God, please let it be so.
Category: Politics
Fred Quits
“Today, I have withdrawn my candidacy for president of the United States. I hope that my country and my party have benefited from our having made this effort,” Thompson said in a statement.
I’ll be taking down the Fred ’08 banner. This is a real bummer. Who to support now?  Mitt, Rudy and Preacher Mike are unacceptable. Ron Paul is a waste at this point, of more than just a vote. That leaves McCain. Can I get behind this man who I swore on more than a few occasions I’d never vote for? If he can beat Obillery, which I think he can, I’ll get on board the McCain Train, but I’m not going to enjoy the scenery.
Government Information Gathering
Joe Huffman has a good post up on government information gathering on its citizens. I think this is indeed something we have to be wary of, but only to the extent that the government can compel me to give them information.  The government, for instance, knows my income because they will lock me up for failing to file an income tax return.
But in an information based society government will be able to know a lot about its citizens. Our government probably knows more about its citizens than any other government in history. There won’t be much means to avoid that. Conversely though, information technology also makes it possible to know more about our government than any other people in history. I would encourage and recommend anyone who’s interested in this topic to read David Brin’s The Transparent Society. Brin’s argument is essentially that technology is going to make information and surveillance technology ubiquitous, and there’s not much we’ll be able to do about it:
While this has the makings for an Orwellian nightmare, Brin argues that we can choose to make the same scenario a setting for even greater freedom. The determining factor is whether the power of observation and surveillance is held only by the police and the powerful or is shared by us all. In the latter case, Brin argues that people will have nothing to fear from the watchers because everyone will be watching each other. The cameras would become a public resource to assure that no mugger is hiding around the corner, our children are playing safely in the park, and police will not abuse their power.
No simplistic Utopian, Brin also acknowledges the many dangers on the way. He discusses how open access to information can either threaten or enhance freedom. It is one thing, for example, to make the entire outdoors public and another thing to allow the cameras and microphones to snoop into our homes. He therefore spends a lot of pages examining what steps are required to assure that a transparent society evolves in a manner that enhances rather than restricts freedom.
It’s a good read. I don’t always agree with the book, but it makes you think.
Rudy In Trouble in Florida
According to Jacob, he’s not doing too well in his home state either against McCain. Rudy bet his campaign on Florida. If he loses it, he’s out. That’ll be a blessing for second amendment advocates.
From Our Side in New Jersey
Scott Bach talks about some of the recent changes in New Jersey that Bryan Miller and CeaseFire New Jersey are suggesting target only criminals:
So what’s the problem, you ask? The problem is that the Garden State’s gun laws are a tangled web of hypertechnical, complex, and frequently incomprehensible regulations that often have the effect of ensnaring otherwise law-abiding citizens and turning them into inadvertent criminals.
New Jersey regulates firearms by banning everything first, and then carving out extremely narrow, limited, and stingy exemptions. Fall outside those exemptions, and you’re considered a criminal, no matter how upstanding a citizen you may otherwise be.
Read the whole thing. This is what the anti-gun folks want to bring to the rest of the country. These are what they consider “reasonable” and necessary gun control laws. Yet Bryan Miller has the audacity to claim:
Why do I care? Not because of any disdain or dislike for hunting or sport shooting. Although I do neither, I don’t oppose either. Hunting is a traditional American pursuit dating back to the first settlers, and I see no reason to seek its demise, as long as it is pursued lawfully and meets the demands of the community in which it occurs. I feel similarly about sport shooting.
Furthermore, hunters and sportsmen are generally not responsible for the unacceptably high rate of gun violence we face in this country, so I have little interest, frankly, in their guns.
If Bryan is sincere in this, would he be willing to agree to re-engineer New Jersey’s gun laws so that they won’t so easily entrap honest sports shooters?  You can bet the answer is no. Bryan cheers Joyce funded studies that show declining gun ownership. If gun ownership is on the decline in New Jersey, which I would bet it is, it’s driven largely by the laws which make owning a firearm for lawful purposes a hazardous legal undertaking. It’s hard to get into the shooting sports in New Jersey without talking to a lawyer, and that’s just fine by the gun control groups there.
Good Advice on Teaching The Parties
Via Instapundit:
Some people think it’s time to teach the party a lesson. Fine, but I thought 2006 was supposed to do that. Did they learn anything? Seems to me that things are about what they were when I put up my pre-mortem post that had Limbaugh exercised. (For that matter, did losing in 2000 and 2004 improve the Democrats? What, exactly, have they learned that led to the Hillary/Edwards/Obama offering? Are political parties capable of really learning?)
