Today I received Senator Carper's reply to my letter about Civil Asset Forfeiture. I was not satisfied by his answer, and here I how I responded:

Dear Senator Carper:

Thank you for your reply to my recent message regarding Civil Asset Forfeiture. You (or your staff) said:

Civil asset forfeiture programs violate several provisions of the Bill of Rights. Please introduce legislation to abolish civil asset forfeiture.

Civil asset forfeiture is not confiscation of contraband or illegal goods. It's not property that has been withheld as evidence during a criminal investigation. It's not a fine or restitution imposed on someone duly convicted of a crime.

Today was Newark Community Day, a local fair held annually on the University of Delaware's campus.

As usual the LPD ran an Operation Politically Homeless booth and Information table. We distributed party literature, including a flyer opposing the City of Newark's plan to have the General Assembly grant it very broad and vaguely defined new powers of taxation; and we collected names and email addresses of interested people.

The Libertarian Party of Delaware is seeking donations of used or new computer hardware. If you have any unused computer equipment taking up space, please consider giving it to us.

What we need most is a server class Pentium4 (or better) multiprocessor system. But any hardware that is less than ten years old is welcome. For example:

• Complete systems, especially Laptops / Notebooks, working or not.
• Components, such as motherboards, CPUs, memory, peripheral cards, SATA drives, tape drives, DVD burners, monitors, etc.

This bill was just introduced to the Delaware Senate by Senator Margaret Rose Henry. It would legalize and set up the ability to dispense marijuana for medicinal use.

Link to SB 94

Link to Sussex Countian Article

According to the article:

If passed, Henry’s bill would:
• Limit patients to six ounces of marijuana a month.

At last Tuesday's Seaford City Council meeting, the board decided they wanted to bypass the referendum process of annexing land into the city, preferring to be the ones with sole discretion whether or not a developer's property comes into the city's jurisdiction. The council has done it by a change in the town charter that has to be approved by the state legislature and the Governor, who have enough on their plates to think about this session, and aren't likely to do anything but rubber stamp the issue.

One of the items on the agenda for the LPD's annual Convention on May 2nd will be a set of proposed amendments to the Party's Articles of Association.

In addition to the most bloated budget ever, Congress is rushing an alarming number of bills to a vote this week w/o reading any of them. There is no compelling urgency to any of these bills:

• H.R. 1388 - Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act
• H.R. 1171 - Homeless Veterans Reintegration Program Reauthorization Act of 2009

Tim Geithner wants to nationalize the finance industry or at least control it w/o calling it nationalization.

Why not start with the Fed?

The Mercatus Center at George Mason University has released a detailed study ranking the 50 states in terms of how much individual freedom each permits to its residents.

New Hampshire places #1 in the overall ranking, and first in Fiscal Policy. New York comes in dead last in Fiscal Policy, Economic Freedom, and in the overall ranking.

Delaware has a lot of room for improvement. We were ranked 30th in Fiscal Policy, 16th in Regulatory Policy, 24th in Economic Freedom, 36th in Personal Freedom, and 26th overall.

Here is how the study summarizes Delaware in its state by state descriptions: