Thursday, March 19, 2015

The Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Commission. The ARMED Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Commission. They're out there, protecting us Virginians from drunk UVA honor students.
Gov. Terry McAuliffe ordered the Virginia State Police to investigate the early Wednesday arrest of Martese Johnson, who needed 10 stitches to close a gash on his head after his altercation with Alcoholic Beverage Control agents outside a Charlottesville bar. State police said that "administrative review" will be conducted along with a criminal investigation requested by the Charlottesville prosecutor.
The good news in all this is they're not racist or sexist fascists. They will put their boot on the neck of anybody:
Agents suspected one of the women was underage and carrying a case of beer, ABC said. Instead, it was LaCroix sparkling water. The women said they didn’t know the agents were officers. Six agents closed in at the height of the incident. One drew a gun.
Hat tip: Instapundit

Thursday, March 05, 2015

Ben Shapiro notes how topsy turvy the federal government has become and how we are going to lose our democracy if we don't wake up and defend it:

Welcome to the most transparent administration in American history, where the Federal Communications Commission can regulate the Internet and keep those regulations secret before a vote, where top government officials can deliberately hide their emails from the public, but where your health records, income and emails are all government business.

The public and private spheres have now been completely reversed.

The federal government can punish its own employees for enforcing federal immigration law; if you oppose this, you are a racist, but if you hire an illegal immigrant, you will be fined or imprisoned. The feds can monitor your electronic metadata, but they can hide their own correspondence from records requests. After all, they are our betters, and we must kneel before Zod.

What possible violations of the Constitutional system will Americans actually fight? The list of possibilities grows short. Reports emerged this week suggesting that President Obama will consider banning bullets by executive order, effectively castrating the Second Amendment by fiat. Shrug. The Obama White House announced this week that Obama was "very interested" in unilaterally raising taxes. Shrug.

Democracies die not with a whimper or a bang but with a shrug.

Columnist Phil Kerpen voices similar concerns:

The rule of law is in grave danger, as federal regulators use ever thinner legal pretexts to enable vast public policy changes without votes by our elected representatives. In a span of just seven days, the FCC declared the Internet a public utility, Congress acceded to DHS implementing executive amnesty, the president used a veto threat to protect the NLRB's ambush elections rule, and the Supreme Court's four liberals showed they are not just willing but enthusiastic to allow the IRS to ignore the plain language of Obamacare. A great week for regulators, but a terrible week for everyone else.

[ . . . ]

The shifting of ever more power into the presidency and his regulatory apparatus is a long running problem, but it has accelerated dramatically in the current administration. President Obama is now even reportedly exploring the possibly of usurping Congress's most fundamental power by directly ordering tax hikes.

We are, if the American people don't wake up and demand better, on the brink of losing our constitutional form of government forever in favor of a soft tyranny of federal regulators constrained only by elite opinion and quadrennial presidential elections.

Michael Walsh: "If Washington, D.C., is Hollywood for ugly people and Hollywood is high school with money, then the Democrats are Mean Girls - cliquish, snobby and bitchy."