“State officials look down the barrel of the laws that they created, and it is very probably that they now tremble as they rethink the extremity of their folly. Connecticut Carry calls on every State official, every Senator, and every Representative, to make the singular decision: Either enforce the laws as they are written and let us fight it out in court, or else repeal the 2013 Gun Ban in its entirety,” states the group’s press release.
In calling the state’s bluff, gun owners are setting the stage for a showdown that could sink the draconian law and set the precedent for the rest of the country.
“If the state does not have the stomach to enforce these laws, then the legislature has until May 7th, 2014 to completely repeal these immoral edicts and let the residents of Connecticut return to their rightfully owned property and former exercise of constitutional rights and practices without any threat of State violence,” adds the press release.
Last month it emerged that Connecticut residents who failed to register their assault weapons or high capacity magazines before the January 1 deadline had received letters from CT State Police ordering them to either make their guns and ammo inoperable, sell them to a licensed dealer, or turn them in at a local police station.
Through a recent motion for public access, the ACLU determined that at least one Florida police department never told judges about its use of the cell phone tracking device, known as a “stingray,” because the department signed a non-disclosure agreement with the stingray’s manufacturer to keep its use from being publicly known.
The manufacturer, which the ACLU said was likely a Florida-based company, also retained ownership of its stingrays and only let the department borrow them, further aiding in its secrecy.
In Georgia, 53.6% of the Babies Aborted Are Black
Excerpt:
Although whites outnumber blacks 2-to-1 in Georgia, black babies are aborted at a rate nearly 2.5 times greater than white babies and comprise 53.6% of the total number of abortions in the Peach State.
An additional 24.3% of the total abortions are of Hispanic and other races (Asian, Native American), meaning 77.9% of the the total abortions in Georgia are of non-white babies — 22.1% of those killed by abortion are white children.
Those numbers come from the 2010 Abortion Surveillance report issued by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), the latest year for data on abortion available from the agency. (The surveillance report for 2011 is scheduled to be published by the CDC in November of this year.)
Ohio student points finger like gun, is suspended
Excerpt:
A central Ohio principal says she suspended a 10-year-old boy from school for three days for pretending his finger was a gun and pointing it at another student’s head.
The boy’s father says it’s the adults who are acting childish for suspending the boy from Devonshire Alternative Elementary School in Columbus last week.
FBI Had Direct Link to Bin Laden—in 1993
Excerpt:
The FBI had a human source in direct contact with Osama bin Laden in 1993 and discovered that he was eager to finance terror attacks on the United States, according to little-noticed testimony in a court case several years back.
The testimony, just reported by the Washington Times, underlines how poorly we understand the degree to which the federal government was interacting with Osama bin Laden and monitoring the activities of a network that came to be widely known as Al Qaeda.
Experts claim that as many as 350,000 people are in violation of the law, and over 100,000 of those people could face felony charges. That means over 3.6% of the entire adult population of Connecticut has been transformed into a felon by the new registration law. Roughly one in twenty Connecticut homes could have their doors smashed in by heavily armed law enforcement seeking to confiscate firearms.
Robin Speronis, a 54-year-old former real estate agent currently living in Cape Coral in a small duplex, has her own solar panels and collects rain water for her needs, She has even installed a simple outdoor shower in order to be independent from the municipal energy and water supply. The local power company and water supply surely have a hand in the Special Magistrate Harold S. Eskin’s ruling that, although the regulations for her city are redundant and unreasonable, she was in violation of city code as well as the International Property Maintenance Code.
Apparently generating your own power and using rainwater or other natural elements is not your sovereign right. Speronis using her own elbow grease to live more in balance with nature is now part of a heated debate.
“Reasonableness and code requirements don’t always go hand-in-hand,” stated Eskin, cunningly inserting his own disagreement with the outrageous rules. Nevertheless, he insists that he is required to enforce them, “whether I want to or not.” We all know this is untrue. He is a judge. He could find other legal precedence for an entirely different determination.
Off The Grid News offers a different opinion, as did Speronis. She has been fighting the city council since November when a code enforcement officer showed up at her home and tried to evict her from her own property for not using public utilities. She challenges that relying on nature for her needs is her personal choice and that it isn’t in violation of anything.
