U.S. government goes after mortgage scammers

It sickens me to see that some people will happily screw over people who are already in trouble:

The federal government is cracking down on scammers who target struggling homeowners looking to lower their monthly mortgage payments.

Hundreds of con artists have been taking advantage of victims through online advertisements on search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo!, promising to help homeowners modify their mortgages through the government-run program known as the Home Affordable Modification Program (or HAMP).

Last week, the agency that investigates fraud, waste and abuse in the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program, announced that it has shut down 85 scams that were advertising on Google. Then, on Monday, it announced it had halted another 125 shady advertisers on Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing search engine. ...

Ever since HAMP and other federal aid programs aimed at helping struggling homeowners were launched, scam artists have been finding ways to exploit them.

Drug prohibition in action

In this video, a police SWAT team in Columbia, Missouri shoot a suspect's two dogs. He was charged with nonviolent, victimless, misdemeanor marijuana possession. He was also charged with second-degree child endangerment (having drugs in the same house as the child), which raises the question: What endangers a child more, the father using marijuana in the same house as the child, or the police shooting guns in the same house as the child?


Don't (just) blame the police. Blame our draconian drug laws.

The case for drug legalization

Clive Crook makes the argument for drug legalization:

Even a casual observer can see that much of the damage done in the US by illegal drugs is a result of the fact that they are illegal, not the fact that they are drugs. Vastly more lives are blighted by the brutality of prohibition, and by the enormous criminal networks it has created, than by the substances themselves. This is true of cocaine and heroin as well as of soft drugs such as marijuana. But the assault on consumption of marijuana sets the standard for the policy’s stupidity.

Nearly half of all Americans say they have tried marijuana. That makes them criminals in the eyes of the law. Luckily, not all of them have been found out – but when one is grateful that most law-breakers go undetected, there is something wrong with the law.

The prohibition of drugs causes violent crime for the same reason the prohibition of alcohol did in the 1920s: When people can't resolve their disputes via the legal system, they tend to resolve them with violence instead.

Even our President has used illegal drugs and turned out O.K. Imagine how much worse his life would have turned out if he had been thrown in jail to punish him for harming himself. The prohibition of drugs is far more harmful than the drugs themselves.