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!
Desruisseaux — froggish, right? Looked it up, it means “brooks” in Froggish. Probably in the trickling stream sense, rather than in the “tolerates no fun” sense.
Jeff, I’m afraid I’ll not be able to hit the tip jar again until I know the content of your prayers.
Sorry, but that’s just how it is.
In some places it’s illegal to feed a stranger’s parking meter. In other places parking meters have been created that blank out the time remaining if you drive away.
This is our government, incrementally showing us who is in charge, and who the underlings are.
– Yeh, and the approximate location of your trailor park.
– “Well Stanley, I certainly hope you’re satisfied…..This is a fine mess you’ve gotten me into THIS time.”
LIKE A [hive-sucking little pension craving] BOSS.
Says you. Any day now choice in the market will be ruled illegal.
If Jeff complains to the right agency.
“The card features the Disney depiction of Robin Hood as a fox.”
A particle of an invitation from the reporter to Disney? Sue ’em for copyright infringement or such? Nah. Reporters aren’t that low. Besides, NBC is in competition with ABC.
A serious, snark-free question: At what point is the nation going to visibly grasp that we’re so far gone we’re quite literally justified in renaming the whole failshit little train wreck The Union of Soviet States of America?
See, the “right” carps and groans about the violence to the Constitution du jour, remaining one clear step behind the practice of stopping it during any particular month, quarter, year, or term.
Which is one clear step from preventing it.
Which is one clear step from identifying it all for what it really is. At least visibly.
Awareness counts. Meanwhile, I fully expect that vetting the IRS for what it really is is actually the first step in acclimating one and all to what it shall forever remain.
Look all the good it did before 2008 ID’ing BHO for what he is…
give me liberty or – hah who the fuck are we kidding
we’re Americans!
To attempt a serious answer JHo, the nation as a whole is in the grip of an intentional miseducation regarding itself, a longstanding project of the progressive formation. On this, I think, we most all agree.
Where the Tea Party arises, by contrast, in full realization of that state of affairs. The Tea Parties, grass-roots folk, want not merely to affect the immediate politics they find offensive to their understanding of American liberty (i.e., the “stimulus” initially, followed quickly by the main-force of ObamaCare rammed down their objecting throats, and so on) but also to affect the education of their fellow citizens (hence the honesty of many of the 501 c (4) designees): the Tea Parties aim to raise awareness and improve understanding in everybody open to thinking. It’s about education.
So, it may take time. Of course it will take time. But then, it took time for the progressives to eradicate what had been commonly understood, too. Yet the necessity of enduring the interim didn’t divert the effort. And a kind of ‘success’ was the reward. Though the kind of success is restricted to the temporary victory of falsehoods, bound to be overturned, if not through intentions, then by the so-called gods of the copybook headings.
You don’t even have to actually put coins in the parking meters anyway. If you hold a coin and insert it about halfway into the slot and wait a few seconds, it will register that the penny has been dropped, so to speak. Not true with the old non-electric meters which aren’t fooled but such shenanigans.
Greetings:
And speaking of race cards….
I grew up in the Bronx of the ’50s and ’60s, so, even on a good day, my mind traverses a spectrum that ranges from sarcasm to cynicism. With that forewarning, I found President Obama’s well touted speech at the Morehouse College graduation ceremony quite interesting. In what many will interpret as his call for improvements in current Negro culture, I saw his references to suffered discrimination as a subtle playing of the race card as the walls of his administration’s scandals begin to close in on him and his.
It was about as subtle as a rubber crutch, 11B40.
Yes they do; Tea Party types are bent on information and education but that’s not what I’m asking. Given that there are steps between a natural resistance toward tyranny and tyranny as an accepted paradigm, I’m asking when the national conversation turns to what virtually all of us already either know or intuit:
That the left is running a fraud on liberty, one known to many to use the buzzwords of their particular Progressive “freedom”. Basically what Jeff’s been on about. The wholesale inversion of language, or as we may phrase it, these days and weeks of mendacity.
Awareness is not education nor is it educable. I’m asking about a visible state of affairs on the street that reflects a prior state of mind — a collective awareness proved by a preponderance of concrete daily evidence — that is all but impossible to strip from humans and especially from Americans. Liberty is in the DNA.
(Notwithstanding his frequent good works I see a leading Libertarian blogger treating these recent high crimes and misdemeanors to the usual company of pro-space travel and sex advice and Amazon links as if this were any other day, while at the same time I see some former tools of the MSM breaking out of their hives to speak things like they really are, here in the waning days of the American experiment they share with us. Free to see. Free to simply observe that they really are the last days of the American experiment.)
I want to know, as these things go, when a people in bondage more or less all agree they are in fact in bondage. It’s a condition, not a lack of information.
Possibly John Kass’s article about the Chicago Way will shed light on the condition you seek to grasp? There, everyone understood where they stood, and understood that piping up was equivalent to hammering-down.
Still, I believe the alternatives to the progressive paradigm are long forgotten in the American people, for the most part. Not irrecoverable so much, as simply out of sight, out of mind.
“What’re ya in for, kid?”
“Feeding parking meters.”
And they all moved away from me there on the “Group W” bench…
I’m failing to see how the city has standing to sue. I don’t think you can harass a city.
What caught my ear was his repeated insistence that black people have to work twice as hard to get ahead. When has that motherfucker, who is now POTUS, ever worked hard in his life?
I believe they are too, sdferr, but I add that as a nation we are terrified about appearing racist, for example, not for new, valid, progressive knowledge and education about race but from progressivism’s recent intimidation of using the social pressure of what it wants to insist is fundamentally racial.
Yesterday I heard some tool exclaim that the extension of a state road through a neighborhood was de facto evidence of “institutional racism”. Given that she had and provided no evidence of the commission’s guilt of same, her assertion was habit, itself a false morality and the bigotry of racialism. She was an educated woman from the ranks of local progressive intelligentsia — she didn’t want for knowledge but for intellect. I suspect many in her audience perceived this.
Today I saw a meme directing that if Obama is guilty on Benghazi it’s only via Bush’s culpability for 9/11 intelligence failures. In other words, Bush’s rank incompetence — long a staple on the left — is the standard by which Obama shall not be judged for his. Again, I suspect many in the audience perceive this and not by way of information but rather for intuition about reason.
This crap is for want of integrity, a hard-coded go/no-go gauge we come with. The former is reversible but the latter is bone marrow stuff. We need a revival of reason.
Limbaugh just finished with a recitation of those who’ve been hammered down, and as such constitute in the deed the clarion call of “red ball” these types: among them, the car dealerships shut down, the bond-holders robbed, the guitar company harrassed, the tea partiers mugged, and so on. Obazm knew how to communicate the message perfectly well:
I want to know, as these things go, when a people in bondage more or less all agree they are in fact in bondage. It’s a condition, not a lack of information.
As a wise man once said:
The left has the biggest PR machine in the history of Mankind; they’ve been working for several generations to secure it, and they know how to use it very, very well. I think they can be expected to get away with it until such time as a critical mass of our neighbors have lost friends in Pinto gas tank explosions. It’s up to us to remind our neighbors of all the gas tank explosions that the PR people try so hard to keep hushed up.
He impregnated Michelle twice.
Mr. Twister a clown in Santa Cruz, CA made news with a similar story 15 years ago. The city council actually relented.
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/localnews/ci_15705068
He impregnated Michelle twice.
I thought turkey basters would be a work saver.
Mr. Twister a clown in Santa Cruz, CA
I hate clowns. This guy sounds like a good egg though.
Some clowns are okay. Ronald McDonald is only sorta creepy; Krusty is almost human. And of course Homey. But then you get John W. Gacy, or Pennywise…
Let’s just say if I had a sister I’d hope she wouldn’t marry one, but that’s as far as I’d go.
Harvey Mansfield on the Bodouin study, and puts in a word (not a good word, exactly) for his own institution, Harvard U.
Objection. Assumes facts not in evidence.
Ach! Link to Mansfield.
[…] PROTEIN WISDOM– “Obama and the IRS: The Smoking Gun?”; Not only is it unfair to thwart governmental attempts to hustle up revenue, it’s harassing; Shorter White House Spokeshole: Shut-the-f***-up, peasants […]