How about taking someone along for the ride whose employer buys ink by the barrel or power by the megawatt/hour?

Hopefully, after carefully pointing out that there is no resident requirement for a Maryland Carry License, hopefully I’ve done just that. Hopefully. Not saying. Nope.

The only issue I see is it may be quite a boring story:

Week one: got the photos, fingerprints, references, paperwork, and the outrageous fee for exercising a core civil right all together. Mailed it in, return receipt requested.

Week two: Maryland failed in their plea to get a stay

Week three: The bank says my check was cashed

Week four: Nothing

Week five: Nothing

…

Week eleven: Nothing, and from my 1000+ other contacts, nothing either. MD state police says “there is a slight backlog”

…

Week twenty-six: Nothing. Except that Raymond Woollard (of Woollard v. Sheridan ) finally got his permit renewed. State Police say they are giving preference to renewals.

Week twenty-seven: Nothing.

…

Anyone with any ideas for “filler”, let’s hear them.

Oh, and credit for the “no residency requirement” goes to Patrick, who is (unverified) [see comments below] President of Maryland Shall Issue, in a comment left on this thread here.

I can’t seem to find a source to tell me whether or not this is a first for any sitting president, but this blog over at ABC at least admits that way back in 2005, an attorney that works at the pleasure of the President says doing it this way is entirely kosher.

The LA Times informs us that past Presidents, celebrities, and public officials have all in the past used the auto-pen, except that the reporter left out the fact that this was usually used to sign form letters and Christmas cards.

This little bit of mischief ought to be good for a few million in lawyer fees, you know, to stimulate the economy. Of course, the only way you’ll ever be granted “standing” in a lawsuit is to hope the government is willing to admit that they secretly spied on you.

The TSA is busy blowing their own horn about the fact that the expected mass opt-out at the pedophile-scanners never really materialized. Of course It looks like the flying public said “no thanks” to even flying this week. Only the government would call that a success. I can’t see anyone in the media reporting hard and fast travel numbers, but Amtrak says Wednesday might have been a record day, and AAA is reporting that the interstates are going to be clogged.

Menwhile, if you think my “boxcar” comment was hyperbole, well you might be right, but Uncle reports that if you aren’t a model citizen, if you opt-out, if you remind the TSA agent that he isn’t above the Constitution, or if you have the gall to question the way the TSA keeps us all safe in your blog or other alternative media, they have a new made up name for you, “domestic extremist“.

We can chose between a former Governor who actually tossed us a tiny bit of gristle last time he was in office (but couldn’t actually tell us, because that would have just totally wigged out the fiscally responsible, middle of the road voters in the next county over), or “O’MoM” O’Malley, champion of the nanny state. (There was also someone from the largely ineffective and comical local branch of the large “L” Libertarians.)

I voted for Charles Lollar (an unknown to me African-American who didn’t spend many campaign dollars here in the most prosperous African-American majority county in the nation explaining exactly which party he belongs to). He’ll never beat Steny Hoyer, unfortunately.

All the judges failed to present a single argument of why they deserve to keep their jobs, so I voted no each time. They’re a shoo-in anyway.

A representive of the local Democratic party handed me a flyer asking for my vote for every single spending referendum, but otherwise failed to explain why we needed them. Somehow someone thinks we can just tax and spend our way out of the Great-Recession.

There was a wonderful amendment to the state constitution that would increase the dollar amount, below which you would not be given the right to a trial by jury in civil procedings. Here again, the party of the downtrodden and the poor; the party of the people urged us to price ourselves out of our own legal system. I guess our Federal Constitution guarantee of twenty dollars only overrides the state Constitution when the state wants it to. The new limit for the right to a jury trial is to be over $15 thousand dollars if the trial lawyer wing of the (D)s get their way.

Ugh.

And Laural gets the Quote of the Day with this:

“Until we get a “None of the Above” on the ballot, I can’t get behind the idea of showing up to vote just for the sake of showing up to vote.”

I need to get into the custom law-enforcement only gadgets business. This thing looks like less than $200 in parts, (zip ties, magnets, a cut down mag-light for power, and a handy-talky packaged with a TNC and a GPS), and I’d retail it with special custom law-enforcement only features for say $2999 to the type of people who spend taxpayer dollars.

A slightly different design, less tactical (i.e. less black) would be marketed to hams¹ for say maybe $260. [youtube]

It looks like there’s a split decision in the circuses and so something like this warrantless tracking mischief might make it there to the supremes. Unfortunately, I don’t have any confidence that we won’t get another “bong hits 4 jesus” boner of a decision.² Until then, depending on where you live, it seems to be perfectly OK to publicly track the location at all times of you congressional-critters. So, anyone want to split the cost for one to be attached to my local rep’s private property?³

[h/t] Kevin (I wish you didn’t have such a god-awful comment system so I could leave a comment once in a while)

¹ Amateur Radio

² School kids don’t shed their rights to free speech at the schoolhouse door, instead, they are required to leave their rights at home just in case they run into the Principal out in public.

³ If anyone wants to search-fu up some homebrew plans, the magic word is “APRS” – Automatic Packet Reporting System.

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.
–
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.

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.

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.

Then tgirsch goes on to say, well, just damn! Read the comment below, because I don’t want to risk misquoting again.
- -

“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.

“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.”