TheAgitator.com
Saturday Links
Saturday, August 21st, 2010- Sportswriter Mike Celizic has just a couple weeks to live, and he’s writing about the experience.
- Matthew Yglesias suggests that maybe heavy-handed licensing laws directed at barbers aren’t such a good idea, and might have some protectionist effects. His commenters cry “Judas!”
- A.P.: Obama administration filtering some FOIA requests through political channels, gathering information on those who make the requests and their motives.
- Woman accidentally gets t-shirt wet at an Orlando theme park. Police ask she cover up, then demand she give them personal information to enter into database. Having broke no law, she refuses. Naturally, they arrest her.
- California photojournalist wins settlement after an ugly confrontation with local police chief. Pretty sure the fact that she was able to capture the incident on video had something to do with her winning a settlement—and the chief’s subsequent resignation.
- Kansas police unsure how they’re going to enforce bans on texting while driving. They’re right. It’s impossible to enfore. And some crazy blogger warned you this would be a problem.
Can’t get AP link to work. Here is one I found. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100721/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_freedom_of_information_7
Way to be ahead of the game on the texting issue. I feel the same way about that as I do about a lot of other things that are POTENTIALLY dangerous. Don’t outlaw the behavior (especially if you can’t stop it in the first place), just come down hard on folks if/when they actually cause harm to anyone else. Obviously, if it was possible, we’d prevent the harm from being done in the first place. But there is no way to do that. At least not without trampling everyone’s rights. So, if you’re texting while driving and crash your car and hurt someone else or their property, you are charged with negligent driving or some other existing law that demonstrates the risk you put upon others. Will it stop it? No. But if I drive and text everyday and never crash, what’s the harm? And if/when I do crash, throw the book at me for being an idiot and needlessly putting others in harms way.
Also, off-topic, but I think it’s worth noting that we officially have a political candidate running on a campaign centered largely on his plan to use eminent domain to stop the Park51 project. What’s troubling is that the guy otherwise seems pretty intent on cleaning up a lot of the redundancy and incompetency in the state government, but also seems intent to violate the rights of citizens in the process. Luckily, existing legislation explicitly forbids exactly what he is proposing, which means he is either ignorant of the law or knows the law but is ignoring it to garner support with those opposed to the mosque. Politics at its best.
E gads!!! Yglesias a Manchurian blogger, brainwashed and planted by that evil think tank — Cato!!
California photojournalist wins settlement
So… where were all the ‘good’ cops when the time came for them to step forward on this? You can see several of them milling about while the chief berates her.
Oh that’s right. There are no good cops.
I wish I had a job where I could falsely arrest anyone who disagreed with–or annoyed–me and send them away for about 10 hours and cause them some suffering and monetary expense. That would be really cool and I’d be a complete douchebag just like cops.
$100 says the police chief in CA resigned because he was close to retirement and he still gets full pension.
Some punishment.
the AP did a good job on the FOIA disclosure… this deserves a wider viewing.
No worries.. just enforce like we do DUI. Pull people over for little or no reason. Force them to hand over their phones. Check for messages. Seize their licenses on the spot and arrest them. No need for pesky lawyers or warrants.
How can anyone in Orlando could be offended by a wet t-shirt and bra? I’m having a hard time really assessing the offense without appropriate photos, though.
There doesn’t need to be an enforcement mechanism for the texting-while-driving ban. The whole point of the ban is to give the police another vague reason to have a reason to stop people. This is by design.
I can just see it now:
“Do you know why I pulled you over?”
“No, officer, I’m not really sure why you pulled me over.”
“I saw you texting while you were driving!”
“That’s impossible officer, I don’t own a cellphone.”
“Oh well you better let me search the vehicle, just to be sure..”
Did you really, really think it was about texting?
In regards to the mom arrested for not giving her name to the police.
i live in Florida. Police love to abuse the whole “resisting without violence” charge. It’s amazing how many people get arrested solely for resisting arrest.
personally, I think these statutes need to go. Anything that gives the police the ability to make an arrest without an actual crime being committed.
Police just can’t handle this power responsibly, and should lose it.
I got a couple of paragraphs into the story about the sportswriter, but then he takes the time to insert a crass political insult into his story about his illness, and that caused me to stop right there.
Wet t-shirt story is impossible to assess without pictures. :-)
The supporters of the protectionist requirements for government certification of barbers at the thinkprogress.org post boggle the mind with their twisted rationale. How can you engage in any substantive exchange of ideas with someone who honestly believes the government should play a major role in haircuts?
This doesn’t look good:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRhamGWmKA0&feature=player_embedded
I just had the police show up knocking on my door looking for a guy who lives nearby and drives a green Toyota Tacoma-I drive a green Toyota TUNDRA. While my wife went outside to talk to them I grabbed both dogs by the collars and barricaded myself in the bathroom (I’m being a tad dramatic but I think I earned the right).
After securing the dogs I went outside-thankfully they didn’t open fire. One of the cops told my wife he saw someone peeking out through the blinds-she said it was our kitten and he “verified” her description. Thank God she sees that guy in the ER all the time while working. I suppose they can work out a signal so he will know when she’s being held hostage.
I can’t wait till I get a place that’s fenced with a 200 foot driveway so I at least get a warning when the cops show up like that guy in CA who got his gun cabinet plundered.
Making a law to stop distracted driving really fixes the problem… just ask Mexico how their gun ban is doing….
- concerning Police Chief Art Michel,
I know this may make me appear sexist/old fashioned/backwards, but..
