Nelson, GA will not enforce mandatory gun ownership law

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 1 Comment

 

Brennan Moss of Moss Firearms in nearby Jasper, GA

Brennan Moss of Moss Firearms in nearby Jasper, GA

Back in May, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence filed a lawsuit against the town of Nelson, Georgia, which passed a city ordinance requiring all heads of households to own at least one gun. In a settlement last week, the city council declared that the law “cannot and will not be enforced,” according to NBC News. According to the Nelson police chief, that was the idea all along. Councilman Duane Cronic agrees, likening the law to the security-company signs on certain suburban homes. “Some people have security systems, some people don’t, but they put those signs up,” Cronic said in April. “I really felt like this ordinance was a security sign for our city.” Consideration of how a law should differ from a deceptive yard sign after the jump.

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Read the Inspector General’s report on the IRS/Tea Party scandal

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 3 Comments
This image of Conan the Barbarian provided as a public-service alternative to pictures of inspectors, hearings or tax forms.

This image of Conan the Barbarian provided as a public-service alternative to pictures of inspectors, hearings or tax forms.

Congressional hearings into news that the IRS singled out conservative political groups applying for tax-exempt status is either a tempest in a teapot or a tempest issuing from the mouth of a tyrannical socialist dragon, depending on which news outlet you read. Mitch McConnell says that the heightened scrutiny of Tea Party organizations reflects a “culture of intimidation” in the Obama administration, which is kind of a weird assertion in light of claims that the President also covered it up. As often happens in our brave modern news cycle, the question of what the IRS did has been elbowed aside by questions of who knew what about what the IRS did, whether what the president might have known they did constitutes an impeachable offense, and how “so many Americans knew this was happening,” as Sarah Palin claims. Now you can know what’s happening, too, simply by reading this 55-page report.

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Medical device lobbyists sway Senate with relaxing truth massage

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 3 Comments
Artificial hip

Artificial hip

In 2010, the Affordable Care Act included a 2.3% tax on medical devices, designed to offset the cost of subsidizing health care for low-income families. Last week, the Senate voted 79-20 to repeal that tax in response to heavy lobbying by the medical device industry. Weirdly, 34 Democrats voted for repeal—many of the same senators who voted for the original tax. What a difference 30 months, several dozens lobbyists and one false cost estimate make. According to Bloomberg, the “reasonable assumptions” that the trade group AdvaMed used to estimate the cost of the tax “conflict with economic research, overstate companies’ incentives to move jobs offshore, and ignore the positive effect of new demand created by the law.”

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What’s wrong with the contemporary Republican Party?

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 3 Comments
The Green Bay Tea Party recruits via hostile placards.

The Green Bay Tea Party recruits via hostile placards.

Last week, Ross Douthat described what he called “the donorist view” of what the Republican Party needs to do. Hint: it should change. After a strong showing in the 2010 midterm elections and what appeared to be a groundswell of populist support from the Tea Party, the GOP has utterly failed to retake Washington. Its primary goal—by many accounts its only goal, given the last two years’ obstruction in Congress—was to beat Obama in 2012. That did not work. A lot of people spent a lot of money hoping that it would, and they want answers. They will settle for a plan to do better next time, however, in the form of the RNC’s Growth and Opportunity Project.

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Supreme Court to hear gay marriage case

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 2 Comments
A trenchant cartoon reminding us that Obama made gay people want to get married in order to distract us from the economy.

A trenchant political cartoon points out that Obama made states ban gay marriage in order to distract us from the economy.

Today is the day, or one of several days this week: the Supreme Court has begun hearing arguments on Proposition 8, California’s ban on same-sex marriage. Probably this it the first you have heard about this issue. To recap: the California Supreme Court affirmed the right of gay couples to marry in 2008. In November of that year, voters approved a ballot measure amending the California constitution to limit marriages to opposite-sex couples. In 2009, Theodore Olson and David Boies filed Hollingsworth v. Perry, No. 12-144, in which they argued that Prop 8 violated the federal constitution by allowing California voters to override their state’s supreme court. Judge Vaughn Walker of San Francisco’s Federal District Court agreed, but his decision was stayed pending Supreme Court review. That started this morning.

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