Snowflakes in Hell

No, not by criminals, but by government officials.

I once got a letter from the township stating that, because of sewage system problems in my neighborhood, they were coming around to inspect sump hookups to make sure no one was illegally dumping sump outflow into the sewer system.

My sump hookup was fine, but I rather incredulous that township code enforcement presumed they could demand to enter my home to look for evidence of a crime without a warrant.  They stopped by while I was at work, but left a note stating that I was to call and arrange an appointment.  I tossed it in the trash can and never heard another peep from them.

In the United States, I had the law on my side, and was ready to demand the township get a warrant or go to hell.  The poor Brits are at the mercy of bureaucrats, it seems.  Still, I wonder how many of my neighbors let the inspectors in thinking they had to.

The Terrorists Watch List has hit 1,000,000 names.  Who’s on it?  How do you end up getting on there?  How do you get yourself off there if there’s a mistake?  We don’t know! Well we know at least one person on the list, and Ted Kennedy.

That’s the beauty of it for the gun control groups, and power hungry authoritarians like Senator Frank Lautenburg.  By making it illegal to sell a gun to anyone who is on this mystery list, we can take away the constitutional rights we don’t approve of, with no due process.  I thought only Bush was the one mugging our civil rights over the war on terror?

… over at the ACLU.  You’d imagine that one of the most prominent decisions regarding the Bill of Rights in years would at least be deserving of a mention.

UPDATE: Looks like they did release something, but it’s not prominent.

There has been a bit of controversey over my statement on the picture of a police officer in Iowa holding a man at gunpoint who attempted to push his way through a police blockade with his vehicle.  I should note that I was merely pointing out that the officer in question was within the bounds of the law in his action.  Under Iowa’s emergency powers statutes, the Governor can order the police to enforce evacuation zones.  That might not be right, but that’s the law.  If you ever want the civil libertarian in you to go into convulsions, take a look at your state’s emergency powers provisions.  Pennsylvania’s is here.

State of emergency declarations have the effect of expanding the powers of the governor greatly.  Under Pennsylvania law, for instance, they state personnel are empowered to come on to your property and remove any debris that could be considered a threat to public health or safety, including, one would presume, the remains of your house.  Another provision can be found here:

§ 7308.  Laws suspended during emergency assignments.

In the case of a declaration of a state of emergency by the Governor, Commonwealth agencies may implement their emergency assignments without regard to procedures required by other laws (except mandatory constitutional requirements) pertaining to the performance of public work, entering into contracts, incurring of obligations, employment of temporary workers, rental of equipment, purchase of supplies and materials and expenditures of public funds.

Pennsylvania’s emergency powers are rather limited compared to what I’ve seen in a lot of states.  There doesn’t seem to be any power to enforce evacuation zones, for instance, like there is in Iowa law. [UPDATE, there is, see in comments below] But the time to look at your state emergency powers provisions, and petition your government to make changes to it, is now.  Most of these laws have been in place for decades, and it’s easier to get them changed when there’s not a disaster than get them changed when there is.

I stand by my assertion that challenging that authority with the officers charged with enforcing the Governor’s edicts (and yes, under most emergency powers laws, the governor gets to make edicts) isn’t the way to go.  If you feel being kept from your property is a violation of your rights, there is a remedy for that through the courts.  My feeling is that restricting movement ought to be unconstitutional except in the most dire circumstances (like a pandemic).  But my opinion isn’t law, and making ones opinion law is usually an uphill battle if you can’t get a lot of your fellow citizens to agree with you.

I have to agree with Kevin on this one.  Playmobil is a German company, so I’ll take some comfort in that, but it’s kind of disturbing this is sold anywhere.  Or was, rather.  I can’t find it as a current product offering on their web site.

The Brady Campaign is always quick to remind us that while an overwhelming number of Americans support the second amendment, there are still a lot of people that support some vague thing called “gun control.”  Rachel Lucas points to some interesting polling on the first amendment, in regards to “hate speech”.

88% “guard” free speech but only 53% have any sort of a clue as to what that means. Since it would be silly to imagine that as time goes on, more people will get the clue, I’m guessing that in another few decades, we’ll have laws just like France and Canada. Awesome.

The poll basically shows that while 88% believe in the first amendment, only 53% oppose laws regulating “hate speech”, with 28% favoring it, and 19% undecided.  I don’t share Rachel’s pessimism about things going downhill from here, however.  We’ve shown that public support for the second amendment can be enhanced when people start understanding the issue.  I don’t see why the first amendment has to be exempt from that.

I don’t really get the objections to it either.  The best arguments seem to be preserving a tradition that’s nearly as old as man.  Seems to be that for most of man’s history we’ve also fed other human beings into live volcanos to appease some god or another, and held others as slaves.  Tradition can be a poor reason to keep doing something.

Four of the people involved in the incident in Dickson City have filed a lawsuit under 42 USC Section 1983 in US District Court.  You can see the document filed here.  Police departments in the Commonwealth need to start training their officers that open carry is a lawful practice except in a city of the first class (where you need a LTCF), and that a gun not having a record of sale is no evidence to seize it.  Dickson City is about to be made an example of why this needs to happen forthwith.

… to never go to China.  How welcoming.  I mean, I won’t go just because I don’t support human rights abusing totalitarian regimes.  That’s not even mentioning that they’ll bug my phone and computer.

Hat Tip Instapundit.

Orin Kerr opines on the legality of it here, and here.   Short answer: it ain’t.

The ACLU needs to get on this like ants on honey.  Can someone explain to me why city politicians want to create police states?  I’m starting to become an advocate of Congress dissolving DC city government and ruling it directly.  Not that I think they’d do much better, but they sure as hell would have a hard time doing worse.

Looks like a town in California is proposing to ban smoking anywhere in public.  I think it’s it’s unreasonable to speculate how soon it will be before gangs are shooting it out in the streets to protect their tobacco turf.  You have to figure the next step after that is just banning it altogether.  It’s for the lungs of the children, you know.

The case SayUncle links to here rules that police can’t ask you for identification without a reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed.  I have a feeling this case, currently in the eighth circuit, might end up being useful in a case that’s developing here in Pennsylvania. Hopefully I’ll be able to post more about that later.

I’m really getting tired of these fascists:

Perhaps, then, the recent signs of violent times occasion an opportunity for broadening our collective sense of what ”rights” should be in terms of our social consciousness. Our political and judicial discourse would benefit from moving beyond a purely libertarian view of rights, which emphasizes freedom from governmental coercion or constraint, to incorporate also a dignitarian view of rights, which promotes freedom for the good of each other and for society as a whole. The challenge now before us is how to preserve personal independence and autonomy while also recognizing, as Prof. Mary Ann Glendon once wrote, ”that we are constituted in important ways by and through our relations with others, and that each of us develops our potential within a social network of obligations and dependencies.”

Sorry Reverend Dailey, you sir, can go to hell.  Inidividual liberty and freedom is social well-being.  Any government empored to create social well-being, empowered to do ulimited good, is by nature empowered to do unlimited evil.  If you’d like to live in a society like that, perhaps I can suggest Venzuela, or perhaps China.  But this country is founded on principles of limiting government for the sake of personal liberty, and if you don’t like that, get the hell out.

Based on this article, you would almost think a bottle of Mike’s Hard Lemonade is rat poison:

The Comerica cop estimated that Leo had drunk about 12 ounces of the hard lemonade, which is 5% alcohol. But an ER resident who drew Leo’s blood less than 90 minutes after he and his father were escorted from their seats detected no trace of alcohol.

“Completely normal appearing,” the resident wrote in his report, “… he is cleared to go home.”

