Before the Affordable Care Act, estimates were that 45,000 people died every year for lack of adequate insurance. We’ll be there again very soon.
Death Panel
Category Archives: Law
Traitors for Trump
Republicans, Trump supporters, the RNC, and the oligarch-elect himself, all seem to be fine with the behavior of traitors…as long as their party benefits at the expense of the majority.
FBI Director James Comey needs to be investigated, prosecuted, and have his ass tossed in jail for about the next 50 years for sitting on evidence of Russian RNC hacking. This isn’t some abstract matter. Russian intelligence put its thumb on the scale of a US election and Republicans will let it slide since they benefited.
How do we define traitors again?
Trump Change
For $24M, Emperor-elect Trump will settle two class actions lawsuits regarding how Trump University fleeced its students. For those of you keeping score that amounts to just over 1/2 of 1% of Trump’s net worth and, after the lawyers get their cut, maybe $600 per member of the class.
Crumbs from the emperor’s table.
Mexico…adding new dimensions of lawlessness
News hit today that 3,200 Mexican Federal police have been fired. They are accused of, get this, corruption. In the Mexican police? Say it isn’t so!
What can you do in a country where you can’t trust the enforcers of the laws? Despair.
Grayson is at it again
The democratic representative from Florida came out with a doozy this week. He’s frustrated, and rightly so, that nothing coming out of the House is being taken up by the Senate. Here’s his quote direct from TheHill.com (and paraphrased a bit by moi):
It doesn’t make a difference if the Republicans in the Senate are blocking everything they can. At this point, if you put a cure for cancer up in the Senate, it would get filibusters
Sad but true Congressman, sad but true.
Good citizen…arm thyself!
Though it’s pretty safe to say that the violence plaguing Mexico hasn’t spilled over the border quite yet, Texans are preparing themselves as if the second coming of Santa Anna is nigh.
In response to concerns recently raised at a Fort Hancock town meeting Arvin West, the sheriff of Hudspeth County, advised the local citizens to get a gun. He then followed up with a quintessentially Texan observation:
You farmers, I’m telling you right now, arm yourselves… As they say the old story is, it’s better to be tried by twelve than carried by six.
Echos of Judge Roy Bean (“The Law West of the Pecos”).
Mandatory Life In Prison For Cagers
You know…it’s time we stopped screwing around when it comes to sentencing in murder cases that involve cars and trucks. It boils down to this: If you’re stupid enough, arrogant enough, or irresponsible enough to use a multi-ton vehicle as a weapon, then when you’re convicted you should spend the rest of your life in jail…PERIOD! No appeal, no extenuating circumstances, go straight the clink and rot there for the rest of your f*cking life!
Take the case of Monica Mercado, recently given a 32 years to life sentence in Compton, California for running down a pregnant rival for her boyfriend’s affections. This bitch will probably be out of prison and back in an SUV in 15 or 16 years—not even enough time to serve as a decent deterrent.
Frankly, if it were up to me, I’d take ever case of vehicular manslaughter and prosecute it as murder first, letting the circumstances as presented at trial dictate whether or not the charge should be reduced. That would deal with two big problems we have with how cagers treat pedestrians: 1) The fact that most people exercise no more restraint—no more responsibility—with their cars than they would if they were on foot or even on a bike; 2) The fact that most states have ludicrous and complex sets of rules about when the use of a car as a weapon constitutes murder and when it does not. Plain fact is, if every pedestrian/car encounter that results in a death is treated as a potential murder, cagers will have to think twice about how they drive.
Be Prepared
Portland (f-A-ke. P.) —
Today representatives of the Boy Scouts of America vigorously defended their organization against charges that they have systematically covered up allegations of sexual abuse of scouts for decades. When asked about the widely publicized civil case against Timor Dykes, an assistant scoutmaster in Portland accused of molesting a young man in the 1980’s, a BSoA representative said:
As you all know, the Boy Scouts of America would never allow a lesbian to be a scoutmaster. Therefore this case is obviously without merit.
In response to a question about the so-called “perversion files” that may be introduced into evidence at the Dykes trial, the representative muttered, “…f*cking clerical error! Somebody wasn’t ‘prepared’…,” before quickly leaving the press conference.
The Weak In Privacy
Two alarming new developments in the privacy arena are exposing the Obama administration as no better than Bu$hCo when it comes to protecting the privacy of Americans.
First, the administration is preparing to argue in a case before the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals that Fourth Amendment prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures do not apply to telco logs of the locations of cell-phone users. If fact, the FBI and local law enforcement agencies have been abusing such records for years, obtaining them merely by asking providers without a warrant and sometimes without probable cause.
Second, federal law enforcement agencies are are pushing for the creation of private “backdoor” interfaces directly into the internal servers of major Internet service providers (ISPs). The stated reason for this new intrusion into private communications is to speed up the process for legally obtaining data when a warrant is presented to an ISP. However, privacy advocates have noted that 1) Federal agencies already abuse existing interfaces by frequently presenting ISPs with “informal” requests for the same information, and so there should be no expectation that a more functional interface would not also be abused, and 2) That a common, consolidated, legally required, interface—implemented by all major ISPs—would present an obvious target for criminal organizations and thus would constitute a terrible risk to the private communications of ordinary citizens.
I said PASS the damn Salt!
New Mexico passed a law this week making it legal for residents to carry handguns into restaurants serving alcohol. Just wine and beer mind you, but we’re talking concealed weapons. The New Mexico state senate has billed this, “An effort to reduce crime”. How? I have no idea! I don’t know about you, but the Frog and I have decided that now not only are we not moving to New Mexico, we’re not even sure we’ll dine there.