Latest global warming scare: internet & power disruptions

Not satisfied with scaring you about oceans rising, glaciers melting, more powerful hurricanes, droughts, floods, famine, cats & dogs living together, the global warming cultists have more doom & gloom in store because of “climate change” – internet and power disruptions. Oh, the humanity! With all of the above soundly debunked (well, maybe not the dogs & cats living together thing), they needed something, anything, to really invoke fear. And what could be more fearsome than disruption of your internet connection? Crap – there goes my Facebook and Netflix! (story here from The Telegraph)

Already the transport sector is preparing for temperatures above 104F (40C) this summer, which could lead to breakdowns on the railways.

Speaking at Blackfriars Station in London, which Network Rail is currently fitting with solar panels and rainwater harvesting systems in order to be more resilient against power cuts, Ms Spelman said the UK is already investing £200 billion (US$287B) over the next five years.

But that will not be enough to stop economic impacts of climate change if it is invested in the wrong areas.

She warned of intense rainfall, droughts and heatwaves in the next 50 to 100 years because of man-made global warming. The signal from wi-fi cannot travel as far when temperatures increase. Heavy downfalls of rain also affect the ability of the device to capture a signal.

For a country like Britain, with a GDP of roughly $2T (compared to the US GDP of $14T), $287B is a big chunk of change to waste on global warming scares. In other words, we need to savage the economy so you don’t lose your WiFi connection. Algore approves, of course.

How long before this idiocy becomes the subject of a congressional investigation…

New passport application – Kafka’s Catch-22

If you don’t have a US passport you might want to get one now before a proposed new application form is adopted. This is particularly true if you don’t have a copy of your long form Birth Certificate. According to this story, many of the questions are almost impossible to answer.

The U.S. Department of State is proposing a new Biographical Questionnaire for some passport applicants: The proposed new  Form DS-5513 asks for all addresses since birth; lifetime employment history including employers’ and supervisors names, addresses, and telephone numbers; personal details of all siblings; mother’s address one year prior to your birth; any “religious ceremony” around the time of birth; and a variety of other information.  According to the proposed form, “failure to provide the information requested may result in … the denial of your U.S. passport application.”

The State Department estimated that the average respondent would be able to compile all this information in just 45 minutes, which is obviously absurd given the amount of research that is likely to be required to even attempt to complete the form.

It seems likely that only some, not all, applicants will be required to fill out the new questionnaire, but no criteria have been made public for determining who will be subjected to these additional new written interrogatories.  So if the passport examiner wants to deny your application, all they will have to do is give you the impossible new form to complete.

This form is a bureaucrat’s dream come true – Kafka’s Catch-22. With the stroke of a pen some government drone who may be having a bad day has the power to deny your passport.

You’re probably thinking, “How could they possibly know any of this – I’ll just make up a bunch of stuff.” That’s true, but that’s also the beauty of it. They don’t have to know any of it. If they deny your application, the onus is on you to prove it.

Please make it stop…

Lemonade Day – a lesson in government regulation

Once upon a time a kid could set up a lemonade stand virtually anywhere and make a few bucks. Sadly those days are over as you are now subject to government harassment and even prosecution should you try it now. In many areas you need a business license and Health Department inspection to set up a simple lemonade stand. But wait, there’s hope. You can do this one day a year on Lemonade Day. That’s right, one day a year many cities will allow this so that kids can “learn and appreciate” entrepreneurship. Actually, it’s a lesson in government regulation (story here from the LA Times).

My 8-year-old recently got the lemonade stand itch. So we started laying plans to enrich her college fund by enticing passers-by with white chocolate-pistachio cookies and juice from organic lemons. Fortunately, our property backs onto one of the busiest paved urban trails in America, bustling on weekends with cyclists, rollerbladers and pedestrians. Visions of dollars danced in our heads.

Googling for the perfect lemonade recipe, we soon found a site promoting a May 1 “national” event called Lemonade Day. This event, organizers say, is an “initiative designed to teach kids how to start, own and operate their own business — a lemonade stand.” What better day to begin building our lemonade empire?

After shopping for her raw materials, I gave my kid a bedtime primer about starting a business. How much profit do you make after expenses? How should you promote your business? Give the customer a great product. She soaked it up and went to sleep all inspiration and smiles. Then I got to thinking about something I hadn’t discussed with her: government regulations.

The author relates a three day odyssey of contacting various government agencies about setting up a simple lemonade stand. The bottom line was that under normal circumstances, a simple child’s lemonade stand was out of the question. They would allow it, however, for Lemonade Day.

What the Lemonade Day organizers should teach the children, said the health official, is about the importance of learning and obeying the government regulations that prohibit lemonade stands.

If we had made it past the health and parks departments, my kid would have been stymied by zoning laws that prohibit lemonade stands in residential neighborhoods. Overcoming that barrier, we would have hung our heads at the daunting costs of business and vending licenses, not to mention taxes.

Lemonade Day is promoted as a way to “inspire a budding entrepreneur!” But it is actually a dispiriting lesson about how hard it now is to become an entrepreneur, whether you’re an adult or a child. It is about how even the most harmless enterprise, the humble lemonade stand, has been sacrificed on the altar of government regulation.

“Obeying the government” – that’s the real lesson here. The author handles it well.

Learning to be an entrepreneur “starts with a lemonade stand,” say the organizers of Lemonade Day. But they don’t want to talk about the regulations that make it impossible for my kid to become a lemonade stand entrepreneur. They tell me it is “silly” and “beside the point” to focus on the regulations. I am told that Lemonade Day is about kids learning to “give back to their communities,” “do better in school” and “open bank accounts.” It is not about something so self-serving as making a profit by selling a good product. That is the old American way, but the new way is living with rules that banish the lemonade stand to one government-approved day a year.

What are my kid and I going to do on Lemonade Day? We are going to set up a stand in one of the permitted locations — in a park or at one of the approved sponsors — with hundreds of other kids doing the same thing. But our “secret ingredient” is that we will hand out leaflets explaining why operating a lemonade stand makes my kid and yours not just a hopeful entrepreneur, but an actual lawbreaker.

Next year they should rename it Regulation Day.

It makes you wonder if America can survive this assholery…

After SC Tax vote, Amazon says UP YOURS!

Amazon.com is the largest and most successful on line marketplace with 33,700 employees and over $34B in revenue. One of the biggest reasons most people shop on the internet is the lack of sales tax on purchases – in most instances. Of course, state governments lament this “loss of revenue” and they have been looking hard at legislating this advantage away from internet merchants (more here). Amazon has been the obvious #1 target of the taxers and they have vowed to fight efforts to tax on-line purchases (more here).

One of the ways states can currently collect sales taxes from internet purchases is if the seller has a presence in the buyer’s state. For example, if you purchase an item from Amazon that comes from one of their affiliates and that affiliate has an outlet in your state, you pay the sales tax. One of the ways Amazon has fought this is to simply close their affiliate program in the states that enact on-line taxing legislation. According to this story Amazon has upped the ante with the state of South Carolina. After the legislature approved an internet tax, Amazon cancelled a project for a distribution center in Midlands. The plant is under construction and was anticipated to provide over 1200 jobs.

South Carolina lawmakers’ decision to deny a sales tax break for online retailer Amazon.com will cost Lexington County more than 1,200 jobs, but the effects could ripple across the state.

Some say the incentives were unfair to established brick-and-mortar retailers while others maintain the reneged deal will cause other industries to pause before bringing their business to South Carolina.

Amazon.com decided after the vote to cancel $52 million in procurement contracts and remove all job postings from its website for the Midlands plant, effectively saying goodbye to South Carolina.

Newly-elected republican governor Nikki Haley applauded the decision, saying that South Carolina wants to “level the playing field” for business. Ugh!

That did little to change Gov. Nikki Haley’s stance, and she applauded the House’s 71-47 decision in a visit to Charleston on Thursday.

‘When you come to South Carolina, we’re going to give you a fair competitive marketplace to do business, and we’re always going to take care of businesses that are in town,’ she said. ‘By allowing Amazon to get a tax break that we’re not giving to any other business in our state destroys what I am saying.’

Haley said retail is different from manufacturing because its jobs are subject to higher turnover and lower pay. ‘It is not a Boeing. It is not a BMW,’ she said during the Free Enterprise Foundation’s awards luncheon at The Citadel.

Amazon is not a Boeing or BMW so we don’t need their business? Those 1200 jobs are low-paying with high turnover – you know, the kind that Americans won’t do but Mexicans will. Great job, governor!

Government wants to regulate icemakers (sigh)

Remember the “old” refrigerators before ice makers? You had those 2 ice trays that you had to keep refilling and you never had enough ice if you had more than 3 people at a party. As someone who loves a glass full of ice with my drink, I appreciate the convenience of the ice maker. Most of us don’t even think about it any more – we just put the glass under the ice dispenser and enjoy a cold drink. Well, in an effort to save you from “climate change,” your government is about to do something about that horrible, wasteful ice maker (story here).

In its latest effort to save the planet from global warming, the U.S. government is on the verge of regulating ice makers commonly found in many refrigerators because they increase energy consumption by a good 12 to 20%.

This could be detrimental to the environment since there are more than 100 million refrigerators across the nation and they devour a substantial chunk of the electricity used by all households. Energy consumed by refrigerators as a whole has long been documented but not what the ice makers inside their freezers use individually.

