbyists had the bill days before it was released to Congressional members and staff, the people that have to act on it.

“ANOTHER UPDATE: The Washington Post reports the stimulus contains pork and other special interest provisions. I’m shocked! Shocked! I tell you.” —Jonathan Adler

Rushing bills through is bad, but sometimes they have to be.  War powers are one example.  I realize that.  The Patriot Act was rushed through, but contained many ’sunset provisions’:  laws automatically expire in 5 years unless Congress acted to extend them.  The concept was that ‘Yes, this is rushed, but we will reconsider —with cooler heads— later on.’

The Stimulus Bill is a one time spending bill . . .  that cannot be repaid in a few years; it will paid back by us and our children.  The rush, the secrecy, the deception, and the lack of debate or consideration are inexcuseable.

The political blogs were burning up with the news of a possible defection from one party to another. It was a sham. Nobody bothered to connect the dots between a Democrat anti-tobacco zealot, and the ‘historic compromise’ of a Republican legislature passing anti-smoking law.

Here’s what the fuss was over:

“Riding in a car for an hour with a person who smokes is the equivalent of smoking 10 cigarettes” Sen. Ralph S. Northam, D-Norfolk (WTOP).

Really? No, but Northam has an agenda.

Riding in a car with someone who smokes one or two cigarettes is not “equal to smoking ten” Even a chain smoker doesn’t burn ten an hour, one or two is the usual range and three is a heavy smoker . . . and the non-smoker never gets more smoke than the smoker.

It’s not new math, it’s not a mistake, it’s not even an exaggeration; it’s simply a lie. A dirty rotten lie or a simple transparent lie. Yet that’s what got the law passed.  Not a single person in the legislature had the spine to call him on it either.

The only bipartisanship in all this is “disgusting”; both sides are disgusting. Northam’s hints to “defect” and the Republicans willingness to throw the public over for one senate seat with an ‘R’ label on it. The Democrats were happy to fake a defection to get their way.  It’s sad.

The General Assembly is supposed to be about what’s best for Virginians, not who can get one over on the other side. Virginia needs another choice besides two packs of juveniles more interested in scoring trivial points than handling the state’s business.