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OUTTA SIGHT! [PART ONE] The Winnowing of the Candidates By John W. Cassell Where have all the candidates gone…short time passing? This is my attempt at an answer to the question “where has the spontaneity gone” asked earlier. This is where it gets tricky, folks. This is the part we never see. They don’t cast any blinking, blinding bright lights on THIS process…no music and special effects psychologically calculated to bring a human being to the point of joyful tears, no matter WHAT is going on at the podium. This is where both the spontaneity went and the real power...

OUTTA SIGHT! [PART ONE] The Winnowing of the Candidates By John W. Cassell Where have all the candidates gone…short time passing? This is my attempt at an answer to the question “where has the spontaneity gone” asked earlier. This is where it gets tricky, folks. This is the part we never see. They don’t cast any blinking, blinding bright lights on THIS process…no music and special effects psychologically calculated to bring a human being to the point of joyful tears, no matter WHAT is going on at the podium. This is where both the spontaneity went and the real power...

Peter Tubic ignored a $50 parking fine in 2004, and on Monday, it cost him his $245,000 house. In what city officials believe is the first case of its kind, the city foreclosed on Tubic's house on W. Verona Court after repeated attempts to collect the fine - which over the years had escalated to $2,600 - had failed. "Our goal isn't to acquire parcels," said Jim Klajbor, special deputy city treasurer. "Our goal is to just collect taxes. . . . It is only as a last resort that we would pursue . . . foreclosure." Milwaukee County Circuit...

MORE British Insanity Mother Needs Criminal Record Check Before Accompanying Epileptic Son to SchoolThe Brits are entering the terminal stages of The Nanny State. While their streets are awash in criminals, the schools failing, the Health Care system on the respirator, and Islam on the verge of being the new royalty, the Brits have redoubled their efforts to make life more difficult for British families. From the Daily Mail. (How do they find this stuff? Hotline?) "Mother stopped from travelling with son in taxi to school - because she hasn't had a criminal record check" Yep. In Britain a mother...

What started out as a plan to shift state workers to a 4-day, 10-hour work week with Fridays off, has morphed into a more sweeping measure after policy makers penciled out the numbers. “At first we thought shutting down on Fridays looked like a good way to save some money during the budget crunch,” said Frank Lee, spokesman for Governor Jon Huntsman (R). “But when we looked at the costs and benefits in more depth it became clear that a total shutdown would be the best option for the state.” “When you get right down to it, the sad fact...

German red tape and a lack of will on the part of officialdom is putting some Muslim women in a very dangerous position. Instead of protecting them from the threat of honor killings, some of the bureaucracy actually increases the risk. The little girl with the pigtails stands at the window staring into the green courtyard. She wants to go outside with her mother to play. "No," the young woman says, "it just rained." In truth, the sun was shining on the major western German city last Wednesday. But the mother is trying to shield her four-year-old daughter from the...

During a recent FNC television report from Iraq, the reporter doing the story commented that the Iraqi people don’t yet trust their government. Just goes to show you how smart the Iraqis are. There’s an old joke in America about “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.” How many times have our professional politicians broken the promises they made during a campaign? More times than they’ve kept them, I’ll wager. The American Revolution was predicated on a distrust of our English rulers. Our Constitution was designed to limit the size and scope of our government. Those powers...

Eye specialist Sarah Anderson works at York Hospital. Her father Ian has been refused Sutent, a new cancer drug, which could provide the only real chance of prolonging his life. Sarah, 40, lives in York with husband, Bill, a computer programmer and their twins, Douglas and Ryan, five. As an ophthalmologist, I have spent my working life in the NHS. And for all its perceived failings, I have been proud of its fundamental role in our society - to provide equality of care for all. Of course, I've heard the term postcode lottery but as a doctor I've only ever...

Common delusions notwithstanding, the United States, I submit, is not a democracy—by which is meant a system in which the will of the people prevails. Rather it is a curious mechanism artfully designed to circumvent the will of the people while appearing to be democratic. Several mechanisms accomplish this. First, we have two identical parties which, when elected, do very much the same things. Thus the election determines not policy but only the division of spoils. Nothing really changes. The Democrats will never seriously reduce military spending, nor the Republicans, entitlements. Second, the two parties determine on which questions we...

An architect's wickedly sarcastic replies to pointless questions on a planning form have made him an unwitting champion for all those exasperated by bureaucracy. John Jessop earned a cult following among his colleagues after his withering comments were leaked in an e-mail which has been sent all round the country. After being asked to fill in a “design access statement” for a storage shed on a small farm, he wrote: “The density is like on a farm, the social context is a farm in the country, the economic context is farming in the United Kingdom in 2008 (which is not...

