“Accused Fort Hood Shooter Paid $278,000 While Awaiting Trial”

NBC:

The Department of Defense confirms to NBC 5 Investigates that accused Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Hasan has now been paid more than $278,000 since the Nov. 5, 2009 shooting that left 13 dead 32 injured. The Army said under the Military Code of Justice, Hasan’s salary cannot be suspended unless he is proven guilty.

If Hasan had been a civilian defense department employee, NBC 5 Investigates has learned, the Army could have suspended his pay after just seven days.

Personnel rules for most civilian government workers allow for “indefinite suspensions” in cases “when the agency has reasonable cause to believe that the employee has committed a crime for which a sentence of imprisonment may be imposed.”

Meanwhile, more than three years later soldiers wounded in the mass shooting are fighting to receive the same pay and medical benefits given to those wounded in combat.

Retired Army Spc. Logan Burnett, a reservist who, in 2009, was soon to be deployed to Iraq, was shot three times when a gunman opened fire inside the Army Deployment Center.

“I honestly thought I was going to die in that building,” said Burnett. “Just blood everywhere and then the thought of — that’s my blood everywhere.”

Burnett nearly died. He’s had more than a dozen surgeries since the shooting, and says post-traumatic stress still keeps him up at night.

Burnett is now fighting a new battle; only this one is against the U.S. Army.

The Army has not classified the wounds of the Ft. Hood victims as “combat related” and declines to label the shooting a “terrorist attack”,

The “combat related” designation is an important one, for without it Burnett and other shooting victims are not given combat-related pay, they are not eligible for Purple Heart retirement or medical benefits given to other soldiers wounded either at war or during the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the Pentagon.

As a result, Burnett, his wife Torey, and the families of other Fort Hood victims miss out on thousands of dollars of potential benefits and pay every year.

You know what?  Burn this entire governmental monstrosity down, kill the PC cancer that courses through it rendering it moribund and malignant, and start the entire self-governance experiment from scratch.

Only this time, we shore up the Constitution by protecting language and removing the avenues for sophistry whose aim it is to weaken and deconstruct, and we explicitly factor out leftism as alien and not consonant with the founding principles and ideals, nor with a constitutional republic.

I am so thoroughly fed up with the defense of such nonsense as this.

Seriously. I’m done with it.  And you know what?  So long as the higher-ups in the military continue behaving like risk-averse leftists angling for political promotions, I don’t much care that they are having their budgets slashed.

Looks like the leftists have poisoned our military structure, too.  So why bother feeding them?

Posted by Jeff G. @ 12:03pm
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“Drudge Editor on Obama Scandals: White House Is Sitting on Something That Has Top Aides Terrified”

Who can even fathom what has aides to this bunch terrified, so blase are they about human life, about the suffering they cause, about the molestation they routinely engage in by way of governmental bureaucracies and agencies and regulations and taxes and fees, about the racial and ethnic and economic division they stoke as casually as they breathe.

If I had to guess?  It’s the potential whistleblower testimony that will tie ObamaCo to the supplying of weapons to Islamist radicals — even as the same Administration spent time and enormous energy domestically trying to take our (meager) weapons away.

But I don’t suspect that revelation would have them “terrified.”  After all, they’d probably just say that Ambassador Stephenson was a rogue agent, and that State and the White House had covered up his tracks to protect his reputation and legacy and shield his family from repercussion from the anti-Islamic bigots that are sure to start burning down mosques here in the US.  Now that it’s no longer possible to do so, fuck it:  He did it, not us! 

So.  I got nothing.  Any guesses?

(h/t newrouter)

Posted by Jeff G. @ 11:41am
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leftist shitboxes who once upon a time politicized a hurricane rush to politicize a tornado

So. Here’s my response to Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who took the occasion of the OK tornadoes to launch a political broadside against the GOP and those who don’t buy into the politically-concocted notion that human exhalation — that is, plant food — nor water vapor are pollutants that cause the earth to warm:

You are fucking loathsome.  In fact, you’re worse than loathsome. Much lower.   You are the fairground vomit of a redneck teen wrecked on Schlitz and chili cheese fries that gets caught unwittingly in the treads of loathsome’s $400 tennis shoes, then gets tracked across the interior of loathsome’s brand new Escalade and sat in by loathsome’s bitchy girlfriend.

