Day: November 9, 2000

United Poultry Concerns Wants Rubber Chicken Recalled

The only thing dumber than OddzOn’s rubber chicken candy dispenser has to be United Poultry Concerns’ Franklin Wade who has been fighting a war against the stupid novelty item.

Okay, usually OddzOn produces some of the coolest toys in the world — their Vortex football rocks — but what is the point of a plucked rubber chicken with a Tootsie Roll lollipop sticking out of its throat? Sounds like something they would sell at a place like Spencer Gifts, but Rite Aid carried these things for a while before protests from animal rights activists led them to pull them off the shelves.

Still some convenience stores and other places are selling them and Wade put out a press release today calling for activists to “protest to the store manager if you see this item for sale.”

Which is certainly their right but what exactly was going on in Wade’s mind when he wrote in a UPC press release,

It [the rubber chicken] encourages children and others to regard animal suffering and death — the cruel treatment of chickens especially — as amusing. It has a strong pornographic implication along with cruelty to animals.

Now I do not know about Wade’s lifestyle, but I’ve seen plenty of rubber chickens and none of them exactly turned me on. I guess sex appeal is in the eye of the beholder.

Source:

Stop production, distribution, and sale of cruel and obscene chicken toy. Press release, United Poultry Concerns, November 9, 2000.

Al Gore Has Not Won the Popular Vote

CounterCoup is one of a number of left wing groups that wants George Bush to simply step aside if he wins Florida because, “A candidate has won the popular vote but lost the White House.”

But it is false to claim that Al Gore has won the popular vote. In fact there are close to two million outstanding absentee ballots that have to still be counted around the country, and Gore’s slim lead in the popular voting could easily vanish (though aside states such as New Mexico and Florida, the absentee ballots are unlikely to change election results in those states).

The other amazing thing is the claim on CounterCoup that “over 19,000 Gore voters’ ballots were thrown away.” Actually those ballots had more than one person chosen as president and as the media finally reported, similar numbers of ballots had to be discarded in the 1996 presidential election as well. Strange that I don’t remember liberals and leftists calling that election a fraud.

Recount Almost Finished, What Happens Next?

David Winer argues on Scripting.Com that whoever loses the recount in Florida should just concede the election,

Here comes an opinion. The time to be partisan is past. If the recount says Gore won, he won. If the recount says Bush won, same deal. The election is almost over. Further, elections always have flaws.

Of course this ain’t going to happen. With 63 of 67 counties reporting in the recount, Bush leads Gore by only 359 votes. Lets be blunt about this — the recount has to be inaccurate, and any subsequent recounts will suffer from inaccurcies as well. There is simply no way to reliably count roughly 6 million votes with the sort of precision to capture such an extremely small percentage difference. At this point, election officials might as well flip a coin to decide who won Florida.

Whoever is declared the loser in Florida is clearly going to sue, which is going to cause a lot of headaches because both candidates have won other states by a very small percentage of votes, and minor election mix-ups are the norm around the country as Deroy Murdock documents well in a column at the National Review’s web site. Normally such problems don’t affect elections because rarely are they this close.

In Wisconsin, for example, Gore won by only 6,000 votes out of 2.5 million votes cast — slightly more than two tenths of one percent difference. And talk about election fraud — Democratic activists were handing out packs of cigarettes to homeless voters.

If Gore is successful in getting courts to order yet another recount or a hands-on rather than electronic recount of some Florida counties, Bush is almost certainly going to respond by challenging Gore victories in Wisconsin, Iowa, New Mexico and maybe elsewhere.

Winer is certainly right that given all of the fallout that happens if Gore or Bush lose the recount and then start mounting legal challenges, it might be best if the loser simply conceded for the good of the nation, but if Bush and Gore were the sort to go along with that idea they probably wouldn’t be in politics at this level (then again if Richard Nixon of all people could concede a tainted election to his opponent, surely Gore or Bush could muster up the moral courage to match Nixon!)

