Tag: government overreach

Lawn Gone Liberty: The Update

It’s finally spring.

Better mow your lawn.

If you don’t, your town government may fine you thousands of dollars a day. 

Worse, if you can’t pay the fine, they may confiscate your home.

Six years ago, in Dunedin, Florida, Jim Ficken let his grass grow. 

His mom had died, and he’d left town to take care of her estate. He asked a friend to cut his grass, but that friend died, too!

In the two months Ficken was away, his grass grew taller than 10 inches.

City bureaucrats started fining him.

But they didn’t tell Ficken that. When he finally got back, there was no notice of the $500-a-day fine. Only when he ran into a “code enforcement officer” did he learn he’d be getting “a big bill.”

When the bill came, it was for $24,454.

Ficken quickly mowed his lawn. Then the city tacked on another $5,000 for “non-compliance.”

Ficken didn’t have that much money, so city officials told him they would take his home.

Fortunately, Ficken discovered the libertarian law firm, the Institute for Justice, which fights government abuse.

IJ lawyer Ari Bargil took on Ficken’s case, arguing that the $30,000 fine violates the Constitution’s limits on “excessive bail, fines, and cruel punishments.”

But a judge ruled that the fine was “not excessive.” 

Of course, judges are just lawyers with robes. Often they are lawyer/bureaucrats who’ve become very comfortable with big government.

I call a $30K penalty for not cutting your lawn absurdly excessive, 

IJ attorney Bargil told local news stations, “If $30,000 for tall grass in Florida is not excessive, it is hard to imagine what is.”

Dunedin’s politicians often impose heavy fines for minor transgressions.

One resident told us, “They fined me $32,000 for a hole the size of a quarter in my stucco … For a lawn mower in my yard … They fine people they can pick on … and they keep picking on them.” 

It happens elsewhere, too.

Charlotte, North Carolina, fined a church for “excessive pruning.”

Danbury, Connecticut, charged a resident $200,000 for leaving his yard messy.

Bargil notes, “It’s pretty apparent that code enforcement is a major cash cow.”

In just five-and-a-half years, Dunedin collected $3.6 million in fines. 

But by then, I and others had noticed. We were reporting on Dunedin’s heavy fines. 

So did the politicians sheepishly acknowledge that they had milked citizens with excessive fines and give the money back?

Of course not. They hired a PR firm. That cost taxpayers another $25,000 a month.

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‘Blesses the Government’s overreach’: Clarence Thomas swipes at fellow justices over ‘series of errors’ in ‘ghost gun’ regulations ruling, and includes his own evidence

The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 Wednesday to uphold a federal agency’s rule regulating so-called “ghost guns,” with the conservatives breaking ranks as Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented from a majority opinion penned by Justice Neil Gorsuch.

“Ghost guns” and “weapons”

The case, Bondi v. Vanderstok, stems from a 2022 Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) regulatory revision of the Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA) that defines firearm, firearm frame, and receiver. The GCA authorizes the ATF to regulate “any weapon … which will or is designed to or may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive.”

That revision followed a 2021 statement from Merrick Garland in which the then-attorney general said: “Criminals and others barred from owning a gun should not be able to exploit a loophole to evade background checks and to escape detection by law enforcement.”

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Pensioner, 93, who has dementia has been convicted of not insuring her car… despite her living in a care home and no longer having a driving licence

An elderly woman with dementia has been convicted of failing to insure her car – despite her living in a nursing home and no longer having a driving licence. 

The pensioner, 93, from Dudley in the West Midlands, was prosecuted by DVLA in September last year when they found out that the insurance on her Ford had expired.

In a handwritten letter the woman explained that due to her diagnosis she had not driven since November 10, 2023, but the vehicle had been ‘kept on the drive’ during this period, the Evening Standard reports.

She admitted to having ‘overlooked’ making a Statutory Off Road Notification (SORN) for the motor, but said her disease had caused her to hide mail – leaving her family unable to access her letters.

The woman also revealed she had been recovering from a stroke in a care home since November.

As prosecutor DVLA could have decided to withdraw the prosecution on the grounds it wasn’t in the public interest.

But, due to the fast-track design of the Single Justice Procedure, this was not considered.

The pensioner was convicted on a guilty plea at Taunton magistrates court last month. 

She was given a six-month conditional discharge, meaning no financial penalty, but still has a criminal conviction.

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It Didn’t Take Long for Free Speech to Prevail in Mississippi

Last week, we brought you the story of a city council in Mississippi that was so thin-skinned that it couldn’t handle a critical editorial in the local paper. The City of Clarksdale took the Clarksdale Press Register to court over an op-ed in which the editors questioned why the city lobbied the state government for a “sin tax” without notifying the citizens or local media.