Americans can finally sleep soundly through the night because government scientists have completed the ice maker study and the findings have been beautifully laid out in a 79-page report titled Energy Consumption of Automatic Ice Makers Installed in Domestic Refrigerators. The information is being used to make a case for regulating the popular little machines that are contributing to the planet’s destruction.

In a nutshell, the culprit is the tiny motor inside the freezing system that’s used to release ice from the mold and into a tray. Because the motor is specially built to function in a cold setting, it requires an internal heater to keep it from freezing up. Here’s where it gets serious; heating elements require a lot of power and that’s where the extra energy consumption kicks in.

OK, I get it – refrigerators consume a lot of power (we have 3 of them). But what if I’m OK with that and am willing to pay for it? What if I don’t mind paying a little extra for the convenience of having as much ice as I want, whenever I want it? It’s a simple matter to disconnect the ice maker if you don’t want to use it. The salient question is this: Do we really need some government apparatchik controlling the use of our refrigerator?

The Obama Administration has been quite active in its campaign to enlighten Americans about the ills of global warming. A few months ago a group of esteemed scientists from several public universities warned that climate change will make food “dangerous” and add to the malnourishment of millions worldwide.

Before that separate government evaluations revealed that global warming causes mental illness and cancer and that it creates national security threats by spreading disease among people and animals. Authored by government scientists from various agencies, the mental illness/cancer report claims global warming is one of the “most visible environmental concerns of the 21st century” The separate national security assessment, made by intelligence and health officials, says climate change will destabilize developing nations as well as the U.S. economy and military.

Mental illness? I guess that explains this nonsense. SHEEESH!

Politician: Detroit “deserves” bailout or something

Detroit, home of the “Big 3″ US auto manufacturers (2 of which are on government life support), is the epitome of failed government social policies. Mired in political corruption (more here and here), with an abysmal school system (more here) and fleeing population, the city has become an economic and industrial wasteland (more here and here). While mayor Dave Bing deserves some credit for at least trying to turn things around, others in the city government believe that Detroit deserves a taxpayer bailout (story here from the Detroit News). Huh? WTF?

Councilwoman JoAnn Watson is reiterating her call for a government bailout of Detroit, saying the city that built the middle class deserves as much help as Wall Street or General Motors.Addressing the City Council today during Mayor Dave Bing’s budget presentation, Watson gave a spirited pitch for federal funds to help the city whose population declined 25 percent since 2000 to 713,777.

“We are worth it. We are worth at least as much as General Motors or Chrysler or the Wall Street bankers,” Watson said. “It was this city that built military vehicles for World War II. It was this city that (invented) the middle class and the five-day work week.

“We should not be in a position to be victims. We are victors. And we should demand respect.”

General Motors received $52 billion in government aid, while Chrysler received $12.5 billion, according to published reports. Mayor Dave Bing has traveled to Washington, D.C., repeatedly seeking more federal funds for Detroit.

Watson has floated the idea for years. The liberal magazine the Nation named Watson one of its 14 MVPs in 2009 for promoting a “multifacted Detroit Marshall Plan to revitalize her economically battered city.”

In the past, Watson has said the city deserves at least $1 billion.

Declared a “Model City” by the LBJ administration in the 1960′s, Detroit has received hundreds of millions in taxpayer funding. And now Detroit demands “respect.” How sad…

For a pictorial view of this disaster see these photo essays:

• The Ruins of Detroit
• Detroit vs Hiroshima 65 years later

School bans lunches brought from home

The Nanny State rolls on as a government school in the Chicago area has banned most lunches brought from home. If you thought that, as a parent, you could could provide a decent and inexpensive lunch for your kid, the nanny principal at this school has two words for you – UP YOURS (story here).

At his public school, Little Village Academy on Chicago’s West Side, students are not allowed to pack lunches from home. Unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served in the cafeteria.

Principal Elsa Carmona said her intention is to protect students from their own unhealthful food choices.

“Nutrition wise, it is better for the children to eat at the school,” Carmona said. “It’s about the nutrition and the excellent quality food that they are able to serve (in the lunchroom). It’s milk versus a Coke. But with allergies and any medical issue, of course, we would make an exception.”

Carmona said she created the policy six years ago after watching students bring “bottles of soda and flaming hot chips” on field trips for their lunch. Although she would not name any other schools that employ such practices, she said it was fairly common.

A Chicago Public Schools spokeswoman said she could not say how many schools prohibit packed lunches and that decision is left to the judgment of the principals.

“While there is no formal policy, principals use common sense judgment based on their individual school environments,” Monique Bond wrote in an email. “In this case, this principal is encouraging the healthier choices and attempting to make an impact that extends beyond the classroom.”

Common sense judgement? The problem with this statement is that the words “common” and “sense,” when used together form an oxymoron in the government lexicon. There’s nothing common about common sense in government. Perhaps the next statement more appropriately describes the situation.

Any school that bans homemade lunches also puts more money in the pockets of the district’s food provider, Chartwells-Thompson. The federal government pays the district for each free or reduced-price lunch taken, and the caterer receives a set fee from the district per lunch.

It also means more money for the school but the nanny insists this about “nutrition.” Riiiiiiiight…

And of course, if the government lunch is so good for them, it should, you know, taste good too. Right?

At Little Village, most students must take the meals served in the cafeteria or go hungry or both. During a recent visit to the school, dozens of students took the lunch but threw most of it in the garbage uneaten. Though CPS has improved the nutritional quality of its meals this year, it also has seen a drop-off in meal participation among students, many of whom say the food tastes bad.

“Some of the kids don’t like the food they give at our school for lunch or breakfast,” said Little Village parent Erica Martinez. “So it would be a good idea if they could bring their lunch so they could at least eat something.”

I guess not. Without even a hint of salt or other spices, it probably tastes as good as it looks:

What is THAT?

I’m not sure what that is but it kinda looks like dog food. But it’s government-issue so eat it or go hungry you ungrateful brats.

While some parents are upset, the money quote comes from this tool:

But parent Miguel Medina said he thinks the “no home lunch policy” is a good one. “The school food is very healthy,” he said, “and when they bring the food from home, there is no control over the food.”

If your kids attended this school what would you do? This is not about nutrition, it’s about control…

NYC nanny state fatso politician wants to ban Happy Meal toys

The idiotic nanny state notion that banning toys in McDonald’s Happy Meals will somehow solve childhood obesity is not new (more here). I suppose the idea is that kids actually want Happy Meals because of the “toys” inside, rather than the burger & fries – after all, the toys probably taste better. And, of course, parents can’t actually say “no” to their kids so the government needs to step in. What makes this story (from NBC NY) so funny is the nanny who is proposing legislation to ban the Happy Meal toys (and the headline to the story). Meet NYC Councilman Leroy Comrie:

Happy Meal victim

A city lawmaker thinks free toys and other giveaways cause children to clamor for fast food, and he planned to introduce a bill Wednesday that will ban them from meals that fail to meet nutritional guidelines.

The bill would create an incentive for restaurants to cook up healthier options, Councilman Leroy Comrie said.

“If we can get the fast food companies to brand and create nutritious meals where children could receive toys, they would be just as excited,” he said.

Meals would be required to be less than 500 calories, as well as low in fat and sodium, according to the proposed law outlined by Comrie’s office Tuesday. Any single food would have to be less than 200 calories. Violators would initially be fined $200 to $500.

So in other words, a Happy Meal would have to consist of carrot and celery sticks and maybe a half of a tuna fish sandwich (on whole wheat) to include a toy. I’m sure kids will be “just as excited” for that – LOL!

What makes this career apparatchik such an expert on childhood obesity and the fast food business? Why, his vast personal experience – and obvious girth.

Comrie, who is himself overweight, has publicly acknowledged his battle with weight and said he ate Happy Meals regularly as a child. He also said he failed to set a good example for his own children by allowing them to eat fast-food.

“Clearly, my weight has always been an issue, and it’s something that has given me the impetus to do this bill,” Comrie, who has confessed he weighs more than 320 pounds, said, according to The New York Post.

He regularly ate Happy Meals (probably several at a time) but he doesn’t say it was because of the wonderful toys inside. I guess we’re just supposed to assume that. He also failed to set a good example for his own kids by allowing them to eat fast food. Hmmm, I guess he’s on a guilt trip or something.

McDonalds has been in the food business for more than 50 years so they probably know more about it than this barrage balloon.

2010 Census: Detroit population down 25%

Lions and Tigers and FAIL, Oh My… That the city of Detroit is a FAIL is not in question (more here, here, here, and here). That it is this big of a FAIL was made apparent with the 2010 Census results. In its heyday (1950s) Detroit had almost 2 million residents. Home of the Big Three US auto manufacturers, Detroit was an industrial and economic powerhouse. Today, it is an economic and industrial wasteland that has lost more than half of its population and more are fleeing every day. Current predictions are that Detroit’s population may sink to below 500,000 by the end of the decade.

Detroit’s population has fallen steadily since the heyday of the auto industry in the 1950s, when it peaked around two million, but the declines have accelerated in recent years as manufacturing jobs have disappeared and the mortgage crisis has devastated even stable, middle-class neighborhoods. The number of vacant housing units doubled in the past decade to nearly 80,000, more than one-fifth of the city’s housing stock, the Census Bureau reported.

“For those of us who have been out in the neighborhoods, we knew that the foreclosures and the abandonment were really extreme and accelerating,” said Lyke Thompson, director of Wayne State University’s Center for Urban Studies. “The question is, can you put a bottom under it?”

