One of the oft-heard comments on American society is that lawsuits are overburdening it. I, for one, see both good and bad in this lawsuit.

The valid parts of the lawsuit:
- The bar should not have kept serving a drunk man, or at very least not allowed him to drive home knowing he was drunk.

The invalid parts:
- Suing the driver of a car that has stalled on the road: one would think that common sense indicates a stalled vehicle is difficult to move.
- Suing the tow truck operator who was in the process of removing that vehicle from the road: bad move in general.

First of all, you can do all the routine maintenance and preventative work on a vehicle you want, and there is still a chance it will stall. Parts break down.

Second - read this portion:

Police said Hargrove noticed the stalled vehicle and stopped to help. The report said he told officers he was there five to seven minutes before his truck was hit by Hancock's SUV. But Kantack said the tow truck may have been there up to 15 minutes, yet failed to get the stalled vehicle out of the way.

"Were the police contacted?" Kantack asked. "Why weren't flares put out? Why was the tow truck there for an exorbitant amount of time?"

Looking into the circumstances, we see a vehicle that was both spun out and stalled (not as easy to remove as a vehicle that simply has stalled: note that the tow truck was hit and not the vehicle, indicating it had spun at least sideways if not backwards). It takes time to hook up a tow truck (especially to load a vehicle onto a flatbed, as opposed to the more common two-wheel lifters).

Add to this a drunken idiot with twice the legal blood-alcohol limit and marijuana in his vehicle, and I think the portion of the lawsuit against the tow truck driver and owner of the stalled vehicle ought to be laughed right out of court.

In the face of the current controversies surrounding the death penalty (whether we should have it, whether Lethal Injection needs to be reworked, humaneness concerns, whether the system of appeals needs fixing) TIME throws in another good question on whether repeat sex offenders warrant the penalty. They focus on enhanced "Jessica's Law" statutes which some states have passed, allowing for the death penalty in the case of those who have repeatedly molested children.

Setting aside whether people think the state should have a death penalty option or not - if a state is to have one, who should qualify for it? It becomes an interesting question.

In the category of murderers, is every murder equal? Obviously not. There is a difference between premeditated murder, planned and executed, and murder committed in the course of a fight. There is a difference between those, and murder that happens in (for example) a vehicular accident on the road or some other event that a rational human still might not expect.

I'd say that a serial murderer - one who targets a segment of the population, and murders multiple people - ought to be eligible for the death penalty. Likewise with the masterminds behind multiple killings, like Charles Manson. Likewise with those who commit incredibly gruesome murders in which they had no possible rational fear for their own lives.

While there is a case to be made for the "thoughtcrime" aspect of a death sentence for the murder of police officers, I feel that they deserve whatever little extra protection such a law might give to them. They are taking the burden of trying to protect society, after all.

These kind of murderers, I would argue, invariably deserve the death penalty.

After murder, what about those who attempt murder? It's an odd question; for some reason, society offers a lesser punishment to a criminal whose intent was the same as a murderer, but who lacked the competence to successfully end the life of another. I can't say that this ought to be the case, save that rarely is there an attempted murder (I say rarely because there's always an exception) that is as heinous or brutal as some of the serial and savage killers society has seen. What worse if they attempted multiple murders, but were just inept about their methods? Attempted murders, like successful murderers, come in two groups - and while there is a case for those who were in a rage and came to their senses before striking the killing blow in a fight to get a lesser sentence, I find it hard to offer a case that someone who deliberately planned a murder but weren't smart enough to come up with a successful plan, should get less of a sentence than someone who didn't make that mistake somewhere. After all, is a poisoner any less of a poisoner because someone got the victim to medical care in time? Is a shooter any less of a shooter because they have lousy aim?

And then we get to this third group - those who commit crimes that are heinous, but not actually intended to be deadly (though possibly leading up to deadly crime later as they get bolder). "Jessica's Law" provisions are based on the problem of recidivism in child molesters, a recidivism rate that seems alarmingly high. Supporters would argue that, if someone fails to be rehabilitated, trying to rehabilitate them again is the insanity of doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. Opponents think it might actually encourage molesters to kill their victims in some insane attempt to hide the evidence.

