Both The Corruption Chronicles and Bailout are available through the Kootenai Shoshone Counties Community Library Network.

After reading both, readers are very likely to correctly conclude that public corruption at all levels of government is non-partisan.  Partisan affiliation and profession of party ideology are more tools to facilitate individual and institutional corruption than a cause of them.

A concern being heard more often is that the United States government will use our military forces to supersede the authority of our civilian law enforcement.  In essence, the fear is that just as with the British in 1770 in Boston (remember the Boston Massacre?), our present government will use military personnel inside the United States not to protect citizens but to police them.  More currently, in May 1970 members of the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four unarmed student rioters at Kent State University.

There are laws in place in the United States, the best-known being the Posse Comitatus Act,  that prohibit that kind of military takeover of civilian law enforcement authorities.   For an excellent discussion of that law and some related ones, see the Congressional Research Service study entitled, “The Posse Comitatus Act and Related Matters:  The Use of the Military to Execute Civilian Law.”  The CRS study was released August 16 ,2012.

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The gang estimates presented in the 2011 National Gang Threat Assessment (NGTA) represent the collection of data provided by the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) through the National Drug Threat Survey, Bureau of Prisons, state correctional facilities, and National Gang Intelligence Center (NGIC) law enforcement partners.

The Assessment has some interesting information about gang activity in or affecting Idaho.  (more…)

Curiosity Image Courtesy of NASA-JPL

Curiosity has landed!

Here’s a link to the NASA MSL website.

Some of the neat interactive stuff is at JPL’s MSL website.

Here’s a link to some basic information about the mission.