In 1950, Detroit was the fifth-largest city in America, behind New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, and it was in the top 10 as recently as the 1990 Census. Now, Detroit is likely to fall to 19th, behind Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio.

Former NBA star Dave Bing is the mayor of Detroit and according to most sources, he’s been trying very hard to turn the city around. Bing replaced former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, currently serving time in a federal prison for a variety of corruption charges. Mayor Bing is said to be incredulous about the Census results and will likely call for a recount – mostly because Detroit will lose federal (taxpayer) money.

The flight of middle-class African-Americans to the suburbs fueled an exodus that cut Detroit’s population 25% in the past decade to 713,777, according to Census Bureau data released Tuesday. That’s the city’s lowest population level since the 1910 census, when automobile mass production was making Detroit Detroit.

The decline, the fastest in city history, shocked local officials, who had expected a number closer to 800,000. Mayor Dave Bing said the city would seek a recount.

“If we could go out and identify another 40,000 people that were missed, and it brings us over the threshold of 750,000, that would make a difference from what we can get from the federal and state government,” Mr. Bing said at a news conference Tuesday.

In all, the city lost more than 237,000 residents, including 185,000 blacks and about 41,000 whites. The Hispanic population ticked up by 1,500. Meanwhile, the black population in neighboring Macomb County more than tripled to 72,723, constituting 8.6% of the county’s population in 2010, compared with 2.7% a decade earlier. Oakland County’s African-American population rose 36% to 164,078.

While Bing has made some positive changes, the answer shouldn’t be finding 40,000 phantom residents so they can get more taxpayer money. They should instead focus on fixing the problems that continue to drive residents from the city. This article (from the WSJ) explains how massive infusions of taxpayer money, coupled with failed social and economic policies, have turned Detroit into a wasteland.

Most Americans did not need to be told that Detroit is in a bad way, and has been for some time. Americans know all about white flight, greedy unions and arrogant auto executives. The recent census numbers, however, put an exclamation mark on a cold fact: A once-great American city today repels people of talent and ambition.

“Detroit is a classic example of how a culture that was legendary for enterprise and innovation was slowly eroded by toxic politicization from the 1960s on,” says the Rev. Robert A. Sirico, president of the Michigan-based Acton Institute. “It’s been class warfare on steroids, and the inevitable result is that so many Detroiters who had the means—black and white—have fled the city.”

Another way of putting it is this: Unlike New Orleans and Japan, the ruin we see in Detroit is entirely man-made.

While the decline of the US auto industry has had a huge impact on the city, Detroit’s problems go deeper and are systemic.

What happened to this Detroit? In many ways the answer is liberal politics and expanding government. In the 1960s, for example, Detroit became one of Lyndon Johnson’s “Model Cities.” That meant it was on the receiving end of hundreds of millions of federal dollars to transform a nine-mile-square section of the city. It would be just the first of many government-funded redevelopment schemes that left behind one of the most blighted urban landscapes in the nation.

Notwithstanding its failures, government continued to grow while city services—e.g., police and fire protection—continued to decline. Whites moving to the suburbs took much of the tax base out of the city in the 1960s. The latest census numbers show that blacks are now following in the path of the whites before them. Apparently they don’t like crime and the lack of decent schools for their kids either.

What’s left is the city so embarrassingly exposed by the census figures, a place that people are fleeing as fast as they can. Think of all the dysfunctional measures you can: poverty rates, unemployment, crime, failing public schools, falling home values. Detroit has them all, and most of its indicators rank among the worst in the nation.

The epitome of government FAIL…

FAIL: Feds “accidently” shut down 84,000 websites for bogus child porn

With laser-guided precision, the DOJ and Homeland Security dropped the hammer on some child porn websites over the weekend – 84,000 of them. The websites were seized and home pages were replaced with a page accusing them of distributing child porn. Great! Uh, wait a minute… I smell a FAIL coming… Ah yes, here it is (from Gizmodo):

“Operation Protect Our Children” sounded great! The Department of Justice and Homeland Security’s tag-team beatdown was supposed to seize ten criminal sites this past weekend. Instead, it shuttered 84,000 innocent domains. And replaced them with a banner labeling them as child porn traffickers. Whoops!

The 83,990 sites that weren’t hosting underage porn were stuck with a the gigantic graphic seen here for days after the error was realized. Not exactly a trivial accusation—and an extremely damaging one for the sites, which were mostly personal and small business pages. FreeDNS—the domain service behind the affected sites—was forced to comply with the takedown request by court order, but was clearly (and rightfully) pissed at the misuse of their system: “freedns.afraid.org has never allowed this type of abuse,” they commented. At the moment, nobody has any idea how the tremendous screwup happened.

The government’s response to this grossly inept boot-to-the-face? Oh well, at least we got those 10 kiddie porn sites shut down.

Surely, DoJ and DHS must be a little red in the face over the whole thing. Right? Right..? Nope. In a beaming statement released yesterday, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano heroically explained that “Each year, far too many children fall prey to sexual predators and all too often, these heinous acts are recorded in photos and on video and released on the Internet. DHS is committed to working with our law enforcement partners to shut down websites that promote child pornography to protect these children from further victimization.”

Child porn is certainly a disgusting problem and the purveyors should be vigorously prosecuted. Unfortunately the assclowns at DOJ and DHS used a tactical nuke instead of a flyswatter. The failure to at least admit that they made a mistake only rubs salt in the wound.

Why is our FAIL tolerance level so high for government?

“Operation Protect Our Children” sounded great! The Department of Justice and Homeland Security‘s tag-team beatdown was supposed to seize ten criminal sites this past weekend. Instead, it shuttered 84,000 innocent domains. And replaced them with a banner labeling them as child porn traffickers. Whoops!

Moron of the Day double header

A couple of quick hits for Moron of the Day. First, from the nation’s capitol:

Brenda Speaks - Moron of the Day

Brenda Speaks, Ward 4 Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner:

When politicians, agency officials and other establishment types discuss the pros and cons of Wal-Mart opening stores in poor, retail-starved neighborhoods in the District, they often talk about pretty high-minded stuff. Fair pay. Job training. Environmental safeguards.

By contrast, in the scruffy blocks around the corner of New York Avenue and Bladensburg Road in Northeast Washington, where the first of four Wal-Marts planned for the District would probably be built, the residents have more immediate, street-level concerns.

First, would a new Wal-Mart there really stock the same quality of food and products as its stores do in better-off, suburban communities?

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Mya Harris, 24, said skeptically. “Sure, you can put the store here, but what are they going to put inside it?”

Second, and I was amazed when this anxiety was aired in fully half the interviews, residents worry that the store would suffer severely or even fail because of petty theft.

“There’ll probably be a lot of shoplifting going on. They’ll need a lot of security,” Terriea Sutton, 35, said.

Brenda Speaks, a Ward 4 ANC commissioner, actually urged blocking construction of the planned store in her ward at Georgia and Missouri avenues NW partly because of that risk. Addressing a small, anti-Wal-Mart rally at City Hall on Monday, Speaks said young people would get criminal records when they couldn’t resist the temptation to steal.

Is this braying jackass woman for real?

MotD #2 is the Surrey Police in jolly old England:

Residents in Surrey and Kent villages have been ordered by police to remove wire mesh from their windows as burglars could be injured.

Home owners in the villages of Tandridge and Tatsfield in Surrey and in Westerham, Brasted and Sundridge in Kent have said they are furious that they are being branded ‘criminals’ for protecting their property.

Locals had reinforced their windows with wire mesh after a series of shed thefts but were told by community police officers that the wire was ‘dangerous’ and could lead to criminals claiming compensation if they ‘hurt themselves’.

Crime reduction officer for Tandridge PC John Lee commented: ‘We are constantly advising homeowners to protect their property and the contents of their shed or garage, however, a commonsense approach needs to be taken.

‘To properly secure your sheds, Surrey Police strongly advises people to invest in items such as good-quality locks and bolts, and not to resort to homemade devices, as this could cause injury.’

A police source  added: ‘Homemade devices can cause injury and there have been cases where criminals have sued for injuries they have suffered while committing a criminal act.

‘We are advising people to do whatever they can to protect their property, but wire mesh is not one of the suggestions we would make.’

Unfortunately, England has all but disarmed the general public. Now the government is discouraging citizens from protecting their own property. How sad…

FAIL: SEC fails audits seven years in a row

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was established in 1934 following the crash of the stock market. Its primary responsibility is the enforcement of federal securities laws and regulating the securities industry, the nation’s stock and options exchanges, and other electronic securities markets. While it may have done a decent job in the past, its recent performance (since about 2000) has been less than stellar, to put it mildly. It has been asleep at the switch for some of the biggest scandals and financial failures of the century and it has failed its own audits seven years running (story here from the NYT).

If a company’s financial reporting were so bad that its auditor had pointed out significant weaknesses in its accounting for seven years running, the Securities and Exchange Commission would most likely be all over it.

But what if the company were the S.E.C. itself?

Since the commission began producing audited statements in 2004, the Government Accountability Office has faulted its reporting almost every year. Last November, the G.A.O. said that the commission’s books were in such disarray that it had failed at some of the agency’s most fundamental tasks: accurately tracking income from fines, filing fees and the return of ill-gotten profits.

“A reasonable possibility exists that a material misstatement of S.E.C.’s financial statements would not be prevented, or detected and corrected on a timely basis,” the auditor concluded.

Since 2000 its budget has tripled and its staff has ballooned to almost 4000 employees.

