Given the recent searches upheld by courts in other states, this was nice to see:

Police may not search a vehicle merely because its driver has been issued a valid concealed carry permit, the Indiana Court of Appeals ruled on Thursday. A three-judge appellate panel weighed the actions of Indianapolis Police Officer Danny Reynolds who pulled over Melvin Washington for driving with a burned-out headlight on September 17, 2008 at 12:30am.

On that morning, Reynolds first asked Washington whether he had a gun, and Washington said he had one under his seat. Washington also carried a valid concealed carry permit. At this point, Reynolds ordered Washington out of the car and handcuffed him so that he could conduct a search under the seat of Washington's vehicle. Reynolds spotted a small bag of marijuana and issued Washington a court summons and a ticket for the defective headlight. Washington was then released with his handgun placed in the trunk of his vehicle, unloaded.

Washington moved to have the evidence against him suppressed because the warrantless search, he argued, violated the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches. A lower court disagreed, insisting that "officer safety" justified the search. The court of appeals did not buy the safety argument. . . .

A copy of the court's decision is here.

The interview on KCUR's "Up to Date" can be heard here.

Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) says that the House isn't sticking with the March 18th deadline given to them by the White House.

"None of us has mentioned the 18th, other than Mr. Gibbs," Hoyer said in response to a question about whether Congress can pass a health care package by March 18, the date laid out last week by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. "We are trying to do this as soon as possible. That continues to be our objective."

In the meantime, Hoyer said an internal fight over abortion restrictions "has to be resolved."

The majority leader didn't offer any ideas for a possible compromise between abortion opponents and their equally enraged adversaries in the abortion-rights camp, nor would he comment directly on whether Democrats could pass the bill without changing the Senate's current restrictions, which require insurance companies to set up separate accounts for anyone who wants coverage of elective abortions.

"I think it will be resolved one way or the other, and I think the bill will pass," Hoyer said after acknowledging that he wouldn't answer a question directly. "It's got to be resolved." . . .

The Hill has the position of some congressmen here. I wish that they had more information on the congressmen who initially voted "no" last fall, but they do have the positions (or lack of positions) for those who originally voted "yes." If you live in the district of any of the congressmen who are at all undecided, please consider contacting them.

It would be nice if the little league baseball teams were embarrassed by this behavior, but they problem won't be.

The local baseball league might not want Matt Carmel’s money. But he’s found a league that does. After the South Orange-Maplewood Baseball Committee turned down Carmel’s $300 check to sponsor a team, the nearby Morris Rugby Football club said “We’ll take that.” And so now, there will be a local rugby team called Constitution Arms, the name of Carmel’s gun dealership.

The baseball committee rejected Carmel’s sponsorship application, without giving him a reason why. But one of the committee members tells Fox News he voted against it because he was “certain that…it would generate controversy.” Craig Gruber, who’s been on the committee for 7 years told us, “We are a group of volunteers and quite frankly, we have our hands full running the league and deciding things like whether or not the infield fly rule should apply to 9 year olds.”

But Matt Carmel says that’s not fair. He says people have an irrational fear of guns and that besides, the league allows local wine stores to sponsor teams. He also points to another approved sponsor, a chicken restaurant called Cluck U, as being objectionable considering its risqué advertising campaign and name.

But the baseball league says it has broad authority to reject potential sponsors based on the well being of the kids who play. And the league just didn’t think a gun dealer was an appropriate sponsor. They tried to negotiate with Carmel to have remove the word “Arms” from his application, but that wasn’t good enough for him. Besides, he says, he’s selling legal products.

“I want to be able to sponsor and have people understand firearms and get some business from it. Obviously, profit is not a dirty word. I don’t know that I will get a lot of business from it. But I want to advocate and agitate for the 2nd amendment,” Carmel told Fox News. . . .

Roger's review starts of this way:

James Madison once said, "It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood." The great Founding Father's words aptly describe the problem we have today with an arcane 67,500-page federal income tax code.

We need a simplified tax system that treats everyone by the same basic set of rules. Ken Hoagland, national communications director for Americans for Fair Taxation, may have the answer in "The FairTax Solution." The idea is simple: Replace all federal income taxes, including those on investments and capital gains, with a flat consumption tax on new goods and services.

