File this under No one could have predicted:

Man Orders TV Through Amazon, Gets Assault Rifle

When D.C. resident Seth Horvitz ordered a flat-panel TV on Amazon, he didn’t expect to get a military-grade assault rifle in return.

Horvitz ordered the TV, a Westinghouse 39-inch LCD, for about $320 from a third-party electronics seller on Amazon.

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Not being one to want a personal “shock and awe” arsenal of his own, Horvitz contacted the D.C. police. They immediately confiscated the box, which contained a semi-automatic Sig Sauer 716 patrol rifle. The police informed Horvitz that the gun was illegal in the District of Columbia.

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When the government kills

The Constitution's guarantee of due process means the president can't act as judge, jury and executioner of suspected terrorists, especially when they are U.S. citizens.

Whether or not it succeeds in court, a lawsuit challenging the killings of Al Qaeda figure Anwar Awlaki and two other U.S. citizens clearly lays out the problems with the Obama administration's policy of "targeted killings" of suspected terrorists even outside the battle zone of Afghanistan.

Allowing the president of the United States to act as judge, jury and executioner for suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens, on the basis of secret evidence is impossible to reconcile with the Constitution's guarantee that a life will not be taken without due process of law. Under the law, the government must obtain a court order if it seeks to target a U.S. citizen for electronic surveillance, yet there is no comparable judicial review of a decision to kill a citizen. No court is even able to review the general policies for such assassinations. (Awlaki's family failed in 2010 to persuade a court to enjoin the government from killing him.)

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Hooray for justice. Boo to the dissenters.

Detailed Parking Tickets Breach Personal Privacy, Appeals Court Says

A federal appeals court is reinstating a class-action privacy suit, ruling that police departments who put too much private data on parking citations are violating U.S. privacy law.

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided against the police department of Palatine Village, a Chicago suburb. When issuing electronically produced parking citations, the department lists the vehicle owner’s name, address, driver’s license number, date of birth, sex, height and weight. That ticket and accompanying information is usually left underneath a vehicle’s windshield-wiper blade.

The case dates to 2010, when a cited motorist sued Palatine Village, alleging the disclosure of his identity was a breach of the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1994. Congress adopted the privacy legislation in response to the death of actress Rebecca Schaeffer. She was killed by a stalker who had obtained her unlisted home address through the California DMV.

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el oh el -- Stephen Colbert is a comedic genius.

Wikipedia Locks Pages Of Potential Romney VP Picks, Thanks To Stephen Colbert

Wikipedia, in a move to thwart merry pranksters from wreaking havoc across the site, is blocking edits on encyclopedia entries about possible GOP vice-presidential nominees.

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Politics blog Tech President speculated on Monday that clues to Romney's running mate might be spotted in recently edited Wikipedia entries, prompting a flurry of media interest that inspired comedian Stephen Colbert to call on his viewers to make a few creative Wiki edits of their own.

"Go on Wikipedia and make as many edits as possible to your favorite VP contender," Colbert said during a segment on his Tuesday night show. He then pulled out a laptop and narrated a mock-editing of Tim Pawlenty's page.

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Sen. Marco Rubio and President Obama team up for a ridiculous new tax break for Olympic medal winners.

If they gave out awards for dumb new policy ideas, President Obama and Republican rising star Sen. Marco Rubio would both be medaling this week. Their achievements? Rubio’s completely pointless bill offering a tax break to recipients of Olympic medals and—even worse—the president’s decision to hop on the bandwagon rather than show the country he has a firmer grasp on the issues than his adversaries do. In the scheme of things, of course, winning Olympic prizes is not an important sector of economic activity, and the medals’ tax status doesn’t really matter. But the overall shape of the tax code does matter a great deal, and the speed with which a bipartisan consensus emerged around making it worse bodes quite poorly for efforts to make it better.

