The city of Miami wants to cut down on litter by making it illegal to give food to homeless people:
The doggie bag from your restaurant dinner could be tomorrow’s lunch. But then you see someone on the street who needs that meal more than you do. So you hand it over (with a smile) and continue on your way, maybe feeling a little better about yourself.
Then a police officer stops you and hands you a $300 ticket.
That’s what could happen if a city ordinance being considered in Miami is enacted into law.
The Miami City Commission is considering a proposal that would prohibit “unauthorized” people and groups from sharing food with homeless people in the downtown area.
Sometimes I wonder whether it’s a lack of common decency or a lack of common sense. Maybe it’s both:
A proposed law designed to prevent child abuse in schools has been lauded by children’s protection advocates, and slammed by House Republicans as an unnecessary expansion of federal government power.The House of Representatives last week passed the Keeping All Students Safe Act, which for the first time sets minimum national standards for practices such as the use “seclusion rooms” or forced restraint of unruly students.
The bill would ban the use of “mechanical restraints” such as tying children to furniture, and would allow seclusion and physical restraint to be used only when there is “imminent danger of injury and only when imposed by trained staff.”
Though the bill was a bipartisan effort in reaction to a government report last year that found “hundreds of cases of alleged abuse and death” related to the practices, it was opposed by a vast majority of Republicans, who said the bill amounted to an intrusion on states’ rights and the ability of local school districts to determine their own policies.
In all, 145 Republicans and eight Democrats voted against the bill last week, which will have to get the Senate’s and the president’s approval to become law.
You know that promotional slogan, “Virgina is for lovers”? Well, they’re going to have to change that now, to “Virginia is for haters.”
It’s not true that conservatives totally had their way with the Senate health care reform bill. Chris Bowers lists nine battles that progressives won. Via Ezra Klein, who points out “how peculiar the framing of this debate has been. There’s no doubt that progressives have suffered some real losses in the legislative process. The public option, for one. But along the way, a lot of progressives have lost sight of the fact that the very existence of this legislative process is a huge progressive victory.”
Jed Lewison at Daily Kos offers graphic evidence that Rasmussen’s polls “are single-handedly propping up Republicans in national composite tracking indexes.”
Glenn Greenwald agrees with Andrew Sullivan’s assessment of Mark Halperin’s journalistic abilities.
Cognitive dissonance is watching Kenneth Starr condemn Liz Cheney on national television.
Glenn Greenwald wonders if and when Congress will pass a resolution condemning Liz Cheney and William Kristol’s “Al Qaeda Seven Department of Jihad” ad as they did MoveOn’s “Petraeus/Betrayus” ad.
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