Archive → April, 2021
Will the US Supreme Court go rogue in the Corlett decision?
The US Supreme Court says it will hear arguments in a major Second Amendment (gun rights) case brought by the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association (Corlett, docket number 20-843) against the State of New York.
These two opponents are now met in legal battle, and the US Supreme Court is the final battlefield upon which the outcome will be legally determined. Legal being a kind of tenuous word these days, as all kinds of government agencies have taxpayer-paid staff who now illegally behave any damned way they want, with no legal accountability. The illegal behavior of the “public servants” raises the question whether the official decisions the various government agencies are then issuing are actually legal, and whether or not citizens should give a fig about them.
The case facts (the policy question) of Corlett are right out of the Constitution’s Second Amendment: The right to keep and BEAR arms. New York State says no, citizens have no intrinsic or Constitutional right to carry concealed or unconcealed firearms outside of their homes, without the state’s approval. And thus has New York State made getting a concealed carry license very difficult, and the penalties for law-abiding citizens who do carry without a license extremely harsh.
As you might guess, the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association believes the opposite. They contend the plain meaning of the Second Amendment means what it says: To bear arms is to carry them in public, while the keep arms part is about having guns in your home. No license or government approval beyond what the Second Amendment says is necessary to keep or bear firearms, nor is government interference in such an individual Constitutional right lawful.
Moreover, they point out that the public policy question is on their side, because concealed carry permit holders are overwhelmingly law-abiding and safe. It does stand to reason that the people who go through the government red tape rigmarole presently needed to get a carry license are people who innately believe in following the law, in contrast to gang members and other urban scourges who carry and use guns illegally as part and parcel of their daily living. Therefore, New York’s stated purpose of limiting carry licenses for public safety and crime reduction is not only meaningless, because the current policy fails on both counts, it is actually having the opposite result. States with liberal concealed carry laws have seen a greatly reduced amount of violent crime, because would-be criminals understand they may encounter deadly force in response to their criminal behavior.
Many gun owners are excited about this case, after so many years of the Court declining to hear appeals of lower court decisions that were completely contrary to the Heller and MacDonald holdings (which were both strongly in keeping with the plain language of the Second Amendment’s very broad guarantee of individual gun rights). Well, hold your horses, people. The US Supreme Court has declined all kinds of appeals of lower court infringements of not just 2A, but what are in essence complete overturns of Heller and MacDonald precedents. The Supreme Court majority has allowed these lawless lower court decisions to stand. When the Court declined to hear appeals of lower court decisions on gun rights that were contrary to established Supreme Court precedent, the Court was more or less agreeing with the lower courts. The result has been a slow chiseling away of Constitutional Second Amendment rights by political activists sitting on lower courts, a slow erosion of the Supreme Court’s standing among and relevance to the citizenry, and a very clear message to Constitutionalists from all the courts: Do not hold hope for the American court system to protect individual American civil rights.
America’s court system is just as politicized and dysfunctional as the rest of our federal government. This is due to the divergent natures of the two types of people inhabiting our courts: Leftist activists for whom the law means nothing but a randomly opportunistic pathway to implement socialism and tyranny, and moderates who cannot be troubled to make a stand on hardly anything at all. So the moderates get swept away by the anti-law socialists. The Supreme Court is subject to these same forces.
Think about how America is still in the aftermath of the Court declining to hear enormously important cases about how some state administrative agencies (Pennsylvania’s Department of State being one) had unilaterally and illegally changed their state election laws right before the 2020 election, bypassing their own state constitutions and laws. And yesterday the Court sided 6-3 with a criminal illegal alien who fought his deportation on the grounds that the US Government had failed to give him “sufficient notice.”
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.
If you are a convicted criminal illegal alien, the US Government and the citizen taxpayers empowering it owe you nothing but a swift kick in the ass on your way out of America.
To be blunt: Because the Supreme Court allowed the 2020 election to be stolen, and would not even hear the monumental legal and policy issues raised during the steal, why would any of us believe they will stand in the way of the government trying to steal our guns?
If any particular official government entity or group of individuals is responsible for the destruction of America’s rule of law, it is the Supreme Court. No wonder fewer and fewer Americans have confidence in or loyalty to this failed government entity.
So, if you are one of the people salivating over the prospect of the Court hereby upholding the Second Amendment rights of the citizen serf in Corlett, you are DREAMING. Do not raise your own or anyone else’s expectations about the Supreme Court now swooping in to set things right on the Second Amendment. If anything, we should be prepared for this lawless body packed with leftist activists and cowards, with just a couple of loyal patriots (the two Constitutionalists Thomas and Alito), to throw the Second Amendment overboard. If anything, we should be raising people’s preparation levels for defending our 2A rights by all means necessary. The US Supreme Court has gone rogue and no American should look to the compromised traitors in it to provide any relief to USA citizens.
So come what may, regardless of what will be the Supreme Court’s latest decision on the Second Amendment, New York State citizens may yet determine on their own what they believe their individual rights to be, and also what the limits are on government interference in the private lives and rights of citizens. After all, both government and these various courts were established to resolve differences in favor of citizen rights that are already very clearly spelled out in our founding documents, including in New York’s own constitution. All of America’s founding documents were written and established to limit government and to elevate the citizen over government, a situation now being reversed in a nationwide atmosphere of autocratic government totalitarianism. New York State being an Exhibit A. Which the Supreme Court may well reinforce in its Corlett decision.
New York citizens may choose to protect themselves as they see fit, perhaps with a concealed handgun minus the license part. Obviously this is presently at some risk to a person’s liberty, due to New York’s anti-Constitution state administration.
And this raises the bigger question here: Will enough Americans rise up and re-assert our collective ownership of this thing called government, which has gone totally rogue and turned against us, the citizen taxpayers? Unfortunately, blood is probably going to flow in answering this question. We freedom loving citizens are being attacked and damaged by anti-freedom people who want full control of everyone and every decision we make. Human history demonstrates that only brute force can determine who prevails in these kinds of contests.
UPDATE: Reading the Washington Post assessment of this case provides insight into the minds of tyrants. The Washington Post wonders aloud what will happen if the Court is “too broad” in its reading of what can only be plainly read as a very broad individual right to keep and bear firearms. As a mouthpiece for the radical Left, the Washington Post sends public messages from elected officials to everyone else, and so they wonder if a “too broad” interpretation of the Second Amendment will result in the Court being “overhauled” by the Democrat Party with an increase in the number of leftist activist justices sitting on the bench. You can’t make this stuff up, and they are proudly stating up front that if the Left does not get what it wants, which is official tyranny via the Supreme Court, then they will artificially install a new Supreme Court that will give them the policy outcome they want, democracy be damned. When people use democratic processes to achieve non-democratic results, you are dealing with pure evil. Well, what am I saying…these people stole the 2020 election in broad daylight, so what else should be expected? My advice: Gentlemen, prepare to defend yourselves!
UPDATE May 2nd, 2021: The Supreme Court discredits itself yet again. The Court has declined to hear one of the most salient lawsuits of our time, that brought by Laura Loomer, whose weighty complaint to the Court was that the Big Tech digital media are illegal monopolies who illegally discriminate against Americans, and thereby violate citizens’ First Amendment free speech rights. Loomer being the Exhibit A of the moment. And we all know an awful lot of “cancel culture” discrimination by Big Tech has been going on the past twelve months, affecting at least a third of the American citizenry, and you would think a reasonable Supreme Court would want to weigh in on this problem. But no, the Supreme Court continues to behave disgracefully and kick away the sniveling little wretches who keep showing up at the carriage door begging for some relief from their oppression.
This Court is daily diminishing its own usefulness and relevance to the American People, and the only answer why this is, is that the Court’s majority no longer sees themselves as part of the American republic or as guardians of the Constitution that holds the republic together.
If not us, We, The People, then who the hell is the Supreme Court working for? I think the Corlett case is going to demonstrate exactly who the Supreme Court is protecting and promoting these days: Tyrannical Big Government. I hope I am wrong, but looking at all these decisions the Court is making, including Loomer’s case, it is clear the US Supreme Court is AWOL.
Don’t you go and feel all alone if the Court’s anti-Constitution behavior leaves you thinking their decisions no longer have a binding effect on you. The Court is clearly now made of tyrants, and tyranny has no role or place on American soil, and they have no claim on the allegiance of the American citizen, much less our obedience.
White liberals confessing they are systemically racist
The bizarre phrase “systemic racism” is being bandied about an awful lot these days. Mostly it is being used as an accusation against the whole of America, as though racism is everywhere in America. We shall see about that in a moment, but first let’s consider what this phrase even means.
When something is “systemic” it means that the infection or disease is coursing throughout the body, and that it is system-wide. In medical terms, something that is “systemic” probably cannot be fully treated. The body is probably going to die from this system-wide infection. Which is what makes this accusation so intriguing in political terms. It means that America is supposedly, allegedly, so racist that it is going to die, and needs to die.
The people using this phrase the most are white liberals, those lawless hardcore partisan Democrat Party adherents who have been goose-stepping, vandalizing, burning, looting, and murdering throughout American cities over the past year. White liberal politicians at every level, white liberal judges, white liberals employed by activist organizations and at purported “news” outlets like CNN and the New York Times, white liberal charitable foundation staff, white liberal teachers, white liberal public employees etc are all in on promoting this allegation of “systemic racism.”
And yet what is so intriguing is that when we look at the basic statistics (violent deaths, violent crime, joblessness, children born out of wedlock and into poverty, failed public school systems, failed public services with high taxes, urban blight etc) behind the human behaviors resulting in the deaths and mayhem attributed to “systemic racism,” we find….these are all Democrat Party-run cities across America, run almost entirely one way or another by…white liberals!
Gees, you try rubbing, you try scrubbing, and no matter what, these darned white liberals keep popping up everywhere as the problem child in every disastrous American city. White liberals run literally all of the institutions that run the cities harboring all of the victimized minorities.
Just about every major city in America is run by the Democrat Party and its local police force, and we are told that the police forces in these cities are “systemically racist.” Because these big city police forces are staffed by and run by the Democrat Party and its systemic white liberals, this means that white liberals totally own this issue. If there is racism of any sort on these police forces, or in the policies and ordinances these cities have, then by gosh, they are wholly owned and caused by white liberals. White liberals are the genesis, nexus, and end-result of all this racism and racial discrimination. The minorities living in these urban places are totally victimized by their white liberal overlords.
America itself is not systemically racist. At least not the regular hard-working, tax-paying, community-volunteering white people who live outside the big urban shitholes run by the Democrat Party. America is overwhelmingly populated by really nice, tolerant people who don’t give a crap about skin color or other people’s religious views. But they are up against a bizarre group of psychologically twisted white liberals who accuse everyone else of what white liberals, they themselves, are – freaking rampant racists.
Because white liberals tend to politicize everything, like every little thing, it is logical to see this false broad accusation of “systemic racism” against America and against America’s really nice heartland citizens as a political punch. And yeah, it is that. But it is also something else, much deeper and more important. This accusation is a subconscious effort by white liberals to come clean about what is really going on in their own heads.
This false accusation against America is really a gigantic confession by white liberals that they are racist as hell and they want forgiveness from everyone living around them.
The question is, given just how badly white liberals have treated all of the minorities living in Democrat white liberal Party – run urban shitholes, can they be forgiven? Or are white liberals such a systemic problem and such a dire threat to the American body politic that they must be utterly eradicated, like any other disease that threatens the body?
Weis soda instead of Coca Cola Coke soda
“Woke” companies like Delta Airlines and Coca Cola Coke have been leading with their chins lately, daring their own consumers to punish them for having turned against their consumers. Leading with your chin means that you run the risk of being punched back on your chin, and really suffering.
I myself run a small business devoted to achieving public benefits using private markets. Whenever possible, I buy land and try to get it folded into the existing public lands around it. State Game Lands, state forests, state parks, etc; if we have a public partner on a given property, then we can conserve that land.
But I would be blowing up my own business if I directly attacked the very people I need to do my business with, like Delta Airlines and Coke have been doing. For some odd reason, these two companies have joined with the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, and now Major League Baseball to crap on the very people who they want to have as customers. Who they expect to be customers. It is the oddest thing, really. It probably stems from this notion that a certain segment of aggressive Americans have that all of these enterprises, including America itself, are just too big, too rich, too successful to ever fail. Which is, of course, foolish. Every enterprise can and will end at some point, but doing things that directly harm your own interests just serves to hasten your own end faster than it would naturally come.
So the latest with Coke and Delta Airlines is that they did what they could to punish the state of Georgia for passing a voting law designed to protect voting rights. Somehow, the decision makers at Coke and Delta Airlines were confused into believing that the Georgia law is a bad thing, when in fact it is a very good and important thing. Voting is the basis of our entire American enterprise, and if voting ceases to mean anything, the entire thing ceases to mean anything. So anything that can protect the concept and practice of one person-one vote is a good thing. Except in the eyes of Coke and Delta Airlines executives.
