Snowflakes in Hell

Shooting through a series of water balloons.

Four more Senators, including Pennsylvania’s Senator Arlen Specter, have signed on to the letter to Department of Interior Secretary Kempthorne calling for new rules to force the National Park Service to follow state law regarding firearms on property managed by the agency.  Excellent.

Academics for the Second Amendment has submitted their brief, and it is now online here. Dave Hardy, who is the Attorney of Record on the brief, says he’s pretty tired after all that, and I think we all owe him a debt of gratitude for helping put this brief together, and for all the academic work he and his colleagues have done over the years that has helped lay the groundwork for this. One way you can say thanks is by donating to ASA. I think it’s the least we can do.

UPDATE: Let’s not forget that Clayton Cramer also lent assistance to this brief as well.

UPDATE: I read the whole thing.  I think it’s devastating to many of DCs arguments.  It’ll take quite a tangle of intellectual knots the court will have to contort for itself to rule in favor of any kind of collective rights viewpoint.

I’ve been a distant observer of the antics of New Jersey Republican and Mayor of Bogota, Steve Lonegan, ever since seeing the movie Anytown USA.  I wrote a few weeks ago about his bogus arrest at one of Corzine’s town hall meetings a few weeks ago (charges have since been dropped).

Lonegan has been very successful in New Jersey, which is a very “blue” state, at rallying grass roots opposition to Corzine’s plans, and generally being a pain in his ass.  For this, I applaud him, and hope to continue to see rallies like this over in the Garden State:

They chanted “No New Tolls” and “Oink, Oink, Oink,” a reference to the implicit “Pigs will fly over the State House” metaphor Corzine has been using to support his plan to raise tolls and freeze spending instead of his opponents’ calls for just spending cuts.

The loudest moment of the noon protest, however, occurred when several clusters of inflatable pig balloons were released into the air by the protesters.

Former Bogota Mayor Steve Lonegan was one of the participants in the anti-Corzine rally. Lonegan was arrested last month after protesting at one of the town hall meetings Corzine has been holding throughout the state to pitch his plan, which would generate as much as $40 billion by significantly raising highway tolls and borrowing against the future revenue.

“We are here to deliver a message. That message is: No new tolls,” Lonegan said, prompting the crowd to respond several times with the same refrain.

Lonegan is forcing Corzine to pay attention, and I think he’s going to have to, or he risks going the way of Jim Florio.  People in New Jersey are getting pissed, and that’s the first step.  Can the New Jersey GOP capitalize on it?  If Lonegan’s recent luck with sticking it to Corzine is any indication, the answer might very well be yes.

War on Guns has a few interesting posts going on, one of which caught my eye.

So I’ll be receptive to anyone who comes up with a plan to help guide us out of the swamp. But what I have to question is, why should anyone, right now and from this day forward, think that such an effort will be best served by continuing in a direction the candidate himself has ceded will lead us to a dead end?

I don’t think that at this point, we can put our faith in men. In order to bring about a more perfect union, we need something bigger than Ron Paul, bigger than the political process, and that subverts the progressive edifice that was erected throughout most of the 20th century. It won’t be a quick fix, or an easy one, but I believe it can be done. I don’t believe that Claire Wolfe is correct, that it’s too late to work within the system.

To understand why we have found ourselves in this situation, I think we first have to look at how the progressive movement, throughout most of the 20th century, have triumphed. Most of it boils down to the fact that progressives are just much better at using government as a tool to achieve their ends. I’m reminded of a comment left by Dave Hardy over at Bitter’s site last year:

I’m told that at my agency, after Clinton’s election, the Demos planned to oust middle level management (Senior Executive Service)… until they figured out that after 12 years of GOP control, it was still almost all liberal Democrats! The conservative GOP had never bothered to promote their own. I know of at least one case during those years in which a moderately conservative republican careerist, with incredible skills in the area, was passed over for promotion in favor of a liberal Dem, simply because the latter had a few more years experience and so it seemed fair. The Dems would never had made that mistake. In fact, they would not have seen it as a choice. The liberal would have been seen as more intelligent, and the conservative as stupid and out of touch, so it wouldn’t have been seen as a partisan matter at all. The libs, in short, are self-confident in using government, and the conservatives are quite uncertain.

