Chicago has repealed it's ban on Foie Gras:

The council voted 37-6 to repeal the two-year-old ban, which critics argued had made Chicago--and the City Council--a national laughingstock.

Ald. Thomas Tunney (44th), a restaurant owner,forced the vote on the measure that prohibits restaurants in the city from serving the delicacy made from the engorged livers of ducks or geese.

Next, maybe cities that have enacted bans on trans fats will start to think better.  One can only hope.  Via On Deadline.

According to Ars Technica, the House Judiciary Committee has unanimously passed a controversial bill known as the Pro-IP bill:

The House Judiciary Committee has unanimously approved the Pro-IP Act, a legislative proposal which aims to impose stronger penalties for copyright infringement. The approval is no surprise, since the bill's chief sponsor is committee chairman Rep. John Conyers.

The bill would create a new position for a federal copyright enforcement czar, establish a new copyright enforcement division within the Department of Justice, and would also permit law enforcement agents to seize property from perpetrators of copyright infringement.

You can read the full text of the bill, including its legislative history at GovTrack.  I blogged about this bill when it was first introduced in December.  As I reported earlier, the most fundamentally frightening aspect is the expansion of civil asset forfeiture laws being introduced with this bill:

The downright scary parts of the bill are the portions which grant the government civil asset forfeiture rights on "Any property used, or intended to be used, to commit or facilitate the commission of a violation of section 506(a) of title 17 that is owned or predominantly controlled by the violator or by a person conspiring with or aiding and abetting the violator in committing the violation."  In most cases of copyright violation, this would be your computer, and any computer equipment you own.  Though given the glee with which agencies like to use civil asset forfeiture, they might consider your house as property that is used to commit a violation of this law as well.

What's important to note here is that civil asset forfeiture does not require you to be found guilty of any crime.  Your property is actually taken to court, and not you.  In fact, you could be not guilty in a criminal trial, and your property can still be taken in a civil trial.  There is no presumption of innocence either.  In reality, it is a license by which the government is allowed to take your property at will.  You can read a good primer on civil asset forfeiture here.

I specifically call out Jim Sensenbrenner in this post because he used to be the chairman of this committee, and not only still sits on this committee, but also sits on the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property.  He voted for this bill, and he is my representative.  It should also be noted that Sensenbrenner has received large donations from different sources who have a direct interest in this expansion of police power in this area of law.  If we go back to the 2006 election (when he still chaired that committee), he received money from companies such as Broadcast Music Inc., Clear Channel, Comcast, DirectTV, MPAA, Sony, Time Warner, Universal Music, Viacom and Walt Disney totally more than $54,000.  So far for the 2008 election cycle, he's only received a total of $7,000 from Comcast, Time Warner, Walt Disney and the Nat'l Accoc. of Broadcasters.  That just goes to show you how much of a difference losing the majority in Congress made to Republicans.  His top contributor so far this year has also been a company called Intellectual Ventures, which donated more than $11,000 so far this year on it's own.  By it's website, they are a company which specializes in different aspects of intellectual property, and would definitely benefit from this law.  And if you look at the top individual contributors from 2006, you'll see that many of his top contributors were also heavily invested in intellectual property law.

The consequences of this law are even more troubling once you take into account the shady tactics used by groups like the RIAA and MPAA to find and supposedly "prosecute" intellectual property scofflaws, and that they often times find the wrong people.  Combine that with the fact that civil asset forfeiture doesn't require a guilty finding in a court room, and you have a recipe for abuse.

I call on Jim Sensenbrenner to immediately work to significantly change or abolish this bill before it moves further along.

One might argue that two of the more powerful constituencies in the Democratic party are the Environmentalists, and the Unions.  So what happens when the interests of the two collide?  Let's go to Minnesota and find out:

Heathrow Airport, The Rose Bowl and the Taj Mahal.

What do you think all these places have in common?

They, along with many others, have all taken the flush out of urinals.
...
Right now more than 25 countries around the world, including most of the United States, are installing flushless urinals.

