Category: Uncategorized

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that states may put pictures of convicted sex offenders on the Internet without unconstitutionally punishing them twice, a victory for states that use the Web to warn of potential predators in neighborhoods.

Finally! Some sense has been made.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for six justices, said that the law is not punitive, and therefore it does not punish the inmates after the fact.
“Our system does not treat dissemination of truthful information in furtherance of a legitimate governmental objection as punishment,” he wrote. “The purpose and the principal effect of notification are to inform the public for its own safety, not to humiliate the offender.”

Yep.

In a dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that “however plain it may be that a former sex offender currently poses no threat of recidivism, he will remain subject to long-term monitoring and inescapable humiliation.”

Justice Ginsburg, them’s the breaks. There is no class of criminal I think more richly deserves such humiliation as someone who would sexually abuse and (in some recent cases) murder a small child. No matter how much you reform and apologize and try to make it up, you’ve destroyed at least one life and ruined countless others. It would not bother me one whit to see states make child molestation a capital offense. A few justifiable hangin’s and Amber Alerts would be few and far between.
You can talk all you want about a free society and fairness and unlikelihood of recidivism, but most child molesters ARE recidivists. It’s a sickness, and the only way to cure it is either to make damn sure that everyone keeps an eye on the sicko and prevents him from striking again, or to simply execute him as being unfit for human association. TOUGH. SHIT. If I had a minor daughter or son and one of these assholes got within spitting distance of her or him, both barrels of my 12-gauge would be a-firin’ in his general direction. BELIEVE IT.

This day got hosed, too. I’m not going to be able to post anything till tomorrow at the earliest.
As a heads up, One Man’s Vote will be on hiatus next week. I have to travel to an undisclosed location to act like an employee, and while I’ll have internet access (boy will I have internet access), I won’t have much time to blog.

Well…that day certainly went fast…
Read yesterday’s posts 🙂

The Professor notes that Swedes are now reversing themselves on recycling.
Sorry, but I knew recycling was crap years ago, even before Dr. William Rathje, et al., published Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage in 1992. It’s a waste of money and resources that could be better used for other things. And burning trash can be done cleanly and without need for huge landfills that you can’t do anything with but use for parks for a thousand years.
LATER THOUGHT: Before anyone jumps me about what to do with the ash from incineration, first of all ash takes up a lot less space than the trash it came from, and secondly, I think it can be used for various things. It’s been ten years since I read Rathje’s book so you’ll have to excuse me for not remembering offhand what his solution to that problem was. However, even if you bury it, it takes up a lot less landfill space than unburned (and often uncompacted) trash, and again, you get the benefit of the heat of combustion as mentioned in the article.
I don’t expect to see a renaissance in backyard trash burners and basement incinerators of the type that were commonly used when I was a tad. But a properly-designed mass burner can get things hot enough to totally destroy just about anything cleanly. The black smoke and stink that used to waft through neighborhoods on trash-burning day (and on leaf-burning day, for that matter) are the product of incomplete combustion due to temperatures too low to do a good job of destroying the trash, which is generally not only designed to be a little sterner than waste paper (think the old paper milk cartons), but is wet to boot. Using natural gas for heat and a blower for forced draft to really get the heat up would have solved a multitude of problems. (Of course it probably would have burned down a few houses, but that’s another reason why municipal mass burners are a better idea…:)

This one got the coveted “Letter Spotlight” in today’s Star. Say hello to Mr. Charlie Wiles, Treasurer of the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center.

Give dialogue a chance before going to war

Whoops. Gotta stop you right there, Mr. Wiles. 12 years of dialogue hasn’t produced the expected results. In fact, it hasn’t been a dialogue at all; it’s been more like a monologue, with Mr. Saddam Hussein ignoring it like I ignore Jay Leno’s.
I won’t waste my time with the rest of the article, which you can easily read for yourself, because it addresses the same tired issues of the Left, but I do have issues with his last paragraph:

Our government should heed the recommendation offered by many, including Pope John Paul II, and begin to engage in dialogue to address this crisis.

We’ve been dialoging…or trying to…ever since we dialogued with Saddam’s lackeys at the end of GWI and told him to disarm within two weeks. That was 12 years ago.

Now is the time for world leaders to engage in one of the most effective tools in conflict resolution: listening.

Exactly what Saddam Hussein hasn’t been doing for 12 years. Son, are you too young to remember Gulf War I? Or are you just stupid? Don’t answer. Give war a chance.

Every now and then it’s worth reading the Letters to the Editor in the Star…for their stupidity. Today’s candidate for the Stupid Hat: Kerry Karner of Indianapolis. Come on down, sir, or ma’am, or whatever sex your androgynous name doesn’t help much with identifying!

Former Libertarian turns ‘carpetbagger’
I was surprised to learn of Andy Horning’s move to the Republican Party. It seems to me he is doing nothing but taking advantage of a larger audience for his own gain.

Well, you know, the Libertarian Party was doing so well in Indiana politics. As in “shouting from a deep well”. So just about any move the man could make would be a good move for him. I suspect the letter writer of sour grapes because she/he/it didn’t think of it first.

In past campaigns, he has been critical of both the Democratic and Republican parties; how then does he suppose to align himself with one of them?

He supposed that he’d do it about like he did; he became a Republican. Probably marched right down to his voter registration office and signed a little card. Easy. “Piece of pie. Easy as cake.”

The former Libertarian has become a political “carpetbagger,” and I believe his motives are suspect.

I’d say it sounds more like he’s leaving the sinking hulk before it goes completely under, but I’m not a Libertarian. I’m a Hayekian liberal democrat (we’re sometimes erroneously called conservatives, these days). Certainly his motives are not suspect at all — he appears to know the stink of rotting hemp when he smells it.
Whether or not the Republicans in this state will ever trust him is another story. To them, I’m sure his motives are indeed suspect. But they shouldn’t be suspect to the Libertarians, unless the Libertarians are so stoned they simply can’t see reason.

I don’t always pay attention to comments after about a week (well, face it, after the posting slides off the front page I pretty much forget about it), but I see some folks have been piling on the French in the comments of my “Fuck France” posting back on 19 February…
So far it looks like 6 to 1 telling the French where to get off.
Just FYI, new policy here (with the advent of MT 2.62) is going to be that posts more than a week old will be comment-blocked (to save my sanity, bandwidth, and disk space). Except for the FUCK FRANCE post 🙂

Just happened to be listening to Greg Garrison’s radio show on WIBC on the way back from the airport, and he was talking about this article.
I may have comments later, I’m only home to take my pills that I forgot to take before I went out to the airport 🙂

How evil are you?
“He don’t know me vewwy well…do he?”

is what White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez has done in re the Estrada confirmation hearings…
His summation:

As I have said before, I appreciate and respect the Senate’s constitutional role in the confirmation process. You have expressed concern that you do not know enough about Mr. Estrada’s views, but you have not submitted any follow-up questions to him. We respectfully submit that the Senate has ample information and has had more than enough time to consider questions about the qualifications and suitability of a nominee submitted more than 21 months ago. Most important, we believe that a majority of Senators have now concluded that they possess sufficient information on Mr. Estrada and would vote to confirm him. We believe it is past time for the Senate to vote on this nominee, and we urge your support.

And that isn’t even the half of it. Damn, I think I heard that *smack* from 600 miles away…