The city of West Allis has agreed to pay $30,000 to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit prompted by one of the first tests of Wisconsin residents’ right to openly carry guns.
Brad Krause was planting a tree in his backyard in August 2008 — while wearing a holstered handgun — when police arrived, drew their weapons and arrested him.
In February 2009, a municipal judge found Krause not guilty of disorderly conduct, and in April of that year state Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen issued a memo advising law enforcement agencies that the mere fact of wearing a gun, by itself, would not support a charge of disorderly conduct.
“This is a clear victory for Mr. Krause and Wisconsin residents who wish to assert their rights under the state and federal Constitution to bear arms lawfully,” said his attorney, John Schiro.
In reaching the settlement, the city did not acknowledge any wrongdoing.
Several other gun rights advocates arrested for openly wearing their weapons in public, assisted by Wisconsin Carry Inc. and a Georgia attorney who specialized in such cases, have won similar lawsuits against other Wisconsin municipalities. Settlements ranged from $6,500 or $7,500 to $10,000.
But after his acquittal, and even after the Van Hollen memo, Krause contends, he was warned by West Allis police that if he wore a gun in the city he would be arrested again.
In fact, when TV reporters were interviewing Krause in West Allis about the Van Hollen memo on April 21, 2009, two squad cars pulled up with their emergency lights on, and officers began to question Krause, according to his lawsuit.
“During the questioning, one officer stated that had television camera not been filming, Plaintiff would have been taken to the ground at gunpoint, disarmed, and possibly arrested,” the suit reads.
Now keep this in mind, the officers knew who this citizen was, knew he was not a threat, and yet they put him at gunpoint anyways, meaning that they were looking for an excuse to pull the trigger and take his life.
Self defense shootings in Detroit are up 79% as the police has been cut from 5,000 to 3,000 – LINK.
Anyone who has ever used a Catholic hospital or school and enjoyed those services should not vote for another Democrat. The Democratic Party from Obama on down has declared war on these services.
By the way, we conservatives warned that this could happen under ObamaCare as it was phased in. The elite media and the Democrats said we were crazy liars. Well, now here we are.
Of course here is the rub. Mitt Romney after promising it wouldn’t happen, ended up having RomneyCare mandate that Catholic Hospitals had to give day after abortion pills under some circumstances.
Oh and you Catholics who dare to act surprised by this; your church leadership has been pushing statism (far left Democrats) for decades. Now you have it. Learn from this and do the country a favor and make it a lesson you remember.
We do not post about religion and God as much as we should, so to help remedy that we present to you Ann Barnhardt’s mailbag. No matter what you may think of her politics Ann gives a great testimony. You will love it 🙂
POSTED BY ANN BARNHARDT
1.
Dear Ann,
Could you please stop posting the Lord’s Prayer every day? It significantly reduces the number of visible posts.
Signed,
Reader
Dear Reader,
Congratulations! You win this month’s “Way to Completely Miss The Point” award! And given the nature of the award, here is the requisite excruciatingly direct answer to your question: Uh, no. I cannot stop posting the Lord’s Prayer every day. Mmm-kay? Yeah. Thanks.
Repetitively,
Ann
2.
Dear Ann,
I thought you hated all secular music. You’re always complaining about “rockband church”, and then you post Elvis and try to make some connection to God. You need to make up your mind.
Signed,
I Don’t Understand Context
——————————————–
Dear I Don’t Understand Context,
Let’s say your best friend has been arrested, tried in a kangaroo court and sentenced to execution for a crime that YOU committed. Before the actual execution, your best friend is tortured, whipped until skinned, and then led through the streets being mocked, pelted and spit upon by huge crowds. He finally gets to the place of execution and is stripped naked and then NAILED hand and foot to two beams to hang and slowly asphyxiate. Amazingly, your best friend does all of this willingly, and is even CONSOLED by the fact that you are present at his execution. What is the proper, moral and dignified way for you to behave while you hold vigil at the place of execution while your best friend dies in agony on your behalf?
A.) “Day-um. This is SO FLIPPING BOOOORING. This is SOOO STUPID. I can think about my friend at home just the same as here. AND I can do chores or watch the football game at the same time! I’m out. Peace, yo.”