…the S.E.C. is far from starved for money. Its $1.1 billion budget in 2010 was 15 percent higher than the $960 million it received the year before — and nearly triple its $377 million budget in 2000.

Representative Spencer T. Bachus, the Alabama Republican who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said last week that the tripling of the S.E.C.’s budget occurred in a period that included some of the agency’s biggest failures — the Ponzi schemes of Bernard L. Madoff and R. Allen Stanford and the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.

FAIL.

With the Dodd/Frank boot-to-the-face avalanche of new financial regulation coming into play, the SEC is about to become even more powerful – and costly.

Dodd-Frank did authorize a doubling of the commission’s budget, to $2.25 billion, over the next five years — without providing the money for it. It also authorized the commission to spend as much as $100 million beyond its operating budget for new technology systems.

Anticipating new employees, the S.E.C. has been busily leasing more office space — an effort that has drawn the attention of the agency’s inspector general. Last week, he began investigating the S.E.C.’s decision last July to lease more than a million square feet of prime office space in Washington, one of the largest federal leases in a decade.

Within a few months of that decision, its prospects for bigger budgets fading, the S.E.C. began negotiations to return some of the leased space. The latest inquiry is the second investigation of the S.E.C.’s leasing practices in a year. Last September, H. David Kotz, the inspector general, reported that a lack of adequate policies led the agency to make lease payments that could have been avoided, including more than $15 million for space in Manhattan that no S.E.C. employees have occupied in the last five years.

Typical. Government. FAIL. With no end in sight…

TSA bars more airports from converting to private security

While the TSA backed off on its Holiday travel grope-a-thon (more here), several airport authorities announced that they would be dropping TSA security for private screeners (more here). Since 2002 sixteen airports have replaced TSA screeners with private security and a larger number began considering similar moves.

Some of the nation’s biggest airports are responding to recent public outrage over security screening by weighing whether they should hire private firms such as Covenant to replace the Transportation Security Administration. Sixteen airports, including San Francisco and Kansas City International Airport, have made the switch since 2002. One Orlando airport has approved the change but needs to select a contractor, and several others are seriously considering it.

The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, which governs Dulles International and Reagan National airports, is studying the option, spokeswoman Tara Hamilton said.

For airports, the change isn’t about money. At issue, airport managers and security experts say, is the unwieldy size and bureaucracy of the federal aviation security system. Private firms may be able to do the job more efficiently and with a personal touch, they argue.

Airports that choose private screeners must submit the request to the TSA. There are no specific criteria for approval, but federal officials can decide whether to grant the request “based on the airport’s record of compliance on security regulations and requirements.” The TSA pays for the cost of the screening and has the final say on which company gets the contract.

Up until last week the TSA has remained “neutral” on these moves. According to this story (from CNN) that has changed. TSA head John Pistone is shutting down the program because he “sees no advantage” in continuing it. No advantage, that is, for the TSA.

A program that allows airports to replace government screeners with private screeners is being brought to a standstill, just a month after the Transportation Security Administration said it was “neutral” on the program.TSA chief John Pistole said Friday he has decided not to expand the program beyond the current 16 airports, saying he does not see any advantage to it.

“I examined the contractor screening program and decided not to expand the program beyond the current 16 airports as I do not see any clear or substantial advantage to do so at this time,” Pistole said.

He said airports that currently use contractor screening will continue to be allowed to.

During the grope-a-thon brouhaha Rep. John Mica (R-FL) wrote a letter encouraging airports to dump the TSA in favor of private contractors. Mica is not amused with Pistone’s move to shut the program down.

Told of the change Friday night, Mica said he intends to launch an investigation and review the matter.

“It’s unimaginable that TSA would suspend the most successfully performing passenger screening program we’ve had over the last decade,” Mica said Friday night. “The agency should concentrate on cutting some of the more than 3,700 administrative personnel in Washington who concocted this decision, and reduce the army of TSA employees that has ballooned to more than 62,000.”

“Nearly every positive security innovation since the beginning of TSA has come from the contractor screening program,” Mica said.

Of course, the union that covers TSA employees supports Pistone’s decision.

A union for Transportation Security Administration employees said it supported the decision to halt the program.

“The nation is secure in the sense that the safety of our skies will not be left in the hands of the lowest-bidder contractor, as it was before 9/11,” said John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees. “We applaud Administrator Pistole for recognizing the value in a cohesive federalized screening system and work force.”

In its 9 year existence the TSA has not caught a single terrorist or prevented a single terrorist attack. They have, however, stopped a 4 year old boy with leg braces (potential terrorist) from boarding a plane to Orlando for a trip to Disney World (more here). And they’ve groped thousands of old folks and children because, you know, they may be terrorists. Even pilots and flight crews have been subject to TSA abuse, although they’ve been forced to modify those procedures (more here).

As with any other government agency, the TSA has been a miserable failure. At an annual cost of over $10B/yr it represents the type of low hanging fruit ripe for picking by congressional budget cutters. While private contractors may not provide a significant security advantage over the TSA, you can bet that they would be more responsive to the needs and concerns of the traveling public. You know, the folks who are paying for it.

TSA hard at work

NY lawmaker wants ban on “walking & talking” – Huh? WTF???

In the race to determine which state can impose the most ridiculous nanny-state sanctions on its beleaguered citizens, NY is certainly a perennial top contender. In the pitifully small and simple minds of NY’s ruling elite, New Yorkers are just incapable of protecting themselves from the dangers of daily life. Thus, being the benevolent shepherds that they are, the ruling class must do what they can to steer their flock through the minefield of life in the Empire State. After all, New Yorkers, this is for your own good. These people are trying to save you.

Without supporting research, it is difficult to discern what type of threshold must be crossed to trigger a nanny-state reaction in the pea brain of a NY politician. The only known fact is that the threshold is exceedingly low, and it covers a broad spectrum of seemingly innocuous activities. According to this story the latest activity that must be banned is “distracted walking.” You know, like crossing a street while talking on a cell phone or listening to music. Huh? WTF?

After targeting distracted drivers, some New York lawmakers want to go after distracted walkers. They are looking to ban them from using iPods, music players and cell phones while walking and crossing the street.

At E.A.T. restaurant on Madison Avenue they still haven’t gotten over the death of co-worker Jason King, killed last month when a truck hit him as he crossed the street while listening to his iPod.

Jason was just 21 and his death and along with other accidents involving people using electronic gadgets while walking is why Brooklyn Sen. Karl Kruger is looking to ban things like cell phones and iPods for pedestrians crossing the street.

“We have people who are literally dying in the street,” Kruger said.

Dying, Kruger said, not because they are distracted drivers but because they are distracted walkers.

OMG! People are literally dying in the street! Not from gunshots or assaults, but from “distracted walking.” Oh, the humanity! They even found some sheeple who agree with this.

Charles Tabasso, 14, admitted he’s one of them because he listens to his iPod constantly.“I would probably get run over right now if it weren’t for my awesome parents,” Tabasso said.

His mom agreed.

“As a parent I am definitely in favor of banning these things,” Tullia Tabasso said.

And as a parent, Tullia, you’re an idiot for wanting the government to do your job for you. You’re part of the problem and the government is not the solution.

Some said they object to the move as an intrusion by government into the everyday lives of people — the nanny state syndrome.

“When people are doing things that are detrimental to their own well being, then government should step in,” Kruger said.

No senator Kruger, the government should not step in. Shit happens, and sometimes bad shit happens. Millions of people walk the streets of NY every day and it’s probably safe to assume that at least 50% of them are “distracted” in one way or another. As much as you would like to wrap everyone in your government-issue straight jacket, it is not the role of government to protect a few stupid people from harm by punishing everyone.

Taxpayers bail out Fannie & Freddie for legal bills too

Back in 2004 the top officials of Fannie Mae were forced to resign in disgrace for an Enron-like accounting scandal that was designed to boost their bonuses and executive compensation (more here). Fannie Mae was also forced to pay hundreds of millions to settle lawsuits and fines by the SEC. At the head of this political criminal enterprise was Franklin Raines, appointed CEO by president Clinton in 1999. From 1999 – 2004 Raines received over $90M in salary and bonuses, of which, according to the SEC, $52M was “improperly awarded.” Raines, along with corruptocrat former senator Chris Dodd, was also part of the Countrywide VIP loan scandal. In 2008 dear comrade candidate employed Raines as a “financial adviser” because of his, um, extensive experience (more here). More on Raines extensive experience here (from Michelle Malkin).

While Raines and his plundering crew may have left Fannie in 2004, the legal bills associated with his criminal enterprise continue to mount. Thus far, the federal government has spent over $160M in legal fees defending Fannie & Freddie (story here from the NY Times) in civil lawsuits. Great – talk about adding insult to injury.

Since the government took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, taxpayers have spent more than $160 million defending the mortgage finance companies and their former top executives in civil lawsuits accusing them of fraud. The cost was a closely guarded secret until last week, when the companies and their regulator produced an accounting at the request of Congress.

The bulk of those expenditures — $132 million — went to defend Fannie Mae and its officials in various securities suits and government investigations into accounting irregularities that occurred years before the subprime lending crisis erupted. The legal payments show no sign of abating.

Not included in this $160M are the tens of millions in legal fees spent by the GSEs prior to the government takeover.

In addition to the $160 million in taxpayer money, Fannie and Freddie themselves spent millions of dollars to defend former executives and directors before the government takeover. Freddie Mac had spent a total of $27.8 million. The expenses are significantly larger at Fannie Mae.