Utah Voters Reign In Property Seizures

By an overwhelming 69 to 31 percent margin, Utah voters on Tuesday approved a ballot initiative that reigns in some of the most outrageous civil forfeiture laws to finance the war on drugs. The initiative addressed three problems with forfeitures: seizure of third party property, legal representation for people whose property is seized, and where money from sale of seized property goes.

The initiative provides more legal protection for third party victims of property seizures. Under most civil forfeiture laws, a person who lends a car to a friend who then uses it to commit a crime generally has his property seized regardless of whether he knew the friend or associate was going to use the property to commit a crime. In Detroit, for example, a property seizure case made national headlines when a woman had her car seized after her husband used the car to solicit a prostitute.

The measure also allows people whose property is seized to have the same access to state-provided attorneys that they would have in a criminal case. This is important because often the costs of hiring lawyers and taking legal action to regain improperly seized property is often greater than the value of the property itself.

Finally, the most important part of the measure is that the proceeds from sales of seized property go to schools rather than police departments. Utah police complained this will cost the millions of dollars in funds they need to fight the drug war, which is exactly the point. When police benefit financially from the results of their property seizures, there is an incentive to focus on increasing property seizures. In several high profile cases around the country, police have targeted the homes of wealthy individuals for relatively minor drug and cocaine possession charges because of the financial rewards awaiting the police department from sales of the expensive property (in several cases, for example, yachts have been seized when drug officers found a handful of marijuana cigarettes owned by a guest on the boat).

These three changes to forfeiture laws bring some common sense to property seizure and should be used nationwide in reforming a property grab by police that is out of control.

Source:

Majority Approves Initiative Limiting Property Seizure. Deseret News, November 8, 2000.

Remembering Roger McBride

With talk circulating among the punditocracy that Democrat Al Gore and his supporters might try to convince electors to cast their votes for Gore based on his win of the popular vote, it is worth pointing out that the Libertarian Party received its only vote in the Electoral College in American history thanks to a turncoat elector.

After the 1972 election, former Republican Virginia legislator Roger McBride was a presidential elector who was supposed to support Richard Nixon but changed his vote and cast it for Libertarian Party candidate John Hospers.

McBride followed up his changed electoral vote by running for president on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1976 garnering 175,000 votes on the 32 state ballots he appeared.

McBride died in 1995.

Booing Batch and Bye Bye Bobby

For the National Football League’s Detroit Lions, this was not a good week. First quarterback Charlie Batch got slammed to the ground — sustaining a concussion in the process — and fans at the Detroit Silverdome booed Batch when he stood up after the hit (i.e. they would have preferred he stayed down with the concussion because the fans hate him). To add insult to injury, coach Bobby Ross then threw in the towel citing burnout.

What is going on here? Batch is a decent quarterback and Ross is a phenomenal coach. Unfortunately they are and were hamstringed by an organization that doesn’t have a clue about how to put together a winning football team.

For years, for example, the Lions tolerated underperforming head coach Wayne Fontes who actually turned around and sued them after he was finally fired saying all that standing on the sidelines caused his back problems. Fontes was a player’s quarterback who was more concerned about being loved by everyone on the team than winning games. Fontes had the best running back in the NFL, Barry Sanders, for much of his tenure and still managed to go nowhere. The frustration of all those years on Fontes teams with no hope of making a serious run in the playoffs contributed to Sanders sudden retirement a couple years ago.

Ross is a football genius who got driven out of Detroit because the team’s owners are more worried about luxury boxes in the new stadium under construction than they are about the woeful offensive line. Several years ago they lost key members of the offensive line who left saying the Lions could not pay them enough to stay in Detroit.

The choice of new coach Gary Moeller seems like a step back to the Fontes days. Although he is a competent coach, Moeller is best known in Michigan for being fired from the job as University of Michigan football coach after he started an altercation in a restaurant.

It is personnel decisions like that which have left the Lions 246-290-13 since current owner William Clay Ford bought the team in 1964. The best chance the Lions have of ever being successful is for the Ford family to sell the team to somebody who understands what it takes to win in the NFL.