It’s long been known that family break-up inflicts massive social costs on communities and children. But what about the burden it imposes on the American taxpayer? It’s a proven fact that family dissolution places children at greater risk of poverty, mental and physical illness, juvenile delinquency, abuse, substance abuse, and educational failure. A few years ago Wade Horn, former director of the federal Administration for Children and Families, revealed, “My agency spends $46 billion per year operating 65 different social programs. If one goes down the list of these programs… the need for each is either created or exacerbated...

NEW YORK - A time-lapse video of a man trapped in an elevator for 41 hours has become something of an Internet sensation after surveillance camera footage emerged after nearly a decade...

Update: Despite efforts from Fox News to facilitate this dying girl's wish to have her father at her bedise when she passes, the imovable, cold-hearted, beauraucratic, red tape of the Jucidiary, Bureau Of Prisons and U.S. Attorney are intransigent in their unwillingness to bend the "rules" to allow this to happen.

SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. - A commission created after a Lake Tahoe blaze destroyed more than 250 homes voted unanimously Friday to seek state and federal emergency declarations to combat what it says is an imminent threat of catastrophic wildfire. A commission report said thinning overgrown forests around communities should be completed within five years and within a decade throughout the entire Tahoe basin, which straddles the two states.

Inside Sylvia de Vries lurked an enormous tumour and fluid totalling 18 kilograms. But not even that massive weight gain and a diagnosis of ovarian cancer could assure her timely treatment in Canada. Fighting for her life, the Windsor woman headed to the United States. In Pontiac, Mich., a surgeon excised the tumour - 35 centimetres at its longest - along with her ovaries, appendix, fallopian tubes, uterus and cervix. In addition, 13 litres of fluid were drained during that October, 2006, operation. And there was little time to spare: Had she waited two weeks, she would have faced potential...

New element discovered! Research has led to the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element, Governmentium (Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert; however, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A minute amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally...

AS a Marine, I was taught never to leave a comrade-in-arms behind on the bat tlefield. But that's exactly what the State Department is doing to men and women who've sacrificed everything to help our troops - our Iraqi interpreters. When I last left Iraq 12 months ago, I promised to save two "terps" marked for assassination. Last month, I received a desperate e-mail from one of them: "Sir my situatione is so bad naw please save my life. Please help me sir." ... A year after making my promise, I'm deeply ashamed that I haven't completed the mission. And...

Man Bites Dog by: Malcolm A. Kline, February 22, 2008 Believe it or not, in the Dominion state, a Democratic governor is trying to cut education spending while Republicans in the state assembly fight those cuts. “In response to Governor Kaine’s proposal to address the $2 billion budget shortfall between fiscal years 2008 and 2010 by eliminating over $220 million in dedicated General Fund support for local school divisions, House Republican members of the conference committee on the state budget expressed deep concern over the negative impact on the Governor’s proposed cuts,” read a Valentine’s Day press release from Virginia...

The following is a letter from my father regarding Senator John McCain's lack of care, concern and assistance for an Air Force Veteran dealing with America's Veterans' Administration. I don't know about the rest of the Veterans in this country, but John McCain is not this Veteran's candidate... I am a United States Air Force Viet Nam Vet that suffered a service connected back injury due to a fall while servicing an airplane in July of 1966. This injury damaged, nerve roots and permanently crushed the left gluteal muscle. After hospitalization and extensive physical therapy I was able to continue...

Republican presidential hopeful Fred Thompson wants to curb government spending by halting federal hiring. If elected, Thompson said, he would stop government agencies from acquiring new personnel for one year and his administration would perform senior-level assessments of agency priorities. “This will give a new administration time to assess its personnel requirements in order to ‘right size’ the federal workforce,” according to a statement posted earlier this week on Thompson’s campaign Web site. Two other candidates have promised to reshape the federal workforce. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said he would not rehire half the positions that will...

War on Terror Complex by: Amanda Busse, January 09, 2008 The War on Terror is yet another example of the state using a national emergency to promote its own growth, according to Robert Higgs, a Senior Fellow in Political Economy for the Independent Institute. “The so-called war on terror has given rise to a huge industry that has emerged almost from scratch during the past few years,” Higgs writes in The Free Market, a newsletter published by the Ludwig Von Mises Institute. The title of the article, “The Siren Song of the State,” refers to Margaret Atwood’s poem Siren Song....

IN Bethesda, Md., in a squat building off a suburban parkway, sits a small federal agency called the Office for Human Research Protections. Its aim is to protect people. But lately you have to wonder. Consider this recent case. A year ago, researchers at Johns Hopkins University published the results of a program that instituted in nearly every intensive care unit in Michigan a simple five-step checklist designed to prevent certain hospital infections. It reminds doctors to make sure, for example, that before putting large intravenous lines into patients, they actually wash their hands and don a sterile gown and...

The Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen announced today that Denmark will not hold a referendum on the treaty of Lisbon on the EU constitution, the so-called “Reform Treaty”. Denmark will ratify this treaty through a parliamentary decision. Mr Rasmussen’s Liberal Party and the Social Democrats have the necessary majority to ratify the treaty in parliament. The Danish PM claims that Denmark’s sovereignty will not be affected by the Reform Treaty. The EU authorities in Brussels want the Reform Treaty signed on 13 December and then ratified, regardless of national democratic sentiment. Everyone knows, however, that the Reform Treaty is...

LAWRENCEBURG, Ind. -- A SWAT team raids the wrong home in Lawrenceburg, Ind., now the homeowner wants some answers.Police said they were led to the Village Apartments on the trail of fugitive Sean Deaton.Convinced he was inside apartment 407G, the Lawrenceburg SWAT unit surrounded the building.

Story of the Unelectable November 3, 2003 by: Alan Moretti "Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to everyone of that society...and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, arbitrary will of another man". - Locke America's founding fathers formed this country not for greed or profit, but to escape from a tyrannical king that ruled the colonies like a dictator. They rebelled and framed a government controlled by checks and balances, never giving complete power to one individual or party. The founding fathers feared "egotism". They also wanted to avoid...

Chicago on Top: Windy City Sweeps Bishops' Posts Cardinal Francis George OMI of Chicago has won the presidency of the US bishops with 188 votes, 85% of the total body. The first cardinal elected to the post since 1971, George, 70, is the first religious ever chosen to lead the American hierarchy. By a margin of 22 votes (55-45%), Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson bested Archbishop Timothy Dolan of Milwaukee to win the conference's vice-presidency. A native Chicagoan -- where he served as auxiliary bishop and rector of Mundelein seminary under Cardinals Joseph Bernardin and George -- the incoming...

The Bush administration's counterterrorism policies appear tough, but inside the courtroom, they evaporate, consistently favoring not American terror victims, but foreign terrorists. Consider a civil lawsuit arising from a September 1997 suicide bombing in Jerusalem. Hamas claimed credit for five dead and 192 wounded, including several Americans. On the grounds that the Islamic Republic of Iran had financed Hamas, five injured Americans students sued it for damages. [snip]But no, the U.S. Department of Justice "entered this case as amicus curiae in support of Bank Melli." It did so, explained a spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, "to vindicate a correct reading"...

South Pasadena, California 10/20/2007 - A California “undercover investigator” identifying himself to this reporter as "Agent Egan" entered the Fremont Center Theatre at 8:00 PM curtain time tonight and halted the performance of Pulitzer Prize and National Medal of Arts author Ray Bradbury’s play Dandelion Wine. Bradbury was in attendance awaiting the start of the performance with a theatre full of celebrity guests including The Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner.

Seventy years locked up in institutions hardly seems to be a punishment that befits the crime of stealing half-a-crown. However, it is just such a fate that befell Jean Gambell when at the age of 15, in 1937, she was falsely accused of stealing 2s 6d (12.5p) from the doctor's surgery where she worked as a cleaner. She was sectioned under the 1890 Lunacy Act and even though the money was later found, she has been moved from mental institution to mental institution. More recently, she went into a care home and has been lost to her family, who thought...

Monday, October 15, 2007 -- Parents with special needs children called KUSI's Michael Turko about a tiny local school that's about to go under. The school is trying to help local school districts, but Turko says it's going broke because those districts haven't paid their bills for months.

Bambi vs. the Bureaucrats Six years ago, an Oregon man rescued a fawn and raised her as a family pet. So when the state seized the deer, with a threat of euthanasia, all hell broke loose. By Winston Ross Sept. 19, 2007 - Had he been a hunter, and had the mottled white doe that tumbled down a hill into his rural Oregon driveway six years ago been an adult, Jim Filipetti could have ponied up $19, applied for a deer tag and gunned the animal down. He could have butchered the deer the state now knows as "Snowball," mounted...

Judge, Jury, and Executive Branch by: Bethany Stotts, September 18, 2007 With ever-increasing federal intervention in state affairs, delineations between Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “Creative Federalism” and Bill Clinton’s “New Age Federalism” have lost meaning, denoting pale differences between degrees of federal hegemony. The federal bureaucratic expansion has made some conservatives nervous that the welfare state will irreversibly centralize government into small department kingdoms, headed by unelected bureaucratic kingpins. “If you strip all the legalese here that shrouds the debate,” asserted Georgetown Law Professor David Vladeck at a September 12 Senate Judiciary hearing, “what is going on here is that the...