B.) “I’ll hang around, but there better be a kick-ass rock band, a PowerPoint show and a stand-up comedy routine or else I AM OUT. If I’m not seriously entertained, then forget it. Oh, and if ANYONE brings up the fact that my friend is dying on my behalf for crimes that I COMMITTED and tries to lay some sort of guilt trip on me, I’m just going to leave. Screw that.”
C.) “I’ll go, but they had better let me talk and sing and be an on-site usher or else I AM OUT. I’m not going to go and just be anonymous and ignored, because if you think about it, this really is ALL ABOUT ME.”
D.) On knees, SILENT, head covered, SILENT, mortified, SILENT, begging in prayer for your Best Friend to forgive you, and telling Him how much you love Him and His Sacrifice of Himself for you. Oh, and SILENT.
The correct answer is . . . D.
When you are at the foot of the Cross at Mass (because that is what the Mass is – the bending of time in order to touch today to Calvary 1979 years ago), you SHUT YOUR MOUTH, GET ON YOUR KNEES and PRAY, just exactly as The Virgin Mary, St. Mary Magdalene and St. John did. They didn’t talk. They didn’t sing super-fun songs in order to entertain themselves or the others there present and show off their musical abilities. They didn’t laugh, or relax or have fun. They got on their knees, beheld the Crucified Christ, and wept and PRAYED. Christ Crucified is NOT ENTERTAINING. Christ Crucified is not “fun”. You don’t play secular music, or music that is trying to sound secular and thus be “entertaining”, AT CALVARY. To do so is, frankly, narcissistic to the point of being utterly deranged.
It is called CONTEXT. If you don’t have it, get it.
In keeping with the situation,
Ann
MAILBAG #3 – A SIMPLE QUESTION
3.
Dear Ann,
Could you please explain the Trinity?
Signed,
Unreasonably High Expectations
————————————
Dear Unreasonably High Expectations,
In a word, no. No one can. It is a mystery. And I find this consoling. Frankly, the fact that the Church says straight-out that there are certain things which are simply unable to be comprehended by human beings is a testament to the legitimacy of the Church as a teaching authority. Never trust any human being or group of human beings who claim to “know everything”. Anyone who claims to know everything is, by definition, a liar right out of the chute, because only God knows everything.
There are several huge mysteries of faith: the Trinity (one God in Three Divine Persons), the Incarnation (Jesus Christ being both fully God and fully human) and the Eucharist (bread and wine being transubstantiated into the physical Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ).
How can God be One in Being, but Father, Son and Holy Ghost? I dunno. It’s a mystery.
How can Jesus be both fully God and fully Man? I dunno. It’s a mystery.
How can something that was bread a few minutes ago, and still looks like bread, and still smells and tastes like bread actually be God? And how did that change occur? I dunno. It’s a mystery.
Regarding the Trinity, here is what we do know. The entire point and revelation of God in the Old Testament is the reality that there is not a “pantheon” of many gods, but that there is, in fact, only ONE God. If you had to pin down what the point of the Old Testament is – that’s it in a very, very simple nutshell. GOD IS ONE.
The Torah, or the first five books of the Old Testament, were written by Moses. The entire point of Moses’ life was to bear witness to the fact that there is only ONE GOD. There was absolutely no ambiguity about this. None. But, if we look at literally the FIRST CHAPTER of the book of Genesis, we see something amazing. Verse 26:
“And He said: Let Us make man to Our image and likeness: and let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth.”
Moses spent most of his adult life in interface with and witnessing for The ONE TRUE GOD. And yet he can’t get more than a couple hundred words into his written record and he is using PLURAL PRONOUNS – “Us” and “Our” – when quoting the ONE TRUE GOD.
SURELY Moses, of all people, wouldn’t make the sloppy mistake of using plural pronouns. SURELY someone around Moses, and for the centuries upon centuries afterward, would say, “Hey! You’ve got plural pronouns here! Shouldn’t we fix that? Afterall, it completely undercuts the whole “GOD IS ONE” thing we are trying to communicate here.”
Nope. Not only did Moses write it that way, but it STAYED that way for all of these centuries.
About the most that can be said about the Triune Godhead is this: God is RELATIONAL to Himself. God is Love – and what is love? Love is the complete giving of one’s self, and love is the act of fully RECEIVING and then returning love. Soooo . . . if God were NOT relational to Himself, how could He have existed as existential love before the creation of the universe? Who was He loving? Was He sitting around pondering Himself? How does inward-turned naval gazing constitute a GIFT of self? What love was He receiving? How could God receive love if He was the only thing that existed?
