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Should moving a throw pillow get you fined or jailed?

With all the artistry and attitude, it’s no wonder design shows are so much fun. But are the people on those shows putting your life, and even the president’s life, at risk?

Natasha Lima-Younts can’t see how she’s putting anyone’s life at risk. She’s been an interior designer for more than 20 years. She started her own business, and hired dozens of employees. She has an extensive portfolio and magazine features about her work. What she doesn’t have is a state license. That doesn’t bother Yount’s client Angie Stoeker, who loves what Younts has done with her home, but it does bother those who push for licensing laws.

Alabama politicians once threatened unlicensed designers with jail time—moving a throw pillow could get you a year behind bars—and 22 states plus the District of Columbia regulate interior designers. Industry groups lobby for such laws because they say unlicensed designers put lives at risk. “Every decision an interior designer makes affects the health, safety, and, welfare of the public,” says the the American Society of Interior Designers. Another group implies that “confusing floor patterns” and other items installed by unlicensed interior designers cause 11,000 deaths per year.

Reason.tv’s Nick Gillespie went looking for dead bodies, and for an explanation for why the state of Florida launched a legal case against Younts. State regulators demand that she obtain a license, a license she says she doesn’t need, a license that could cost her six years and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Do licensing laws protect consumers from death and destruction or, as the Interior Design Protection Council argues, do they protect licensed designers from competition? Should Younts be stripped of the career it took her decades to build? Should President Obama be worried about his interior designer, the unlicensed Michael Smith? Jump into the throw-pillow fight and decide for yourself.

“Throw-Pillow Fight” is written and produced by Ted Balaker. Director of photography is Roger Richards.

http://www.reuters.com/…

http://www.usatoday.com/…

Cities and school boards are naming streets and buildings after President Obama, breaking with the tradition of waiting until a president is out of office.

• Ludlum Elementary School in Hempstead, N.Y., on Long Island, was renamed after Obama in November. A school in Portland, Ore., is deliberating a similar change.
• Opa-Locka, Fla., renamed one of its main city streets in December. Hollywood, Fla., is considering doing the same.
• St. Louis made an honorary name change to a busy road that used to divide white and black neighborhoods. The postal address is still Delmar Boulevard, but the city will post signs that also designate the street Barack Obama Boulevard.

The tributes are bound to continue, says Indiana University history professor Edward Linenthal.

“On the one hand, you can say it’s premature,” says Linenthal, editor of the Journal of American History. Obama’s administration has yet to make its own history, he says. “On the other hand, you can argue that what has happened is extraordinary and astonishing in American history … and the naming of streets and schools reflects that sense.”

John Gillis, editor of the book Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, says he does not know of instances of presidents being commemorated while they were in office, let alone before they took office, as some of the changes were.

“This is a trivialization of the serious process of naming,” he says. “This is all hope and no memory. It’s all anticipation and no looking back.”

Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan have been the most popular presidents in the last century for commemorations, Gillis says. Hundreds of schools and civic buildings have been named for them.

Jean Bligen, principal of Barack Obama Elementary School on Long Island, says the idea for the name change came from fifth-graders who had held mock debates before the election and were excited about Obama’s win.

“The children take such pride over the name being changed and knowing they represent such a strong individual,” she says.

Obama is being honored abroad, too. The Associated Press reports that Antigua is renaming 1,300-foot Boggy Peak, its highest spot, Mount Obama.

In Perry County, Ala., where the 1965 killing of a black man by a white state trooper in Marion led to the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, commissioners paid tribute to the president by designating the second Monday in November a legal holiday: Barack Obama Day.

This level of worship is unmatched in US history as I can tell. Especially for someone in office a week. I agree with J.H. Huebert over at LRC blog:

Some libertarians see this as an opportunity for people to be disillusioned when Obama fails, but I don’t. Given these people’s unquestioning adoration for Obama — and his status in their minds as someone as untouchable as Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King — whatever goes wrong will not be his fault, no matter what. Instead, it will be the fault of anyone who has attempted to restrain him in any way. When he fails, they will be ready and willing to give him more power — all that he says he needs.

and:

The children represent him? The myth that our government represents us is bad enough; the idea that people now think we exist to represent our so-called leader is terrifying.

http://www.bloomberg.com/…

A divided U.S. Supreme Court gave prosecutors more ability to use evidence obtained in violation of the Constitution, ruling against a man who was arrested and searched only because of a police clerical error.

The justices, voting 5-4 along ideological lines, upheld Bennie Dean Herring’s conviction for illegal possession of the methamphetamine and pistol he was carrying when he was arrested in 2004 in Coffee County, Alabama.

“In such a case, the criminal should not go free because the constable has blundered,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court, using a line from a 1926 Supreme Court decision.

Herring was arrested when he came to the Coffee County sheriff’s department to retrieve something from an impounded truck. At the time, a neighboring county’s computer system showed an active arrest warrant for Herring’s failure to appear in court on a felony charge. That warrant in reality had been recalled, so Coffee County police lacked any legal basis to arrest Herring.

The Supreme Court in some past cases has applied the so- called exclusionary rule to illegally obtained evidence, barring its use at trial. The court has restricted use of the exclusionary rule under Roberts and his predecessor as chief justice, William Rehnquist.

Not Deliberate

“As laid out in our cases, the exclusionary rule serves to deter deliberate, reckless or grossly negligent conduct, or in some circumstances recurring or systemic negligence,” Roberts wrote. “The error in this case does not rise to that level.”

Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy joined Roberts’s opinion.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter, John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer dissented.

“Negligent recordkeeping errors by law enforcement threaten individual liberty, are susceptible to deterrence by the exclusionary rule and cannot be remedied effectively through other means,” Ginsburg wrote.

The case is Herring v. United States, 07-513.

I predict an increase in clerical errors, blunders and accidents by police officers and department clerks.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/

NOTASULGA, AL: Residents of the tiny Alabama town of Notasulga are rallying around a local fixture after his eviction from the post office.

“Sammy” the cat was banned from the building after someone wrote in to complain about the cat’s presence.

“They said ‘This is a federal building and he doesn’t pay federal taxes so he can’t come in’,” said postal worker Rochelle Langford.

Before his banishment Sammy spent most of his time lounging in the post office’s window.

Sammy’s supporters think they’ve found a way to move him safely back in.

They’ve rented a P.O. Box in his name.

Post office workers say they’ll allow Sammy back in, but will try to keep him out of the way of customers.

Krugman Still Wrong After All These Years by Mish Shedlock

Krugman seems particularly proud of a piece he wrote a decade ago. His new remake, Hangover Theorists, is as wrong now as it was then. Let’s take a look.

The hangover theory, which I wrote about a decade ago, is still out there.

The basic idea is that a recession, even a depression, is somehow a necessary thing, part of the process of “adapting the structure of production.” We have to get those people who were pounding nails in Nevada into other places and occupation, which is why unemployment has to be high in the housing bubble states for a while.

The trouble with this theory, as I pointed out way back when, is twofold:

1. It doesn’t explain why there isn’t mass unemployment when bubbles are growing as well as shrinking — why didn’t we need high unemployment elsewhere to get those people into the nail-pounding-in-Nevada business?

2. It doesn’t explain why recessions reduce unemployment across the board, not just in industries that were bloated by a bubble.

One striking fact, which I’ve already written about, is that the current slump is affecting some non-housing-bubble states as or more severely as the epicenters of the bubble. Here’s a convenient table from the BLS, ranking states by the rise in unemployment over the past year. Unemployment is up everywhere. And while the centers of the bubble, Florida and California, are high in the rankings, so are Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas.

So the liquidationists are still with us.

Let’s answer Krugman’s two points in reverse order starting with number 2:

I’m always surprised how simple Austrian economic theory is and yet so many monetarists and Keynesians seem to completely misunderstand it.

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