But it would be two days before the state of Michigan allowed Ratte’s wife, U-M architecture professor Claire Zimmerman, to take their son home, and nearly a week before Ratte was permitted to move back into his own house.

The father, a Professor of Archeology at the University of Michigan, who doesn’t watch much television, apparently was unaware that it was alcoholic lemonade.  Easy mistake to make.

One 12 ounce bottle of hard lemonade isn’t going to hurt a 7 year old.  Hell, they used to tell parents to give whiskey to kids to fight teething pain (ask my dad about that one).  It was a simple mistake, and a bit of questioning should have revealed that, and that should have been the end of it.

Hat tip to Orin Kerr.

I can’t help but notice that these kinds of stories seem to come from states with high Brady rankings.

Via Glenn, I noticed this article talking about the entire Texas polygamy fiasco, and asking where the ACLU is in all of this.  The answer to me, is pretty clear.  It’s not George W. Bush perpetrating this outrage against people’s civil rights, so who’s to care?  If it can’t used it to beat those warmongering Republicans over the head, why does it matter?

The progressives’ defense of civil rights has become an utter joke, and it’s not just their willingness to throw the second amendment under the bus.  I’m not happy with Bush’s record on civil liberties at all, and for letting a weasel like Gonzalez run around for as long as he did.  But civil liberties violations don’t start and end with the Bush administration.

This law could be the bane of dirty old men in malls in the State of Maine.  Dr. Helen talks about whether this law, which basically seems to outlaw staring at children, won’t have unintended consequences.  Here’s my scenario:

A man is caught starting into a park with a set of binoculars where children are known to be congregating.  Surely that’s enough to creep out any parent who might come across it?  The police are called, and arrest the man for “visual sexual aggression”, in the face of a crowd of angry parents demanding something be done.  The man, a member of the local ornithological society, claims he was tracking a rare Rufous-capped Warbler.  The police don’t buy it, and he’s arrested and charged.  He’s ultimately acquitted in a jury trial, but the legal fees force him into bankruptcy, and he loses his life’s savings.

People need to develop a healthy skepticism of what those in power suggest will protect their children.  Legislators can pass laws.  That’s all they can do.  When your only tool is a hammer, a lot of things start looking like nails.  Voters need to consider that the legal system can ruin the lives of the guilty along with the innocent.  The reason I oppose this Maine law is the exact same reason I opposed the “Lost and Stolen” requirement.  We set the state’s burden of proof high for a reason, and we should look most skeptically on any proposal designed to allow the state to divine that a person clearly must be guilty, and to give the state tools to make an easy conviction based on that cognition, without having to meet the burden of proof for the more serious, but more difficult to prove offense.

UPDATE: Illspirit points out that the actual bill is not nearly what the reporter has lead us to believe.  After reading the actual text, I have no problem with said bill.  It only goes to show you should never believe anything you hear from a reporter.

… or maybe we can’t if you’re on property under the jurisdication of the National Park Service.  I smell a a lawsuit.

SayUncle points out that Wyoming is telling the feds to go to hell in regards to a lot of their less-than-civil-rights-respecting laws.  Montana did a similar action with federal gun laws.  These are largely symbolic gestures, because despite all this, Montana and Wyoming are still committed to being a functioning part of the United States.

But what if they weren’t?  What if the federal government crossed the Rubicon of gun control?  We often like to think that the federal government will meet mass resistance should the “knock on the door” ever come, but they probably won’t.  Lone individual action will not be how an onerous federal gun measure will be successfully resisted.  No doubt some individuals will try, with the end result being those individuals end up dead, possibly along with their families.  I don’t think the answer to the “Crossed Rubicon” problem lies in relying on that possibility.  The knock won’t likely come from men in jack boots, disarming people to ship them off in cattle cars and toss them into ovens.  It’ll come from a happy, smiling government that wants to take care of everybody, and surely you don’t need guns in such a happy utopia.

Most non-sociopathic human beings have powerful mental programming that prevents them from going against the tribe.  It’s easy to say “I’ll shoot any son of a bitch that comes for my guns.” from the comfort of a lounge or living room.  It’s quite another thing to actually do it; to put a fellow countryman in the cross hairs, one that’s likely to represent a government that looks more like Sweden than 1930s Germany, and actually pull the trigger.  It is not something the vast majority of law abiding people are capable of doing.  I have no doubt some will, but the numbers will be very small, too small to make any difference in the end.  Such action will likely strengthen the resolve of those who want to bring us paradise.

Whether we realize it or not, Wyoming and Montana are showing us how it could be done, effectively done.  They key to resisting an unconstitutional federal government is state action, but something more than mere symbolic action.  What if, for instance, Montana declared that federal gun control was invalid and unconstitutional, and threatened to arrest any federal agent who entered Montana to enforce it?  How far would the federal government be willing to press Montana?  What are other Americans willing to sacrifice in order to impose gun control on states that don’t want it?  In this hypothetical scenario, Montana would have to be deadly serious about enforcing their edicts.  Attempts by the federal government to impose control over the situation would need to be met with quite real threats of secession, along with the attendant violence that could go along with such an audacious move. Montana would essentially be asking the nation a very serious question “Are you so intent on gun control that you’re willing to risk the cohesion and integrity of the United States, and to risk violence against the citizens of several of our states to enforce it?”  Unless Americans change greatly, the answer to that is probably going to be no, and it would offer a peaceful way for the federal government to retreat back across the Rubicon.

This scenario offers three very important things — It offers people, who want to resist, the legitimacy of a functioning, lawful government to rally around, as an alternative to dying in a desperate, lone action.  It offers a means of collective confrontation with the federal government that wouldn’t have to turn violent except as a final resort, and finally it offers an opportunity for the proponents of gun control to back down from the brink.

The question second amendment advocates need to be thinking about isn’t “Where’s the line in the sand where I start shooting.” but “Where’s my line in the sand where I start lobbying my state government to stand up to this crap?”  We have to keep the spirit of defiance alive in our state cultures.  Secession has a lot of negative connotations to many people, since the last time we did it, it was in defense of slavery, but its possibility a critical aspect in the balance of power between the federal and state governments.  It is the ultimate trump card, one that must be played with utmost care, but it must be kept in play.  That’s tough in an age where all the states suckle at the federal teat, but if we’re to remain under a federal government limited by the a constitution, more states have to start acting like Montana and Wyoming, and be willing to tell the federal government to go to hell, with all the terrible consequences that statement could have if they were to one day be serious about it.

We all know Boston was looking at doing voluntary random searches, but according to Bruce they aren’t above doing involuntary random searches either.

Good to see they are standing up for free speech.

Cam Edwards has a good post up on the recent push by DC and Boston authorities to go door to door asking homeowners whether they can voluntarily search the house for drugs and guns:

This effort may end up leading to more violent crime. If it’s already leading to police being referred to as “vampires”, you’d have to think it’s not a great boon to establishing rapport between the beat cops and the people who live in these high-crime communities. It seems designed mostly to get positive press coverage rather than achieving any real benefit.

The politicians in D.C. have become so used to taking away liberty in the name of the common good that it’s fair to say they really don’t see anything wrong with this. And that’s the scariest part of all.

Indeed.

For folks who might live in Washington DC, I have a handy and timely doormat suggestion.

UPDATE: Check out this NBC 4 article:

If weapons are recovered, they will be tested and destroyed if they are not found to be linked to any other crimes.

A police spokeswoman said that if evidence of other crimes is found during voluntary searches, amnesty will be granted for that crime as well.

Nevermind the murderers and the rapists!  As long as we get that gun off the street everything will be peachy.  And they wonder why they can’t keep their crime under control.  These DC city politicians really do live in a fantasy world, don’t they?

h/t Instapundit

Or they’ll lock you up, in Ohio.