Self-reliance rules!

By Jennifer J. Foster

From my Twitter feed @jefoster):

Forget the government: Behold, the resounding success of sweet self-reliance! http://tinyurl.com/da4rfk

This CNN story explores how business owners and residents on Hawaii’s Kaua’i island got tired of waiting and depending on the government for $4 million to repair an access road and bridge to a state park. Local jobs and the survival of small businesses depend on the tourism in that park, and officials with the state Department of Land and Natural Resources told the residents that it could be two years before they could turn up the dough.

Well, the community decided that was too long to wait. So they banded together, and volunteers got the job done in ... EIGHT DAYS.

“We can wait around for the state or federal government to make this move, or we can go out and do our part,“ (local business owner Ivan) Slack said. “Just like everyone’s sitting around waiting for a stimulus check, we were waiting for this but decided we couldn’t wait anymore.“

The road and bridge are ready, so only one question remains: How long will it take the state to certify the bridge so the park can reopen?

Botched autopsy may lead to big changes in other criminal cases

By Jennifer J. Foster

From the Associated Press:

The autopsy of an Alabama baby was so badly botched a judge dismissed a murder charge against the mother today, and the state now plans to review every forensic case by the medical examiner who bungled the procedure.

Circuit Judge James Moore threw out the case against Bridget Lee, a 34-year-old church pianist who spent nine months in jail after being charged with her child’s death in 2006. An initial autopsy found that the baby was suffocated, but reviews by six experts concluded the baby was stillborn and no crime occurred.

The medical examiner who worked on Lee’s case, Dr. Corinne Stern, now works in Texas, where officials were just learning of the Alabama case. It’s not known exactly how many homicide cases Stern worked on in Alabama, but officials said it could be as many as 100.

The story goes on to say that the six other forensic experts concluded that the bruises on the baby’s face, which Stern mistook for evidence of suffocation, were actually signs of decomposition.

If Stern couldn’t tell the difference, there’s a fair shot that when her cases are reviewed, more than a few may wind up back in court—with different results.

Red-light runners: America’s dangerous scourge

By Jennifer J. Foster

I support red-light cameras. I support civil and criminal penalities based on what those red-light cameras record.

And this is why.

Concerned about privacy? Don’t run red lights. 

More on this in my column on Saturday.

Does immigration get you ‘real riled up politically’?

By Jennifer J. Foster

If you oppose amnesty for illegal immigrants, you might “get real riled up politically about this.“

President Obama is quietly preparing to undertake the immigration issue later this year, according to The New York Times:

Mr. Obama plans to speak publicly about the issue in May, administration officials said, and over the summer he will convene working groups, including lawmakers from both parties and a range of immigration groups, to begin discussing possible legislation for as early as this fall.

The idea will be to focus on “policy reform that controls immigration and makes it an orderly system,” according to the White House director of intergovernmental affairs.

In addition, CNN reports that “the Obama administration wants to remove incentives to enter the U.S. illegally, beef up border security and work with Mexico to cut down on illegal immigration.“

Hmm ... “remove incentives to enter the U.S. illegally.“ I’ll be very interested to learn what, exactly, he means by that. Employment? Free health care? Access to driver’s licenses and in-state tuition in some states? All of the above, or something else?

While Obama will be keeping a campaign promise to help illegal immigrants “get out of the shadows” during his first term, politicos on both sides of the aisle are scratching their heads at his timing. Republicans literally can’t wait to engage a president who will seek to legalize illegal immigrants—and keep them employed in the United States—at a time of economic uncertainty when so many Americans have lost and are losing their jobs. Republicans have had a terrible time trying to get themselves and their message together, but with this, Obama would be handing them some fresh red meat on a silver platter.

Assuming some sort of legislation comes out of the workgroups this fall, the timing sets up a congressional showdown ahead of midterm elections in 2010. If the economy doesn’t turn—or is slow to turn—around, Obama won’t be doing himself or his party any favors by fanning the flames of voter anger with efforts to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants. Midterm elections are historically bad for the party in power, anyway, but this set of circumstances could make the GOP’s losses in 2006 pale in comparison.

