craschworks

The first is an article about a disabled California Highway Patrol retiree who collects over $100,000 per year as a disability pension and “was hired by the federal government to be security director at San Francisco International Airport” (2007 followup).

The second is a Sacramento Bee tool for searching state employee salaries. Pick an agency and then click “search” and the top-paid workers are displayed. Selecting “California Highway Patrol”, for example, brings up a sergeant earning $304,477 per year. When you reflect that the average worker’s pension is approximately the same cost as his or her salary (using realistic assumptions about investment returns and the likely life expectancy of someone who comfortably retires to the golf course at age 50), this is an entire page of state workers who are being given more than $500,000 per year in total compensation. The pension system itself is apparently hugely expensive to run, with plenty of workers there earning over $300,000 per year. Fish and Game are cheaper, with only 4.5 pages of people being paid more than $95,000 per year (plus pension obligations of at least another $95,000, for a total of $190,000/year if compared to a private industry salary).

The US Supreme Court on Wednesday is set to consider an unusual question: Do Americans who have been framed by unscrupulous prosecutors for crimes they did not commit have a right to sue the prosecutors when the fraud is finally exposed?

According to the Obama administration, the answer is no.

Solicitor General Elena Kagan argues in a friend of the court brief that local, state, and federal prosecutors must enjoy absolute immunity from citizen lawsuits – even when they sent innocent men to prison for life by fabricating incriminating evidence and hiding exculpatory evidence.

Via flutterby.

Black people often make bad decisions about their health. For instance, a slightly higher percentage of black men than white men smoke, despite the fact that black men are 34 percent more likely to get lung cancer. Most black women weigh too much: According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Minority Health, “African-American women have the highest rates of being overweight or obese compared to other groups in the U.S. About four out of five African-American women are overweight or obese.”

Black men are 30 percent more likely to die from heart disease than non-Hispanic white men, and they contract AIDS more than seven times as often. Black women are 2.5 times as likely to start prenatal care in the third trimester, or not to start it at all. As a group, African-Americans are 50 percent less likely to exercise. The death rate for African-Americans is higher than whites for heart diseases, stroke, diabetes, and homicide.

All of this imposes immense costs on society.

By now it should be clear that simply trying to educate black people is not enough. Therefore, the United States needs a multi-pronged, coordinated effort aimed at forcing black people to make better choices. African-Americans should be required to pay higher taxes for unhealthy foods. They should be encouraged, if not required, to engage in regular exercise. Cass Sunstein, President Obama’s regulatory czar, has proposed in his book Nudge a system of “libertarian paternalism” through which government incentives could encourage people to make the right choices. We should do this with black people by, for example, charging them more for snack foods, cigarettes, and other unhealthy products.

Not really, of course. No one should seriously make such a condescending and paternalistic argument. And anyone who did should be denounced as a bigot of the first order.

What’s interesting, though, is that many progressives think nothing of making the very same argument about Americans generally. With more and more frequency we are told Americans’ poor choices about their own health lead to higher costs for everybody — so the government must act. Hence the campaign against obesity. Hence proliferating proposals for higher taxes on soft drinks. Hence the drive to have the FDA regulate Americans’ salt intake. And so on.

why on earth, in 2010, would a black person (or member of any other “protected class”) wish to go out of his or her way to do business with, or place himself or herself in the employ of, a bigot? Is the “right” to fatten the pockets of someone who sees you as his or her inferior (by, for example, patronizing his or her business, or placing your skills at his or her disposal) really a right worth fighting for? If so…why?

For my part, I’d love to see a “No Blacks Allowed” sign, or something to that effect, in the window of a local bigot’s business, so that I could know to avoid associating (financially and in any other way) with him or her…as well as with anyone that he or she may be doing business with. As it stands now, bigots cannot “out” themselves in such an explicit way without fear of a lawsuit, thus we are probably all unknowingly doing business with bigots.

Nobody wants to be the one to stand up for sex offenders, but you’ve got to have pretty damned good cause to make a person face what is basically a life-long punishment, served even after their jail term is over. Which sounds fine if we’re talking about a serial rapist murderer, but not when something like public urination can land you on the registry right alongside him.

That would be just one reason studies show Megan’s Law hasn’t done a damned thing to stop child molesters.

Why Doesn’t it Work?

So you take a guy who’s committed a crime. Now you put him on a registry that may keep him from getting a job, or making friends, generally just totally isolating him for the rest of his life and giving him lots of free time. Do you think that makes him less likely to commit another crime?

Wikileaks, he says, has released more classified documents than the rest of the world press combined.

”That’s not something I say as a way of saying how successful we are – rather, that shows you the parlous state of the rest of the media. How is it that a team of five people has managed to release to the public more suppressed information, at that level, than the rest of the world press combined? It’s disgraceful.”

Where does Assange see Wikileaks in 10 years? “It’s not what I want the world to be. It’s what I want the rest of the world to be,” he replies.

He would like to see all media develop their own forms of Wikileaks. That would put his own website out of business, I point out.

In Illinois it actually is illegal to make audio recordings of on-duty cops–or any other public official. Illinois is one of a handful of states that require all parties to consent before someone can record a conversation. But the other all-party-consent states also include a provision in their statutes stating that for there to be a violation of the law the nonconsenting party must have a reasonable expectation of privacy. On-duty police officers in public spaces have no such expectation.

Here’s where it gets even worse: Originally, the Illinois eavesdropping law did also include a similar expectation of privacy provision. But the legislature stripped that provision out in 1994, and they did so in response to an incident in which a citizen recorded his interaction with two on-duty police officers. In other words, the Illinois legislature specifically intended to make it a Class I felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, to make an audio recording of an on-duty police officer without his permission.

Etsy makers of children‘s items, along with the larger handmade movement, succeeded in getting the ear of Washington politicians and agencies by calling out for the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) to be amended. An amendment now hangs in the balance, and we urge you to call your representatives. Cecilia Leibovitz, a.k.a. paperdreams, sent us this urgent message. Cecelia is not only the founder of craftsburykids.com, a shop specializing in unique handmade toys and gifts for children — she is also president of the Handmade Toy Alliance, a grassroots organization advocating for makers of small batch children’s products.

Last week, a Columbia, Missouri, drug raid captured on video went viral. As of this morning, the video had garnered 950,000 views on YouTube. It has lit up message boards, blogs, and discussion groups around the Web, unleashing anger, resentment and even, regrettably, calls for violence against the police officers who conducted the raid. I’ve been writing about and researching these raids for about five years, including raids that claimed the lives of innocent children, grandmothers, college students, and bystanders. Innocent families have been terrorized by cops who raided on bad information, or who raided the wrong home due to some careless mistake. There’s never been a reaction like this one.

But despite all the anger the raid has inspired, the only thing unusual thing here is that the raid was captured on video, and that the video was subsequently released to the press. Everything else was routine. Save for the outrage coming from Columbia residents themselves, therefore, the mass anger directed at the Columbia Police Department over the last week is misdirected. Raids just like the one captured in the video happen 100-150 times every day in America. Those angered by that video should probably look to their own communities. Odds are pretty good that your local police department is doing the same thing.