Nobody's Business

Are We All Criminals Now?

I don't know that almost everything is a crime in America now, as this article alleges. But it's fair to say that if you had told Americans fifty years ago that this is what their children and grandchildren would end up getting arrested for, they would probably have laughed, and pointed out that this is the land of the free, and accused you of being a damn fool or a Chicken Little.

Most people don't give much credence to the admittedly much-abused slippery-slope argument. They think you're just seeing ghosts and engaging in tinfoil-hat radical thought when you say that, for instance, the blind enforcement of overreaching commerce laws is going to lead to the patently preposterous, like officials shutting down kids' lemonade stands.

And then the day comes when officials, in one city after another, begin shutting down kids' lemonade stands.

Thomas Paine got it right: "Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must undergo the fatigue of supporting it."

New Year's Resolution

I am going to be favoring rotund candidates from now on. If they smoke, so much the better. This is on the unproven theory that fat smokers are much less likely to get their XXL panties in a legislative wad about other people choosing to light up or eat calorie-rich foods. We'll see.

Rape Oracles Who Aren't

There are smart, articulate women everywhere. Why would the Times give these two ditzes the time of day on the topic of the questionable sexual assault charges against Julian Assange? I guess it's because they are rape victims: instant "credibility."

Sorry to rain on their parade, but whatever rape does to a woman, it clearly does not magically bestow great insight, or intellectual rigor, or a way with words.

In fact, the one on the right, Maureen Tkacik, literally has less vocabulary than my eight-year-old. I'm floored, in part because I didn't even know they have Valley Girls in Washington D.C. — much less that they can get jobs at City Paper.

So I was like, uh, totally. Yeah. And, you know, stuff.

The Most Useless Distinction That the World Lives By

Left. Right. Screw that.

Dickweeds on the left are the mirror image of dickweeds on the right. That's nothing new, it just needs to be said from time to time.

Don't Watch. Submit to Being Watched. Good Boy.

The government may eavesdrop on your phone conversations and grab your e-mails in transit. It has has the power to seize your laptop at the airport and at the border, keep it for weeks on end, and search it; neither reasonable suspicion nor a warrant is required. U.S. spies habitually monitor everything you do on social-media sites, looking for "subversive" words and phrases such as militia, Iraq, and (of course) body scanner.

This is business as usual for the fine folks who lord over the American citizenry like they're Sun Kings and we're the smelly rabble they must put up with.

Now contrast that with this: A man in Michigan has been charged with reading his wife's e-mails,

...under a state law intended to prevent identity fraud. As the Detroit Free Press reports, computer technician Leon Walker accessed his wife's Gmail account on a laptop in their home. From her e-mail messages, he learned she was having an affair with her ex-husband — a man previously arrested for domestic violence. Walker then filed for emergency custody of his wife's young son.

Oakland County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper says Walker is a dangerous "hacker." In other words, she and her colleagues, and other officials up the chain, ultimately claim the right to know every word your spouse utters — but if you look at your significant other's e-mail, they'll throw the book at you and try to put you away for five years.

Jesse Jackson Jr. Is Not God After All

Glad The Washington Post cleared that up. [second item]

I Don't Quite Get the Difference. You?

Interesting:

Despite sanctions and trade embargoes, over the past decade the United States government has allowed American companies to do billions of dollars in business with Iran and other countries blacklisted as state sponsors of terrorism, an examination by The New York Times has found.

If Wikileaks (not a Times investigation) had revealed this, people would be screaming for Assange's head. Maybe they'll be screaming for the Sulzbergers to be executed, but I doubt it. Not as loudly and not as massively, anyway.

As far as I'm concerned, this is exactly how a free press in a free country is supposed to operate. So thank you Arthur Sulzberger, and thank you Julian Assange. More disinfectant, please.

Daddy's Girl

Lauren LePage's LinkedIn profile says she's interested in "career opportunities" and "business deals." And boy, did she get them. The recent college grad, 22, has hit the mother lode. More accurately, she's hit the father lode.

Tea Party candidate Paul LePage narrowly won the governorship of my state last month. He hasn't taken office yet, but he's already made at least one executive decision that reveals how serious he is about upholding ethics standards and cutting government spending:

Gov.-elect Paul LePage has appointed his daughter, Lauren, to a staff position within the upper echelon of his administration, members of the LePage transition team said Wednesday. Lauren LePage, 22, will serve as assistant to the governor’s chief of staff, John McGough — a position that administration officials describe as entry-level and is commensurate with her experience, work history and education. LePage, a recent college graduate, will be a salaried political appointee earning approximately $41,000 a year.

Lauren LePage studied something medical (I wasn't able to learn exactly what), so she graduated in a field that appears to have zero relevance to the nice government job she just landed.

