Screeners in the employ of the Transportation Safety Administration have been accused of all kinds of abuses, from banning passengers who don't follow irrelevant orders to forcing a woman to remove her nipple rings with pliers. The TSA's response:
A spokesman said that out of 2 billion passengers screened nationwide since 9-11, there have been only 110,000 abuse complaints.
Only 110,000 abuse complaints? This is their defense?
Rookie police officer Tim Pochron of Hobart, Indiana, was 29 minutes into his first day on the job when an impaired driver smashed into his parked squadcar, destroying it.
Pochron was inside his house at 12:29 a.m. Monday when someone hit his new squad car parked outside, as well as a tree, police said.
My question is: what was he doing at home, 29 minutes into his first shift as a police officer? Shouldn't he have been...you know, working
The ACLU estimates that there are 1 million people on the U.S. Terrorist Watch List. The Transportation Security Administration reacts with outrage, claiming that the ACLU's figure is "just plain wrong." The TSA estimates that their list of terrorist watch subjects is only 450,000 people. To put that in perspective, that means that means the TSA suspects there are 9,000 terrorists in every state. This, they imagine to be reasonable.
Among those on the list: Saddam Hussein, who is dead, and Senator Ted Kennedy.
As my regular reader knows, I've been entertained for the last couple of years by FEMA Trailers, a federal project so inept that it seems to have been a kind of performance art piece demonstrating that government shouldn't be allowed to do anything, ever.
The trailers started out as a modest and obvious suggestion: "Hey, why don't we get a bunch of trailers and haul 'em down there for people to live in while their houses are being rebuilt." In the flurry of political butt-covering following Katrina, Congress and the President were throwing money at any project that demonstrated "I care" and "we're doing something, already, so leave us alone, wouldja?" the round-up-some-trailers plan metastasized into a full-blown government boondoggle.
Instead of quickly grabbing trailers parked in sales lots around the country, FEMA protected taxpayer interests by contracting the manufacture of thousands of trailers to Spartan government specs. As a result, the trailers trickled off assembly lines over the course of months, leaving Katrina victims either homeless or running-up big hotel bills. The trailers arrived too late to do anything but rust in parking lots and farm fields. Attempts to auction the surplus failed because no one wanted a government trailer with no amenities, and in the end it turned out that the trailers themselves were poisonous for those who lived in them.
The few trailers that actually were used generally served as temporary housing for people while they rebuilt their homes. Which is where this sad saga ends, in the front yards of ruined houses across New Orleans. There, the trailers have become an eyesore, and it's time for them to be hauled off to the dustbin of history:
Last month, Mayor Ray Nagin set a July 1 deadline to vacate the trailers or city officials would begin enforcing an ordinance that fines residents for parking trailers on their property. The ordinance was waived after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.
City inspectors will hand out warnings to those still in trailers or help residents file for extensions, said Edward Horan, the city's zoning administrator. Residents still in violation after 15 days will trigger a hearing process and could be fined up to $500, he said. Daily fines could follow.
So it all ends the way it began, in oblivious bureaucracy. What started as an emergency response ("Let's get some trailers!") and evolved into a long-term program that satisfied government process requirements but failed to solve the problem at hand, becomes a clean-up project where the people who are handing out the warnings that the trailers must go are cross-trained in helping people file for extensions.
In a few years, the State of Louisiana will start designating the trailers as historical sites, hearkening back to historic Hurricane Katrina, and will forbid them being torn down or hauled off.
Those trailers are going to be with us forever.
From the Detroit Free Press, via Radley Balko, an attempt to explain how Flint, Michigan, police are going to enforce appropriate fashion. Clearly, police in Flint, Michigan, don't have enough to do.
Senator Arlen Specter is meddling in pro football, demanding the formation of a commission to investigate -- this is almost to stupid to write out loud -- videotaping by one team of the activities of another team.
While this videotaping is sometimes referred to in the media as "illegal," it is in fact merely a violation of the rules of professional football. Violating the rules of professional football is not a crime, as is evidenced by the fact that offensive linemen are not sent to jail when they tackle the blitzing linebacker. Thus, the rules of professional football are not, technically, within the purview of the United States Senate.
Alas, Senator Specter recognizes no limits to his wisdom or authority, so he's pissing away taxpayer dollars interfering with a private association of adults who have done nothing even close to illegal.
Clearly, Senator Specter doesn't have enough to do. So, as a public service, I have assembled a list of things Senator Specter could be doing with his time that would be more valuable than worrying about professional football.
This is not, I understand, an extensive list, nor are the activities on the list particularly productive -- except, you know, the war one. Still, if Senator Specter were indulging in the listed activities he would at least be less bothersome.
The NFL, in response to Senator Specter's meddling, should tell the Senator to go pound sand. They won't, but they should.
Everywhere you look, cities are hiring private contractors to install and operate traffic camera ticketing systems. What's becoming apparent is that the traffic cameras have nothing whatsoever to do with public safety. Instead, they're all about generating revenue for government and profits for the operators. In many cases, the studies that are used to justify the installation of cameras are conducted by the same companies that stand to profit once the cameras are installed.
