Tag: land of the free

The Greenwich Noise Ordinance Hypocrisy

Effective May 24 at 6:00pm, the use of gas-powered leaf blowers, with a few exceptions, became prohibited on residential properties until September 30. This restriction specifically targets gas-powered leaf blowers. Beginning in 2025, individuals found in violation may face fines of $100 for a first offense and $249 for subsequent offenses.

The new ordinance passed at the Representative Town Meeting (RTM), the Town’s legislative body, in January.

If you drive around Greenwich, chances are you have observed first-hand that landscapers and even some residents are continuing to use their gas-powered leaf blowers, whether in defiance of the ordinance or perhaps they are completely unaware of what the RTM has mandated.

To be clear this is not intended to “rat out” or “snitch” on neighbors in the hopes they draw fines.

However, it is important to point out a bit of the hypocrisy when it comes to the equal application of the ordinance, also known as the “rules for thee but not for me” mentality.

On this particular morning, a Greenwich resident who happened to be driving up Glenville Street toward King Street snapped a few photos of landscapers using at least two gas-powered back pack leaf blowers and a larger leaf blower toward the rear of the property. The landscaping truck had New York license plates.

Based on the photos, the address was identified and an online search of the property was performed.

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Amish Farmer Threatened for Not Giving Up Traditional Farming

Armed federal agents were used to threaten a traditional Amish farmer just 150 miles outside Washington, D.C., who does not use pesticides, fertilizer, or gas to run his farm.

In the last 100 years, there have been significant changes in the way farming is carried out. Most significant was the development of genetically modified organisms and chemical pesticides. In 1982, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)[3] approved the first GMO product, which was developed to treat diabetes: human insulin. The first GMO foods available in the United States were alfalfa and sugar beets in 2005.

By 2015, the FDA had approved an application for genetically engineered salmon. Further bioengineered foods and plants include apples, pink pineapples, and, in 2020, the GalSafe pig, which is a genetically modified pig that eliminates detectable amounts of alpha-gal,[4] which is a sugar on the surface of pig cells that triggers a rare allergy.

As some applauded these scientific advancements, others began asking hard questions about how modifying genetic information and the application of large amounts of pesticides and herbicides will impact animal and human health. Miller[5] chose to use farming practices that have successfully provided healthy food for thousands of years.[6]

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Zoning Regulations Empower Control Freaks—and Bigots

Imagine you’re a member of a religious minority that’s on the receiving end of a lot of hate, and the local zoning board is giving you a hard time over plans to expand your house of worship. Is it regulators being their nitpicky selves? Are the neighbors weaponizing rules to squeeze out the cars and foot traffic that accompany any successful endeavor? Or could it be hostility directed at your faith? Zoning has been used and abused in all these ways, which underlines the need for reform.

Bigotry Through Red Tape

“A proposal to dramatically expand Harvard Chabad’s Banks Street headquarters failed to win approval from the Cambridge Board of Zoning Appeals during a contentious Thursday public hearing,” The Harvard Crimson reported last week. “The rejection leaves the Jewish student organization to revise and clarify the proposal before a follow-up hearing in June.”

Harvard Chabad’s Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi told me that opposition to the group’s expansion has featured many “inappropriate comments” including suggestions that the group is “too visibly Jewish.” Other criticism, he says, is more “classic NIMBY,” though it sometimes touches on the nature of Chabad in the former of objections to the presence of security often required by Jewish organizations after October 7.

Zarchi and company aren’t alone. Just last month, the U.S. Department of Justice warned officials in Hawaii about their efforts to block operation of a Chabad house. The plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Hawaii County “have established a likelihood of success on the merits” of their claims of bias, according to Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general of the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

Part of the problem in Cambridge could be general opposition to houses of worship, which draw crowds but don’t generate much money for revenue-hungry governments.

“Many land-use disputes aren’t about explicit bigotry,” Emma Green wrote in 2017 for The Atlantic. “They arise from concerns about noise, lost property taxes, and Sunday-morning traffic jams. The effect is largely the same, and can be just as devastating as outright hatred: A religious community is dragged into a lengthy, and costly, dispute with a city or town.”

Use of zoning laws to block churches, synagogues, and mosques has been such a problem that it inspired the passage of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act in 2000. “Zoning codes and landmarking laws may illegally exclude religious assemblies in places where they permit theaters, meeting halls, and other places where large groups of people assemble for secular purposes,” notes the Department of Justice in a commentary on the law. That the effort wasn’t fully successful is apparent from the fact that the Justice Department is still cautioning jurisdictions over land use regulations that, as in Hawaii, explicitly discriminate against religious groups.

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A Nanny State Idiocracy: A Tale of Too Many Laws and Too Little Freedom

We are caught in a vicious cycle of too many laws, too many cops, and too little freedom.

It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens), or a Nanny State Idiocracy.

Whatever the label, this overbearing despotism is what happens when government representatives (those elected and appointed to work for us) adopt the authoritarian notion that the government knows best and therefore must control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives.

