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Woman finds she wasn't given up at age 2 for adoption

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

by Caitlin Cleary

January 9, 2005

When Darlene Jones was growing up in Pittsburgh, she was told that her mother gave her away when she was a baby to Mose and Marilee Minifield, the couple who raised her along with their three other foster and adopted children.

Jones wouldn't know her birth mother's version of events for many years -- that she had not been given away, but had been spirited off as a baby and taken to Pittsburgh. But over the years, suspicions took root. Once or twice, she spied a different name on her birth certificate and on a driver's license learner's permit, before Marilee Minifield whisked them out of sight. The Minifields would ask her not to write their Pittsburgh return address on Christmas cards to an aunt and uncle in Arkansas, saying they didn't want anybody to find them.

Government IDs and Identity Theft

Lew Rockwell

by Ron Paul - Before the US House of Representatives International Relations Committee

January 12, 2005

Mr. Speaker, today I introduce the Identity Theft Prevention Act. This act protects the American people from government-mandated uniform identifiers that facilitate private crime as well as the abuse of liberty.

The major provision of the Identity Theft Prevention Act halts the practice of using the Social Security number as an identifier by requiring the Social Security Administration to issue all Americans new Social Security numbers within five years after the enactment of the bill. These new numbers will be the sole legal property of the recipient, and the Social Security administration shall be forbidden to divulge the numbers for any purposes not related to Social Security administration. Social Security numbers issued before implementation of this bill shall no longer be considered valid federal identifiers.

The future of lying

BBC NEWS (UK)

by Chris Summers

January 14, 2005

Convicted sex offenders may undergo polygraph tests to put them off contacting children when they get out of prison.

Imagine the Pentagon equipped with a machine which can read minds. Sound like the plot of a Hollywood thriller' Well, it might not be that far away. The US Department of Defense has given Dr Jennifer Vendemia a $5m grant to work on her theory that by monitoring brainwaves she can detect whether someone is lying.

Supreme Court Ends Current Federal Sentencing System

Stop The Drug War

January 14, 2005

For nearly 20 years, federal judges have been sentencing defendants to sentences beyond the statutory maximum based on findings of fact never considered by a jury.

Under sentencing laws adopted as "reforms" in the 1980s, judges could use a lower standard of proof than required to convict defendants to find that they had, for example, trafficked in a certain quantity of drugs or embezzled a certain amount of money, and use those findings to add years to their sentences. In part because of the federal sentencing guidelines scheme, in the intervening period federal prison populations have swollen dramatically, with a majority of those prisoners being drug offenders.

Lakewood no-smoking plan gets both sides all fired up

The Cleveland Plain Dealer (OH)

by Kaye Spector

January 26, 2005

Sentiment over a proposed citywide smoking ban has bar and restaurant owners fuming, but others concerned about health issues are holding their breath that the proposal will become law.

A hearing on the proposed ban Tuesday night drew a capacity crowd to the City Hall auditorium. About 80 people were seated, and more lined the walls along the back and side of the room. Bar and restaurant patrons, business owners, high school students, health professionals and a group from Toledo stepped forward one by one to deliver their thoughts to the eight members of a panel appointed by council to study a ban.

Tying jobs to smoking too draconian

The Kalamazoo Gazette (MI)

January 26, 2005

Over the last quarter-century, smokers have become pariahs. As of Jan. 1, KVCC will no longer hire tobacco users for full-time jobs.

Once they could smoke at their desks, anywhere in restaurants, in stores. Nowadays, smokers may not light up in the workplace, in many public places and even many businesses that have declared themselves smoke-free.

S.F. board votes to ban smoking in city's parks - Only golf courses would be exempt from tobacco taboo

San Francisco Chronicle (CA)

by Suzanne Herel

January 26, 2005

Smokers, take heed: A new law is kicking your butts out of San Francisco parks and open spaces.

The Board of Supervisors voted 8-3 Tuesday to outlaw smoking outdoors in all recreational areas managed by the city except for golf courses. That includes parks, squares, gardens and playing fields but not federal lands such as the Presidio or Ocean Beach.

US staff sacked over smoking ban

BBC NEWS (UK)

January 27, 2005

A US firm sacks four of its workers after they refuse to take a test to determine if they are smokers.

They were employees of Michigan-based healthcare firm Weyco, which introduced a policy banning its staff from smoking - even away from the workplace.

Democracy Is Not Freedom

lewrockwell.com

by Rep. Ron Paul, Md

February 7, 2005

We've all heard the words democracy and freedom used countless times, especially in the context of our invasion of Iraq. They are used interchangeably in modern political discourse, yet their true meanings are very different.

George Orwell wrote about "meaningless words" that are endlessly repeated in the political arena.* Words like "freedom," "democracy," and "justice," Orwell explained, have been abused so long that their original meanings have been eviscerated. In Orwell's view, political words were "Often used in a consciously dishonest way." Without precise meanings behind words, politicians and elites can obscure reality and condition people to reflexively associate certain words with positive or negative perceptions. In other words, unpleasant facts can be hidden behind purposely meaningless language. As a result, Americans have been conditioned to accept the word "democracy" as a synonym for freedom, and thus to believe that democracy is unquestionably good. The problem is that democracy is not freedom. Democracy is simply majoritarianism, which is inherently incompatible with real freedom. Our founding fathers clearly understood this, as evidenced not only by our republican constitutional system, but also by their writings in the Federalist Papers and elsewhere. James Madison cautioned that under a democratic government, "There is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual." John Adams argued that democracies merely grant revocable rights to citizens depending on the whims of the masses, while a republic exists to secure and protect pre-existing rights. Yet how many Americans know that the word "democracy" is found neither in the Constitution nor the Declaration of Independence, our very founding documents?

Behind the wheel, troopers shouldn't be above the law - seattlepi.com

seattlepi.com

by Thomas Shapley

February 26, 2005

"We humbly apologize." Those are words no appointed state official wants to utter to the chairman of a key legislative committee after just three weeks on the job.

But Washington State Patrol Chief John Batiste had little choice in making that apology after a state legislator received a barrage of nasty, even threatening, e-mail messages apparently sent by troopers and their families. Batiste, who took the top WSP job earlier this month, offered the apology "as an individual and as a group," to House Transportation Chairman Ed Murray, D-Seattle, and Rep. Toby Nixon, R-Kirkland, at a committee hearing Wednesday evening. "I and the union representative want to apologize for the behavior of a few," he said.

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