They can probabably get you!
The US Federal Government at work.
With nearly 4000 federal criminal statutes on the books the chance of you knowing when and what law you broke is probably nil.
The constitution called out three federal criminal offenses: treason, piracy and counterfeiting. As a glossy overgeneralization I suggest that any additional ones are inappropriate and relate to things that should be beyond the business of federal busybodies.
Via Freespace.
The current edition of the Carnival of the Capitalists is up at Poliblog.
Browse through the links which include the practical, the radical and a throwaway or two. You decide which is which.
Here is yet another example of why we should kick all the drug warriors off the dole and send them out to get real jobs:
Landscape contractor Blair Davis was in his northwest Harris County home around 2 p.m. Tuesday when there was a knock at his door.
Davis said he hadn’t even gotten his hand on the doorknob when it flew open and he was looking at the barrel of a pistol.
Behind the gun were about 10 members of the Harris County Organized Crime and Narcotics Task Force, who burst into the home, guns drawn, and began shouting at him to get down on the floor.
There on the floor, Davis said, it took a while to figure out that what had caused the swarm of lawmen to descend upon him was the hibiscus in his front yard.
Let’s put an end to domestic terrorism now!
Via Zombyboy and Jeff Trigg.
Photo: Meg Loucks/ Houston Chronicle
This kind of speaks for itself:
The Kentucky crime labs have actually eliminated a backlog of drug cases that have plagued our courts for years.But just in case it does not, contemplate these same resources being applied to health care or infrastructure projects or tracking down perpetrators who have actual committed a crime against someone else or simply leaving the money in the hands of the taxpayers it was taken from to make a local decision on how the money would be best used.
The six crime labs have handled 16,000 drug cases since January and no cases older than 60 days remain.
….
The six labs in the state have 140 analysts and support staff to handle cases from about 400 law enforcement agencies.
Their caseload nearly doubled from 20,700 in 1989 to 40,000 in 2003.
A lot of these cases also had to be sent to private labs to enable them to catch up.
Point 14 of the things Mark Kleiman recently learned at an Executive Session on Gang Violence opens with:
14. On the other hand, gang violence accounts for more deaths each year than were killed on 9-11. Thinking about getting ready to think about it isn’t really a satisfactory response.Why hasn’t this changed everything?