One of my state’s Senators, Arlen Specter, was approached at a town hall in Lebanon, PA (near my hometown of Harrisburg, Pa) by a constituent who was angry about…well, I don’t know what about. I am not just being a snide jerk about that either, I really can’t tell because the screaming citizen, Craig Anthony Miller, really is just scolding Arlen Specter. At the top of his lungs for not being allowed to speak at the town hall which he was allowed to speak at. Specter just lets him yell, and gets back to business.

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As we fought two wars, Chinese products have poisoned us with products, including chilren’s toys, and our response is to drive up the cost and diminish the access to used books and toys:

It’s hard to believe, but true: under a law Congress passed last year aimed at regulating hazards in children’s products, the federal government has now advised that children’s books published before 1985 should not be considered safe and may in many cases be unlawful to sell or distribute. Merchants, thrift stores, and booksellers may be at risk if they sell older volumes, or even give them away, without first subjecting them to testing—at prohibitive expense. Many used-book sellers, consignment stores, Goodwill outlets, and the like have accordingly begun to refuse new donations of pre-1985 volumes, yank existing ones off their shelves, and in some cases discard them en masse.

via The New Book Banning by Walter Olson, City Journal 12 February 2009

[c/o Megan McCardle]

The geniuses known as Congress decides to forbid mom and pop bookstores, flea market shoppers, community day care organizers and anyone else from buying or selling themselvs or their kids cheap books that have been printed before 1985. Why? They are banned because minute trace amounts of lead may be present in the book cover illustration paint. Minute amounts that have never produced any cases of lead poisoned children. Can’t it just be mandated that we have to recover them?

This doesn’t affect your 2 kid + dog family at the local suburban mall. This affects the teachers in poor districts that may want to teach great books and may have to buy the books themselves. This affects the kid that may walk by a yard sale with a dime in their pocket and he will have to buy the old lampshade instead of a copy of “To Kill a Mockingbird”.

In February, they made exceptions for libraries, but that is not enough. Its a pretty dumb law, that would be a nuisance to enforce.

Disabled or not, this is too many students being beaten in Public Schools.

More than 200,000 schoolchildren are paddled, spanked or subjected to other physical punishment each year, and disabled students get a disproportionate share of the treatment, according to a new study.

Most states prohibit corporal punishment in public schools, but 20 do not.

via Disabled Students Are Spanked More – NYTimes.com.

The study is available here: http://www.hrw.org/node/84950

These rules should have been developed prior to bonus time. It will be interesting to see what Feinberg decides and then what happens with the media coverage following any pay adjustments:

The resurrection of the guaranteed bonus is sure to become a hot-button issue for the Obama administration’s pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg, who is preparing this week to review how compensation should be structured at seven companies that received two or more federal bailouts.

The companies must each submit 2009 compensation plans for their top 25 earners by Thursday, and Mr. Feinberg has 60 days to rule on them. He has the authority to single out any of those employees and adjust their pay packages.

In the next phase, he is to review the packages of the next 75 highest earners in each company. For them, he can set pay formulas to be applied broadly.

via Effort to Rein In Wall Street Pay Hits New Hurdle – NYTimes.com.

Fraud ain’t protected speech. DOJ should be compelled to investigate:

The controversial business of selling grassroots political campaigns is getting the spotlight treatment as details continue to emerge about the source of fake letters sent to a first-term member of Congress urging him to vote against the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill.
[…] Perriello, a first-term Democrat from a central Virginia district Republicans are keen to retake in 2010, also received letters that claimed to be from members of a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; the letters bear a striking similarity to the one attributed to Creciendo Juntos. M. Rick Turner, president of the NAACP Albemarle-Charlottesville Branch, confirmed that the letters are fake—none of the five individuals who purportedly signed the letters are employed by his organization.

via Forged climate bill letters spark uproar over ‘astroturfing’ | Grist.

Who else received these letters?

Former President Clinton arrived in North Korea today in a dramatic bid to negotiate the release of two American TV journalists sentenced to 12 years in prison for illegally entering the secretive nation earlier this year.

via Bill Clinton visits North Korea in bid to free journalists – Los Angeles Times.

Good luck to WJC.

Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), who has been shut out of the 6 person, non representative health care negotiations on the Senate Finance Committee, doesn’t seem to be happy about the exclusion or the proposals being mulled over by the Baucus/Conrad/Grassley led group:

Rockefeller has sparred privately with Conrad and Baucus during their Democrat-only Finance Committee meetings about what Rockefeller views as a disregard for measures that would make insurance truly affordable to the poor in West Virginia. But when Rockefeller emerged from those meetings, he tended to deliver only cryptic statements to the media.

On Thursday, however, he stopped putting on a polite face. In a warning shot of sorts, he sent letters to the Government Accountability Office, the National Cooperative Business Association and the Agriculture Department, asking dozens of questions about the history, success rate and legal, regulatory and licensure requirements of cooperatives — questions he said he has yet to receive answers from by the committee.

“I don’t think he is very happy with me, and I regret that,” Rockefeller said of Conrad. “I can’t worry about that.”

via Senate Democrats spar over public plan – Carrie Budoff Brown and Patrick O’Connor – POLITICO.com.

3 Democrats, 3 Republicans guiding health care is not what the American public voted for. No solution should be 50/50 bipartisan with the way the country split the senate 60/40. Since true universal health care is off the table and the real conversation is around a public option, the Republicans have gotten as much as they 40% they deserve. The fact that Baucus and Conrad insist on meeting the GOP on their side of the debate, should not only concern the Obama administration going forward but should make democratic senate leadership seriously consider enacting and making permanent Sen. Tom Harkin’s proposals for choosing new committee leadership at regular intervals and by other criteria in addition to Senator tenure.

A serious post from the satirist:

The phenomenon called “Driving While Black” is nothing new. But now the so-called Birthers have come up with a novel variation on it: President While Black. They are essentially pulling Obama over and asking him to show his license and registration.

Here’s my teachable moment: let’s not be afraid to use words like “stupid” and “racist” when they apply; let’s stop using the word “post-racial” altogether; and please, just when the conversation is starting to get interesting, let’s not settle it over a few beers.

via Andy Borowitz: President While Black.

We just love us some torture.

Surprisingly, democracies are not necessarily more hostile to the practice than non-democracies. According to the polls, Americans are more willing to tolerate the use of torture than are Chinese.

via Attitudes to torture: Tolerating abuse | The Economist.

[h/t The Daily Dish]

Iraq is not the place to spend any more American Blood and Treasure:

Text of memo from Col. Timothy R. Reese, Chief, Baghdad Operations Command Advisory Team, MND-B, Baghdad, Iraq.

It’s Time for the US to Declare Victory and Go Home

As the old saying goes, “guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” Since the signing of the 2009 Security Agreement, we are guests in Iraq, and after six years in Iraq, we now smell bad to the Iraqi nose. Today the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) are good enough to keep the Government of Iraq (GOI) from being overthrown by the actions of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the Baathists, and the Shia violent extremists that might have toppled it a year or two ago. Continue reading