And depending on what it's replacing, one waterless urinal can save up to 40,000 gallons of water a year, but the I-TEAM found that you won't see them here in Minnesota.
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One of the most effective ways to save water is a water free urinal, but Minnesota is the only state that outlaws them.
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Plumbers have not been supportive of waterless urinals and have fought against them in other states arguing they will impact jobs.
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However, the I-TEAM investigation finds the state's Plumbing Advisory Council has had proof of the safety of waterless urinals for years -- proof it ignored.

The minutes from a meeting in 2003, it said the Plumbing Advisory Council was asked to establish a test site for waterless urinals. According to the minutes, "There was no second to the motion and the motion was not acted on."

So I guess that means unions win, because Lord knows... without urinals to prop up the languishing plumbing business, many men with their pants falling down would be out of work.

Attacks on basic constitutional rights like this are becoming more and more common:

Brendan Colin Jones, 25, was sitting on a park ledge on de Maisonneuve Blvd. just east of Berri St. At one point, he swung around southward and his feet were on grass behind the ledge.

The Victoria native's ticket cited his offending behaviour as "using urban equipment for uses other than those intended."

Montreal police Sgt. Ian Lafrenière said Jones was told "several times" that he was sitting "somewhere else than on a park bench" and in so doing was guilty of an infraction.
...
He saw police approach people who were drinking alcohol nearby, took out his small digital camera and shot some photos.

"I saw this as an opportunity to observe how police deal with underprivileged people," Jones recounted.

Then a police officer came by and asked if he had been taking pictures.

"Once I realized she was attempting to get me to give her my camera, I became confused and told her I would not give it to her," Jones said.

"I had not committed any crime and had been sitting peacefully, just like many others around me."

The officer's two partners joined her, and Jones slipped the camera into his pocket. The police then told him it was illegal to sit in a city park when not on a bench and he would have to leave.

Although this happened in Canada, this is becoming more and more common everywhere, including the United States.  In some cases, people who video record arrests have been arrested under "wire tap" laws.  In this case, a private citizen was in a public place, and took pictures of uniformed police, while performing their duty.  All of these things are perfectly legal, and in a free society, should always be perfectly legal.  The police didn't like this because it opens them up to scrutiny, and so they decided to use an obscure law to penalize this person for something he had every right to do.  They cited him for "misusing urban equipment".  In some cases I've read, they've taken memory cards and claimed it was illegal to take pictures of them.

In this case, they fined him for using a wall as a bench.  Interestingly enough, the park was designed so that the walls were supposed to be used as benches!

Asked about fining someone for sitting in the park, Jean-Yves Duthel, spokesperson for Ville Marie borough mayor Benoit Labonté, said: "If they do it in respect of the bylaw, there is no problem."

The purpose of the granite surfaces at Émilie Gamelin Park is to have people sit on them, said Montreal architect Gavin Affleck, a specialist in urban spaces.

As a budding amateur photographer, I find these stories especially disturbing.  I've often times thought about what I'd do in a situation like this, and I still haven't quite decided.  My current thinking is that I carry multiple memory cards at all times, and if I saw police approaching, I'd try to swap out a blank card secretively.  Perhaps it would be smarter to always have a couple of pictures of something on the card I'd swap out so it looked more believable.  I'm not sure.  What has this country come to that I have to think about these things?

I'm having a hard time not viewing politicians who vote for ethanol subsidies as murderers.  I don't mean this as a literary trick for the benefit of my blog readers, or some other sort of exaggeration.  I mean honest to goodness murderer, as if a Senator who voted for subsidies had put a gun to someone's head and shot them himself.

Food prices are skyrocketing, not just in our country (the growth is not as substantial here), but also in other countries.  The hardest hit are third world countries who import much of their food:

According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation, the price of wheat is more than 80 per cent higher than a year ago and corn (maize) prices are up by a quarter. Prices for vegetable oils are increasing at similar rates. The organisation also reported that the food price index, based on export prices for 60 internationally-traded foodstuffs, climbed 37 per cent last year, on top of a 14 per cent increase in 2006, and the trend has accelerated this winter.

