For Megan and Annie, a shot of my new toaster. She's a beauty. The older I get the more I seem to slip toward anarchy. I've become reflexively suspicious of the motives of everyone in authority. I expect the worst and I am rarely surprised these days. While the echos of, ...ding dong, the Bush is gone.. still hang in the air, I find that a major consulting firm, tied to prominent Democrats, has been identified as having given counsel to Gov. Blago about how to best sell the President's former Senate seat. Democrat or Republican, it matters little. The skunk smells the same. The past eight years have clouded that reality, but the next eight should clarify things. I do not doubt the President's resolve to bring about change, but I do not underestimate the will of the powerful to resist him. Open a dusty closet in any hall of government, local, state or federal and there will be a bipartisan stampede of rats out of the light and back into the shadows. But back to the subject of anarchy. A debate is raging all across Arizona, including Hooterville, over the spread of traffic cameras. This is an old argument in many places, but in the desert it is the latest. By way of disclaimer, I will disclose that I don't speed as a rule, except when I am moving at the pace of traffic. The last speeding ticket I received was in 1969 and that was for going 45 mph in a 35 zone. In Arizona, because of a quirk in the law, you must be going faster than 11 mph over the posted limit in order for a camera to snap your picture. Then, they send you a ticket and you are supposed to pay up. Most people don't, until they are tracked down. Merle Wayne Sneed has no argument with enforcing the speed limits, but I do have have a big issue with cameras. I really have issues with hiring private companies to run them. Particularly when many speed limits are set by the politicians, rather than the traffic engineers. We have a four-lane thoroughfare here in Hooterville, stretching from the University to the East side, where the speed limit is set at 30 mph. Traffic flows faster, making it easy pickings for the radar camera guys. The speed limit is set at 30, not for traffic safety reasons, but because the University-area crowd has their hand in the pocket of their friends in City government. Cars whizzing by at 40 are a menace in the eyes of the pretentious. The first rule of economics is, production increases when the price is high enough. Pay these companies enough and they will produce plenty of pictures. But, the bigger issue is the idea that I'm under surveillance when I am just going about my business. It turns out that our authorities are not only taking pictures of speeders, they are taking streaming video on a 24/7 basis. They are keeping this video for months, "just in case they need it", according to a spokesman. The authorities are quick to point out that these cameras are for "public safety" reasons and not revenue generation, which is just a happy byproduct. A camera can catch speeders at a rate a 1000-fold times that of an patrol officer. If public safety is our goal, we can carry things to a lot of undesirable, yet logical ends. If a camera on the roadway is good, isn't one on every corner better? Wouldn't we be safer if we were monitored more closely. Perhaps a camera trained on every house, or a GPS in every car. After all, if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about. Do you? Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky