TheAgitator.com
Membership Has Its Privileges
Friday, October 10th, 2008Chicago may revise its strictest-in-the-country ban on using cell phones while driving—but only because one of the city’s aldermen got caught breaking the law.
Chicago motorists who get caught talking on cell phones while driving without a hands-free device would no longer lose their driver’s licenses, under a mayoral plan that would have spared a North Side alderman political embarrassment.
Last year, Ald. Tom Tunney (44th) got pulled over and ticketed for yakking on his cell phone while driving. He was forced to hand over his license like thousands of other motorists.
Tunney then called Town Hall District Cmdr. Gary Yamashiroya and demanded to know why officers in an "understaffed police district" with serious unsolved crimes were "assigned to pull people over solely for cell phone violations."
In response, Yamashiroya ordered a police officer — not the one who wrote the $50 ticket — to hand-deliver Tunney’s driver’s license to the alderman’s ward office.
Motorists generally get licenses back only after they go to court or pay their fines.
Earlier this year, Chicago Alderman Dick Mell introduced a bill granting a grace period for Chicagoans who may have forgotten to register their guns (this would apply only to the handful of privileged Chicagoans permitted to own a gun). The reason for Mell’s bill? He himself had forgotten to register his guns before the deadline.
Now you see how Chicago’s aldermen could make the city one of the most paternalistic in the country. They either don’t have to abide by the laws they pass, or they can simply pass a new law exonerating themselves should they get caught.
Chicago politics at its finest. Remind me why we want to vote for someone that came out of this culture?
Ditto, andyinsdca!
We don’t. Unfortunately, even though the majority of this country doesn’t want either of the main candidates to be president, they are too stupid to realize that if they all vote for a third party candidate it makes that candidate, by definition, viable.
Because he is the Obamassiah who will save us from high energy costs with his magic energy pony, he will increase health care consumption while driving costs down, he will keep American jobs here, and he’ll cut taxes for just about every.
And given the choice between McCain and Obama, I’ll take the one who has at least paid lip service to drug policy reform over the one who thinks mandatory minimums are an appropriate response to victimless “crimes.”
Given the choice between McCain or Obama…
damn…
Giant Douche and Turd Sandwich all over again…
Sigh. Radley, those laws are for the *little people*, not elected officials! You just don’t get it. That’s why Tunney had his license hand-delivered back to him – it wasn’t supposed to be removed from him in the first place.
This, I would say, is a pretty good representation, overall, of what’s wrong with this country.
“Remind me why we want to vote for someone that came out of this culture?”
Would that be the culture that backed Dan Hynes to oppose Obama in the ’04 Senate primary? Yes.
I heard another one I thought was funny, “Barack me Obamadeus.”
I see a silver lining in this story.
When faced with the negative consequences of the stupid laws they pass, most politicians just lean on the police and we never hear of the offense. Here, they actually repeal or modify the law.
Maybe this guy’s constituents will be pissed about him skirting the law and will vote him out of office next election. We can only hope.
How about the video of McCain at a town hall and his response to medical marijuana? Tells a person that had asked him about it and making it legal, and McCain says he used to romanticize about hemp and how it can be used for so many other good things, with him being in the Navy and having hemp products, but then when he got older he realized hemp could also be smoked and is therefore bad. What an idiot, hemp has next to no THC (the ingredient that gets you high, and is rather enjoyable and causes no harm).
Membership indeed.
I hear a lot of nonsense from people about “privilege” and how it’s so awful. Usually, they mean that rich people play by different rules than poor people, that white people play by different rules than non-whites, that men play by different rules than women, etc. I usually just roll my eyes. Not that there isn’t some truth to it, but it doesn’t strike me as being high in the rankings of outrageous injustices of the world.
But, insofar as privilege refers to people who can break rules and get away with it because of their station in life, I actually do agree that it is a real thing and a bad one. But, I don’t see the markers of privilege the way those other people do. It seems like the levels of privilege in society are really along the lines of:
Elected Officials
Law Enforcement (People With Badges Or Law Degrees Who Work For The Government)
High-Level Government Employees (Department Heads, Etc.)
Low- to Mid-level Government Employees (Bureaucrats)
Everyday Citizens
I am not sure that that’s the exact order, and there may be some fuzziness and crossover as we go from municipal to state to federal. But, I am sure that people who are not government employees are at the bottom rung of the ladder.
The greatest affronts to freedom come from government.
I really need to read Healy’s book.
And, the deification of the President goes beyond the popular perceptions of the average Joe. Another aspect comes from historians who tend to evaluate a President based on how much power accrued to the office during his term, and to government in general. War leadership and handling of other dramatic events (whether the President himself really made much difference or not) is a factor, of course. But, if you listen to these historians on PBS specials (somehow Doris Kearns Goodwin keeps coming to mind), they talk about how FDR, TR, Wilson, Lincoln, (more recently) Reagan, and so on increased the power and influence of the President and set executive precedents that assumed power that was previously unknown or in the hands of Congress or the courts.
That approach to evaluating a Presidency always struck me as fundamentally statist. How many “great” Presidents do we hear about who reduced the power of government overall or of the office specifically? It’s a metric that encourages authoritarianism.
Umm. Sorry about that. I meant that last comment for the “Gabriel…” thread.