The fact is, sir, that tornadoes and hurricanes and hail storms and blizzards and rock slides and avalanches and tsunamis and typhoons and volcanic eruptions and wild fires and all manner of other natural disasters existed long before the industrial revolution, and it is the height of posturing self-hatred (if you actually believe this garbage) or political cynicism (if you don’t, but find it useful to adopt the pose) to declare that humanity is itself a blight on the earth, that our failure properly to flagellate ourselves (and then pay you for the privilege of making that self-flagellation manifest in taxes and fees and carbon exchange schemes and global wealth redistribution plans designed by transnational progressivists to undermine individual and state sovereignty and secure global bureaucratic power) is the reason school children and others are dead in Oklahoma.

That you would so openly and publicly attempt to tether the death and destruction in the tornado belt to a particular political party is but one of the reasons the people in the US hold their “representatives” in such utter contempt.  In fact, you are so beneath contempt that you’d need a fucking snorkel and several compressed air tanks to even approach the surface where contempt begins and your vile and frankly evil opportunism ends.

The Republicans’ stance — or the stance of anyone on anthropocentric global climate change — is responsible for the OK tornadoes in precisely the same way that your having been elected to the Senate speaks to your intelligence:  that is, the two are wholly unrelated.

If you wish to cast around for blame, you might wish to start with the very earth and its atmosphere that you pretend your political party alone wishes to protect:  because evidently, despite all your posing and hubris, she doesn’t much give a shit, and she goes along doing her  thing just as she’s always done.  And in the end, she’ll swallow you up in dirt and let the worms crawl through you, too.

On occasion, people die as a result of such natural disasters.  Trying to legislate against weather is like trying to legislate against stupidity.  And the fact that you are a Senator shows the futility in the latter.

If we had any real decency left as a society — and yes, I realize this will strike the PC crowd as counter-intuitive — we’d pull people like Senator Sheldon Whitehouse out of his cozy, taxpayer-funded digs and put him in some town square in stocks with a dunce cap fixed to his moronic, odious, malicious head, and invite anyone with a desire to to pelt him with rotten vegetables.

Fuck you, you cowardly sack.

Now.  In response to the always repugnant leftist hack David Sirota and his offputtingly well-plucked metrosexual facade, who has used this tragedy to intimate that GOP cuts to spending for the National Weather Service are somehow culpable for the death and destruction in Oklahoma:  are you for real?  The Democrats spend and spend and spend and spend and print and print and print and print — Harry Reid, for fuck’s sake, stood on the floor of the Senate and told America about the real need for governmental spending on Cowboy Poetry Festivals — and we’re to believe that a country over 90 TRILLION dollars in the red, counting unfunded liabilities (read: statist promises to provide social welfare for people with money that they already spent elsewhere) is insufficiently funded when it comes to monitoring the weather?

Let’s say that’s true, even though we all know it isn’t.  How about this for a solution, then:  we get rid of the billions of dollars wasted on redundant programs; or the billions of dollars the government itself notes is lost to fraud waste and abuse; or the social welfare money we hand out to non-citizens; or the social welfare money we hand out to those who buy pressure cookers and nails with our tax dollars and then use them to blow up children and charity runners at a foot race?

And all that would take would be to get rid of posturing shitbag progressives like David Sirota, to remove them from office, to put an end to their constant attempts to divide and use bloc politics and taxpayer dollars to find client bases for votes.

As with everything in your despicable, self-important, self-aggrandizing life, Mr Sirota, this casual conjoining of the deaths in Oklahoma to a political decision to cut something, anything — all so that you can wave the bloody shirts in the hopes of shaming people into agreeing to spend well beyond their means, all so you can pretend that you are more “compassionate” than the adults who understand that economics doesn’t succumb to the leftist desire to create reality from will and manufactured consent — is what defines people like you:  you are petty, opportunistic, shameless.  You are a social parasite who cynically makes his living off the essential goodness of the American people, preying as you do upon their readiness to feel guilt, to believe that if they had only done something (and you’ll be there to tell them what that is, be it pay more in taxes, build more bullet trains, fund more Solyndras, provide more taxpayer money for grants given to those looking to deligitimate the very system that makes their comfortable livings possible), no one in OK would have died, that the earth would have bent to your will and technocratic genius, that the tornadoes wouldn’t have stood a chance against your collectivist social engineering schemes.

You are a charlatan.  And a loudmouthed punk who stages his outrages for maximum exposure.

In short, you are a pathetic man propping himself up and shining a light on his own self-loathing — disguised as social activism — in the hope that nobody sees the rumpled, sad, clownish and petulant child that lives inside you.

So fuck you, too.

In the squeakhole.  Sideways. With a frozen loaf of artisan jalapeno cheese bread.

I am done feeling any kind of guilt or shame.  And no, I don’t worry what “independents or moderates” may think of my reaction:  it’s those dullards who keep us flush with the Pelosis and the Reids and the Sheldon Whitehouses  of the world in positions of power or influence.

It’s long past time we put an end to this social dynamic that provides the world be turned into a perpetual re-run of Revenge of the Nerds.

There’s nothing hip about statism. There’s nothing transgressive about agitating for surrendering to an overreaching government and its lust for tyrannical control over subjects.

And there’s nothing at all in David Sirota’s soul worth salvaging.  He’s a fucking punk who once got in the face of an older conservative during a debate and got off on the charge it gave him.

I do so hope that one day he does the same thing to me.

Meantime, I’ll just have to be content to (virtually) piss on him.  And not because he’s on fire.  But rather because he’s not.

Posted by Jeff G. @ 10:58am
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mental and emotional sorbet

I’m of course deeply saddened by the destruction in Oklahoma, but I find myself growing very angry at the same time, for reasons that will become clear shortly.

In the meantime, I figured maybe now is a good time to lighten the mood.  And to that end, I present you with this, some of the coolest parents and parenting tips ever.

Posted by Jeff G. @ 9:24am
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10PM Phone Call: genesis of a cover story?

Andrew McCarthy:

[...] were investigating Benghazi, I’d be homing in on that 10 p.m. phone call. That’s the one between President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — the one that’s gotten close to zero attention.

Benghazi is not a scandal because of Ambassador Susan Rice, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, and “talking points.” The scandal is about Rice and Nuland’s principals, and about what the talking points were intended to accomplish. Benghazi is about derelictions of duty by President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton before and during the massacre of our ambassador and three other American officials, as well as Obama and Clinton’s fraud on the public afterward.

A good deal of media attention has quite appropriately been lavished on e-mail traffic between mid-level administration officials in the days leading up to Sunday, September 16. That is the day when Ms. Rice, a close Obama confidant, made her appalling appearances on the Sunday-morning political shows. Those performances were transparently designed to mislead the American people, during the presidential campaign stretch run, into believing that an anti-Islamic Internet video — rather than a coordinated terrorist attack orchestrated by al-Qaeda affiliates, coupled with the Obama administration’s gross failure to secure and defend American personnel in Benghazi — was responsible for the killings.

Fraud flows from the top down, not the mid-level up. Mid-level officials in the White House and the State Department do not call the shots — they carry out orders. They also were not running for reelection in 2012 or positioning themselves for a campaign in 2016. The people doing that were, respectively, President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton.

Obama and Clinton had been the architects of American foreign policy. As Election Day 2012 loomed, each of them had a powerful motive to promote the impressions (a) that al-Qaeda had been decimated; (b) that the administration’s deft handling of the Arab Spring — by empowering Islamists — had been a boon for democracy, regional stability, and American national security; and (c) that our real security problem was “Islamophobia” and the “violent extremism” it allegedly causes — which was why Obama and Clinton had worked for years with Islamists, both overseas and at home, to promote international resolutions that would make it illegal to incite hostility to Islam, the First Amendment be damned.

All of that being the case, I am puzzled why so little attention has been paid to the Obama-Clinton phone call at 10 p.m. on the night of September 11.

Even in the conservative press, it has become received wisdom that President Obama was AWOL on the night of September 11, after first being informed by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, in the late afternoon, that the State Department facility in Benghazi was under attack. You hear it again and again: While Americans were under attack, the commander-in-chief checked out, leaving subordinates to deal with the crisis while he got his beauty sleep in preparation for a fundraising campaign trip to Vegas.

That is not true . . . and the truth, as we’ve come to expect with Obama, is almost surely worse. There is good reason to believe that while Americans were still fighting for their lives in Benghazi, while no military efforts were being made to rescue them, and while those desperately trying to rescue them were being told to stand down, the president was busy shaping the “blame the video” narrative to which his administration clung in the aftermath.

We have heard almost nothing about what Obama was doing that night. Back in February, though, CNS News did manage to pry one grudging disclosure out of White House mendacity mogul Jay Carney: “At about 10 p.m., the president called Secretary Clinton to get an update on the situation.”

