Gwinnett County, Georgia recently signed on to build a new baseball stadium for the Atlanta Braves farm team, currently in Richmond, Virginia.  They made this agreement behind closed doors and kept it secret from the public until it was too late for the public to do anything about it.

Under the terms of the agreement, Gwinnett County owns the stadium and is responsible for all the upkeep and maintenance, but only gets to use the stadium for ten days each year.  The rent the Braves are paying will only cover the contruction bonds, so the ongoing maintenance will fall entirely on the backs of taxpayers.

The project will be financed with 30 year bonds.  However, the Braves have an escape clause that will let them, at any time after year 15, pull out if they feel that the stadium has not been maintained the way they want it.  In addition, they could not only bail on the County but also block Gwinnett from bringing in another baseball team!  Thus in 15 years the taxpayers of Gwinnett will not only be subject to the whims of the County Commissioners, but also to the whims of a private company which has been granted the power of extortion by those Commissioners.

The cost of building the stadium is reported at around $45 millon.  The Braves could easily finance that themselves out of a trivial payroll cut on their millionaire athletes.  Why are the Gwinnett County taxpayers being forced to subsidize them?

The Farm Bill for the next five years recently passed overwhelmingly in both the House and the Senate.  Why?  Because it looks like each and every member of Congress put his or her own slice of bacon in it!  It seems if you put enough bad, selfish ideas together in one bill, everyone will vote for it.

Lumped in with farm subsidies (which is the first thing developing coutries point to when the U.S. goes after them for dumping goods here, and which are ludicrous on their face given the current climate of rising food pricies worldwide)  are things like tax breaks for race horse owners.  Anyone know of any race horse owners struggling to feed their families?

This is another great example of why we need to limit the size and scope of bills in our legislatures.  This bill is over 600 pages long.  I wonder how many members of Congress have actually read the whole thing?

Break out each piece and make it stand or fall on its own merits.

And if you are going to use tax policy to influence food production, it should be done in  a way that encourages HEALTHY food production.  According to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, there is a gross imbalance between what we recommend and what we subsidize.

I think I may have another quote to add to the list on this site:

“Nuts to you!”

H.R. 1955, pushed as the “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007″ and widely  derided as the “Thought Crimes Act” is one of those pieces of crap that only a professional politician or network news anchor could love.  It starts with a list of “Findings” and then creates a Commission to spend 18 months “studying” the already decided and written into law conclusions and writing a report on how to curtail the free speech of anyone who does not accept the status quo.

Some samples:

The term `violent radicalization’ means the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change.

The term `ideologically based violence’ means the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual’s political, religious, or social beliefs.

Is this not what our military is doing trying to establish democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan?

The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens.

Does anybody remember Radio Free Europe? (Hint for the young: it wasn’t a campaign to hide all the radios.) Is the US government the only legal source of propaganda? (I’m sorry, I forgot - our leaders only speak the truth. It’s the NotUS that speak propaganda.)

Understanding the motivational factors that lead to violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence is a vital step toward eradicating these threats in the United States.

“Eradicate” violence!?!?!? Yeah, let’s nuke it out of existence…

Only after all this is the Constitution mentioned, and a weak prohibition of profiling “based solely on race, ethnicity, or religion”. In other words, profiling is OK as long as its only 99% of the process, not 100%.

As far as I’m concerned, the “status quo” is something to be endured until something better comes along, not something to be preserved at the cost of liberty and privacy.

So how would I rewrite this bill?

The current policy in Iraq and the War on Terra (all this time you thought he was mispronouncing it, didn’t you?) have been the best recruitment tool the terrorists could have asked for. A study is therefore needed to find a better policy aimed at increasing understanding and tolerance among people of different beliefs everywhere. Career politicians and preachers are not eligible to serve on the Committee as they are the ones that made this mess in the first place.

We the People includes the NotMe.

Nixon got crucified for erasing 18 minutes of a tape recording. This violation of the Federal Records Act led to the Presidential Records Act, which a 1993 court decision held applied to emails. The Clinton administration set up and archive for their Lotus Notes based email system to comply.

The Bush administration in 2001 tossed Lotus Notes in favor of a Microsoft Outlook/Exchange email system. This did not work with the existing archive system, and it is now 2008 and a new archive system has still not been implemented. Legal requests for information related to Executive branch activities are met with “We can’t find those emails” or by getting emails from local users’ Outlook folders, which are not in any way shape or form tamper-proof.

Further, it appears that many Bush administration officials, including Karl Rove, routinely used Republican Party email addresses for official government business in order to escape the legal requirements for email retention. The Republican Party has only a 30 day email retention policy.

All this from an administration that believes it has the right to monitor anyone’s telephone or internet activities at any time without a warrant, just in case you might be a terrorist.

You would think that given a years-long pattern of flouting the law, I would have heard this on TV news or read about it in the newspaper, right? No, I read about it in an IT newsletter on SQL databases linking to a post on the ars technica web site.

Back in 1985, the Georgia Legislature voted to allow Tax Alocation Districts that would subsidise development in part with tax money from what voters had approved as taxes to fund schools.  It took over twenty years, but the Georgia Supreme Court ruled in February that this is an unconstitutional use of school taxes.  Yeah! for common sense.

So what does Georgia’s Legislature set out to do?  You guessed it - if the Constitution won’t let us pay back our developer buddies with school tax dollars, let’s change the Constitution!  There will be a proposed Constitutional Amendment on the ballot in Georgia this November to specifically allow school funds to be siphoned off into developers’ pockets.

At a more local level, a Gwinnett County attempt to do the same thing is going to be on the ballot in a special election in July.  This hits taxpayers with the cost of running the special election, even though a similar proposal was rejected by voters just a few years ago.  And the developers are hoping that no one but their buddies knows about or bothers to vote in the special election.

Georgia’s schools are already among the worst in the country  - they don’t need their funding reduced further.  It seems to me that the developers and legislators want an uneducated public they can scam at will…