Pennsylvania – Page 44 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Single-Issue Voters: For Wine?

Hey, people get passionate about their drinks – especially when those drinks are restricted at the hands of a state monopoly that jacks prices up. Not to mention, the selection sucks and if you try to buy out-of-state, you are committing a crime.

In his August newsletter, Keith Wallace of the Wine School of Philadelphia made a pitch for Tom Corbett. As he says, â€œâ€¦ I have gained assurances that Gubernatorial candidate Tom Corbett will make reforming the PLCB an element of his administration.â€

This is significant because, besides being a well respected person amongst the wine circles in the Philadelphia area, he also isnâ€™t your expected Corbett supporter. â€œAfter all,â€ he says, â€œI am a former NPR journalist and Democratic operative [originally] from Massachusetts.â€

This shows two very important things. First, the PLCB is a significant enough of an issue to get people to be a one issue voter across party lines. Second, while there is the debate between both sides on where the line is drawn on the appropriate role of government, the PLCB crosses that line for many people.

I would love to be part of the wine vote coalition. Our state rep already knows that we’re all about the guns and letting our wine & beer run free. (Although getting rid of our stupid beer laws will be another tough sell, and much harder to do.)

Welcome to Central Pennsylvania

While we would obviously fight any attempt by a township in this state to shut down a legitimate shooting range, shooting across roadways is to be generally frowned upon. Now a man’s quest for 1000 yard shooting (hard to find in PA) has run into his Township. The money quote here is:

Lavelle asked what London was doing in the photo Beatty took, and what the object identified as a target in DeBoer’s video was. London said he was shooting at a groundhog that was about 1,060 yards away, and the object was a five-gallon drum suspended by ropes used as a deer feeder, not a target.

[…]

Choman questioned if hunting groundhogs with a sniper rifle at a distance of 1,060 yards was extreme.

“I don’t think so,” said London.

If the guy is shooting over township roads, which he has admitted, and doesn’t have the appropriate safety measures in place, he needs to stop. While a .50BMG can’t travel “a distance of 45 miles,” as one Township Supervisor said, It can certainly travel quite a bit.

History of the Sheriff

Looking around for more information about the new LTC standards, I found this very interesting page on the PA Sheriff Association’s web site on the history of the office:

Under Anglo-Saxon rule it was the duty of the citizens themselves to see that the law was not broken, and if it was, to catch the offenders. All the males in the community between the ages of 12 and 60 were responsible for this duty. They were organized in groups of about ten families, and each group was called a “tything”: At their head was a “tythingman.” Each member of the tything was held responsible for the good behavior of the others. Ten tythings were led by a “reeve.” If one member committed a crime, the others had to catch him and bring him before the court, or the “moot” as the Saxons called it. If they failed to do so they were all punished, usually by paying a fine. If anyone saw a crime he raised a “hue and cry” and all men had to join in the chase to catch the criminal and bring him before the court. Under Alfred the Great, (A.D. 871-901), reeves began to be combined, forming “shires” or counties. Each shire was led by a reeve. For minor offenses, people accused of crimes were brought before the local “folk moot.” More serious cases went to the “Shire Court,” which came under the “shire reeve” (meaning “keeper and chief of his county”), who came to be known as the Sheriff. After the Normans conquered England in A.D. 1066, they adopted many Anglo-Saxon law keeping methods, including the system of tythings, the use of the hue and cry, and the Sheriff’s courts. In A.D. 1085, King William ordered a compilation of all taxable property in a census, and decreed that the Sheriff was to be the official tax collector of the king.

Read the whole thing. I found it to be quite interesting.

UPDATE: If you think about it, this type of system is probably what made English liberty possible. If the King was dependent on the community to enforce the King’s law, then the laws had to largely reflect the values of those communities. You wouldn’t be much interested in catching law breakers over laws that went against the values held in that community, would you? You’d probably spend a lot of time looking the other way. So English law didn’t develop in the same manner as other countries, and when they came here, they brought the law with them. Obviously neither the English nor Americans use this type of system for law enforcement anymore, but the American distrust of centralized police forces is probably rooted in this tradition, and has probably helped keep locally controlled policing, despite the efficiencies that could be gained from centralized police forces. Though most states have State Police, at least in Pennsylvania, they have jurisdiction over our highways, and in any communities that don’t hire local police.

Chester Looking to Pass Lost and Stolen

They will be yet another municipality bucking preemption passing this useless law.

Gun Owners Challenge Lentz

Lentz was pushing his bill in Upper Darby, but ran into a good bit of opposition from gun owners.

In her testimony, Lt. Lisa King, commander of the Philadelphia Police gun-permit unit, said that there is no way to tell if those 3,100 have been denied a permit in Pennsylvania because Florida will not provide police with their names.

“I fundamentally have a problem, that Pennsylvania allows another state to dictate who can carry a concealed-carry permit here and not tell us the names,” said state Rep. Josh Shapiro, D-Montgomery. “Whether you’re in the NRA or CeaseFire PA . . . we would all be better suited having Pennsylvania laws govern [here].”

So is Shapiro really coming out against reciprocity here? Because I can’t think of anything that’s going to piss us off more than that. I am one of the 3100 people, and I also have a PA LTC. I suspect that’s the case with the vast majority of this small number of people. As I said previously, if Philadelphia wants to have us push to remove all of its discretion in LTC issuance, it can feel free to push the Lentz bill. Otherwise we’re going to make the criteria completely objective, so that we can be sure that there is no room for the city to deny or revoke permits based on bogus criteria.

I am very glad Florida won’t turn over the names. I can guarantee they’ll appear in the Inquirer or Daily News if that happens. PA LTC’s are private, and there’s no reason to expect less from the State of Florida.

Bringing a Little New Jersey to Pennsylvania

One Republican lawmaker is upset about the growing lack of full service stations, so he’s introducing a bill to mandate stations maintain at least one full service pump. I’m not in favor of such a mandate, but thinking about the problem, it probably wouldn’t be all that difficult to build a robot that could pump gas.

LTC Price Issue Fixed (For Now)

Looks like all the area sheriffs who were overcharging for licenses have agreed to stop, and will issue the state mandated 25 dollar license. They will also keep issuing the plastic ones for a higher price, but it looks like that might change when the uniform standards are announced.

I’m asking the Snowflakes in Hell research division to find out for me any information we can report about the new standards that might be put in place, to see what changes it may portend for your average LTC holder. I will report when there’s more information.

Democratic Officials Lining Up Behind Self-Proclaimed Tea Party Candidates

It looks like suburban Philadelphia Democrats are working hard to ensure that Republicans not only have to overcome the margin of error, but also the margin of fraud. Their first step is lining up self-proclaimed tea party type candidates to funnel off votes from Republican challengers.

I already mentioned the shenanigans in PA-7, and it’s amazing how slimy Democratic candidate Bryan Lentz and the local party leaders are trying to be by claiming that they have nothing to do with the third party candidate. In this age, you can’t hide. Â Here are some of the names and titles of Democratic officials and activists who pushed Jim Schneller over the edge to get on the ballot released by PA2010:

Colleen Guiney is the head of the Swarthmore, PA Democratic Committee.
Joseph Gallagher is a Democratic Committeeman from Aston, PA.
Timothy Willard is a former Lentz staffer who previously worked on his state house campaign.
Nicholas Allred is an officer with the Swarthmore College Democrats – an organization that already backed the Democratic candidate. Â (Election fraud – you can’t get started too early!)
Democratic activists Rocco Polidoro and Arthur Manos signed petitions to get Lentz on the ballot and then turned around to collect signatures for the third party candidate.

Upon further research, PA2010’s editor added this startling fact about the (legal) fraud at work in this self-proclaimed tea party campaign:

With the exception of Schneller himself and one registered Republican, it seems that all of Schnellerâ€™s circulators were registered Democrats, and most of them can be tied to Lentz by far less than Six Degrees of Separation. At least five of those circulators also gathered signatures for Lentz. And as we noted from the beginning, one of them is Colleen Guiney, the volunteer who Lentz once called â€œthe hardest worker on my campaign.â€

I don’t know how Lentz’s campaign and the Democratic officials can keep a straight face while they issue denial after denial.

It’s worth noting that local tea party groups have asked Schneller to leave the race, and they are making clear that they in no way support his candidacy.

The Independence Hall Tea Party Association, the largest such group in the region, endorsed Meehan in the spring and asked Schneller last year to quit the race, said Teri Adams, a board member of the group’s political action committee. …

The Independence Hall group and the Delaware County Patriots sent Schneller a letter Wednesday asking him again to drop out of the race, or at least to withdraw the signatures that Lentz volunteers and supporters had gathered.

In the meantime, we’re dealing with it here in PA-8, too. Here are the (so far) announced names of Democratic officials pushing a candidate who attended a Tea Party Forum in January only to tell attendees that they suck for attending and suck for voting.

Brian Caplan now works for the state Democratic Party and is a former staffer for Democratic candidate Patrick Murphy.
Jessica Milinichik also now reportedly works for the state party, but she was with the Murphy campaign as recently as a few weeks ago.

The third party candidate is expected to pull voters away from the Republican candidate, though the Democrats, again, deny any involvement. Â Unfortunately, our local tea party group hasn’t issued any statements about this kooky candidate, even though he got up and insulted them at their own event. Â Hopefully, they will make it clear to their supporters that they aren’t backing his candidacy.

I had my first experience with dirty politics from Philadelphia-area Democrats in 2008 when MoveOn volunteers canvassed our neighborhood and destroyed all of the GOP signs they recognized. Â Not only were the McCain signs in our yards cut, but the frames were pulled out of our lawns and bent beyond easy repair. Â Fortunately for me, I had a stash of extra frames from another campaign that didn’t need as much help, so I set out to repair the ones on our block. Â I expect the same kind of shenanigans this year.

I’m not opposed to third party candidates, but I am opposed to those who accept help from one party just to screw over another candidate when they have no intention of running a real campaign.

The Anti-Carry Bill that Won’t Die

It looks like the anti-gun politicians have learned a little something from the worst of New Jersey’s political traditions. When their bills are about to go down in defeat, they yank them from the floor. That way there’s never a real “no” vote against them, and they can keep pulling them up periodically to test the waters for any new votes.

This bill has to be defeated. Until Philadelphia stops abusing their authority over carry licenses, there’s no room to even talk about this subject.

RodentGate Consequences

Who knew that an infestation of rodents would lead to lower sales at the State Capitol cafeteria?

Add One Mouse, Subtract $674,000.
That’s how much sales are down in the Capitol cafeteria, apres Rodentgate, the Patriot-News reports this morning.
Sales for the first two quarters of 2009 totaled nearly $1.1 million, while figures for the first two quarters of this year were just $407,738.

In addition to rodents, the cafeteria wasn’t properly washing dishes. Shockingly, people have apparently been avoiding it like the plague – probably out of fears of catching the plague.

Thank goodness for John Micek’s reporting on RodentGate or we would have eaten there at the gun rally in April. Fortunately, we knew better and stuck with a bottle soda until we could escape to the brewery nearby. However, I did feel a bit of guilt as we watched other gun owners chow down at the cafeteria.