Maybe they are so tight with China’s leaders, who desire to use weak American voting laws to elect people in America who are favorable to China, that they have thrown America overboard.
So people like me, who value voting rights and counting all legal votes, are unhappy with Coke and Delta Airlines. As a result of our unhappiness, we have been looking for alternatives to these two products. After all, we would rather support companies that are at least not at our throats.
Therefore, I am happy to announce the discovery of a very refreshing alternative to Coca Cola Coke, and that is the Weis brand of sodas (see photo below) (I “discovered” these refreshing Weis sodas at my friend Scott’s house, in an ice chest cooler, on his porch). Most generic, off-brand sodas are not very tasty or refreshing. I mean, let’s face it, Pepsi and Coke spent decades perfecting their products to meet the widest taste acceptance possible. These two companies have been so successful they now completely dominate the soda market. Very few competitors can even try to take some market share from them. And that means that most competitors who do show up have expensive alternatives, or their products are not very good tasting. Until now.
Whatever Weis is doing, their diet cola tastes a lot like diet Coke. It is very close to the same taste soda drinkers enjoy. It is also cheaper than Coke. Weis is a regional company, run by a family from Sunbury, Pennsylvania. Weis has been a part of my own food shopping experience since I was a child, and they still are now in my adult years. So see if you can find a local Weis, and try some of their sodas. I was more than pleasantly surprised at how good they are; actually, I was almost shocked.
If you are looking for a good alternative or substitute to Coke, try Weis. You will like it, and you will be supporting a local family run business, not some global corporation working hard to make friends with America’s worst enemies, and punish Americans for protecting America.
Carlisle’s “Truth & Reconciliation Commission”
Carlisle, Pennsylvania, is home to the northern-most military attack by Confederacy troops during the first (or second, if you justifiably count the Revolutionary War as the first one) Civil War. It also houses Dickinson College, the Dickinson School of Law, the Army War College, and the Letort spring creek, one of central PA’s better native trout fisheries. But now, Carlisle is even more infamous.
Last month, the Carlisle borough council passed a resolution establishing a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” with the purported purpose of “improving racial justice and racial equity within the scope and jurisdiction of the borough council…including policies, practices and actions that have contributed to racial inequity and systemic racism.”
How refreshing this is. Really, I mean it, I am not being snarky here. This commission is a huge step forward for white liberals/leftists/ Democrat Party members to begin their inward-looking process of accepting the corrosive effects of their own racist white liberal thinking that has so badly damaged every minority in America since 1865.
Because the Democrats never forgave the Republicans for taking away their slaves in 1865, the Democrat Party has ever since losing that Civil War devoted itself for 155 years to regaining power, re-asserting slavery and control every way possible, over as many Americans as possible. They used Jim Crow laws, the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings, burnings, the poll tax, and a slew of other patently illegal and undemocratic ploys to keep American blacks from voting. And despite all of these methods being morally wrong and illegal (so is stealing elections), the empirical evidence visible to everyone’s eyes is that the Democrat Party has been wildly successful.
One way we can measure white liberals’ success in achieving their 1865 goal of re-establishing slavery and racial inequity is by the huge number of American cities, municipalities, and boroughs today that are majority minority (mostly black or Latino), bankrupt, violent, high-tax, low-municipal services, financially and socially failed, and which are nonetheless run by white liberals.
My own city of Harrisburg is like this, filled up with poverty-stricken minorities and kept that way decade-by-decade by their white liberal slave owners. Oh sure, the poor minorities are thrown tidbits of welfare and taxpayer support by the white liberals, but they are never allowed to leave. Any black or Latino who dares to speak out against white liberal racism is denounced as…a racist. By white liberals, no less. This same situation is found elsewhere, notably Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Saint Louis, etc.
