From My Position… blogger Chuck got nailed by a IED last week. It looks like he’s going to pull through with a bit of help from the doctors at Walter Reed, and a whole lot of prayers.

Chuck was on a foot patrol w/ one of his platoons. A civilian Iraqi informant was leading the patrol to the site of the IED. Well, this informant (ass hole) set the patrol up and the IED was remotely detonated. And my husband was hit!!! The blast blew him into the canal, and CPT Jason Spencer went into the canal and saved Chuck’s life… he kept him above the water so he didn’t drown.

Everything on his amazon list has been bought, but you can still help show you support on this 4th of July weekend by buying some Fighting Aces T-Shirts to help support their homecoming party. You can print out the order form here.

I came across this disturbing news out of Zimbabwe thanks to Kim du Toit.

“Police would like to advise members of the public that firearm licences of the following weapons, self loading weapons, G3, FN 7,62 mm rifles and scorpion pistols have since been revoked in terms of sub section (7) of Section (6) of the Firearms Act (Chapter) 10:09,” she said.

“Possession of the above listed firearms is now unlawful. Members of the public are being urged to surrender these firearms to their nearest police stations by 30 June 2005. They will be issued with an issue voucher upon surrendering the firearm,” said Insp Banda.

As observed on Kim’s site — we can look forward to an all new bloodbath in Zimbabwe. Where is the Liberal’s favorite savior in this instance? Last I heard the UN was off raping young women under their protection and selling off oil vouchers.

We’ve all known it for some time now. We are no longer the land of the free and home of the brave. We live at the whim of decisions made by 5 black robed judges. That is apparently all it takes to wipe out your God given right to own your own proprty and be free from Government interference as used to be protected by the 5th Amendment of the US Constitution.

Read Vin Suprynowicz’s book The Ballad of Carl Drega to see where this proprty rights battle is leading.

EFF-WA has more coverage of the Supreme court decision, as does Michelle Malkin

According to this news.com article by Declan McCullagh the senate has voted (in secret) to expand the Patriot act to expand the FBI’s powers to reduce judicial oversight and more disturbingly allow them to classify some subpoenas as secret with up to 5 years in prison for disclosing them.

I have never been one of the rabid anti-Patriot act zelots. I thought that the original act went too far in some instances, but overall was balanced and since it had a sunset clause we were protected from it becoming permanent. But this continuing trend towards operating out of the public view is very disturbing to me. When the people lose the right to monitor the activities of their government the government has no incentive to act in the best interests of the people.

Terrorism is a threat, and needs to be fought on every front, but it is becoming the latest boogeyman. Invoke ‘terrorist’ and ‘national security’ and you end up with 57-year old Principals being added to the terrorist watch-list for a simple mistake.

A MINORITY VIEW
BY WALTER E. WILLIAMS
RELEASE: WEDNESDAY, JUNE 1, 2005, AND THEREAFTER

Police departments must use race and sex preferences in hiring as a result of federal court consent decrees and political pressures. To meet these demands, many police departments have lowered, and in some cases eliminated, established standards for personal character and intellectual and physical capacity.

Jan Golab writes about this in “How Racial P.C. Corrupted the LAPD” in the May 2005 issue of The American Enterprise. While most of Mr. Golab’s article chronicles how Los Angeles damaged its police force in its quest for “diversity,” where it’s had to fire 100 police officers, identical damage has occurred in other cities. Washington, D.C., had to indict or fire 250 cops; New Orleans indicted more than 100. In these cities, policemen have been charged with crimes ranging from murder and rape to robbing drug dealers and selling confiscated drugs.

You can read Professor Williams’s full article here

In a bold move the Board of Directors of the Sacramento Valley Shooting Center have banned the use of their range facilites to Department of Justice employees while on duty. This is because of their support for California’s newest gun-grabbing legislation.

You can read the letter sent to the DOJ here.

This comes on the heels of the persident, inventor, owner of Barrett Firearms refusing to sell his rifles to California Law Enforcement after their support for CA’s recently passed .50 ban. You can read his American Rifleman article here in pdf format.

Reporters Without Borders voiced alarm today at the Chinese government’s announced intention to close down all China-based websites and blogs that are not officially registered. The plan is all the more worrying as the government has also revealed that it has a new system for monitoring sites in real time and spotting those that fail to comply.

“The Chinese authorities use this type of announcement above all to intimidate website operators and bloggers,” the press freedom organisation said. “The authorities also hope to push the most outspoken online sites to migrate abroad where they will become inaccessible to those inside China because of the Chinese filtering systems.”

Reporters Without Borders added : “Those who continue to publish under their real names on sites hosted in China will either have to avoid political subjects or just relay the Communist Party’s propaganda. This decision will enable those in power to control online news and information much more effectively.”

The new initiative was announced in a decree issued by the ministry for the information industry (MII) on 20 March, which said all China-based websites – commercial or otherwise – would have to register by 30 June, giving the complete identity of the persons responsible for the sites. According to the authorities, the aim is to control information that “endanger the country.”

According to official figures, about 75 per cent of Chinese sites have already complied with the new procedure. The Russian news agency Interfax reported that the ministry subsequently announced that a new system called “Night Crawler” (Pa Chong, in Chinese) that allows the authorities to locate and block unregistered sites would get under away at the start of June.

At the request of the authorities, the Telecom operators that host the biggest Chinese news portals informed their users that this procedure is obligatory. In May, many bloggers received e-mail messages telling them to register to avoid their blogs being declared illegal.

A China-based blogger told Reporters Without Borders on condition of anonymity that the Shanghai police recently rendered his website inaccessible because it had not been registered. He then phoned the MII to ask what he had to do in order to register, and was told that in his case it was “not worth bothering” because “there was no chance of an independent blog getting permission to publish.”

This came from Reporters Without Borders, via the Politech mailing list.

In California, Arizona, Washington (and possibly others) the people have voted in democratic elections to allow some of their fellow citizens to use Marijuana in cases where doctors have determined that it helps their medical condition. Yesterday the Supreme Court decided that the people and their doctors don’t know what’s good for them and overruled these laws by using the ever-broadening “Interstate Commerce Clause” as reason to override both the will of the people and the State’s right to determine its own laws, as protected by the 10th amendment.

More detailed explinations can be found here at the Legal Theory Blog

I was trying an experiment. Posting only good liberty related news and leaving the bad stuff up to everyone else. Well, I’ve given up. There’s just too much crap going on to ignore. I’ll still post good news, but I’m going to be posting the bad as well, and after yesterday’s ruling in the Washington State Governor’s Election I’m in a bit of a foul mood.

I see why the judge ruled as he did, he took the easy path and rested his decision on Washington’s totally impossible standards for contesting illegal ballots — essentially you have to PROVE who the illegal ballot voted for, which is not possible in a system that keeps every vote private (at least until we are all using electronic voting machines). State law doesn’t allow for cases where the margin of error was bigger than the margin of victory (by more than 10 times), but it should.

One way to express our outrage at this is to write to our State Legiscritters and demand they change the election laws in this state, another is to try to get the Feds (ha!) involved since election workers did admit to committing fraud. We can also send a message to Olympia by gathering enough signatures to get Initiative-912 the no-new-gas-tax initiative on the ballot in November. They need over 200,000 signatures by July 8th so they need as much help as they can get.