Category: Government Overreach

The Springfield News-Leader notices that the tax initiatives on the ballot are now getting organized opposition:

A quarter-cent Capital Improvement Program sales tax that has been renewed six times in the past is up for renewal again on June 8.

But for the first time that anyone can remember, there is organized opposition to the tax that resurfaces streets, builds sidewalks and improves intersections.

“People need a break right now,” said Steven Reed, a sales tax opponent who acknowledged recycling “Vote No” yard signs from the recent pension sales tax vote for the upcoming CIP sales tax election.

I’ve always seen organized support for pretty much every tax increase I’ve seen on a ballot, often because tax dollars or existing union or other existing organization money is behind it along with the actual organizations themselves. The side of increasing taxes has always had targeted true believers for each cause (people who like libraries acting to support those initiatives, teachers and school boosters acting to support property tax increases, and so on).

I attribute the new rise of anti-tax supporters directly to the Tea Party movement because I know that the people who opposed, unsuccessfully, the St. Louis County Metro sales tax on a recent ballot were Tea Partiers. Now we will see some real effort and opposition to tax increases that will stun people who’ve supported the tax increases on autopilot for the last several decades.

However, yard signs won’t be enough. To succeed, the opposition needs to master Get Out The Vote efforts. A lot of these taxes are stuck on off ballots in the spring or the summer when turnout is low and favors the true believers out to get the thing passed. I recall voting against a property tax increase for the library in Webster Groves (where I was and still am a dues paying Friend of the Library) on a ten degree February day. The tax increase was the only thing on the ballot, but I carved thirty minutes out of my day to go to the polling place and cast my vote. I didn’t have to wait in line, as only a couple hundred voters out of a population of 23,000 showed up. Mostly to support the proposition.

I think the new organization and connections that the Tea Party Movement has made will provide some good energy to drive people to the polls to counteract the continual ratcheting up of tax rates, a half percent here and fifty dollars annually on your assessed value there. I welcome it. Maybe it will compel the government and our elected and unelected municipal leaders to make priorities to spend existing tax revenue accordingly instead of continually going to the bottomless well of citizen pockets.

But it will take effort every time. Don’t just remember November. Remember February, April, June, and whenever they sneak the initiatives in.

Tam points out this story about a New York legislator who wants police to aim for off-center mass:

City cops are livid over a legislative proposal that could handcuff the brave officers involved in life-and-death confrontations every day — requiring them to shoot gun-wielding suspects in the arm or leg rather than shoot to kill, The Post has learned.

The “minimum force” bill, which surfaced in the Assembly last week, seeks to amend the state penal codes’ “justification” clause that allows an officer the right to kill a thug if he feels his life or someone else’s is in imminent danger.

The bill — drafted in the wake of Sean Bell’s controversial police shooting death — would force officers to use their weapons “with the intent to stop, rather than kill” a suspect. They would be mandated to “shoot a suspect in the arm or the leg.”

The legislators apparently favor bad guys drowning in their own pools.

A cop demands a hummer from an underage girl and gets probation. Fortunately for the delicate sensitivities of your Federal government, there’s an alternate charge available.

On Friday, Steven Burgess was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison without parole for violating the girl’s civil rights. His attorney, John O’Connor, said Burgess agreed to the plea bargain because it was better than the life sentence federal prosecutors were prepared to recommend.

So how do you feel knowing that you can be put in an FCI for life for violating someone’s civil rights? Don’t you get the sense that that particular charge is rather elastic?

Another entry in a thought-provoking series designed to provoke support for government health care:

For nearly a decade, Paula O—-‘s brain tumor was kept at bay by a drug that was not approved to treat her condition.

Then Oertel did something she never imagined would jeopardize her good health. She moved. Less than 30 miles – from one county in Wisconsin to another.

The move triggered a review of her health insurance from Medicare, which eventually led to a loss of coverage, including the drug. And the tumor returned within four months.

A tragic story, but, um, that’s already government health care denying the coverage. Is this story supposed to be promoting health control reform or arguing against it?

Mike Luckovich’s cartoon from March 10 nails the health care crisis in Congress:

Click for full size

Given that this cartoon was reprinted this morning in the Springfield News-Leader only two pages before the story entitled Runaway Prius tale in doubt:

Investigators with Toyota Motor Corp. and the federal government could not replicate the runaway speeding reported by a Prius owner who said his car’s accelerator stuck as he drove on a California freeway, according to a memo for a congressional panel.

