Supreme Court to consider eminent domain

Well it took them long enough didn't it.

KRT Wire | 02/21/2005 | Supreme Court to consider eminent domain: "Berliner, with the Institute for Justice, said Kelo isn't asking the court to overturn its 1954 ruling or even diminish eminent domain in a way that will affect private development.
She said that because even New London agrees that Kelo's neighborhood isn't a blighted slum, it's an extreme case.
'We're just trying to have the standards enforced properly,' she said. 'It's one thing to take (property) for private development of a blighted area, it's another to take it to simply raise tax dollars or create jobs."

So apparently the argument is that if the neighborhood is poor -er "blighted" then it is okay to seize their property by force to develop the area for people with more money. If they are middle class then its not okay.

I like to think of this as the long struggle of local governments to keep class warfare alive and well.

The more things change...

Khaleej Times Online

NEW DELHI - Three days after Nepal’s King Gyanendra assumed direct powers in the Himalayan kingdom, reports trickled in Friday of a severe clampdown on all voices of dissent.


India’s Hindustan Times quoted sources in Kathmandu as saying that helicopters from the Royal Nepal Army (RNA) had fired on student protesters in the town of Pokhra soon after King Gyanendra dismissed the government of Sher Bahadur Deuba on Tuesday.

The newspaper said the reports were confirmed by a spokesperson for Nepal’s National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). “We have information that there was such an incident from very reliable sources,” Kedar Prasad Poudyal, acting secretary of the NHRC, was quoted as saying.

At least 15 students were hurt in the incident at Prithvi Narayan College, which RNA troops also raided, with the injured shifted to army barracks, the report said. There were reports of continued arrests of politicians in Nepal in the Indian media, most of which had correspondents filing stories from Nepal over satellite telephones.

Some of the politicians had approached the local office of the United Nations for protection and officials were now in the process of prioritizing which ones to help, the Hindustan Times reported.

The more things change the more they stay the same. Maybe this guy should call himself "caesar" while hes at it. Its so stereotypical of tyrant activity it reminds me of several episodes of Babylon 5 in which the exact same thing happened only it was all of earth instead of one country.

When will our world get past the petty dictator motif. The dismiss government, crush dissent, kill the oppositon, and reign with military force motif. When is that going to end. Will we hear about these every year till the end of time? Or will we reach a point where its completely out of our system? Or perhaps as predicted on Babylon 5 we'll just learn to do it on a larger scale.