Category: Civil Liberties

… only outlaws will cure bacon.

This fight is almost as tiring as gun rights, in that it’s constantly under assault by clueless, power hungry politicians:

Leahy’s rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies — including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission — to access Americans’ e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant. It also would give the FBI and Homeland Security more authority, in some circumstances, to gain full access to Internet accounts without notifying either the owner or a judge.

If you want to know why I self-host everything, this is why. You want to look into my electronic affairs? Personal files? E-mail? Bring me a warrant. It’s also why I only use Facebook for platitudes and crap I don’t care if other people know.

That’s pretty funny right there.

Stephanie Jones has an article in Salon that starts off with “If Americans cared as much about their voting rights as their gun rights, they’d be up in arms right now.” And I could say that if the left cared about Second Amendment rights as much as they care about Voting Rights, you’d be able to buy a gun cash on the barrel, no questions asked. I find this kind of attitude infuriating:

These laws — which require voters to show a state-issued photo ID that many Americans don’t have and will have great difficulty obtaining — could bar 3.2 million eligible and legally registered voters from voting in the next election, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan think tank.

Oh, but there’s no concern about millions people who might not be able to exercise their Right to Keep and Bear Arms for the same reason? This is complete and utter bullshit. I’ll put more thought into what to have for dinner tonight than what Stephanie Jones put into this article, for her to parrot such nonsense. Either you can’t condition the exercise of a right on showing state ID, or you can. If you can, it’s acceptable for both rights. If you can’t, it’s acceptable for neither. That’s the debate, and it’s one I think that is worth having. It’s also one I’m perfectly happen to be on the side of requiring no state ID for either, if Ms. Jones can decide voting rights are really that important. But what we don’t get to do is choose rights we like to have the highest protections, and those we don’t to have inferior protections. That’s no way to run a country that claims to be serious about rights and protecting them.

Zermoid wins the Internets in the comments:

There is something very wrong with America when you can have a serious discussion about “you won’t need to smuggle in a Big Gulp. You can buy one legally.”

So we apparently do not have pre-ban Big Gulps and post-ban Big Gulp’s.

Sorry for the absence, but we had our Friends of the NRA banquet tonight, and for just our county managed to bring in an order or magnitude more warm bodies than the typical CSGV protest I’ve seen outside the White House, and these people were actually forking over hard earned cash to support youth shooting.

But today’s quote comes from Tam, who comments on New York City actually adopting the Big Gulp Ban, opening up the market for smuggling high-capacity drink containers:

… and best of all, even if you get intercepted crossing the Hudson with your illicit Styrofoam cargo and the NYPD opens up on you, it’s not like they could actually hit you (and the Palisades make a safer backstop for them than Fifth Avenue does…)

Zing!

… they want to use to tell us whether we can have constitutional rights or not?

Interestingly, this is a First Amendment case. The claim is that the City of Honolulu, engaging in Reasoned Discourse(TM) on their Facebook page, by deleting unfavorable posts, constitutes unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. That’s very interesting, and I’m not an expert in First Amendment law, but from what I do know, I think they probably have a good chance of prevailing here.

Cops knock on the wrong house, a man answers with a gun, and the man ends up dead. I feel fortunate to live in a good neighborhood where SWAT raids are not a regular occurrence, because if someone breaks down my door early in the morning, without announcing their intentions, I’d probably be found in the same position: SWAT team in the living room with me visibly armed. I’d likely suffer the same fate unless I can ascertain they are indeed police officers quickly enough.

I would point out, if it wasn’t for the War on Drugs, we’d have relatively little need for this kind of military tactic. No knock warrants are generally used to prevent destruction of evidence, which if you’re going to do, you had better be sure the crime warrants putting people’s lives at risk. I don’t think preventing people from getting high is worth that, personally.