Most of us dread April 15, but Mr. Hoag- land says that if the FairTax is enacted, it'll be just any other spring day. No more saving receipts all year, only to find that you need to scramble to find missing ones. No more lousy 1040s or W-2s. Instead, when you purchase a new good or a service, 23 percent of its price will go to the federal government. . . .

Pollster Mark Penn warns Democrats not to pass the partisan Health Care bill.

. . . Reconciliation has been used before to pass major legislation. Proponents of this approach are fond of pointing to the passage of welfare reform, COBRA, and Bush's '01 and '03 tax cuts as evidence that the Democrats are fully inside the lines. For the administration, the most crucial difference between those bills and this is not their urgency, partisan nature, or even particularly their impact on the deficit; for Obama and his team, the most critical variant is that those bills were popular with the public. In 1996, 68% of Americans favored welfare reform. In 2000, before Bush's $1.3 trillion tax cut was introduced (by the notably bipartisan duo of Senators Phil Gramm and Zell Miller,) 63% of Americans thought they were paying too much income tax; by the spring of 2001, after a month of legislative wrangling, 56% favored Bush's proposed cuts. In 2003, with the Iraq war railing in the background and a post-9/11 economy flailing at home, 52% supported the second round of cuts. Not a huge margin, perhaps, but still a majority.

A February CNN poll puts voter support for the current bill (or a similar variant thereof) at just 25%. An equal percentage thinks Congress should forget health care reform altogether, while 48% think they should start work on an entirely new bill. Of more concern to any Democrat with an eye on reelection, Independents remain unmoved by the arguments in reform's favor, with only 18% supporting it and 52% calling for an entirely new bill.

I went back to look at some of the big Democratic fights of the past -- Medicare and Civil Rights -- both of which had long, multi-year histories and were eventually fostered amid the kind of bare-knuckle wrangling we're seeing today. The AMA opposed Medicare but a Gallup poll from January of '65 shows it had 63% support when passed. And while most opposed Civil Rights legislation when Kennedy proposed it, polling from the period shows 60% of the public favored the legislation once Johnson got it passed.

In every one of these contentious national debates, public support was solidified as a pre-condition to final passage. There simply is no shortcut or parliamentary maneuver around that process. The public is uncomfortable with the current bill and this is likely to be a Dirty Harry moment for the Republican party as they dare Democrats to "make their day." . . .

It will be interesting to see ABC's explanation for the pulled video and why the new video doesn't seem to fit what was originally claimed.

Toyota Motor Corp. on Monday criticized ABC News, saying a recent report it ran on sudden acceleration used video showing an engine revving in a parked Toyota vehicle, not a car that was being driven on a road.

The car maker raised questions about the ABC video as part of a Webcast intended to rebut critics who have alleged electronics problems could be causing Toyota vehicles to accelerate suddenly on their own.

"An engine responds very differently in park than when it is being driven and is under load," said Matthew Schwall, an engineer at Exponent Inc., a consulting firm Toyota has hired to evaluate its electronics and the charges of its critics.

In the Webcast, Mr. Schwall showed still frames from ABC's broadcast showing a Toyota Avalon's instrument panel, with certain warning lights illuminated that are on when a car is in park.

Toyota said in its Webcast that ABC subsequently pulled this video from its Web site and replaced it with a modified one where the engine tachometer never reaches close to the 6,500 revolutions per minute shown in the original version.

An ABC spokeswoman said the network had no comment on Toyota's presentation and added it was preparing its own story about it. . . .

Apparently the Obama administration is appealing this decision.

In America, another fascinating home-education tussle has been going on. Uwe and Hannelore Romeike have been granted asylum because, they say, they face persecution in Germany for home-educating their children (they have been fined and say they feared losing custody of their five offspring, who are aged between 2 and 12). The judge in their case agreed, saying not only that there was a "well-founded fear of persecution," due to their educational philosophies, but also that that the German policy was "utterly repellent to everything we believe as Americans." . . .

The Romeikes told Time magazinethat it was their "fundamental right to decide how we want to teach our children." Uwe Romeike is an evangelical Christian (yes, this is relevant) and he added that their main objection involved what was being taught in the classroom. "The curriculum goes against our Christian values," he said "German schools use textbooks that force inappropriate subject matter onto young children and tell stories with characters that promote profanity and disrespect. . . .

