She supported gun control and is now paying the political price for it. She's actually resigning before the recall effort is even completed, because doing so will allow her party to name her replacement (and thus retain control of the Senate in Colorado).

It helps to have a few really, really crazy anti-gun jurisdictions. That way, we can find good cases to bring to the Supreme Court.

Hat tip to SaysUncle.

It's time to grow up and understand the 5 lies your government is telling you.

Hat tip to Alphecca.

Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy.

The Census employee caught faking the results is Julius Buckmon, according to confidential Census documents obtained by The Post. Buckmon told me in an interview this past weekend that he was told to make up information by higher-ups at Census.

No. It's another indication that Obama's re-election will have an asterisk appended to it in the honest history books. As in (*): President Obama achieved re-election by systematically and illegally repressing opposition organizations via the Internal Revenue Service, manipulation of economic reports via the Census Bureau, and other means.

And we can't prove it, because:

"It was a phone conversation -- I forget the exact words -- but it was,'Go ahead and fabricate it' to make it what it was," Buckmon told me.

They have learned that official emails are subject to FOIA requests, so they don't use official email accounts to conduct business. They use private email accounts -- or did, because that's been exposed now -- and phone conversations to issue their illegal instructions. Then it becomes he-said-she-said if the lower-level employee gets caught.

All this while the NSA records everything we say, and the local police department records everywhere we drive.

We now know that federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies are using automated license-plate scanners, mounted on everything from telephone poles to police cars, to build a huge database of where people are driving. This might seem like a small intrusion compared with the electronic spying carried out by the NSA. But not all threats to privacy involve the tracking of emails and other communications.

This is exactly the sort of thing that isn't very threatening when applied to individuals by a high-cost method (following them with a police vehicle 24/7), but when applied to the whole population in a manner that can be accessed at any time in the future when the government becomes interested in a particular citizen, turns the society into a police state.

Exhibit A is the NSA spying on everyone.
Exhibit B is the forced rectal searches, enemas, and colonoscopy applied to at least two men on the basis of the same police dog with an expired training certificate...

Over at Irons in the Fire is another example of something I've seen occasionally in so-called journalism. As he quotes from an article about someone in Oklahoma pushing for a "legislative study" of Stand-Your-Ground laws:

"Is there a clear line on Stand Your Ground?," asked Oklahoma Representative Mike Shelton, (D) Oklahoma City, who is now calling for a legislative study into the law. Rep. Shelton is a registered gun owner who has been opposed to "Stand Your Ground" and "Make My Day" laws.

So here's my puzzlement. Oklohoma doesn't have state-level gun registration, or gun owner registration. Gun control supporters generally aren't sophisticated enough to view the BATFE's 4473 form as "registration". So how is Shelton a "registered" gun owner? Who did he register with? Why is it necessary to describe him as a "registered" gun owner as opposed to an unmodified gun owner?

I've speculated about this before, but I've never seen a good answer from a "journalist" about why they describe gun owners this way. So I wrote this one to ask.

It's been a few days since I sent that email. Crickets.

... and why you should oppose any police officer's bill of rights that arrives in your legislature. They are just like us, not better.

This resolution probably has little chance of passing, and even less chance of a Senate conviction -- but this is Obama's moment of weakness.

Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX) has introduced an Articles of Impeachment resolution against Attorney General Eric Holder for his role in Operation Fast and Furious and other scandals of President Barack Obama’s administration.

Seven congressman have signed onto the resolution thus far in addition to Olson. They are Reps. Larry Bucshon (R-IN), Blake Farenthold (R-TX), Phil Roe (R-TN), Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA), Roger Williams (R-TX), Ted Yoho (R-FL), and Randy Weber (R-TX).

My representative is on that list. Time to go write him a thank-you note.

All joking aside, legal resident aliens should be able to defend themselves, which means that states issuing concealed carry licenses need to apply the same criteria they do for citizens. Or that's what the Second Amendment Foundation is arguing anyway.

An interesting tactic.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the transparency report are the last two sentences: “Apple has never received an order under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. We would expect to challenge such an order if served on us.”

Apple’s statement is an implementation of the so-called “warrant canary.” Canaries are used to signal that, as of the date published, there have been no law enforcement requests of a particular type received. In Apple's case, the canary is limited to a signal that no secret Section 215 orders have been served on the company. If the canary is removed in the next transparency report, it is safe for users to assume that a Section 215 data request and the accompanying gag order has been issued. We appreciate Apple’s implementation in particular, including its six-month delay, because if its use is ever challenged in court, the ample time will allow a judge to coolly and calmly review the constitutionality of any government attempt to compel Apple to lie. We fear that if the first challenge to a warrant canary comes before a court in a more rushed context, a rushed judge could make bad law.

It's tragic that this sort of tactic has become necessary in our current police state.

They keep proposing to trample on the Constitutional rights and liberties of innocent people, whether it's evesdropping on their communications or inspecting their homes...

