In any case the police work for us, ostensibly to establish domestic tranquility, and we have the right to keep them honest.

(Props to Carlos Miller for bringing this to my attention).

Mike Haege, of Hastings, owns a tree cutting service which operates in several cities. When he saw the news of devastation in the town he decided to put his business to use for free, volunteering to remove trees and debris from peoples’ homes, many of whom did not have insurance and were otherwise stuck without his help.

The city requires a license to conduct a tree cutting business within the city, which Haege did not have. Of course, that shouldn’t have mattered since he was not running a business that day – all the work he was doing was being done for free.

Have no fear, local government had its priorities strait and somehow managed to spare the resources to harass and threaten a local volunteer in their own devastated city.

A city inspector arrived at the scene. She told Haege he had to leave. Immediately.

“You have to leave right now,” the inspector told Haege. “You’re not licensed to be here.”

“I said, ‘I’m just a volunteer,’ and she didn’t believe me.”

Haege went back to his truck and got his volunteer paperwork. Still, that did little to get the inspector off his back.

“I don’t want to see you up here,” she told him.

“She just didn’t believe me,” he said.

And it gets even better. The charity he was helping and the citizens whom he had just helped all came to his defense, but to no avail. Soon he was forced to leave, chased out of a city he was trying to help, for free, by a government that apparently cares more about its own pathetic bureaucracy than the suffering of their own people.

Even that wasn’t good enough for these, apparently, vindictive bureaucrats. As Mr. Haege was driving home local police were following him in order to ensure his departure. He was unaware of this, however, when his help was requested again.

As they were on their way back to the volunteer area, residents waved down Haege, pleading for help. He pulled over and helped get a tree out of the way for them.

Haege had no idea police officers were behind him in a sort of unofficial escort out of town. He said they stopped traffic for about two hours while they figured out what to do with him. At one point, officers threatened to throw him in jail, he said.

Ultimately he went home and received a $275 fine in the mail.

A lot of words come to mind to describe the city’s actions that day, but I like Haege’s the best:

“I happened to have a day off, and I happened to get run out of the city for no reason,” he said. “It was really kind of disturbing. Going up there, thinking you’ll be welcomed. The residents welcomed me. They were very grateful, but the Gestapo wasn’t. ”[emphasis mine]

On a related note, why should one need a license to remove trees and debris even if they are charging? What’s wrong with enriching yourself by providing a service to your fellow man?

  by  abraham.williams 

The economic news just keeps piling on.

A new poll released by The Hill says a full one-third of Americans expect to be worse off by November of 2012.

More than one in three likely voters expect to be worse off when they go to the polls a year from this November, a somber fact for President Obama’s reelection campaign, while just 25 percent believe they will be better off, according to this week’s The Hill poll.

Even more directly:

Thirty-nine percent said they expect to be in the same economic position they are now, but 65 percent also said they believe the country is on the wrong track.

That, it seems to me, is a direct indictment of the President’s policies. The country is still evenly split on whether this is still Bush’s recession or Obama’s. Of course many of those who blame Bush for the current economic situation forget (or neglect to mention) that the Democrats took control of Congress in January of 2007 – it was less than a year of Democratic congressional policy before the recession began to trample the economy, and less then two years before the stock market imploded.

I’m not offering much of a defense of Bush because the fact is he continued a policy of government expansion at the cost of debt and cheap money. However, Obama has taken those ills and magnified them 500% with massive deficits and no end in sight to dramatic expansion of the federal government.

Democratic group Third Way has a handy chart indicating just what happens to presidents running for reelection during times of high unemployment (credit: Hot Air).

In other economic dread news CBS is running the headline, “Chronic unemployment worse than Great Depression” and the article is about as warm and fuzzy as you might guess.

About 6.2 million Americans, 45.1 percent of all unemployed workers in this country, have been jobless for more than six months – a higher percentage than during the Great Depression.

