To:  New GOP Majorities in the MN House and US Congress
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  Agenda

All,

Want something to show you’re serious about getting the boot of government off of innocent citizens’ necks? 

Reform civil-forfeiture laws.  Now. 

Including, preferably, eradicating laws that allow corrupt pettifoggers to run rackets with the blessing of “the law”. 

Do it now, so we can see who the real enemies are. 

That is all.

One of the brighter spots in Tuesday’s proceedings was the crushing victory of Peggy Bennett over Shannon Savick in Albert Lea. 

It was an old-fashioned whooping – 53-40.  Not even close.  And that was with an Indyparty candidate who took 6% out of the race, likely mostly from Bennett. 

I’m still doing the end-zone happy dance in my head. 

Shannon Savick was one of the DFLers from Greater Minnesota who supported Michael Paymar and Alice “The Phantom” Hausman’s gun grab bills in the 2013 legislature. 

And she was one of the DFLers who joined Hausman and Paymar in getting up and theatrically walking out of the hearing room when the Real Americans of the Second Amendment movement started their testimony against their proposals.  Indeed, the DFL made a shameful spetacle of ignoring their opponents’ testimony.

Watching their bills – and all of their support from Michael Bloomberg – go down to whining, piddling defeat – was sweet.  And it was what mattered most.

But seeing Shannon Savick tossed out of office with all the ceremony of a day old egg salad sandwich is right up there.

OK, Ms. Savick.  NOW you may get up and leave the room.

UPDATE:  It wasn’t just Savick – and it wasn’t just in Minnesota.  Gun grabbers were crushed nationwide.  It was lopsided in the Senate, of course – but the most astounding progress was among governors.

To sum it all up?  The NRA-endorsed candidate won in Maryland. 

Perhaps bigger, but definitely more subtle?  The flip of the Senate will at least slow down President Obama’s ongoing campaign to pack the Federal Appelate courts with gun-grabbing activists. 

It was a good Tuesday for Pro-Second-Amendment Real Americans from coast to coast.

SCENE:   Mitch BERG is biking in the southwest suburbs.  He pulls over into a coffee shop.

As he sits down, he notices Stephanie Marie ANNAN, Community Organizer for the Minnesota 5th CD Libertarian party.   She is wearing capri pants and a t-shirt with “He Gave His Only Begotten Son”, and a picture of Ron Paul walking across the water toward the camera.

ANNAN:  Hey, Mitch.

BERG:  Hey, Stephanie Marie.  Ready for the election.

ANNAN:  Yep.  I’m voting Libertarian. 

BERG:  Kinda figured.  So – why? 

ANNAN:  Because big changes need to happen.

BERG:  Yeah, that’s true.  That’s why I’m voting for Jeff Johnson as many times as Mark Richie will let me get away with it. 

ANNAN:  He won’t bring any changes.  The GOP is just as big a part of the problem as the DFL is. 

BERG:  Er…why do you say that?

ANNAN:  When people put the GOP in power, they were just as bad as the Democrats.  There is no difference between the parties. 

BERG:  Yeah, the GOP can be frustrating.  Although you’re oversimplifying.  Bobby Jindal has made a huge difference in Louisiana; under his leadership, the New Orleans Public Schools went all charter.  Other GOP governors – Pence, Haley, Walker, Martinez – have made inroads in reducing the size and power of government.  The GOP – and GOP candidates – have made a difference at limiting government and its impact over the years.   Reagan’s tax cuts were a huge help…

ANNAN:  Reagan grew the deficit!  He raised taxes!

BERG:   Bingo.  You’re making my point for me.  Reagan, being a Republican president dealing with a Democrat Congress run by a big-government ward heeler like Tip O’Neill, had to make compromises.  One of those compromises was that he had to trust O’Neill to keep up his end of the bargain on cutting spending – which, of course, he didn’t.  And for all of that, his “tax hikes” were a fraction of his tax cuts, and they happened at a time when the economy was humming along.  If you don’t think Reagan’s tax cuts in the early eighties helped immensely with the recession, you’re dreaming. 

