Tag Archives: government

Gun Control

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Or just control.

One guy, Cody Wilson, worked out a way to make pistols out of plastic and a 3-D printer, posted the information on the Internet, and tried to start a business out of the thing. Nothing secretive here; he wasn’t trying to hide anything.

The technology will break gun control. I stand for freedom[,]

he said.

But

…Wilson’s invention also caught the attention of the State Department, which came after him with both barrels blazing. The feds claimed Wilson violated the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, which “requires advance government authorization to export technical data,” and as a result, could spend up to 20 years in prison and be fined as much as $1 million per violation.

Wilson was ordered to remove the blueprints for The Liberator from his web site. The government also told him they were claiming ownership of his intellectual property.

Never mind that the “international arms trafficking” beef has no basis, unless simply identifying where firearms can be obtained and how to obtain them are somehow trafficking. Never mind that the “technical data” are old technology: 3-D printing is years old, and anyone can write a printing program. Nor is there anything magic about the plastic that is the printer’s ink. Indeed, that’s a major drawback for these 3-D weapons: they wear out quickly.

No, this is just an overreaching government trying to control for control’s sake. Nothing else.

A Proper Ruling

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And by Article III judges….

The Second Circuit appellate court has ruled in favor of individual liberty, privacy, and free speech all in one ruling.

[The Second Circuit] ruled Thursday the National Security Agency’s controversial collection of millions of Americans’ phone records isn’t authorized by the Patriot Act, as the Bush and Obama administrations have long maintained.

The Court held, in part,

…we hold that the text of [the law in question] cannot bear the weight the government asks us to assign to it, and that it does not authorize the telephone metadata program. We do so comfortably in the full understanding that if Congress chooses to authorize such a far‐reaching and unprecedented program, it has every opportunity to do so, and to do so unambiguously. Until such time as it does so, however, we decline to deviate from widely accepted interpretations of well‐established legal standards.

Indeed. The question is a political one and not a judicial one. It may be that Congress will screw this up and authorize the thing, but in that event we have recourse: we can fire the blackguards in an upcoming election and select, instead, representatives who understand our rights as free men.

The court’s ruling was based on one of the core questions regarding this law:

[T]he government takes the position that the metadata collected—a vast amount of which does not contain directly “relevant” information, as the government concedes—are nevertheless “relevant” because they may allow the NSA, at some unknown time in the future, utilizing its ability to sift through the trove of irrelevant data it has collected up to that point, to identify information that is relevant. We agree with appellants that such an expansive concept of “relevance” is unprecedented and unwarranted.

Sorry guys—no fishing expeditions, either.

The Second Circuit’s ruling can be read here.

Embarrassingly Dysfunctional

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To coin a phrase, this is embarrassing, a Department like this.

Ignored claims, manipulated records, cost overruns and even one facility infested with insects and rodents are among the latest issues uncovered by a blistering VA Inspector General’s report. The auditor’s probe found that more than 31,000 inquiries placed by veterans to the Philadelphia Regional VA office call center went ignored for more than 312 days, even though they were supposed to be answered in five. Perhaps even worse, claim dates were manipulated to hide delays, $2.2 million in improper payments were made because of duplicate records, 22,000 pieces of returned mail went ignored, and some 16,600 documents involving patient records and dating back to 2011 were never scanned into the system.

This is a year after the Veterans Administration promised, to Congress and to us, that they were cleaning up their act.

Disband the Veterans Administration; it’s an affront to our veterans and an embarrassment to our nation. Use the VA budget for vouchers for vets. No more delay. Our vets can’t wait.

Then Get Out Of The Way

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President Barack Obama had some choice words about the Loretta Lynch nomination at a press conference with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.

What are we doing here? I have to say, there are times where the dysfunction in the Senate just goes too far. This is an example of it. It’s gone too far. Enough. Enough. … This is embarrassing, a process like this.

It is enough, Mr Obama, and it is embarrassing. When are you going to get your Senate Democrats out of the way and allow a vote on the anti-human tracking bill that your fellow Democrats are holding up? Your fellow Democrats are cynically blocking the bill because they demand that Federal tax dollars be available to pay for abortions, and the bill continues a decades-long prohibition against that misuse of Americans’ money. Your fellow Democrats would rather allow human trafficking to continue apace than not have public funds available for abortions.

It’s also a bill that those same Democrats of yours knew when they voted affirmatively to pass it out of committee onto the Senate floor contained that prohibition.

As soon as your Democrats allow a vote on that bill, the Lynch confirmation will come up.

Get off the dime, Mr Obama.

It’s Their Job

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Iranian President Hasan Rouhani doesn’t like it that in a republican democracy, legislatures, representing the plebes, get a say in what the republican democratic government does internationally—including agreeing to treaties and Executive Agreements. From this, he “accused” Congress of “meddling in sensitive negotiations” about Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

What the US Senate says, or what the US House of Representatives want, or what the extremists in the US are looking for, or what the US mercenaries in the region say, it doesn’t have anything to do with our government or our people…. We announce that the side that we deal with is not the US Senate or the House of Representatives—it is a group called the P5+1[.]

However, this thing has everything to do with our government and our people—us Americans on the other side of this…negotiation. And so Congress is obligated to say, to want, to look for.

Rouhani probably wants to (re)read the letter 47 of those US Senators sent him a bit ago.