People will make up their minds closer to the date. Meanwhile, here’s a suggestion: If you care about saving the Republican Party, don’t blog about it. Get to work at the local and state level. Push your views, and find and promote candidates you like. Meanwhile, my earlier thoughts about culture and politics are still relevant. If you feel that way, then focus your energies there. But either way, don’t expect a candidate to be all you want. They seldom are, in my experience.
Read the whole thing, because it’s very true.
Lesser of Two Evils
So it’s looking like this will be an election where, once again, we’ll be stuck having to choose the “lesser of two evils” rather than a candidate that we really want.
It’s not a situation I like any more than others, but I think in our political system, where coalitions happen at the party level, outside the structures of government, this is going to be the outcome more often than not. The coalitions will coalesce around a candidate that doesn’t make anyone truly happy, but that offers each part enough to keep them from leaving. Huckabee appeals to evangelicals, but his support outside of them is practically nonexistent.  Fred Thompson appeals to small government conservatives, but with not much appeal to the monied conservatives or independents.
I think McCain’s rise from the ashes has a lot to do with the fact that each part of the Republican base can probably settle for him, even if no one really loves him. That appeal, combined with his inexplicable (to me, anyway) appeal to Democrats and Independents, is a big part of why he’s doing so well.
I don’t really want a McCain candidacy in 2008, but it wouldn’t offend me to the degree that would keep me from voting in the election. I don’t really see any way out of voting for lesser of two evils candidates, because our system encourages it, really. I’m not sure it’s unhealthy for The Republic either.
No Knock Raids Gone Sour
Classical Values has a pretty insightful comment about the latest no knock raid gone sour:
Incidents keep happening, and the only remedy I can see is to get rid of night time no knock warrants.
Otherwise, if they keep doing this, it will become another argument in favor of gun control.
No, seriously. Police will claim they “don’t feel safe” executing these no knock warrants, so to “avoid more such tragedies,” all citizens (beginning with those in “at risk neighborhoods”) should be disarmed.
Don’t laugh. It’s already a major unstated reason for dog control, especially “pit bull control.” The best protection you can buy against a
home invasionSWAT team is being called the “number one dog of choice for drug dealers.” Sure, there’s a “loophole”; convicted criminals can still legally own dogs. So can ordinary citizens.
That will go doubly for people who have center fire rifles which soft body armor presents no obstacle to. It’s a price that will be demanded to make it safer for the government to prosecute the War on Drugs.
Maybe We Need a NGCA
… to defend our right to keep and bear Geiger Counters. Fortunately it looks like there are other people in New York City’s government that aren’t as brain dead as Falkenrath, and aren’t as fascist as Bloomberg.
Stifling Free Speech in The Garden State
Steve Lonegan, former Mayor of Bogota, New Jersey, and persistent thorn in the side of Governor Corzine, has just been handed a fantastic lawsuit opportunity under Title 42 USC Section 1983, and I do hope he takes the opportunity for the sake of anyone else exercising their constitutional rights in New Jersey.
Steve Lonegan, the former mayor of Bogota who is an outspoken critic of tax and immigration policies, was arrested Saturday afternoon outside a South Jersey high school while protesting Governor Corzine’s toll-hike plan.
Lonegan said in a telephone interview that he was handcuffed while handing out pamphlets a few minutes before the 2 p.m. start of Corzine’s town meeting in Cape May County. Corzine is holding the public events in each of the state’s 21 counties to try to sell his financial proposal.
Arrested outside a public event, on public property, and while peacefully demonstrating would seem to be to be a proper exercise of first amendment rights.
Paul Porreca, a retired Superior Court judge who served in Cape May County and is a member of Lonegan’s group, said he witnessed a verbal altercation between Lonegan, police and a school board administrator over the right of protesters to display placards outside the Middle Township High School. The unidentified administrator claimed the site was not public property and that school board policy prohibited protesting, Porreca said.
Police arrested Lonegan when he refused to get rid of his sign or clear off the property, Porreca said.
Porreca later said “I think it was outrageous. It was a clear abuse of our constitutional rights, our right to assembly, the people’s right to free speech. They were intimidated and, though they were not physically abused, certainly their sensibilities were abused.” I agree.
UPDATE: Not being a first amendment expert, I e-mailed Eugene Volokh to see if he knew whether the state has a case here. He pointed me to U.S. v. Kokinda. That case suggests it would depend on the nature of the property they were arrested on. If it was a public sidewalk outside of the high school, that would be a traditional public forum, where they would be free to protest. A sidewalk owned by the school, leading up to the school, would be a non-public forum, where the school district would be in its right to enforce a blanket prohibition on protesting.