Is a repeat child molester so heinous as to warrant society's ultimate punishment? I can't say for sure. I know that if they re-offend, they've likely proven that they are beyond any rehabilitation - especially knowing perfectly well that they were caught at least once before. I know that the damage they do is going to last a lifetime, and is done to a segment of the population that we already deem worthy of extra protections. And as RAW pointed out earlier, criminals don't necessarily have a great future-time orientation in their thoughts... so perhaps society ought to. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, or so the saying goes.

As a side note, Texas law adds another interesting wrinkle; the lack of a "statutory rape" on the books. According to Texas law, an 17-year-old high schooler who has sex with a 16-year-old boyfriend/girlfriend can be charged with the same crime, and subject to the same after-release conditions (monitoring, testing, restrictions on where they can live), as someone who rapes a child. Something strikes me as wrong about that. Theoretically, that 17-year-old could be put out on probation, "re-offend" with the boyfriend/girlfriend, and be eligible for the death penalty. Worse yet, it's not the parents or the "victim" who get to decide whether it's prosecuted or not; the state prosecutor takes care of that themselves. In the zeal to toughen the law, it appears someone left no room for a bit of common sense.

[EDIT]: It appears I spoke too soon. After a review of the law, it appears there is a small fail-safe clause: Texas penal code section 21.11(b) states:

(b) It is an affirmative defense to prosecution under this section that the actor:
(1) was not more than three years older than the victim and of the opposite sex;
(2) did not use duress, force, or a threat against the victim at the time of the offense; and
(3) at the time of the offense:
(A) was not required under Chapter 62, Code of Criminal Procedure, to register for life as a sex offender; or
(B) was not a person who under Chapter 62 had a reportable conviction or adjudication for an offense under this section.

I'm not sure how I missed this story from 2005:

Like many shoppers, attorney Stephen Diamond buys lots of stuff online. But unlike other consumers, he sues retailers that don't charge him state and local sales taxes -- and is making a profit doing it.

Using a state whistle-blower law, Mr. Diamond since 2002 has filed about 95 suits in Cook County court here against retailers that failed to charge him taxes on Internet sales, alleging that they broke the law. In cases where the state of Illinois joins the suits and prevails, he is entitled to up to 25% of the financial damages, with the rest going to state coffers.

"This is a no-brainer," says Mr. Diamond, a veteran class-action attorney who has a scenic view of Lake Michigan from his downtown office. "I started going on the Internet and discovered to my astonishment that companies like Target Corp. and Wal-Mart were not collecting taxes on their Internet sales. I was like, "Wow!"

Wow indeed. The article mentions a movement by the states to coordinate sales tax collection. Considering that we're approaching midway 2007 and the article was written in late 2005, I'd imagine that it wasn't very successful.

It seems that most people are quick to claim laws that they like as inherently constitutional and laws that they dislike as unconstitutional. I'm not much different, in that regard, but periodically I do find laws that I don't really have a problem with but that I find pretty difficult to defend from a constitutional standpoint.

One such law is that of felons being denied the right to vote once they've served their sentence. When incarcerated, prisoners lose all sorts of rights, so I don't have a problem with that. But once they've served their sentence and have been released, it seems to me that there are no constitutional grounds to deprive them of the right to vote unless that was expressly a part of their sentence to begin with. I think that democracy as a whole may benefit from such laws.

For instance, if a felon were to commit a crime in Maine, which allows felons to vote, and then moves to Idaho, wherein felons are disenfranchised, I'm not sure what right the latter has to deny the prisoner of their vote. I could maybe be convinced that Idaho has the right to attach disenfranchisement to the sentence (I'd need to think upon it further), but they shouldn't be allowed to attach an additional punishment onto a sentence applied for a crime committed out of the state.

