Snowflakes in Hell

From Obama the Socialist Messiah:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Emphasis mine.  Rachel Lucas had this to say:

Jesus in a meadow. What classic bullshit.

No kidding.  So we’re just a bunch of xenophobic, paranoid Jesus freaks digging a bunker in the back yard because we think the dirty Mexicans stole our jobs, and sharpening our shooting skills in anticipation of invasion of job stealing hordes who will be coming any day now.

Are we really going to elect this elitist piece of shit president?  I won’t vote for anyone who thinks of me and my fellow Pennsylvanians so poorly.

… would be an advocate for breaking the law.

Grown from cat poop.   No, seriously.

Tam has a great article on how the Mac faithful haven’t been quite so happy since their product has gone main stream.  I have been a Mac user since 1992, so I’ve been working with this platform for a while.  Of course, the truly geeky among us know that we have not witnessed the Triumph of the Macintosh, but have in fact witnessed NeXT take its rightful place in the world of computing!  The original Macintosh died in 2001, and what everyone has been using since then is really a jazzed up version of NeXTStep that now runs on a very expensive and stylishly designed Intel PC.

Looks like Unisys Corporation (who may or may not have once been my employer) is relocating to the City of Philadelphia from their current headquarters in Blue Bell.  I guess Unisys wants to demonstrate its leadership in the industry by doing the opposite of most technology companies, by selling the cushy campus-like HQ in the ‘burbs, and heading to the concrete jungle.  But the interesting story is that they want to plaster their name all over Liberty Two.  I have to agree this would be tacky, but you have to wonder about people who make arguments like this:

“It will ruin our city,” said Mary Tracy, who heads the nonprofit Society Created to Reduce Urban Blight

A Unisys sign is going to ruin your city?  Ummm.

The Parking Lot bill that allows people to keep their firearms at work on company property has passed in Florida.  NRA has their position on the matter, which I know many of you here agree with, and I respect that.  Unfortunately, I agree with Robb Allen.

Ooops

Thanks again to reader ErnieD for doing the hard work finding the PDFs, but here are the passed ordinances:

1. 080018-A Prohibited Possession, Sale, Transfer of Firearms by Persons Subject to Protection from Abuse Orders

http://webapps.phila.gov/council/attachments/5080.pdf

2. 080032-A Reporting Lost or Stolen

http://webapps.phila.gov/council/attachments/5081.pdf

3. 080035-A One Gun A Month

http://webapps.phila.gov/council/attachments/5083.pdf

4. 080017 Removal of Firearms From Persons Posing Risk

http://webapps.phila.gov/council/attachments/4733.pdf

5. 080033 Assault Weapons Ban

http://webapps.phila.gov/council/attachments/4748.pdf

Several of these mirror existing federal and state laws.  Here’s my guess as to what they are planning, based on the laws they didn’t pass, and based on the ones that did.  Ortiz v. Commonwealth pretty clearly established that the city’s Home Rule Charter doesn’t allow it to override Pennsylvania Statute nor the Pennsylvania Constitution, and in this particular case, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld preemption.   But let’s look at the preemption law:

General rule. No county, municipality or township may in any manner regulate the lawful ownership, possession, transfer or transportation of firearms, ammunition or ammuni­tion components when carried or transported for purposes not prohibited by the laws of this commonwealth.

I’m guessing they are planning to argue that the laws which overlap are criminalizing firearms possession for purposes which are prohibited by “the laws of this commonwealth” and so they can regulate.  I’m also guessing they will argue the lost and stolen require doesn’t regulate any of the above, and that the one gun per month scheme also doesn’t regulate any of the above.  I think they fully expect to lose on the assault weapons deal, which was just thrown in there for media effect.

Yes, all these arguments are bogus, and I’m confident they’ll fail, but pretty clearly, I think they will have to argue something other than home rule.

Talk about the defeated “Lost and Stolen” bill:

But we also think the diligence required to always know the location and condition of one’s firearm is not too much to expect of any attentive gun owner.

Frankly, anyone who doesn’t quickly notice the loss of their weapon shouldn’t own a gun in the first place. And anyone who subsequently fails to report that loss within three days can only have something to hide.

Or they didn’t know about the requirement, are poor, don’t have insurance, won’t be able to afford a lawyer, and maybe don’t trust the police to actually do something about it.  This isn’t a law that’s going to affect middle class people with insurance.  It’s a law that’s going to snare poor people who might have a gun in the home for self-protection in rougher neighborhoods.

With the mandatory reporting amendment, gun owners might have assumed an active role in keeping guns out of the hands of felons, adding some credibility to gun advocacy movement by actively demonstrating its claim that most gun owners are law-abiding and responsible.

Except that a felon can’t be charged for failing to report a lost or stolen firearm, because that would be self-incrimination.  This law can only go after otherwise law abiding people.  Explain to me how that’s fair?  Or a useful tool for going after criminals with guns?  Everyone just assumes this law will be effective because certain people with agendas have claimed it will be.  The media ought to do it’s job and be more skeptical of these claims.  As it stands now, they are merely shills.  This is the great challenge with defeating these bills; it sounds great, until you really start looking at it.

According to this article, the southeast of Pennsylvania is growing.

The gains in the south and east, despite big population losses in Philadelphia, have increased the influence of the state’s younger, more affluent, more urban residents. Politically, the shift has made the state less conservative, though it remains less liberal than New Jersey and New York.

Even in Chester County, a Republican bastion, Democratic registrations are creeping up and GOP registrations slipping, though Republicans still hold a registration edge of 48 percent to 37 percent.

“I moved here from western New York because of greater economic opportunity,” said Tom Curtin, who lives in Parkesburg and works for Independence Blue Cross in Valley Forge and Philadelphia. “I think, overall, people in the region are becoming less conservative than they were in the past.”

It’s true.  We’ve seen this pattern before in other states.  One of the problems of New Jersey and New York running their populations out with high taxes and corrupt government is that when the people come here, they still follow the same voting patterns that turned their former states into cesspools.  It’s going to get increasingly more difficult to keep Pennsylvania pro-gun under these conditions.  We’ve been under siege by New York, New Jersey, and Maryland — anti-gun states all — and their populations are moving here.

At least one Philadelphia gun owner isn’t taking it lying down.  My hat is off to him.  Just a word of advice to any Philly readers who decide to defy the City’s non-law; be prepared with competent legal representation if you do get in trouble, and once you’re able to, let me know about what happened.  We can get the ball rolling on fighting this nonsense.