Obviously, it is not a detail Carney was anxious to share. Indeed, it contradicted an earlier White House account that claimed the president had not spoken with Clinton or other top administration officials that night.

The earlier story better fit Obama’s modus operandi, which is to disappear in times of crisis. His brief legislative career was about voting “present” because he prefers to be absent when accountability knocks. The idea is to be the Obama of Evan Thomas lore: “standing above the country, above — above the world, he’s sort of God.” He reemerges only after the shooting stops and the smoke clears: gnosis personified, here to diagnose our failings. He is not a commander-in-chief for the battle but the armchair general of the post mortem.

In this instance, though, Carney’s hand was forced by then-secretary Clinton. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January, she recounted first learning at about 4 p.m. on September 11 that the State Department facility in Benghazi was under attack. That was very shortly after the siege started. Over the hours that followed, Clinton stated, “we were in continuous meetings and conversations, both within the department, with our team in Tripoli, with the interagency and internationally.” It was in the course of this “constant ongoing discussion and sets of meetings” that Clinton then recalled: “I spoke with President Obama later in the evening to, you know, bring him up to date, to hear his perspective.”

Yes, the 10 p.m. phone call.

[...]

[...] at 8 p.m. Washington time, Hicks spoke directly with Clinton and some of her top advisers by telephone. Not only was it apparent that a terrorist attack involving al-Qaeda-affiliated Ansar al-Sharia was underway, but Hicks’s two most profound fears at the time he briefed Clinton centered on those terrorists: First, there were reports that Ambassador Stevens might be in the clutches of the terrorists at a hospital they controlled; second, there were rumblings that a similar attack on the embassy in Tripoli could be imminent, convincing Hicks that State Department personnel should evacuate. He naturally conveyed these developments to his boss, the secretary of state. Clinton, he recalled, agreed that evacuation was the right course.

At about 9 p.m. Washington time, Hicks learned from the Libyan prime minister that Stevens was dead. Hicks said he relayed all significant developments on to Washington as the evening progressed — although he did not speak directly to Secretary Clinton again after the 8 p.m. briefing.

That is the context of the 10 p.m. phone call between the president and the secretary of state.

We do not have a recording of this call, and neither Clinton nor the White House has described it beyond noting that it happened. But we do know that, just a few minutes after Obama called Clinton, the Washington press began reporting that the State Department had issued a statement by Clinton regarding the Benghazi attack. In it, she asserted:

Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation.

Gee, what do you suppose Obama and Clinton talked about in that 10 p.m. call?

Interestingly, CNS News asked Carney whether, in that 10 p.m. phone call, the president and Secretary Clinton discussed the statement that Clinton was about to issue, and, specifically, whether they discussed “the issue of inflammatory material posted on the Internet.”

Carney declined to answer.

We now know from the e-mails and TV clips that, by Sunday morning, the White House staff, State Department minions, and Susan Rice were all in agreement that the video fairy tale, peppered with indignant rebukes of Islamophobia, was the way to go.

How do you suppose they got that idea?

And even more importantly — in light of this — when was the stand-down order given.

It is becoming increasingly clear to me that the President and his tight group of advisers were worrying about narrative-shaping, spin, plausible deniability, and being able to string the tragedy out beyond the election. Part of that calculus was to keep military engagement out of the equation and play the attacks down as a spontaneous uprising.

And while they were plotting the political strategy — which Clinton, who has her own political aspirations, would have happily gone along with, the upshot being, she hoped, that her gross incompetence not come to the fore — a couple of brave men died alone, exhausted, unsupported, on a rooftop in Libyan.
– All while Obama and Clinton planned alibis and the cover up.

Did Obama know that the two SEALS had attempted a rescue and were calling for backup?  Did he care that the CIA annex was being attacked — knowing that the nature of the facility would allow him keep much of the information classified?

Where is Charlie Gibson to once again ride the cultural referent for scandal, coming to the air and intoning gravely, as he did during Bush’s presidency, “What did the President know and when did he know it?”

(h/t geoff B; more here and here)

Posted by Jeff G. @ 11:59am
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“Congressman: IRS asked pro-life group about ‘the content of their prayers’”

Washington Examiner:

During a House Ways and Means Committee hearing today, Rep. Aaron Schock, R-Ill., grilled outgoing IRS commissioner Steven Miller about the IRS targeting a pro-life group in Iowa.

“Their question, specifically asked from the IRS to the Coalition for Life of Iowa: ‘Please detail the content of the members of your organization’s prayers,’” Schock declared.

