Unless there’s a whole helluva lot missing from this story, there are a lot of people who need to be fined, fired, and jailed:

The U.S. Department of Education issued the search and called in the S.W.A.T for his wife's defaulted student loans.

An early-morning no-knock raid by heavily-armed federal agents, over student loans. And they locked three children in the back of a patrol car while they spent hours searching the house for a woman who wasn’t there. What exactly were they looking for, a secret stash of hundred-dollar bills they could seize to pay off the loans? What were they afraid he’d flush if they executed a normal search warrant at a normal hour, his checkbook?

[Update: and the additional explanation, as provided by the actual search warrant, is that they believed the woman who didn’t live there had fraudulently filed student-loan paperwork, possibly in volume. The kitchen-sink list of items they wanted to be able to seize (and the judge’s refusal to allow them to go fishing for unrelated crimes) suggests that it would have been impossible for someone to destroy it all during a normal search, so there’s no excuse at all for an armed raid. One or two feds, with a local officer for support, could have politely knocked and executed a normal search.]

If an actual house passes you on the highway, you're driving too slow.

Being arrested because a cop thought you might be carrying a pocket knife. Not brandishing it, not openly using a clearly-illegal type of knife, but having a slight bulge in your front pocket suggesting that there’s a knife clipped there.

All part of an ambitious District Attorney’s plan to crack down on the scourge of modern pocket knives purchased at major retailers by law-abiding citizens. Because if it looks scarier than a butter knife, it must be a criminal tool that no normal person would own. This may sound familiar to anyone who’s seen the laundry list of cosmetic features used to define “assault weapons”.

Personally, I carry a 555 and a 710, so no Big Apple for me!

Now for the real question. Is this District Attorney:

A. running for re-election.
B. pretending to be "tough on crime".
C. raising revenue with easy arrests.
D. improving cops' personal knife collections.
E. ruining lives with bullshit convictions.
F. diverting police resources from actual crime.
G. all of the above

...the other three were of a breed Verkan Vall had learned to recognize on any time-line --- the arrogant, cocksure, ambitious, leftist politician, who knows what is best for everybody better than anybody else does, and who is convinced that he is inescapably right and that whoever differs with him is not only an ignoramus but a venal scoundrel as well.
Last Enemy, H. Beam Piper, August, 1950

…May Day celebrations will feature an entirely different crowd.

Nothing like last month’s monster, but bigger than all but 5 of the aftershocks in the week that followed it. The USGS report gives an epicenter just a few miles offshore, and other reports say the accompanying tsunami is expected to top out at 2 meters.

"By not allowing interior designers to be specialists and focus on the things they do, what you’re basically doing is contributing to 88,000 deaths every year."

Yes, it’s true. This person is actually a licensed interior designer, testifying to the Florida legislature about the dangers of allowing just anyone to choose fabrics.

There are more juicy quotes from people who both teach and study this and other life-or-death professions, and who are desperate to keep just anyone from engaging in pillow-selection, hair-braiding, fundraising, water-cooler vending, dance instruction, furniture moving, etc.

Now, I’m not saying that the “Xfinity” thing hasn’t persuaded consumers into thinking you’re all shiny and new again, but if you wanted to do one tiny little thing that would show everyone a commitment to quality in one component of your “triple play” deals, perhaps you could pick up the May 2011 issue of C_ns_m_r R_p_rts.

And then pick up the company they rated as the best in that category.

Just a, y’know, suggestion.