Read the whole thing. In this same vain, I would also point out that conservatives (for our purposes here, I’ll use the term to mean the coalition of libertarian conservatives, social conservative, and foreign policy hawks that make up the Republican Party), acting through the Republican Party, have been dismally unsuccessful at shaping the course of the federal judiciary. Currently there are only two Democratic appointees on the Supreme Court, but it is widely regarded that there are only four conservatives. John Paul Stevens was appointed by Ford, Souter by George H.W. Bush, and Kennedy by Reagan. By all means the federal judiciary should be, by now, overwhelmingly more like Justice Thomas, Roberts, Alito and Scalia rather than like Justice Breyer and Stevens, yet it is not. Ever since FDR, liberals have been masters at stocking the federal court system, and conservatives have been amateurs. Judges today use a presumption of constitutionality, rather than a presumption of liberty, when engaging in judicial review of legislation, and are willing to uphold some pretty awful laws under this regime.

But this just outlines a few major areas where conservatives have failed. It’s not an underlying explanation for why conservatives have failed. After all, if the population were overwhelmingly dedicated to conservative principles, we would have no problem keeping the left out of key institutions. The chief reason we have failed is because we have a population that is not overwhelmingly dedicated to conservative principles. If we want conservative ideas to win, if we wish to have to compromise with the middle less often, if we wish to shift the middle in the direction of liberty, the only way to do that is to begin to seize the social institutions that can accomplish that back from the progressives.

Chief among these social institutions is our education system, which has been all but completely hijacked by progressives. It’s worthwhile to note that the Pledge of Allegiance was created by a socialist as early as 1892, and meant it to teach obedience to the state to the Nation’s youngsters. If we want to reverse the progressive slide, we have to make progress in academia, particularly in topics that tend to feed the political elite, such as political science, law, and economics. The good news is, we’ve pretty much won on economics, and I think we’re making progress in law. But that’s really just the beginning; I think we also need to push into the public education system if we want to have an impact long term. We need to be supporting educational groups like The Bill of Rights Institute, FIRE, Institute of Justice, The Federalist Society, and ACTA. Many of these groups are not overtly political, but that’s the point. The progressives undermined pro-liberty ideas through slow subversion, and we need to use the same tactic on them. It can work, it will take time, but in the end if we don’t win on education, we lose the battle, because the system will keep turning out reliable progressive voters, progressive judges, journalists, professors, and bureaucrats. Education is just one key, but it’s the only way you change minds, create opinion leaders, and grow your movement.

The Violence Policy Center holds a Federal Firearms License, which Dave points out make them exempt from DC’s handgun ban.  Can you spell hypocrite?

Apparently the IRS is being taken to court because of how it treats Scientology:

There has been a case working its way up through the federal courts challenging this special treatment that Scientology gets. (Why? Probably because Scientology is the religion of Hollywood, and this special treatment decision was reached during the Clinton Administration.)

In this case, a couple named Sklar are arguing that Scientology is allowed to do this, then should be allowed to treat Jewish school tuition the same way. If the courts actually treat the Sklars’ case the same way as Scientology, then they will effectively create a religious school tuition tax deduction.

I agree with Clayton that this exception should just be eliminated.  I believe this is something Bush could do through executive order, if I’m not mistaken.

Chicago Handgun Rights gives us a review of the goings on in New York State in regards to gun control advocates there attempting to close the “Musket Loophole”  But in addition, he also tells us what the “Musket Loophole” means for Chicago residents.

Dave Hardy details some difficulties faced by leading gun control advocates.

According to Gun Law News, American Hunters and Shooters Association, a “False Flag” outfit designed to trick hunters into thinking it’s a pro-gun group, submitted a brief essentially calling for the DC gun ban to be overturned because it violates DC’s home rule charter.

Apparently AHSA, which has claimed to support the second amendment, and says it’s against the DC gun law, would prefer it if The Court not discover that the second amendment is an individual right.

This group is a fraud, and anyone who buys their crap is either not paying attention, or actively conspiring with these pirates.

UPDATE: Thirdpower has much much more.

Now that the present has been presented, I can tell you what I got her. It’s a CZ 452 Lux in .22LR. If you follow the link, you’ll notice that I wrapped it up with two NRA 200 yard targets, and used a sliced up 12 gauge shotgun shell as an appropriate bow. Here’s what it looks like:

Thanks to Traction Control for tracking one down and getting it to the local FFL. I also got her a Bushnell 40mm objective scope, the Banner series, but the rings I got her are too short for it, plus it looks like the CZ has 11mm dovetails. No worries though, I’ll find the proper scope rings at some point that’ll make it all work. After looking at the rifle in person, I think a smaller scope might be better for it anyway, in which case I might swap her the Bushnell for a smaller scope and use it when I finally get around to building my accurized 10/22 project.

Hopefully we’ll get to try it out sometime soon. I think it’ll shoot very nice. Bitter is more of a pistol shooter than a rifle(wo)man, so it was time to get her started. Everyone needs at least one rifle in .22LR, so I figured the 452 was as good as any to start her out with.