Anyway – the GOP in 1994 made a huge difference in paring back Bill Clinton’s megalomania.  Remember “Hillary Care?”  Either does anyone else.  And the Tea Party class of the GOP, the people elected in 2010, have largely kept their promises. 

ANNAN:  But the Minnesota GOP had the governor’s office from 2002 to 2010, and the House until 2008, and both chambers in 2011 and 2011, and nothing changed. 

BERG:  Plenty changed.  “Republican” used to mean Arne Carlson.  It used to mean “go along with the DFL in turning surpluses into more permanent spending”. 

ANNAN:  The GOP raised the budget in 2011, and built the stadium. 

BERG:  Yep.  And both were wrong.  And in neither case did the Tea Party class of 2010 go along, at least without a fight. 

ANNAN:  Bla bla bla.  The GOP always compromises.

BERG:  Parts of the GOP – the older, “Moderate” wing of the party, especially, which still exerts way too much control over the party at the Capitol – certainly does.  Parties don’t change overnight.   The GOP still caves in on way too much.  It’s improving, as conservatives slowly replace moderates. 

And let’s be honest; Minnesota is a blueish purple state at best.   Minnesota is split between various shades of red and hard, deep blue.   When a conservative goes to Saint Paul, and wants to get anything done, compromise is inevitable.  There is no way anyone who gets elected to office as a conservative in Minnesota doesn’t have to defile the purity of their principles at some point or another. 

ANNAN: Yeah, well, I’m sick of voting for the lesser of two evils all the time.  I’m going to vote my absolute, pure principles and vote Libertarian. 

BERG:   And that way, you’ll promote liberty.

ANNAN:  Yep.  

BERG:  So let me get this straight; you won’t vote for Republicans because previous generations of Republicans have had to compromise the purity of their principles when they actually got into a room with the other side and had to actually try to get things done, to say nothing of having to stop the other side from getting worse things, like daycare unionization and gun control, done. 

ANNAN:   Yep. 

BERG:  And you’ll vote for someone who’s never had to test the purity of his precious principles by trying to enact any kind of policy at all, much less over the votes of a legislature that is at least 50% completely hostile to everything your candidate says. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I could see myself supporting Rand Paul for President.   

ANNAN:  Ew.  He’s abandoned his principles.  Not like Doctor Paul.

BERG:  You’re proving my point.  “Doctor” Paul never got elected to anything outside of a House district in Texas.  And for all his big talk about policy – auditing the fed, disengaging abroad, yadda yadda – he admits, albeit quietly, that he never could have done it.  He had no support in Congress. 

ANNAN:  Why do you hate liberty?

BERG:  Actually, I clearly respect liberty more than you do. 

ANNAN:  Hah!  How can you say that? 

BERG:  Because the only way you’re going to get your agenda passed is to elect a libertarian monarch who takes office, sweeps away a century of noxious policy by decree, and then steps down.  Hopefully.  And that’s fine, if “magical thinking” is good enough for you.   But that’s really all voting for a third party gets you.  A third party vote is a wasted vote.

ANNAN:  It wasn’t with Jesse Ventura!  He had principles and he stuck with them!

BERG:  No, he didn’t.  He ran on a promise of returning the entire plus to the people. And once he got elected, he had to deal with the fact that was a governor with no caucus in the legislature – two Democrats flipped over to the Independence Party over the next year, and that was it. So we had to run with his hat in hand to Roger Moe, the DFLSenate majority leader, and cut deals like a madman. Meaning that about a third of the surplus got paid back. And the rest of it got turned into permanent spending, the way the DFL wanted.

So where was the principal?

ANNAN:  He sent a message!

BERG: Yep. And that message was “voting for a third-party candidate is of nothing but symbolic value”.

ANNAN:  (Plugs ears, turns, starts running).  Bla bla blaaaaa can’t year youuuuuuu bla bla bla bla bla).

[And SCENE]

“For instance, we have a Bill of Rights, which could with equal accuracy be called the List of Stuff You Idiots Can’t Be Trusted To Vote On.”

— Kevin Williamson (from a National Review article I’ll go more deeply into later this week).

We were warned; if we voted for Mitt Romney, free speech would evaporate.

And they were right; Obama’s FEC is moving to regulate online political speech, including this blog. 

Late Friday, Ann M. Ravel, the Democratic vice chair of the Federal Elections Commission, said the FEC would begin the process to regulate Internet-based campaigns and videos which are currently free from oversight by the federal government. The Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard said one Republican FEC chairman, Lee E. Goodman, warned that anyone who writes a political blog, a politically active news site or even a chat room, could be regulated….Earlier in the year, Bedard noted, Goodman warned that Democrats on the panel were gunning for conservative websites like the extremely popular Drudge Report, a site that typically sees some 30 million visits per day.

The beef is ostensibly about political groups disseminating videos via blogs and social media that would be regulated on television. 

But then, they’d manage that by regulating everyone who links or carries the content.  Which, in plain English, means regulating political content in all social media, including here on Shot In The Dark.

Not only is it imperative that the Democrats lose and lose big next month – it’s even more imperative that the GOP actually provide a meaningful alternative.

Watch this video starring Ted Nugent, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage, in which President Obama is called…well, exactly that.

UPDATE:  I lied.  It’s not Nugent, Hannity and Savage.  It’s Nat Hentoff, liberal civil libertarian and godfather of the ACLU.  He’s a liberal – but he has been committed enough to actual civil liberty over the decades that he’s even pissed liberals off at him…

In Houston last summer, the Democrat-run government passed an “anti-discrimination” ordinance which, like most such ordinances, did little about discrimination but did sodomize freedom of association.   It was opposed by a variety of religious groups, for a variety of reasons.

But that was just the warmup.

Perhaps inspired by Barack Obama’s siccing of the IRS against dissenters, Houston’s Democrat-run city government is looking for payback against dissenters; it’s subpoenaing ministers’ sermons from the run-up to the vote for the ordinance.

That’s subpoenaing; not just sternly asking:

The city of Houston has issued subpoenas demanding a group of pastors turn over any sermons dealing with homosexuality, gender identity or Annise Parker, the city’s first openly lesbian mayor. And those ministers who fail to comply could be held in contempt of court.

“The city’s subpoena of sermons and other pastoral communications is both needless and unprecedented,” Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Christina Holcomb said in a statement. “The city council and its attorneys are engaging in an inquisition designed to stifle any critique of its actions.”

ADF, a nationally-known law firm specializing in religious liberty cases, is representing five Houston pastors. They filed a motion in Harris County court to stop the subpoenas arguing they are “overbroad, unduly burdensome, harassing, and vexatious.”

Dear Wisconsin “Jon Doe” prosecutors; I take it back.  You are no longer the most corrupt pettifoggers south of the Fed.

And this is not an aberration.  This is every Democrat, everywhere in the country.  Oh, they make nice noises about “liberties” like making dung statues of the Virgin Mary and waving their genitals around in public; but when it comes to the real ones, speech (by people not favored by the ACLU’s ministrations, meaning people from flyoverland in general), assembly, association, the fruits of ones labor, self-defense, self-determination?

If your local Democrats haven’t sicced the IRS, or a prosecutor, or their county attorney, on you yet, it’s just that they haven’t had a clear opportunity yet. 

All eggs to be broken to make the state omelet.

PS:  Don’t you dare say there’s a war on religion.

GOP governor candidate Jeff Johnson at yesterday’s debate in Duluth, asked if he and Governor Messinger Dayton had anything in common:

“We both love our dogs, and want to control my life”.

Last Saturday I interviewed Craig Bergman, producer of Unfair, a detailed documentary on the IRS’s systematic oppression of Americans. 

It’ll be showed one time, Tuesday, October 14, at a theater near you; here are the Minnesota showings; you can find one nearer  you on the same page.

