[Guest post by Jack Dunphy]

The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday on the impact felt in the LAPD from one of the last vestiges of the federal consent decree that resulted from the Rampart scandal. Officers working gang and narcotics units are now required to disclose their personal finances to department auditors in an effort – a misguided one, in my opinion – to detect and deter corruption in those units. Many officers, particularly those assigned to gang units, have exercised their option to accept reassignment to other duties rather than disclose this information, resulting in vacancies in every gang unit in the city and the complete shutdown of some, including those in Southeast, 77th Street, and Northeast Divisions, three areas that see some of the city’s worst gang violence.

I discussed this issue in my most recent piece on Pajamas Media, which you can read here.

–Jack Dunphy

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

That is a quote from Dave Kranz, a spokesman for the California Farm Bureau Federation responding to the portion of Judge Vinson’s ruling where Vinson said that if the mandate was upheld, this meant the government could force people to eat broccoli.  It is a funny line and one of the bright spots in an otherwise risible New York Times piece on the Vinson decision.

The risible part starts with the very headline: “Tea Party Shadows Health Care Ruling.”  They echo the belief that because the judge mentioned the Boston Tea Party and its surrounding controversy, that this was supposedly a nod toward the modern political movement called the Tea Party which self-consciously invokes that incident.  They do so citing people I already fisked in the previous posts, here and here.

It’s worth remembering what the judge said there, if only because it is such a good line:

It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place.

But really, liberals?  You are going to concede America’s revolutionary heritage to one party or movement?  Now the Boston Tea Party is the property of the Tea Party?  Because that would seem like a tactical error, suggesting that your views are in opposition to what this nation was founded on.

(more…)

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

I confess fully that having Filipino in-laws makes me pay more attention than otherwise I would:

Imelda Marcos and her son, Ferdinand R. Marcos, have been ordered to pay $353.6 million for failing to adhere to a permanent injunction tied to a $4.5 billion judgment in the multidistrict litigation over alleged human rights violations stemming from her late husband’s rule over the Philippines….

The civil contempt order was issued after it was revealed that the Marcos defendants had attempted to divide and transfer their assets to make it difficult for the class to collect the judgment, according a motion that Swift filed on March 2, 2009. They also refused to appear for depositions or produce documents, and sold art worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. When the Marcos defendants failed to renounce their asset agreements and deposit proceeds from the art sales, they were fined $100,000 per day beginning on May 23, 1995.

Given the 5,000 days that have elapsed since then, the total sanction should have been more than $500 million, Swift wrote. He asked that the sanction be terminated and that a final judgment be issued against the Marcos defendants.

The bummer in all of this is that this discussion suggests that the Marcos are moving assets out of reach, which means that those harmed by the late Marcos’ regime might be as likely to recover on their rulings as the families of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman.

And, finally, it raises the question of how much our courts should be  used as a vehicle to correct injustices in other countries.

Anyway, read the whole thing (registration required).

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]