The bill, which was introduced in Trenton by state Sen. Nick Sacco (D-Hudson County), would require adults and juveniles convicted of disorderly persons offenses to submit a sample under the state’s DNA Database law, according to the Jersey Journal.

“We have to give the law enforcement community every tool possible to fight crime,” Sacco told the Jersey City newspaper. “By expanding DNA sampling to anyone convicted of a crime, we can greatly increase the accuracy and effectiveness of the database.”

If the legislation passes, anyone in the state who is convicted of a first- to fourth-degree crime would be required to hand over the sample after a conviction.

Disorderly persons offenses in New Jersey include shoplifting items worth less than $200, criminal mischief, defiant trespass, simple assault, disorderly conduct and prostitution.

Some say the law is a violation of privacy rights.

“It’s just more Big Brother watching,” Calvin Hart, president of the Jersey City NAACP chapter and a retired Jersey City detective told the Jersey Journal. “People don’t trust law enforcement as it is . . . It’s another invasion of privacy.”

The bill is being currently reviewed by the state’s Senate Law and Public Safety Committee.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/03/22/new-jersey-may-require-dna-samples-from-those-convicted-minor-crimes/#ixzz1q8Fcx5Vz

GOING to bed the other night, I noticed people in my shed stealing things.

I phoned the police but was told
no one was in the area to help.
They said they would send someone over as soon as possible.

I hung up. A minute later, I rang again.
‘Hello,’ I said, ‘I called you a minute ago
because there were people in my shed.
You don’t have to hurry now, because I’ve shot them.’

Within minutes there were half a dozen
police cars in the area, plus helicopters
and an armed response unit.
They caught the burglars red-handed.

One of the officers said:
‘I thought you said you’d shot them’
To which I replied:
‘I thought you said there was no one available.’

By E.D. Kain, Forbes Magazine, 7/05/2011

Drug warriors often contend that drug use would skyrocket if we were to legalize or decriminalize drugs in the United States. Fortunately, we have a real-world example of the actual effects of ending the violent, expensive War on Drugs and replacing it with a system of treatment for problem users and addicts.

Ten years ago, Portugal decriminalized all drugs. One decade after this unprecedented experiment, drug abuse is down by half:

Health experts in Portugal said Friday that Portugal’s decision 10 years ago to decriminalise drug use and treat addicts rather than punishing them is an experiment that has worked.

“There is no doubt that the phenomenon of addiction is in decline in Portugal,” said Joao Goulao, President of the Institute of Drugs and Drugs Addiction, a press conference to mark the 10th anniversary of the law.

The number of addicts considered “problematic” — those who repeatedly use “hard” drugs and intravenous users — had fallen by half since the early 1990s, when the figure was estimated at around 100,000 people, Goulao said.

Other factors had also played their part however, Goulao, a medical doctor added.

“This development can not only be attributed to decriminalisation but to a confluence of treatment and risk reduction policies.”

Many of these innovative treatment procedures would not have emerged if addicts had continued to be arrested and locked up rather than treated by medical experts and psychologists. Currently 40,000 people in Portugal are being treated for drug abuse. This is a far cheaper, far more humane way to tackle the problem. Rather than locking up 100,000 criminals, the Portuguese are working to cure 40,000 patients and fine-tuning a whole new canon of drug treatment knowledge at the same time.

None of this is possible when waging a war.

What’s all the fuss about the NDAA?

When the executive branch can act as judge, jury, jailer (and in Anwar Al-Awlaki’s case, executioner), our most basic system of checks and balances is broken. Anwar Al-Awlaki was a very bad guy, but what about the next person the executive branch kills or jails? And the next after that?

What if Democrats and Republicans were two wings of the same bird of prey?

What if elections were actually useful tools of social control? What if they just provided the populace with meaningless participation in a process that validates an establishment that never meaningfully changes? What if that establishment doesn’t want and doesn’t have the consent of the governed? What if the two-party system was actually a mechanism used to limit so-called public opinion? What if there were more than two sides to every issue, but the two parties wanted to box you in to one of their corners?

What if there’s no such thing as public opinion, because every thinking person has opinions that are uniquely his own? What if public opinion was just a manufactured narrative that makes it easier to convince people that if their views are different, there’s something wrong with that — or something wrong with them?

What if the whole purpose of the Democratic and Republican parties was not to expand voters’ choices, but to limit them? What if the widely perceived differences between the two parties was just an illusion? What if the heart of government policy remains the same, no matter who’s in the White House? What if the heart of government policy remains the same, no matter what the people want?

What if those vaunted differences between Democrat and Republican were actually just minor disagreements? What if both parties just want power and are willing to have young people fight meaningless wars in order to enhance that power? What if both parties continue to fight the war on drugs just to give bureaucrats and cops bigger budgets and more jobs?

What if both parties supported welfare, war, debt, bailouts and big government? What if the rhetoric that candidates displayed on the campaign trail was dumped after electoral victory? What if Barack Obama campaigned as an antiwar, pro-civil liberties candidate, then waged senseless wars while assaulting your rights that the Constitution is supposed to protect? What if George W. Bush campaigned on a platform of nonintervention and small government, then waged a foreign policy of muscular military intervention and a domestic policy of vast government borrowing and growth?What if government policies didn’t change when government’s leaders did? What if no matter who won an election, government stayed the same? What if government was really a revolving door of political hacks, bent on exploiting the people while they’re in charge?

