Governments making money by seizing assets

The abuse of the civil asset forfeiture laws where police and local agencies seize the assets of people on the slightest of pretexts without having to get a court order or even charge someone with a crime let alone convict them, has reached such epidemic proportions that mainstream news organizations have started running stories on it, rightly focusing on the fact that this is being used as a source of revenue rather than for fighting crime. Law enforcement agencies have essentially become like organized crime syndicates in a shakedown racket.
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Surprising Republican gambit on birth control

The Republican war on women overlapped with their war on Obamacare when they strenuously opposed the contraception mandate in the law that required health insurance policies to cover contraception. That was at the heart of the Hobby Lobby case, where that company successfully argued that the health insurance policies they offered their employees should not be required to cover birth control because of the owners’ religious objections to it..
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Minor celebrity ego

I keep promising myself to ignore Sarah Palin’s pathetic attempts to remain relevant but she keeps doing things that suck me into her strange world. The latest is that she and her family seemed to have got into a brawl at a drunken party in Alaska over the weekend that resulted in daughter Bristol repeatedly punching someone, son Track ending up shirtless and threatening someone else, and husband Todd ending up with a bloody nose. In other words, just another fun-filled weekend in the Palin household.
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Who is going to be the next big villain?

It is interesting how yesterday’s major threat to civilization as we know it (al Qaeda) has suddenly become relegated to being an insignificant factor as soon as a new actor (ISIS/ISIL) came along. This is the usual pattern of the US always needing to have some boogeyman to scare the hell out of people so that wars can be promoted and executed.
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Permanent war

So as expected, president Obama said yesterday that he will continue the long-standing US practice of all war, all the time, finding new wars to start even a the old ones drag on. ISIS/ISIL has now given momentum to that effort by moving public opinion in the US by some horrific acts. Of course, if the beheading of two Americans can anger public opinion here so much, one can imagine what is the reaction of people in that region when the US blasts so many of their people to bits with powerful hi-tech weaponry.
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Rich getting richer

Not that this will be a surprise but via Kevin Drum, I learned that the Federal Reserve has released a set of economic data that among other things shows that the gap between the rich and the poor has indeed been getting bigger at an astonishing rate within the last 25 years, with the top 3% making enormous gains at the expense of the bottom 90%, with the balance 7% remaining relatively stable.
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