Police departments – at least, some that Mother Jones talked with – are ostensibly trying to get rid of surplus military gear:

Even before police militarization made the news, hundreds of police departments were finding that grenade launchers, military firearms, and armored vehicles aren’t very useful to community policing. When Chelan County police officers requested one armored car in 2000—the request that landed them three tanks—they pictured a vehicle that could withstand bullets, not land mines. Law enforcement agencies across the country have quietly returned more than 6,000 unwanted or unusable items to the Pentagon in the last 10 years, according to Defense Department data provided to Mother Jones by a spokeswoman for Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), who has spearheaded a Senate investigation of the Pentagon program that is arming local police. Thousands more unwanted items have been transferred to other police departments.

The catch?  The Pentagon doesn’t really want it all back.  It’s cheaper to let local cops maintain it than to keep it in Federal storage.

Which is vexing some cops:

In reality, however, police departments may find the returns process slow, mystifying, or nonfunctional. Online law enforcement message boards brim with complaints that the Pentagon refuses to take back unwanted guns and vehicles—like this one, about a pair of M14 rifles that have survived attempts by two sheriffs to get rid of them.

I’ve got an obvious answer – one that’ll make cops, the Pentagon and citizens (the right ones, anyway) happy: sell it to private citizens.  Or at least the private citizens that pass the same background check that qualifies them for a state carry permit.  It’ll save government money, and make the country safer by making Real Americans better-armed.

Facetious?   Halfway.  A fair chunk of this equipment could, and should by all rights, be going into the “Civilian Marksmanship Program”.  But Barack Obama has been sandbagging the CMP for the past six years – which is why the price of surplus M-1 Garand rifles (from WW2 and the Korean War) is so very high these days.

But I digress.

And I’m about to digress some more; it’d seem we have some real powderpuffs in uniform (empasis added):

[Hillsborough NC police lieutenant Davis] Trimmer has twice requested permission to return three M14 rifles that are too heavy for practical use.

“Too heavy for practical use?”  They weight eight pounds.  Our troops lugged them all over Vietnam, for crying out loud.

Maybe the lieutenant was referring to carrying all three of them together?

Turn them over to me, if that’d help…

And now, from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, comes this radical news; law-enforcement officers’ qualified immunity doesn’t allow them to act like storm troopers just because they feel like it.

Kevin Williamson’s conclusion:

The only thing stopping federal authorities from suffocating free speech — not only by independent groups such as the SBA List, but by individuals, trade groups, National Review, and the New York Times — is the First Amendment.

And Harry Reid wants to gut it. Figure out why that is and you’ll know everything you need to know about the Democratic party, which with each passing day functions less and less like a political party and more like a crime syndicate.

What led him to the conclusion?

Well, here’s the opener:

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism. Dissent is the lowest form of crime. If you are a drone in the hive of the Left, it is possible — easy, in fact — to believe both of those things at the same time.

Just read the whole thing.

HR 1962 is a proposal for a press shield law. 

The beef of the bill says that…

In any matter arising under Federal law, a Federal entity may not compel a covered person to provide testimony or produce any document related to information obtained or created by such covered person as part of engaging in journalism, unless a court determines by a preponderance of the evidence, after providing notice and an opportunity to be heard to such covered person…

…is closely involved in an imminent crime or act of terrorism.

OK, so far so good. 

Except that the bill serves only to protect the mainstream media – the ones that largely kiss Democrat ass:

The term covered person means a person who, for financial gain or livelihood, is engaged in journalism and includes a supervisor, employer, parent, subsidiary, or affiliate of such covered person.

In other words, institutional media – and, likely, the institutionally-paid alt-media that have been Walz and Nolan’s BFFs, ermuhgerd, I’m writing like Sally Jo Sorenson, oh noes – are covered.

All the rest of us – the ones that actually try to hold government accountable?  We’re on our own. 

Why do representatives Walz, Nolan and McCollum hate freedom of the (non-Democrat-aligned) press?

To be a nicer, more civil person.  I truly am.

Here’s the deal.  I left the Libertarian Party in 1998 largely over the LP’s complete illiteracy on foreign policy and defense.

