I am torn on legislation recognizing “hate crimes“. There are crimes, and not crimes. How can you define “hate crimes”?
If someone gets into a fight at a bar with someone else, it is disturbing the peace, assault, and so forth. Now, if the person you got into the fight with was homosexual, not white, or any other niche, you have committed a “hate crime“.
That example shows to me that the idea of “hate crime” is stupid. Just because something happens that is a crime and the victim or other party is calling themselves homosexual or african-american, you can be charged with a felony under these laws and face much harsher penalties than if they were white. Isn’t that reverse-racism (or sexism)?
The other side of the coin is when your local KKK chapter destroys a home because there are non-white people living in the house. In this case, the idiots did commit a crime that was directed at people simply due to their race. Those idiot criminals should be locked down and penalized to the maximum extent of the law. However, are special laws needed for that? Shouldn’t we just increase the penalties for whatever crime they committed and allow the judiciary the ability to use their sense to apply sentences as they should be?
Like I said, I’m torn. Racists and hate-filled people need to be dealt with harshly, but do we really need special laws to accomplish that end?
I would seriously like to thank all of you who are reading this blog. I know you’re out there, I can hear you breathing. (Actually, I can see your visits in the IP logs and hit counters.)
We are easily on pace to break the 2,000 unique-visitor mark this month, not including search engines. I have even heard from a few people in person how they like reading my blog. I’m getting a good feeling from all of this positive feedback, and I wanted to say thank you to you all.
RSS subscriptions are up, unique hits are up, repeat hits are up, viewed pages are up, and I’m hearing good feedback. My day is going pretty well. I would really appreciate if you would subscribe to the RSS feed if you repeat visit instead of using bookmarks. It isn’t that hard, and I know over 1/2 of you are using Firefox. Firefox has a built-in reader, just click on the radio icon on the right.
Thank you all again! Use the comments, talk to Dave, subscribe to the RSS feed, and have fun while you’re here!
OK, here’s a little tax quiz. How does the US government raise ~$500 Billion over 5 years without raising taxes? The answer, by doing absolutely NOTHING. Man, this is just sweet for the Liberals in Congress. They get all this extra money to spend and they don’t have to take ANY political hits by passing tax increases. This is just plain beautiful, isn’t it? How’d they do it? Just let the Bush tax cuts from ’02, ’03, & ’04 expire. Those tax cuts have completely removed millions from the tax rolls, and saved families with children an average of ~$1500. Those tax cuts doubled the deductions for dependant children, reduced the lower tax bracket from 15% to 10%, eliminated the “marriage penalty”, reduced taxes on capital gains, etc. If the Dems remain in control in Congress and especially if they take the White House in ’08, then the taxes roll back to where they were at the end of Clinton’s reign. Sure they’ll throw some of those tax cuts back to the “people”, but they will keep far more of your money than they will give back. Let’s see, what was that old Karl Marx quote, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”.
Dave