The memo, obtained Saturday by The Associated Press, said the experts who examined and test drove the car could not replicate the sudden, unintended acceleration James Sikes said he encountered. A backup mechanism that shuts off the engine when the brake and gas pedals are floored also worked properly during tests.

Sikes, 61, called 911 on March 8 to report losing control of his 2008 Prius as the hybrid reached speeds of 94 mph. A California Highway Patrol officer helped Sikes bring the vehicle to a safe stop on Interstate 8 near San Diego.

One would have to assume, then, that Luckovich’s metaphor is that Congress has made a stunt of a crisis for its own gain, would one not? Because that’s spot on.

Even though Marquette University “technically” lost its game in the NCAA tournament, I still have hope they will take the title.

How? A controversial, infrequently used procedure called “Deem and Win.”

If you want your upsetted team to continue playing, call House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and tell her to make it so. After all, Congress already sees college athletics and broadcasting of professional sports as its balliwick. Why doesn’t it just get onto picking sports’ winners and losers like it does for big business’?

Given the weight of court rulings that police officers have no obligation to protect you, the individual citizen (see this for a list of relevant cases), will government doctors have a legal obligation to treat you, the individual citizen?

The Springfield-News Leader discovers that a recent government lawsuit against a private company will cost the consumers:

AT&T is charging Springfield landline customers a roughly $2-a-month fee in order to recoup a $7.45 million settlement with Springfield’s city government.

And Springfield is not alone. Customers from 270 other Missouri communities will also pay the fee for five years.

Surprised?

AT&T says city officials were aware the company would use a state law that allows the company to recoup the money and that officials or the public should not be surprised.

Who is surprised by this? A few guesses:

• Journalists unfamiliar with the economics of doing business, where you raise prices–or in this case, use lawful line items on bills–to recoup additional costs.
• People who don’t know any better and learn these things from journalists.
• Skittish kittens who are taken aback by anything loud.

Keep that in mind whenever The Good Guys In The Government stick it to the robber barons who have to work for a living: the citizen or the consumer always pays, sometimes twice (once for the sticking it to, and once for being stuck it to).

From his remarks yesterday:

I remember growing up in a land in which it was presumed that people were free to do things, and there were not silly laws about how much grass you must have on it. We don’t seem to live there any longer.

There are people in this world who want to control others. They tend to become public employees.

You know the United States Government spent something like $2,500,000 to air an ad in the Superbowl, right? This ad:

The official version is on YouTube here complete with the “Visionary and Director, in that order” self-loving profile.

You know, it’s not bad enough that the Department of Treasury spent that much money buying space for an ad in the Superbowl. They had to make it worse by just giving a blank check to an ad company that proceeded to make an ad company ad for it.

I’ve done some work in the field, and you can tell an ad company’s ad (or an interactive agency’s Web site) because they’re not targeted to consumers. They’re targeted to other ad companies to show how cool the producing ad company is. The ad company can break all the rules of comprehensibility and including a call to action since the ad is not designed to convince you of anything, but merely to exist in its coolness.

This ad shares some of the core features of a hip ad-man’s dream ad:

• Incomprehensibility. They’re having a meeting. The title tells us that. What is the point of the meeting? In most commercials, it’s to get to the punchline. This ad doesn’t really have a punchine, nor a core call to action. What is the viewer supposed to do? Embrace the existence of hip use of tax money budget.
• Self-reference. It’s an ad company having a meeting to talk with a client. A stupid client! Haw! There’s your punchline. Also, it’s epic, because the lives and livelihoods of those who work at ad agencies are dramatic, glamorous, and exciting (see Mad Men or just interact with ad agency people. They’re thespians without any acting skill, so they live the melodramas in their own lives. And if you let them, they make advertisements about them.)
• Expensivity. When money is no object, it will be spent. On an ad buy. On expensive sets and catering. Money is no object!

As a conservative, I feel outraged enough that the government profligately wasted Chinese bondholder money on an ad in the Superbowl. As a viewer, I felt worse that the ad sucked that badly.

I also feel a little bad for the “client,” whatever government functionary signed off on this. Didn’t he or she realize that the ad company was mocking him or her? Or was he so hip as to accept its mockery, feeling that he was in on it even though the ad agency didn’t think so?