Absent Constitutional problems, whether or not such laws are a good idea is a different question. It seems that people that can't follow the law are probably not the best people to elect the people making the laws. A little problematic, though, is the expansion of the term "felony" to include all sorts of offenses wherein the denial of voting rights seems out of line. Petty drug offenses come to mind. When it comes to violent felonies and other more serious offenses, however, I think that the civic case for their being assured the right to vote is pretty weak.

Steven Landsburg, guest-blogging at The Volokh Conspiracy, points out the real beneficiaries of disaster recovery:

There has long been an expectation that in Katrina-like circumstances, the government will step in to help. That makes disaster-prone cities like New Orleans (and, among others, San Francisco) more desirable and pushes up land prices in those cities.

So if you own a house on a flood plain, chances are the purchase price included a premium for the disaster insurance that the government insists on providing. That's a boon not to you, but to the former owner, who might live in Montana by now. The wealth transfer goes not to those who are currently in danger, but to those who owned endangered property when the policy went into effect.

I would add one additional effect: the expectation of government help is based largely on precedents; and congressmen voting on emergency relief measures will feel the effects of this. Even if they do not see the connection Mr. Landsburg points out, their land-owning constituents surely do. Thus a vote for New Orleans reconstruction funds made by a representative from, say, California has the effect of rewarding the wealthy Californians at the expense of the poor.

A few years ago Devah Pager and Northwestern University lead a study on the employment prospects of felons (a drug-related felony that landed them in prison for 18 months) when it comes to entry level jobs in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, advertised either in the local newspaper of the state's job placement posting. Her group employed four testers, two black males and two white males, who applied for various entry-level positions. The two black guys would apply for a job with one admitting to a felony and one not admitting to a felony and the two white guys did the same.

It's no surprise that the felons had diminished prospects when it came to applying for the jobs. Even when the crime they committed did concern misbehavior that would directly adversely affect their job functions and even though Milwaukee actually has laws against discrimination against ex-convicts. For the jobs they applied to, the results went as follows:

White without a conviction: 34% callback rate
White with a conviction: 17% callback rate
Black without a conviction: 14% callback rate
Black with a conviction: 5% callback rate

The aspect of the study that jumps out at me is not so much the relative callback rates between felons and non-felons but rather the rates between the races. If I'd been asked to guess, I would have figured that blacks would probably be called back between 65-80% or so as much as the whites. I would not have guessed less than 50% in a major metropolitan area and I definitely would not have guessed that having black skin would be the statistical equivalent of having a criminal record.

It may not be as simple an issue to say "white racists are picking on black applicants" because we don't actually know the races of the people making the decisions and we're not sure why precisely they made the decisions that they did. For all we know all of the recruiting managers were black. The decision may have hinged more on a fear of the work ethic or moral terpitude rather than race explicitly. But I'm not sure how much that matters. The salient point to me is that young black men without a college degree face more of an uphill climb than do young white men in the same demographic and that's important to know regardless of who is doing the hiring. And even if the recruiting managers are more concerned about moral terpitude and work ethic, they seem to be making the determination of the applicant based almost entirely on race which is a factor the applicant cannot change.

They controlled the study to make sure that the applicants were bright and effective communicators, they made sure that there wasn't a disparity in the resumes, and they applied for the same types of jobs with the same types of recruitment practices in the same areas. The only potential flaw I can see is that the black testers applied for the same jobs as one another but not the same precise jobs as the whites. That could account for some disparity, but given the similarity of profiles of the jobs it seems unlikely that this would account for the wide gulf. Every other objection I can think of was addressed in a section of the study itself.

In regards to the central focus of the study I agree with the study's authors that the seeming inability of ex-convicts to find work is a problem. It's easy to write them off and say that they shouldn't have committed the crime to get convicted in the first place. It's true enough. Nonetheless it creates a drag for society at large to have a segment of society that can't find jobs but has criminal experience. It's setting them up to fail.

I disagree, however, with some of the suggestions that the study makes. They seem to support laws that would allow a potential employee to conceal his or her convictions. I believe that an employee has a right to know and act on the criminal past of its applicants (so I disagree with the Milwaukee law prohibiting it). The right of a potential employer to know who they are hiring trumps a criminal's right to privacy in that regard.

