Monday, January 24, 2005

Release the hounds!

According to the ruling in Illinois v. Caballes your United States Supreme Court has decided that the next time you have a light out or are going 6 miles over the speed limit (as the defendant in this case was when he was stopped) your local law enforcement community may detain you long enough to run a K-9 unit through your car.

This isn't seen as an unreasonable search because you are in public. It seems that nowadays being 'secure in your person' stops at your front porch—after the city's easement all bets are off.

Maybe after white middle-class folks get a taste of what the drug war is all about we'll be able to talk about ending the damned thing. When some twenty & thirty-something professionals go from earning $30,000 a year in taxable income to requiring $30,000 a year to incarcerate (and then being economically crippled for life after release, if not also infected with AIDS) because they wanted to burn one before they saw the latest Will Ferrell movie the madness will become apparent.

Sunday, January 23, 2005

Don't Laugh at Me Venezuela

Hugo Chavez isn't buying the new Bush Doctrine put forth Thursday. Guess he's still pissed about the whole coup d'état thing we tried in 2002.