Tag: hit&run

The amount of
taxpayer money involved in selling Obamacare is unprecedented. The
main task has come with a massive price tag: nearly $700 million,
which has created a veritable ecosystem of turnspits working to
convince Americans that a government takeover of one sixth of the
economy is a good idea. Such government P.R. campaigns have become
a regrettable staple of American politics, laments Mark Heminway.
But it says a lot about Obamacare’s appeal that so many resources
are being deployed to sell Americans a product that the Internal
Revenue Service will soon compel them to buy.

View this article.

About a year after Douglas Chase was
diagnosed with brain cancer, it became difficult for him to go to
Boston for treatment. So his family tried to switch the Vietnam
vet’s care closer to home at the Veterans Affairs hospital in
Bedford, Massachusetts. But they heard nothing from the VA after
contacting the agency in 2012. To add to the injury, officials
later turned down Chase’s request for benefits because he wasn’t
treated in a VA hospital, and several months after that, Chase
passed away. But just a couple of weeks ago, almost two
years after Chase died, his widow got a letter from the VA
saying he could now apply to see a doctor.

The Chicago Tribune
reports on so much foot-dragging from the state of Illinois
regarding issuing gun-carry permits after the state Supreme Court
last
year overturned the state’s ban on such carrying that aggrieved
citizens are suing.

After telling of a military veteran, Michael Thomas, who has his
application for a concealed carry license denied for no apparent
reason:

The state police review every application and can automatically
deny any applicant who does not follow application rules, pay
appropriate fees or meet standard background
requirements. A provision in the law also
allows local police and other officials to object to a person’s
application after the applicant has passed a fingerprint background
check and met the other requirements for a license.

The Concealed Carry Licensing Review Board, a panel with law
enforcement backgrounds, considers the objections in private and is
not required to explain the reasons behind its decisions except
under order from a court, according to the state police’s
interpretation of the statute.

Officials won’t say why Thomas’ application was flagged for
denial, or by
whom. Thomas insists that he has a clean
record. A search of Cook County court records turned up no charges.
An Air Force spokesman told the Tribune that Thomas was honorably
discharged in 2012 and that his military record does not contain
any unfavorable information.

Thomas is now one of 194 resident suing over their mysterious
permit denials.

The lawsuits, including two backed by the National Rifle
Association, claim that applicants were denied due process because
they weren’t given a reason for the board’s decision and have no
recourse for challenging its findings. Lawyers involved in the
cases say the issue is not whether applicants are qualified for the
licenses, but whether the licensing process is too secretive and
arbitrary.

The review board’s meetings “are not subject to the Open
Meetings Act and its records are not subject to the Freedom of
Information Act.”

So far, the state police have received 79,207 applications and
issued 62,258 licenses, according to data provided by the
department. The state automatically denied more than
1,620 applicants for
failing to follow application rules or meet basic requirements.
There have also been more than 2,400 objections lodged by local law
enforcement officials and 809 applicants who were denied because
objections were sustained by the review board.

More than half of the objections — 1,461 — have come from
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart. An outspoken critic of the concealed
carry law, Dart came under fire earlier this year when he said he
would object to any applicant who has been arrested even once in
the past seven years for domestic violence, gun possession or gang
crimes.

Dart said he is confident that his office did not make mistakes
and that it only targeted people who records showed should not be
allowed to carry guns. Still, he said he expected litigation to
follow.

As widely reported, this weekend’s 82 shootings proves Chicago
(Cook County) has lots of problems with people misusing guns, the
type of people likely not much moved by whether or not they have a
legal carry permit.

The Supreme Court, alas,
continues to avoid the question of how Heller and
the newly meaningful Second Amendment impacts restrictions on
public carry. Someday they’ll have to think about it.

Tonight’s episode of The
Independents (Fox Business Network, 9 p.m. ET, 6 p.m. PT,
with re-airs three hours later), starts with party panelists
Thaddeus McCotter
(guitar-playing former GOP congressman) and Gavin McInnes
(Canadian-derived multimedia
controversialist)
talking about whether
American Exceptionalism is as dead as
Captain America says it is. The McDuo will also weigh in on
concerns over some of the illegal immigrant kids near the Mexican
border testing positive for swine
flu, and also whether interventionist Republicans like Sen.
John McCain (R-Arizona) would
prefer to see Hillary Clinton instead of Sen. Rand Paul
(R-Kentucky) in the White House.

