Snowflakes in Hell

David Bernstein has a good bit on Obama’s position on firearms and gun control before he decided to run for President.

Bitter and I hadn’t much to do today.  I’m feeling lousy because of the cold I brought back from the camping trip.  We watched the movie Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell.  It’s a great movie, until you realize that you can’t get that damned song Pennsylvania Polka out of your head.  Yes, yes, click the link!  Get it stuck in your head too, and sing along:

Strike up the music the band has begun
The Pennsylvania Polka
Pick out your partner and join in the fun
The Pennsylvania Polka
It started in Scranton. It’s now number one
It’s bound to entertain ya
Everybody has a mania to do the polka from Pennsylvania

While they’re dancing
Everybody’s cares are quickly gone
Sweet romancing
This goes on and on until the dawn.
They’re so carefree
Gay with laughter, happy as can be
They stop to have a beer
Then the crowd begins to cheer
They kiss and then they start to dance again.

Sing along now. You’ll hate me for weeks for this. But misery loves company.

Thanks to reader Jack, we have an update on the lawsuit by the City of Philadelphia to overturn state preemption through the court system, talked about several months ago here.

Bochetto said some things have changed since [the 1996 ruling upholding preemption], including the recent increase in Philadelphia’s gun violence. Also, the state Supreme Court recently ruled the city can impose its own rules when it comes to campaign finance.

And three justices who issued the 4-0 decision in 1996 have since left the court.

“I’m playing Texas Hold ‘Em — of my seven cards, I now get six new cards,” Bochetto said.

Clarke and Miller first sued in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court in July, but the case was later transferred to Commonwealth Court, where disputes between Pennsylvania governmental bodies often end up. The March 12 hearing concerns whether the case should be thrown out or allowed to continue.

So basically, the City is just going to keep playing poker with your rights until they get a winning hand, and gun owners in or near Philadelphia lose.  I sincerely hope that Commonealth Court throws this case out based on the Ortiz precedent, and this stops here.  The law is not a card game, and preemption in Pennsylvania is well established.

The Allentown Morning Call talks about how an Allentown woman got labeled a scofflaw in the City of Philadelphia.  It seems that parking enforcement officers (a.k.a. meter maids) have problems with dyslexia:

”What is probably happening is that the ticket writer is transposing the H and the M characters because they are next to each other and they are shaped the same,” Martinko, a 19-year veteran, wrote in an e-mail. ”I have done this when running license plates on my in-car computer.”

Going on that hunch, Martinko ran a slight variation of Hersch’s license plate: GMH-7177. Sure enough, that plate traced to an Oldsmobile registered to an owner who lives in the neighborhood where the tickets were issued.

A transposition error sounds like a reasonable explanation, said Linda Miller, the parking authority’s deputy executive director. It’s one of the first explanations the parking authority looks at when someone contests a ticket.

”Unfortunately, when you have someone keying in or writing a plate, they sometimes make mistakes,” Miller said.

Mistakes are understandable, but it shouldn’t take six months to fix the problem.  I had a friend who got nabbed by the PPA for having an unregistered vehicle on city streets even though the car had valid and current Iowa tags and registration on it.  When she contested it, PPA claimed the plate was stolen.  There are reasons why the city’s tax base has been eroding steadily for decades; it’s not a nice place to live.  The government is hopelessly corrupt and incompetent, the taxes are horrible, and the only people who live there tend to do so out of neccessity rather than choice.

Joe Huffman has a great write up on it.

SayUncle answers the question about kind of gun control that advocates of such measures might want to think about.

Pandering like this is almost enough to make me sick, but you have to imagine it’s not half as sickening to me as it is to the folks in the gun control movement:

Well, well. We wondered, did she have any hunting tales to tell? Did she ever shoot anything?

“A duck,” she answered a bit later in a press availability. “And a lot of tin cans, and a lot of targets, and some skeet.”

Maybe she was spending time hanging out with that other life long hunter, Mitt Romney, in the duck blind, but I’m not buying it.  Still, if people weren’t fooled by this stuff, politicians wouldn’t do it.

Via Gun Legislation & Politics in New York

Harry Reid has decided he doesn’t want Hilly and Obama to have to vote on it (i.e. they will vote against it, which could become an issue in the election):

Republicans counter that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is trying to protect the two leading Democratic candidates for president by shielding them from a politically difficult vote on an issue that many rural voters consider crucial.

Arizona Sen. John McCain, the leading Republican contender for president, is a co-sponsor of the amendment, which would allow gun owners to carry loaded, accessible firearms into national parks and wildlife refuges. Current regulations ban gun owners from carrying easy-to-reach firearms onto lands managed by the National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service.

Is it political pandering on McCain’s part to co-sponsor this bill?  Or are there real differences between McCain and Obillery on the gun issue?

Hat tip to Of Arms and the Law

Breda takes on the notion of “rape whistles”  I agree these are a poor substitute for fighting back, but I wouldn’t completely discount their utility.  I mean, if you heard someone whistling frantically within close proximity of you, and after following the sound saw a man about to rape a woman, would you do nothing?   I wouldn’t.  Of course, that presumes that at least some of us have the capability to do something other than dial 911 and hope that help shows up in time.

The good thing about today is that both Bitter and I have off from work, so we get an extra day.   The bad news is, even if I didn’t have off from work today, I’d probably be taking off sick anyway, because the cold I came down with while camping made me toss and turn all night, so I feel like crud this morning.