The effects of this are already visible. Earlier this year protests erupted in Pakistan over wheat shortages and in Indonesia over soybean shortages. Egypt has banned rice exports to keep food at home and China has put price controls on cooking oil, grain, meat, milk and eggs. Food riots have occurred over the last few months in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Uzbekistan, Senegal and Yemen.
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Population growth and economic progress are part of the problem. Consumption of high-quality foods – mainly in China and India – has boosted demand for grain for animal feed. Add in poor harvests due to bad weather in places such as the US and high energy prices, and it is not surprising that prices are soaring. But the most important reason for the price shock is the rich world’s subsidised appetite for biofuels. Short-sighted policies are causing crops to be diverted to environmentally-dubious biofuels and, as usual, the burden is falling disproportionately on the poor.

Ethanol subsidies, which will do little to nothing to help our higher gas prices are literally killing people, either through food riots or starvation.  We are fortunate in this country to have the economic backbone to pay for higher food prices, even if it means we don't have as much money for other things.  Other countries aren't so lucky.  For them, our useless ethanol policies have real life consequences.

Do the politicians who voted for these subsidies and mandates even care?  Many of them are now talking about how these are "unintended consequences", as if that somehow should assuage their guilt.  But just because a consequence is unintended, doesn't mean it was unforeseen.  That's an important difference.  People said at the very beginning that this would lead to this exact result, including me.  So while they may not have wanted people to die, they certainly knew it would happen as a result.

And so knowing this, we have to come to the realization that the politicians who pushed for these ethanol mandates were perfectly willing to kill tens of thousands of people (or more), and cause hundreds of thousands (or possibly millions) more to suffer, in order to pick up the votes of a few thousand farmers in this country.  That is the math that they cared about.

Calling this an atrocity does not come close to being descriptive enough.

Is this the United States of America, or the Middle East?

Defense attorneys would be banned from advertising their expertise with drunken driving cases under a bill advancing in the Senate.

Sen. Rosalind Kurita, a Clarksville Democrat, successfully added the provision to a bill that would create an online registry of repeat DUI offenders in Tennessee.

Kurita says officials have a hard enough time convicting drunken drivers without lawyers advertising their expertise in the field and offering discounts to DUI defendants.

Hell... why bother giving them lawyers at all?  Really... why bother with a trial then?  Why not just let the cops shoot them on the side of the road if they fail a Breathalyzer test?

And the online registry idea sure is growing in popularity isn't it?  First will come the registry, then cities will begin passing ordinances so that people on that registry can't live within a certain distance of a business which sells alcohol, which will conveniently make most of that city out of bounds for anyone on the registry.

How did we lose our constitutional rights?  One law at a time.  Via The Agitator.

This is part of my ongoing examination of the folly of sexual predator zoning laws in cities.  In Woodbridge Virginia, a 6 year old child has been declared a "sex offender" by the elementary school because he slapped a girl on the butt.  Mark Steyn is correctly wondering how long this will stick on his record.  Who knows, some city ordinance may one day (or already is) broad enough to keep this horrible human being from living next door to you and pulling your daughter's hair on the playground because he likes her.  Rogier van Bakel takes this case to the next logical conclusion, and is waiting to see a story of a newborn being charged as a sex offender.

In Maine on the other hand, you could now be charged as a sex offender simply for looking too long at a child in public.  Seriously:

Those who peer at children in public could find themselves on the wrong side of the law in Maine soon.

A bill that passed the House last month aims to strengthen the crime of visual sexual aggression against children, according to state Rep. Dawn Hill, D-York.
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Under the bill, if someone is arrested for viewing children in a public place, it would be a Class D felony if the child is between 12 to 14 years old and a Class C felony if the child is under 12, according to Alexander.

Dr. Helen asks some very good questions about who would be targeted, and very simple circumstances where its reasonable to be "keeping an eye" on a child that's not yours in a public place.  It's absolutely stupid, and it creates the intention that anything involving a child and a stranger is automatically assumed to be sexual in nature.  How perverse an idea is that?!  How sick are you that you think the majority of society thinks about children that way, that you cast that wide a net?