“The editorial highlighted how the mayor has touted his ‘open’ and ‘transparent’ governance, yet he and the city council didn’t notify the press about its intentions despite promising to ‘give appropriate notice thereof to the media,’” I wrote last week. “The editors admitted that they support the tax, yet they questioned why the city left everyone in the dark about the lobbying efforts.”

In the court filing, the city clerk admitted that she forgot to notify the media of the city’s efforts, which turned out to be a violation of state law. Nevertheless, Judge Crystal Wise Martin issued an order demanding that the paper take the editorial off its website — without a hearing that would give the paper a chance to tell its side of the story.

“For over a hundred years, the Press Register has served the people of Clarksdale by speaking the truth and printing the facts,” said Wyatt Emmerich, president of Emmerich Newspapers, the Press Register’s publisher. “We didn’t earn the community’s trust by backing down to politicians, and we didn’t plan on starting now.”

The order set off a First Amendment firestorm, and the paper enlisted the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) to help defend itself against this unconstitutional onslaught. By the end of last week, FIRE had agreed to help the Press Register work to lift the judge’s order.

“The implications of this case go beyond one Mississippi town censoring its paper of record,” said FIRE attorney David Rubin. “If the government can get a court order silencing mere questions about its decisions, the First Amendment rights of all Americans are in jeopardy.”

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More Victims of Obama/Biden Persecutions Remain Hopeful to Receive Trump Pardons and Clemency

President Donald Trump campaigned on pardoning the January 6th political prisoners on day one, and the President kept his promise, pardoning a historic number of people in his first week. Trump has also issued a variety of pardons to other individuals, such as the 20 pro-lifers convicted by the Biden Department of Justice, who were prosecuted for praying at abortion clinics.

Trump pardoned or granted clemency to 237 people in his first term, many of them at the very end of his term in 2020. So far, just two weeks into Trump’s new term, he has pardoned over 1,500 individuals.

Several however, are still quietly lobbying the new Trump administration and its key staffers looking for pardons, hoping that their cases are not lost in the fast-paced Trump administration.

Just yesterday, Trump was lukewarm to a reporter’s question about a pardon for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Last May, Trump said he would give “very serious consideration” to pardoning Wikileaks’ Julian Assange.

But lesser-known individuals also still seeking pardons range from former Congressmen to pastors to State Senators and Bitcoin billionaires.

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“Full-On Corruption”: A Horrific Account Of Government Harassment Against Jan. 6 ‘Survivor’

The following is an account from Michael Shane Daughtery, a former SWAT officer who was aggressively pursued by the Biden DOJ for peacefully participating in the Jan 6, 2021 protest.

Daughtery’s story was conveyed by journalist Sarah Fields via X, who writes “Just when you think his story cannot get crazier, it does. His story is one of full-on corruption.“

Click into the post to read via X (and consider subscribing to Fields’ feed), or continue reading below.

My name is Michael Shane Daughtry and this is my January 6th Story.

I was a Police Officer with SWAT and Sniper Certifications, 20+ years Police experience and over a thousand hours of training. I’m also a Master Gunsmith with a Federal Firearms License and a Gunsmithing Business with over 10 years experience.

On January 6th 2021, I traveled to Washington DC with my wife Tammie to watch the Trump Rally. As the rally was completing, the President of the United States told the crowd to go to the West Lawn and “peacefully” protest, which we did. As we arrived at the West Lawn, the police officers removed the barricades and waved us onto the West Lawn. I had video of this but the FBI later raided my home and confiscated this Video. I never went into the Capital Building or damaged any property but I did later observe people causing damage to the Capital Building so I took a few pictures of these people and then returned to my motel room, we returned home the next morning.

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Soros-Backed DA Seeks to Bring Charges Against Jan 6 Prisoners Despite Trump Pardon

Radical progressive Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner is now scrambling to find ways to bring state charges against January 6 prisoners who were pardoned by President Donald Trump.

Krasner is exploring the possibility of bringing charges against Pennsylvania residents, CNN’s Marshall Cohen reported.

The Soros-backed district attorney’s plans to charge the J6 protesters would likely face significant legal hurdles, such as double jeopardy.

However, he maintains, “You can have a state prosecution for conduct that was not fully encompassed in the federal prosecution.”

Past attempts to bring state charges against individuals are usually unsuccessful due to constitutional protections against double jeopardy.

Krasner said he is now scouring over federal charging documents in order to find prosecutable conduct that was not covered in the January 6 prosecutions.