Another way of measuring the Democrat Party’s inbred lust for absolute power and coercive control over every breathing and dead person is their stolen 2020 election, from which the they have launched an all-out assault on the individual freedoms enshrined in the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence, through a multi-prong effort to white-out Free Speech, Self Defense, Freedom of Assembly, Freedom of Religion, and a whole host of other absolute rights. It is mind-boggling how in just a few months America’s white liberals have designed a totalitarian federal government that fits every American like a glove. It is almost like they have been thinking about this for a very long time…but hey, when you are looking to expand your pool of slaves from 40 million to 340 million, ya gotta go big, and so that is what the Democrat Party has done. Enslave an entire nation, to big coercive, forceful, unaccountable, unjust, lawless, untouchable federal government.
So this racial justice business in Carlisle offers its white liberal progenitors some real tangible opportunity to come clean, to own up, to ask for forgiveness for the sins of generations of white liberals. For all the pain and suffering they have inflicted upon American blacks, especially, the forced inter-generational dependence on white liberals, and the forced failure, so that dependent minorities never, ever escape their grasp again.
Man, do I really look forward to the Carlisle Truth and Reconciliation Commission getting the ball rolling on this. I know that the Republican Party kind of lost its raison d’etre after they defeated the Democrat Party Confederacy in 1865 and gave American blacks voting rights in 1964, but here is a real opportunity for the Cumberland County GOP to help these poor white liberals come to terms with their own racial inequity and systemic racism built into the Democrat Party. After all, the Democrat Party could not have won any elections, real or stolen, without at least the appearance of Black loyalty at the stuffed voting box.
Let the education, honesty, and reconciliation begin, right at home where it started, with white liberals.
Dave Schankweiler for Harrisburg Mayor
All politics is local, and while it is easy to talk about and pay attention most to the biggest political issues that play out on a national scale, the fact is, at the end of the day, much of our political life is determined by local government.
Therefore, David Schankweiler should be Harrisburg’s next mayor.
Because he is a successful entrepreneur with a fresh approach to solving Harrisburg’s seemingly intractable problems, Dave deserves a shot at contributing to Harrisburg’s seemingly endless recovery. Recovery from what, you ask?
Well, for many years Harrisburg has been dominated by just one political party that has implemented a disproven, debunked, and obviously failed set of ideas and practices. This nonstop assault on the citizens of Harrisburg has driven it deeper into financial and social failure, driven the best wage earners out of the high tax city, and made corruption a way of life among the political elites.
When Eric Papenfuse was a candidate, I asked him at a forum if he would get the $100 million criminal Harrisburg incinerator situation sorted out legally, and he said Yes, People Will Go To Jail for that. And then eight years later….Papenfuse failed to deliver. He did and said nothing. Nothing happened, there was no accountability. Why? Because Papenfuse craves to be part of the Harrisburg inner circle that pulled off that illegal scam heist in the first place. Papenfuse is not a reformer, or an agent for change, or an agent for the rule of law. He is a paid lackey, a hired gun, an enabler of criminal insider dealing.
Papenfuse has been questioned about some of his own real estate investments since he was elected mayor. Like using his office to damage local businesses so, it appears, he can buy up their property for cheap. He did the same thing with Mike Brenner, who leased a property to the City of Harrisburg Public Works Department. In that case, Papenfuse was over two years behind in rent, and then he refused to pay any rent, and then he tried to steal Brenner’s property through eminent domain. But a county judge stopped him in court. A mayor who doesn’t believe in the rule of law, who uses his mayor’s office for personal gain…this is not what elected office is about.
Frankly, Papenfuse is a crooked thug whose greatest claims to fame are reducing the number of road lanes for daily commuters into the city, so that bicyclists have their own lane….Right next to a pre-existing bike lane that was also in dis-use for lack of regular bicyclists. This has caused more car accidents and greater daily commuting delays, but Papenfuse has mindlessly punched that politically correct “green” box on his hit list against the citizens of Harrisburg.
While Harrisburg’s school district remains a national disgrace and catastrophe, there is not a whole lot that any mayor can do about it. The citizens and parents of that school district have to want it to be better, and they have to force the issue. A good mayor can help rally those parents and families of school children, but why would Papenfuse do that? He is in lockstep with the white liberal-run unions that have repeatedly burned the city’s school district to the ground for decades.
Schankweiler represents a breath of fresh air, a positive and professional face, voice, and an experienced hand. He is not an incumbent, he has no history of being owned by the various power brokers in the city, and being mayor of Harrisburg is not a lifetime appointment. Harrisburg needs a change for the better, and Schankweiler is it.
Please vote for Dave Schankweiler in the upcoming primary election.
