Everyone’s Finally Equal
A short film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s story Harrison Bergeron:
The film is produced by these folks: The Moving Picture Institute.
Here’s the text of the original story, one of my favorite short stories.
Police State Pittsburgh
The G 20 protesters, World Bank protesters, or any other global economic summit protesters are typically a bunch of commie/leftest/anarchist rabble rousers. They show up at these events, smash shop windows, and cause all kinds of destruction all in the name of protesting against evil capitalism.
Basically their just a bunch of rent-a-thugs. I’ve seen them in D.C. when they take the streets every time the World Bank hosts some big meeting.
That said, the response to those protest by Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania police was way over the top, turning into something you might see from the Mullahs in Iran.
Check out this video taken by a pair of bystanders in Pittsburgh’s Oakland section, just across the street from the “Dirty O,” a famous hot dog stand in the university section of the city:
Pittsburgh is a city inhabited and run by leftist. The government is thoroughly Democrat and the population largely subscribes to the full spectrum of leftist nostrums. Yet, here on a peaceful street, where people are just milling around, the cops come out in full force and start macing bystanders.
I don’t know what they were protecting. But there was no riot going on, nothing. Just people standing around.
From Radley Balko, writing at Reason.com:
Emily Tanner, a grad student at the University of Pittsburgh who describes herself as a “capitalist” and who doesn’t agree with the general philosophy of the anti-globalization protesters, has been covering the fallout on her blog. The most egregious police actions seemed to take place on Friday September 25, when police began ordering students who were in public spaces to disperse, despite the fact that they had broken no laws. Those who moved too slowly, even from public spaces on their own campus or in front of their dorms, were arrested.
Lucy Steigerwald, a libertarian student at Chatham University (and daughter of Reason contributor Bill Steigerwald), describes the scene via email: “I’m truly disappointed in my city’s reaction to Friday night….hundreds of riot cops attack[ed] Pittsburgh’s biggest, most jockish, mainstream college. And people still have no sympathy for peaceful protesters or curious college students on their campus. They just feel comfortable and confident that people who have the right to use force on other people are always in the right when they do so. It’s pretty scary and disappointing that they’re so trusting with people’s right to assembly being at the whim of the government.
A University of Pittsburgh spokesman said the tactic was to break up crowds that “had the potential of disrupting normal activities, traffic flow, egress and the like…Much of the arrests last night had to do with failure to disperse when ordered.” Note that a group of people needn’t have actually broken any laws, only possessed the “potential” to do so, at which point not moving quickly enough for the liking of the police on the scene could result in an arrest. That standard is essentially a license for the police to arrest anyone, anywhere in the city at any time, regardless of whether those under arrest have actually done anything wrong.
No wonder folks are stocking up on guns and ammo.
Scary
We already know The Obama considers more than half the citizens in the U.S. to be public enemies for not worshipping him. His Department of Homeland Security a couple months ago branded opponents “extremists” who could be potential terrorists.
Looks like The Obama’s fellow travelers in Congress want to outlaw conservatives altogether.
From the Washington Examiner:
What’s wrong with this picture? The federal government spends billions on homeland security, but apparently can’t stop foreigners from illegally crossing the border or overstaying their visas. The Obama administration wants to bring violent terrorists captured overseas to the mainland and close the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay. Yet in the latest bizarre twist, legislation quietly making its way through Congress would give the White House power to categorize political opponents as hate groups and even send Americans to detention centers on abandoned military bases.
Rep. Alcee Hastings – the impeached Florida judge Nancy Pelosi tried to install as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee until her own party members rebelled – introduced an amendment to the defense authorization bill that gives Attorney General Eric Holder sole discretion to label groups that oppose government policy on guns, abortion, immigration, states’ rights, or a host of other issues. In a June 25 speech on the House floor, Rep. Trent Franks, R-AZ, blasted the idea: “This sounds an alarm for many of us because of the recent shocking and offensive report released by the Department of Homeland Security which labeled, arguably, a majority of Americans as ‘extremists.’”
