What the goat does, the kid follows.
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Author: Redactor
Protecting the peace isn’t easy. Sometimes it calls for extraordinary action. Like a recent police assault to capture and kill an outlaw . . .
In this case, the targeted outlaw wasn’t really a person at all, but a fawn named Giggles.
The baby deer was being illegally held by the Society of St. Francis no-kill animal shelter and farm near Kenosha, Wisconsin, without the required state permit. Giggles had been nursed back to health by shelter employees, who told reporters they were within days of moving the fawn to an Illinois wildlife facility.
Four sheriff deputies and nine Department of Natural Resources agents took the heavily-armed SWAT-like approach, and, through “aerial surveillance,” were able descend upon the fawn and kill it.
It is policy to euthanize because of the potential for disease and danger to humans.
“That’s one hell of a policy,” said the man who had cared for the dangerous Giggles.
Why the rush to kill this deer? And, why not make a phone call to talk to the folks at the Society of St. Francis, instead of a launching a military-style assault?
“If a sheriff’s department is going in to do a search warrant on a drug bust,” DNR spokeswomen Jennifer Niemeyer explained, “they don’t call them and ask them to voluntarily surrender their marijuana or whatever drug that they have before they show up.”
Right. No quarter is given to outlaws. Even if they are innocent forest creatures who had received illegal charity from well-meaning humanitarians.
This is Common Sense? I’m Paul Jacob.
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Big Soda Ban Still Fizzles
One of the Nanny State’s ninniest nannies is New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, eager to save New Yorkers from big cups of sugary drinks. Big Soda supposedly makes you tubby. Bloomberg feels that it is the government’s job to prevent such tubbiness. (No word yet on bans of big chocolate, big hamburger, big pizza . . .)
In July, a court upheld a prior ruling that the NYC Board of Health had exceeded its bounds by trying to ban certain Big Soda sales. According to the Times, the justices objected to “exceptions and carve-outs in the rule [that] demonstrated that the board was concerned with matters beyond its core mission to improve public health. . . .”
The now-banned ban was indeed full of carve-outs and contradictions — unavoidable this side of a totalitarian state. To achieve its goals consistently, the government would have to monitor our every sip. How much more must it have to do to really stop us from gaining “too much” weight, Bloomberg’s rationale for the assault on Big Soda sales?
It is not government’s job to compel good living by violating the very political rights that we need in order to live well. Its job is to safeguard those rights; i.e., to safeguard the freedom to make choices about matters big and small according to our own judgment. A state that bans every conceivable “wrong” choice also prohibits our means of making the choices that are — for each of us, given our individual purposes and priorities — the right choices.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Winston Churchill
What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone?
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George Bernard Shaw
The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.
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Townhall: The Fight for Your Gun Rights
This weekend’s Common Sense column at Townhall.com looks at the latest political battles over gun-ownership rights in the two states of the union that have also legalized marijuana. Shoot on over, and reload back here, with more information:
- Spokane Spokesman-Review: Washington gun initiatives square off
- Ballotpedia: Washington Gun Rights Measure, Initiative 591 (2014)
- Washington Sec. of State: Initiative Measure No. 591 (text)
- Protect Our Gun Rights / Yes on I-591
- Seattle Times: Gun-rights supporters planning initiative of their own
- Ballotpedia: Washington Universal Background Checks for Gun Purchases, Initiative 594 (2014)
- Washington Sec. of State: Initiative Measure No. 594 (text)
- Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility / Yes on 594
- New York Times: Facing a Recall After Supporting Stronger Gun Laws in Colorado
- Citizens in Charge: Colorado Second Amendment Activists Turn-in Recall Petitions
- Video: Colorado Sheriffs File Suit Against Anti-Gun Laws
- Independence Institute: Colorado Gun Case
- 2nd Amendment Crusader Dave Kopel: davekopel.org
- Morse Recall: The Basic Freedom Defense Fund
- Ballotpedia: Giron Recall
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
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Video: White Riot
Enough of the “Black Community” and the “White Community” — how about seeing everyone as an individual? Though not perfect, this bit of satire is well worth thinking about:
http://youtu.be/NjyUSxCD4jg
What kind of world do we live in?
That was my thought when I heard how Sharon Snyder got fired for doing right.
The 70-year-old worked in a Kansas, Missouri, court for over three decades. She was fired for providing a public — public — document showing how an inmate could successfully request DNA testing.
Twenty-seven years ago, Robert Nelson was convicted of rape. Nelson was no angel back then. He was also sentenced for robbery; the sentence for rape would begin after he had served the time for robbery.
When his sister appealed to Snyder in 2011, Nelson had filed two previous requests for DNA testing, both denied. Snyder gave her a copy of a motion that had worked in a different case. It worked again. A crime lab determined that Nelson’s DNA was not that found at the crime scene.
He was released with decades left to serve on the rape charge.
Then the judge who had denied Nelson’s first two motions, David Byrne, fired Sharon Synder for violating court rules. Whatever validity those rules may sometimes have, they were wrongly applied here.
We live in a world where persons like Byrne feel justified in firing a woman for helping a wrongly convicted man escape many years of unjust imprisonment. That makes me angry. But — it is also a world in which Sharon Snyder acted to save that man from suffering any more of that unjust prison time. Thank you, Sharon Snyder.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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George Bernard Shaw
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read.