That means she has the wrong background and no experience. Yet her salary is more than double that of the average Mainer, all the more impressive because of her age and her essentially blank employment history. To be fair, we have to take the market value of her degree from Florida State University into account (unrelated though it is to her job). However, that still means she's getting paid at least $10K over the going rate. $41,000 is roughly what a Mainer with a master's degree makes — after five years on the job.

By most accounts, the LePages have gotten pretty good at grabbing the long end of the stick. That degree from Florida State? Lauren LePage (or rather, her parents) received a generous discount on her tuition because Paul and Ann LePage bought a home in Florida. Ann then claimed it as her primary residence, enabling Lauren to go to university while taxpayers footed a big part of the bill. At the same time, Paul and Ann LePage engaged in illegal double-dipping by claiming both properties as homestead exemptions on their tax returns. When that came to light, a few months ago, a spokesman explained that it was a "paperwork error." Fine.

But the hiring of inexperienced family members at much-bigger-than-usual salaries is surely no paperwork error. It indicates the makings of an imperial governing style that is galling enough if it's perpetrated by the Great Democrat Cronyism Machine in Chicago. When it's done by a Tea Party poobah who ran on promises of small government and fiscal responsibility, however, the stench of hypocrisy actually overpowers the stink of the "merely" improper and unethical.

Look, I don't begrudge Lauren LePage her nice new paycheck (assuming she's bright and hard-working). I don't even begrudge her the fancy digs she's moving into with her parents: Blaine House, a palatial mansion paid for by the state, where she'll save an additional $8,000 to $15,000 annually because she doesn't have to pay for a roof over her head. I'm not miffed that my taxes are helping keep a young lady gainfully employed and off the street. But it's perfectly clear she would have none of these advantages if her last name wasn't LePage. And it's more than plausible that LePage Sr., who won the election by a nose, would have gone down in defeat if he'd had the honesty to announce two months ago who'd be among his hires.

Question: Do I still get to feel betrayed even though I didn't vote for him?

Temperance Indeed

This is Prohibition in a nutshell: driven by moral panic, costly to police and prosecute, flouted and ridiculed from border to border, and pretty much completely ineffective.

The history of Prohibition in Maine echoes the history of the nation-wide Temperance movement, except that Maine is, sadly, a helluva lot more experienced in this statist bullshit than any other U.S. state: Maine was officially dry for some 83 years, a record.

Through most of it, alcoholic drinks weren't completely forbidden. But my state had a monopoly on the stuff in the form of a small and tightly-controlled alcohol-selling enterprise. Portland, for instance, could boast an honest-to-god agency liquor store on the ground floor of City Hall. Under Maine’s Prohibition law, an agency store was allowed to sell liquor "for medicinal and industrial purposes," thus putting it in competition with organized crime and small-time moonshiners alike. And if perhaps some of the local enforcers (called "liquor deputies") or a thirsty City Hall pencil pusher occasionally wanted a tipple, well, they had good connections, and they didn't have to walk far.

The rest of the time, they'd busy themselves going after scofflaws like these:

In one week in July 1855,

...local police had seized 123 gallons of liquor from a grog shop on Munjoy Hill, 60 gallons from a cart in the street supposedly carrying barrels of flour, 10 gallons from a steamer at the wharves, and 57 gallons from the schooner Comet. 

Also in that period,

police found four kegs of liquor packed in salt inside four barrels of “mess pork.” The barrels of “pork” were addressed to a man in Mechanic Falls, who quickly claimed “he had no knowledge of the transaction, had never ordered any liquor at all.” Obviously, liquor was finding its way into Maine.*

19th-century Portland mayor Neal Dow was a leader of the Temperance movement. According to the very entertaining and informative DownEast Magazine article from which I've plucked the information above, Dow still has admirers today, including one who glowingly compares Hizzoner's one-time fame to ... Elvis Presley's. Because nothing says temperance like a bloated lounge singer who died on the toilet after sucking down a quantity of prescription drugs that would knock out an elephant.

Read it all.

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* Note how closely this fact tracks to the easy availablity of all manner of illicit drugs today. Prohibition, meant to choke off supply, was a failed idea then, and remains so now.

Drowning in the Letter of the Law

Two guys with a rubber raft successfully save a drowning deer. For their kind act, Baltimore's Natural Resources Police rewards the two samaritans with a good scolding and a matching $90 fine, because the two lacked the requisite "flotation devices." I'd have thought a rubber raft floats pretty damn well. Hell, it might even be made for buoyancy, but I admit I'm no nautical expert.

Just remember folks: if you ever see police officers drowning, get thee to a store pronto and buy life jackets before you attempt a rescue. It's the law.