Last week, Swampscott Selectman Barry Greenfield proposed the idea of mandatory home inspections for the town’s 600 licensed gun owners. He mentioned the Newtown massacre. He mentioned children’s safety.

Massachusetts law requires gun owners to store their firearms safely. Greenfield is frustrated with the inability of local cops to push their way into local homes and have a look around without all that “probable cause” and “search warrant” nonsense.

... but somehow it never gets any safer, and nothing gets done about the people who actually become terrorists.

Due to the demands of maintaining productive employment in the wonderful Obama Recovery, the free ice cream ration is being increased again.

Last evening the Florida House conducted a public hearing, judiciary committee debate, and committee vote on HB-4003, which would have done away with Florida's Stand-Your-Ground law by repealing Florida statute 776.013. Home protection; use of deadly force; presumption of fear of death or great bodily harm.

More details at Sharp as a Marble. It seems emails on this topic were roughly a thousand to one in favor of the Stand Your Ground law. The anti-self-defense side was able to muster a total of 4 emails to one representative.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday said the Justice Department has not decided whether to file federal civil rights charges against George Zimmerman in the 2012 killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

Holder will make the decision not to file charges when the issue is no longer useful as a political distraction, and not before.

Yes, it's another "I'm a gun owner, but..." editorial, published in Guns and Ammo magazine.

I firmly believe that all U.S. citizens have the right to bear arms, but . . .

It should be noted that the link goes to a blog commenting on the article, not the article itself. No links for quislings.

UPDATE: Already fired. But if the magazine under current control is so strong on the 2nd Amendment, why publish the editorial at all? This is more like frantic backpedaling than sincerity. Guns & Ammo and the editor Jim Bequette has lost the trust of its readers, and it will take more than firing the author of an editorial to restore it.

More like this, please:

A Florida sheriff was acquitted on Thursday of charges that he committed misconduct and falsified public records when he freed a jailed man who carried a loaded gun without a permit. Suspended Liberty County Sheriff Nick Finch, 51, had testified that he released Floyd Parrish from jail because he had a constitutional duty to uphold the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

Law enforcement agencies and individual agents are not obligated to enforce laws they believe to be unConstitutional. Prohibitions on the peaceful carry of arms, open or concealed, are unConstitutional under the 2nd Amendment.

The speaker of the Massachusetts State House is pushing legislation to prevent welfare recipients from sending money or goods overseas. The amount of money transferred by wire services is said to be roughly $2.4 billion across the whole United States, which isn't exactly peanuts but is hardly a pressing problem on the national budget. Nevertheless, he sees part of the problem, and wants to get ahead of voter angry by presenting a solution:

DeLeo is pushing legislation as part of the state’s new welfare reform bill that would prohibit Bay State recipients from using their EBT cards — and the cash assistance they carry — for international wire transfers.

The problem here is that money is fungible. Once you've given people money, they can trade it for other things. If you provide welfare benefits in any form other than "Here is a hot bowl of soup, sit down over there and eat it right now", then it can be transferred to others or traded. If you give them welfare benefits and say they can't transfer that money overseas, you are just creating a market for an underground business trading welfare benefits for goods or money that can be sent overseas.

And that's exactly what happens.

They are doing it wrong:

So: if that is Chief Santiago, the police chief of a city of about 125,000 people, thinks that his department should "find you" and investigate you if you support the legalization of marijuana or oppose the ruinous, amoral War on Drugs. Notice the collection of cop tropes in the second response: (1) the thug's dance of first threatening to "find you" and then halfway backing off from it, (2) the "why worry if you have nothing to hide" routine, (3) the suggestion that advocating against the War on Drugs creates reasonable suspicion to investigate you — bearing in mind that "reasonable suspicion" is a legal term referring to the quantum of proof that supports cops, for instance, stopping and frisking you, and (4) the statement that the cops are always open to hearing from citizens after threatening to come find a citizen for criticizing them.

And if you were wondering why I blog under a (somewhat thin) pseudonym? Yeah, that's why.

We already knew that FEC employees, without authorization, had asked Lerner for information about certain groups they were trying to get investigated. Now, we know that Lerner responded to that request by providing extensive, confidential tax information from the IRS files on those groups to the FEC.

Doing this appears to be a federal felony:

Under the Internal Revenue Code, it is a felony for IRS officials to release taxpayer return information outside of the agency. For example, the Treasury Department will not release the results of investigations into unauthorized disclosures, even if they are requested by the party whose tax returns were allegedly leaked.

And we know what the IRS did about this: they provided Lerner with months of paid vacation followed by retirement with full benefits.

Case in point, a moderately disgruntled Obama visionary:

And then I close the book. Cutting to the present is a rude awakening, like snapping out of a dream. It's hard to remember those days of optimism -- they seem a distant memory, a sad reminder of opportunities gone by. Change indeed happened, in the years since I cast my first ballot. It was simply nothing I could have imagined.

You'd think this would be an opportunity for reflection upon the lessons learned. But no: