The Barr Code

In a recent ACLU case, Lily Haskell was arrested for attending a protest of the Iraq War, but was never charged with anything.   When she was required by police to provide DNA, she requested a lawyer, and at that point she was told that she would be charged with a misdemeanor if she did not provide a DNA sample.  This raises the question: why was a person who was only exercising her right as an American to protest, treated the same as every other criminal in America.  For merely attending a protest event, she was arrested and forced to provide DNA to law enforcement.   What happened to Ms. Haskell can and is happening to people across our nation.  Government is finding any excuse possible to collect your DNA. 

All levels of government are beginning to maintain databases of citizens DNA.  Whereas in the past, the fingerprint was the method that law enforcement used to identify criminals; now, government is using any excuse necessary to extract and store one’s DNA. …

Continue reading Your DNA up for grabs »

An African American male construction worker trudges up the steps to the front porch of his house in a middle-class neighborhood of New York City; it is dusk and he’s had a hard day on the job at a construction site.  Dressed in work clothes, dog-tired, and with tools in hand he wearily approaches his front door.  As he fumbles with his keys to unlock the door of his house, a man dressed in a police uniform approaches and begins questioning him.   Quickly dismissing his initial thought that this was an Ashton Kutcher “punked” incident, the homeowner realizes he is being interrogated by a real police officer with a real gun ready at his side.

This scenario is not hypothetical.  It happens hundreds if not thousands of times each day in cities and communities across the country; and it is occurring with increasing frequency. Police are randomly stopping more than one million people, mostly minorities, throughout major U.S. cities each year.  Simply walking down the …

Continue reading Random police stops increasing fast »

Hello – is there anybody out there who still believes our leaders in Washington care about what the Constitution of the United States says?  Or what it was intended to mean?  Or even that it exists?  If there actually is anybody out there who still believes this, recent discussions on Capitol Hill about proposed federal legislation should dispel such thought from the minds of even the most die-hard optimists.

Legislation dealing with the delivery and cost of health care in the United States is nearing votes in both houses of the Congress.  Although differing significantly in their details, the primary proposals in both the House and the Senate establish clearly it will be the heavy hand of the federal government, not patients and their doctors, who will be controlling health care decision-making in the decades to come. 

With such a massively expensive and substantively far-reaching piece of legislation being debated at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, one would hope …

Continue reading Constitutional Ignorance Reigns Supreme on Capitol Hill »

The Food and Drug Administration, a federal regulatory agency perpetually in search of new products to regulate and new jurisdiction to conquer, last June received the gift it had coveted for decades.  On June 22, 2009, President Barack Obama signed into law the “Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act,” which gave the FDA legal power to regulate the manufacture, marketing and sale of tobacco products including, most importantly, cigarettes.

The regulators at FDA have wasted no time flexing their new regulatory muscles.  Their first target to vaporize?  Why, clove cigarettes, of course.  I’d not even heard of clove cigarettes until someone I know was smoking one outside a club at which I was attending an event in New Orleans last summer.  I was sitting there enjoying a good cigar, and this friend of mine was smoking what appeared to be a cigarette, but whose smoke smelled like no cigarette I’d ever been exposed to.  With my curiosity thus piqued, I asked what …

Continue reading FDA launches its attack on cigarettes »

In the 2008 general election, only about 57% of the country’s voting age population actually voted.  In Georgia, even fewer citizens — 54.7% of the “VAP” — felt it sufficiently important to actually cast a ballot.  Although Georgia’s voting percentage was better than Hawaii’s or Texas’ (45.1% and 45.6%, respectively), it’s still nothing to write home about.  Undaunted by the already low turnout, however, recently several municipalities in Georgia have decided to employ a decade-old state law that will almost certainly diminish voter interest and turnout even further. 