How does this guy (Michel) treat a WOMAN like that? and how do all these other officers let it continue? Are they that dead inside?
The Yglesias’s link was a real eye opener. People really think unlicensed barbers will result in the transmission of lice, spreading of disease, and harmful chemical exposure. Jesus, it’s almost as bad as being afraid of terrorist building a mosque next door to you.
New Zealand has no licensure for barbers at all, and we somehow manage to avoid spiralling into chaos.
No wonder Xena had such a bad haircut. You Kiwis should be ashamed.
Totally untrue the UK barber’s business is unregulated. You have to file a form with the local council saying you’re opening a barber’s shop and you’re under the local hygiene bylaws (as are all food shops, any business dealing directly with animals, etc. etc.).
It’s very different from limiting *who* can operate as a barber/hairdresser, but it’s hardly the free for all which the “professional” body would have either.
Someone please describe how being videotaped by a citizen could inhibit a cop from acting lawfully.
#24 anarch
Of course it can’t. What the cops are concerned about is it would impact their ability to do their jobs. See, in their eyes, good police work involves intuition to tell if someone is lying or if they are hiding illegal activity. So, they need to be able to work around pesky shit like the constitution to get probable cause.
Of course, if that creative work around gets recorded and the Proles put it on You-Tube, that allows the activist Judges to throw all their brilliant work out of court and make them look bad to their superiors.
What are you, a cop? ;-)
In most places licensing has long since gone from being about protecting consumers to a combination of revenue generation and protecting a monopoly. That’s not to say that licensing isn’t a good tool for protecting consumers: It can be, but not the way it’s done for most licenses in most places.
If it’s really about protecting consumers, then it’s simple to charge a small fee to reasonably test the knowledge of the person that wants a license. Instead most places just test the ability of a person that wants to open a small business (Or even work there) to come up with several, and in some cases tens of, thousands of dollars on top of the other start up costs.
Both of the links to the AP FOIA story are broken.
I’d be curious about whether folks here agree with Yglesias’ suggestion that barbers who offer straight razor cuts should be licensed in some way. (Let us for a moment set aside the question of whether such circumscribed licensing is truly feasible and focus on its desirability.) As someone who has enjoyed a straight razor cut or two in his time, I’d have to say I’d support some minor form of licensing because I think the feedback mechanisms for assessing such services is poor. That is to say, if you get a bad straight razor cut then of course you’re going to complain and of course you’re never going to come back. But the barber can keep on advertising and giving bad (and potentially very painful) shaves.
This is akin to conversations I used to have with a friend in Chicago who was conflicted about licensing requirements for braiders and twisters. On the one hand, he knew the licensing requirements were absurd — I think they added up to thousands of dollars and hours of useless training in how to do things like shampoo hair — and primarily driven by state cosmetology trade union. On the other hand, she had had some bad braiding experiences and wouldn’t have minded some sort of licensing requirement just to be assured of some level of credibility. But it was hard to figure out where to draw the line of acceptability.
A lot of our discussions came down to how to weigh the limitations of “word of mouth” reputations vs. the one time bad experience. Everyone has had a bad haircut we all learn to deal with it. But a bad straight razor shave? A bad locking? These can be painful in ways that might make one want to augment or amplify word of mouth reputations somehow.
I started poking around about the hairbraiding thing and found this grreat IoJ breakdown (related to a braiding lawsuit): https://www.ij.org/research/1631?task=view
Federalism at work, I guess.
RT-
I got a couple words into your comment but you then inserted something ridiculous about a common political punchline. So I stopped there.
I’m drunk , in a bar, too far too comment serioulsy
abotut he weet t-shist case , but tha’t so classic…
was Ken Starr the prosecutor?
“The whole point of the ban is to give the police another vague reason to have a reason to stop people.”
This is absolutely true. There was an article in a local free paper about the propositions appearing on the California ballot. Of course, Prop 19 (marijuana legalization) took the most space. What floored me was this actual quote from Capt. Joe Stephen of the Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station: “It would change the way we do business. Right now we can go into cars if we smell the presence of marijuana, but it would take away that right for us.”
He thinks its a fucking RIGHT! Prop 19 must be passed just to stop this bullshit.
Here’s a Google cache of the AP article: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-6iLldmAbX8J:news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100721/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_freedom_of_information_7+http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100721/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_freedom_of_information_7&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
Interesting that the links to the original articles no longer work.
Both at Radley’s link to the AP article on the FOIA requests, and the alternate link in the very first comment, there is the information that the article is no longer available. Someone in the Executive branch, obviously, discovered the article and had it pulled, they don’t want this knowledge available for just anyone to read.
So what’s up with the disappearing FOIA stories?
Arrest everyone (except those in government unions) and charge them $500 to get out. Do it about 100 times to each citizen and we’ll cut our debt almost in half.
After all, we exist only at the mercy of the state.
“Right now we can go into cars if we can make an unsubstantiated claim about smelling the presence of marijuana,”
There. I fixed it.
JThompson – A quick sampling of UK council websites on this shows fees between zero and £100, and waiting times in the 1-2 week period (with some using implied consent if you haven’t heard back after 2 weeks, if you sent it signed-for).
Which is afaik is very much within the “reasonable” zone.
I think Mike Celizic is making the right–and terribly depressing–decision. Godspeed, Mr Celizic.
That “theme park” is a city park with a splash area for kids having a capacity of about 60 people max. For this woman to have been known to the police in 2 prior incidents, in a town of 12k or so people, she is not an angel.
…and god knows anyone who’s not an angel belongs “in the database.”