The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
I think now I have to call him John “I’m doing my job” Street. After reading this article, it’s pretty clear that despite his assertions, that no, he is not. Can you imagine what would happen to me if I decided to leave the office for a day to stand in line for an iPhone?
UPDATE: Well, at least John Street had the decency to pull up a chair and wait in line with everyone else. Mayors of some other towns didn’t even have the decency to do that.
Wyatt Earp over at Support Your Local Gunfighter is a Philadelphia police officer, and marks an unfortunate milestone for the city: the 200th murder of the year. Â Read the whole thing. Â He doesn’t have good things to say about Commissioner Johnson’s last act of “leadership”:
Look, when you take someone who has been behind a desk for half their career and put them in patrol for the summer, who is that helping? No one. They don’t want to be there, so they’re not going to be stopping cars and rushing to priority jobs. But, when the media asks, the brass can say, “We’ve increased the amount of officers on the streets!” It’s a shell game.
Yup. I talked about that a few months ago here. Until the city politicians actually face the problem, instead of deflecting blame to Harrisburg or elsewhere, this is going to continue. The city’s politicians lack the political courage to do anything. The only thing that will work is taking the criminals off the streets and keeping them off the streets. It’s my understanding that the courts, jails and prisons in the city have become a revolving door.
I think it’s a tough thing to for the politicians to face, because to go into a bad neighborhood and say “We’re getting the criminals off the streets, and we need your help” means telling folks that you’re going to lock up someone’s brother, child, nephew, husband or other loved one. It means people will have to take responsibility. It’s far easier for the politicians to deflect blame, whether it to be to Harrisburg, guns, drugs, what have you, so no one has to take responsibility.  There may be things Harrisburg can do to help, but the problem won’t abate until someone stands up and admits what the problem is.  I may have my disagreements with Michael Nutter, but he’ll be an improvement over the circus clowns that currently run city hall. Hopefully he’ll impress me.
Over at Jeff’s, the Black Caucus in the General Assembly is holding up the budget over gun control.
Philadelphia is now the sixth largest city.  Congratulations Phoenix! I heard on the radio this morning it was because Phoenix cheated, by annexing land. I also think it might have something to do with the city not being a sewer, but I could be wrong.
Cam Edwards has some good thoughts on the potential revival of The Fairness Doctrine:
The bottom line is this: those who want to regulate speech live in a very bad time to do so. Gone are the days when you needed a printing press or a broadcasting license to share your opinions with the world. The genie’s out of the bottle, and it’s not going back in.
Yup! Read the whole thing.
Bitter points out a new regulation that may go into effect in Tennessee requiring everyone, regardless of age, to flash ID to buy alcohol. I would actually be willing to agree to have that in Pennsylvania if they abolished the state run liquor system and I could buy a bottle of bourbon in the supermarket. Can’t make the argument that it’ll encourage underage drinking if you have to card everyone! Whipping out the drivers license is less of a burden to me than having to drive to New Jersey or Delaware to get decent hooch.
Of course. all this is going to do is cause more straw purchasing of alcohol. Pretty soon after that, you’ll only be able to buy so much alcohol in a month in order to deal with the problem. But then they’ll start manufacturing it at home like I do [I should be clear here, I mean home brewing, not distilling. The ATF already has my number for the F part, I don’t want any trouble with the A part too :)]. And then…. but oh wait, we already went down this road and it didn’t work. It’s a pity folks can’t make the analogy.
It looks like the Cumberland County District Attorney has done the right thing:
“When police are audio- and video-recording traffic stops with notice to the subjects, similar actions by citizens, even if done in secret, will not result in criminal charges,” Freed said yesterday. “I intend to communicate this decision to all police agencies within the county so that officers on the street are better-prepared to handle a similar situation should it arise again.”
Excellent.
It always astonishes me what lengths the nanny state politicians will go to in order to control your life.  Bruce links to this article n the Boston Globe which has me quite literally speechless.
People of Massachusetts: You started a war over less than this. What happened?
MADD is pushing for DUI reform in the Keystone State. MADD long ago went off the rails, and are now the new preachers against demon rum. I don’t have a lot of specifics on what they are looking to change specifically, but if MADD is involved, we need to keep an eye on things.
Apparently now the conspiracy has expanded to encompass Purdue University.
I’ve gotten some more comments on my earlier post about Iraq. I saw my friend Jason commented, and started to craft my own, but decided it would work best as a separate post, rather than as a comment.
I think it’s a grave mistake to believe this is a problem that originated with the United States, and that by retreating, we can solve it. When I say that Al-Qaeda felt they could attack us with impunity, I do not mean that they felt that we would just sit back and shrug it off. What I mean is that Al-Qaeda felt that they could attack and defeat America. Whether that involved drawing us into a war in Afghanistan, or Iraq, that would turn into a quagmire, is of little matter. They felt it was time to take us on, and their narrative centers around western weakness and softness, and up until post 9/11, we hadn’t done much in the way to dispel that narrative.
That’s why I think leaving would be dangerous. Radical Islam aims to re-establish the caliphate, and to instigate a world wide Islamic movement. It’s absurd only in the sense that the west has the capability to largely destroy Islam as an ideology of any serious consequence. But we don’t want it to come to that. Iraq is an experiment to determine whether an Arab and Islamic society can be brought into a globalized world, and able to live among us, without having to resort to terrible measures.
I don’t think we really have a choice here. We either fight now, where we have the luxury of a measured response, or we fight later, when we might have to do it with nuclear weapons. Right now the choice is ours, it deosn’t make much sense to wait until we have no choice, except pushing the button.
Whether we like or not, at the end of World War II, Europe basically handed us the keys to their former empire, and said “Well, we’re quite tired of working on the place. We’ve decided to retire to greener pastures. Here are the keys. Hope you don’t mind the mess too much.” We didn’t ask for it, and I wish we didn’t have to do it, but we’re stuck with it. I’d rather do everything we can to win now, when we can keep the body count to a relative minimum, than to fight later, when that could end up meaning total war. I don’t really see any in between ground on this issue.