But absent that I'm really not sure what we should do. I'm certainly not opposed to looking into sending fewer drug criminals to prison on a number of fronts, including the disruption that occurs in their employment history. I've seen in other ways how the judicial incarceration-and-release system sets up a class of people to fail. On the other hand I think it's a bit sanguine to suggest that if we just give them a chance they will take us up on it or do less damage. After all, they had a chance before their conviction.

Even though I don't have any firm conclusions, I found both the racial and judicial aspects of the study to be quite fascinating and worth the time it took to read the report. At the very least I will need to hold on to it to use as an object lesson as to the most clear and present dangers of marijuana usage: getting caught.

For some things, defining the "victim" is easy. Someone who's injured, murdered, has their property broken by another, is a victim.

For some things, it's not so easy. In the Duke Lacrosse case, for instance, all charges have now been dropped. That the accuser is a victim - many times over, and having a horrible life, to which she has doubtless contributed but that is likely not all her fault - is certain. It now appears equally certain that the three Lacrosse players, as well as the team and its coach (affected by having their season cancelled and a forced resignation), were all victims too - of a racist and overzealous prosecutor who sought to use the case for political gain. Nifong, the prosecutor, will likely be disbarred in June for misconduct, and civil lawsuits over his behavior are pending. (The charges against Nifong are available here. They're pretty serious.)

In the case of crimes when the perpetrator isn't known, entire communities can become victimized as suspicion causes people to become seclusive and suspicious of their neighbors. This is especially true in the case of gruesome cases, even if a perpetrator is later possibly caught.

A number of people are victims of the crimes of others - by being convicted as look-alikes or people with similar names.

Plenty of people are being victimized by the ongoing question of climate change, whether humans cause it, and a ton of junk science - the idea that ethanol can be the future, for instance - that's pushed as a "solution" while it in reality, it just makes for more problems. The latest is this "carbon-neutral" stuff that's being pushed by people... who fly around in jets all day, run motorcades of a dozen or more cars, and have mansions that could house 200 people in which only 2 live.

TIME has an interesting piece on some odd victims of violent/brutal/sickening crimes: the juries who have to look at the evidence for days but, unlike the police and prosecutors and lab workers and court employees, are given no counseling to help cope with what they're seeing.

A lot of victims to go around.

So, the election results are in. For the first time in a few years, I did something abnormal for me; I deliberately stayed home and didn't vote.

Allow me to explain. As for the city of Houston issues, I really couldn't care less, because I know precisely what would have happened; had they failed, the bond issues would just have been back on the ballot in 6 months, and again and again until Bill White got what he wanted. How do I know? Katy ISD failed a bond issue 6 months ago and just pulled the same stunt, managing to get it passed the second time around.

As for congressional district? I had no interest.

As for the Governorship? I decided, at the end of the day, that I had no interest for the following reasons:
- Perry I can't stand.
- With Strayhorn, I don't know which Strayhorn I'm electing.
- Friedman was an appealing choice until he started talking about giving Willie Nelson a cabinet post.
- Bell? Much as I respect him personally, with respect to policy I think he's got his head up his arse.

So, what did that leave me? What obvious choice did I have? I could walk in and write my own name in for every post, and not vote in any of the various other minor mishmash, but at the end of the day, that has the precise same effect as what I did do - stay home.

Now, getting around to the larger election results... yeesh. It has long been my position that our government governs best when checks and balances are in place. My personal preference is for there to be a Republican control on the legislature (and thus the purse strings) and a Democrat in the Presidency.

Unfortunately, both parties screwed this up. In 2000, there was no way I could vote for Gore, and the same in 2004 for Kerry. This year, I'm equally disappointed with those who will likely be the leaders of the Democrats, because they're the shrill egomaniacs that make for poor policymakers and even worse representatives.

The Senate's undecided, the House went so that we get Nancy Freaking Pelosi as the Speakeress, and when all is said and done, what really gets accomplished? Best case, not a whole heck of a lot, worst case, the American public gets sold out on everything that really matters.