The government’s bureaucratic attempts at muscle-flexing by way of overregulation and overcriminalization have reached such outrageous limits that federal and state governments now require on penalty of a fine that individuals apply for permission before they can grow exotic orchids, host elaborate dinner parties, gather friends in one’s home for Bible studies, give coffee to the homeless, let their kids manage a lemonade stand, keep chickens as pets, or braid someone’s hair, as ludicrous as that may seem.

As the Regulatory Transparency Project explains, “There are over 70 federal regulatory agencies, employing hundreds of thousands of people to write and implement regulations. Every year, they issue about 3,500 new rules, and the regulatory code now is over 168,000 pages long.”

In his CrimeADay Twitter feed, Mike Chase highlights some of the more arcane and inane laws that render us all guilty of violating some law or other.

As Chase notes, it’s against the law to try to make an unreasonable noise while a horse is passing by in a national park; to leave Michigan with a turkey that was hunted with a drone; to refill a liquor bottle with different liquor than it had in it when it was originally filled; to offer to buy swan feathers so you can make a woman’s hat with them; to enter a design in the Federal Duck Stamp contest if waterfowl are not the dominant feature of the design; to transport a cougar without a cougar license; to sell spray deodorant without telling people to avoid spraying it in their eyes; and to transport “meat loaf” unless it’s in loaf form.

In such a society, we are all petty criminals.

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Cops called on Van Nuys ‘flower grandma’ on Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day weekend is huge for flower vendors, including one 83-year-old woman who can usually be seen on the corner of Sherman Way and Sepulveda Boulevard in Van Nuys.

This weekend, though, LAPD officers approached the woman known to locals as “the flower grandma,” saying they’d gotten a call complaining she did not have a permit. Other vendors in the area, including the owner of the popular Pupusa Express truck usually parked in the same corner, were upset.

“I know [the] police have to do what they have to do,” said Nelson Gonzalez, “but, really?” He reacted by taking his phone and going live on social media to show what was happening. In the video, officers are seen telling him to step back, eventually taking his phone and handcuffing him.

Seeing that scene live on social media, people began to show up at the corner. One of them, Nelson Martin Sandoval, began going live on TikTok, saying he was there to buy flowers. It wasn’t long before dozens of people showed up and bought every single flower from the woman, even saying they’d pay off her citation if she got one.

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Pregnant women in Missouri can’t get divorced. Critics say it fuels domestic violence

The turning point for Destonee was a car ride.

She describes a scene of emotional abuse: Pregnant with her third child, her husband yelled at her while her older two kids listened in the car. “He would call me awful things in front of them,” she says. “And soon my son would call me those names too.”

She made up her mind to leave him, but when she went to a lawyer to file for divorce, she was told to come back when she was no longer pregnant.

Destonee requested she be identified by only her first name. She says she still lives with abusive threats from her ex-husband. She couldn’t end her marriage because Missouri law requires women seeking divorce to disclose whether they’re pregnant — and state judges won’t finalize divorces during a pregnancy. Established in the 1970s, the rule was intended to make sure men were financially accountable for the children they fathered.

Advocates in Missouri are now pushing to change this law, arguing that it’s being weaponized against victims of domestic violence and contributes to the contraction of women’s reproductive freedoms in a post-Roe v. Wade landscape.

“In Missouri, it feels as though they have really closed down every door in terms of reproductive autonomy,” says Kristen Marinaccio, an attorney and expert in divorce law who has examined these kinds of laws in Missouri and other states. She says beyond the legal and financial ties of marriage, there is powerful emotional weight to legally terminating a marriage. “You might just think, well, it’s a piece of paper,” she says, “but that piece of paper that tells you you’re no longer in this horrible marriage is really freeing for a lot of clients.”

After hearing stories about survivors unable to leave marriages, state Rep. Ashley Aune introduced House Bill 2402. It would allow pregnant women to finalize divorce in Missouri.

Aune says that the law has gone unexamined for too long and that policymakers need to give women the right to leave a dangerous or even life-threatening situation. “How can you look that person in the eye and say, ‘No, I think you should stay with that person,'” says Aune, a Democrat. “That’s wild to me.”

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Florida Man’s Tall Grass Saga Comes to an End

Retiree Jim Ficken can finally breathe easy. After six years, two lawsuits, and harrying legal wrangling over a $30,000 fine for tall grass in Dunedin, Florida, a new settlement has brought him closure.

The agreement, announced on April 22, ends the city’s pursuit to recover $10,000 in attorney fees that Dunedin officials tried to characterize as “administrative expenses” after reducing Ficken’s original fine by 80 percent. The reduction was only possible because of reforms the city instituted soon after Ficken filed his first lawsuit.

Initially, the city attempted to tack on $25,000 for out-of-pocket legal expenses before realizing it had miscalculated that figure. As a result of this settlement, Ficken will not have to cough up any amount for bogus fees—an important consolation following setbacks in his first lawsuit.

Ficken attempted to reason with code enforcers before going to court—explaining that his lawn had grown long while he was settling his late mother’s estate in South Carolina and that the landscaper he had hired to mow his grass while he was gone had died unexpectedly. He asked for leniency, but the city refused to budge and insisted on full payment: $500 per day for nearly two months, plus interest. They even put liens on Ficken’s home and authorized city attorneys to initiate proceedings to seize it.

