Melissa Sheridan, a New Yorker with two years of probation remaining, moved to North Carolina. In order for her to remain in good standing, she needs North Carolina’s Department of Community Corrections to agree to monitor the probation. She lives with her boyfriend, also father of one of her children. And according to the North Carolina agency, that’s a problem:

North Carolina is one of seven states that prohibits men and women from living together unless they are married. Prosecutors rarely act on the 1805 law, written during an era when state legislators also laid out penalties for “keeping bawdy houses” and “crimes against nature with mankind or beast.”
But the ban is still invoked in a number of situations, including when convicted criminals move to the state and seek to transfer their probation.

So here’s the deal:

“They told me I had three choices: They can send my kids back to New York, or we can get married, or we can get separate houses,” Sheridan said. “I wasn’t happy at all. It’s breaking up my family.”

“Hmmmm,” you may be wondering, “there’s undoubtedly a lot of unmarried people living together in North Carolina. What is the law doing about them?” Good question. The answer is nothing.

Over the last decade, North Carolina’s social trends were tracking the nation’s. The number of households with unmarried couples increased from 67,425 to 143,680. In Hanover County alone, where Carolina Beach is located, 3,434 unmarried couples live together as a household, according to the Census Bureau.
Partly for that reason, prosecutors seldom pursue cohabitation cases. They brought just six prosecutions last year, according to court records.

States should get rid of these archaic laws if they are not going to attempt to enforce them except in select or symbolic instances.

President Bush threatens to make this his first veto. Will he deliver? In an election year?

At a time when the federal budget deficit is approaching a record $500 billion a year, the House of Representatives will open debate Wednesday on a bill that includes $4.6 million for water taxis in New York, $2 million to build a bike trail in Durham, N.C., and $74 million for a bridge over the Trinity River in Dallas.
Those projects are part of a massive highway and transit construction bill that would cost $275 billion over six years. Billed as a “jobs creation” measure, the highway legislation is a time-honored way for lawmakers facing November elections to send money back home to their districts.
It would boost transportation spending by 26 percent by authorizing $217 billion for highways, $51.5 billion for public transit and about $6 billion for a variety of safety programs. The House is expected to pass the bill Thursday. The Senate passed its $318 billion version in February.

Of course participating contestants walk away with great parting gifts:

“Everyone on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is each getting $40 million to $90 million for their districts,” said Keith Ashdown, the vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a fiscal watchdog group that combed the bill line by line.

Interesting analysis:

The bill is intended to improve American transportation and ease highway congestion. Each year Americans spend 51 hours more commuting during rush hour than they would with manageable traffic, according to Tim Lomax, a research engineer for the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University. The institute tracks congestion patterns in 75 major metropolitan areas. The average delay is four times what it was in 1982.
But building more highways is only part of the solution, Lomax said. In fast-growing areas with open land “you are going to need more roads and transit to serve the people,” he said, “but you also have to get more out of the capacity we already have.”
Other ways to ease congestion include removing wrecked vehicles more quickly and synchronizing traffic signals. Incentives to encourage commuters to travel in off-peak hours also help. Building residential areas near shops and office buildings allows people to walk instead of drive, Lomax said.

But Congress critters don’t get as much bang from urban planning and synchronized traffic flow as they do from nifty new highways and bridges. So guess where the money continues to flow.

Note to self: Don’t store guns in this manner:

A San Antonio woman is in the hospital this morning after a loaded pistol, hidden inside her oven, went off while she was cooking.
. . .
Police officers were told that a friend of the woman’s boyfriend brought over a gun to show the couple. She wanted nothing to do with the weapon, she told police.
The boyfriend then decided to hide the gun, of all places, in the oven, police were told.
Police said they were told that the woman turned on the oven to cook something Thursday night, and as the heat in the oven rose, the gun went off. She was wounded in the leg, police said.

What does it take to have someone strip searched? If it’s a fast food employee, apparently not much:

Authorities say a 39-year-old Taco Bell manager forced a 17-year-old female employee to strip and endure a body search after a caller posing as a police officer gave him instructions to do so at the Fountain Hills restaurant this week.
The girl was taken to a back room in the restaurant and told to disrobe, said Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Once naked, she was asked to do jumping jacks and was then subjected to a body search, Arpaio said.
The apparent ruse began when a caller posing as a police officer called the Taco Bell this week giving a general description of a female employee he said needed to be detained as a crime suspect.

Turns out this isn’t the only manager to get duped:

It might seem implausible that any manager could be compelled by an unknown caller to order someone to entirely disrobe and submit to a humiliating search for drugs or stolen money. Or that someone would succumb to such an examination. But investigators say there have been dozens of similar cases since 1999, involving Burger King, Wendy’s, Applebee’s and others. Similar incidents have been reported in Massachusetts, South Dakota, Indiana, Utah and Ohio. The managers and the victims of such incidents have been male and female. Investigators have begun linking the cases and say they believe the hoaxes are the work of a single person calling from North Florida public telephones using a phone card.
His likely motive, they say: Not money, but power and perversion.

These mistakes can be costly:

These cases raise enormous, complex liability issues: Last summer, an Odessa, Texas, Burger King franchise paid $35,000 to settle a civil suit filed by an employee who alleged she was forced to submit to a strip search by a male manager who received a similar phone call. The restaurant’s manager was arrested and charged with “illegal restraint,” and fined $500.
And last week, Wendy’s International Inc. said it had been hit with four lawsuits by former workers of Boston-area company-owned outlets. In February, managers there, acting on a call from a man posing as a police officer, ordered the workers to submit to a strip search for allegedly stolen money.

Employers are justified in being concerned about employee theft, but physical searches are a bad idea, especially when initiated by an anonymous phone call.

More license plate fun. A guy in New York has his custom license plate application rejected. Why? Because the license plate powers that be are–what shall we say–oversensative?

Alas, in mid-January, he received a Dear Noah rejection letter. “The Custom Plate which you requested – DUMPBUSH – cannot be issued at this time for the reason(s) indicated below,” the letter said. The reason: “Others may view the plate as obscene or offensive.”
. . .
THE Custom Plates Unit has 16 employees, most of them veteran decoders and defenders of proper roadway decorum. All day long, they scrutinize letter-and-number combinations of eight or less to ensure that some Niskayuna knucklehead’s license plate does not suggest that your mother wears Army boots.
If a custom-plate specialist feels uneasy about a submission, a committee of specialists will gather to decipher its true meaning, and to advise, aye or nay. “Once in a while, one will get through,” Joseph Picchi, the department’s spokesman, said, referring to inappropriate license plates. “That’s why you have to be very careful.”
It turns out that proposed phrases of a political nature are held to a slightly different standard: generally speaking, they should be positive, upbeat – nice. “We don’t censor plates for political content or if they’re politically related,” Mr. Picchi said. “We do if they’re politically offensive. If they said HATE somebody.”

Why is it that advocating a politician be voted out of office is “hate” speech? Isn’t that Democracy 101? And how is that going to offend someone any more than bumper stickers, yard signs, commercials, and any other kind of campaign advertising? If you support a candidate, you’re implicitly rejecting his or her opponent.