Not surprisingly, those studies usually come back citing tremendous savings of lives and property. Because the companies that operate the cameras are paid a cut of the revenue, it should surprise no one that cameras end up being installed primarily at the intersections that promise the most profit. What makes an intersection profitable? Usually it's one at which the critical amber light portion of the cycle is so short that it's virtually impossible for people to obey the law. In cities where short light cycles weren't a problem, traffic engineers were dispatched to shorten the cycles and increase revenue.
Interestingly, elected officials and bureaucrats are largely immune from the cameras. Their automobile registrations are, for all practical purposes, classified. The ticketing agencies can't track a license number to a name and address, and thus can't issue a ticket. The secrecy provision of the law was created 30 years ago to protect police. But in the age of terrorism, the use of that law has wildly expanded. In California alone, there are nearly 1 million private autos that can't be ticketed, owned by high-value targets like museum guards and social workers.
And the rest of us? We're becoming kind of a political problem. While the initial bureaucratic reaction may have been to dismiss complainers as pro-reckless-driving cranks, politicians under pressure are starting to step up. In Georgia, there is legislation pending that will require cities wanting to install stoplight cameras to demonstrate a safety need, and that will ban them from altering the timing of the lights to increase revenue. That's a good start.
Here's a rundown of cities that have been ordered by the courts to either remove their cameras or refund the fines they've been collecting.
An investigation by Politico reveals that taxpayers are underwriting former President and embryonic billionaire Bill Clinton to the tune of more than $1 million a year.
Since 2001, Clinton has received more of almost every benefit available to former presidents — from his pension to his staff’s salaries and benefits to supplies. His $420,000 phone bill and $3.2 million office rent tab both nearly surpassed the totals rung up for those purposes by Bush, Carter and the late former presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan combined. As a group, they spent $484,000 on telephone service and $3.8 million on rent in the same span.
I'm sorry: $420,000 for a phone bill? Who's he calling? At 10-cents a minute -- and I'm guessing if he shops around he can fine a lower rate than that -- that's 4.2 million minutes. Over the course of seven years, that's 600,000 minutes a year which is 59 weeks of phone calls every single year, which doesn't even include local calls. Which means, assuming an 8 hour workday, 5 days a week, that at any given moment there are 5 people on the phone in Clinton's office talking long distance.
Assume a nickel a minute and there must be 10 people talking long distance all the time. What's he running, a telemarketing operation?
Hi, I'm calling from the office of former President Bill Clinton, and I was wondering if you need anyone to give a speech at your next corporate event?
Also contained in the report: News that it's costing us nearly a million dollars a year to support former President George H.W. Bush and -- hold onto your socks -- a half million a year in office support for Jimmy Carter.
Must need someone to handle all his fan mail.
Local governments love capital-intensive economic development strategies that involve big construction projects that can be named after politicians and the doling-out of fat contracts to those politicians' political underwriters. Every city in America has a convention center that sits largely idle most of the year, and the massive number of seldom-visited, local-interest museums will lead future archaeologists to conclude that Americans were a race of self-obsessed anal-retentives -- which, come to think of it, we are.
My own, personal favorite local government "attraction" is the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky. It was built largely with tax dollars, touted as the cure to Bowling Green's economic ills after the local underpants factory moved its equipment, jobs and pension plan to Malaysia. Now more than a decade into that economic development project, it's a museum that allows visitors to put their own cars on display in exchange for donations. The biggest exhibition to date focused on dinosaurs.
Anyway, it's nice to know that emerging democracies around the world are learning more from the United States than the importance of paying their debts on time. As evidence, the government of Nigeria's capital city, Abuja, has teamed up with fat cat real estate developers to underwrite the world's tallest shopping mall. The thinking is, apparently, that the only reason tourists don't flock to sweltering Equatorial Africa is a dearth of Orange Julius and Hot-Dog-On-a-Stick.
The minister said that the multi-billionaire 50-storey shopping mall, with twin towers, would be located at the Constitution Avenue, beside the proposed Abuja Transportation Centre in the Central Business District of the Federal Capital Territory.
His words, "Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory has comparative advantage for having prime location as the capital of the most populous country in Africa, therefore any investment in this regard will surely get investment recouped immediately".
Umar reiterated that this was part of the innovation of the FCT administration, in addition to the planned multi-billionaire Abuja Boulevard project, to make Abuja the world’s tourist and conference delight.
According to the CIA World Factbook, 70% of Nigeria's population lives below what is doubtless a fairly meager poverty line. The average age of Nigeria's citizens is 18, largely because the life expectancy of its adults is 47.
The municipal government of Abuja welcomes outside, private sector investment in its quest to make landlocked Abuja "the world's tourist and conference delight." To visit the Federal Capital Territory website and inquire about investment opportunities, click here.
To learn how to put your car on display at the National Corvette Museum, click here.
The ACLU estimates that the government's Terrorist Watch List contains nearly 1 million names.