Legal costs incurred by Mr. Raines, Mr. Howard and Ms. Spencer in the roughly four and a half years prior to the government takeover totaled almost $63 million. The total incurred before the bailout by other high-level executives and board members was around $12 million, while an additional $18 million covered fees for lawyers for Fannie Mae officials below the level of executive vice president. Many of these individuals are provided lawyers because they are witnesses in the matters.

After the government moved to back Fannie and Freddie, the Federal Housing Finance Agency agreed to continue paying to defend the executives, with the taxpayers covering the costs.

Jeffrey Skilling (former Enron president) got 24 years in the slammer for his part in the Enron scam. Ken Lay (Enron CEO) would have gotten a similar sentence but he died before his sentencing hearing. Yet the taxpayers are forced to defend the perpetrators of the same scams at Fannie & Freddie. It would have been cheaper to prosecute them and send them off to prison.

US still gives “foreign aid” to China – Huh? WTF?

There’s little doubt that China has become a major player in the world economy. While using virtual slave labor to flood the world marketplace with cheap goods, their own markets are all but closed to foreign trade. Foreign companies (including US companies) have packed up and moved to China to take advantage of cheap labor and try to gain a foothold in the Chinese marketplace.

While the Chinese economy has shown signs of weakening in recent months, they are still buying US long term debt and have even offered to bail out the failing EU. So the question of the day is this: Why is the US still sending foreign aid to China? (story here from Investor’s Business Daily)

While Chinese President Hu flaunted his country’s power during his Western tour, his No. 2 economy raked in billions in Western aid. That’s right. We’re still subsidizing China. Why?According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, foreign aid to China totals $2.6 billion a year. The biggest donor is Japan, followed by Germany, France and Britain, then the U.S. All of these countries, meanwhile, are in debt to China and running massive deficits.

U.S. aid, at $65 million a year, is relatively small thanks to sanctions imposed following Beijing’s 1989 military crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square. Still, why are we sending China any succor at all?

OK, so $65M a year is chump change when you consider we spend about $50B (that we don’t have) on foreign aid. But why are we giving anything at all to China? Especially when we’re essentially borrowing it from them in the first place. Couldn’t that $65M be better spent, say, on cancer research? With an average tax liability of approximately $10,000 per family, $65M represents the sweat equity of about 6500 US families to pay for this foolishness.

If the government is really serious about cutting spending, here’s a no brainer…

FCC conditions for Comcast-NBCU merger – BOHICA Comcast customers

After agreeing to stipulations by the FCC, the Comcast-NBC Universal merger is a done deal. While some of Comcast’s costs for this deal would be passed on to their customers anyway, the conditions mandated by the FCC will more than likely add even more to the monthly Comcast bill. BOHICA!

Here are some of the more interesting mandates from the FCC (post here).

“Comcast will make available to approximately 2.5 million low income households: (i) high-speed Internet access service for less than $10 per month; (ii) personal computers, netbooks, or other computer equipment at a purchase price below $150″ and “we require Comcast-NBCU to increase programming diversity by expanding its over the-air programming to the Spanish language-speaking community, and by making NBCU’s Spanish-language broadcast programming available via Comcast’s on demand and online platforms.”

So Comcast must provide computers and $10/month internet service to 2.5M “low income” households because, you know, internet access is a human right. While Comcast must provide this benefit, you can bet that they aren’t going to pay for it out of the goodness of their heart. No, Comcast will simply pass this along to their subscribers as a cost of doing business. So get ready for yet another rate increase courtesy of the FCC.

 

Million$ in college grants for bogus “green jobs”

The federal government has been very busy on the “green jobs” front – spending lots of your money creating nebulous jobs (which they couldn’t define) that ultimately end up in China. Recently the regime simply labeled all jobs as green jobs (more here), including financial advisers, wholesale buyers and reporters. This allowed them to speciously claim that the government has created 200,000 “green jobs.” Hmmm…

According to this story (from the Daily Caller), the Labor Department has gotten into the act by providing grants to colleges and universities to train students in “green jobs” technologies. What could possibly go wrong?

The Department of Labor has issued several million dollars in grants to community colleges and specialized universities around the country to train students for “green jobs” in renewable energy fields. While the grants are supposed to fund the future “rank and file” workers of the renewable energy industry, there’s a glaring problem the DOL seemingly overlooked — those jobs are either non-existent or scarce.

A former college official who has applied for these grants and has in-depth experience working with the Department of Labor and the Department of Education told The Daily Caller that colleges will often fudge expected job placement numbers just to get extra government cash.

“On ground level – it’s a real struggle – my grant writers came to me and honestly said, ‘I don’t have any job projections, what do I tell them?’ You do your best to make up job numbers,” said the former college official, who wished to remain anonymous to prevent jeopardizing future job opportunities. “But it’s not like lying – it’s just guessing what we might be able to do in a best case scenario, but you don’t say it’s not likely for many jobs.”

The former college official told TheDC that, though his college received five different “green jobs” grants from the Department of Labor to train students, no program has been set up yet.

Let me see if I’ve got this straight:

• The government is giving taxpayer money to colleges to train students for jobs that either don’t exist or can’t be defined.
• The colleges don’t have a clue on job projections so they’re making up numbers based on “best case” scenarios.
• The colleges may be inflating the numbers of potential jobs to get more money.
• While they have already received the grant money, few of the programs have actually been implemented.

Jeez, sounds like a winning formula to me. I think I’ll start Da Mook College of Green Stuff. I could offer courses in “How to Use 7 Union Workers to Screw in a CFL Bulb” or “Let’s Build a Wind Turbine – In China.” The feds would fall over themselves to give me grant money! SHEESH!

It’s not like these grants are being given to research and development programs at big name schools focusing on developing new renewable energy technology, either. They’re being given to universities and community colleges to train students in technical or associate degree programs to work in yet-to-be-developed fields. Many of the grants are promised to colleges that pledged to push “green jobs” or “new energy technology,” but don’t go into much more detail about how they plan to go about doing that.

The former college official told TheDC that, though solar and wind are emerging energy sources and though some people around the country are interested in making their homes or businesses “greener,” he thinks there isn’t enough business to support the people being trained to go into these industries. Colleges, he said, are simply incapable of turning down free government money.

Free money indeed. Who the hell do they think pays for this bullshit?

HUD punishes Marin County, CA for being “too white”

Bucolic, affluent, ultra-liberal Marin County (California) apparently has a minority problem – at least according to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). You see, Marin Co. is over 80% white so there must be a “diversity” problem. Forget the fact that even after housing prices have taken a steep plunge, the average price of a single family home in Marin Co. is still $676,000. HUD is out to change the landscape – they simply can’t abide these bastions of rich white folks (story here from PajamasMedia).

Did you see the hilarious spoof in The Onion the other day — “Marin Agrees to Seek Out Minorities”? “Marin County,” the post begins, “has agreed to research why it has so few minority residents relative to the rest of the Bay Area and to take specific actions to attract more low-income people and ethnic minorities to the affluent county, which is more than 80 percent white.” This agreement, the post continued in the same vein, was not really voluntary; it was forced upon the affluent suburban county, across the Golden Gate from San Francisco, by the federal diversity police.

How funny is that?

Way too funny, it happens, for The Onion to dream up — or anyone else. No, “Marin Agrees to Seek Out Minorities” was not an Onion spoof but an actual article in The New York Times about an actual agreement that HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity for Region IX foisted on Marin.

The agreement, signed last month with the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, came more than a year after the agency found that the county failed to comply with Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and two other antidiscrimination statutes.

The review found that Marin County’s federally financed affordable-housing programs failed to reach out adequately to minorities and people with disabilities, failed to adequately track which ethnic groups were benefiting from those programs, and failed to take steps to ensure that low-income and minority residents were not pushed out.

“The jurisdiction has an obligation to take actions that affirm housing is fair and that there’s choice,” Charles E. Hauptman, regional director for fair housing and equal opportunity at HUD, said in an interview.

HUD obliged Marin County, represented for five terms by legendary liberal “Call Me” Senator Barbara Boxer, to expatiate its guilt for discriminating against minorities who weren’t there by recruiting and housing more of them.

Being ultra-liberal and suffering from extreme white guilt, Marin simply caved to the HUD assault instead of telling the feds to take a hike.

After all the meetings and forms and data collection and training, of course, is the required affirmative action: wherever “under-representation” was identified, “affirmative marketing and outreach strategies targeting the under-represented groups” must be developed and implemented. Where “Asian and Hispanic populations” with “Limited English Proficiency” are among the under-represented, a “Language Assistance Plan” must be developed “as a means of increasing their participation in affordable housing programs and public service activities.”

These sorts of requirements go on for over eight pages. Many are stellar, but perhaps my favorite is III(E), which requires “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH).” Section 1 requires the County to complete “an Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice (AI)” that must include, among other items, identification and analysis of “the causes of lower racial and ethnic minority residency in the County relative to adjacent counties” and “the actions the Recipient will take to address those impediments.”

So there it is. The biggest “Impediment” to fair housing in Marin, one of America’s 25 richest counties, would seem to be that, according to the 2000 Census, it is only 2.9% black and only 5.7% Mexican. (It is also 0.2% Puerto Rican and 0.1% Cuban; does HUD care if those groups are “under-represented” among the Hispanics who are “represented”?) Both Sonoma County to the north (6.6% black in 2009) and San Francisco County to the south (6.7%) are doing much better. Those counties are also doing far better than Marin in attracting people of Limited English Proficiency. According to this November 2010 “Assessment of Limited English Proficient Populations” in the Bay Area, only 7.5% of Marin’s population speaks English “less than very well,” compared to 10.5% in Sonoma County and 22.1% in San Francisco County.