Which leads back to the title of this post.  These people are all being labeled as some sort of "sex offender".  Will they have to register too?  What cities will they not be allowed to live in because of these stupid laws?  We've absolutely gone crazy in this society with labeling people with things that simply don't apply.  This also once again over blows the danger of stranger attacks on children, when over 90% of all sexual abuse against a child is committed by a family member, or close friend.

Update:  The report of the Maine law on visual sexual aggression appears to be false.  Dr. Helen has the update.

A man was arrested for having sex with a picnic table... seriously:

According to NBC Toledo, Ohio, affiliate WNWO-TV, the videos show Price tilting the metal round picnic table on its side and then laying up against it to have sexual intercourse with the table. Afterward, he can then be seen cleaning the table and the deck.

During questioning, he reportedly admitted to having sex with the table. Police said he also admitted to bringing the table inside his home for sex.

I don't know what's more disturbing.  The fact that he did this, or the fact that it was considered a felony.  The charges have since been dropped, but misdemeanor charges may be filed instead.  I wonder what led to the charges being dropped.  Perhaps he found the instruction manual for assembling the table which said that you were supposed to insert a pole into the hole into the middle?

Via Reason.

I've been reading a lot of the commentary going on in relation to this New York Times article about parents who are refusing to vaccinate their children.  Part of this problem comes from over-protective parents who read bad information on the Internet, and think that vaccinations are too dangerous.  Especially problematic is the mythology behind the vaccine-autism link, and the idiots like John McCain who propagate the belief in this link.  The problem here is that there is a two-fold free riding problem.

The most obvious free riding problem is the one that Megan McArdle has been talking about recently, in that parents are taking advantage of herd immunity.  As long as 99% of the population are vaccinated, parents can refuse vaccination and their child will be safe, without exposing them to the risks of vaccination.  As Megan correctly points out, this very quickly breaks down as soon as enough people free ride.  Once herd immunity breaks down, the community at large suffers... even those who took the vaccine.

At the same time, Michelle Malkin wants to be able to make decisions taking only the best interests of her child in mind.  Of course, if everyone did that, then too many people would refuse immunization and the system breaks down very quickly.  But Michelle does expose the other free riding problem.  Doctors and pharmaceuticals are free ride on the legal structures created to enforce immunization, and are trying to convince parents to get their children immunized against things that aren't absolutely necessary.  The Hepatitis B example is a very good one, in that the transmission of the disease is very specific and not typical of other diseases that we enforce immunization on, especially for children.  Same goes with cervical cancer vaccines.  Both of these are compounded by the fact that companies are over selling their effectiveness.

And when you look at the debates, and who has pushed for the bills, you very quickly see that many companies are rent seeking... essentially creating a legally enforced market for their drug.  And so drug companies are free riding on the good will of the community at large, and abusing the trust that we have in doctors.  And so now that parents have caught onto this, they're not just becoming skeptical of certain vaccines, but of all vaccines.

This is why having any legal framework forcing a community to do something is dangerous... because people in power will try to take advantage of the framework, and sneak in more and more, because they see a captive market.  The solution here is two fold.  First, we need to tighten the restrictions by which parents can refuse vaccinations for their children, but at the same time tighten the restrictions on what vaccines we force children to have.

Yes, this is what campaign finance reform can actually do:

A Brookfield father told the Waukesha County district attorney that he had no idea he needed to register under state campaign finance laws before funding two large newspaper advertisements regarding an Elmbrook School District referendum.

James Hollowell, a neurosurgeon whose son is a senior at Brookfield Central High School who plays hockey and lacrosse, said he bought the ads and would file the registration papers, Waukesha County District Attorney Brad Schimel said in an interview this afternoon.
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Schimel said Hollowell was surprised that he was required to register his political stance and spending.

"It's a circumstance where it is a citizen who had strong feelings about the referendum and just had no idea that those campaign finance laws that you hear about now and then even remotely applied to a citizen who just wanted to exercise his constitutional right to free speech," Schimel said.

