Unless you intend to essentially run the labs anyway, and simply have private companies walk off with a massive profit which will just be added to the taxpayer’s burden.

@7 – At least mass murder isn’t their first and last priority.

And if you haven’t figured it out yet, most who frequent Radley’s page (and the man himself) have no use for the partisan crap. And “a pox on both their houses” could be the slogan ’round here.

See…I have a slightly different list for conservatives:

Priority #1 – Defend the presidency against any attempt to reduce its power, just in case Ronald Reagan can be brought back to life through science or magic.

Priority #2 – Prevent Afghanistan from becoming an existential threat to the United States (an existential threat is anyone who wants to hurt us to any degree) and prevent it from acquiring weapons of mass destruction (a category which includes everything from a three-stage hydrogen bomb to a pair of briefs loaded with triacetone triperoxide).

Priority #197 – Prevent Zimbabwe from becoming an existential threat to the United States and/or acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

(Looks like just a long list of different countries between #2 and #197.)

Priority #495 – Cut government spending

Come to think of it, I didn’t see ending the drug war on the conservative list at all.

I take it, then, that you’ll be voting third-party? That you’ll shirk the lesser-of-two-evils argument and endorse a candidate who genuinely represents you? That you’ll doff the bridle of two-party cronyism that reinforces the trends you disavow? If you vote for Obama or Romney, you’re not just part of the problem, you’re willing party to the travesty.

Thanks for the link. I’ve passed it on to Less Wrong.

Here are the relevant portions of that list:

Priority #1 – Enlarging the public sector and fighting any encroachment against the power of the state (even just perceived encroachments).

Priority #7 – Taking whatever position seems most clearly opposite to any position ever taken by the Koch Brothers (or any position merely alleged to be so taken).

Priority #495 – Ending the drug war and reforming a criminal justice system that crushes millions of blacks, hispanics, and poor whites beneath its mercilessly stomping heels.

(To put this in perspective, you should know – for instance – that Priority #281 turned out to be “Genital piercing on demand”.)

http://cen.acs.org/articles/90/i37/Forensic-Science-Innocence-Project.html

Everybody, if you haven’t done so, click on that last link.

The biggest nut punch to me was “The initial investigation found at least 230 cases in which crime lab workers failed to turn over potentially exculpatory evidence, including three cases that resulted in the defendant’s execution.”

Sorry, but I was actually responding to the first comment only. I didn’t follow the link because of my below paragraph. Presumptuous yes, wrong no.

I’ve read your blog for a number of years and have incorporated your ideas into my thinking. I didn’t go to your link, because I would never expect you to deviate from what you have set out so well earlier: Single contract labs are just government labs masquerading as private; and knowing which crime the sample is tied to just invites influence and corruption.

You’ve actually made a profound difference in my thinking. I’m glad I found your blog, but it was through a long, circuitous route.

My oddessey started over a child molested in 2005 by a family member, and that side of my family responded in the worst of possible ways (I and my child were expected to suck it up for the family, making me a felon and my child unable to ever speak of it to keep me out of jail), driving me to cut off all contact permanently. I allowed my children the right to know their cousins, uncles and grandparents on that side, but I have no contact. And theirs is controlled.

I actually hired a lawyer to write an Amicus brief to protect the molester from being charged as an adult. Charging him that way was an affront to my sense of decency, and not because he was a family member. My family thought I hired the lawyer to go after him, a clear disconnect of how the system works.

I don’t understand our system where you are an adult here, but not there. Where a stupid girl sends a graphic picture to a boy she likes, he sends it on, and they become child pornographers. Shouldn’t she be charged as an adult at 15? We charge 15 year-olds as adults for other crimes, so why not in this circumstance? A point made in frustration of this amoral, even immoral, and certainly illogical system we’ve allowed.

Anyway, I searched on many subjects circling outward from “child molestation”, found even government stats putting the lie to what we read in the papers about molestation, child abuse, and sex offender registration. Eventually, it lead me to your blog. Oxygen in a CO2 environment. I thank you for the breathes I take.

As I mentioned in the article.

Better would be multiple private labs with blind samples (no knowledge of the particular case) rotated through each by a percentage allocation.

As I mentioned in the article.

Better would be multiple private labs with blind samples (no knowledge of the particular case) rotated through each by a percentage allocation. Tracking, if each custodian of the sample does their job, would be easy in this day of software. A custodian that doesn’t do their job should fully suffer the repercussions of not doing so. Of course, I dream…