United States

... personally I think it's the refusing to submit part that is causing him problems:

We obtained official court documents from both sides of this case.  On one hand, the arresting officer from the Logan City Police Department, James Adkins, claims that when Jared refused to stop talking, that hindered his ability to do his job, hence, the obstruction charge.  On the other side, Ben White points out that nowhere in the arresting officer's petition, does it mention Jared ever making any threats or acting in a violent manner.

So he wore an NRA t-shirt to school and refused to stop talking when the school officials infringed his 1st Amendment rights by demanding that he remove the shirt.  This is alleged to justify arresting him and charging him with obstruction of justice.

Justice would be firing everyone involved in this case so far, and then charging them with obstruction of civil rights under color of law.

So.  An anti-gun activist gets a bee on her bonnet about guns, and decides to spend a month carrying a firearm while doing the absolute legal minimum necessary.  Even though she knows nothing about guns.

Yes, I bought a handgun and will carry it everywhere I go over the next 30 days. I have four rules: Carry it with me at all times, follow the laws of my state, only do what is minimally required for permits, licensing, purchasing and carrying, and finally be prepared to use it for protecting myself at home or in public.

Normally, I'd be all for this idea.  Widen the horizons, educate yourself, new experiences, walk a mile in the other guy's shoes, etc.  But here's where I balked:

Tony told me a Glock doesn't have an external safety feature, so when I got home and opened the box and saw the magazine in the gun I freaked. I was too scared to try and eject it as thoughts flooded my mind of me accidentally shooting the gun and a bullet hitting my son in the house or rupturing the gas tank of my car, followed by an earth-shaking explosion. This was the first time my hands shook from the adrenaline surge and the first time I questioned the wisdom of this 30-day experiment.

I needed help. I drove to where a police officer had pulled over another driver. Now, writing this, I realize that rolling up on an on-duty cop with a handgun in tow might not have been fully thought through.

I told him I just bought a gun, had no clue how to use it. I asked him to make sure there were no bullets in the magazine or chamber. He took the magazine out and cleared the chamber. He assured me it was empty and showed me how to look. Then he told me how great the gun was and how he had one just like it.

The cop thought I was an idiot and suggested I take a class. But up to that point I'd done nothing wrong, nothing illegal.

Newsflash: you were an idiot.  You had done nothing illegal because a free society requires a certain degree of personal responsibility.  It's your personal responsibility to know and understand gun safety before endangering yourself and those around you by carrying a gun.

Now, most states don't have a legal requirement to get training before you can buy a gun.  (Some do).  There are a number of reasons for that, but most of them boil down to the fact that such training requirements can be, and often are, abused to act as a barrier to gun ownership.  After all, it's hard to get training with a gun if you don't have a gun.  Sort of a chicken and egg problem.  Not to mention, for people who own many guns, it's silly to make them take a training course over and over again.

That doesn't mean gun safety training isn't available, and it certainly doesn't mean it isn't a good idea.  What it means is that it is up to the individual to recognize their ignorance and seek out gun safety training.

Many people were trained informally in gun safety by their parents or extended family growing up.  Many others, who suddenly experience a need for self-defense later in their lives, get the short version from a friend or police officer as they buy their first gun.  There are safety classes available for those whose circle of friends and family don't include knowledgeable gun owners.  (In fact, I recommend a formal safety course when you buy your first gun, even if you already got the basics).

Most of them don't approach a police officer conducting a traffic stop, because most of them have thought through their actions quite a bit further.  They recognized their ignorance and took steps to correct it.  They exercised personal responsibility.

The author is not exercising personal responsibility.   She knows she doesn't understand firearms, and has taken no steps to correct that before carrying one in public.  She is endangering herself and those around her.

Now, let's inject some reality checks.

Getting the permit to carry a concealed weapon was simple. I filled out a form, had my fingerprints taken for a background check and paid $56.50. No training required. It took far longer to get my dog a license.

I don't know what state the author is in, but in my state (Texas), the application fee for the license is significantly more than that amount, and a 12 hour training class is required.  The training class cost roughly $200, and the fingerprinting process also has an associated fee of about $50.

So the total cost -- including a gun, for someone who doesn't already own one -- approaches $1000.  That's a much more significant barrier to entry. 

It was obvious from the way I handled the gun that I knew nothing about firearms. Tony sold it to me anyway. The whole thing took 7 minutes. As a gratified consumer, I thought, "Well, that was easy." Then the terrifying reality hit me, "Holy hell, that was EASY."  Too easy. I still knew nothing about firearms.

It's not Tony's job to make sure you know anything about firearms.  That's your job.  But I'd be curious whether Tony recommended you take a gun safety class.

That said, 7 minutes?  If the author bought her gun from a gun store, she had to fill out a background check form.  You may have heard that the BATFE has been a little busy conducting those checks lately.  Filling out the form will easily take 10 or 15 minutes on its own, especially the first time, and waiting for the BATFE to approve the sale can take up to three days.  I've never had it take less than half an hour, and I have had it take several hours.

Because the author had already obtained her concealed carry permit, she avoided the wait times associated with calling in the background check, which enabled her to cite that 7 minute figure deceptively.

Finally, when she bought the gun, included in the transaction should have been an instruction manual.  Rather than driving around in a panic looking for a police officer with a firearm she thought was loaded and ready to fire, she could have picked up that instruction manual and read it.  This would have told her where the controls on her firearm were located, how to operate them, and how to safely unload the firearm.

And it would have informed her that she really should take a gun safety class, even if it isn't required.

Gun safety, you see, is a personal responsibility, not a government one.  And the author is very much a part of the problem.

Peggy Noonan writes:

The purpose of the surveillance is enhanced security, a necessary goal to say the least.

If this were true, the government would not be exempting mosques from surveillance.  It is impossible to provide security from terrorism, which has an undeniable Islamic component, without scrutinizing mosques.  Therefore, the purpose of the surveillance state is not to provide security.  Security is the excuse.

The purpose?  Judging by the experiences of Catherine Engelbrech, whose True the Vote organization sought to clean voter rolls of ineligible or fraudulent voters, and who was harassed by the IRS, FBI, BATFE, and OSHA during an election year, the purpose of the surveillance is to elect Democrats.  Particularly Barack Obama.

Recall how proud Obama was of his campaign's data mining capabilities?  How well they targeted people?

Yep.

Tea party groups are dangerous and must be suppressed, because they motivate Republican leaning voters to actually get out and vote.  The 2010 elections showed that when Republican leaners get motivated, Democrats lose badly -- so those voters must remain disillusioned and apathetic.  It's enough to turn the IRS loose on them.  Delay them, deny them non-profit status the left has been abusing for years, demand reams of intrusive information about them, intimidate them.

But True the Vote got the full treatment -- a four-agency anal probe.  Why?

Because True the Vote threatened to expose the left's reliance on voter fraud for the margin of victory.

Accorti responded to a home Monday afternoon where a feral mother cat and her five kittens were living in a woodpile.

He allegedly told the homeowner that shelters were full and that the cats would be going to kitty heaven. He then pulled out his gun and shot the five, 8- to 10-week-old kittens.

Accorti allegedly told the homeowner that he isn't supposed to do this, but it was justifiable. The woman ran into the house to shield her children, who were screaming and crying.

These are the actions of a psychopath.  They are also the actions of a police officer.  We are so fucking screwed.

"A cyber security firm hired by CBS News has determined through forensic analysis that Sharyl Attkisson's computer was accessed by an unauthorized, external, unknown party on multiple occasions late in 2012. Evidence suggests this party performed all access remotely using Attkisson's accounts. While no malicious code was found, forensic analysis revealed an intruder had executed commands that appeared to involve search and exfiltration of data.

This party also used sophisticated methods to remove all possible indications of unauthorized activity, and alter system times to cause further confusion.

CBS News is taking steps to identify the responsible party and their method of access."

What does the Justice Department have to say about that?

To our knowledge, the Justice Department has never compromised Ms. Attkisson's computers, or otherwise sought any information from or concerning any telephone, computer, or other media device she may own or use.

"To our knowledge"?  What about, say, the NSA?  The CIA?

47 Senators show up for a briefing on NSA surveillance.  The nation employs 100 Senators.  Why are we paying the other 53?

... says nothing about the NSA surveillance going on while he was Vice President.

In other news, Al Gore is a Democrat.  Democrats are attacking a Democratic president over the NSA scandal.  Wow.

... says Big Sister Napolitano.

To make a long story short:

All three letters tested positive for ricin, using a somewhat insensitive field test. No one was exposed to lethal levels of the toxin (lethal levels being extremely small), fortunately. But the publicity over the letters wasn?t what the putative sender might have expected. Glaze, Bloomberg, and Obama, and their partisans and the media (but we repeat ourselves!) received the news with something approximating delight. The letters were proof that gun owners were murderous, insurrectionist sickos, fully deserving the IRS audits and whatever other miseries federal authorities could bring down on them. Editorials and "news analyses" (i.e., the New York Times equivalent of the front-page editorial formerly favored by Pravda pre-1992) piled imprecations on the presumed facilitator and enabler of this act of terrorism: the NRA, naturally.

Meanwhile, the actual investigation took another turn.

Another turn that involved an unsuccessful zombie actress with anti-gun views married to a pro-gun husband she was tired of. 

Solution: She allegedly decides to frame the husband for sending letters poisoned with ricin to prominent anti-gun politicians along with a threatening pro-gun letter.  The police arrested her husband, but he immediately figured out what was up and when they investigated further, well, his alibi was valid -- he was at work when she was using his computer to print the letters she wrote on hers.

Which leads me to ask... say, why are anti-gun activists so violent?

... is that criminals don't buy weapons from law-abiding citizens.

They steal them from police officers.

Or from FBI agents.

Or from the secure firearms room in a courthouse.

Even in Jamaica, an island where firearms are banned outright, criminals seem to have no problem getting firearms.  Even fully automatic firearms.

Oh, and about how assault weapons are really powerful and deadly:

For two hours, the man - armed with an assault rifle, a handgun and hundreds of rounds of ammunition - opened fire on unsuspecting motorists from his pickup truck as he drove around the remote central Texas county.

Two hours, hundreds of rounds from an assault rifle (really?  I don't know if it was full or semi automatic) and a handgun, and the death toll was... 1.  5 others wounded.

He could have killed more people running them over with his truck.

... and removing their facebook pages, too.  It's almost like they have something to be ashamed of, isn't it?  Peggy Noonan writes that the IRS thinks they are The Untouchables.  I agree; I'm just thinking of a different kind of untouchable.

He's allying with Bloomberg and funding a "Stop The NRA" website. 

What's weird about this is that he says his reasons for focusing on gun control are. 

First, he says the issue is tearing the country apart -- but overall crime is down, and so is gun crime.  Even spree killers are low enough to be statistical noise, though recent horrific incidents have the issue on the media's mind.

Second, he says:

"I also don't like bullies," he adds. "And the NRA is a bully. And Congress needs leadership from the outside."

Leadership from a billionaire who can afford bodyguards opposing the NRA's 5 million members who just want their right to self-defense to be respected?

I don't think he really gets the whole bully thing.

So long as there are legal safeguards in place to prevent the usage of data collection from moving beyond the kind of matrix hunting that the NSA is doing with meta data, I don't feel -- and haven't since back when Bush was under assault for similar programs; sorry, but I just don't -- that these programs are scandalous.  They are part of national security in a high tech era, and the delicate balance between civil liberties and data collection, while it must be jealously delineated by the courts to err on the side of individual autonomy and privacy, has probably helped thwart any number of terror attacks.

In fact, had such a program been in place prior to the Boston Marathon bombing, it's possible that atrocity may have been prevented.

Jeff, the program WAS in place when the Boston Marathon bombing took place.  The court order that was released is a renewal of an order that has been in place continuously -- renewed every so often -- since 2007 or perhaps earlier.

I have no objection to wiretapping terrorists.  The problem is, I and the vast majority of the American people are not terrorists.  Before the government is allowed to obtain information about me in an investigation, it must obtain a warrant that is specific to me, specific to the crimes of which I am accused, specific in the information or physical items sought, and demonstrate probable cause for all of those things.

