I agree with Obama on this one, too.

According to Yahoo news:

Barack Obama told House Democrats on Tuesday that as president he would order his attorney general to scour White House executive orders and expunge any that "trample on liberty," several lawmakers said.

Presidents, as head of the executive branch of government, issue such orders to direct operations of executive branch agencies, like the Justice Department and the CIA.

I have said for years that I was wanting a President to go through all the executive orders issued by previous administrations and get rid of the ones that I disagreed with or wanted to change. Actually, to be more accurate, I feel that every last executive order should be nullified upon the leaving of the previous administration. There is no way feasible that the executive branch should be held to the standards laid down by a President from 30 years ago. Why should choices made by Jimmy Carter dictate how George W. Bush runs his administration? If an executive officer made the order, and executive officer can rescind the order.

I have no problem with the chief executive officer making administration policy. I do have a problem with using executive orders in place of law. For instance, Bush's order on bass fishing regulation (cited in the article) is not something a POTUS should be deciding. Whether the CIA is allowed to perform certain sorts of operations, however, is within the jurisdiction of the head of the executive branch.

Of course I expect someone like Obama to only keep liberally bending orders in place, but he does have the concept of eliminating those orders that do not coincide with his goals and purposes.

Water conservation and reclamation hurts American families?

Water reclamation is not a bad idea. I am all for recycling used water, often called "gray water" for purposes of irrigation, construction, and other non-potable purposes. If the water is just going to waste anyway, then I say it is a great move to do so. However, I have a slight problem with the US government paying for a small town like Benson to build a pipeline to reclaim said water. Why should people in Arkansas be contributing to the project here in North Carolina?

Projects like this are what I consider to be pork barrel spending. Sure, some people may benefit. However, it is not the job of the federal government to act like an unending pool of money to be siphoned off for special or experimental projects.

When building or expanding the town's water supply is the time to innovate and include the gray water reclamation lines. I remember that the proposed ethanol plant in Selma was planning on using gray water for its plant. However, there was no such line existing anywhere. One would have to be built from way out in Smithfield all the way in to Selma's fringes. That of course would have been funded by tax dollars in one form or another.

Government grants are TAX DOLLARS. Never forget that fact. Whenever some town applies for a grant to revitalize its downtown, for people to renovate their homes, or whatever, we are talking about tax dollars. Multiply those local expenditures times the tens of thousands of other communities in this nation and you can see why we have such a huge budget in our federal government.

Government loans are probably even worse than grants. Why do I say that? Because the federal government taxes us citizens to get the capital. Then they turn around and lend it to municipalities like Selma or Benson, as is the case in this instance. Then the town has to pay back borrowed tax dollars with funds it derives from...yup, you guessed it, tax dollars. In essence, we are being taxed twice for the same funding.

The federal government has no business being in the lending industry. It has no business redistributing the wealth of its citizens. People wonder why I am passionate about such waste, why I decry it so. It is because it truly impacts each and every tax payer in this nation. There are some who pay no taxes. Even people who pay very little taxes often get back more money than they paid the government by nature of the earned income tax credit and the recent tax rebate incentive package.

In the 1950's, women were primarily stay at home mothers and wives. The man of the house went to work in the morning and came home in the evening. They usually lived comfortably on one salary. Nowadays, that is virtually impossible for many Americans. It means that more and more families can not survive on a single income so now both parents have to work. It means that children are placed in day care so that a stranger can raise the children instead of their own parents. It means that there is a lot more economic pressure that stresses out couples and fractures their marriages. It means that women have lost the sense of femininity and compete with men in the work place instead of glorying in the role of a mother that they were created to perform. It means that the high taxation rates have short changed our youth instead of helping them. It means that welfare queens can have more babies and get more money instead of marrying a man and settling down. It undermines the family. Yes, building a gray water reclamation pipeline in Benson helps undermine its own citizenry.

Here is the news item from the WTSB news page.

Benson Receives Federal Loan To Fund $3M Reclaimed Wastewater Project
Benson is one step closer to start construction of a nearly eight-mile pipeline to take treated wastewater and deliver it to CPC Wholesale Nursery on Benson Hardee Road where it will be used for irrigation. The town has accepted a low-interest loan for $886,000 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help fund the $3 million project. Reclaimed wastewater can be used to irrigate decorative plants and other crops not intended for human consumption. Commercial-scale grass growing operations, including pasture land, golf courses and turf farms, are common beneficiaries of reclaimed wastewater. While no other area businesses or farmers have expressed an interest in tying their irrigation systems into the pipeline, officials maintain it’s an excellent incentive to prospective agribusiness owners. Benson Town Manager Keith Langdon said the nursery was chosen as the initial recipient of the water because of the amount of water they use for irrigation: between 300,000 to 350,000 gallons per day. The pipeline is part of a water reclamation project that would capture an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 gallons per day of water that would otherwise be dumped back into Hannah Creek. The town is currently restricted to treating and discharging no more than 1.97 million gallons per day. While the reclaimed water project will reduce the amount of treated wastewater being released, it will not increase the capacity of the water treatment plant, according to Martin Morris, the plant supervisor. Water reclamation is not entirely new to Benson. For the past two years, effluent from the wastewater treatment plant has been routed to South Johnston High School - about a mile from the plant - to be used for irrigation. Mr. Morris said the school uses about 24,000 gallons per day.

Jury duty over...fast conviction **UPDATED**

I did end up having jury duty for two days. My date was postponed from Monday the 23rd to Tuesday the 24th. Then it was postponed to Monday the 30th, then rescheduled yet again for Friday the 27th. On Friday, the jury pool went to the U.S. District Court, Eastern North Carolina District courthouse on New Bern Avenue in Raleigh. A bunch of us sat around in an assembly room and finally went into the courtroom an hour after the appointed time. Sixteen of us were ushered into the jury box plus two more seats outside the box. Only four people were dismissed, one of which being a Harnett County lawyer. After the initial 12, six more were interviewed for the remaining two seats as alternate jurors. Four were dismissed. The rest of the jury pool was then dismissed, not even being interviewed.

It was a bit different. The judge asked all the questions, usually consisting of where we live, our marital status, what we did for a living, and if married, what our spouses did for a work.

The case was a criminal one, in which one inmate was physically assaulted by another inmate while in the recreation cage. The victim was a chomo, which makes him a target by other inmates. In just a few moments, he was beaten within an inch of his life. The perpetrator gave him a roundhouse kick, knocked him to the ground, and repeatedly kicked him in the head, ribs, side, and abdomen. He had head lacerations, broken ribs, a collapsed lung, and a ruptured spleen. Without an emergency splenectomy, the victim would have died.

The inmates in this case were in a special housing unit at the Butner Federal Correctional Facility. They are locked up 23 hours a day and allowed just one hour of recreation time in some cages. The cages are about 15 feet by 10 feet, four men to a cage. When the guard went to put away the handcuffs he used to secure the prisoners from their cells to the rec cages, the perpetrator, Scott Dell Gustin, stomped a mud hole in David Danser.

On Friday, the lawyers made opening statements. The lawyer for the US Government was terrible. He really needs to find a new career. He is hardly articulate, monotone, he does not flow well, and he is a bit soft spoken. This was his first trial, as if we could not tell. Fortunately, an experienced lawyer, Gaston Williams, was there to work with him. The defense attorney had a father and son team from the Edmisten Webb law firm. The Edmisten part of that firm refers to Rufus Edmisten, former NC Attorney General and former NC Secretary of State.

