Move over, Chicago. You’ve got nothing on Baltimore. So you let dead people vote in your elections? That’s nothing. Baltimore lets dead police officers issue traffic citations.

Under Maryland law, a traffic citation issued to the owner of a motor vehicle “caught” by a stoplight or speed camera must contain a sworn statement signed by a police officer stating that the officer has studied the camera images and that the vehicle was in violation of the law. Last week, WBAL-TV News discovered that some 2,000 stoplight camera citations were issued over the signature of an officer who was dead at the time of alleged violations.

The officer who had “signed” the citations was Baltimore City Police Officer James Fowler, who was killed in a traffic accident back in September. The problem came to light because someone who received one of the citations — for a violation that allegedly had occurred last month — showed it to a retired city police officer who had once worked with Fowler.

A police department spokesman said the problem was caused by a “computer glitch” and blamed it on the private contractor that operates the cameras. He said the department “does not blanket approve citations”. I don’t know whether he realizes it or not — or maybe he just thinks the rest of us are too stupid to realize it — but those two statements are contradictory. If a “computer glitch” was responsible, then the officer who really reviewed the citations should have caught the error. That is, if an actual, flesh-and-blood officer really did review the citations. Read more »

This week FBI agents arrested Muhammad Hussain, née Antonio Martinez, as he tried to blow up a military recruiting facility in Catonsville, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore. Hussain/Martinez’ bomb, like the one Somalia-born Mohamed Mohamud tried to detonate at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon, two weeks ago, was obligingly supplied by the FBI. Fortunately, both bombs were fake.

Now Antonio Martinez is in jail. So is Mohamed Mohamud. So is Julian Assange. And Tom Delay has been convicted and is facing the possibility of life in prison. And the Department of Homeland Security is protecting us from buying unauthorized copies of copyrighted music by shutting down websites that were selling them. And agents of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are protecting airline passengers by looking at nude pictures and fondling toddlers and great-grandmothers.

There, now. Don’t you feel much safer?

Apparently, the only thing Martinez and Mohamud did on their own was to have evil thoughts. These thoughts became action only because the FBI encouraged them, helped them and even constructed their “bombs” for them, taught them how to “detonate” them, and provided the vehicles with which to deliver them. Traditionally, three elements are necessary to prove that someone committed a crime: means, motive and opportunity. Here, the FBI supplied both the means and the opportunity. Technically speaking, this is not necessarily entrapment. Realistically, though, it is. Read more »

Forget what’s in the latest WikiLeaks release of classified documents.

I’d like to see the communications between the U.S. and Sweden, the U.K, and Interpol that resulted in Julian Assange, the Australian who runs WikiLeaks, turning himself into British police after being the subject of an international manhunt on “rape” charges.

The charge of “rape” conjures up images of violence and forced sex. It would certainly tarnish the reputation of this international folk hero if it turned out that he doesn’t respect women enough to obtain their consent before having sex with them.

But, as it turns out, “rape” in Sweden means something else entirely. That enlightened, progressive and politically correct democracy defines “rape” as having sex without using a condom. After you stop laughing, you’ll realize it’s not such a laughing matter when you learn that the penalty for this is a minimum of two years in prison.

According to Assange’s accuser(s) — I’m not sure if there’s one or two at this point — the sex was consensual and he used a condom, or started out to use one. But it broke. So it looks like he’s facing a minimum of two years in prison for buying a cheap condom. And Interpol spread a wide dragnet to bring this cheapskate before Sweden’s bar of justice. Read more »

Last week the government and its lapdog news media were telling us how much safer we are now that Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents are taking pornographic photos and groping us at airports. This week they’ve been telling us how much less safe we are as a result of Monday’s leak of some 250,000 classified documents by the website WikiLeaks.

And, yes, I’ve provided a link to it (twice — in case you missed the first one). This is just the most recent link. The site has had to keep moving as a result of cyber attacks and being kicked off of servers by several hosts and domain name services.

I would have jumped on this story sooner, but I wanted to find out what’s so dangerous about the information that was leaked.

Let’s see, I learned that Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi is afraid to fly over water, never goes anywhere without his “voluptuous blonde” Ukrainian nurse, and likes to stay on the ground floor of hotels.

I learned that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia wants the U. S. to take military action to stop Iran’s nuclear program, and that some of the king’s friends are al-Qaeda supporters. He also wants to implant tracking chips in Guantanamo inmates when they are released.

I learned that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) has dealt with the Taliban. And that the U. S. has been secretly bombing jihadists in Yemen and letting the Yemen government take the credit or blame, depending on one’s point of view. And that U. S. officials believe Afghan president Hamid Karzai is “weak”. Read more »

A good argument can be made — and I tend to agree with it — that the Sixth Amendment, not the Second, is our last line of defense against tyranny. This is the amendment that guarantees that a criminal defendant be accorded a speedy trial by an impartial jury of his peers.

The government can do a lot of horrible things to you — imprison you, confiscate all your wealth, even kill you — but not until 12 of your peers, selected at random, have found that you violated a law that carries one of those penalties. Resorting to Second Amendment remedies should never be necessary as long as we have a Sixth Amendment.

However, when the defendant is a conservative Republican whose “crime” was taking power away from liberal Democrats, and those sitting in judgment were drawn from the most liberal jury pool in the state, the Sixth Amendment becomes a sick joke.

Last Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, was convicted of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering by a not-so-impartial jury of his not-quite peers in Austin, TX.

Here are the basic facts in this case:

DeLay controlled a political action committee, Texans for a Republican Majority PAC (TRMPAC), which was focused mainly on electing Republicans to the state legislature. Some of the money raised by the PAC — $190,000, to be exact — had been raised from corporations. Read more »