Because God is, in Himself, able to relate to Himself. Christ revealed to us that God is Three Divine Persons, all distinct but yet completely One in Being. Got your head around that? No, of course not. We can’t FULLY grasp that existential reality any more than we can grasp and explicitly describe what a fifth dimension would look like. But Christ did give us names for the Three Persons in Matthew 28:19 so that we could relate a little bit to the Trinity. Those names are: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The words “Father and Son” are not a perfect analogue because the Father did not exist before the Son, as in the human case. The Three Divine Persons of the Trinity are co-eternal. No one can explain that. No one can explain eternity. All we can do is name it, and then get on with living. Also, there is the issue of gender, which is another post, but suffice it to say that God contains “femaleness” and women are not a foreign mystery to Him.
So, God the Father gives Himself fully to God the Son. God the Son then fully receives that love, and then returns it to God the Father fully. This infinite back-and-forth of love is so existentially perfect that it yields a Third, which Jesus taught us to call “The Holy Ghost”. The big human clue-in to all of this is human procreation. A man loves his wife and gives himself to her fully and completely. The wife loves her husband and thus receives his gift of himself in the form of his DNA and offers her own DNA in return. The two gifts of self are so perfect and complete that they actually become a third person.
Thus, the Triune Godhead is the foundational reality, and human procreation is the DERIVATIVE, which points back to the underlying reality of the Trinity. And yes, eventually every derivative expires, and upon expiry there is a delivery and the books get settled and squared. That would be “death” and “judgment”. As a (former) futures broker, I like that part. 🙂
Here is a classic song that touches on the crux of what real, Trinitarian love is: “Nature Boy”, best performed by Nat King Cole.
Real GDP increased 1.7 percent in 2011 (that is, from the 2010 annual level to the 2011 annual level), compared with an increase of 3.0 percent in 2010.
The increase in real GDP in 2011 primarily reflected positive contributions from personal consumption expenditures (PCE), exports, and nonresidential fixed investment that were partly offset by negative contributions from state and local government spending, private inventory investment, and federal government spending. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased.
Direct payments. The amount of money the federal government hands out in direct payments to individuals steadily increased over the past four decades, but shot up under Obama, climbing by almost $600 billion — a 32% increase — in his first three years. And Obama’s last budget called for these payments to climb another $500 billion by 2016, at which point they would account for fully two-thirds of all federal spending.
People getting benefits. According to the Census Bureau 49% now live in homes where at least one person gets a federal benefit — Social Security, workers comp, unemployment, subsidized housing, and the like. That’s up from 44% the year before Obama took office, and way up from 1983, when fewer than a third were government beneficiaries.
Food stamps. This year, more than 46 million (15% of all Americans) will get food stamps. That’s 45% higher than when Obama took office, and twice as high as the average for the previous 40 years. This surge was driven in part by the recession, but also because Obama boosted the benefit amount as part of his stimulus plan.
Disability. The number of people on Social Security disability has steadily climbed since the 1970s, thanks mainly to easier eligibility rules. But their numbers jumped 10% in Obama’s first two years in office, according to the Social Security Administration. That sharp rise was due largely to meager job prospects since the recession ended in 2009. When employment opportunities are scarce, experts note, many who could otherwise work sign up for disability benefits instead.
Most healthcare plans will be required to cover birth control without charging co-pays or deductibles starting Aug. 1, the Obama administration announced Friday.
The final regulation retains the approach federal health officials proposed last summer, despite the deluge of complaints from religious groups and congressional Republicans that has poured in since then. Churches, synagogues and other houses of worship are exempt from the requirement, but religious-affiliated hospitals and universities only get a one-year delay and must comply by Aug. 1, 2013.
“This decision was made after very careful consideration, including the important concerns some have raised about religious liberty,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement. “I believe this proposal strikes the appropriate balance between respecting religious freedom and increasing access to important preventive services.”
Congressional Republicans slammed the decision as an assault on religious freedom.
“This ruling forces religious organizations to violate the fundamental tenets of their faith, or stop offering health insurance coverage to their employees,” said the Republican Policy Committee. “Time will tell whether those institutions choose the former or the latter course — but neither option should be necessary, if the administration had not taken such an unbending approach to appease its liberal base.”
