Michingan Mom told she can’t have neighborhood kids wait for the school bus at her house without a license from the state.

The bureaucrat that sent the warning letter to her should be fired. The law should be reviewed and the drafters of the original legislation should be tarred and feathered! O.K. maybe that’s a little harsh.

At the very least, a review of such policies needs to be completed and the bureaucracies need to be restrained in such cases of utter nonsense.

There are supposed to be directors, managers, case workers, and review mechanisms in place that can oversee and step in when the idiot proofing fails. This is a common problem in bureaucracies where a rigid adherence to the written rule supplants all possibility of the use of practical sense.

Have organizations where practical sense and critical thinking are valued become extinct?

Situations like this certainly make one wonder!

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If you disapprove of the current administration’s actions, policies, or direction and chose to post that information to the internet, you may well be on the list of people doing so.

Long reported by various fringe groups, there are in fact lists that have been and are being compiled by various federal agencies. Some of us may remember the controversy when Nixon used federal resources to compile a political enemy list, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were/are fond of lists, the Clintons accessed IRS records to compile their list, we have no-fly lists, potential domestic terrorist lists, and (no pun intended) the list goes on.

Now, as reported by the Washington Times, we have an administration appearing somewhat paranoid in their twisting of federal law to say they are required to compile and maintain a list of those objecting to administration policies.

I don’t have a problem with the administration surfing the internet to get a feel for public opinion, I don’t have a problem with the administration putting together packages of internet content for use in accessing the amount of opposition or support for policies, I don’t even have a problem with the administration saving some of the information for later reference in determining course for future policies. I do, however, have a serious problem with the compilation of lists that can be used to single out individuals or groups.

However innocent the gathering of this information may seem initially, there will always be those in the government who will gain access to and use such lists for nefarious purposes.

Governments like those of Chavez in Venezuela, Castro in Cuba, Ahmadinejad in Iran, etc. generally compile lists of their detractors, in the United States this is unforgivable.

Add this to the attempts to force radical over-reaching growth in government and we appear to have a government that is out of control and rapidly attempting to establish a totalitarian regime.

Oops… I guess I just earned another entry on the list!

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An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph found that three quarters of local authorities have used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000 over the past year. The Act gives councils the right to place residents and businesses under surveillance, trace telephone and email accounts and even send staff on undercover missions.

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Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.

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FISA Passed, Obama voted in favor of it, too.

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This is a provision with huge reach, and was slipped into the bill this week. Not only does it affect nearly every credit card transaction, such as Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express, but the bill specifically targets payment systems like eBay’s PayPal, Amazon, and Google Checkout, that are used by many online businesses.

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According to a legislative notice from the U.S. Senate, a new Housing Bill (HR 3221) contains a provision that will require nearly every online credit card transaction to be reported directly to the Internal Revenue Service.

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Homeowners were released from custody at 3am after being held without charges for up to 14 hours. They are being told they will no longer be able to access their property without violating a trespassing law.

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A group of four people were arrested in Philly, and detained for 12 hours while their house was being illegally searched for any evidence of wrongdoing.

Actual quote from the Police Captain: “They’re a hate group. We’re trying to drum up charges against them, but unfortunately we’ll probably have to let them go.”

Guilty until proven innocent?

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Fingerprints are considered to be among the most personal of information, and fingerprint databases created and proposed in the name of national security have generated much debate.

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