Also, there is something to be said for the fact that this news came from the director of intergovernmental affairs in the White House (a gold star for you if you can name her without looking at the story) and not from a higher-profile staffer—like, say, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel or Press Secretary Robert Gibbs—or even the president himself. By introducing the news this way, Obama is floating the idea—breaking the ice, so to speak—so that folks in the middle (if there is anyone in Washington in the middle) will know what’s coming and so that they and the White House can start to feel each other out on potential areas of agreement and conflict.

It means he’s serious.

And as for that missing middle, I actually think I’m part of it. It’s absolutely unreasonable to expect that the federal government can find, round up and deport 12 million (or more) illegal immigrants. But there has to be some punishment for the willful ignorance of the laws of the United States.

I continue to believe that a short-term self-reporting program is the way to go. It yielded poor results when it was tried last year, but it was poorly publicized and not widely applied. If illegal immigrants had a chance to self-report, pay a fine, leave the country and come back in legally (thus, the incentive to self-report), my guess is that a good number of them—maybe even as many as half—would take advantage of it. That, combined with a congressional end to so-called “sanctuary cities” and a reporting requirement for state and local law enforcement (yes, Congress can do this—the same way it “encouraged” states to raise the drinking age to 21, by making it a requirement for eligibility for federal funds), would make for a much more manageable job for the feds. And you could throw in extras that would help even more: Incentives (read: tax credits) for businesses to use e-Verify, a real guest worker program that made sense for workers and businesses alike, etc.

Folks who didn’t self-report under the new program ... well, when the feds did catch them (and given the closing net enabled by the three-prong process, it would just be a matter of time), they would be immediately deported and banned from returning to the U.S. for two years. If they are found here during the ban, they could never return.

It would take a while, but this problem didn’t develop overnight, and it’s not going to be solved overnight. A comprehensive approach, sustained over a period of time, is our best shot at cleaning up the mess.

And that’s how I would do it. Amnesty apologists and opponents alike would hate it ... but maybe that’s a good thing.

Oh, and one more thing: That line about getting “real riled up politically”? President Obama said that.

See also:

L.A. mayor to ICE: Back off, a post I wrote about immigration—coincidentally—one year ago tomorrow: What former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff should have said to Antonio Villaraigosa.

U.S. Rep. Mike Pence’s 2006 plan for immigration reform. Pence has earned a reputation as a sensible, pragmatic lawmaker; it will be interesting to see whether he’s one of the Republicans to whom the president reaches out as he undertakes his own initiative.

They are ‘mad as hell’

By Jennifer J. Foster

Watch out, Google and other evil news aggregators. America’s newspaper owners, the Associated Press and Rupert Murdoch are “mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more.“

What’s got them so angry? As Breitbart explains, “websites that use their stories without paying for them.“

AP chairman Dean Singleton characterized the web sites’ use of the stories as “(walking) off with our work under misguided legal theories.“ Murdoch calls it stealing. And The Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson calls the sites themselves “parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet.“

Eww.

The harsh and descriptive nature of this language underscores the seriousness of the paradoxical problem newspapers face as they try to draw traffic to their respective web sites: Their survival depends on the development and implementation of some sort of framework that will allow them to charge for their content on the web, but they have to figure out a way to do it without alienating the readers they need to make it work.

As they struggle to strike that balance, aggregators rip the rug out from them, pulling content out of the fragile framework altogether and then profiting from it themselves.

The problem is that news aggregation is a valuable service for web users. I frequently use Google to search the headlines for blog-worthy items. If the AP wants to stop Google from making money off of its product, it should consider going into the aggregation business itself: If it provided its stories directly to readers on the web, it could sell ads the way Google does now—and, as a bonus, it would have a bit of leverage in its developing skirmishes with individual newspapers over fees and long-term agreements.

As the web has grown in size, reach and readership, courts have stepped in to provide clarification and guidance to existing copyright and fair-use provisions. We see evidence of their work in the user agreements on sites like YouTube and Facebook, which incorporate user-generated content.

So it’s likely that the courts will have to step in again here, to referee this latest battle between aggregator giants like Google and the content originators.

And that will actually be a good thing.