Long term unemployment is hard for lots of obvious reasons. Savings run out, unemployment assistance runs out, the gap on your resume actually makes it harder for you to find employment. It’s a serious problem.

The question is whether voters will respond to that problem by voting for the candidate more likely to create jobs, or the one more likely to make it “easier” to remain unemployed.

What would happen to you if you nearly ran a pedestrian over with your car then, when the pedestrian slaps your car and yells at you, you jump out and beat the man in the face with a bat? Jail? Not if you have a get-away-with-crime-free pass issued by the police department.

Officer Marc Rios plead guilty to beating a man in the face with his baton after the NYPD Officer nearly ran victim, John Roperto, over with his cruiser. Mr. Roperto slapped the car and swore at the Officer which prompted Mr. Rios to jump out of his cruiser and beat the man in the face with his baton. He then drove off and made no report of the incident.

Officer Marc Rios admitted to the March 30, 2009, assault that left victim John Roperto, 34, with broken bones in his cheek and nose.

There is one bright spot in this mess: because he plead guilty he was actually terminated from his employment which, with union and political protection, is all too rare in cases like this.

After a woman refused to go through a full body scanner she was pulled aside and made to undergo the pat down procedure. When the TSA agent touched the woman’s breasts, she broke down into tears and screamed for a police officer.

Of course the officers only threatened the woman, rather than help the assault victim. Then agents threatened to arrest her son for recording the incident. If we’ve learned that there’s anything the government hates it people that assert their rights, especially the 1st and 4th amendment rights.

That story makes these next two all the more satisfying.

The bill to ban the TSA’s molestation in Texas was scuttled recently after the TSA threatened to ground all Texas air traffic. (A move similar to the Stalinist threats used by the feds to revoke highway funds or otherwise cripple state economies of any states who oppose them.)

However, Rep. David Simpson (R) suddenly found renewed backbone after reconsidering the measure and deciding to try to move forward again.

“Gentlemen, we find ourselves at such a watershed moment today,” Simpson continued. “The federal government is attempting to deprive the citizens of Texas of their constitutional rights under the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution and Article 1, Section 9 of the Texas Constitution. If we do not stand for our citizens in the face of this deprivation of their personal rights and dignity, who will?”

And it looks like Utah’s joining the club:

“Opened a bill file today which will prohibit TSA pat downs in Utah without reasonable suspicion,” [Rep. Carl] Wimmer [(R)] wrote on his Facebook page this week. “Texas needs us to stand with them.”

The TSA makes the laughable argument that the bills are nullified by the supremacy clause of the Constitution, the very document they ignore in performing the “freedom groping” to begin with.

Is it possible that our copyright laws could be made even more draconian? So much so that a person could go to prison for five years for the unspeakable crime of embedding a YouTube video on their blog or website?

Apparently, the answer is yes.

Three Senators want to amend the Copyright Act to make “public performances” of copy-written material a crime, not just a civil tort as it is now. Why is this a problem? Because, as usual, our government is incompetent in matters of technology they don’t understand and have written a piece of legislation which would have broad consequences in turning millions of Americans into criminals.

Furthermore, as we suspected, in the full text of the bill, “performance” is not clearly defined. This is the really troubling part. Everyone keeps insisting that this is targeted towards “streaming” websites, but is streaming a “performance”? If so, how does embedding play into this? Is the site that hosts the content guilty of performing? What about the site that merely linked to and/or embedded the video (linking and embedding are technically effectively the same thing). Without clear definitions, we run into problems pretty quickly.

…

If you embed a YouTube video that turns out to be infringing, and more than 10 people view it because of your link… you could be facing five years in jail.

It seems unlikely that we’d see massive prosecutions against every person who shares an “infringing” video on their Facebook account, but that brings up another, perhaps more important point: Laws like this turn all our laws into a joke. There’s no longer a stigma against breaking the law but rather simply getting caught. Any time you pass a law which is unenforceable it degrades the integrity of our entire legal system, and when we pass laws this broad which are enforced it’s one more step into the pit of tyranny.

