How is this legal?

In this article, a Hispanic trucker has to fork over his life savings to DEA officers and then prove it wasn't drug money -- when there was no evidence he was a smuggler and drug-sniffing dogs found nothing? This is hard to believe. There is nothing that would keep DEA from simply taking people's cash if this is the case, but apparently, it really is the case. I plan to forward this article to my senator at the very least. Unbelievable!

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A trucker has sued the Drug Enforcement Administration, seeking to get back nearly $24,000 seized by DEA agents earlier this month at a weigh station on U.S. 54 in New Mexico north of El Paso, Texas.

Anastasio Prieto of El Paso gave a state police officer at the weigh station permission to search the truck to see if it contained "needles or cash in excess of $10,000," according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the federal lawsuit Thursday.

Prieto told the officer he didn't have any needles but did have $23,700.

Officers took the money and turned it over to the DEA. DEA agents photographed and fingerprinted Prieto over his objections, then released him without charging him with anything.

Border Patrol agents searched his truck with drug-sniffing dogs, but found no evidence of illegal substances, the ACLU said.

The lawsuit alleges the defendants violated Prieto's right to be free of unlawful search and seizure by taking his money without probable cause and by fingerprinting and photographing him.

"Mere possession of approximately $23,700 does not establish probable cause for a search or seizure," the lawsuit said.

It said Prieto pulled into the weigh station about 10:30 a.m. Aug. 8 and was let go about 4 p.m.

DEA agents told Prieto he would receive a notice of federal proceedings to permanently forfeit the money within 30 days and that to get it back, he'd have to prove it was his and did not come from illegal drug sales.

They told him the process probably would take a year, the ACLU said.

The ACLU's New Mexico executive director, Peter Simonson, said Prieto needs his money now to pay bills and maintain his truck. The lawsuit said Prieto does not like banks and customarily carries his savings as cash.

"The government took Mr. Prieto's money as surely as if he had been robbed on a street corner at night," Simonson said. "In fact, being robbed might have been better. At least then the police would have treated him as the victim of a crime instead of as a perpetrator."

The Death of Traditional Journalism

When I started college, I had the idea in my head that I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. I loved writing and had dominated the Journalism department in my high school, even running the small town paper when times got hard, and my dream was to be the next Woodward and Bernstein, exposing corruption, educating the public...

Well, fast forward to the summer after my sophomore year. I started working for a small, local paper as a cub reporter and I had a nose for scandal. I found out that some business had come in and bought out all the buildings on Main Street and was causing each business to close, one by one, by raising rents ridiculously high (Two and three hundred percent). But...I wasn't allowed to report it.

I found out the local factory had an asbestos problem and was exposing their workers. One man had gotten in to take photos of the asbestos piled and floating in the air, and had been promptly fired. But...I wasn't allowed to report it.

Why? Advertising dollars. Relationships with owners. Big business. Money.

I quickly realized that, in most cases, reporters' hands are tied. The editor's hands are also tied. The real decisions are made in the boardroom by the owners. And becoming the owner of a media company wasn't the subject I was studying.

That was practically an innocent time. I could not have looked 12 years into the future to see how the media would consolidate...and consolidate...and consolidate. But now the content of our news is in the hands of a few extremely powerful people. Seeing yet another consolidation -- the Wall Street Journal in the hands of the man who created Fox News -- makes me glad that bloggers are out there. We are part of the last bastion of free speech available -- we and a dwindling number of small, radical local papers, a few online news' sources, podcasters. My skepticism of traditional media mounts and more and more I read the experiences of bloggers as my news (Baghdad Burning in Iraq, for example). I may have dropped Journalism in school...but I still feel wishful about the concept.

May bloggers live long and bring down more politicians!

From Murdoch Prevails by Forbes

News Corp.'s acquisition of Dow Jones will represent a coronation of sorts for Murdoch. With a prosperous TV network, a market-leading cable news channel, a soon-to-be-launched business news channel, a major film studio, big Internet assets like social-networking giant MySpace, and now The Wall Street Journal, Murdoch has arguably become the King of All Media.

This extraordinary concentration of power in the hands of one man will trouble critics of the media industry's continuing consolidation and those who disagree with Murdoch's conservative politics.

Regardless of what one thinks of his media empire, it's clear that where he leads News Corp. from here will in many ways be the story of where the media industry itself is headed. What does the future hold for newspapers, television, the film industry and the Internet? Keep an eye on News Corp. to find out.

Zero energy bill, Zero emissions

Mr. Strizki's monthly utility bill is zero – he's off the power grid – and his system creates no carbon-dioxide emissions. Neither does the fuel-cell car parked in his garage, which runs off the hydrogen his system creates.

It sounds promising, even utopian: homemade, storable energy that doesn't contribute to global warming. But does Strizki's method – converting electricity generated from renewable sources into hydrogen – make sense for widespread adoption?

I found this article while perusing my favorite personal finances blogs and although it does relate to finance, I decided to post it here for a few reasons. First, I think it's a great article and I love the fact that some guy just decided to make his home and vehicle completely free of greenhouse gas emissions. I think this embodies the true American spirit, and I find it ironic that he has gotten so much criticism for doing what nobody thinks can be done simple because...it cost him a lot of money. I mean, if the U.S. government had done the same research for half a mil, we'd be praising that lab to the stars. But some guy does it and suddenly everyone breaks out the "not practical" phrases. Whatever.

Secondly, I don't really know if anyone reads my PF blog and I don't actually care. It is more there for me to track my own finances and as a neutral place for Marti and I to communicate. So, since I want my readers to actually see the the article, I am posting it here.