Will terrorists be emboldened? Well let's see. The Democrats are hell-bent on making Iraq into Vietnam, and their "phased withdrawal" plan looks a whole hell of a lot like Nixon's plan back when he was busy turning Vietnam into a disaster. Meanwhile, the public face of the terrorists in Iraq is gloating.

In Palestine? Democrats get elected, and Hamas is openly calling for attacks on Americans all of a sudden. Why? Because the Democrats are the cut-and-run party, and Bill Clinton never did call out Arafat for his support of terror, so Hamas probably expects Pelosi to do likewise and start trying appeasement there too.

So, score one for Democrats. They get the House, and the terrorists are definitely bolder now than they were before the election.

Oh, and I'm just waiting to see what Pelosi's stand on the border is going to be. Dobbs has been going on about the "War on the middle class" being waged by both political parties; I'm starting to think he's right.

The Minnesota airport is having a problem with Somali Muslim immigrant cab drivers refusing fares that have alcohol in their possesion due to a religious ban on transporting alcohol.

Hogan said the first refusals to carry alcohol began 10 years ago, but came from just a handful of drivers. Now, though, he estimates that three-quarters of the 900 airport cabdrivers are Somali, most of them Muslim. Hogan said drunken passengers haven't had trouble getting a cab, just the ones who let on that they're carrying a bottle.

Cabbies don't like being put in the position of turning away fares, and passengers don't like being left standing at the taxi stand, waiting for the next taxi.

"It's slowly grown over the years to the point that it's become a significant customer service issue for us," he said.

The story is a couple months old and I heard a snipit about it at the time, but this is the first article I've read on it.

Much in the same way that I don't believe the state ought to force pharmacists to sell birth control pills, cabbies should not be required to take on customers that they have a religious issue with -- provided that ethnic-bias is not a factor.

The only hang-up here is whether or not there are a limited number of cabbies given access to the airport. as some at RedState.org suggest*. If that's the case, then whether or not the cabbie allows alcohol on board should be a factor in whether or not their access is renewed or given to someone with no such moral dilemma the same way that a pharmacy should be able to fire a pharmacist that won't do his or her job at the pharmacy sees it.

Really, though, that's probably not a good idea. Putting aside for the moment that an overwhelming majority of the cabbies are Muslim and that it could cause a strike, most of the time it wouldn't be an issue. Since most people coming out of an airport don't have alcohol, allowing certain cabbies to pass up those passengers that do strikes me as a reasonable acommodation.

One possible solution here would be to alot 40% of the licenses to cabbies that are willing to carry alcohol. That would apply some pressure to get cabbies to reconsider their stance (because it would make getting the license easier) while not prohibiting cabbies from following their consciences.

Ultimately, I don't think that taxi transportation with alcohol is more of a right than is the ability to follow through with ones religious convictions.

The cabbies and the airport did reach a compromise:

Now, the airport and cab drivers have worked out a proposal that calls for cabdrivers who won't carry alcohol to have a cab light that's a different color. That way, the airport workers who hook up travelers with taxis can steer alcohol-carrying fares to cabs that will take them. Airport officials hope to have the new lights ready by the end of the year.

Cabdrivers who want the lights will have to pay for them, though airport spokesman Pat Hogan said the cost will be minimal. Cabbies without the light who refuse fares will be sent to the back of line - often a three-hour wait until it's their turn again for a fare.

The only concern I have about this deal is that it may be putting an undo burden on the airport, depending on how much extra "steering" would be required. I don't have enough information on that. Chances are it's not significant, though an alternative (that's a bit too late to implement now) would have been to add a relatively light fee for the special lights to compensate for whatever costs are generated for the required steering.

* - The people at RedState are trying to draw a distinction between the birth control pills and Muslim cabbies because the latter has to get privileges while the former just needs a license. I think that's a bit of a stretch, though if the airport itself were making that argument I would give it more weight. I think what it ultimately comes down to is the belief of some that immigrants ought to be held to a higher standard than native born Americans when it comes to conformity. This is not a wholly irrational idea as the site of an American burning an American flag, for instance, and an immigrant from a hostile nation envoke two very different images. However, I think that by taking this stance they are ultimately weakening the pharmacist's ability to refuse prescriptions that they have a moral issue with, be it birth control pills today or abortion or suicide pills tomorrow.

A guy by the name of Jason Fortuny put up a provocative woman's picture on Cragslist's risque personals section and pretended to want to play slave to someone else's master to see what kind of response he could get. Within 24 hours he got "178 responses, with 145 photos of men in various states of undress." Fortuny then took the emails, which included real names, phone numbers, and email addresses (with employer's names) and put them on another side (that doesn't appear to be working at the moment).

This brought an emphatic condemnation from Wired's Ryan Singel:

These aren't prominent people, there weren't breaking the law and there's no news value in posting their identifying information. There'd hardly be any value in posting the stuff even with the information removed and faces blurred on the photos, but there might be some -- if only as a warning to naive people.

And I hope Fortuny does get sued.

At first I thought of this "prank" as frat boy boorishness, but its worse than that.

It's sociopathic.

My sympathies to the guys who responded and take note -- any of you out there -- anything you divulge over email can come back to haunt you, even when divulging that information is illegal.

Then, in response to various comments supportive of Fortuny's actions, he wrote:

As Fortuny shows, it may be practically so, but that lack of knowledge does not obviate these persons' legal rights.

While I'm not a big fan of guys into dominating women (it's rather retrograde for my taste), the only truly pathetic individuals involved in this whole debacle are Fortuny and his supporters who get off on their own righteousness.

This was not like a legal sting.

None of these people are violating any law.

No journalist would ever pull a stunt like this, because exposing the private lives of private persons, in absence of any justifiable public interest, is both unethical and a clear violation of the law.

If Fortuny wanted to show the world that there's a lot of guys willing to, not so smartly, email pictures of their members to a woman who wants to be dominated, Fortuny could have easily obfuscated phone numbers, email addresses and identifying pictures.

That wasn't his point.

The point of the whole 'prank' was to shame and humiliate other people and to let Fortuny and his LiveJournal hangers-on feel intellectually and morally superior -- e.g. the victims are 'perverts' who aren't smart enough to know how use the internet anonymously.

I won't speak to Fortuny's motives, which appear to be as banal and narcissistic as Singel suggests. Nor will I speak on the legality of Fortuny's actions, as I will let the state of Washington figure that out. And, to be honest, I'm not that concerned with the behavior of those targetted except to the extent that they are married. Abstractly, what interests me in this is Singel's repetition that what's important here is that the emailers were not breaking any laws and his suggestion that one type of legal behavior is just as valid as another.

One of the tenets of libertarianism and social liberalism in general is that liberty is not license. It is not right to pass laws against certain behavior simply because you don't find them acceptable. And just because somebody can do something doesn't mean that they should or should.

The problem with this idea, as attractive as it is, is that it quickly breaks down when things do become decriminialized. When facing social consequences for one's actions, "I wasn't breaking any laws" becomes an oft-used defense. Largely, the same people that want to de-criminalize various activity are the quickest to denounce judgmentalism from a purely moralistic standpoint.

Which is exactly the opposite of the way it should be. Social libertarianism requires more, not less, judgmentalism. For libertarianism to sustain, it requires not only that man regulate his own behavior, but also regulate the behavior of others by whatever the law permits.

In some ways the most disappointing aspect of this (aside from the possible illegality of it) whole this is that it was thought up by a self-proclaimed provocateur. This is the sort of thing that social conservatives ought to be doing. The quickest way to shut down a new porn store is with a camera, access to DMV records, and smart press. Once people start hearing about their actions being relaid to their spouses or even parents, few would risk their comfort by frequenting it.

I believe firmly that it is the government's responsibility to protect our privacy from the government, but protecting our privacy, in public places, is nowhere in the contract. People that frequent the merchants of immorality depend not only on freedom from the law, but freedom from consequence. It's not society's job to preserve immoral behavior through the lies and deceptions of the actors.