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The Deep State’s Triumph: 2024 and the Erosion of Liberty

We have become a nation adrift in a sea of government overreach, abuse and corruption.

The following is a sobering account of the challenges we faced in 2024, which were marked by the government’s never-ending power grabs and relentless assaults on our civil liberties.

2024 saw a continued rise in government overreach and abuse of power. The militarization of police forces continued unabated, with local departments increasingly resembling extensions of the military. Schools, meant to be places of learning and growth, became more prison-like with the implementation of “safety” measures that criminalize minor infractions and create an environment of fear. The right to private property was further eroded, with the government increasingly empowered to seize assets under various pretexts. The plight of the homeless worsened, with cities criminalizing homelessness and implementing policies designed to make their lives even more difficult. Military veterans, once hailed as heroes, were increasingly treated with suspicion and subjected to surveillance.

On almost every front this year, the government overreached and abused its powers.

With every new law enacted by federal and state legislatures, every new ruling handed down by government courts, and every new military weapon, invasive tactic and egregious protocol employed by government agents, we were reminded that in the eyes of the government and its corporate accomplices, “we the people” possess no rights except for that which the Deep State grants on an as-needed basis.

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From Woke to Law: Realigning the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to Correct Decades of Judicial Overreach

The Justice Department under the next Trump administration has a duty to remove protected classes for groups that have exploited civil rights laws to garner extra privileges and rights, over and above the rights of American citizens. Of note include illegal aliens and LGBT persons. Neither of these groups should have ever enjoyed the privileges of heightened scrutiny analysis within the purview of Title VII or Civil Rights law generally. These laws were never intended for such persons, however, over years they have been misapplied and misinterpreted, resulting in very real harms to society. In fact, heightened scrutiny analysis has no basis whatsoever in the text of the Constitution itself and can be rightly deemed anathema with the letter and spirit of the Constitution, though that is a separate topic worthy of its own discussion.

For decades, America’s civil rights jurisprudence has clouded and distorted the Constitutions’ original meaning and purpose. Activist judges, under the pretext of “judicial review,” have perverted the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment and other laws and constitutional provisions in service to a liberal ideology, now recognizably termed as “woke.” New standards of review were manifested into existence, such as “intermediate scrutiny,” which is used to adjudicate cases of alleged sex or gender-based discrimination. None of these developments have a relationship, directly or indirectly, to the text or original intent of the Constitution itself.

Instead, they have been weaponized in many cases against businesses, schools, and legacy American citizens, creating hostile work environments that actively prioritize non-Americans while at the same time discriminating against men and native-born people in many cases. The result has been to establish and legitimize a new form of institutionalized racism, directed primarily at whites – who themselves increasingly are a numerical minority in many states. All of this has been made in service to an ideology born out of the civil rights movement that is oriented around a fundamentally Marxist view of history. This ideology perceives all historically disenfranchised and “wronged” minorities as needing legal recourse, in the form of extra-constitutional remedies that ultimately seek to establish absolute equality – now commonly described as “equity” – in real world outcomes.

This is in sharp contrast with the far more limited goal of legal equality enumerated under the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Whereas the former is ordered towards achieving equal outcomes, the latter establishes a baseline of generally applicable standards like fairness and justice for all parties regardless of background that courts must adhere to.

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Bombshell US House investigative report confirms that almost everything the alternative media said about COVID origins, lockdowns, masks, vaccines and government overreach was TRUE

So four years after the COVID pandemic nightmare was unleashed upon America by a cabal of junk science tyrants and power-hungry vax-o-crats, the US House has just released a damning, detailed investigative report that reveals the independent media was right all along.

COVID was engineered in a lab.

Mask demands and vaccine mandates were based on junk science.

Lockdowns were completely made up by self-appointed scientism authoritarians.

The government covered up the truth and pushed disinformation propaganda on purpose.

Dr. Fauci and others were guilty as hell.

So all the censorship by Big Tech turns out to be truly malicious and even harmful to the public. And the entire corporate media was nothing but an organized cabal of liars and profiteers… brought to you by Pfizer.

This investigative report reveals that COVID was a crime scene, and the government conspired with Big Tech and mainstream media to commit numerous crimes of cognitive assault (psyops), medial violence (vaccines) and hospital homicide against the American people.

So when do the mass arrests begin? (Don’t hold your breath.)

Unfortunately, no one can bring back the estimated 1.2 million Americans who were killed by the jabs because they “believed the science.”

Fortunately for you and I, we never believed the plandemic hype in the first place, and we most certainly didn’t follow the herd into getting jabbed, masked and locked down.

It turns out that was a tremendously valuable choice of actions on our part.

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