Cato’s Julian Sanchez
will discuss the latest Edward Snowden/NSA revelations about
snooping surreptitiously through the love letters and private
communications of
tens of thousands of U.S. citizens; publishing icon and
former presidential perennial Steve Forbes will talk trash about
the Federal Reserve, the co-hosts will assess what lessons for free
speech can be gleaned from Opie and Anthony Show co-host
Anthony Cumia getting bounced from SiriusXM after
Tweeting nasty things about a woman he claims assaulted him
near Times Square, and I’ll be tying together two Reason
blog posts: Ed Krayewski on video of a California Highway Patrolman

repeatedly punching a prone woman in the head, and Ronald
Bailey’s happier tale of cops and cameras in
Rialto, California.

Online aftershow begins on http://ift.tt/QYHXdy
just after 10. Follow The Independents on Facebook at
http://ift.tt/QYHXdB,
follow on Twitter @ independentsFBN, tweet
during the show & we’ll use the cream of the crop. Click on
this
page for more video of past segments.

The Washington Post looks at
seven Senate races in which a Libertarian Party candidate has
some chance of enough traction, according to the Post‘s
headline, to beat the spread between the major party winner and
loser, thus affecting the shape of the Senate majority.

While the evidence the Post presents in all these cases
doesn’t convince me they are correct in every case that the L.P.
candidate will be a player—though they mention Alaska, Kentucky,
Montana, and Arkansas in the story they lack a likely case for
those states—here’s some examples of how that might shape up:

•North Carolina’s Sean Haugh “has pulled between 8 and 11
percentage points, enough to make a big difference in the race
between Sen. Kay Hagan (D) and state House Speaker Thom Tillis
(R).”

•West Virginia’s John Buckley, who was actually a former state
legislator from neighboring Virginia, and although Republican
Shelly Capito is favored, “Buckley could tap into conservative
anger over Capito’s voting record,” saith the Post.

• Virginia’s surprisingly high-polling gubernatorial
candidate from last year, Robert Sarvis; polls “show
Sarvis attracting 6 percent of the vote, including 11 percent among
crucial independent voters.”
See my recent interview with Sarvis.

I blogged last month about some L.P. candidates
polling unexpectedly well in the south.

Boise State University trampled
a libertarian student club’s free speech rights by forcing the
group to pay a large fee before administrators would permit a gun
rights activist to speak on campus, according to the Foundation for
Individual Rights in Education.

The Young Americans for Liberty invited Dick Heller, one
of the plaintiffs in the landmark Supreme Court Case District
of Columbia v. Heller, to discuss his pro-Second Amendment
views at an even in May. A mere 24 hours before the event, Boise
State told YAL that the group would have to pay a $465 “security
fee” or face immediate cancellation of Heller’s speech.

After taking criticism for their actions, administrators
claimed the security fee was necessary to hire guards to deal with
the potential for disorder—a rationale both dubious and
unconstitutional,
according to FIRE:

Having no other choice, YAL acceded to Boise State’s demand. A
Boise State spokesperson later justified
the fees by citing “concern that a community
member had been encouraging folks to open carry” in violation of
Boise State policy—an action YAL had explicitly discouraged
among attendees. Boise State’s event policies claim to
give the university the discretionary right to “require
uniformed security officers and/or law enforcement officers” at
student group events and make clear that “the cost will be passed
on to the sponsoring organization.”

FIRE wrote
to university president Robert Kustra on July 3,
calling on Boise State to refund the unconstitutional security
fees. As FIRE explained, Boise State’s demand that YAL pay extra
security fees in response to the university’s open carry concerns
allows for a “heckler’s veto,” meaning that opponents of any given
event may saddle the event’s planners with prohibitive security
costs by threatening trouble. FIRE also criticized Boise State’s
unconstitutional event policies, which give university
administrators essentially unchecked discretion to charge security
fees as they see fit, in violation of the First Amendment.

As FIRE notes, this is a perfect (and unfortunate) example of
the “heckler’s veto.” If Person A can make threats that prompt a
university to limit Person B’s rights, then the campus would not be
a welcome place for diverse ideas at all.

Sadly, Boise State seems like quite the unfree hellhole. A
pro-life student group, Abolitionists4Life, has sued the university
for forcing it to conduct its political advocacy in one of
several small “free speech zones” on campus. The group’s signs were
deemed offensive in the eyes of university administrators.

FIRE has asked the university to refund YAL’s security fee. If
Boise State does not comply, it could find itself the subject of a
lawsuit. FIRE
recently announced expansive litigation efforts against
colleges across the country that abridge their students’ First
Amendment rights.

On
this day 86 years ago, the best thing since—well, since
ever—hit store shelves: sliced bread.