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Then the president, who courageously rejected rivals’ gimmicky gas-tax holiday schemes on the campaign trail four years ago, decided to endorse Rubio’s bill rather than try to win some points for good sense.

With the president now on board, there’s a good chance Rubio’s idea will become law. In fiscal terms, the change will be minuscule. In terms of fairness, it seems like a strange slight to winners of other kinds of prizes. Are Olympic medalists worthier than winners of the Nobel or Pulitzer prizes? And of course exempting all prize income from income tax could merely encourage all kinds of people to restructure their income as prizes. The J.P. Morgan Memorial Prize for Achievement in Investment Banking, anyone?

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The following story is linked here ONLY for the purposes of yet another demonstration that laws only apply to some people, and the "law enforcement officials" who enabled this to happen, in my opinion, should all be fired on the spot. As we've seen over and over again, "law enforcement" is an oxymoron.

Mitt Romney's Motorcade Chased by Orthodox Jews in Sunny Lakewood, NJ

Pool reporter Holly Bailey of Yahoo News, filed this:

Romney arrived at Lake Terrace, the site of his fundraiser tonight, at roughly 3:35 pm, after what your pooler can only describe as a harrowing high-speed motorcade from Newark airport to Lakewood NJ. Hitting speeds of up to 90 mph at times, the motorcade made what had been scheduled as a 61-minute drive in roughly 45 minutes on a route that took us along the Jersey Turnpike to the Garden State Parkway and prompted your pooler to wonder many times if she would live to cover Romney's remarks at the fundraiser tonight. The motorcade was escorted by unmarked police SUVs which at times flashed their lights. At one point, we passed a school bus where several little kids could been seen standing on their seats to get a glimpse of the motorcade.

And I adopt this comment as posted under the story:

I thought the public...
...has shown in the Corzine and the Death Race stories that it doesn't appreciate the police endangering everyone on the Turnpike with reckless driving. I thought the state police had said these things were wrong. Speeding past school buses at up to 90 mph?

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The American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana threatened Tuesday to sue a northeastern Louisiana charter school if it doesn't change rules that keep pregnant students out of the classroom and require girls under suspicion of being pregnant to be tested.

The four-paragraph "Student Pregnancy Policy" in Delhi Charter School's policy manual says that if a suspected girl refuses to take a pregnancy test, she can be removed from class or the school.

That violates the U.S. Constitution and federal laws against sexual discrimination, state ACLU executive director Marjorie R. Esman said.

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Former school principal Steve Gaharan told the newspaper he was always concerned when he had to enforce the policy, which came up about once a year. Gaharan said he was forced to resign earlier this year over an alleged violation that wasn't explained to him.

"The system used at Delhi Charter School is quite unusual and punishing to the young lady; however the young man can strut along, continue in school and compete in or participate in all extracurricular activities," he said. "However, the pregnant young lady is not only excluded from all of these activities, but also must be home-schooled instead of having the privilege of attending school."

In other words, NO, you can't have birth control, NO, you can't have an abortion, and NO, you can't get a proper education if you're pregnant. GO INCUBATE.

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h/t to Senator Sanders

By Mark Miller

Aug 7 (Reuters) - Are you going to retire in poverty?

Today's seniors are more affluent than the general population. But the generations that follow them - starting with the baby boom generation - will not be as fortunate. The decline of pensions, the erosion of Social Security and the housing crash all are pointing toward a new crisis of poverty among lower- and middle-class seniors in the years ahead.

Social Security and pensions, in particular, have been the two most important factors in keeping seniors out of poverty for decades. Both provide reliable, guaranteed income sources for life. And home equity has been an important fall-back source of assets that can be tapped in retirement. That is because seniors typically have more equity built up in their homes than younger homeowners and carry less debt into retirement.

Indeed, the poverty rate for seniors in 2010 (the most recent year available) was just 9 percent, compared with 15 percent for the general U.S. population.

But the economic safety net is fraying quickly.