Standard Mischief

Shouldn’t we name bills after heroes, when we can? Isn’t that better than naming them posthumously after an innocent victim?

Louisiana’s governor Bobby Jindal signed House Bill 1272 into law that allows “any church, synagogue, mosque, or other similar place of worship” to exercise control over who may carry firearms in defense of the congregation. That means it would be legal for someone in Louisiana to be a hero just like Jeanne Assam was at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

As you can expect, the left side of the “separation of church and state” crowd doesn’t like this slight relaxation of the laws concerning churches one bit. You’ll get all the usual “blood running in the pews” and “fights over parking spaces ending in gunfire” scenarios that somehow never really pan out as true. I won’t link to that crap, but if you want to find it, they’re calling it the “guns in churches bill”. Knowing that, you don’t need anything higher than a white belt in “search engine-fu” to find all the hand wringing you want.

Let the anti-freedom crowd pick the catch-phrases, and you’re fighting an unfair fight with one hand tied behind your back. I know what I’m going to call HB 1272.
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Jeanne Assam has a blog and a book out.

nola.com published a link to the bill. Thanks, I’m always bashing the MSM for not doing that.

You can find the text of the bill (linked as a pdf) on this page, and it’s a compact 3 pages of double spaced text and the usual wide margins, so you just know it was meant to be read by the voters.

in India, they have coinage made out of stainless steel. While not at Zimbabwe’s level of inflation, it appears that their coinage is worth more as scrap than as coins. The steel coins are being melted down and used to make things like razor blades.

We’ve got the same issue here. Check out Coinflation.com. This site shows the value of coins expressed as the spot price of the coin makeup. Zinc is down this week, but a bit ago, even the copper-plated zinc pennies made since 1982 were worth more than their face value. While I’m not yet buying penny sorting machines and hording rolls of nickels, Every good coin I posses by the end of the day is ending up in a jar.

Below that is a handy listing of all the coins that have silver in them and the value based on spot price.

What we really need to do is to drop the penny and the nickel, and start pricing things in tenths of a dollar. We could also stop trying to make dollar coins the same weight and size as a Carter Quarter, (only the government would fail to figure out by now that no one wants these coins), and instead introduce a new coin about the size of a nickel. Punching a pentagon shaped hole in the coin and adding Twin Towers on the obverse, along with withdrawing dollar bills from circulation will insure that these coins will be used.

We should also scrap those laws that prevent people from doing what they will with their property. I know that’s a radical idea, but we could pretend that people actually own the things they own every once in a while.

This is the “Second Amendment Enforcement Act“, announced by the NRA in this presser, introduced by Senators John McCain, et al.

You will note that the actual bill number is nowhere in the release. I still don’t get this, because if you read the bill itself – even with it not being inline with the actual U. S. code D.C. law – it’s still fairly easy to understand. It’s well organized and clearly was meant to be read by the public.

That’s actually the point, I’d wager. Not having the bill attached to the bill that gives D.C. residents representation in Congress by an unconstitutional method, means that this bill pretty much has a snowflake’s chance in hell of being signed by Obama. So this is a bill that’s not actually meant to be passed, its only meant to enhance the NRA cred of some critters.

ETA: good catch by Sebastian, see below in comments.

Edited to add: Despite the fact that I deep-linked to the full comment, and even added ellipses to point out the my deliberate omission, tgirsch still thinks I misquoted him. I’m leaving the post intact below the following two dashes, but I encourage you to follow my original link to read the whole comment.

Then tgirsch goes on to say, well, just damn! Read the comment below, because I don’t want to risk misquoting again.
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“Hidden” is the exact language used by CNN in this story.

While I may not be adamantly opposed to this, it’s still another tax on employers which will get passed on to consumers or paid out of possible salaries of people who don’t lactate. I’m sure no one factored that into the cost of the bill before it was introduced.

My real objection is the fact that we never got to read, discuss, or debate the behemoth before it was deemed as passed.

Back when we had a whole 72 hours to decode such standard mischief as :

…strike the first four letters on the fifth word of the second sentence in section 170(c)(2)(B) and replace them with the letters “fsck” …

…tgirsch let a little truth out. Earlier I had said something to the effect that the more people learn about the bill, the more that people of all stripes dislike it. He countered that reality was the exact other way around. Then he dropped this whopper:

You really and truly think the way to build broad support for a complex piece of legislation is to let people read it?…

Wow, just fucking wow.

I really don’t know what they’re protesting, or why. I usually find stuff like this fascinating but I really can’t spare the time right now to do the digging. But that doesn’t matter. I find the following statement highly disturbing:

“By order of the City of Pittsburgh Chief Police, I hereby declare this to be an unlawful assembly. I order all those assembled to immediately disperse. You must leave the immediate vicinity. If you remain in this immediate vicinity, you will be in violation of the Pennsylvania Crimes Code. No matter what your purpose is, you must leave. If you do not disperse, you may be arrested and/or subject to other police action. Other police action may include actual physical removal, the use of riot control agents and/or less lethal munitions which could cause risk of injury to those who remain.”