Also, it's been an age since I posted, and I apologize; my world has been a bit crazy. But I should be back on track soon. Stay tuned.

A 50-cent soda

When I was in highschool, my maths teacher used to give us extra credit problems -- hard problems, problems we hadn't gone over in class -- and he would give a Coke to the person who solved the problem first (never mind that he favored the boys in the class; that's another issue altogether). He was fond of saying that whenever you wanted something to happen, you got a lot of smart guys (notice the gender) in a room and offered them a million dollars for finding a solution, and that's how a lot of the best inventions happened. I don't know if he was right, but lunch hour was right after math class and I would see my fellow classmates furtively working on the problem in corners, trying to get the answer first so they could get that fifty cent soda. It's amazing what people will do. I won't even tell you about the time he offered a six-pack of Coke for a college-level problem (okay, I'll tell you -- I solved it but he wouldn't believe me, so I got a male classmate to present it and we split the winnings).

I guess Mr. Baumann must now be in charge of the world, because I saw this headline yesterday and it piqued my interest: Scientists to Vie for $25M Climate Prize. I'm glad that we are finally facing what has been pretty obvious for a while now; the earth is getting warmer, and we are part of the problem. I'm glad, too, because I think Mr. Baumann was right. If a group of 16-year-olds would work through lunch for a 50-cent soda, what would smart guys (and gals) do for $25 million? A lot, I hope. Because we need it.

On Building Big

You know, this article really hit me. I have a 1300 square foot home that often seems huge to me (and difficult to clean) and I sometimes wish we had a smaller home. I mean, all of us generally use the one master bath. We only use 2 of the three bedrooms. And yet, I know my home is considered "modest." A friend refused to consider any home less than 1500 square feet for her family. 1500 square feet? That's 200 more square feet to clean and to worry about. I personally like small houses with big yards but that ideal seems to be going as builders realize they charge "per square foot" and that's for the home, not the lot. You can read this poignant article here.

I was driving to Boston and saw this house set above the others, all pomp and puffery, just a blink away from a city where the working poor live in flats, and it struck me -- as it hasn't in a long, long time, because I am inured, because I see what I want to see -- that we are going in the wrong direction in this country; that the gap between the rich and the poor is a great divide and it is not pretty, no matter what your political beliefs.

More Nukes

While I am not one to march outside of Davis-Monthan or anything, I have been a member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) for several years now. Most of the time I think some of the members have had a tad too much sugar, or perhaps smoked a leetle too much weed in the 60s. I mean, they would love to have civil disobedience every third day of the week, and nothing pisses them off more than a living, breathing Republican. I attended the meetings for a little while and then discovered that 1. Mentioning that Marti used to be in the Marine Corps brought silence to a room, and 2. I was the youngest person there by 40 years. At least. Also? I tend to be very moderate, at least in comparison, although by some of my family members standards I am a screaming liberal. And I don't like marching around nuclear testing sites, it's very bad for my complexion (and my ovaries)

Nevertheless, I was rather shocked when I stumbled across this article in the New York Times:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 — The Bush administration is expected to announce next week a major step forward in the building of the country’s first new nuclear warhead in nearly two decades. It will propose combining elements of competing designs from two weapons laboratories in an approach that some experts argue is untested and risky.

The new weapon would not add to but replace the nation’s existing arsenal of aging warheads, with a new generation meant to be sturdier, more reliable, safer from accidental detonation and more secure from theft by terrorists.

The article goes on to say that the government wants two competing labs to make a hybrid which MAY OR MAY NOT be safe, because if not one weapons lab will go out of business. I'm sorry? I thought we all agreed only to pour money into one failing business *cough - Amtrak - cough* ? What is up with this? I like to call it Republican charity, because those poor weapons laboratories, they are starving, and we wouldn't want them on the streets.

*sigh*

I suppose there is something to be said about not pissing off the guys who build the bombs. Nevertheless, am I the only one who thinks its a tiny bit hypocritical to be "renewing" our nuclear warheads at a time when we are fighting two wars and sanctioning or threatening sanctions to several other countries for... developing nuclear warheads? I know some redneck would say, "But we need to be number one, superior, keep our world power status, blah blah blah" but honestly -- developing more nuclear weapons? Will keep us safer? Come on. We already have Paris Hilton. Do we really need another weapon more deadly than that?

Some kudos to Republicans

While I generally think of conservatives as evil, power-hungry businessmen who love to use God to convince people to take money from the poor, I did appreciate this speech from new Minority House Speaker John Boehner:

And as Mr. Boehner rose to speak and to hand the gavel over to Mrs. Pelosi, he mentioned the historic nature of her rise to the speakership:

“But today marks an occasion I think the Founding Fathers would view approvingly. My fellow Americans: whether you’re a Republican, a Democrat, or an independent, this is a cause for celebration.”

And in a rather humble tone, he said:

“There were some great achievements during the 12 years that followed, but there were also some profound disappointments. If there is one lesson that stands out from our party’s time in the majority, it is this: a congressional majority is simply a means to an end. The value of a majority lies not in the chance to wield great power, but in the chance to use limited power to do great things.

“We refer to the gavel I’m holding as the Speaker’s gavel. But like everything else in this chamber, it really belongs to the people. It’s on loan from the real owners. This is the people’s House. This is the people’s Congress. And most of the people don’t care which party controls it; what they want is a government that is limited, honest, accountable, and responsive to their needs. The moment a majority forgets this lesson, it begins writing itself a ticket to minority status.”