If the government wants to make a case for reducing the required elements of an "anti-terrorism" warrant -- as the Patriot Act did and does -- I admit there is an argument to be made.  That argument consists of these three points:

1. Most terrorists are agents of foreign powers (nations or terrorist groups).  Insofar as they were once citizens, they have given up that claim.
2. Most terrorists are readily identifiable as risky individuals through their connections to other terrorists, once scrutinized.
3. There are few terrorists, and so relaxing the privacy standards for people suspected of terrorism is relatively low-risk for non-terrorists.

What the government has been doing is using those same arguments -- especially point three -- to support a wholesale national surveillance infrastructure that destroys the privacy of everyone in the country.  It is a program supposedly targeted at a limited number of people (terrorists) for a limited time (three months) and is instead applied to the whole population (300 million people) for years (at least 6 years so far).

It is entirely unacceptable, even assuming that the surveillance measures being taken would prevent terrorist attacks -- except that the Boston Marathon attack proves that the surveillance is completely useless. 

Remember the characteristics of the attackers.

They were Muslims.  They were foreign immigrants.  They had ties to Chechnya, a region with a serious terror problem.  They were the subject of terror warnings from multiple foreign governments.  They had quite possibly committed a brutal multiple murder years before their terror attack.  One had been charged with domestic violence.  They had traveled to their home country, quite possibly to receive training in explosives and firearms.  Despite all of this, they were interviewed by the FBI and given a clean bill of terrorist health.

In the face of a record that incompetent, what possible benefit is gained from subjecting the whole country to warrantless and suspicionless surveillance?

If the goal is preventing terrorism, the answer is clear: No benefit at all.

If the goal is one more step towards a totalitarian police state, on the other hand...

It's a speech they need to hear, but I doubt they were paying attention.

See the last update to my earlier post.

... says TalkLeft?  And Democratic Senator Manchin?

I do have this to say: just because Holder resigns does not mean the scandals are over.

... it's also all of your credit card transaction information.  Not "We think you're a terrorist, so we got a warrant for your credit card transaction data."  No, there's a federal program to collect all of it -- sheep and wolf alike -- so the FBI, NSA, and other organizations can data-mine as much as they like with no controls over how they do it or what they access.  Because, you see, they already have the data.  Once they have the data, what they do with it cannot be controlled no matter how many procedures are put in place.

The National Security Agency has at times mistakenly deliberately, knowingly, and intentionally intercepted the private email messages and phone calls of Americans who had no link to terrorism, requiring Justice Department officials to report the errors to a secret national security court and destroy the data, according to two former U.S. intelligence officials.

Fixed that for them.

See, here's the problem.

The government reveals a few specific cases where data was collected by mistake -- literally a typo entering a phone number.  That sounds like a reasonable error that could be forgiven if nothing was done with the information.  But that's not the reality of the program.  Here's the reality:

Blair drew a distinction between the "collection" or mining of data on specific U.S. citizens by NSA and the massive trove of phone call information that was turned over to the NSA under a negotiated agreement among intelligence officials, the telecommunications companies and the FISA judges. The purpose of the FISA order was to store information in the event that U.S. intelligence agencies need to access it after getting specific intelligence that somebody in the U.S. might be tied to terrorism.  It is only at that point, he explained, that the NSA goes back to the court to get permission to mine or ?collect? the data.

They aren't collecting data on innocent Americans by mistake.  They are collecting data on literally everyone in case they need to look it up later.

Oh, yeah, they promise they'll get a warrant to look it up later if they need to.

Sure.

Trust them.

After all, they are so dilligent and careful about staying within the appropriate lines, and our constitutional rights are such a high priority for the Obama Administration:

David Medine, chairman of the new Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, asked for the briefing in a letter Friday to Clapper, the director of national intelligence.

