http://www.timesonline.co.uk/…

Grossly overweight children may be taken from their families and put into care if Britain’s obesity epidemic continues to escalate, council chiefs said yesterday.

The Local Government Association argued that parents who allowed their children to eat too much could be as guilty of neglect as those who did not feed their children at all.

The association said that until now there had been only a few cases when social services had intervened in obesity cases. But it gave warning that local councils may have to take action much more often and, if necessary, put obese children on “at risk” registers or take them into care. It called for new guidelines to be drawn up to help authorities deal with the issue.

“Councils are increasingly having to consider taking action where parents are putting children’s health in real danger,” he said. “As the obesity epidemic grows, these tricky cases will keep on cropping up. Councils would step in to deal with an undernourished and neglected child, so should a case with a morbidly obese child be different? If parents consistently place their children at risk through bad diet and lack of exercise, is it right that a council should step in to keep the child’s health under review?”

“The nation’s expanding waistline threatens to have a devastating impact on our public services. It’s a huge issue for public health, but it also risks placing an unprecedented amount of pressure on council services.”

Deadly facts

— Councils are spending tens of thousands of pounds widening crematorium furnaces to deal with fatter corpses

— Standard coffins are between 16 and 20ins wide (40-50cm) but coffins twice that size are being ordered to fit larger bodies

— Lewisham Council has ordered a 44in cremator from America and is taking coffins from the Midlands. A furnace has just been installed at King’s Lynn, Norfolk, for coffins a metre wide and Blackburn is to buy a 42in cremator

— New ambulances have been introduced across Wales with special equipment for fat patients, including a winch and an extra wide strengthened stretcher

— Fire services are threatening to charge police or hospitals a fee if they are called in to move grossly overweight people out of dangerous buildings

— Many schools are having to adapt their furniture to cope with heavier, wider children. Each larger table and chair costs about £30

— It is estimated that nearly 2,000 people are too fat to work

Another problem associated with socialism. One person’s problem is socialized and then everyone believes they have a say in your life. Isn’t that counter to what universal health care was advertised as? Everyone has care regardless of status or condition? You’d now be free from the worry of obtaining care. The problem is when you remove the incentive to take care of yourself you’re more likely to be worse off. The cost of not caring for oneself is spread out over the populous.

Karen DeCoster over at LewRockwell.com/blog made a good point: “I thought that the Department of Health banned the use of the word “obese” when referencing children?” Perhaps the local authorities haven’t gotten the memo yet.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/…

Mikheil Saakashvili’s decision to use the opening of the Olympic Games to cover Georgia’s invasion of its breakaway province of South Ossetia must rank in stupidity with Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s decision to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships.

Nasser’s blunder cost him the Sinai in the Six-Day War. Saakashvili’s blunder probably means permanent loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

After shelling and attacking what he claims is his own country, killing scores of his own Ossetian citizens and sending tens of thousands fleeing into Russia, Saakashvili’s army was whipped back into Georgia in 48 hours.

Vladimir Putin took the opportunity to kick the Georgian army out of Abkhazia, as well, to bomb Tbilisi and to seize Gori, birthplace of Stalin.

Reveling in his status as an intimate of George Bush, Dick Cheney and John McCain, and America’s lone democratic ally in the Caucasus, Saakashvili thought he could get away with a lightning coup and present the world with a fait accompli.

Mikheil did not reckon on the rage or resolve of the Bear.

Read More…

http://www.economist.com/…

A LIFELONG libertarian, Alan Greenspan does not ordinarily advocate giving the government more power. But he does so in a new epilogue to the paperback edition of his memoir, parts of which were made available to The Economist. The crisis of the past year has convinced him it is the lesser evil. Better someone else be in charge of bail-outs, he argues, than the Federal Reserve, which he led for 18 years.

Mr Greenspan says a high-level panel of American financial officials should be given broad power to seize any financial institution whose failure threatens the entire economy, bail out its creditors and close it down. “We need laws that specify and limit the conditions for bail-outs” and do so transparently with taxpayers’ money, “rather than circuitously through the central bank, as was done during the blow-up of Bear Stearns,” he writes in “The Age of Turbulence”. (Penguin is to release the paperback on September 9th.)

If that means the government has to wade in, so be it. “Our country has long since abandoned the notion that we should leave crises to be resolved solely by the marketplace,” he says. “The critical need…is to formalise…the procedures improvised in the case of Bear Stearns. This should ensure that in the future, government financial assistance to lending institutions does not impact the Federal Reserve’s balance-sheet and monetary policy.”

He says a standby panel, empowered by Congress, should determine if an institution’s failure is dangerous enough to require taxpayer support. It would then form a vehicle to take the firm into “conservatorship”, wipe out the equity, preferably impose a “haircut” on its debts before guaranteeing them, and then sell its assets. Mr Greenspan’s model is the Resolution Trust Corporation (on whose board he served), created in 1989 to take over failing thrifts, sell their assets, then close itself down. He pours cold water on a proposal by Hank Paulson, America’s treasury secretary, to give the Fed broad responsibility over market stability.

Mr Greenspan’s proposal may be politically difficult. For years Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, America’s mortgage giants, resisted the creation of a regulator that could close them down. With other large institutions—be they investment banks, hedge funds or insurance companies—there might be even more of a fuss. And the Fed is not yet ready to bow out. “Unless I hear from Congress that I should not be responding to a crisis situation, I think that it’s a long-standing role of the central bank to use its lender-of-last-resort facilities,” Ben Bernanke, Mr Greenspan’s successor at the Fed, said last month.

