Tag: law

Constitution? Not in an Airport.

An amusing bit of news:

A man who wrote the fourth amendment on his skin was arrested at an airport.

A Charlottesville man who stripped down to his underwear at Richmond International Airport to protest security-screening procedures was charged with disorderly conduct Thursday, airport police said.

So, just to be clear. If you…

  • …are told to submit to groping and/or ogling by a TSA agent and don’t do so, you’re in trouble.
  • …make ogling more efficient by stripping down to your underwear in line without being asked, you’re in trouble.
  • …write the fourth amendment on your body, your first amendment rights will be violated and you’re in trouble.

Half the people behind this guy in line probably never saw the fourth amendment before this guy took his shirt off, so I say he’s just performing a public service.

Remember folks: Bureaucracy is the art of removing every last vestige of good judgment from every process involved. Don’t gum up the works by scrawling quotes from the nation’s fundamental legal document on your skin. You’re body belongs to the government, and they’ll have none of it, or didn’t you know that?

Happy new year!

Supreme Court Actually Reads Constitution

Well, I’m sure everybody who cares has heard by now that the Supreme Court has affirmed that an individual has the right to own guns, and that the individual right doesn’t have anything to do with military service.

So today we had a “duh” ruling. This is so obvious that one has to wonder when the four dissenting judges are going to be impeached by Congress for blatantly denying Constitutional rights.

What should worry people who care about the Constitution is that this was a 5-4 ruling. That means that there was actually a “swing vote” over such an obvious and clear right protected by the Bill of Rights. That means that it would only take one Constitutionalist judge being replaced by a liberal to erase this obvious, clear right from existence.

I won’t bore people with more punditry — it’s all been said. I’m glad that the Supreme Court has affirmed an obvious fact, and struck down an obviously unconstitutional law. I’ll be happy about that and shut up now.

Patents Gone Wild

EBay in Patent Fight Over ‘Buy It Now’

“A small Virginia company in a patent fight with eBay Inc. asked a federal judge Tuesday to stop the online auction powerhouse from using its ‘Buy It Now’ feature allowing shoppers to buy items at a fixed price.”

And here I thought buying items at a fixed price was just the way most stores sell things! I never knew it was such a novel concept that someone could actually file a patent on it.

Obviously, there’s some absurd obfuscation involved that some patent clerk thought was good enough for a filing. This is just like the ridiculous “One click buying” patent Amazon.com had — a company being granted ownership of a concept so utterly simple and obvious.

I’m all for intellectual property rights, but this is beyond absurd.

Gun Rights and Voting

Today I was researching concealed carry permit reciprocity across the various states, and while viewing a color-coded map showing where a concealed carry permit is honored from another state, two things struck me:

1. Imagine if we had to look at a map like that to find out where we could exercise our FIRST amendment rights.

2. It should be as difficult to register to vote as it is to legally carry a concealed firearm. If you can not be trusted with your Second Amendment rights, you can not be trusted to help decide who gets to make laws.

Virginia Tech – Another failure of gun control laws.

Yesterday’s Virginia Tech massacre, where a single crazed student was able to kill over 30 of his peers in the span of two hours, is just one more example of the failure of gun control laws to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. But will this event cause gun control proponents to rethink their position ensuring that only criminals can carry guns?

Suppose that one year ago, house bill 1572 were not squashed before it could get a floor vote:

[State quashed bill allowing handguns on campuses]

Clearly, squashing a bill reaffirming students’ Second Amendment rights didn’t make Virginia Tech “safer.”

Imagine if those students had their First Amendment rights infringed in college. The ACLU would have been there in a heartbeat. Where are those students’ civil rights now?

The attack on the Second Amendment rights of responsible United States citizens hasn’t just disarmed law abiding citizens; it has also had the effect of making them dependent upon government agents for their defense. And that’s the tragedy in the atrocity: that a single student could rampage for over two hours without being stopped by his peers.