In 1998, the Georgia General Assembly passed legislation that permitted local governments to actually cancel elections.  This extraordinary power can be exercised if all candidates on a ballot in any particular voting precinct are unopposed.  This year, several governments in the Atlanta metropolitan area have opted to use this power and are then beating their chests and declaring to their constituents how …

Continue reading Dim-bulb law leads to cancelled elections »

Like the mythical phoenix that rises from the ashes, the USA PATRIOT Act just won’t go away.  After signing the massive piece of legislation into law on October 26, 2001, President George W. Bush and his attorneys general John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez (with considerable help from former Vice President Dick Cheney), tried repeatedly to expand its powers.  They did this both by seeking to amend the Act directly, as well as through other legislative vehicles such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).  They were occasionally successful and sometimes not; but they never stopped trying.

During the 2008 campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama made statements appearing to support moves to scale back these laws.  However, when the time came for a vote in the summer of 2008, he not only voted against scaling back FISA, but in favor of expanding its reach considerably.  In fact, he voted to grant immunity retroactively to telecommunications carriers that had …

Continue reading Patriot Act reform may be nearer »

With the H1N1 “swine” flu season moving into full swing, and with AIDS/HIV and other deadly diseases continuing to plague millions of Americans, one might think that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), would have its hands full.  After all, the CDC “serves as the national focus for developing and applying disease prevention and control,  .  .  .  to improve the health of the people of the United States.”  You might be inclined to think that with all that’s happening here and around the world posing very real and very serious health risks to the American citizenry, the CDC would have sense enough not to squander its resources on matters wholly unrelated to health and infectious diseases.  If you made such a presumption, you’d be flat wrong.

The CDC, like many if not all federal bureaucracies, seems always to be searching for new projects and agendas in which to involve itself.  One “problem” on which the CDC has now focussed its attention, is gun control.  That’s …

Continue reading CDC and guns — here it goes again! »

President Obama has declared the H1N1 or “swine” flu a “national emergency.”  Exactly what this will mean to the average citizen remains unclear, as shortages of the swine flu vaccine continue; but it is unlikely that simply declaring an “emergency” will relieve bottlenecks in distribution or cause additional supplies to magically appear.  What is perhaps more interesting, will be if governors follow the president’s lead and start declaring state “emergencies” simply because the H1N1 flu virus has appeared in their state.  Various “emergency declaration” provisions in state law books or currently being considered by state legislatures (such as in Massachusetts) give the governors extensive, if not downright frightening powers once an “emergency” is declared.

Legislation currently pending in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, for example, would allow the governor to forceably quarantine citizens in the event he declares a “health emergency.”  Forced vaccinations could also …

Continue reading Flu “emergency” powers can be extensive »

The folks at United Nations headquarters in New York City, and our “allies” at Number 10 Downing Street in London, must be rubbing their hands with glee. Gun control groups here and abroad likewise are at last quietly cheering. Why? After a decade and a half of pushing unsuccessfully to secure America’s support for a legally-binding, international instrument to regulate the marketing, transfer and brokering in firearms, they are now on the brink of success. The process of formally negotiating an Arms Trade Treaty (“ATT”) now has Washington’s seal of approval; announced October 14th by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

It was not always thus.

In the summer of 2001, the UN formally launched its multi-year effort to institutionalize its role as regulator of international transfers of firearms; something it had coveted openly since the mid-1990s. In July 2001, John Bolton had been serving as President George W. Bush’s undersecretary of state for arms control and …

Continue reading “Perfect Storm” For UN Gun Control Agenda »

In 2005, the United States Supreme Court struck a blow against the medicinal use of marijuana and against the notion that states can enact and enforce their own laws without being trumped by the federal government.  In the Gonzalez v. Raich decision, the High Court used the Constitution’s much-abused “interstate commerce” clause as a basis on which to uphold a federal prosecution of two women who grew and used small amounts of marijuana under a doctor’s care, in compliance with California’s law permitting medicinal use of marijuana.

The Raich opinion personified the perspective of the administration of George W. Bush toward medicinal marijuana useage as well as state’s powers.  On October 19th, in a partial but welcome reversal of that Bush-era policy, the Department of Justice issued new guidelines for United States Attorneys in those states (California and 14 others) that have medicinal marijuana laws on the books.  Henceforth, so long as individuals in those states are …

Continue reading New federal marijuana policy a welcome change »