This is bizarre on so many levels. Should fishing be outlawed because it harms fish? So much for eating healthy. Could one imagine what the implications this would be for eating animals?

Last month, Antoine Goetschel went to court here in defense of an unusual client: a 22-pound pike that had fought a fisherman for 10 minutes before surrendering.

Mr. Goetschel is the official animal lawyer for the Swiss canton of Zurich, a sort of public defender who represents the interests of pets, farm animals and wildlife. He wound up with the pike as a client when animal-welfare groups filed a complaint alleging animal cruelty in the fish's epic battle with an amateur angler.

The case emerged after a local newspaper photo showed the fisherman proudly showing off the four-foot-long fish—a scene that, to Mr. Goetschel, was reminiscent of a safari hunter with his foot perched on the head of a dead lion. "It is this Hemingway thinking," he says. "Why should this be legal when other animals have to be slaughtered in a humane way?"

Mr. Goetschel is the only official animal lawyer in Switzerland, but that may be about to change. On Sunday, the Swiss will vote on a referendum that would compel all of Switzerland's cantons to hire animal lawyers. The rationale: If people accused of mistreating animals can hire lawyers, the victims of such abuse are also entitled to representation. . . .

From Dennis Cauchon at USA Today:

Federal employees earn higher average salaries than private-sector workers in more than eight out of 10 occupations, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data finds.
Accountants, nurses, chemists, surveyors, cooks, clerks and janitors are among the wide range of jobs that get paid more on average in the federal government than in the private sector.

Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.

These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Federal pay has become a hot political issue in recent months because of concerns over the federal budget deficit and recession-battered wages in the private sector. . . .

Why not? I guess that the point of the stimulus was wealth redistribution so why not distribute the money based on the race of the recipients?

Latinos and blacks have faced obstacles to winning government contracts long before the stimulus. They own 6.8 and 5.2 percent of all businesses, respectively, according to census figures. Yet Latino-owned business have received only 1.7 percent of $46 billion in federal stimulus contracts recorded in U.S. government data, and black-owned businesses have received just 1.1 percent.
That pot of money is just a small fraction of the $862 billion economic stimulus law. Billions more have been given to states, which have used the money to award contracts of their own.
Although states record minority status when they award contracts to businesses, there is no central, consistent or public compilation of that data, according to Laura Barrett, director of the Transportation Equity Network. She and other minority advocates are calling for complete and publicly accessible demographic information on all contracts and jobs financed by the stimulus. . . .

So we have a deadline for rushing through something as important as health care reform because the president has to go traveling abroad? Is this a serious reason for a deadline to quickly pass such a bill?

Barack Obama has given Democrats a March 18 deadline for the House to pass the Senate version of a healthcare reform bill before he leaves on a trip to Asia, leading to a frenzy of arm-twisting and vote tallying on Capitol Hill. . . .

From an interview with Georgia congressman Congressman Phil Gingrey:

He also said President Obama's reform effort, which he has pushed almost relentlessly in recent weeks, will lose momentum when he embarks March 18 on a official trip to Indonesia, Guam and Australia.

"He's so heck bent and determined to run off to Indonesia, Guam and all of those places to improve our image across the world," Mr. Gingrey said.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters he thinks the House is on schedule to approve the landmark legislation by March 18, when the president leaves for an Asian trip, and he can sign it into law "shortly thereafter," according to the Associated Press.

I haven't verified this nor have I determined how frequent it is:

a considerable amount of the criminal element are now painting the tips of their ‘Real Weapons’ with an orange tip. It’s easy to understand their reasoning. Once again, Law Enforcement find themselves in a deeper hole. Ironically, if this criminal who has no criminal record and is allowed to own this weapon in the first place, there is no law preventing him from painting the tip of his real gun orange in the attempt to make it appear as a toy. . . .

The British government suppressing information on problems with bad patient care. What this article indicates is that the waiting time is reduced only by lowering the quality of service even further.

DAMNING reports on the state of the National Health Service, suppressed by the government, reveal how patients’ needs have been neglected.

They diagnose a blind pursuit of political and managerial targets as the root cause of a string of hospital scandals that have cost thousands of lives.

The harsh verdict on the state of the NHS, after a spending splurge under Labour between 2000 and 2008, raises worrying questions about the future quality of the health service as budgets are squeezed.

