And Senator John McCain of Arizona, once considered a prohibitive favorite, is now operating on a relative shoestring. He raised $5.7 million and spent $5.5 million, leaving him with $1.67 million that could be used in the primaries, and $1.73 million in debts.

By comparison, Representative Ron Paul of Texas, whose libertarian, antiwar Republican candidacy has gained a passionate following on the Web, raised $5.2 million and had $5.4 million left for the primaries and no debt.

Smokers who cross the state line to buy cheaper cigarettes could see their cars searched or seized as Tennessee tax agents start cracking down on the practice, revenue officials announced Friday.
[...]
Tax agents will stake out nearby stores in other states to find people loading up on cigarettes. Then a second agent will stop and search the vehicle once it crosses into Tennessee, Remke said.
Transporting between three and 24 cartons is a misdemeanor, and 25 or more is a felony, he said.

So depriving the state of $155 is a felony offense that can result in seizure of your car and the loss of your rights to vote or own guns.

Lured by false promises and driven by desperation, thousands of Chinese and Filipina women pay high fees for jobs in garment factories on the Pacific island of Saipan—which despite being a U.S. territory is exempt from federal minimum wage and certain immigration laws. The clothing they sew, bearing the "Made in the USA" label, is shipped duty- and quota-free to the U.S. for sale by The Gap, J. Crew, Polo, and other retailers.

see also

The recently publicized terrorist plot to blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport, like so many of the terrorist plots over the past few years, is a study in alarmism and incompetence: on the part of the terrorists, our government and the press.

Terrorism is a real threat, and one that needs to be addressed by appropriate means. But allowing ourselves to be terrorized by wannabe terrorists and unrealistic plots -- and worse, allowing our essential freedoms to be lost by using them as an excuse -- is wrong.
[...]
Following one of these abortive terror misadventures, the administration invariably jumps on the news to trumpet whatever ineffective "security" measure they're trying to push, whether it be national ID cards, wholesale National Security Agency eavesdropping or massive data mining. Never mind that in all these cases, what caught the bad guys was old-fashioned police work -- the kind of thing you'd see in decades-old spy movies.

The swelling Swiss bank accounts that Boris Nikolayevich lived off of as he drank his gurgling elderly self to death in the last eight years were just a modern version of the stolen haystacks the lazy Butka peasants slept on eighty years ago. Like them, Yeltsin stole whatever he could get his hands on and then lived out his days rolling in his bounty like a human pig -- because a sovok doesn't know how to enjoy anything except to roll around in it like a pig. Yeltsin was just better at it than the rest of his peers. And he survived longer than the rest of them because his "life" was, until today, just a biological technicality -- it is hard to kill what has, inside, been dead all along.
[...]
I ran a cover in my Moscow newspaper The eXile that showed a picture of a wobbling Yeltsin over the headline, "Die Already!!!" But he didn't. He survived and lived to turn over power to the next vampire, the Thief Mark VII, Vladimir Putin. Then he disappeared somewhere to spend seven glorious years drinking himself to death -- a Soviet version of Leaving Las Vegas, set in Switzerland and the south of France. Like all the great Russian monsters, like Stalin and Lenin and Brezhnyev and Andropov and a million other czars big and small, he died peacefully of natural causes while murders raged all around him, a piece of fat noiselessly clogging his heart while he slept in his stolen bed.

Admitting to having used LSD four decades ago is apparently enough to warrant a lifetime ban from entering the US:

Before long the customs guard was engrossed in an article Feldmar had published in the spring 2001 issue of the journal Janus Head. The article concerned an acid trip Feldmar had taken in London, Ontario, and another in London, England, almost forty years ago. It also alluded to the fact that he had used hallucinogenics as a "path" to understanding self and that in certain cases, he reflected, it could "be preferable to psychiatry." Everything seemed to collapse around him, as a quiet day crossing the border began to turn into a nightmare.

To my future background checkers, I would like to note that I have never commited any acts of moral turpitude, including but not limited to LSD use.

NBC said that they debated internally "for hours" over whether to air the VT gunman's multimedia manifesto. That's right, whole hours. Rather than even waiting until the dead had all been buried before posthumously stroking the gunman's narcissistic ego, they decided to forge ahead and lay it all out for us in a tantalizing trickle of photos and video clips. (Speaking of narcissism, how 'bout those NBC NEWS watermarks on all the images. Classy. Neener, neener! The killer chose us and not you!) Their justification for airing the material included something about helping people who wanted to make some sort of sense out of the massacre. Right. Oh, so he was apparently a crazy monotone talking motherfucker. Now it all makes sense. Thanks, NBC, you've taken your cues from FOX NEWS well and have done the public quite a service.

I'm sure the desire to air their big scoop before the other guys had absolutely no bearing whatsoever on their decision. Nor was it that they thought viewers' interest might be waning after seeing the same old greasy head shot for 48 continuous hours.

(More below...)

The Nation:

Eventually the rocket shrapnel was removed from Town's neck and his ears stopped leaking blood. But his hearing never really recovered, and in many ways, neither has his life. A soldier honored twelve times during his seven years in uniform, Town has spent the last three struggling with deafness, memory failure and depression. By September 2006 he and the Army agreed he was no longer combat-ready.

But instead of sending Town to a medical board and discharging him because of his injuries, doctors at Fort Carson, Colorado, did something strange: They claimed Town's wounds were actually caused by a "personality disorder." Town was then booted from the Army and told that under a personality disorder discharge, he would never receive disability or medical benefits.