Starvin Larry

h/t WRSA

“Just before heading off to Ireland a couple of weeks ago, I linked to a discussion between John Batchelor and Stephen F. Cohen about the “Sovietization” of American political culture in recent years. By this term, Professor Cohen referred to the increasing use of social, political, economic, and legal pressure to cow and silence those who dissent from the accumulating theses of “Progressive” orthodoxy. (A particularly worrisome aspect of this is that those theses are in constant leftward motion, so that one never knows, based on what was sayable yesterday, what is unsayable today — the effect of which is to make it safest simply to say nothing.)

Writing at at PJ Media, Richard Fernandez has taken up this topic in a brief item about the possibility of a new kind of civil war. After listing some examples of deepening political viciousness, he brings up the idea of “hybrid warfare”:”

http://malcolmpollack.com/2019/03/07/on-civil-war/

The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official.”—Herman Schwartz, The Nation

You think you’ve got rights? Think again.

All of those freedoms we cherish—the ones enshrined in the Constitution, the ones that affirm our right to free speech and assembly, due process, privacy, bodily integrity, the right to not have police seize our property without a warrant, or search and detain us without probable cause—amount to nothing when the government and its agents are allowed to disregard those prohibitions on government overreach at will.

This is the grim reality of life in the American police state.

Our so-called rights have been reduced to technicalities in the face of the government’s ongoing power grabs.

Consider a case before the U.S. Supreme Court (Mitchell vs. Wisconsin) in which Wisconsin police officers read an unconscious man his rights and then proceeded to forcibly and warrantlessly draw his blood while he was still unconscious in order to determine if he could be charged with a DUI.

To sanction this forced blood draw, the cops and the courts have hitched their wagon to state “implied consent” laws (all of the states have them), which suggest that merely driving on a state-owned road implies that a person has consented to police sobriety tests, breathalyzers and blood draws.

More than half of the states (29 states) allow police to do warrantless, forced blood draws on unconscious individuals whom they suspect of driving while intoxicated.

Seven state appeals courts have declared these warrantless blood draws when carried out on unconscious suspects are unconstitutional. Courts in seven other states have found that implied consent laws run afoul of the Fourth Amendment. And yet seven other states (including Wisconsin) have ruled that implied consent laws provide police with a free pass when it comes to the Fourth Amendment and forced blood draws.

With this much division among the state courts, a lot is riding on which way the U.S. Supreme Court rules in Mitchell and whether it allows state legislatures to use implied consent laws as a means of allowing police to bypass the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement in relation to forced blood draws and unconscious suspects.

Mind you, this is the third time in as many years that the Supreme Court has taken up the issue of warrantless blood draws.

In 2016, the Court ruled 7-1 in Birchfield v. North Dakota that states may not prosecute suspected drunken drivers for refusing warrantless blood draws when they are arrested. However, the Court also tossed the cops a bone by giving them a green light to require a warrantless breath test incident to arrest. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito rightly recognized the danger of allowing the government to warrantlessly take possession of—and preserve indefinitely—one’s biological and genetic material.

In 2013, a divided Supreme Court held in Missouri v. McNeely that people suspected of drunken driving can’t automatically be subjected to blood tests without a warrant and without their consent.

The differences between McNeely, Birchfeld and Mitchell are nuanced, but it is in these nuances that the struggle to preserve the Fourth Amendment can best be seen.

The Fourth Amendment has been on life support for a long time.

Our freedoms—especially the Fourth Amendment—continue to be strangulated by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.

Forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases: these are just a few ways in which Americans are being forced to accept that we have no control over our bodies, our lives and our property, especially when it comes to interactions with the government.

Worse, on a daily basis, Americans are being made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to clear the nearly insurmountable hurdle that increasingly defines life in the United States: we are now guilty until proven innocent.

Read more @ The Rutherford Institute

here

“Sergeant Gregg Marinelli, 38, was also charged with criminal conspiracy and hindering prosecution after warning a suspect in an investigation into cocaine and fentanyl-trafficking drug rings that move drugs into New York State.

The Orange County resident assembled and knowingly sold pistols and various semi-automatic rifles to members of multiple Outlaw motorcycle clubs including members that by law were prohibited from owning guns due to their criminal records. These same people were under investigation by the State Police for trafficking drugs into New York State.”

Read it all @

“Maryland ‘Gun Bill Day’ Turns Ugly – State Dem Secretary Threatens to ‘Dox’ Protesters,” a Monday story in the Washco Chronicle reports. “Many of those testifying arrived in shirts stating that they “will not comply” with new gun control laws. This took a turn for the worst when the Maryland Democratic Party secretary, Robbie Leonard, threatened to ‘dox’ those testifying today.”

Leonard’s Facebook post, which he has since deleted, shows a photo of a gun owner outside the hearings holding an “I will not comply” sign, and another photo of several gun owners inside the hearing wearing shirts bearing the same message.

“Time to dox some homegrown terrorists,” Leonard advocated.

Read the rest @

https://www.ammoland.com/2019/03/maryland-democrat-party-official-and-lawyer-calls-for-doxing-terrorist-gun-owners/