What is Your Government Up To?

Why did the police office cross the road? To entrap you! Thats right, an undercover operation involving multiple officers spent significant time and money not to track down fugitives, or patrol areas of high criminal action, but to pull over drivers who did not stop when the undercover officer was walking in a crosswalk. Yeah... so the law says to stop for pedestrians... the law also says not to steal. In Chicago, where this took place, about 65 pedestrians die annually... but of course there is no statistic of how many of them were actually in crosswalks! I have a sneaky suspicion that more than 65 people get mugged a year in Chicago... but for some reason the Police Department felt that this operation was more important. According to the report, the team stopped over 35 people an hour (thats 1 person every 2 minutes)... do the math on the number of cross walks in the city... this infraction happens hundreds of thousands of times per year across the city and only leads to a handful of incidents. Perhaps the focus should be on cracking down on jay walking?

Your Government At Work

Perhaps it is time to take a more indepth look at what your government has been up to lately...

In an effort to take people's minds off the real problems of the day, such as the price of oil the future of social security or impending international war... the U.S. Congress is holding hearings on a potential partnership between Google and Yahoo. Remember the fruitlessness of the Major League Baseball hearings? Legislators complain they don't have time to read appropriation bills but they seem to find time to have corporate executives come up to DC and have a public platform to talk about their companies (free advertising). Microsoft representatives were sure to note that "Never before in the history of advertising has one company been in a position to control prices on up to 90 per cent of advertising in a single medium... Not in television, not in radio, not in publishing. It should not happen on the internet." Good thing that you can now advertise on airline boarding passes, I was getting worried there for a second! Hmm... wait... last I checked anyone who has a website could potentially sell advertising on it. Also, doesn't the U.S. Post Office hold a monopoly on mail based advertising? Why isn't that a problem? More importantly... do any constituents actually care??? Oh wait... these companies all give money to elected officials... that explains it!

The Senate is considering ending a two-decade ban on people with HIV visiting or immigrating to the United States. One senator supporting the issue said "There's no excuse for a law that stigmatizes a particular disease." Really? So you would have no problem with teaching having the Plague teaching your kids? What about the chefs with colds sneezing in your food... good with that to? So it's not bad enough that people want to get rid of a law that protects U.S. citizens at a very low cost to the tax payer, but the bill would also contribute $50 billion over the next five years to fight AIDS and other diseases in Africa and other poor areas. What about fighting diseases here in the United States? Gee, this is just what we need... more sick people coming here and more money to help with the problem going to other countries. At least one Senator was willing to point out that "the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the new immigrants coming in under the relaxed policy could cost the government more than $80 million over a 10-year period."

Final Thoughts

Computer games are getting more complex and the characters are getting smarter. Too bad we can't say the same for the kids who play them. I wonder if government officials are getting smarter or dumber... perhaps they should play more video games, it makes kids smarter!