In many cases, a father’s child support payments can be the difference between putting food on a child’s plate and clothes on her back.

The dad who allowed his child to die in a van in clearly not careful enough to protect one girl, let alone 12.

Thank you so very much. You are heroic to this end.

I must say that I think the cops want everyone to have a criminal record (in order to obtain fingerprints and/or eventually biometric data on everyone). They hate it that they cannot find everyone’s intimate data (enter stage left: Obamacare). Still, they have other intents.

And I think the ultimate goal is to make us all criminals so that we can have our guns taken away.

But there will be a problem in trying to do this, and that is people with criminal records don’t make good incomes and therefore cannot be taxed at a high enough rate to fund the ever expanding police-state with its requisite expensive retirement, pension, and benefit programs

It will eventually collapse large part because of the cops (and those who lobby for them) themselves. Then things will get very ugly.

Like Paul Craig Roberts points out in his book The Tyranny of Good Intentions”, people have lost the important idea that the law should be a shield to protect the citizen from the state instead of a weapon used to attack him.

The reason we have let this happen is our government schools. They will not teach our children about their heritage from the Rights Of Englishment, the Magna Carta, the Anglo-Saxon tradition. But when you (the government schools) hate that tradtion, why should you teach it? t

The refuse to teach that government was the most dangerous institution last century and that government should be mistrusted and kept humble. The only anti-government thing they teach is that kids should be anti-republicans. When, in fact they should even be teaching anti-compulsory public schools (if they really believed in liberty). And they should teach that Obama and the democrats ought to be as much mistrusted as Bush and the republicans.

But that is not what happens in the leftist control public schools.

One of the many curses of politicians is their constant need to be doing something and seen to be doing something. Having done it, their latest idiotic petty regulation is immediately picked up and enforced with almost religious zeal by minor bureaucrats. Hence the cases cited in your article.

There are several downsides to this. The criminalization that you mention, the minimal advantage that the rest of society gain from these prosecutions and the diversion of valuable resources away from fighting real crime. This is a particular problem in the current economic climate where resources in most states are severely stretched.

The “crimes” you cite are soft targets from the point of view of law enforcement. Easy prey! Not the sort of people who are going to start a gun fight to avoid arrest.

Sadly idiotic laws and regulations never seem to get repealed once on the statute book.

Richard Clark

Hey Susan,
Hope you are well. NOW did a program on private contract prisons and how many people we imprison in this country last night.
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Hi Jill, hope you’re well too. I have to wonder, as any concerned citizen would, just how many people we are wrongly imprisoning for these so-called “crimes” that have in fact, caused NO bodily injury or death to someone, and caused NO money to be illegally taken from anyone. The fact that some neocon idiots find these types of outrages acceptable is even more alarming.

Hope you are well. NOW did a program on private contract prisons and how many people we imprison in this country last night.

Jill

Man Gets 30 Days in Prison for Sharing Snack Cake
http://www.wnwo.com/news/news_story.aspx?id=132268

I guess common decency and kindness, even in jail, are considered “crimes” now? I wish there was a “thoroughly disgusted” emoticon around somewhere! Sorry JT and everyone, this kind of insanity just makes me spitting mad.

How very neo-con of you. Thank you for “letting” us have our way, the results of numerous elections and court decisions not withstanding. Where, pray tell, would you start this “war”? Who would you fight? How would you “win”? These are questions beyond most neo-con thinking,and sadly, likely beyond yours. As long as the far right has champions such as you, we in the left may rest soundly in our beds.

P.S. A little history lesson for you: the far right tried that little civil war maneuver in 1861. It didn’t go very well then either.

If this tidal wave of abusive legislation isn’t stopped, what’s next? Some lawmaker deciding that any church non-attendance should be a felony offense as well? Gee, would that merit only six months in prison or six years? Will some politician like Newt Gingrich convince enough of his buddies that free speech which criticizes either himself, Republicans or the Bush administration is “sedition” and vote to make that a felony offense too?

Citizens can write to their elected officials about this, for all the good it would do. Odds are, anything that sounds critical of their policies would go into the wastebasket. Our elected officials need to know that making targets out of innocent citizens will NOT get them votes at election time. Maybe you and Keith Olbermann could remind them? Please?

Susan in VA