What if Bill Clinton declared the era of big government to be over, but actually just convinced Republicans like Newt Gingrich that they can get what they want out of big government, too? What if the Republicans went along with it?

What if all this is happening again? What if Rick Santorum is being embraced by voters who want small government even though he voted for the Patriot Act, for an expansion of Medicare and for raising the debt ceiling by trillions of dollars? What if Mitt Romney is being embraced by voters who want anyone but Obama, but don’t realize that Romney might as well be Obama on everything from warfare to welfare?What if Ronald Reagan spent six years running for president promising to shrink government, but then the government grew while he was in office? What if, notwithstanding Reagan’s ideas and cheerfulness and libertarian rhetoric, there really was no Reagan Revolution?

What if Ron Paul is being ignored by the media not because theyclaim he’s unappealing or unelectable, but because he doesn’t fit into the pre-manufactured public opinion mold used by the establishment to pigeonhole the electorate and create the so-called narrative that drives media coverage of elections?

What if the biggest difference between most candidates was not substance but style? What if those stylistic differences were packaged as substantive ones to re-enforce the illusion of a difference between Democrats and Republicans? What if Romney wins and ends up continuing most of the same policies that Obama promoted? What if Obama’s policies, too, are merely extensions of Bush’s?

What if a government that manipulated us could be fired? What if a government that lacked the true and knowing consent of the governed could be dismissed? What if it were possible to have a game-changer? What if we need a Ron Paul to preserve and protect our freedoms from assault by the government?

What if we could make elections matter again? What if we could do something about this?

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

January 13, 2012

Andrew P. Napolitano [send him mail], a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at the Fox News Channel, and the host of “FreedomWatch” on the Fox Business Network. His latest book is It is Dangerous to be Right When the Government is Wrong: The Case for Personal Freedom.

Copyright © 2012 Andrew P. Napolitano

It was first reported in January of last year that the Obama administration had compiled a hit list of American citizens whom the President had ordered assassinated without any due process, and one of those Americans was Anwar al-Awlaki.  No effort was made to indict him for any crimes (despite a report last October that the Obama administration was “considering” indicting him).  Despite substantial doubt among Yemen experts about whether he even had any operational role in Al Qaeda, no evidence (as opposed to unverified government accusations) was presented of his guilt.  When Awlaki’s father sought a court order barring Obama from killing his son, the DOJ argued, among other things, that such decisions were “state secrets” and thus beyond the scrutiny of the courts.  He was simply ordered killed by the President: his judge, jury and executioner.  When Awlaki’s inclusion on President Obama’s hit list was confirmed, The New York Times noted that “it is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing.”

After several unsuccessful efforts to assassinate its own citizen, the U.S. succeeded today (and it was the U.S.).  It almost certainly was able to find and kill Awlaki with the help of its long-time close friend President Saleh, who took a little time off from murdering his own citizens to help the U.S. murder its.  The U.S. thus transformed someone who was, at best, a marginal figure into a martyr, and again showed its true face to the world.  The government and media search for The Next bin Laden has undoubtedly already commenced.

What’s most striking about this is not that the U.S. Government has seized and exercised exactly the power the Fifth Amendment was designed to bar (“No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law”), and did so in a way that almost certainly violates core First Amendment protections (questions that will now never be decided in a court of law). What’s most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government’s new power to assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the U.S. Government.  Many will celebrate the strong, decisive, Tough President’s ability to eradicate the life of Anwar al-Awlaki — including many who just so righteously condemned those Republican audience members as so terribly barbaric and crass for cheering Governor Perry’s execution of scores of serial murderers and rapists: criminals who were at least given a trial and appeals and the other trappings of due process before being killed.

From an authoritarian perspective, that’s the genius of America’s political culture.  It not only finds ways to obliterate the most basic individual liberties designed to safeguard citizens from consummate abuses of power (such as extinguishing the lives of citizens without due process).  It actually gets its citizens to stand up and clap and even celebrate the destruction of those safeguards.

* * * * *

In the column I wrote on Wednesday regarding Wall Street protests, I mistakenly linked to a post discussing a New York Times article by Colin Moynihan as an example of a “condescending” media report about the protest.  There was nothing condescending or otherwise worthy of criticism in Moynihan’s article; I meant to reference this NYT article by Ginia Bellafante.  My apologies to Moynihan, who rightly objected by email, for the mistake. 

UPDATE: What amazes me most whenever I write about this topic is recalling how terribly upset so many Democrats pretended to be when Bush claimed the power merely to detain or even just eavesdrop on American citizens without due process.  Remember all that?  Yet now, here’s Obama claiming the power not to detain or eavesdrop on citizens without due process, but to kill them; marvel at how the hardest-core White House loyalists now celebrate this and uncritically accept the same justifying rationale used by Bush/Cheney (this is war! the President says he was a Terrorist!) without even a moment of acknowledgment of the profound inconsistency or the deeply troubling implications of having a President — even Barack Obama — vested with the power to target U.S. citizens for murder with no due process.

Also, during the Bush years, civil libertarians who tried to convince conservatives to oppose that administration’s radical excesses would often ask things like this: would you be comfortable having Hillary Clinton wield the power to spy on your calls or imprison you with no judicial reivew or oversight?  So for you good progressives out there justifying this, I would ask this:  how would the power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process look to you in the hands of, say, Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann?

I was on Democracy Now earlier this morning discussing the Awlaki assassination and presidential due-process-free killings: