They are arguing over filing deadlines while ballots have been printed and absentee voting has already started.

It purports to be a tool for ranking nations in the order of the user's selected importance on various freedom measures, including things like gun rights, limited government, free speech, property rights, drug rights, corruption, and so on.

It produces some interesting and sometimes counterintuitive results that make me question the input data a bit. But the basic idea seems sound, and it's an interesting though experiment.

If I was going to actually use this to determine the best place to live, though, I would need measures for technology, infrastructure, economic stability... etc.

This question is being posed after a large amount of weapons were found in domestic dispute case in Saddle Brook. A man was stabbed by his wife, and she was charged. The police found the husband’s gun collection and confiscated it in accordance with protocol. He may be charged for the massive amount of gunpowder in his possession.

Does the man’s large gun ammunition collection pose a threat to others? Some feel that his gun collection is no different than any other collection. As long as he isn’t using the guns or gunpowder to harm anyone, he should be allowed to have it. Others are concerned about the man’s intentions – what is the man’s reason for having such a huge amount of ammunition in the first place?

Note that the man was stabbed by his wife and the police confiscated his gun collection. He didn't do anything wrong; in fact he was the victim of a crime. But they took his guns, which he could have used to defend himself (from his wife!). This is a horrific miscarriage of justice.

There's a poll on the ammunition question at the link. Results are running 99.51% to "No, there should be no limit to the amount of ammunition you can own."

I bet they are glad they didn't try to run a poll on "Should you be allowed to shoot your wife if she stabs you?"

There's a big difference between having a same-sex marriage and having a same-sex marriage at people.

A woman in El Paso, Texas, drowned in her car early Monday morning after it got into a drainage ditch. Several bystanders reportedly tried to save the 64-year-old woman but cops stopped them.

People used to cut cops some slack because they knew that police would be there to help them if they ever got into trouble, even at some risk to the officer's life. You earn some credit when you run towards the sound of gunfire. But you lose that credit when you not only refuse to help people in danger, but prevent others from helping in your place. Ordinary people, not in uniform, who get no special privileges, were willing to help -- and the police threatened to arrest them.

That's not friendly.

The facts about voter ID are not being reported.

Bill Quick links to surveillance video of the man shot in Wal-Mart while holding a BB or pellet rifle he had picked up in the store. In the video, it seems clear that the man was shot while talking on the phone with no idea the police were present. Police claims that they had issued repeated warnings and commands to drop the gun are demonstrably false.

Unlike the case in Georgia, I have some sympathy for the police in this situation, because they had been spun up by a 911 caller claiming the person was "trying to load the weapon" and "pointing it at children", and he did in fact have something resembling an actual weapon. But: the man was shot while casually walking around and talking on the phone. There was no one else around and he was given no opportunity to surrender peacefully for the situation to be sorted out.

Charge the 911 caller with murder, and the police with negligent homicide.

Wearing a badge isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card for murder.

I bet he didn't think he was going to need to use that gun on a decapitation crazy Muslim convert when he went to work at his office job in suburban Oklahoma this morning.

Nobody does -- but some of us try to be prepared for the worst that can happen. And yes, it can still get worse.

UPDATE: These are not the ties to terrorism you are looking for.

The problem, is that I believe I have no moral right to force MY personal beliefs, preferences, or ideas on anyone else (no matter how "great" or "right" they may be).

I also believe that we have a moral obligation to use the force of government as little as possible (even if doing so may be "for the greater good").

Read the whole thing to see how both progressives and conservatives end up running afoul of the above.

The problem, of course, is that the poeple who are attracted to politics as a career are, almost invariably, people who want to spend their lives telling other people what to do.

UPDATE: Link was broken; fixed it.

The permit costs $1500, with fines up to $1000 for violations. What, are people not allowed to take pictures when they go to a national park on vacation anymore? I honestly can't see any justification for this.

It's one of those grand gestures that sounds more grand in the abstract description than in the reality:

I did not pay my taxes this year. I just didn’t have the money. Now I will not pay my taxes until every single Lois Lerner email is released and the people who planned and carried out this governmental travesty are held accountable. So start watching that clock, John Koskinen, if you think you’re going to get my overdue money, and every day this goes on is another day I’m not giving you a dime (soon it will hit 619 days, one for every hard-earned dollar I “owe.”)

I’m not giving you $619 I need so I can subsidize a fraction of a new salary bonus for some unethical bureaucrat who audited my friends and fellow countrymen. Your corruption cast a hopeless pall over this great but troubled country and its great but jaded people.

It's likely this young journalist is still naive enough to believe that not paying the $619 in taxes he owed on April 15th after completing his income tax forms is a significant act to the Internal Revenue Service. He most likely doesn't realize that the bulk of his taxes have been paid, deducted automatically from his paycheck by his employers, and sent to the IRS as an informal loan until the accounts are reconciled each year.