HUD is right; clearly Marin is falling down on the job of attracting minorities. Perhaps it could offer relocation bonuses, homestead tax exemptions, and other tax benefits to minorities to move there, especially Hispanics and Asians with limited English proficiency, so they could not be discriminated against in public housing and other services.

This is not only ridiculous on a social level, it completely ignores the economic factors of the situation. Like, you know, most poor minorities simply can’t afford a $675,000 home. Perhaps HUD should carpet bomb the area with Section 8 housing vouchers – that would teach those white snobs.

What’s next for the federal government? There are still a bunch of states that are over 90% white – a target rich environment for the diversity police.

US Customs saves woman from chocolate egg

Dangerous contraband

More nanny-state drama. According to this story (from Reason Magazine), US Customs confiscated a Kinder Chocolate Surprise candy egg from a Canadian woman at the US border.

Lind Bird had no idea she was in posession of illegal goods when she tried to cross the border from Canada to the United States with a $2 chocolate Kinder Surprise egg in her car. But astute U.S. customs officials detected her confectionery contraband at once, and seized it from the appropriately-named Bird.Little did Bird know, the Kinder egg could have resulted in a $300 fine. The toy surprise inside has been declared an unacceptable choking hazard by U.S. officials. (I’ve never had a Kinder Surprise egg, but a gander at the image at right suggests you’d have to be awfully intent on getting that chocolate into your system not to notice the huge, bright yellow plastic capsule inside.)

Instead of getting to chow down on a chocolate egg when she got home, Bird was treated to a 7-page letter from U.S. customs officials seeking official permission to destroy the egg.

“I thought it was a joke. I had to read it twice. But they are serious,” she said.

The letter states if Bird wishes to contest the seizure, she’ll have to pay $250 for it to be stored as the two sides wrangle over it.

Bird is far from along in having run afoul (afowl?) of the anti-egg law:

The U.S. takes catching illegal Kinder candy seriously, judging by the number of them they’ve confiscated in the last year. Officials said they’ve seized more than 25,000 of the treats in 2,000 separate seizures.

Please MAKE IT STOP!

Dear comrade leader declares France “our biggest ally” – France? Huh? WTF?

What the hell does our dear comrade leader have against England? In a stunning display of “smart diplomacy” the dear comrade has once again pissed off the Brits by declaring that France is our “greatest ally.” France??? (story here)

Barack Obama has declared that France is America’s greatest ally, undermining Britain’s Special Relationship with the U.S.

The President risked offending British troops in Afghanistan by saying that French president Nicolas Sarkozy is a ‘stronger friend’ than David Cameron.

The remarks, during a White House appearance with Mr Sarkozy, will reinforce the widely-held view in British diplomatic circles that Mr Obama has less interest in the Special Relationship than any other recent American leader.

Mr Obama said: ‘We don’t have a stronger friend and stronger ally than Nicolas Sarkozy, and the French people.’

Since the turn of the 20th century, England has been our staunchest ally. We not only worked together in WWII to save France but we rebuilt it after the war. The UK (and Finland) paid off their war debt to us – France has not and will not ever repay the billions we spent restoring their country. In fact, for most of the years since WWII, France has basically said “Up Yours” to both the UK and the US. Here’s what 60 Minutes columnist Andy Rooney had to say about France in a 2003 column (here):

You can’t beat the French when it comes to food, fashion, wine or perfume, but they lost their license to have an opinion on world affairs years ago. They may even be selling stuff to Iraq and don’t want to hurt business.

The French are simply not reliable partners in a world where the good people in it ought to be working together. Americans may come off as international jerks sometimes but we’re usually trying to do the right thing.

The French lost WW II to the Germans in about 20 minutes. Along with the British, we got into the war and had about 150,000 guys killed getting their country back for them. We fought all across France, and the Germans finally surrendered in a French schoolhouse.

You’d think that school building in Reims would be a great tourist attraction but it isn’t. The French seem embarrassed by it. They don’t want to call attention to the fact that we freed them from German occupation.

I heard Steven Spielberg say the French wouldn’t even let him film the D-Day scenes in “Saving Private Ryan” on the Normandy beaches. They want people to forget the price we paid getting their country back for them.

Americans have a right to protest going to war with Iraq. The French do not. They owe us the independence they flaunt in our face at the U.N.

If this is what “smart diplomacy” is all about, we need to scrap it and start over. SHEESH!

NYC garbage pile saves man from suicide leap

After a week of no garbage pickup in NYC (it was suspended on Dec 26th), the trash is really piling up. With piles of stinking trash everywhere, NYC residents are starting to get a bit pissed off. It appears however, that this situation might have averted at least one fatality. A mid-town Manhatten man was saved by a huge pile of trash when he attempted suicide from 9 stories up (story here).

A suicidal man plummeted nine stories and survived in midtown Sunday when he landed on a mountain of trash that had piled up since last week’s blizzard, officials said.

Vangelis (Angelo) Kapatos, 26, wearing only pajama bottoms, jumped from his family’s apartment in the Whitby building on 45th St. near Eighth Ave. just after noon.

The young man, troubled by a threat of eviction from the rent-regulated apartment, was fresh out of psychiatric treatment, relatives said.

He had tried to end his life in a number of other ways before leaping, police sources said.

“He landed on a garbage pile,” one official said. “That’s the only reason he’s alive.”

Kapatos, whose family hails from Greece, was taken by ambulance to Bellevue Hospital. He was in critical but stable condition Sunday night, police said.

Kapatos landed on his back, causing some of the black plastic garbage bags to burst, spewing out their rotten contents.

The Sanitation Department suspended trash collection after the Dec. 26 snowstorm paralyzed the city.

The sanitation union was thought to be claiming responsibility for saving the man’s life. Union officials, however, were unavailable for comment.

In other NYC blizzard news:

NYC sanitation supervisors boozing it up during blizzard

Instead of plowing, they got plowed.

A group of on-duty Sanitation supervisors is under investigation for allegedly buying booze and chilling in their cozy department car for hours Monday night after the blizzard stranded a bus and three snowplows blocks away.

The city Department of Investigation is probing the incident after witnesses said four snow blowers blew off their duties to get blitzed, buying two six-packs of beer from a Brooklyn bodega. The workers then walked five blocks to their car, which was in 20 inches of snow in the middle of 18th at McDonald avenues near the F train entrance, passing the stuck bus and idle plows on 18th Avenue between Third and Fourth streets.

NYC sanitation sickout during blizzard

It was a real snow job.

Between 660 and 720 Sanitation workers called in sick for the cleanup of last week’s blizzard — more than double the usual rate, The Post has learned.

About 11 to 12 percent of the Sanitation Department’s 6,000-strong force didn’t show up for work on Monday or Tuesday, city officials confirmed, as 20 inches of snow brought the Apple to a near-standstill.

The spotty snow response sparked reports of a deliberate slowdown by some Sanitation supervisors angered by City Hall cost-cutting measures. The Department of Investigation is looking into the allegations.

Nice. More reasons why I left NY…

Sanitation Dept. sabotages NYC blizzard cleanup

Brooklyn street 3 days after blizzard

New York City is no stranger to blizzards (more here) – they usually have one or two a year. Generally the city does a pretty good job getting everything back to working order, considering the sheer size of the metropolitan area. The blizzard that struck the city on Christmas weekend was a different story, however. Apparently they underestimated the severity of the storm and were hesitant to engage the emergency with an all-out response by the Sanitation Department, which is responsible for snow removal. To add insult to injury, it appears that the Sanitation Department may have also engaged in a work slowdown as payback for some modest cuts by the mayor (story here from the NY Post).

Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts — a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.

Miles of roads stretching from as north as Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained treacherously unplowed last night because of the shameless job action, several sources and a city lawmaker said, which was over a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts.

“They sent a message to the rest of the city that these particular labor issues are more important,” said City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens), who was visited yesterday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot.

The snitches “didn’t want to be identified because they were afraid of retaliation,” Halloran said. “They were told [by supervisors] to take off routes [and] not do the plowing of some of the major arteries in a timely manner. They were told to make the mayor pay for the layoffs, the reductions in rank for the supervisors, shrinking the rolls of the rank-and-file.”

New York’s Strongest used a variety of tactics to drag out the plowing process — and pad overtime checks — which included keeping plows slightly higher than the roadways and skipping over streets along their routes, the sources said.

The snow-removal snitches said they were told to keep their plows off most streets and to wait for orders before attacking the accumulating piles of snow.

The workers said the work slowdown was the result of growing hostility between the mayor and the workers responsible for clearing the snow.

In the last two years, the agency’s workforce has been slashed by 400 trash haulers and supervisors — down from 6,300 — because of the city’s budget crisis. And, effective tomorrow, 100 department supervisors are to be demoted and their salaries slashed as an added cost-saving move.

Lovely. The department bosses were pissed off at the mayor so a city of almost 8 million people suffers for it. There were also stories of people waiting hours for emergency services that could not navigate snow-clogged streets (more here from the NY Daily News).

A blizzard baby delivered inside the lobby of a snowbound Brooklyn building died after an emergency call of a woman in labor brought no help for nine excruciating hours.