Another Hastings bill (HR 645) authorizes $360 million in 2009 and 2010 to set up “not fewer than six national emergency centers on military installations” capable of housing “a large number of individuals affected by an emergency or major disaster.” But Section 2 (b) 4 allows the Secretary of Homeland Security to use the camps “to meet other appropriate needs” – none of which are specified. This is the kind of blank check that Congress should never, ever sign.
It’s not paranoid to be extremely wary of legislation that would give two unelected government officials power to legally declare someone a “domestic terrorist” and send them to a government-run camp. After all, the federal government has done exactly this sort of thing before. During World War II, more than 120,000 law-abiding Japanese Americans were rounded up by the government and confined for four years in ten internment camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. Joy Kogawa chronicled the trauma her family experienced firsthand under FDR’s executive order: “Families were made to move in two hours. Abandoned everything, leaving pets and possessions at gun point…”
It was wrong then, and it would be doubly wrong now should members of Congress somehow fail to learn from past mistakes.
Motorists Harassment II
Apropos of the last post on the police state tactics of my hometown cops, I stumbled across this Reason magazine blog post on the “Click It, or Ticket” campaign.
A cop stops you at a checkpoint. The officer peers inside. What’s he looking for? A kidnapper? A terrorist? This week, chances are good the officer is looking for a less frightening perpetrator—the unbuckled motorist.
We are again in the midst of Click It or Ticketseason, the time of year when law enforcement focuses extra-hard on forcing us to buckle up. Nationwide over 12,000 agencies participate in the federally-backed campaign, and checkpoints are just one part of the effort. Other elements include $26-million worth of tough-talking PSAs, steep fines, and lots of lobbying for “primary enforcement” laws, which allow cops to ticket those whose only offense is not buckling up.
The article gets into all the public safety nannyism behind the campaign, but then gets right down to the heart of the matter:
Beyond all the safety talk, why do authorities bother? There’s the lure of federal cash-typically the payoff for bowing to federal regulations. This year the Bush administration is backing a bill that would give more transportation funding to states that pass primary enforcement laws and achieve 90 percent seat belt use.
But local governments need not covet federal funds to warm up to tougher seat belt laws. With fines as high as $200, all that ticket writing makes for quite a nice revenue stream all by itself. Officially it’s (wink, wink) all about saving lives, but money has a way of sidetracking the pursuit of safety. Take red light cameras, which are supposed to reduce side-angle collisions. Like primary enforcement seat belt laws, they are growing in popularity. But there’s evidence that some cameras are positioned, not to maximize safety, but to maximize revenue. Also like seat belt laws, it’s unclear how well red light cameras work. Some studies have found that the reduction in side-angle collisions has been offset by increases in rear-end accidents. But with so much cash a-flowin’ will local officials be able to examine the issue with cool objectivity and side with safety regardless of the fiscal impact?
I think I’m going to contact my town treasurer and find out how much our little hamlet gets for harassing its citizens.
Home Town Motorist Harassment
I live in a tiny rural town on the edge of Northern Virginia. You cross the river, which forms the southern border of the town, and county, and you’re in “real” Virginia, that is the un-Yankeefied rest of the state.
Our little town of less than 700 has a five-man police force. To me that’s an incredible number of cops for such a small town. It’s not like we’re the crime mecca of Va. And, when you consider we have about five deputy sheriffs living in here as well as a couple state cops, the police coverage does seem a bit extravagant, especially given falling property tax revenues from the numerous foreclosures in town.
My house is on the main drag through town, and from this vantage point I have great view of the “traffic safety” police road blocks that the town cops throw up every couple weeks. Last week, I had to run down the street to a little store and pulling out of my driveway immediately encountered one of these road blocks.
As I drove down the street, less than a block from my house, two town cops stepped into the roadway and one signalled for me to stop. He asked for my drivers license. I asked why I was stopped and he said it was a “routine” check that the town was paid by the Va. Division of Motor Vehicles to conduct.
Reading today’s newspaper, I discovered that stop was the first of two “license/registration checkpoints” conducted that day. According to the local paper:
In all officers issued 17 summonses. Of those, three were for unlicensed drivers and two were for driving suspended. Officers also issued summonses for child safety seat violations.