Just because the man used to hang out with Ayn Rand and was apparently a libertarian Objectivist doesn’t mean he continues to be one. Anyone who advocates aggression is not by definition a libertarian. But what better way to destroy a movement then by redefining the words? Eric Arthur Blair would be proud. It was done at around the turn of the 20th century with ‘liberal.’ In economics ‘inflation’ has been redefined. Now a concerted effort appears to be being made to change the meaning of ‘libertarian.’ People like Glenn Beck and Neil Bortz nationally claim to be libertarians. Advocating government manipulation of the market and money bailouts, immigration control and war with people who pose no threat is NOT libertarian.

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/…

It was supposed to be just another federal drug prosecution.  The federal prosecutors introduced evidence that the man on trial was involved in the black market drug trade.  The defense attorney said the government agents entrapped his client.  And then the twelve citizen-jurors retired to deliberate the outcome of the case.

But then something unusual happened.  The jury sent a note to the trial judge with the following query: Since the Constitution needed to be amended in 1919 to authorize federal criminal prosecutions for manufacturing and smuggling alcohol, a juror wanted to know from the judge where “is the constitutional grant of authority to ban mere possession of cocaine today?”

That’s a fair question.  It is a point that has been made in Cato’s publications ( go here (pdf) and here (pdf)) and a point that has been made by Justice Clarence Thomas, among many others.  Federal District Court Judge William Young was startled.  He says he has been on the bench for 30 years and has never faced a situation where a juror was challenging the legitimacy of a criminal law.  Young tried to assure the jury that the federal drug laws are constitutional because the Supreme Court has interpreted the commerce clause quite expansively.  When the jury sent out more notes about a juror that wasn’t going to sign off on an unconstitutional prosecution, Young halted the proceedings to identify the ”problem juror.”  Once discovered, that juror was replaced with an alternate–over the objections of defense counsel.  Shortly thereafter, the new jury returned with guilty verdicts on several cocaine-related charges.

It is an extraordinary thing for a judge to meddle with the jury in the middle of its deliberations.  So, to justify his removal of the “problem juror,” a man named Thomas Eddlem, Judge Young issued a 40-page memorandum of law (pdf).  I happen to know and respect Judge Young.  I invited him to speak here at Cato about the awful federal sentencing guidelines, but his legal memorandum in this case is remarkably thin.  I will briefly respond to his substantive arguments below.

1.  Court precedents say jurors have no right to nullify.  Well, yes, that is undeniable.   But that’s like someone saying in 1950 that court precedents tell us that  ”separate, but equal” is the law of the land–go read Plessy v. Ferguson. The real question is whether those court rulings are truly consistent with the Constitution.  I would also point out that even though many modern court rulings express hostility toward jury nullification, no court has yet dared try to reverse a not guilty verdict or attempt to punish any juror who cast a not guilty vote in a jury room where the result was deadlock (not an untoward outcome, by the way).  Judges do remove jurors from time to time, but there is no punishment.  At least not yet.

2.  Judge Young writes, “The impropriety of nullification emanates from the notion that ours is ‘a government of laws and not of men,’” and he attributes that proposition to our second president, John Adams, who also authored the Massachusetts Constitution.  The quote is accurate, but Young is mixing up legal principles and does not know Adams well enough.  Like so many of America’s early leaders, John Adams was a strong proponent of jury nullification.  Here’s Adams: “It is not only the juror’s right, but his duty, to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.” C.F. Adams, “The Works of John Adams,” 253-255 (1856)(emphasis added).

3.  Jury nullification undermines the rule of law. This is simply another variation of objection #2 above.  There is a logical fallacy to this objection.  Jury nullification is assumed to be improper–so it undermines “the law.”  It is like saying a presidential pardon undermines the “rule of law.”  But if the president has the power to pardon, and he does, he can exercise it (though we may or may not like the result in particular cases).  This is the way in which to understand jury nullification.  The framers of the American Constitution considered it to be part and parcel of what a criminal jury trial was all about.  Some state constitutions, such as Indiana, Maryland and Oregon, explicitly provide that juries have the power to judge the law and the facts in criminal cases.  Judges are the ones that have undermined the “rule of law” by pretending those provisions mean the opposite of what they say.

Judge Young expressed alarm about the recent Time magazine article by David Simon and his The Wire colleagues that calls for jury nullification in drug cases.  But that article has revived a debate that we should all welcome.  For much more on this subject, go here, here, here, and here.

Some other jury nullification quotes:

The jury has the right to determine both the law and the facts. -Samuel Chase, U.S. Supreme Court Justice / 1796

The jury has the power to bring a verdict in the teeth of both law and fact. -Oliver Wendell Holmes, U.S. Supreme Court Justice / 1920

The jury has a right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy. -John Jay, U.S. Supreme Court Justice / 1794

I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution. -Thomas Jefferson / 1789

Companies and organizations which very likely won’t be getting my business in the future.

• Target
• TIME
• Home Depot
• Bank of America
• American Red Cross
• Big Brother Big Sister
• Boys & Girls Clubs of America
• Habitat for Humanity
• “I Have a Dream” Foundation
• National Peace Corps Association
• Special Olympics
• United Way of America

This is a subset of the list available at BeTheChangeInc.org and is organizations that stood out for me. AARP, Target, TIME, The Home Depot Foundation and Bank of America are sponsoring the 2008 Service Nation Summit in NYC on… wait for it…. September 11-12.

Mark Edge of Free Talk Live has contacted Target to get their official position but as of last night’s show had not received a response.

I noticed that Americans for a National Service Act is a member of the Service Nation coalition. Comments after the jump.

Read More…