Hey elite media….what happened to “it’s just sex” and “sex doesn’t matter”?
ABC is accusing Newt of having wanted an open marriage…. just like Bill and Hillary Clinton. Everyone knows they have an open marriage so where was the firestorm? Where was it when Hillary ran in 2008? They didn’t even live together for how many years?
Of course this is coming from an elite media who knew all about how John Edwards was cheating on his cancer stricken wife and said nothing until the National Enquirer caught Edwards red-handed.
How many years ago did Newt and Marianne get divorced? If memory serves it is over 12 years. So why is this big news and Bill and Hillary are held up as virtuous by the elite media?
Well besides the fact that what Marianne said is likely not true, my point is the hypocrisy. The elite media and the left will lie or do anything to trash us with one standard, and yet proclaim that the same standard is a virtue if the person has a D by their name.
Paula Jones got some media play because her case went to the Supreme Court and Gennifer Flowers got some play when she posed nude. The elite media tried to cover up Monica Lewinsky but Matt Drudge found out. The Lewinsky affair would have come out anyway as Paula Jones’ lawyers had found out about her through the discovery process.
[Editor’s Note – we would rather make no reference to Miss Lewinsky, but in this case we had to. Good editorial judgment is important and the facts indicate that Miss Lewinsky was the victim of a very lopsided power relationship. She should be allowed to live this down and enjoy her life in peace. We wish her well.]
There were also reported affairs with actresses Sharon Stone, Barbara Streisand, Gina Gershon. There are also numerous other affairs and sexual assaults, such as Kathleen Willey (who got one interview at CBS) and others that were just not mentioned such as Dolly Kyle Browning, Elizabeth Ward Gracen and the rape of Juanita Broaddrick (who got one interview with NBC’s Lisa Myers and that was it).
Where was the media frenzy and the planning to release the interview at a key electoral time? What happened to “it’s just sex” and “sex doesn’t matter” elite media??
In August 2011, a Marietta, Ga. 7th grade teacher gave a three-page homework lesson from InspirEd Educators Inc. of Roswell, Ga. to students to help them discuss pros and cons of school uniforms. “Women in the West do not have the protection of the Sharia as we do,” declared a letter from a Saudi wife named Ahlima. “If our marriage has problems, my husband can take another wife rather than divorce me, and I would still be cared for.” She’s glad that Saudi women “have the Sharia.” When parents objected to the assignment’s pro-Islam stance, the school district changed the curriculum.
In 2010, Act for America compiled research from former assistant education secretary Diane Ravitch, American Textbook Council and Textbook League on how 38 public school texts handled Islam; last month, Christian Action Network launched a national campaign warning of bias.
More….
While probably unaware of their carefully staged genesis, parents for years have vocally opposed such Islamic instructions in public schools and texts as:
In Sept. 2010, a Wellesley, Ma. school “field trip” to a Saudi-funded Roxbury mosque taught kids how to pray like Muslims.
In early 2010, Minnesota’s ACLU sued St. Paul’s public k-8 Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy for breaching the ban against government religious advocacy.
Massachusetts schools adopted a Notebook by Abiquiu, N.M.’s Saudi-funded AWIRG. Pushed by Harvard’s Middle Eastern Studies Center, it claims Muslim explorers discovered the New World and Native Americans had Muslim names. (In 2005, the center had received $20 million from Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talaal, who later boasted he could control global TV news.)
In Sept. 2010, the Texas Board of Education endured heavy criticism after issuing a textbook resolution asking publishers to fix the “pro-Islamic/anti-Christian half-truths, selective disinformation, and false stereotypes” that riddled textbooks. The board included four pages of notes to document “pejoratives” targeting Christians and “superlatives,” Muslims—e.g. brutal conquests of Christian lands were called “migrations” of “empire builders.” Books listed Crusaders’ massacres, but not the Muslim Tamerlane’s 1389 Delhi murder of 100,000 prisoners or his 1401 Baghdad massacre of 90,000 Muslims.
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Former Polish president and anti-communist leader Lech Walesa unveiled a statue of Ronald Reagan on an elegant Warsaw street on Monday, honoring the late U.S. president for inspiring Poland’s toppling of communism.
Though Reagan’s legacy is mixed in the U.S., across much of central and eastern Europe he is considered the greatest American leader in recent history for challenging the Soviet Union.
The moniker he gave it — the “evil empire” — resonated with Poles, who suffered greatly under Moscow-imposed rule.
“I wonder whether today’s Poland, Europe and world could look the same without president Reagan,” Walesa said. “As a participant in those events, I must say that it’s inconceivable.”
The 3.5-meter (11.5-foot) bronze statue depicts a smiling Reagan in a historic moment — as he stood at a podium at Berlin’s Brandenburg gate in 1987 and said the famous words, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
It sits across from the U.S. Embassy on Aleje Ujazdowskie, a street lined with embassies and manicured parks in the heart of the capital.
“Reagan gave us hope,” said Janusz Dorosiewicz, the president of the board of the Ronald Reagan Foundation in Poland. He conceived of the monument and struggled for six years with bureaucracy to secure the prized location for the statue.
Several statues of Reagan have gone up this year, the centennial of Reagan’s birth. Most notably, monuments to him have been erected in London and in Budapest, Hungary, and yet another is to be unveiled later this week in the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
Remember this story? Well it appears justice has been done and the winners are parents, teachers and the kids who were exposed to this radicalized school administrator.
This wen site, but especially my old college blog (2) has countless stories of administrators gone wild. Civil rights groups such as FIRE and ADF list thousands of such cases on their web sites. The problem of radicalized overzealous school administrators (without a residue of good judgment and common sense) is nearly epidemic.
GASTONIA, N.C. (CBS Charlotte/AP) — The principal of a Gaston County school where a 9-year-old boy was suspended for sexual harassment submitted his resignation Tuesday, saying he wasn’t given a chance to apologize.
Jerry Bostic told The Gaston Gazette he could understand being written up for the suspension and having someone follow up during the school year, but he added that he was disappointed because this is how his 44 years in education ended.
“To me it’s a really sad final note to a career that I have found very satisfying and enjoy working with kids,” Bostic said. “I really don’t believe I was treated fairly.”
School officials offered an apology to Emanyea Lockett and his mother, Chiquita Lockett, after the boy was accused of calling a teacher “cute.” A statement from the system said it was determined that the fourth grader at Brookside Elementary School didn’t engage in sexual harassment. The school system said the suspension won’t count against the student, and there will be additional instructional assistance provided to the student for the classroom time missed.
“This is something that everyone needed to see, just to see what’s happening within our school systems,” Lockett told WSOC-TV.
Gaston County Schools Superintendent Reeves McGlohon would only say that Bostic submitted his resignation. McGlohon had no further comment.
“He (McGlohon) told me he had made the decision he was going to terminate me or drop me into an assistant principal position,” Bostic said. “I admit I made some errors in what I did, but to fire me or to demote me with 44 years in it, it just doesn’t make sense. To me he was a very heartless man, and he did it because of politics.”
In 44 years of experience he still had such a complete lack of judgment, common sense, and restraint to not see what is perfectly obvious to anyone who is not radicalized by Marxist radical feminism. The real problem is that it took 44 years for this pinhead to get escorted to the door.
According to the FBI, over 1.5 million background checks on customers were requested by gun dealers to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System in December. Nearly 500,000 of those were in the six days before Christmas.
It was the highest number ever in a single month, surpassing the previous record set in November.
On Dec 23 alone there were 102,222 background checks, making it the second busiest single day for buying guns in history.
The actual number of guns bought may have been even higher if individual customers took home more than one each.
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) — Columbia University will offer a new course for upperclassmen and grad students next semester. An Occupy Wall Street class will send students into the field and will be taught by Dr. Hannah Appel, a veteran of the Occupy movement.
The course begins next semester and will be divided between class work at Columbia’sMorningside Heights campus and fieldwork that will require students to become involved with the Occupy movement outside of the classroom.
The course will be called “Occupy the Field: Global Finance, Inequality, Social Movement” it will be run by the anthropology department.
We are tough on Mitt because we believe that there is much to be tough on Mitt about, but giving credit where credit is due, this was great. Nice Work Governor [With that said there are some corporations who over reach at the expense of employees and when they do that they encourage government and occutards to go on their wealth destroying campaigns].
Show this to everyone. There is not a better example of why the Republican Party has always been better on the issues affecting inner city families than the Democrats.
“If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcolm X
Political Arena 