The GOP thinks Obama’s prospects for reelection may be getting dimmer, and it looks like they have some good reason: his policies and those of his Congress have failed to deliver on the economic growth and recovery he promised nearly three years ago.

Today we see news that the economy saw a meager 54,000 jobs created in the month of May, well below the previous quarter’s monthly average of 220,000 job per month. Some experts are blaming high gas prices for the poor performance, but gas prices declined steadily in the month of May. The truth is that relentless government interference in the free markets – propping up otherwise failed companies, exploding regulations and printing money without end – has made what should have been a short correction into what increasingly looks like a long-term, stagnant recession.

The news is made worse by the fact that we need to create hundreds of thousands of jobs a month just to keep unemployment at current levels. The lackluster report for last month meant that unemployment rose to 9.1%. But that doesn’t include underemployment (the measure of unemployment which includes people unable to secure full time work) and those who have simply given up looking for work after years of disappointment.

Even once jobs are created at a faster, sustained pace unemployment may actually increase as people reenter the workforce in search of new jobs.

The pessimism is not lost on the American people who, overwhelmingly, believe it will be years before they can return to pre-recession living standards.

In fact, an increasing number, some 61 percent, say they don’t expect to return to their respective pre-recession lifestyles until the spring of 2014, if ever.

A full 10% say they expect the economy to never recover. It doesn’t get much more pessimistic than that.

So what’s the political takeaway? The AP sums it up nicely:

The anemic pace of job creation poses a challenge to President Barack Obama’s re-election prospects next year. The Conference Board, a business research group, predicts that the unemployment rate will be 8.5 percent by the end of next year. That would mean Obama would face re-election with a higher unemployment rate than any other post-war president has.

Update: looks like half of those new jobs created last month were from one employer… McDonald’s.

Ok, may they didn’t use that wording to describe Obama’s increasingly abysmal poll numbers, but the results were not good for the President:

“American voters disapprove 48 – 42 percent of the job President Barack Obama is doing and say 50 – 41 percent he does not deserve to be re-elected in 2012, both all-time lows, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.”

He’s in for a rough ride if he wants to win re-election. So what’s dragging him down? Well, his handling of the economy, foreign policy and the war in Libya, his lack of leadership, his health care mess. Essentially every aspect of his presidency other than his personality. Well, at least he’s a nice guy.

Source.

Former President Bush continues to be attacked for his faith, and the role that it played in his decision making as President. In particular, the idea that Bush felt led by God to attack Iraq.

Now that President Obama says something similar, that he prays his way through his decisions as well, I’m sure we’ll see the same kind of outrage directed at him… perhaps not.

But is the lack of outrage, particularly from those on the left, actually symptomatic of something many Americans wonder: does Obama really believe in God?

The same article points out that “Forty-three percent of Americans now say they don’t know what Obama’s religion is at all.”

I don’t think this is a question we can judge, whether the President believes something in his heart, and I don’t think we should try. However, I would question whether the uncertainty about his faith comes from questions about his Islamic roots or if it’s more about the simple fact that Obama hasn’t made his faith an outwardly important part of his presidency.

I wonder if that’s why we don’t see the criticism of Obama’s claim to pray for wisdom from God like we did with Bush. People believed Bush when he said it, I don’t think even Obama’s supporters believe it when he says it.

The Chamber supported TARP, the auto bailout, and the stimulus.

The Chamber is supporting a pro-Obamacare, pro-TARP, pro-card check, pro-stimulus, pro-amnesty Democrat in Arizona over his free-market GOP challenger.

Malkin makes a great point about the Chamber, and I would expand on that point to mention that much of the force pushing for bigger government today comes from big business. Big companies want the government to run your health care so they don’t have to worry about. They want the government to run your retirement so they don’t have to worry about it. They want the government to spend trillions in “stimulus” money because it’s the big companies, not the small and mid-sized businesses, that will be on the receiving end of the hand outs.