One report, based on the advice of almost 200 top managers and doctors, says hospitals ignored basic hygiene to cram in patients to meet waiting-time targets. . . . .

No matter what one thinks of the policy, the media apparently isn't doing a very good job of covering this issue.

While President Barack Obama and his administration are calling for an end to the Bill Clinton-initiated "don't ask, don't tell" policy for gays and lesbians in the U.S. military, most Americans are being told only half the story.
Contrary to the news media's applause for so-called military leaders who support allowing openly gay soldiers, sailors and Marines, there are several top commanders who oppose rescinding the current policy.
This week, several senior military leaders came forward to oppose repealing the ban on homosexuals serving in the military until a one-year study can be completed. This opposition contrasts significantly with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen's expressed "personal belief" that the current policy should be overturned.
Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway expressed his fear that the repeal effort will distract from the military's mission of protecting the nation. He explained, "My concern would be that somehow that central purpose or focus were to become secondary to the discussion."

Army Chief of Staff General George Casey agreed, saying, "I do have serious concerns about the impact of a repeal of the law on a force that is fully engaged in two wars." He added, "We just don't know the impacts on readiness and military effectiveness."
Meanwhile, Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz argued that now is not the time to repeal. "This is not the time to perturb the force that is, at the moment, stretched by demands in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere without careful deliberation," he said.
"Shortly after the State of the Union Address, President Obama sent Defense Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen to Capitol Hill to argue for a repeal of the military's ban on homosexuals. Clearly, this hearing was politically timed in order to suppress opposition within the military to the President's proposed new policy," claims Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. . . .

From the WSJ:

Europe's highest court ruled Thursday that setting minimum retail prices for tobacco in Ireland, France and Austria is against European laws.

The three countries all argued that minimum prices protect public health by making sure tobacco isn't too cheap.

The European Court of Justice ruled that setting minimum retail prices was against the law as it hindered competition. The court also said that the countries had other ways of battling the health effects of smoking, for example by raising excise duties on the products. . . .

Suppose you want to buy a new digital electronic camera. You go to a store and have the store spend lots of time let you look at the different cameras and answer your questions. People do that and then they go and try to find the cheapest price they can find for the camera that they want. The problem that creates is that the store doesn't spend the money to teach customers about the different cameras. Consumers are hurt and fewer cameras are sold. How to solve this problem? Have minimum retail price regulations on the retailers that sell your cameras.

Radek Sikorski is a great guy and would make an amazing president for Poland. I got to know him some when we were both at AEI.

Radek Sikorski and Bronislaw Komorowski held his first pre-election rally, Sunday, aimed at securing the nomination as Civic Platform‘s candidate in this year‘s presidential elections.

At his first election rally for Civic Platform’s primaries Foreign Minister Sikorski promised a new style of leadership if he was chosen to stand in the elections, probably scheduled for this autumn. Taking a shot at President Lech Kaczynski, who will almost certainly be running as candidate for the Law and Justice party, Sikorski said:

“The presidency does not have to look like it does now. In place of […] dozens of bodyguards and advisors all over the place everything, I promise simplicity: fewer jobs in the office, and less interference in matters for which someone else is responsible,” he said, referring to President Kaczynski’s incursions into areas of policy which the government sees as its responsibility.

\Meanwhile, speaking to party activists in Bialystok, Sikorski’s rival for the Civic Platform nomination, Bronislaw Komorowski, launched an attack on Lech Kaczynski’s presidency, which he believes “is blocking or at least not to encouraging the modernization of the country." He promised that after the elections he "will end the practice of blocking modernization in the name of the interests of [the Law and Justice] party."
Asked at a press conference whether the primary elections by party activists will not lead to divisions within Civic Platform, Komorowski said that "there is always such a risk” but assured that he and his opponent will try to do everything to avoid this.

"I think we are both trying to present a candidate that has the backing of the conservative-liberal. mainstream of the party,

Radek Sikorski promised the party faithful not to "insult to Europe", but instead engage in dialogue with EU partners.

He promised that as president he would "allow the government to govern," and will focus on promotion of Polish in the world. . . .

Since then it looks as if the election campaign has heated up.

This is pretty bizarre.

"He didn't know did they talk to him about it what actions were taken to tell him this isn't allowed," Lorena Hurtado, Manuel's mother. . . .

Manuel's mom doesn't see anything wrong with her son putting his hands like this and shooting down at the ground. She doesn't think it poses an immediate threat to the school or Manuel's classmates. We took the issue to School District employees and asked them about their policy.

"When students are at school they should be concerned about learning….safety shouldn't be a concern at school, we have a zero tolerance policy," said Dr. John Irion, from the Yakima School District. . . .

"A five-year-old shouldn't be held to the same policy as a 12th grader...he is in kindergarten," said Hurtado.

Lorena Hurtado is appealing the expulsion and wants to try to clear her son's record. She says she doesn't want her five-year-old to be labeled as a troublemaker.

I don't understand the statement: "A five-year-old shouldn't be held to the same policy as a 12th grader...he is in kindergarten." This is a crazy rule for even a 12th grader. Death threats might be one thing, but playfully going "bang" should not be a punishable offense.

Thanks to Gus Cotey for the link.

Here is Emmanuel's explanation for the probability that people should receive medical treatment.

Because none of the currently used systems satisfy all ethical requirements for just allocation, we propose an alternative: the complete lives system. This system incorporates five principles (table 2): youngest-first, prognosis, save the most lives, lottery, and instrumental value. As such, it prioritises younger people who have not yet lived a complete life and will be unlikely to do so without aid. Many thinkers have accepted complete lives as the appropriate focus of distributive justice: “individual human lives, rather than individual experiences, [are] the units over which any distributive principle should operate.” Although there are important differences between these thinkers, they share a core commitment to consider entire lives rather than events or episodes, which is also the defining feature of the complete lives system.

Consideration of the importance of complete lives also supports modifying the youngest-first principle by prioritising adolescents and young adults over infants (figure). Adolescents have received substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, by contrast, have not yet received these investments. Similarly, adolescence brings with it a developed personality capable of forming and valuing long-term plans whose fulfilment requires a complete life. As the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin argues, “It is terrible when an infant dies, but worse, most people think, when a three-year-old child dies and worse still when an adolescent does”; this argument is supported by empirical surveys. Importantly, the prioritisation of adolescents and young adults considers the social and personal investment that people are morally entitled to have received at a particular age, rather than accepting the results of an unjust status quo. Consequently, poor adolescents should be treated the same as wealthy ones, even though they may have received less investment owing to social injustice.

Human capital investments are important except where Emmanuel and friends don't think that they matter. There is one thing that is obviously left out: what the patients think their lives are worth.

Remember that this estimate is by the Democrat controlled Congressional Budget Office. There are a lot of claimed spending control that will never occur to even get to the CBO number.

A new congressional report released Friday says the United States' long-term fiscal woes are even worse than predicted by President Barack Obama's grim budget submission last month.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts that Obama's budget plans would generate deficits over the upcoming decade that would total $9.8 trillion. That's $1.2 trillion more than predicted by the administration. . . .

This new Rasmussen Poll says that more Americans oppose stricter gun control. It is interesting that so few Americans support Chicago's gun control law.

The Supreme Court is wrestling with a major case questioning whether Chicago’s handgun ban violates the Second Amendment, but 69% of Americans say city governments do not have the right to prevent citizens from owning such guns.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just 25% of adults think city governments do have that right.
These findings are unchanged from June 2008 just before the Supreme Court overturned a Washington, D.C. law banning handguns in that city. That decision also prompted an increase in the high court’s favorability ratings. Sizable majorities of Americans across virtually all demographic lines, including age, income, gender, race and political affiliation, share the belief that cities do not have the right to ban handgun ownership.
In part, that’s because 70% of all adults believe the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right of an average citizen to own a gun. That’s down five points from a year ago but consistent with findings last October. Generally unchanged from those surveys is the 14% who say there’s not a constitutional right to gun ownership. Sixteen percent (16%) are not sure.
Americans have decidedly mixed feelings about the need for stricter gun control laws, however. Forty-two percent (42%) say tougher anti-gun laws are needed, but 49% disagree and say stricter gun control is not necessary. . . .

Guns in the saloon: Virginians have a right to defend themselves

This segment contains her first stand up comic routine.

From the Washington Post:

more than 214,000 Virginians with concealed-weapons permits . . .

John Donvan of ABC News has a nice story on people who open carry guns. I meet Donvan at the Intelligence Squared debates and I thought that he was an extremely fair guy. This piece is extremely friendly to the topic.