Category Archives: Politics

As reported in the New York Times, an investigation into prosecutor misconduct during the 2008 trial of Ted Stevens found that the Department of Justice intentionally and illegally concealed evidence that would have helped Stevens in his defense. However, the investigator, an apologist for corruption named Henry F. Schuelke, recommended against prosecuting any of the officials involved for contempt of court because the trial judge had not specifically ordered them to obey the law by turning over all of their evidence to the defense.

As unbelievable as that sounds – I had to read it twice – Schuelke actually makes the argument that federal prosecutors shouldn’t be held accountable for breaking the law unless they were specifically told by the judge not to. I’m beginning to see why the DOJ also apparently didn’t see anything wrong with helping to smuggle guns to Mexican criminals. It looks very much like the DOJ has been infected with a massive case of Thin Blue Line Syndrome: the belief that, since they’re on the side of good, anything whatsoever that they do is justified.

That’s the only message I can deduce from the announcements that they’ve started running in hotels. The “suspicious person” shown in the video would appear, to any bystanders, to simply be getting something out of the trunk of his car. So I guess that anybody driving, or at least anybody carrying things in their trunk, is a potential terrorist.

Security theater again, obviously. In this case, though, I hope that a lot of people do follow through and report everybody they see opening up the trunk of a car. Considering that these messages are playing at motels, that should keep the DHS investigators so busy they won’t have time to screw us up any further.

Apparently doesn’t exist on the University of Wisconsin – Stout campus. It seems that academic freedom there doesn’t include the freedom to say anything the boss disagrees with.

UWS Chancellor Charles W. Sorensen, as shown by his own email response to FIRE, is both a moron and a petty tin-plated wannabe dictator. That goes double for UWS Police Chief Lisa A. Walter, who is grossly unqualified for her job if she knows so little about Constitutionally protected free speech. And no, I’m not an attorney. But Ken at Popehat is, and his response to this outrage is even more vehemently worded than mine.

It looks like more and more courts are not going along with police departments that try to stop citizens from recording police officers in public. Just the other day, the First Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling that not only is recording the police an activity that is protected under the First Amendment, but that the officers who wrongfully arrested a Massachusetts man for doing so can be sued.

However, it looks like the state of Illinois didn’t get the message. As reported by NBC Wabash affiliate, the state attorney general is trying to send a man to prison for doing exactly the same thing. In this case, if the facts are as reported, the violation is so blatant that both the attorney general and the arresting officer(s) really ought to face arrest and prison themselves. However, I will be quite happy if the First Circuit Court precedent results in them being sued for everything they’ve got. This “we watch you, you don’t watch us” crap needs to stop NOW.

Apparently that’s what the Long Beach (California) PD is doing, according to this story. Taking pictures of something that a police officer doesn’t find pretty (“with no apparent esthetic value”) is considered suspicious behavior, sufficient to justify detaining the photographer. I’m not an attorney, but it sounds like what they’re doing is a Terry stop. This is less burdensome that being arrested, certainly, but it is still an intrusion that needs to be carefully controlled. Not only is it offensive for a law abiding person to be detained without good cause, but needless investigation of innocent people takes police time away from other, more useful activities.

Since the department acknowledges that police officers are given no training in what qualifies as “esthetic,” we must assume it’s based on the personal preferences of each officer. It’s difficult to imagine how such a standard could possibly be defended in court. Even more so when the list of “suspicious” behaviors also includes looking through binoculars, taking notes, and inquiring about an establishment’s hours of operation. (Will business owners now be told not to post the hours they are open, lest that information somehow be used by terrorists? That would seem to be as reasonable as anything else in this policy.)

Well, apart from this, that is. Including the Brian Terry murder, at least twelve violent crimes in the United States have been linked to guns that the BATFE knowingly allowed to go to criminals. The number of crimes in Mexico connected to this program is unknown, but almost certainly a lot higher. And there’s no telling how many innocent people will be robbed, raped, or murdered with guns that were allowed to “walk” before they are all finally recovered.

This is way past being a regrettable mistake. High ranking people in the BATFE and the Justice Department absolutely need to go to prison for this.

Even medically necessary drugs, it seems, are a danger that the TSA must work hard to defend against.

I know this is a terrible thing to say, but things have reached the point where, if somebody were to be arrested for beating up a TSA screener at an airport, and I were on the jury, I would most likely not convict that person, even if I was convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that they were guilty.

It appears that the TSA allowed a somebody with a stun gun to slip past their watchful vigil and get onto a flight from Boston to Newark. According to the news report, the stun gun was left in a seat pocket. I guess the screeners were too busy feeling the private parts of children to pat attention to anything else. If these enhanced screenings were actually making our planes safer, I would still say it’s not worth the price. But clearly the TSA can’t even offer that excuse.

I have frankly come to the conclusion that if there were ever any honorable people working at this disgusting agency, they would have been forced by their own consciences to quit long before now. Everybody working for the TSA, from John Pistole down to the newest raw recruit, should be publicly shamed, and the agency itself needs to be disbanded.