The five-member board was  authorized by Congress in 2007 to monitor privacy and civil liberties throughout the U.S. government. But after lengthy delays by President Obama in nominating members -- and disputes over its membership -- the panel only officially came into existence last week when Medine was sworn in. It has no website, has yet to move into its office in downtown Washington and has a staff of only two members assigned from other agencies, Medine said.

Such a high priority that it took a huge national scandal that publicly revealed the programs this oversight board was supposed to be overseeing to induce Obama to actually name a chairman.

Yes, it's a grand jury refusing to bring charges -- but that's no less a jury nullification than a jury refusing to convict. 

Jury nullification is often attacked because it has been abused to protect racists from the consequences of their vigilante violence in the South.  The history of jury nullification, however, is a long one, extending well before our nation separated from England.  Though it can be abused, as can any mechanism, the core idea behind jury nullification is simple: society must consent to each and every application of its laws against one of its members.

If you can't get 12 random members of your community to agree that a law is just when applied to a particular person and a particular set of circumstances, it doesn't matter whether they are technically guilty or not.

That comes in pretty handy when the government is stupid enough to want to prosecute people for posting "threatening" rap lyrics.

Even if the rap lyrics really suck, and are sort of threatening when taken out of context.  They're rap lyrics, and unless the government can show that the person posting them actually intended to carry out a bombing, they are out of luck.

A word to the wise, though: don't quit the day job.

After today's news, this graphic needs to be expanded to cover the whole country.

This is now a known and definitive fact.  It's been taking place since 2006 with Verizon, and only an idiot would think that the government would get a warrant (an illegal warrant, I might add, since it's not specific as to the persons being searched) for all Verizon customers without also getting a similar warrant for all AT&T, T-Mobile, Cingular, and other phone service providers.  (And it's not just phones, it's also internet service).


The tinfoil hat brigade has been talking about this since at least under Clinton (remember ECHELON)?  They were right then, but couldn't prove it.  Now we have proof going back at least 7 years.

This sort of intensive government data collection has consequences.  Libertarians don't like it.  Even Massachusetts Democrats don't like it.

UPDATE: The NYTimes softened it's editorial, which previously concluded with "The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue." 

Many people supported Obama thinking he would be a typical liberal once elected to office.  Typical liberals claim to care deeply about civil liberties like freedom of speech while deemphasizing economic liberty.

The problem is, Obama is not a typical liberal.  Obama is a totalitarian.  And he is not unusual within his political party on that front.  The Democratic party has changed for the worse.

Holder: "With all due respect, Senator, I don't think this is an appropriate setting for me to discuss that issue. I'd be more than glad to come back in a -- in an appropriate setting to discuss the issues that you have raised.  But in this open forum I don't . . ."

In other words, yes, he did.

Members of Congress should not have special rights, but you can be damn sure that if you piss them off, they can do more about it.

UPDATE: Found a transcript and got Holder's exact quote.

Note that the case was brought by Google opposing 19 of the letters.  The judge ruled that the requirement to remain silent about the letters was unconstitutional, and in this ruling indicated that 17 of the 19 letters were issued properly.  The remaining 2 letters did not have enough information to make a determination.  

Here's the bigger deal:

In 2007, the Justice Department's inspector general found widespread violations in the FBI's use of the letters, including demands without proper authorization and information obtained in non-emergency circumstances. The FBI has tightened oversight of the system.

The FBI made 16,511 national security letter requests for information regarding 7,201 people in 2011, the latest data available.

That's 16,000 people about whom the FBI needed more than a detailed list of phone calls made and received, more than they could recover through their existing internet taps, and yet did not have enough probable cause to get a warrant.  And yet they still did not stop the Boston Marathon bombings.  The only terrorists they can manage to stop are those they gave fake bombs to.

I don't object to government monitoring terrorists.  I object to the government monitoring everyone as if we were all terrorists.  I object to the government violating the Constitution that is supposed to protect us from being treated like criminals without probable cause to believe we ARE criminals.

The next link in the chain between the IRS agents abusing Tea Party applicants and the White House is IRS lawyer Carter Hull, who closely oversaw the work of at least one agent in the Cincinnati office and suggested some of the questions being asked of the applicants.

UPDATE: Orders coming from Washington is corroborated here.