“Would that be an inappropriate question to a 501 c3 applicant?” asked Schock. “The content of one’s prayers?”

“It pains me to say I can’t speak to that one either,” Miller replied.

After Schock pressed him further, Miller explained that although he couldn’t comment on the specific case, it would “surprise him” if that question was asked.

The report comes from the Thomas More Society, a national public interest law firm for religious liberty.

Any questions about this Administration’s attacks on nearly every right secured under the Bill of Rights and the Declaration and Constitution?

Or perhaps better, Alles klar, Herr Komissar?

Posted by Jeff G. @ 11:16am
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“The IRS’s Job Is To Violate Our Liberties”

Ron Paul:

“What do you expect when you target the President?” This is what an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agent allegedly said to the head of a conservative organization that was being audited after calling for the impeachment of then-President Clinton. Recent revelations that IRS agents gave “special scrutiny” to organizations opposed to the current administration’s policies suggest that many in the IRS still believe harassing the President’s opponents is part of their job.

As troubling as these recent reports are, it would be a grave mistake to think that IRS harassment of opponents of the incumbent President is a modern, or a partisan, phenomenon. As scholar Burton Folsom pointed out in his book New Deal or Raw Deal, IRS agents in the 1930s where essentially “hit squads” against opponents of the New Deal. It is well-known that the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson used the IRS to silence their critics. One of the articles of impeachment drawn up against Richard Nixon dealt with his use of the IRS to harass his political enemies. Allegations of IRS abuses were common during the Clinton administration, and just this week some of the current administration’s defenders recalled that antiwar and progressive groups alleged harassment by the IRS during the Bush presidency.

The bipartisan tradition of using the IRS as a tool to harass political opponents suggests that the problem is deeper than just a few “rogue” IRS agents—or even corruption within one, two, three or many administrations. Instead, the problem lays in the extraordinary power the tax system grants the IRS.

The IRS routinely obtains information about how we earn a living, what investments we make, what we spend on ourselves and our families, and even what charitable and religious organizations we support. Starting next year, the IRS will be collecting personally identifiable health insurance information in order to ensure we are complying with Obamacare’s mandates.

The current tax laws even give the IRS power to marginalize any educational, political, or even religious organizations whose goals, beliefs, and values are not favored by the current regime by denying those organizations “tax-free” status. This is the root of the latest scandal involving the IRS.

Considering the type of power the IRS excises over the American people, and the propensity of those who hold power to violate liberty, it is surprising we do not hear about more cases of politically-motivated IRS harassment. As the first US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall said, “The power to tax is the power to destroy” — and who better to destroy than one’s political enemies?

The US flourished for over 120 years without an income tax, and our liberty and prosperity will only benefit from getting rid of the current tax system. The federal government will get along just fine without its immoral claim on the fruits of our labor, particularly if the elimination of federal income taxes are accompanied by serious reduction in all areas of spending, starting with the military spending beloved by so many who claim to be opponents of high taxes and big government.

While it is important for Congress to investigate the most recent scandal and ensure all involved are held accountable, we cannot pretend that the problem is a few bad actors. The very purpose of the IRS is to transfer wealth from one group to another while violating our liberties in the process, thus the only way Congress can protect our freedoms is to repeal the income tax and shutter the doors of the IRS once and for all.

As many of you here know, I have my share of problems with Ron Paul.  As does, eg., Mark Levin.  And yet I think in this instance you can find a near perfect convergence between Ron Paul’s libertarianism and the classical liberalism / legal conservatism of people like myself and Levin and many in the TEA Party movement.

In fact, what Paul has written here isn’t much different from what I wrote last week, when I pointed out that the establishment ruling class — regardless of party — was likely interested only in appearing outraged and gathering up the necessary fall guys so that they could pat themselves on the back for pretending to restore integrity to the IRS while keeping it largely the same.  Because in the final analysis, politicians like having the ability to bully opponents and keep the people frightened of their power, and the IRS has become the agency that best exemplifies that (though other bureaucratic agencies and Departments such as the EPA and Interior and HHS are starting to give them a run for their money).

Establishment politicians hate change.  And we’ve seen virtually no attempt by GOP leadership to bring to the fore the idea of abolishing or attenuating the IRS and replacing it with a much more equitable (and classically liberal) tax system, one that promoted actual fairness and equality and made it so that all Americans had a degree of skin in the game.

