Obama promises 600,000 new federal employees.
Amtrak police arrest man who says he was taking pictures for an Amtrak photo contest.
Indiana Court of Appeals strikes down Internet sex sting convictions, finds that in order to be guilty of attempted sex with a minor, the victim must be an actual minor, not an undercover police officer. A solicitation charge against the man will stand.
Connecticut judge drives drunk, drifts out of lane while in a construction zone, hits a parked police car, and unleashes barrage of racial insults shortly after the accident. Her sentence? An alcohol education program. The charge will be erased if she stays clean for a year.
Not particularly interesting: Former Ft. Lauderdale city commissioner has his bike stolen. Interesting-er: While in office, commissioner created mandatory bike registration system, on the theory that forcing city residents to register bikes would deter theft. Interesting-est: When reporting the theft, the former commissioner had to admit to police that he hadn’t registered his own bike.
Burglars dressed as cops invade home in DeKalb County, Georgia.
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on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 10:59 am by Radley Balko
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TheAgitator.com
I have to admit, I agree with the Indiana court. I’ve thought of this several times, especially on the two occasions I watched that TV show where they “bust” someone trying to have sex with a minor (sorry, don’t remember the name). It goes along the same lines as someone carrying a pound of dried oregano and passing it off to his friends as pot. Is it really a crime, even if his buddies buy it from him and smoke it (some people have been convicted for this)? I don’t believe it is.
If a crime is never committed, i.e. the sex never takes place, and the person accused of being a criminal never actually meets the person who would be a victim, is there really a crime there? There might have been intent and conspiracy, but nothing ever happened. Therefore, the only thing the person should be charged with, if anything, is a conspiracy charge.
600,000 new jobs is 20% of the new jobs Obama is proposing, and nowhere does he say the remaining jobs will be federal. I suspect many of the new jobs will be in education, with state and local employees hired with federal funds.
So far I see the US Government’s plan as:
- cut some taxes
- increase spending
- print more money
- loans, loans, loans…(Can ANYONE do ANYTHING with this money!)
As economic genius Dick Cheney told TreasurySec Paul O’Neill a few years ago “Deficits don’t matter.” I guess Bush/Cheney also did away with the law of compounding interest.
Bad, bad, bad times ahead…maybe a complete collapse of the country to pay for 30 years of Ponzi-scheme vote-buying.
Nando,
Actually, you can’t have an attempted conspiracy of any kind. That doctrine is based on reasoning very similar to that used by the Indiana Ct. of Appeals. Since conspiracy involves an agreement to commit a crime, you need both parties to actually “agree to commit the crime” when one party is an undercovery police officer or an informant that never intended to go through with the criminal act, you never have a real agreement. Attempted conspiracy would require an attempt to agree that is not a prosecutable offense in most states.
Heh.
“Ponzi-scheme vote-buying” (Boyd Durkin, post 3)
That’s probably the best description of our economic strategy I’ve ever heard. I don’t think this is what John Maynard Keynes had in mind with his economic principles, which we essentially adopted in 1971.
I think the Keynesian system works, but only if the leaders directing it are honest, scrupled individuals. I guess we’re boned, huh?
That’s not necessarily true. The federal government has been letting contractors go left and right. Now, there are two types of contractors: technical and non-technical. The non-technical are the ones that they are letting go of the most because they are often people who should have been government employees anyway. So, in reality, a lot of those “new” jobs will be civil service versions of contract positions that already exist.
Of course, the reason why a lot of the non-technical positions are filled by contractors is because a contractor secretary can be fired if she sits there on the phone all day long, talking to her girlfriends and filing her nails. A “civil servant,” not so much.
If Obama really wanted to be radical, he would promise to remodel the civil service on at-will employment so as to help remove some of the stigma and dead wood surrounding government employment.
Nando,
It is a crime to sell Oregono as weed and I think it should be (presupposing the legitimacy of the criminalization of marijuana – which is of course total BS). It is fraudulent and akin to theft to tell someone they are buying something they are not, and those people should be punished for that. I think your logic about no actual crime being committed is also suspect because intent to committ a crime is very important. Attempted murder where a person puts what they think is poison in someone’s glass, or attempted bank robbery where a person pulls up to a bank with a ski mask, safe-cracking tools and a gun are crimes right at that very moment, even if the poison is simply water, or the robber is apprehended before he gets out of his car.
Of course simply forming the intent in your mind is not enough and the law recognizes this. There is the “substantial step doctrine” which is self-explanatory. I agree with the Indiana decision, but i don’t think it’s as easy to simply look at the result in most cases.
Mike T, there are actually due process rights associated with people who lose their government jobs, so the at-will paradigm would be very difficult to apply to government jobs.
And as for the CT judge’s DUI case, I don’t find that sentence particularly troubling. Getting that sentence for your first DUI is very common. The racial comments are patently irrelevant to any criminal culpability, and the police car damage is really a separate crime which does nto seem to be mentioned in the article.