There's a reason people grow more cynical as they grow older: they are learning.

This time, it's popular cellphone-based credit card payment processor that is refusing to process sales related to firearms (along with ammunition, firearm parts, or indeed, any weapons whatsoever; as well as tobacco and cigarettes, another Choke Point target).

... and has a history of stonewalling information requests, too, but that Kathryn Ruemmler was once White House counsel to Obama suggests that the White House has a lot to hide here. He's appointing someone he can trust to keep his secrets, not just by friendship and prior employment, but by personal involvement:

I've been told today by several reporters that President Obama's White House counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, knew for several days -- perhaps weeks --that some Internal Revenue Service officials were engaging in political targeting of conservative groups, and that she did not tell the president as soon as she knew even partial reports about the story.

If this much has leaked out to reporters, what she actually knows is likely much worse. She kept quiet, and this is her reward -- and a place where she can continue to be useful.

The US government, through an unnamed "Senior Admin Official", is denying that they are aware of a plot and also denying that Iraqi officials attempted to warn them of a plot.

I guess we'll find out who was right when we hear the explosions.

2 more years before we can even hope to have a competent national security team in place.

BREAKING: White House official says Attorney General Eric Holder is resigning.

— The Associated Press (@AP) September 25, 2014

The only reason I can think of for him to resign now is to try to confirm a replacement before the Senate majority changes hands.

UPDATE: It's also possible he is resigning in advance of the Fast and Furious document log being produced.

UPDATE: J Christian Adams sums up Holder's tenure at the Department of Justice: Goodbye, Eric, and Good Riddance.

When you pull someone over, in a gas station, because you think they weren't wearing their seat belt, ask for their license and registration, and then shoot them when they go to retrieve the documents from their vehicle, you've just committed attempted murder.

Murder is not friendly.

83% of the groups targeted were right-leaning. And it was those right-leaning groups that were delayed, harassed, asked for donor lists to support secret research projects, and so on.

Local chapter head approves of quote from Josef Goebbels, and of course tries to memory hole the quote when called on it (and told who Goebbels is).

It seems to me this is a damning moral failure, or a damning demonstration of historical illiteracy, or possibly both... but damning, definitely.

This change of heart doesn't solve the real problem, but it helps an individual who was facing a lot more trouble than they deserved.

A gun control activist who helped pass the draconian SAFE Act in New York has received a sentence of community service and probation that will allow him, if he is not charged with anything else, to escape the serious felony charges that he himself advocated for -- charges he should have received when he accidentally carried a gun into a school, setting off a raid by the local SWAT team, k9 unit, and the kitchen sink at the police station.

It would be poetic justice if he had actually gotten the sentence he would have liked to impose on anyone else. But apparently he is politically connected and can wiggle out of serious consequences.

The details about the update are at No Lawyers -- Only Guns and Money. The interesting question is why they are adding this to the form; I can only assume, because Obama, that it is for nefarious purposes. What specifically, though, we will need to wait and see.

Since guns are physical objects and the sale of guns through the mail is already required to go through an FFL dealer physically, it's not like there's an actual regulatory gap that needs to be addressed here. It could be as simple as the BATFE wanting to check and make sure those rules are followed. But somehow I suspect there is more to it than that.

It has taken five-and-a-half years to learn that the Obama administration has been censoring White House print pool reports—and that the media has quietly acquiesced until now.

The embarrassing part isn't that the White House wanted changes made, it's that the press just meekly agreed. Would they have done that for any other president? More and more, Obama's relationship with the press looks like domestic abuse.

It's been all over the web today and yesterday, but I'm not going to link it, because there is no new information in the "interview". There is a bunch of self-justification about peripheral matters, and revealing quotes about how Lerner "loves dogs" and "bakes brownies for the workers she supervises" but no actual new information about the scandal aside from name-checking the Mark Levin Show to justify her quote about Republicans being assholes.

It's more interesting to link to this piece at the Daily Mail, where some of Lerner's colleagues speak out:

But two former colleagues of Lerner's from the FEC, both of whom are Republicans, said she was a partisan to the core, as evidenced by her vocal support of stricter oversight of political donations, a stance generally held by progressives and strongly opposed by conservatives.

'Lois’ ideology is against money in politics, is ‘anti-contribution’; that’s her bias,' Craig Engle, a former executive assistant to a Republican FEC commissioner told Politico. 'Her ideology inhibited fair administration of the law.'

If Lerner was confident she did nothing wrong, she would testify under oath. That she refuses to, even as her own emails and those of her colleagues continue to disappear, speaks volumes.