House Committee on Ways & Means – Republican — This kind of solves the problem if you think of it. Jails have health care.

Today, Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp R-MI released a letter from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation JCT confirming that the failure to comply with the individual mandate to buy health insurance contained in the Pelosi health care bill H.R. 3962, as amended could land people in jail. The JCT letter makes clear that Americans who do not maintain “acceptable health insurance coverage” and who choose not to pay the bill’s new individual mandate tax generally 2.5% of income, are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties, including criminal fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years.

Found by Matt Duvall.

While the reason for this may be reasonable, how many others are in jail, even been executed, because prosecutors are immune from answering, like the rest of us, for their actions? Perhaps it’s time to have their offices wired with cameras and mics like police cars that catch dirty cops in the act. What’s that line about power corrupting?

In July 1977, retired police captain John Schweer was shot and killed while working as a night watchman at an Oldsmobile dealership in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Two teenagers, Curtis McGhee and Terry Harrington, were convicted of the murder based on evidence they allege was knowingly fabricated by prosecutors.
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Now both men are suing the Pottawattamie County prosecutors, claiming they coerced and coached witnesses, fabricated evidence and arrested them without probable cause. But according to federal law supported by numerous legal precedents, prosecutors have immunity for anything they do during a trial. Richter and Hrvol say they were just doing their job.

“If a prosecutor knowingly introduces false evidence at trial, that prosecutor is absolutely immune from lawsuit,” explains Stephen Sanders, an attorney representing Richter and Hrvol. The rationale is that if prosecutors could be blamed for errors in a trial, they would become vulnerable targets for any litigious convict with an ax to grind.

“This means that some people who are genuinely wronged by a prosecutor [are not] able to recover,” Sanders concedes.
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Hrvol and Richter cannot be tried for knowingly putting a dishonest witness on the stand. They don’t have to own up to the fact that they presented false evidence or coerced a witness’s testimony. But fortunately for McGhee and Harrington, they did something on which the law is not completely clear — they didn’t just present the evidence at trial, but also helped gather it. In an unusual move, the prosecutors aided detectives by canvassing the neighborhood and interviewing witnesses, and so their actions may not be covered by absolute immunity. That is what the Supreme Court will decide.

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Two mothers were charged with multiple counts of child endangerment after three toddlers fell out of a moving vehicle Sunday evening on Bruce Street near Owens Avenue, Las Vegas police said.

One-year-old twins were taken to University Medical Center. One of them was in critical condition this morning, and the other was being held for observation. Another child who fell from the vehicle, a 3-year-old boy, suffered a cut above an eye and was treated and released.

[...]The 3-year-old’s mother, Nancy Lopez, 28, was booked into the Clark County Detention Center on seven counts of child endangerment, seven counts of having an unrestrained minor in a vehicle, driving under the influence, driving on a suspended license, having an open container in a vehicle and a headlights violation.

The twins’ mother, Vanessa Ramirez, 19, was booked on seven counts of child endangerment. Lopez was driving the vehicle, which police said was carrying 10 people. According to police, Ramirez was aware that her children were in the car with Lopez. It is unknown if Ramirez also was in the car.

Police spokesman Bill Cassell said that shortly before the children fell out of the car, officers responded to a fight in the area that involved someone in the vehicle.

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The MPAA and RIAA want ISPs to police their traffic for pirated material. Others wants them to police for child porn. Now this. When are phone companies going to be held liable for chuckleheads drunk dialing when I sleep? When are cable companies going to be held liable for allowing stations to up the volume on commercials or playing bad shows? This is just idiotic, irresponsible, pointless lawmaking on so many levels.

The House Financial Services Committee has approved a bill, the Investor Protection Act, which requires to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block any traffic on their networks which fraudulently invokes the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, Failure to do so will make the ISPs subject to court injunctions and liable for any damages that result from the fraud.

The SIPC’s job is to protect investor assets when a brokerage firm fails. The committee found that fraudulent actors on the Internet and elsewhere sometimes represent themselves as legitimate.
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Note that the rules include any data simply routed through the network. This amounts to a requirement that all data on the network be subject to deep packet inspection and contextual analysis. This is an enormous, potentially crippling burden for ISPs, both large and small. Even if representations are found that someone represents the SIPC, it’s not clear how the ISP is supposed to determine if it’s fraudulent. And the bill doesn’t appear to make any allowances for data encryption, which would probably make the ISPs duties impossible to implement.

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It says something about the powers that be at the time that no one was watching for this crap, Madoff, etc.

In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

Goldman’s sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation’s premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.

Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk.

Now, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses, and a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman’s failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws.

Clergy: Jail gays, don’t hang them – Daily Monitor

Good grief. This is progress? What a bunch of hypocritical idiots. What would Jesus have thought of this?

Local News | Another foot is found in shoe on B.C. beach | Seattle Times — Geez, now everyone wants this resolved. It’s weird.

Another disembodied foot has been found inside a running shoe on a beach in Richmond, B.C. the seventh foot found along the coast, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police reported Wednesday.Two men walking on the beach found the foot in a size 8 ½ running shoe. The Richmond RCMP, Forensic Identification Section and General Investigation Section seized the shoe and its contents, the RCMP said.

“We’re having a swell un-foreclosure party tonight. We’ll start stacking the loan papers for his bonfire about 8. Can you come? Bring smores!”

Five people are charged with torturing and robbing two loan modification agents they thought falsely promised to save their home from foreclosure.

Two men were charged Monday with torture, robbery and false imprisonment.

Another man and two women pleaded not guilty to the same charges Friday.

Prosecutors say Daniel Weston and Mary Ann Parmelee hired two loan modification agents in hopes of keeping their home but believed the men took their money and did nothing.

Prosecutors claim the victims were lured to Glendale on Oct. 20, held for hours, beaten and robbed before one escaped.

Dallas police ticketed 39 drivers in 3 years for not speaking English | Dallas Morning News — The funniest aspect of this story are not the tickets but the fact that the paper reporting it had to turn off comments. Gee, I wonder why?

Dallas police wrongly ticketed at least 39 drivers for not speaking English over the last three years, Police Chief David Kunkle announced Friday while promising to investigate all officers involved in the cases for dereliction of duty.Pending cases will be dismissed, and those who paid the $204 fine for the charge, which does not exist in the city, will be reimbursed, Kunkle said.”I was surprised and stunned that that would happen, particularly in the city of Dallas,” Kunkle said. “In my world, you would never tell someone not to speak Spanish.”