I don't know if the defense arguments were just so weak that the Webbs had a hard time building a convincing case or that they are just not great lawyers. [ADDITIONAL NOTE ADDED 7/10/08 -- I just got a phone call from Woodie Webb, Sr., the lead defense attorney and had a nice conversation about the trial and this blog entry. Mr. Webb took exception to that last sentence as if I had actually called his competence into question. For that, I apologize. After I went back and read the blog entry, I realized that what I had meant to be a rhetorical and slightly sarcastic comment could have been taken the wrong way. I figured it would have been incredibly obvious that the defense had an extremely weak case. Mr. Webb admitted that very thing on the phone. He knew that he had to grasp at straws as the court appointed attorney to create reasonable doubt and that he had pretty much nothing to work with. I could have worded that sentence better than I did. Since I grew up with a rather sarcastic wit, I often forget that not everybody can glean that intent from my brain droppings.] Assertions were made to attempt to create reasonable doubt. In the face of a half dozen witnesses and a common thread through all the testimony, they really just could not convince us of any reasonable doubt as to the guilt of Paul Gustin. There were only four men in the cage. One was a victim who directly identified the attacker. Another testified that Gustin was the attacker. The fourth claims to not have seen anything.

I will spare the long, boring recital of the details, but I will share this part. We were expecting to be there on Tuesday, July 1. However, testimony was shortened, the prosecution rested, and we heard closing arguments Monday afternoon. It took longer for the judge to read the jury instructions than it did for us to reach a verdict.

We had to elect a jury foreman. I was chosen unanimously. When the question was asked who we want to pick, everyone pointed at me. I guess I was the most outspoken in the jury room, citing details during breaks, recounting my notes, and talking about testimony each break that we were sent to the jury room. I took copious notes, along with one lady.

I went over the three things we needed in order to fulfill a conviction. We had the part that the victim did indeed receive serious bodily injury and then we had to agree that defendant was the one who willingly and knowingly did it. As I started to read a few of my notes on issues for us to ponder, one guy cut us short and said that we should just save the time and take a vote, since he got the feeling that we were all in agreement. I asked if they wanted a raise of hands or a private ballot. I said that if there was a single person uncomfortable with a raise of hands, that we needed a private ballot. All were agreeable to the raising of hands. I asked if there were any for not guilty. None. All raised for guilty. Even before we took the vote, one guy grabbed the foreman's verdict sheet and handed it my way, indicating that he thought it was time. In less than ten minutes, we elected the foreman, recounted some details and requirements, and voted on the verdict. News of such a quick verdict could not have been good news to the defense. We had to wait for the judge to reassemble the lawyers and all in the court for us to come out and hand the verdict to the bailiff.

There were a lot of things that you do see on TV on legal shows, but also a lot you don't. We joked in the jury room often about how Matlock would have done things. In the jury, we had a lot of people who got along well. Folks were from Rocky Mount, Granville County, Cary, Creedmoor, Lillington, Goldsboro, Raleigh, and a few places in between. We actually had a good time as a group, despite the fact that many did not want to be there. I was just fine being a juror. This was my first time ever getting a jury summons.

One thing I relayed to the clerk for Judge Boyle at the beginning of the first full day of trial (Monday) as well as the prosecuting attorney (after all was done and over) is that for many of us in the jury, not ONE TIME was our identity verified as jurors. The security guards at the federal building never asked for identification. They clerk of court's employees never checked ID. Both days of jury duty never required me or most of my fellow jurors to verify that we were actually the ones summonsed. I thought about saying that I was not Troy but some unemployed friend of his who needed the $40 per diem.

I see that my blog entry has now been referenced on the website Jury Experiences. Thanks.

And it is the government's job to pay for people to watch TV WHY???

I disagree with the federal government's decision to make analog TV a thing of the past. I disagree even more with spending our tax dollars on the purchasing of converter boxes for people to use to watch TV. This is NOT a function of the government and it is an illegal use of our tax money. Nobody ever reads the Constitution any more, apparently.

From The N&O. Click on the link for the full story.

Millions of older and disabled Americans in nursing and adult-care homes are excluded from a government program that helps people convert their TV sets to receive a new digital signal next year.

The reason? A federal program that pays for digital converter boxes for older televisions -- necessary when all TV broadcasting goes digital early next year -- specifically requires recipients to live in a "household" as recognized by the U.S. Census Bureau.