Under state laws, anyone who spends more than $25 to advocate for or against a political candidate or a referendum must register their political activity. If they spend more than $1,000 or collect more than $100 from a single source, more detailed financial reports must be filed.

Now then... if they're willing to go after a guy who pays for a newspaper advertisement with his own money, and make him "register", simply for the right to speak his mind... how long do you think it will be before they starting adding up the cost of internet hosting and domain registration and decide that costs enough to force people like me to "register" simply to exercise my constitutionally protected right to free speech.

People don't even realize everything they've given up.  And soon, after they've made sure people are used to simply "registering", there will come a time when they will begin to decide which registrations they will deny.  And then what will you do?  Perhaps there will come a time when the police will start hunting down bloggers simply for criticizing city government... oh wait... they already are.

Who the hell does this sort of thing?  Do they really get their jollies off of scaring kids like this?

The parents of two Bronx preschoolers are suing the city, charging that their kids were tossed out of class - and handcuffed by a school-safety officer - for refusing to take a nap.

Lawyer Scott Agulnick said Jaden Diaz and Christopher Brito - both then 4 and students at CS 211, The Bilingual School - told their parents that a substitute teacher took them and another boy to an empty classroom on Nov. 17, 2006, and left them there alone.

Soon, the lawyer said, the school-safety officer entered the room, cuffed the boys' wrists - and further terrified them by telling they that they would never see their parents again.

"I wasn't shot, but my hands were tied," Christopher, now 5, recalled, according to his mother, Vasso Brito, a 34- year-old office worker - who says the little guy is now scared of police officers.

This is the problem with having police officers in schools where crime is generally low anyway.  They get bored, and then start looking for ways to fill their time.  When you think that refusing to nap becomes and arrestable offense, then you know you're not needed any more.  Of course in reality these were "public safety officers", not actual police officers, which is even worse.  These guys tend to make Barney Fife look qualified.

Via The Agitator.

This man deserves to be voted out of office this November... and thankfully... the entire House is up for election every two years so it could happen:

Kentucky Representative Tim Couch filed a bill this week to make anonymous posting online illegal.

The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and e-mail address with that site.

Their full name would be used anytime a comment is posted.

If the bill becomes law, the website operator would have to pay if someone was allowed to post anonymously on their site. The fine would be five-hundred dollars for a first offense and one-thousand dollars for each offense after that.

Via capper... which goes to show that no matter what your general political philosophy, we can always find common ground on some issues.  Rep. Couch would be well served to crack open a history book some day and read about the founding of our nation.  He would learn that the blogging tradition has been alive and well for over 250 years, even if not always in electronic form.  We are decedents of the original pamphleteers... and his law would have outlawed important works of this nation like Common Sense... of which Rep. Couch has none.  Though like Thomas Paine, his law would not stop me from blogging in any form, anonymous or otherwise.

Elliot seems to think we don't throw enough people in jail.  I think we throw too many people in jail, and it stops us from arresting the real criminals.  For instance, why is this person being arrested?  Or this person?  And how much harm does a cancer patient smoking pot cause us that we send in SWAT teams to go get them?

It's nice to see the youngest generation interested in politics learning to disrespect and abuse the Constitution at an early age, just like those in real positions of power.  What's next... water boarding if you get an F?  More here.

Bruce Schneier takes on the recent statement by the Director of National Intelligence, Michael McConnell, that "Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.":

Security and privacy are not opposite ends of a seesaw; you don't have to accept less of one to get more of the other. Think of a door lock, a burglar alarm and a tall fence. Think of guns, anti-counterfeiting measures on currency and that dumb liquid ban at airports. Security affects privacy only when it's based on identity, and there are limitations to that sort of approach.

If you don't read Schneier's blog, then you should be.  He believes very strongly in the threat of terrorism, and in advancing real ways to protect people from the danger.  The catch is, most of the things that the government has pushed to protect us won't make us safer, and could very well put us in more danger, either from terrorists, or from other criminals.