The day before its official debut, Chillicothe Baking Company,
the first company to produce and market this revolutionary new way
to buy bread, put out
a full-page ad in its local Missouri paper the Chillicothe
Constitution Tribune.

Announcing: The Greatest Forward Step in the Baking Industry
Since Bread was Wrapped—Sliced Kleen Maid Bread.

The ad slogan is possibly where the phrase “best thing since
sliced bread” originated.

Two years later, another baking company brought sliced bread to
a national market with the iconic brand Wonder Bread.

Housewives rejoiced, toaster sales boomed, and Americans ate
more slices of bread than ever before.

Then, on January 18, 1943, the modern marvel disappeared from
store shelves. The reason? Government officials had initiated the
first-ever war on carbs—a
ban on pre-sliced bread, deemed necessary to help conserve
resources for World War II.

The sandwich-loving public was not happy. As one woman put it in

a letter to The New York Times:

I should like to let you know how important sliced bread is to
the morale and saneness of a household. My husband and four
children are all in a rush during and after breakfast. Without
ready-sliced bread I must do the slicing for toast—two pieces for
each one—that’s ten. For their lunches I must cut by hand at least
twenty slices, for two sandwiches apiece. Afterward I make my own
toast. Twenty-two slices of bread to be cut in a hurry!”

The head of the War Food Administration said the ban was to
conserve
the thicker wax paper that Federal Drug Administration regulations
said bakeries had to use because sliced bread went stale
faster than whole loaves. 

The ban did not last long though, probably due to its
unpopularity. The government repealed it three months later with
the
head of the War Food Administration saying,

Our experience with the order, however, leads us to believe that
the savings are not as much as we expected, and the War Production
Board tells us that sufficient wax paper to wrap sliced
bread for four months is in the hands of paper processor and the
baking industry.

Sandwich-loving Americans haven’t gone stale on the mondern
convience since.

Glenn Reynolds has a great column
up at USA Today. It’s about what he calls “the New Class,” or
the bureaucrats, crony capitalists, and other flunkies who make
their living by administering the modern welfare state.
Reynolds—you love him as the interweb’s Instapundit—notes the main reason we
don’t give poor people cash to spend as they see fit is that such
an arrangement wouldn’t benefit well-connected folks.

A lot of programs officially aimed at the poor look suspiciously
like subsidies to the New Class, too. Among “means-tested”
programs, Food Stamps, now officially called SNAP, cover
about 46
million people up to 125% of the poverty
line (set at about
$16,000 for a single mother and child). Other programs, such as
the Earned Income
Tax credit, cover people at slightly higher incomes, up to 200%
of the poverty line. When federal spending on the dozens of
programs are added up and state and local contributions included,
the budget for assistance is about $1
trillion.

If we simply handed those people, perhaps
60 million of them, their share of the cash, that would be more
than $16,500 each. A single mom and her baby would get over
$33,000, twice as much as a poverty wage. A family of four would
land more than $66,000, $15,000 more than the average
family income.

So where’s the money going? To people who aren’t poor, such as
doctors paid through Medicaid or landlords paid through Section 8.
And to tens of thousands of members of the New Class, people like
social workers, administrators and lawyers who run more
than 120
different means tested federal programs.

Read the whole thing.

• “If the allegations are true,
  it would be for me a clear contradiction as to what I consider to
  be trusting cooperation between agencies and partners,” said German
  Chancellor Angela Merkel regarding the alleged American spy within
  Germany’s intelligence agency.
• The latest tally is
  14 fatalities out of 82 people shot. No, it’s not Syria or
  Ukraine, it’s Chicago’s Independence Day weekend. How’s that gun
  control working out for you?
• Did you see that crazy video of the California cop
  straddling and pummeling a woman on the side of the highway?
  Her family is filing a lawsuit against the agency.  
• Israel is mobilizing
  1,500 troops in response to rising tensions with Palestine’s
  Hamas, which fired dozens of rockets across the border
  today. 
• The United Nations will
  recognize gay marriages of its staffers. Previously, it only
  recognized such marriages if the staffer’s nation recognized
  them.
• Pink Floyd is releasing
  a new album. Dim the lights, take a hit, and try synchronizing
  it with some classic cinema until you blow your own mind.

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The “revolving door” through which
government officials cash out on their public service has a new
destination, reports Ira Stoll: campus rape investigations. To the
list of defense contractors recruiting retiring Pentagon officials,
corporate law firms hiring former SEC and Justice Department
officials, and trade associations signing up former senators, add
another new hot recruiting field for the private sector.
Universities are snapping up employees with experience related to
the federal Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which
is in charge of enforcing Title IX of the Education Amendments of
1972.

View this article.