Now, many “Libertarians” are drawn to the belief, and the party, by the reductionistic magical thinking that all of the world’s questions break down into binary, black-or-white answers.  The right answer to everything lies in unbending, unyielding adherence to “principles”, any deviance from which for any reason is an unforgiveable impurity.

Which is a fine and dandy thing, if your “principles” are so well-thought-out as to account for all of the myriad gray areas life, human nature and history throw into one’s path.  For example, the idea that some “libertarians” have that one is either an isolationist peacenik…or a “warmonger”, with nothing in between.  Too stupid to mock.

Anyway.

What I’m trying to do is figure out a way to write “if everything you know about history and foreign policy is stuff you read from the inside of Ron Paul’s anterior colon, you probably are not going to be a partner in a serious debate”.

And I got nothing.

I’m open to suggestions.

When the founding fathers created our Constitution, one of their biggest fears was that of the standing army.  In Europe at the time (and in most dictatorships today), the Army was a professional, full-time force, frequently composed of mercenaries whose loyalty to the local king was purchased; in larger kingdoms, it was composed of units from different parts of the kingdom, who had no loyalty or affection to the people of the local province.

The Army, in short, was an agent of oppression.

The first municipal police department (in London in the 1820’s) on the other hand was an attempt to distance itself from the idea of the military.

Kevin Williamson at NRO goes through the squandered legacy of Sir John Peel, the inventor of the modern police force.   Peel’s nine guidelines to the then-new Metro Police are – or were – a standard for cops for well over a century:

The first order of police work is, according to Peel, “to prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.” The second principle is “to recognize always that the power of the police to fulfill their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions, and behavior, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.” He called this “policing by consent.” The policeman, in Peel’s view, was a citizen: “The police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”

And the importance of the uniform.  The bright colors and towering headdresses of the uniforms of post-medieval Europe (still worn by the Guards at Buckingham Palace) were intended to try to intimidate the opposition, especially an opposition of peasants and rabble that didn’t have uniforms:

In that context, the function of the police uniform is simply that of an imprimatur — of the municipal government of London or of New York or Mayberry. It tells little Peter Pat whom he can trust.

We seem to have lost that idea:

Our contemporary and increasingly militarized police uniforms are designed for a different purpose: the projection of force. Peel organized the Metropolitan Police as an alternative to “military repression,” but we, in turn, have turned our police into quasi-military organizations: Armored vehicles roam the mean streets of Pulaski County, Ind. Why? “It’s more intimidating,” the sheriff says.

Cops will note in response that there are times when they do need to assert control – to “intimidate”.  That’s true.  But that “time” is not “when in contact with a general public that is exercising its right to protest”, among quite a few others.

The more I think about it, the more it seems modern law enforcement has become the standing army our founding fathers were worried about.

What do I think about what’s going on in Ferguson, Missouri?

Re the Brown shooting:  On the one hand, American police do a lot more shooting than any other police force in the world.  More shots were fired in that single incident in Ferguson than were fired by the entire German police force in six whole weeks. 

On the other hand, African-Americans do get a disparately-harsh response from law-enforcement.   It causes some to prejudge all cases involving black shooting victimes.

On the third hand – that cuts both ways.  We don’t know the facts – not all of them – about the Brown shooting, but we’ve seen the media whitewash the likes of Darren Evanovich, trying to create a racial incident out of what turned out to be a perfectly clean self-defense shooting. 

On the fourth hand, if Brown was going for the officer’s gun, that’s a legitimate cause for self-defense.  Even for a regular citizen.  If someone grabs your gun, the law doesn’t require you to read his mind as to what he intends to do with it. 

On the fourth, we may not ever really know why the scuffle happened, or exactly what happened. 

And that, in fact, is the only real response I have to add.  Remember the media’s reports in the first hours, days, even weeks after Columbine?  Virginia Tech? The Giffords and Aurora Theater and Newtown shootings?  Remember how close to the actual facts of the stories they got?

Not at all.

So I’ll wait for the facts to shake out, assuming they ever do.

