YOU BE THE JUDGE

and the legislature. Also the ACLU.

Heather Mac Donald on Chief Bratton, “Broken Windows” and Three Strikes:

Merely questioning the homeless for littering, selling illegal merchandise, and jaywalking, they said, constituted illegal harassment of the poor. UCLA law professor Gary Blasi charged the LAPD with trying to “ethnically cleanse” downtown to make way for gentrification. A hostile federal judiciary lapped up every preposterous charge the advocates leveled against the police, but the LAPD continued enforcing public-order laws on Skid Row, producing some of the largest crime drops in Los Angeles and bringing a modicum of sanity to streets that had resembled bedlam just five years earlier. The beneficiaries of this crime drop included elderly residents of the neighborhood SROs, vagrants seeking to get clean and turn their lives around, and low-income workers in the area’s intrepid small wholesalers and factories, who no longer found themselves victimized by psychotic drug users as a matter of course.

And now Charles Samuel will be taken off the streets and brought to justice [for murder], thanks to two Skid Row officers’ willingness to ignore ACLU propaganda and accost a vagrant drinking in public.

Three Carter appointees, U.S. District Judges Thelton Henderson and Lawrence Karlton, and U.S. 9th Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt just ordered the California legislature to spend millions on prison conditions. Otherwise, they’ll release a 47,000-man crime wave on the citizens of California.

Trouble is, the legislature has spent all the money already.

I don’t want to say that they’ve recklessly spent all of this generation’s money and are now greedily working on future generation’s, but Mr. Spacely just fired George Jetson from Spacely Sprockets because of their tax increases. California just told the Federation that the Enterprise must be put in drydock because it cannot afford any more Dilithium Crystals. Instead, Spock and Kirk will be issued a bus pass to boldly go bankrupt.

It’s not just about the debt; California’s Democrats have wasted so much money so foolishly for so long that they are actually putting their own citizens in danger with their extreme profligacy and extremist policies.

Now this, from the LA Times via Overlawyered:

In the last few months alone, the courts added more than a billion dollars to the state’s deficit by declaring illegal reductions in healthcare services, redevelopment agency funds and transportation spending. Another ruling threatens to deprive California of all its federal stimulus money if the state does not rescind a cut to the salaries of home healthcare workers. [...]

“We are seeing more lawsuits and more victories by the groups filing them,” said Bob Hertzberg, a former Assembly speaker who now is chairman of California Forward, a think tank focused on reforming the budget process. “They don’t want to compromise. . . . It’s easier to hire lawyers than lobbyists, and you probably get better outcomes.”

So that government by lawyer might not perish from the earth.

Do you have a lobbyist? You’re supposed to; your elected representatives are supposed to be your lobbyist. Did you know that? It seems quaint, almost delusional to even say such a thing today.

Had enough yet, voters?