Man Jailed Over 50-Cent Toll Mass. Resident Considering Lawsuit POSTED: 6:49 am EDT September 14, 2007 UPDATED: 1:18 pm EDT September 15, 2007 ROCHESTER, N.H. -- A Massachusetts man who insists his New Hampshire highway tokens are still valid just spent three days in jail because he insisted on using two tokens to pay a 50-cent toll. Thomas Jensen, 68, of Braintree, said the state broke a contract with him and everyone else who bought tokens by refusing to accept them after January of last year. He was convicted of theft of services for continuing to use tokens after they...

LONDON — Britain's citizens are now free to buy their ale and milk by the pint and their bananas and potatoes by the pound, then measure the distance they drive back home in miles — all without threat of interference from the European Union. The Brussels-based European Union, evidently exasperated, announced yesterday that Britain could carry on indefinitely using its centuries-old system of imperial measures. The European Union — 27 member nations strong but still not forceful enough to bend the British to its will — effectively halted its efforts to force its metric-only system of liters, kilograms, kilometers and...

SHREWSBURY, MA - The full weight of state and local bureaucracy is coming down on Helen Jarzobski and her buddies at Francis Gardens in Shrewsbury. “Why should I be expected to change now?” asked Ms. Jarzobski, a rather precise senior who cited her age at 92 and a half. “I’m going to be gone soon. If they keep pushing this, I’ll be gone even sooner.” Ms. Jarzobski sat with me Tuesday afternoon on her small backyard deck, which contains two comfy wicker chairs and a glass table. The grandmother of eight likes to relax there every morning with her coffee....

It's been a rocky start for the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and now the departure of its top scientist illustrates the difficulty it has had coming to terms with issues of politics, compensation and governance. Voters approved Proposition 71 in 2004, creating the institute and authorizing it to pump nearly $300 million a year in bond money into the state's research laboratories. The institute first had to break free of two years of lawsuits challenging its constitutionality. Then in April, President Zach Hall abruptly announced his resignation after a stormy meeting with the group that oversees the agency, the...

Survivology would be a science and accompanying support technologies aimed at (1) studying doomsday catastrophic events and their immediate and posterior consequences, as well as the prevention of such events when of manmade nature, and (2) formulating ways and means necessary for planning and preparing for national or global effective survival and recovery in the aftermath of as many kinds of doomsday catastrophic events as possible. To that effect, Survivology would cover the following five concentrically layered levels of survival: 1) Individual, aimed at the survival of individuals and the family nucleus 2) Community, partially banking as much as possible...

China’s Worthless Stooges By John E. Carey Peace and Freedom August 9, 2007Below Beijing’s leadership, who runs China’s sprawling bureaucracy? The cadre of loyal communist worthless stooges.Yesterday The Washington Times published an article I wrote entitled “China: Less than the Whole Truth.” I pointed out that after more than seven months of bad news concerning Chinese food, drug and other product safety, the vice minister for the State Administration for Industry and Commerce in China said, “We can guarantee food safety.�Anyone who could read knew that not to be true: both in China and everywhere else in the world.In another...

Swedish boaters may soon need to pass a 'driving test' before taking to the seas. Should a forthcoming government proposal gain acceptance the new requirement will apply to boats that are over seven metres long and/or have a top speed of at least ten knots. "Between 200,000 and 250,000 boat owners may need to take the driving test," said Lars Högdahl from the Ministry of Enterprise. A generous set of transitional rules may however soften the blow. Seasoned boaters with many years of documented experience will for example be eligible for a licence without needing to first pass a test....

(Well, IMO she's pretty enough to be Swedish, so perhaps the authorities are right.) "Malin Aass was shocked when Norwegian authorities refused to renew her passport and told her she was "not a Norwegian citizen." Several times a week, confused "Norwegians that are really Swedish" turn up at the Swedish embassy, shocked that despite holding Norwegian passports, they are citizens of Sweden."

“We don’t have problems, just solutions.” This was the motto of Rear Admiral Eugene Fluckey, the man responsible for destroying more tonnage of Japanese shipping than any other submarine commander during World War II. I can’t think of a phrase that better explains the can-do spirit of America, the attitude that propelled our country to be the powerful and wealthy country in history. Americans still clearly possess this same can-do spirit. More small businesses and scientific breakthroughs are produced in America than anywhere else in the world. However, there is a growing gap between the world that works - the...