Regarding the Police Response:  I’ve written before about how I oppose the militarization of the police.  And the first couple of days of the Ferguson PD’s response was the Keystone Kops led by Major Frank Burns.  Oh, don’t get me wrong; I have no problem with the DoD selling military firearms and armored vehicles to police departments – provided they sell them to law-abiding citizens, as well.

And yet when the Ferguson Fusiliers were withdrawn and replaced by the kinder, gentler, New-Ageier Missouri State Police?   The violence ebbed ,then came back as bad as ever, prompting local, black residents to wonder to the media why the cops weren’t shooting looters.  And now the National Guard is involved. 

The Charlatan Caucus:  Of course, where there are grievances, there will be grievance vultures.  And sure enough, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are on the scene – which in and of itself devalues much of the local community’s complaints. 

As bad, in their own way?  The media – which continue lead with inaccurate info, when they’re not making the story about themselves.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This legal analysis is interesting because it starts from the basic assumption that the police have NO obligation to protect citizens from crime. The police create an obligation to protect you only if they go out of their way to make the situation worse than it was before they intervened.
The obvious implication of this “no obligation” ruling – coupled with the Supreme Court’s holding that individuals have a Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms for self-defense – is that the fundamental legal principle of public security in American law is . . . you’re on your own.
Which Conservatives have known all along, but it’s nice to see the Courts spell it out so clearly for us. Now, Liberals, do you have any questions?
Joe Doakes

I’m gonna guess “no”.

Y’know, as a conservative, I have a bent toward law and order.  With an emphasis on “rule of law” and “general order”. 

We’ll come back to that. 

(more…)

The Lightworker, on his penchant for trampling the separation of powers:

“The American people don’t want me just standing around twiddling my thumbs and waiting for Congress to get something done,” Obama said.

Well, yes, Mr. President; if Congress doesn’t pass legislation, those of us who understand the Constitution, especially the bit about “separation of powers”, most certainly do want you to go golfing, rather than usurp the role of Congress.

Head for the golf course, Mr. Lightworker.

A New Jersey cop responds to a citizen’s allegations about his First and Fourth Amendment rights being violated:

“I’ve made you objections (sic) about what’s going on at the shelter over there,” [an animal rights activist] told the cop. “My 1st and 4th Amendment rights were violated – my civil rights were violated…”
The Helmetta police officer replied, “Obama just decimated the freakin’ Constitution, so I don’t give a damn. If he doesn’t follow the Constitution, we don’t have to.”

Just a crabby cop having a bad day and picking a lame excuse?

Perhaps.

But our founding fathers understood better than our generation does that freedom only survives when “the authorities” respect the idea. 

And to too many of them, it’s just not there.  (more…)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

. Connecticut mother leaves 11 year old child in car, gets arrested by police.
California mother leaves 12 year old child in car while she visits bank, gets shot by police.
Is it just me, or is “child protection” getting out of hand?
Joe Doakes
Como Park

Like all those Vietnamese villages that had to be destroyed to protect them…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Liberals don’t mind open borders because those immigrants won’t take their jobs, or their kids. And government spending doesn’t matter because government loans never have to be repaid. Half a million illegal immigrants have swarmed the border this year, all claiming to be refugees entitled to food, shelter, medical care, in-state tuition and public defenders. Oh, and interpreters, because although they don’t speak English they sure as Hell know their rights.
In completely unrelated news, .22 LR shells are still impossible to find on the shelves, as right-wing kook bitter clinging racist homophobes continue to snatch them up the instant they roll off the truck.
This cannot end well.
Joe Doakes

That which cannot be sustained, won’t be.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

My practice is real estate title law – what individual natural person owns this particular patch of land?

My job didn’t exist in olden times because The King owned all land (or “nobody owns the land” in aboriginal cultures).

My job still doesn’t exist in Cuba or North Korea, where the answer remains “the king, however he’s titled” or in places like Somalia where lack of a functional government to enforce a rule of law leaves the answer as “whoever can defend his occupation of the land at the moment.”