Instead, they are content to play with the Marxist progressive tax framework, because within it, they can please cronies and punish enemies and wield enormous power and influence.  And without it?  Not so much.

So we’re going to see show trials and arrests and some flunkies get flushed.  None of which will matter. Because what’s needed is systemic change, and everyone knows it.  It’s just that a vanishingly few in power desire to make the changes — and they’re hoping that we can again be sated by impassioned words of condemnation and a few scapegoats.

Not me.  Not this time.  Spit.

So congrats to the ruling class, which has managed to bring me, Mark Levin and Ron Paul (mostly) together (Paul had to throw in his trademark sop to cutting military spending, which is ludicrous at a time when the world is on the brink of some sort of global war, but let’s let it slide this time, because it’s almost like a tic to him, and I honestly don’t think he can help himself) in our calls for how best to reform the government.

And that is no easy feat.

(h/t JHo)

Posted by Jeff G. @ 11:05am
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“Obama and the IRS: The Smoking Gun?”

So. The President met with an anti-Tea Party IRS union chief the day before agency targeted Tea Party.

Is anyone — and I do mean anyone, including even Rick Moran (I’ve long believed that some centrist Republicans were the last of the credulous hold-outs, that the left knew all along who and what Obama was, and approved of both him and his methods) — at all surprised to learn of this?

Now, we’ll be told that no laws were broken, that the meeting was over something else entirely, that the timing was completely coincidental, and that we’re all racist (and likely even white supremacists) and misogynist for even noting the meeting, much less its proximity to the targeting of the TEA Party and other small government groups.

But honestly, doesn’t that faux-outraged denial just make you want to slap a bitch at this point? The President told us he’d learned of this IRS scandal from news reports. And yet the Treasury knew about the investigation and the targeting before the 2012 election. Now this.

Does Obama really expect us to believe his own political appointees kept him in the dark? And that he’s nothing more than an absent and incompetent puppet who is otherwise out of the loop?

His ego is too big to let that kind of thing stand, fortunately, so we should press it as our narrative of his increasingly absurd and dismal presidency. That way, before all is said and done, I believe if somebody asks him the right set of questions, he may just cop to ordering the code red on Private Santiago.

And then we could all bathe in the cleansing waters of Ezra Klein’s endless tears.

(h/t Darth Levin and sdferr)

Posted by Jeff G. @ 10:44am
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Not only is it unfair to thwart governmental attempts to hustle up revenue, it’s harassing

As some taunting Good Samaritans are finding out:

A group of self-styled Robin Hoods who scamper around the streets of a New Hampshire city and feed expired parking meters for strangers has been hit with a harassment lawsuit.

The city of Keene says its three parking inspectors have been taunted, insulted and followed by the group — to the point that one of them says he has suffered heart palpitations and is thinking about quitting his job.

In its lawsuit, the city is asking a court to order the group not to come within 50 feet of the parking inspectors.

The suit names six defendants, most of them bloggers for Free Keene, which describes itself on its Facebook page as “your connection to the liberty activism movement in New Hampshire.”
One of the six, Ian Freeman, told NBC News that “The Robin Hooders have always been courteous in my experience” and pointed out that the city has not charged them criminally with harassment.

“The city is upset because they are losing revenue and are coming up with anything they can to try to stop it,” he said.

He also noted that the city’s job description for parking inspectors, included as part of the lawsuit, requires that inspectors “endure verbal and mental abuse when confronted with the hostile views and opinions of the public.”

The city attorney in Keene did not immediately respond to a call for comment from NBC News.

Look, the sooner we make it clear that government only works — and is only legitimate to begin with — when it is founded on the consent of the governed, the sooner we’ll beat back the petty tyrants and the attempted lawfare the bureaucrats use to keep themselves flush with power and our money.

Any judge hearing this case should throw it out. And the meter fairies should file continue doing what they are doing and then file a wrongful arrest and prosecution lawsuit against the city should any law enforcement official attempt to enforce any dictate that would prevent anyone from obeying the law by feeding the parking meters before they expire.

Local governments don’t have a “right” to catch meters running out. And meter maids aren’t being “harassed” when they’re beaten to the punch by kids with quarters.

I love that the complaining parking service thought that they could throw the race card on the table and make things go away, though. It shows me that there is a national standard being set at the top for how to deal with problems and it’s an ugly one.

Thanks, first post-racial President!

Posted by Jeff G. @ 9:56am
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