The baby’s mother, a 22-year-old college senior, was recovering Tuesday night at Interfaith Medical Center, where her newborn was pronounced dead at 6:34 p.m. on Monday. That was 10 hours after the first 911 call from the bloody vestibule on Brooklyn Ave. in Crown Heights.

“No one could get to her. Crown Heights was not plowed, and no medical aid came for hours,” said the student’s mother.

By the time a horde of firefighters and cops finally trooped to her aid through snow-covered blocks, the baby was unconscious and unresponsive, sources said.

Lawsuits filed in 3…2…1… Just put them on the Sanitation Department’s tab.

Unpassable Queens street 3 days after blizzard

As of Thursday, four days after the storm, numerous streets still had not been plowed – even once. The head of the Sanitation Department promised that would be fixed.

Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty promised that every street will have been plowed by 7 this morning, but then he offered this hedge: “Will somebody find a street that I missed? Maybe.”

Bloomberg and Doherty also offered a series of excuses for the failed response to the blizzard. They blamed residents for shoveling snow into streets that had already been plowed and for tying up 911 with non-emergency calls.

Nice – blame residents for trying to clean up.

Soon-to-be former governor David Patterson has called for an investigation (more here). Let the circular firing squad of blame and finger pointing begin…

Senator writes letter to Santa – about global warming (BLECH)

Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ), who survived a recall effort earlier this year, is a serial moron (previous posts here and here). He has also captured the special Christmas Moron of the Week with this letter to Santa (story here from HuffPo).

Dear Santa Claus,

I am writing out of concern, because you may have to move from the North Pole due to the dramatic melting of Arctic sea ice. The Navy’s chief oceanographer says that by the summer of 2020 the North Pole may not have summer ice and other scientists project that an ice-free Arctic is possible as soon as 2012!

Scientists overwhelmingly agree that polar ice is melting because of greenhouse gas pollution and I am working hard to reduce these emissions. But there is probably nothing we can do in time to save the North Pole. I am worried about your safety and your ability to deliver billions of Christmas gifts if the ice cap on the North Pole no longer stays frozen all year. What will happen to your house, your workshop, the elves’ houses and your reindeer barns?

I want you to know that if you want to relocate to the beautiful state of New Jersey, I would be proud to assist you. But given the climate you are accustomed to, I will understand if you would like to relocate to the South Pole. Just be sure not to move to the Antarctic Peninsula or West Antarctic ice sheet, areas that are also experiencing rapid ice melt.

Please know that I will work to mobilize the U.S. federal government to assist when you relocate. I am sure we can both agree that on a warming planet, we need to do all we can to save Christmas.

Sincerely,
Robert Menendez
U.S. Senator

I guess this dope didn’t get the most recent memo about the coming of a Mini Ice Age (more here). He also hasn’t been paying attention to recent news in Europe where they’re experiencing a second winter in a row of deadly cold and snow (more here). Since he’s a democrat, I’m thinking that his motivations for Santa moving to the US lie elsewhere. Like this:

• Corporate taxes on Santa’s workshop
• NJ state taxes on Santa’s workshop
• Demands to unionize his elfin workforce
• Regulation by the EPA for carbon emissions
• Regulation by the FDA for making unsafe toys (with small toxic parts)
• Regulation by the Labor Department for discriminatory hiring (elves only)
• Regulation by the Labor Department for minimum wage violations
• Regulation by the Labor Department for possible OSHA violations
• Health insurance mandates for obamacare
• Regulation by the Agriculture Department for maintaining a reindeer herd

I think Santa would be wise to stay right where he is. UGH…

Disarming the public…and their kids?

Gun buyback programs are nothing new, they’ve been around a while. They don’t necessarily work as many of the firearms collected are non-working relics and more important, no self-respecting criminal is going to turn in his weapon for a gift certificate to WalMart. These feel-good programs also have an added benefit for the criminals in that they add to the pool of disarmed citizens, which decreases their chances of becoming a DRT (Dead Right There) statistic.

Not satisfied with disarming adults of real guns, some communities are now offering buyback programs of…um, er, toy guns. Because, you know, some kid’s plastic toy with a huge red cap on the end could be dangerous. And besides, is a (EEK) gun! (story here)

Dominic Johnson, a 10-year-old fourth-grader with a fledgling Mohawk, brandished his black, long-nosed toy gun and caressed the muzzle appreciatively.

“It’s like a shotgun mixed with a rifle,’’ he said, as his mother, April, told him to stop pointing it at nearby children.

Soon it would be junk.

Dominic joined dozens of children yesterday at the annual Toy Gun Bash in the gymnasium of Pleasant View Elementary School. There, they lined up to toss their toy guns, from dainty purple water guns to camouflage-painted pistols, inside the Bash-O-Matic, a large black, foam creature with churning metal teeth and the shape of a cockroach spliced with a frog.

Prodded by Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch, who wore a fuzzy Santa hat, the children stared curiously as the Bash-O-Matic mashed up their guns and digested them into a plastic bin near its tail.

In exchange for their toy guns, all the children received wrapped presents that were indisputably not violent — dolls, stuffed animals, and board games like checkers.

Some children were not thrilled with the trade.

Not thrilled – can you blame them? Hint: Boys like guns – better than dolls, stuffed animals, and checkers. So what’s the motivation for this mushy-headed, feel-good, PC-addled bullshit? To send kids a message that “guns are bad.”

Diane Levin, professor of education at Wheelock College, said police and parents coming together to destroy toy guns sends a powerful message to children.

But adults should follow up with children to explain the complexities of weapons and violence so they can more efficiently counter the seductive image of guns in movies and video games.

“It’s one piece of what needs to happen around this issue,’’ said Levin, coauthor of “The War Play Dilemma.’’ “There is also this side of [children] trying to understand why are there guns there, and why do people use them? When kids are getting all kinds of other messages about guns, it’s a more complicated issue than just having one day about how guns are bad.’’

That’s right a gun, an inanimate object that cannot cause harm on its own, is bad. I’ve got news for you morons. I can set a fully loaded firearm on a table in the middle of a room full of people and absolutely guarantee that it will not harm anyone – unless someone picks it up and fires it. In the same token, you could set a baseball bat on a table in a room full of people and it will harm no one – unless someone picks it up and bashes somebody’s head in with it. It’s not the gun (or baseball bat) that kills, it’s the person using it.

When seconds count the police are minutes away…

FAA loses track of 119,000 aircraft – FAIL

There are about 357,000 commercial and private aircraft with registered ownership in the US. Aircraft ownership registration is the responsibility of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA),  part of Ray LaHood’s Transportation department.  Given that Ray is in charge, I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise that the FAA has “lost track” with a third of the aircraft registered in the US – kinda like how DHS lost 1000 computers and other property (more here). Seriously, how the hell can you lose track of a third of a fleet of aircraft for crying out loud? I suppose it’s not too hard for government. (story here)

The Federal Aviation Administration is missing key information on who owns one-third of the 357,000 private and commercial aircraft in the U.S. — a gap the agency fears could be exploited by terrorists and drug traffickers.The records are in such disarray that the FAA says it is worried that criminals could buy planes without the government’s knowledge, or use the registration numbers of other aircraft to evade new computer systems designed to track suspicious flights. It has ordered all aircraft owners to re-register their planes in an effort to clean up its files.

About 119,000 of the aircraft on the U.S. registry have “questionable registration” because of missing forms, invalid addresses, unreported sales or other paperwork problems, according to the FAA. In many cases, the FAA cannot say who owns a plane or even whether it is still flying or has been junked.

Already there have been cases of drug traffickers using phony U.S. registration numbers, as well as instances of mistaken identity in which police raided the wrong plane because of faulty record-keeping.

Faulty record keeping – ooops! In some cases the consequences have almost gotten people killed.

Unreliable data in the system has led to cases of mistaken identity.

Pilot Pierre Redmond said his Cirrus was searched by Customs and Border Protection agents in fatigues and bulletproof vests last year in Ramona, Calif. They told him his tail number had been confused with that of a wanted plane in Florida.

In August, police in Santa Barbara, Calif., detained flight instructors John and Martha King at gunpoint after federal authorities mistook their Cessna for a plane that was stolen in 2002. The Kings are famous in aviation because they produce and star in a popular series of test-preparation videos for pilots.

The error in the Kings’ case was eventually traced to a law-enforcement database that is cross-referenced with the FAA’s registry, not to the registry itself. But Brown of the FAA called it an example of the real-world consequences of bad recordkeeping.

“It’s very, very scary,” Martha King said. “If this keeps happening to people, somebody’s going to get shot.”

Oh well, I guess the solution to this mess is to make everyone re-register their planes so we can fix our database.

Airlines, leasing companies, charter operators and banks agree there is a problem but have complained about having to repeatedly re-register planes.

The Air Transport Association of America, which represents airlines, warned in 2008 that the measure “had the potential to wreak havoc on the commercial air transportation system.” On Tuesday, ATA spokesman David Castelveter said airlines are still gauging the potential effect of the new rule.

Other groups noted that most of the aircraft with paperwork problems are smaller planes that pose little terrorist threat.

“I don’t think we’re going to see a tremendous security benefit as a result of this,” said Doug Carr, a vice president of the National Business Aviation Association.

Banks and finance companies that hold loans used to buy planes will be among those hardest hit, said David Warner, general counsel for the National Aircraft Finance Association. A bank’s claim to an aircraft is often tied to the FAA registration, so lenders are having to hire more staff and buy computer systems to track hundreds of aircraft registrations, Warner said.

Another FAIL brought to you by big government. Don’t worry, you’ll still get your bonuses…

High speed rail folly – California edition

More on the High Speed Rail lunacy front (more here) from the People’s Republic of California. Facing a $24+B budget deficit and businesses fleeing the state (more here), the “geniuses” in California are getting another $624M for their fantasy of building a HSR line running the length of the state. This brings the total of “stimulus” seed money to $1.15B for the Golden State (more here).

So, flush with “stimulus” money, where do we start? Well, I guess this probably not the best place (story here).

There are a lot of critics when it comes to high-speed rail. So what does California do? They approve the first section of HSR rail to be built without trains or electricity. This has bad idea written all over it.California has plans for an 800-mile high-speed rail system running the length of the Golden State, and initial estimates place the cost somewhere around $45 billion (though I wouldn’t be surprised if it cost twice that by the time it is finished). Even a 800 mile journey begins with the first step, and California has been trying to find the area most receptive to the idea of a high-speed rail line. They found that place in the Central Valley, between Borden and Bakersfield, with stations to be built in Fresno and the Hanford area of Kings County. In total, the plan calls for 65 miles of track and stations at a cost of about $4 billion.

Sounds good, right? That is, until you realize that this section will be completely un-powered and un-supported until more lines are built. No trains, no maintenance facilities, just empty tracks and stations. Que?

This is a very, very bad idea. From an engineering standpoint, I guess it makes sense to lay the infrastructure first in an area receptive to HSR. But why is it they can’t put even a single train on this line, to give people a chance to try HSR out before committing a few billion bucks to it?  Build a word-of-mouth campaign from the people who get to use it regularly. Instead, it’ll be just empty tracks and stations, not exactly the best way to build support for a massive project like this.

Instead of quieting skeptics, this plan will give them more fuel for the fire. “Look at all the empty stations your tax dollars paid for!” They’ll say. Then there is the distinct possibility that politicians in either California or Washington could cut funding (this project is only possible with the Fed’s help after all). $45 billion isn’t exactly chump change, especially for a state that can’t even balance its budget. If funding gets cut after the first 54 miles are finished, well, what then? You’ve got a few billion dollars worth of HSR track that can’t even be used between a few small towns.

Sounds like a plan to me. Any bets on what will happen with this?

WikiLeaks – why are we putting up with this shit?

Thought I would weigh in on this whole WikiLeaks brouhaha for a moment. Currently there is a rather heated cyberwar going on with opposing sides carrying out DoS (Denial of Service) attacks on pro and anti WikiLeaks servers. When hackers started taking down WikiLeaks servers and financial services started blocking funding and donations (Visa, Mastercard and PayPal), supporters launched DoS attacks (Operation Payback) against the financial services and for some strange reason, websites associated with Sara Palin (more here). Huh? WTF?

WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, was arrested in the UK on a Swedish warrant for sexual assault (more here) and he has threatened to release what he calls his “nuclear option” if “anything happens” to him or WikiLeaks. Apparently this involves coded top secret US State Department cables not yet released.

OK, so what do you say about an international organization that releases secret US government communications to the world? (more here and here) Critics claim that this has created embarrassment for the government and could compromise sensitive relationships with foreign governments. Supporters say that these documents expose diplomatic ineptitude and nefarious government activities which the people have a right to know about. I guess I could agree with both sides – to a point. The fact that these are secret communications should invoke a stronger response from the government.

Corruptocrat Attorney General Eric Holder is considering espionage charges against Assange (more here). Given Holder’s abysmal record as AG, don’t expect any movement on this in the near future – you know, like the Brits still have him in custody and all. And please stop with the whole freedom of speech/First Amendment bullshit. Assange is not a US citizen and therefore has no Constitutional rights – period.

My question is this: Why are we putting up with this shit? There is no doubt in my mind that Mr. Assange would have assumed room temperature by now if he did this with the Russians or the ChiComs. Where the hell is the CIA? Or Jason Bourne?

Just sayin’…

New high tech $100 bill – FAIL

In its ongoing effort to thwart counterfeiting of US currency, the federal government is about to issue a new, high tech version of the 100 dollar bill. At a cost of about 12 cents per note (about what it will be worth in a few years if we keep our current pace of money production), it is twice as expensive to produce than other currency. All of this is necessary since the $100 bill is the most popular for counterfeiters – like the governments of North Korea and China (more here).

So far, so good but wait, I smell a FAIL coming. Of course, here it is:

A significant production problem with new high-tech $100 bills has caused government printers to shut down production of the new notes and to quarantine more than one billion of the bills in huge vaults in Fort Worth, Texas and Washington, DC, CNBC has learned.

An official familiar with the situation told CNBC that 1.1 billion of the new bills have been printed, but they are unusable because of a creasing problem in which paper folds over during production, revealing a blank unlinked portion of the bill face.A second person familiar with the situation said that at the height of the problem, as many as 30 percent of the bills rolling off the printing press included the flaw, leading to the production shut down.

The total face value of the unusable bills, $110 billion, represents more than ten percent of the entire supply of US currency on the planet, which a government source said is $930 billion in banknotes. For now, the unusable bills are stored in the vaults in “cash packs” of four bundles of 4,000 each, with each pack containing 16,000 bills.

Officials don’t know exactly what caused the problem. “There is something drastically wrong here,” a person familiar with the situation said. “The frustration level is off the charts.”

According to a person familiar with the matter, the bills are the most costly ever produced, with a per-note cost of about 12 cents—twice the cost of a conventional bill. That means the government spent about $120 million to produce bills it can’t use. On top of that, it is not yet clear how much more it will cost to sort the existing horde of hundred dollar bills.

Poof – and $120M is wasted. Ooops! Looks like the folks over at Quality Control were asleep at the switch here. I know those printing machines are fast but does it take 1.1 BILLION to realize you’ve got a problem? Oh well, they’ll probably still get their step raises and bonuses anyway. And the ChiComs and North Koreans will have at least another year to print more $100 bills.

So now the circular firing squad of blame starts.

Officials have mixed views on what caused the problem, and who is responsible for it. “This is not about assigning blame,” said one. But another person familiar with the matter said finger-pointing has already begun. “The Fed’s very unhappy, and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing is taking a beating unnecessarily,” the person said. “Somebody has to pay for this.”

Hey, this is government. Trust me, absolutely no one but the taxpayer will pay for this. That’s how the system “works.” On a karmic side note, this was to be the first bill with Tax Cheat Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s signature on it.

I know that shit happens and people make mistakes and all but why does this have to be the norm for our government? Why is government destined to FAIL at virtually everything?

More nanny state auto regulation

LaHood: "This is how much I know about transportation."

Back when our dear comrade leader was building his cabinet of czars, commissars, bureaucrats and apparatchiks, he chose Ray LaHood, retiring republican congressman from Illinois for Transportation Secretary. In doing so he not only boosted his bipartisan creds but also got a big spending career bureaucrat with virtually no experience or knowledge of transportation issues (more here). Who could ask for anything more?

 

In 2 years LaHood has not only demonstrated his vacuity on transportation in general (more here), but also that he is a arrogant nanny-stater. When questioned about concerns of government intrusion with one of his ridiculous policy proposals, LaHood famously quipped:

“About everything we do around here is government intrusion in people’s lives,” said LaHood. “So have at it.”

In other words, we don’t care what you think about government being up your sphincter – deal with it. Nice.

Hot on the heels of proposing cell phone disabling technology for cars (more here), old Ray is talking about forcing auto manufacturers to install backup cameras in all vehicles (story here from Bloomberg).

U.S. auto-safety regulators proposed requiring backup cameras on all new vehicles by 2014 to prevent drivers from backing over pedestrians, a rule that may cost as much as $2.7 billion.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which published the proposed rule today, said an average of 292 people die each year from back-over accidents, which primarily kill children and the elderly. To equip a new-vehicle fleet of 16.6 million produced in a year would cost from $1.9 billion to $2.7 billion, the agency said in the proposal, calling the cost “substantial” and saying it might reduce back-over deaths and injuries by almost half.

Great. For a cost to the consumer of $1.9B – $2.7B we can save 150 lives. Of course the Auto Industry is expected to go along with this – because they’re not paying for it, consumers are.

“Given that our top priority is keeping people, especially children, safe in and around autos, the Alliance looks forward to working with regulators to ensure that, in the end, we have enhancements that saves lives and improve safety,” Wade Newton, a spokesman for the Washington-based alliance, said in an e- mail.

“AIAM supports the establishment of performance-based requirements that provide maximum flexibility to manufacturers in selecting approaches to meet enhanced rear visibility requirements,” Annemarie Pender, a spokeswoman for the Washington-based international group, said in an e-mail. “Our members invest billions of dollars into saving lives by researching, creating and deploying advanced safety features on their vehicles.”

I personally don’t have a problem with this technology – it’s actually quite cool. If it improves safety, then that’s a big plus too. I am simply against some bureaucrat tool forcing it on everyone whether they want it or not. If most people want this, the auto manufacturers will do it because it’s good for business. Make it an option, not a requirement.

Just as a point of reference, here are some statistics (from 2000) on accidental deaths:

• Drowning and submersion while in or falling into bath-tub – 341
• Fall on same level from slipping, tripping and stumbling – 565
• Fall involving bed, chair, other furniture – 650
• Accidental suffocation and strangulation in bed – 327
• Inhalation of gastric contents – 382
• Other and unspecified electric current – 296
• Alcohol poisoning – 302

As you can see, we have a lot of nanny-state work to do…