The woman, pulled to a police car in gym clothes, was captured on video shouting, “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
A University of Texas Student filmed the police capturing the jogger and placing her in an officer’s car.
“I was sitting at the Starbucks at 24th and San Antonio,” the student, Chris Quintero, told the Daily Texan, the student newspaper for the University of Texas-Austin. “Then I hear a cop shout at an innocent girl jogging through West Campus with her headphones on.”
Police told the woman to provide identification, Quintero remarked. When she wouldn’t, the officer grabbed her arm and placed her in handcuffs.
Cops hit my car, then arrested me
Excerpt:
Two Brooklyn cops sideswiped a parked SUV, then arrested a man sitting in the passenger seat of the vehicle, accusing him of damaging their car, a suit charges.
And the officers would have gotten away with their lie — had the whole bizarre drama not been caught by a security camera.
Robert Jackson, 31, told The Post his nightmare began when a police car heading the wrong way on one-way Watkins Street in Brownsville scraped against a parked Ford Explorer, which belongs to his girlfriend.
Jackson, a maintenance worker, said he was sitting in the legally parked car outside of his apartment when the accident happened. He got out of the vehicle and walked up to the officers.
Evidence from a dashboard camera on a police cruiser ended a nightmare for a New Jersey man facing false charges of eluding police, resisting arrest and assault.
Prosecutors dismissed all the criminal charges against Marcus Jeter, 30, of Bloomfield, N.J. and instead indicted two Bloomfield police officers for falsifying reports and one of them for assault after the recording surfaced showing police officers beating Jeter during a traffic stop, according to WABC of New York. A third has pleaded guilty to tampering.
Jeter’s defense attorney requested all recorded evidence, but the police failed to hand over a second tape until additional evidence surfaced of a second police car at the scene. The tape showed Jeter complying with police, even as one punched him in the head repeatedly.
The kicker:
Without the tape, prosecutors had been demanding a five-year prison sentence.
Now, Austin’s chief of police has weighed in, telling the public they should be glad his officers aren’t treating people even worse.
“This person absolutely took something that was as simple as ‘Austin Police – Stop!’ and decided to do everything you see on that video,” Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo said at a press conference Friday, according to Austin NPR station 90.5 KUT. “And quite frankly she wasn’t charged with resisting. She’s lucky I wasn’t the arresting officer, because I wouldn’t have been as generous. … In other cities there’s cops who are actually committing sexual assaults on duty, so I thank God that this is what passes for a controversy in Austin, Texas,” Acevedo said.
Not long after that, it became clear that Acevedo had essentially told the public that they should be grateful that all the police officers did was bundle a woman who had been jogging through the streets of Austin into the back of a police car because she crossed against the light, instead of molesting her or charging her with more serious offenses.
Saturday evening, Acevedo issued an apology for his earlier comments, calling it the result of an emotional week.
“During the press conference I attempted to place the arrest into context by bringing attention to the fact that law enforcement deals with many acts of serious misconduct,” Acevedo wrote. “This includes recent instances in the news of sexual assault by police officers in other cities. In hindsight I believe the comparison was a poor analogy, and for this I apologize. I stand committed to transparent leadership and will continue to engage the community we serve in an open, honest, and timely manner.”
The Court did not comment on petitions for certiorari for NRA v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, NRA v. McCraw and Lane v. Holder.
Constitution Daily reports the cases were considered on Friday in private conference.
A fourth case, however, may ultimately be considered by the Court and settle the matter. Drake v. Jerejian addresses gun control in New Jersey. The case argues that the Second Amendment permits a resident of the state to carry a firearm outside the home without providing justification to the state. A number of amici curiae briefs were filed with the Court on February 12.
The Court is set to respond by March 14, according to the SCOTUSBlog.
The Court has not ruled on the Second Amendment since 2010 when it issued a decision on McDonald v. City of Chicago. The case added to the 2008 Heller decision. Heller held in a 5-4 decision the Second Amendment applies to the District of Columbia and protects an individual’s right to possess a firearm for self-defense. It struck down a DC law outlawing the possession of handguns in the home.
The decision follows a ruling issued last week by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that overturned a prohibition on carrying concealed handguns. The Court ruled that carrying a handgun “outside the home for the lawful purpose of self-defense, though subject to traditional restrictions, constitutes ‘bear[ing] Arms’ within the meaning of the Second Amendment.”
Rulings on carrying firearms outside of the home have been mixed. The 7th Circuit concurred with the 9th Circuit that carrying a gun in public is covered under the Second Amendment. Other courts, however, including the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Circuits, have issued less definitive opinions.
Earlier this month, the 9th Circuit struck down a California law restricting the carrying of a concealed weapon in the state. A majority ruled that restriction on carrying firearms in Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego and San Francisco violate the Second Amendment.
Can Washington overthrow three governments at the same time?
Excerpt:
Washington, which failed in 2011 to bomb Libya and Syria simultaneously, is now engaged in a new demonstration of its strength: organizing regime change in three states at the same time, in different regions of the world: Syria (CentCom), Ukraine (EuCom) and Venezuela (SouthCom).
To do this, President Obama has mobilized almost the entire National Security Council team.
First, Advisor Susan Rice and Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power. These two women are champions of “democratic” talk. They have for many years specialized in advocating interference in the internal affairs of other countries under the pretext of preventing genocide. But behind this generous rhetoric, they couldn’t care less about non-US lives as shown by Ms. Power during the chemical weapons crisis in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. The ambassador, who was aware of the innocence of the Syrian authorities, had gone to Europe with her husband to attend a film festival dedicated to Charlie Chaplin, while her government denounced a crime against humanity, the responsibility for which was placed upon President al Assad.
Then, the three regional co-ordinators: Philip Gordon ( Middle East and North Africa ), Karen Donfried (Europe and Eurasia ) and Ricardo Zuñiga ( Latin America).
In cellphone footage uploaded to Vimeo, a large group of police thought to be from the Baltimore County Police Department can be seen arresting two people as a massive crowd watches from the sidewalk. As the video’s author quietly films, one officer spots the camera and immediately approaches.
“Get out of my face,” the officer bizarrely says after walking up to the camera.
Despite being surrounded by countless people, the cameraman is specifically singled out as more police approach and begin demanding he leave the area.
“Get the hell out of here!” a second officer says. “You diverted my attention!”
Attempting to assert his Constitutional right, the cameraman is suddenly assaulted as the second officer begins pushing him down the street.
David Duren-Sanner should be spending his time going through college and scholarship applications this time of year.
Instead, he’s wondering if he’ll even be able to graduate after what hundreds of people are calling an overreaction to a mistake.
On Thursday, Duren-Sanner, a senior at Northeast High School drove his father’s car to school. During a random lockdown, his car was chosen to be searched.
Duren-Sanner gave permission because he said he had nothing to hide.
His father is a commercial fisherman on the West Coast and had apparently left a fishing knife in the car. Duren-Sanner’s father said it might have been wedged between one of the seats.
Duren-Sanner said he told school officials and the Sheriff’s department the car was his father’s and he didn’t know the knife was in it.
“He’s like ‘it doesn’t matter it was in your possession anyway,'” Duren-Sanner said.
Citing how riot police used force to crush dissent during the recent uprising, the Ukrainian Gun Owner’s Association has announced that it will, “start to work on the preparation of amendments to the Constitution, which will provide an unconditional right for Ukrainian citizens to bear arms.”
“People should have the right to bear arms, which will be put in written into the Constitution. Authorities should not and will not be stronger than its people! Armed people are treated with respect!” states the press release.
Whether the newly formed Ukrainian government (which will almost inevitably be comprised of EU-friendly puppets) will allow Ukrainians the bedrock freedom of the right to bear arms seems highly unlikely given Europe’s restrictive firearms laws.
Current Ukrainian law only allows people to own pistols or revolvers if they are licensed and can provide a “genuine reason” for needing to own a gun.
One of the proposed amendments to the constitution which would legalize the right to bear arms states;
“Everyone has the right to freedom of owning a firearm to protect their life and health, housing and property, life and health of other people’s constitutional rights and freedoms in the case of usurpation of power , the encroachments on the constitutional order, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine. Exercising the right to free possession of firearms is governed by applicable law and may be limited only by the court on the individual. “
Good luck to Ukrainians attempting to secure actual freedoms in the aftermath of a revolution which was in fact more of a coup d’état that will replace one dictator with a more western-compliant dictator. We won’t be holding our breath.
IRS Warns: Obamacare Tax Must Be Paid with Tax Return – Agency employs Orwellian term “Shared Responsibility Payment” to describe Obamacare individual mandate tax.
Excerpt:
President Obama’s Internal Revenue Service today quietly released a series of Obamacare “Health Care Tax Tips” warning Americans that they must obtain “qualifying” health insurance – as defined by the federal government – or face a “shared responsibility payment” when filing their tax returns in 2015. The term “shared responsibility payment” refers to the Obamacare individual mandate tax, one of at least seven tax hikes in the healthcare law that directly hit families making less than $250,000 per year.
‘Pure evil’: City caps sewer of woman fighting to live ‘off the grid’
Excerpt:
The fight of Cape Coral, Florida resident Robin Speronis to live “off the grid” has escalated with the city’s recent decision to cap her access to the sewer so she can no longer use it. It’s a move she calls, “pure evil.”
Since November 2013, WFTX Fox 4 has reported on Ms. Speronis’ ongoing battle with the city to live without most utilities. The self-sufficient woman has lived for more than a year-and-a-half using solar energy, a propane camping stove, rain water, and eating mainly non-perishable food. However, the day after the station’s first profile of her lifestyle Speronis’ home was tagged by the city code enforcement with a notice to vacate.
The State Police Special Licensing & Firearms Unit began mailing out notices to gun owners who attempted to register their firearms and accessories with the state but did not do so in time for the Jan. 1 deadline of Connecticut’s newly enacted gun control law.
The law bans the sale of magazines holding over 10 rounds and “assault rifles” manufactured after 1994 and requires that residents who possessed either before the ban to register them with the state.
Cops Continued Beating Dead, Unarmed Suspect
Excerpt:
The lawyer for a family whose patriarch died after a one-sided confrontation with police says officers may have continued beating the man even after he was already dead.
The attorney’s remarks come as outrageous new raw footage documenting the last moments of the man’s life is released.
The 6-3 ruling, triggered by a Los Angeles Police Department arrest in 2009, gives authorities more leeway to search homes without obtaining a warrant, even when there is no emergency.
The majority, led by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., said police need not take the time to get a magistrate’s approval before entering a home in such cases. But dissenters, led by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, warned that the decision would erode protections against warrantless home searches. The court had previously held that such protections were at the “very core” of the 4th Amendment and its ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.
The case began when LAPD officers responded to reports of a street robbery near Venice Boulevard and Magnolia Avenue. They pursued a suspect to an apartment building, heard shouting inside a unit and knocked on the door. Roxanne Rojas opened the door, but her boyfriend, Walter Fernandez, told officers they could not enter without a warrant.
“You don’t have any right to come in here. I know my rights,” Fernandez shouted from inside the apartment, according to court records.
The bill, introduced by State Sen. Toi Hutchinson, would require any phone bought or sold in the state to have the technology. Providers would also be mandated to insure smart phones against theft if the phone cannot be rendered completely inoperable.
The legislation is a replica of a bill recently introduced in California, aimed, according to lawmakers, at discouraging theft of phones and black market trading. Critics have warned, however, that such a system could be abused by government and police in order to stifle dissent.
Even worse, if the system were approved up by one or two states, such as California, manufacturers will undoubtedly push for all states to adopt the technology, to spare themselves more work in producing custom devices for select states.
Uploaded by Nick Brannigan and Vicky Lepage of healthconspiracy.com, the video reveals how countless Americans are willing to blindly sign their names on any petition without question.
“By signing this petition, I hereby fully support the adding of more toxic and dangerous fluoride to the drinking water of American people,” the petition states. “I am aware of the dozens of side effects fluoride has on the human body and mind. I am selling out the physical and mental well being of the American population and believe America needs more idiots (like myself).”
Nazis were Progressives – Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism
Excerpt:
On 16 June 1941, as Hitler readied his forces for Operation Barbarossa, Josef Goebbels looked forward to the new order that the Nazis would impose on a conquered Russia. There would be no come-back, he wrote, for capitalists nor priests nor Tsars. Rather, in the place of debased, Jewish Bolshevism, the Wehrmacht would deliver “der echte Sozialismus”: real socialism.
Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the Volk.
So total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that the merely to recount this fact is jarring. But few at the time would have found it especially contentious. As George Watson put it in The Lost Literature of Socialism:
It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too.
The clue is in the name. Subsequent generations of Leftists have tried to explain away the awkward nomenclature of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party as either a cynical PR stunt or an embarrassing coincidence. In fact, the name meant what it said.
Big Boob Is a Bust
Excerpt:
As recently as the early 1970s, millions of Americans couldn’t say the word “cancer” out loud, let alone “breast.”
Although All in the Family had broached the taboo topic in 1973, it was still a big deal a year later when new First Lady Betty Ford announced matter of factly that she’d undergone a mastectomy for breast cancer. She urged other women to get tested for the disease. They did, in droves.
Whether or not this is a net positive depends upon your opinion of 20th-century allopathic medicine: Either “countless daughters, mothers, and grandmothers were saved from certain death just in time” or—uttered in one’s best Dr. McCoy voice—“who knows how many women were poisoned and tortured by glorified witch doctors to add a few miserable, mutilated years to their lives? Dammit, Jim!”
And since those particular years encompassed the subsequent Carter Administration (plus the Pet Rock, Dr. Scholl’s Exercise Sandals, and KC and the Sunshine Band), I’m kinda with Bones on this one.
Luckily, not all of Betty Ford’s campaigns achieved such traction. (Remember the Equal Rights Amendment?) Nevertheless, she helped propagate a freak mutation of old-fashioned civic duty that’s outlasted Earth Shoes and Billy Beer: that species of empty-calorie activism known as “raising awareness.”
A geographically-challenged airport security agent nearly turned away a woman with a valid Washington, DC identification card — because she had no clue where the District was, or that it’s just as legit as a state.
Ashley Brandt was traveling back from the Grand Canyon with her boyfriend a couple weeks ago, when a Transportation Security Administration officer in Phoenix took a look at her driver’s license — marked “District of Columbia” — and threatened not to take it, The Washington Post reported.
“I don’t know if we can accept these. Do you have a US passport?” the agent said, according to Brandt .
Attorney general to challenge ruling that allows concealed weapons
Excerpt:
Atty. Gen. Kamala D. Harris said Thursday that she would challenge a federal appeals court ruling that would require counties to give law-abiding residents permits to carry concealed guns.
Harris’ announcement followed a decision last week by San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore, the named defendant in the case that triggered the ruling, not to appeal.
Unless overturned, the 2-1 ruling by a panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals would end a stringent restriction on carrying handguns in the state’s most populous counties. Most rural countries already allow permits if minimal requirements are met.
“Local law enforcement must be able to use their discretion to determine who can carry a concealed weapon,” Harris said. “I will do everything possible to restore law enforcement’s authority to protect public safety, and so today am calling on the court to review and reverse its decision.”
The court said fears of racial violence by students outraged over the American flag displayed on the t-shirts outweighed the right guaranteed by the Constitution. The Live Oak High School in the San Jose suburb of Morgan Hill has experienced racial issues between Latino and white students in the past.
“Our role is not to second-guess the decision to have a Cinco de Mayo celebration or the precautions put in place to avoid violence,” Judge M. Margaret McKeown wrote for the three member panel. Racial issues unrelated to the Bill of Rights “made it reasonable for school officials to proceed as though the threat of a potentially violent disturbance was real,” she added.
William Becker, a lawyer from the American Freedom Law Center representing the students, said they will appeal the ruling.
“The 9th Circuit upheld the rights of Mexican students celebrating a holiday of another country over U.S. student proudly supporting this country,” Becker said.
“Andrew Robinson was looking forward to getting health insurance through the Affordable Care Act. He has a small publishing business and works part time, so he hasn’t had coverage. In early January he signed up for a plan that cost nearly $300 a month. About a half hour later he and his wife realized they could barely afford that. They quickly found a less expensive plan through Humana for $116 a month,” says the reporter.
“I immediately called back the Florida Blue and asked them to cancel the policy I just set up,” says Robinson.
“But he quickly learned canceling Obamacare is no easy task. … More than six weeks later after spending 50 to 60 hours on the phone his policy is still not canceled and he is still waiting for the payment Florida Blue withdrew from his account to be refunded.”
“It is not something that I feel is really part of this conversation,” Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood told Fusion’s Jorge Ramos on Thursday. “I don’t know if it’s really relevant to the conversation.”
When pressed, Richards said that in her view life began for her three children when she delivered them.
She explained that the purpose of her organization is not to answer a question that “will be debated through the centuries,” but to provide options for pregnant women.
Thomas Jefferson’s Final Warnings
Excerpt:
People remember Thomas Jefferson for the Declaration of Independence, which he wrote in 1776. A few will remember that he served as president from 1801 to 1809, but aside from that, they know almost nothing of his life and work. In actual fact, he lived till 1826, when he died on July 4, fifty years to the day after the ratification of his Declaration.
During those fifty years, Jefferson’s intellectual life bloomed. He was an inventor, a horticulturalist, and especially a philosopher. In fact, he was a brave and excellent philosopher.
Christi Seale says her 17-year-old son Chaz accidentally confused a beer can for a soda can and packed it in his lunch.
“He was in a hurry, running late. We were talking about school and he put it all together and took off for school,” she said.
When he realized his mistake at school, Chaz gave the unopened beer to his teacher. But that teacher then reported it to the principal at Livingston High School, who suspended the boy for three days and then sent him to an alternative school for two months.
Chaz said, “I gave it to the teacher thinking I wouldn’t get in trouble, and I got in trouble.”
That kind of tone deaf, zero tolerance informed move isn’t going to discourage students from underage drinking, it’s going to discourage them from alerting school officials to inadvertent infractions of school policy.
Meanwhile, a student in Tennessee learned never to consent to a search, even when you don’t think you have anything to hide. Via News Channel 5:
On Thursday, Duren-Sanner, a senior at Northeast High School drove his father’s car to school. During a random lockdown, his car was chosen to be searched.
Duren-Sanner gave permission because he said he had nothing to hide.
His father is a commercial fisherman on the West Coast and had apparently left a fishing knife in the car. Duren-Sanner’s father said it might have been wedged between one of the seats.
Duren-Sanner said he told school officials and the Sheriff’s department the car was his father’s and he didn’t know the knife was in it.
“He’s like ‘it doesn’t matter it was in your possession anyway,'” Duren-Sanner said.
School officials suspended him for 10 days, the maximum allowed under school policy, and then he was reprimanded to attend 90 days at an alternative school.
He’s probably learned his lesson, not about the dangers of fishing knives, but about the dangers of consenting to a search. The beer can and the fishing knife cost the two students a combined 13 days of suspension and five months at “alternative” schools. Administrators at both schools insist procedures were followed, and what are they getting paid the big bucks for if not to defer to the rule book and deny access to their schools to students who’ve inadvertently run afoul of those rules, even when they haven’t hurt anyone. Whether they like it or not, they’ve taught the students, and any classmates paying attention, a valuable lesson on authority and how stupid and dangerous it can be.
Thomas Jefferson: “We Failed”
Excerpt:
Thomas Jefferson – one of my long-time heroes – was convinced that he and his friends blew the chance they had to establish true freedom in America. I know that a hundred thousand self-praising textbooks, speeches, pundits and songs claim that Jefferson and the rest established freedom, but that’s NOT what Jefferson thought, and that is NOT what he said. (You can choose who to believe for yourself.)
Nearly fifty years after the declaration of independence, he was of the opinion that the founders did not fully live up to the moment presented to them.
Opine Time 