Even in many modern countries, most of the land is held by a few wealthy families (France, Germany, Russia) and everybody else lives in public housing (English council estates) or apartments (Hong Kong).

And in almost all the science fiction stories I can recall, the answer in the future is “the government” or sometimes “huge corporations.”

Mass individual home-ownership exists in Canada, Australia and the USA. It’s a uniquely Colonial thing and when these countries eventually fall (as all nations do), the concept may vanish with it.

We’re living in a bubble of rights not seen before, and not to be seen again. What an amazing privilege. What a shame that our leaders are risking it all.

Explaining to Americans “it doesn’t have to be like this” is like explaining to a spoiled teenager (or a liberal) where money comes from.  It’s a revelation to them that it could ever be different. 

(Bonus:  Explaining to self-styled “anarchists” that lack of government doesn’t mean freedom; it pretty much inevitably means a much worse form of authority will fill the gap)

This is for you progressives in the audience.  The conservatives and libertarians already know this, so you may skip down to the next post.

A right is something that is endowed to you by your creator, whatever you believe that is, and can not (legitimately) be taken away by any person or government.   Life.  Liberty.  The pursuit of happiness.  Speech, religion, press, assembly, keeping and bearing arms, no illegitimate searches and seizures (ooops), and so on.  It’s a short list, but a pretty comprehensive one.

The Constitutional Convention. Are they debating whether people have a right to happy hour between 5 and 6 every weekday? I think not.

Rights have one thing in common;  they don’t infringe other peoples’ rights.  When I exercise my right to speak, it doesn’t take away your right to speak.  For that matter, when you talk about taking away my rights – like the Second Amendment – it doesn’t infringe my rights; I need to meet you with more, better speech, and convince more Americans that you’re a ninny.  And I do.

But I digress.

There is no right not to be offended – because if we tried to say you had a right not to be offended, then it’d take away someone else’s freedom of speech.   If person A makes a statue of the Virgin Mary out of cow dung, Catholic Person B isn’t getting any rights violated; they are fully entitled to show the world why Person A is a terrible artist, or make a statue of Person A out of goat dung, or whatever.

So since it’s been in the news for the past 24 hours, let’s talk about the “women’s right” to birth control.

You women (and men, ahem) have a right to your private life (NSA notwithstanding), and to live your life more or less as you want (yep, there are restrictions on snake-handling and marijuana and raw milk and machine guns and a bunch of other stuff, but work with me here).  So go ahead and buy and use birth control!

Sorry, children. Everything that displeases you isn’t bigotry. Even religion.

But you have no right to force other people to buy birth control for you if it violates their beliefs, which are a right and don’t interfere with your rights (as opposed to wants).

Idiot columnistette Jessica Valenti thinks women should have sex *in* Hobby Lobbies nationwide to protest the ruling. Which is great, with two exceptions; 1) five’ll getcha ten the “women” will look like Jessica Valenti 2) That’ll open the door to people splattering guts and gore all over Planned Parenthood clinics. Choose your pointless symbolic gestures wisely, whiny spoiled progressives!

Frankly, you should have no more “right” for you to force anyone else to buy you contraception than I should to force you to buy me ammunition, not because of my religious beliefs (which say nothing about contraception) but because it takes my money.  But that brings up an argument about taxation and government that goes way beyond this, and that we should actually have in our society (government should pay for nothing but the court system, defense, and arresting and prosecuting people who materially harm other people), but is a huge tangent from the discussion we’re actually having.

You have a right to use contraception.  You have, currently, the legal means to force most people who work for most companies, and all publicly-held companies, to pay for them.  You don’t have the right to violate the rights of privately-owned companies’ freedom of religion.

It’s pretty simple, which is of course why you all get it wrong.

Hobby Lobby won its case – to not be forced to provide contraception – 5-4:

The justices’ 5-4 decision Monday is the first time that the high court has ruled that profit-seeking businesses can hold religious views under federal law. And it means the Obama administration must search for a different way of providing free contraception to women who are covered under objecting companies’ health insurance plans.

Look for an escalation of “War on Women” rhetoric in 3…2…1…