In response, Ficken filed a federal lawsuit with representation from the Institute for Justice, asserting that the excessive fines and lack of due process violated his Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment rights. He lost in district court in 2021 and again in 2022 at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals—but he won in other ways. His case ignited a media frenzy and public calls for reform, prompting Dunedin to overhaul its code enforcement regime to prevent ruinous fines for trivial offenses.

After his legal battles, Ficken managed to get the fines reduced enough to prevent foreclosure. He thought he was safe. But then the city hit him with the bill for attorney fees, a retroactive attempt to penalize him for seeking his day in court. Left with no choice, he sued again in 2023.

The city could have avoided both lawsuits merely by treating Ficken like a neighbor instead of a cash machine.

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Ohio Pastor Criminally Charged for Letting People Sleep In Church. Again.

An Ohio pastor is once again being brought up on criminal charges for sheltering people in his church.

On Friday, the city of Bryan, Ohio refiled charges against Chris Avell, the pastor of Dad’s Place, for fire and zoning code violations related to his operation of a 24-hour “Rest and Refresh” ministry at the church’s downtown building.

The city argues the church’s 24-hour ministry is in fact just a residential homeless shelter, which is not allowed at the commercially zoned property. The fire code violations make it not only unauthorized but also unsafe. Each violation, if not corrected, is punishable by a $1,000 daily fine.

“We appreciate that Dad’s Place has tried to help people in need,” said Bryan Mayor Carrie Schlade in a statement. “But putting these people’s lives at risk in the case of a fire or other dangers is not helping them.”

“Here we are with the pastor facing new criminal charges for caring for people inside his church,” First Liberty Institute attorney Jeremy Dys, who is representing Dad’s Place, told Reason in an interview on Friday.

Reason covered Avell’s case back in January when he was first charged with 18 criminal counts for similar zoning and fire code violations.

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Girl Scout, 13, is fined $400 for selling cookies on her grandparents’ driveway for three very bizarre reasons

A Wyoming Girl Scout and her mother were hit with $400 in fines for selling cookies from a stand in her grandparents driveway.

Erica Fairbanks McCarroll and her 13-year-old daughter Emma were selling cookies after school on Erica’s parents property along Main Street in Pinedale when they were approached by a code enforcement officer on March 13.

Fairbanks McCarroll told DailyMail.com the woman, who was driving the town’s animal control vehicle and did not identify herself as code enforcement, told them they could not block the sidewalk.

The mother and daughter pulled back their stand and continued to sell cookies for two more days before the woman showed up again and handed them citations.

‘We sold for about 1 hour and 30 minutes when she showed up and handed me 3 parking tickets totaling $400,’ Fairbanks McCarroll said on Facebook.

‘I responded that I had complied with what she had asked and had moved off the sidewalk. She said the tickets aren’t just for being on the sidewalk and that this is for your daughter’s safety.’

Fairbanks McCarroll was given a $100 fine for parking on the sidewalk, a $150 fine for unlawful obstruction and another $150 fine for a municipal code that said there needs to be at least five feet of unobstructed passage on the sidewalk.

‘Sometimes I just think that government can be unreasonable. It wasn’t reasonable to be fined $400 for selling cookies in front on my grandparent’s property,’ Emma told Cowboy State Daily, who photographed the mother daughter duo.

Emma, who has been a Girl Scout since she was six years old, was aiming to sell 1,200 boxes of cookies so she could receive a $350 credit for summer camp.

Fairbanks McCarroll said, ‘She did not identify herself as Code Enforcement, she did not say what I was doing was illegal, she didn’t say she would or even could write me a ticket, she didn’t even say I couldn’t sell there anymore. All she said really was you shouldn’t block the sidewalk.’

When the code enforcement officer told her the Fairbanks probably would not like her blocking their property, Fairbanks McCarroll said: ‘I responded with ‘the Fairbanks are my parents and they don’t care.’ She then said ‘okay well I just recommend you don’t block the sidewalk’ and left.’

The town of Pinedale released a statement insisting the officer was acting under official capacity when she approached Fairbanks McCarroll and warned her several times to move before issuing the citations.

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Teacher sues after he’s convicted of putting ‘For Sale’ sign in truck window

A retired Pennsylvania teacher is suing his local government after he was convicted of a criminal charge for putting a “For Sale” sign in his truck window.

Will Cramer teamed up with the Institute for Justice last week to take legal action against the borough of Nazareth over its ordinance, claiming that it’s a violation of his First Amendment rights, according to the nonprofit law firm.

Cramer had put the sign in his 1987 Chevy Deluxe last October and received a ticket stating that parking a vehicle in public “for the purposes” of selling it was illegal.

“It made no sense to me that I could park my truck on the street legally, but as soon as I put a ‘For Sale’ sign in the window, it became illegal,” said Cramer, who was found guilty by a judge after trying to fight his ticket.

“This lawsuit is bigger than me, it’s about standing up for the free speech rights of everybody in Nazareth.” 

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