Congress is currently considering the president's proposed $2.9 trillion federal budget. While federal spending consumes an awesome 20% of nation's GDP, the budget process at least allows taxpayers to know on what Washington is spending. But there is much more to government's reach in the economy than direct spending. The costs to the public of complying with federal health, safety, environmental and economic regulations appear nowhere in the federal budget. Economist Mark Crain's research for the U.S. Small Business Administration finds that in 2006 regulatory compliance cost Americans $1.14 trillion. Astoundingly, that approaches half of last year's total federal spending...

Monica Emmerson and her 19-month old son missed their flight to Nevada when they were hassled by Transportation Security Administration officials at Reagan National Airport on June 11th. The incident was initiated because there was water in her son's “sippy” cup. The sippy cup, the only vessel the woman’s son would drink from, was seized by TSA because it may have contained more than three ounces of liquid. A TSA security guard instructed Emmerson to drink the liquid in order to “prove she wasn’t trying to pull something.” Nervous and agitated, she spilled the water. The spill sent the TSA...

Why isn’t anyone talking about the new governmental agency needed to implement the Senate’s “comprehensive” immigration reform bill? For weeks now we have been hearing about, and have been discussing, S. 1348 – the Senate’s “Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007”. Presidential candidates, Senators, Representatives, talk show hosts, journalists, and scholars have been debating the details of the Senate’s latest “grand” compromise on immigration. The buzz word details of the bill have been knocked around newscasts and talk shows like ping pong balls. For example, we are constantly hearing about temporary workers, guest workers, undocumented workers, Z visas, triggers, amnesty,...

WASHINGTON - Two years after the nation's commando forces were given broad authority to attack terrorist networks, the elite units remain hampered by uncertainty over coordination, says the admiral chosen to head the U.S. Special Operations Command. Navy Vice Adm. Eric Olson said that while the command has the lead for "synchronizing" the Bush administration's global war on terror, enforcement of that expanded jurisdiction has been difficult. The command's "ability to drive behavior within (the Defense Department) is limited due to unclear definition of authorities," Olson said in a written response to a question from the Senate Armed Services Committee....

The system for getting badly needed gear to Iraq failed to meet many urgent requests for equipment from troops in the field, according to an internal document prepared by Marine Corps officials at Camp Pendleton and delivered to the Pentagon in March. Of more than 100 requests from deployed Marine units between February 2006 and this February, less than 10 percent have been fulfilled, the document obtained by The Associated Press says. It blamed the bureaucracy and a "risk-averse" approach by acquisition officials. Among the items held up were a mine resistant vehicle and a hand-held laser system. "Process worship...

An article in the Wall Street Journal last week points out what happens when public officials depend upon the continued bad behavior of Americans to fund their projects. Under the headline: "Fuel-Efficient Cars Dent States' Road Budgets," reporter Robert Guy Matthews writes that drivers, answering the call to conserve energy, are driving cars which use less gas. Less gas used means less gas purchased. Less gas purchased means fewer tax dollars collected. Way fewer. According to Matthews: The Federal Highway Administration estimates that by 2009 the tax receipts that make up most of the federal highway trust fund will be...

UNITED NATIONS - Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon formally endorsed a radical streamlining of United Nations operations Monday, delivering a report to the General Assembly that urges the elimination of unnecessary bureaucracy. The sprawling U.N. system contains 16 specialized agencies, 14 funds and programs, and 17 departments and offices, leading to costly duplication and competition for resources. A high-level panel recommended a series of reforms in November including the consolidation of different programs — as many two dozen separate operations in some countries — into one U.N. operation per country, with one budget, one leader and one common office if possible. Ban...

It is curiously appropriate that the EU's celebrations today of the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome should have coincided with the news, heavily reported last week on the Continent but scarcely noticed here, that the EU's huge Galileo space programme is facing such a crisis that it may collapse. After the euro and the constitution, this scheme to project on the world stage what Le Monde described as "l'Europe-puissance", (Europe power) and to create 150,000 jobs, is probably the EU's most ambitious project to date. Its aborting, following that of the Constitution itself, would be richly symbolic. In...

Legislators in Sacramento are pushing four new laws that would mandate California restaurant chains and grocery stores to reveal nutrition information immediately and ban all trans fats by 2009. Legislators believe they are fighting the obesity epidemic, but they are also expanding a government that is already overweight. The current obsession with obesity is driven by studies, such as the recent report by the nonprofit California Center for Public Health Advocacy, which found that California has an average of 4.18 times as many fast-food restaurants and convenience stores as supermarkets and produce vendors. San Bernardino County was found to have...