According to the town cop:
The primary purpose of the checkpoints — which were conducted in suppor of the Click-It or Ticket campaign — was to promote overall traffic safety in the community.
The cops say the checkpoints are a “constant” in the police department’s enforcement strategy. Translation: this is one of the only ways we can justify our salaries, besides running radar in the same spot every day.
He said, “motorists may expect more checkpoints.”
Now, I know the courts have held that these checkpoints are not violations of the 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitutions, although I understand that Justice Clarence Thomas has said he would have voted to consider the checkpoints unconstitutional had he been on the Supreme Court when the issue was considered.
Legal or no, the civil libertarian in me finds them to be incredibly intrusive and unreasonable.
As a motorist, if I am driving legally, that is obeying speed and other traffic laws, in a lawfully tagged and other wise safe vehicle, then the cops have no business at all of stopping me from travelling to my intended destination for some bogus dragnet.
And it really cranks me off to know that my property taxes, to which I pay to both the county and TOWN, are going to fund a bloated and useless police force, whose only real purpose is to harrass motorist and write revenue generating tickets.
Apparently I am not alone in objecting to these gestapo-like intrusions into my rights. The National Motorist Association also opposes traffic stops from 5 Thing You Need to Know About Roadblocks:
The National Motorists Association opposes the use of roadblocks, period. The only justification for stopping citizens under a roadblock scenario is to warn them of an unseen peril that could cause injury or death to an unsuspecting motorist.
So-called “sobriety check points,” or seat belt checks, or the myriad of other excuses the government concocts to harass and intimidate its citizens through the use of roadblocks are, in our opinion unconstitutional and in direct contradiction to any honest definition of freedom.
Here’s some guidance from an article entitled, “Reasons to be prepared for police road blocks“:
- 1. At a police road block, you may be asked for your driver’s license, registration, and proof of insurance. After complying with these requests and your documentation is returned, you have the right to leave unless the police have a legitimate reason to detain you. You must ask them if you are free to go; if you do not, they may later claim that you stayed voluntarily.
- 2. When asked to supply your driving documentation, you have the right to open your window only enough to pass your documents to the police officer. The police officer does not have the right to stick his head or his flashlight inside of your vehicle.
- 3. You have the right to say little and be on your way. You do not have to answer questions about where you are going or where you have been. You do not have to answer any questions that do not pertain to your driving documentation. You cannot be legally detained for refusing to make small talk with a police officer at a road block.
- 4. If the police at a road block ask to search your car, you have the right to refuse. Politely but firmly say “no”. If they have to ask permission to search your car, then they don’t have probable cause or reasonable suspicion, which is the legal requirement for a forced vehicle search. Do not permit a voluntary search of your vehicle that may land you in trouble. If the police ask why you are refusing a search of your vehicle, tell them that you value your right to privacy.
- 5. If police at a road block are persistent about searching your vehicle, you have the right to know why. You should ask what they think they will find or what they are looking for. If they cannot give you plausible answers, then they do not have the legal right to search your vehicle.
- 6. If a vehicle search is forced upon you, you have the right to request that the searching officer wear gloves. You also have the right to request a witness to the search.
- 7. If you are ordered to exit your vehicle, you have the right to lock your doors.
Somebody’s Watching Me & You
Just because you’re not paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not watching you.
A panel of judges in Wisconsin gave police there the authority to attach global positioning system tracking devices to automobiles without first seeking a warrent or court approval.
From ChicagoTribune.com:
Wisconsin police can attach GPS to cars to secretly track anybody’s movements without obtaining search warrants, an appeals court ruled Thursday.
However, the District 4 Court of Appeals said it was “more than a little troubled” by that conclusion and asked Wisconsin lawmakers to regulate GPS use to protect against abuse by police and private individuals.
As the law currently stands, the court said police can mount GPS on cars to track people without violating their constitutional rights — even if the drivers aren’t suspects.
Officers do not need to get warrants beforehand because GPS tracking does not involve a search or a seizure, Judge Paul Lundsten wrote for the unanimous three-judge panel based in Madison.
”I only want to left alone in my average home…”