I would agree that the police proabbly would have gone ape-shit v. a regular joe because an officer was injured, but this particular sentence by itself is not SO lenient.
The Amtrak story has the usual disheartening comments from the safety & security bootlick segment of society.
Yeah, it really sucks for law enforcement when the suspect actually has to commit the crime he’s being arrested for. I guess that means he got off on a technicality.
I’m not sure that registering your bike would deter any bike thefts. It would make it much easier for cops to stop those rogue 6 year old kids, frisk them, interrogate them some, or maybe a quick tasering. That will prepare them for their near future.
What is “attempted murder?” Do they give a Nobel Prize for Attempted Chemistry?
“What is “attempted murder?” Do they give a Nobel Prize for Attempted Chemistry?”
Smash someone with a baseball bat for 10 minutes until interrupted and arrested. Stab someone 12 times and walk away, get caught later. Run someone over with your car, put it in reverse, back over them, put it back in 1st, and hit them again and flee the scene.
Attempted murder is notably different from simple assault, or assault with intent to maim, or aggravated assault.
It should be noted that in many districts every 3rd taze counts as attempted murder.
People do get shot multiple times and live. Assault with a deadly weapon isn’t enough, that’s more of a charge for stabbing someone in the leg with a hunting knife.
Cop murders person, caught on video, shoots person in back that is face down on ground…
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/024723.html
Just a note on clarity. We don’t want to be bound by yet another example of ABC’s sloppy-ass characterizations.
No, Jake Tapper, it doesn’t. A job that isn’t in the public sector doesn’t necessarily equal a government employee. It could be a government-funded job in the non-profit sector, for example. If, say, the package includes funding for 10,000 people to work for the United Way’s employment transition services handling the jump in laid-off people then they aren’t “new government employees”, a term which means civil service. From a fiscal standpoint the government still pays them in whole or in part, but they ain’t civil service and so aren’t permanent or protected in the way that Tapper’s either sloppy or deceitful phrasing implies that they are.
One can validly argue whether such spending is a proper action for the American federal government to take. One can’t argue that reporters should get their goddammed facts straight.
I think we should count it as a miracle when Obama actually puts some real numbers to some of his proposals. Has the guy ever put an actual plan forth on anything that had any substantive information? He WANTS to create 3 million jobs, but HOW MUCH is he going to spend on these stupid projects he’s talking about? How many jobs is that going to create? I’m sure there will be no count of the lost opportunity cost if the money had been spent elsewhere.
He seems to have moved from promising Change to promising Dollars. And that’s the extent of the detail.
The longer he takes to give any real information on these plans of his, the worse that information is likely to be!
Clearly, he was asking for it.
Oops. My comment was supposed to go with the entry on the BART shooting and doesn’t belong under this entry. Sorry.
#5 | Bob | January 5th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
“I don’t think this is what John Maynard Keynes had in mind with his economic principles, which we essentially adopted in 1971. I think the Keynesian system works, but only if the leaders directing it are honest, scrupled individuals.”
Keynesian economics is the reason for the present disaster.
I just read Sheldon Richman’s (freeassociation.blogspot.com) blog where he posted that Keynes was most likely kidding about his economic philosophy, that he knew he was just promoting the same old mercantilism that the State just loves.
As for Keynesian economics working with principled, scrupulous leaders, how nice and convenient to stand behind an unfalsifiable hypothesis. Pure religion, Bob.
Austrian economics is the only moral economic system.
We despartely need 600,000 New Federal Employees.
http://rightklik.net
The stories about the city commissioner and the judge make me have an idea about a law I’d like to see passed. The law I want is that any government employee (except military) who violates any law has to do double the maximum (fines &/or jail time) of any civilian charged with the same crime. And this would be the minimum they should do. Any elected government official would have a multiplier of 5. Any official who actually voted for said law would have a multiplier of 10. A sponser of the law would have a multiplier of 100. And just for the sake of completeness, any spouse or dependent family member would be treated like a regular government employee with a multiplier of 2.
I hink that would fix a world of ills.
I think #22 Big Chief is on to something. If the offense occurs while on duty, there are always “official misconduct” charges that can be utilized. But, perhaps they should also apply to off-duty incidents. That could conceivably chip away at the “do as I say, not as I do” or “do you know who I am” approaches that are favored by too many government employees.
Regarding the drunk judge: Does alcohol encourage tribalism? I have noticed this trend while on the job. People get loaded and all the sudden it’s time to drag out the “free, white and twenty-one” redneck shit or to play the “brother” card. Oh well. Whatever the case, this judge’s moral authority just went down the tubes. People should not hesitate to remind her of this.
Re #22, why do you suppose this situation, which you would like to see enacted and which appears to be so sensible, does not exist, Big Chief?
Under what system would there be true justice?
Hint: it starts with “a” and ends with “narchism.”