Wednesday, January 12, 2005

In Recent Political News...

President Bush has an Ipod. Evidentally he listens to Van Morrison on it. Go figure. Oh and after his knee injury last year, he seems to have switched from running to cycling.

The US government posted a $1 billion budget surplus in December. We're still in the hole $114 billion for the year though. This time last year we were $130 billion in the hole so thats still an improvement.

Handgun fingerprinting in Maryland and New York is a failure. Handgun fingerprinting is where they analyze the fired case from a pistol for the various marks left on it by the gun's firing pin, extractor, etc. In theory this would allow the police to solve crimes easier. In practice, deliberately altering this pattern is cheap and easy. The pattern also changes with mechanical wear on the gun, so after one thousand rounds or so its completely different. Maryland has spent $2.5 million over 4 years on this. They have not caught a single criminal. New York spends $4 million per year with identical results.

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