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For a non-candidate, Gingrich continues to steal enough votes to muddy up the works IF he decides to enter the race next September.

38 Pitches

According to the Washington Times, the DC Circuit Court struck down the District's 30-year old gun ban on the grounds of the 'prior right' and 'individual right' aspects of the 2nd Amendment (and the US Constitution).

Of course, there is typical liberal outrage about how effective the gun law was at curbing violence. The Washington Times article notes, however, that a) gun murders in DC account for about 80% of the total, against a little less than 70% nationally; and, b) gun crimes in general are rising in DC, while other types of violent crimes are decreasing.

As we say in Paulie World, "An armed society is a polite society."

Here's the money quote:

"To summarize, we conclude that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. That right existed prior to the formation of the new government under the Constitution and was premised on the private use of arms for activities such as hunting and self-defense, the latter being understood as resistance to either private lawlessness or the depredations of a tyrannical government (or a threat from abroad). In addition, the right to keep and bear arms had the important and salutary civic purpose of helping to preserve the citizen militia. The civic purpose was also a political expedient for the Federalists in the First Congress as it served, in part, to placate their Antifederalist opponents. The individual right facilitated militia service by ensuring that citizens would not be barred from keeping the arms they would need when called forth for militia duty. Despite the importance of the Second Amendment’s civic purpose, however, the activities it protects are not limited to militia service, nor is an individual’s enjoyment of the right contingent upon his or her continued or intermittent enrollment in the militia."

Finally, my personal belief is that if the Framers wanted to outlaw any type of arms or munitions, they would have done so. I belief is that the Framers wanted to make sure the people could rise in rebellion against a tyrannical government. The writings of both Jefferson and Justice Storey are pretty clear in this regard. I believe that one should be able to have an M1 Abrams parked in your front yard: if the gubmint can have one, we should be able to have two.

Good online discussion transcript from 2000 here

Anyway, how's that for an early Saturday Morning read?

KATU - Portland, Oregon - Local & Regional - Teacher jailed for sex with teenage student

Schoolteacher, who fellated a young fellow from the school where she taught, got six months in the "pokey" instead of the 30 days house arrest she expected.

At least that's one health/gym teacher who's heterosexual.

Well, folks I was in Washington DC on Saturday 17 March for, as the Sun Paper called it, the dueling protests. I went over for the Gathering of Eagles, but I did venture into the anti-war rally. The peace rally crowd seemed to be a bit more angry, and surly. It was also full of some of the old 60’s slogans, “What do we want? PEACE!” “When do we want it? NOW!” there was also something I couldn’t make out about war, racism, and sexism, etc. They also chanted about jobs, schools, wages, and justice. Now, while this chanting was going on I must admit I was in the GoE area talking to some vets who had come from all over the country because there had been threats of desecration to some monuments in general, and the Vietnam Memorial in particular, and they were not going to allow this to happen, at least not if they had any say in the matter. I found the vets to be respectful of the protesters right to speak out against the war, but just wished the protesters would acknowledge who helps secure this right. I read in the paper that there were a lot of taunts thrown at the anti-war protesters, but I saw none of it, in fact just the opposite, protesters were helped in their quest to get to their rally point. Many vets directed them to the easiest, or shortest routes, all the while being very friendly towards them. By the same token the protesters didn’t taunt the vets who wandered through their rally. They just seemed to ignore them, I guess thinking they were looking for a confrontation, while I never heard any vets express this desire, there are always a few in every crowd who many want to cause trouble, so one never knows, about either crowd. I did hear of a few protesters calling the vets baby killers, I also heard of a protester taking a poke at a vet, who dodged the swing and got in one of his own, and was hustled away by his buddies before this incident could escalate but didn’t witness either of these so I can’t attest to their actual occurrence. I did see a debate between a group of vets and a pair of protesters. One of the protesters said he wanted to get both sides of the story as he was writing about the issue, and respected the vets for what they had done. The vets for their part said they would read what he had to say if they could get the article. This debate did a one point get a bit heated; however, it never got to the point of threats, or name calling. At the worst one vet told the protesters they were misguided. But all partys shook hands afterwards, and no body went away mad.

We're back, a "kinder, gentler" Paulie World....

"Polite Policy" is our motto. Nothing fancy: we read the news and write about it. Some of us lead public lives, so we made the decision very long ago to use nommes de plume, using a Revolutionary War theme.

Our primary contributors are:

Paulie = the Messenger of the Revolution! (Viva!!) (Wait! Not that revolution!). Primary contributor and all-around good guy.

John Adams = our resident attorney and general go-to guy

Israel Putnam = Famous citizen-soldier from Connecticut; does not tolerate fools gladly & keeps an eye on politics and some reservist affairs.

The Swamp Fox = Namesake is Col Francis Marion, led a guerilla war against the British in the South. Our resident Second Amendment expert and perhaps the only true libertarian on our masthead.

Capt. Trevett = the original was first Marine to raise the US flag over a conquered enemy. Our Captain Trevett is a serving Marine, currently on his second tour to Iraq. A tremendous fellow who is good in a pinch and backs up his boasts.

There's a cast of characters in the background that may or may not be writing for us. We got a little unwieldy (over ambitious? Say it ain't so!) in our last incarnation.

We welcome your comments, but we ask that you register through TypeKey. It's free.

One of the reasons we took the site down before was the issue of dealing with the hundreds of spam messages - especially nasty port spam - that clogged our email boxes. Nothing worse than coming down to the computer at 5 am on a Monday morning and having 500 porn spam messages in your inbox that you have to manually scrub through the blacklist.

Another reason for taking the blog down the last time was the apparent unending vitriol in our political climate. It's really hard to be outraged about those "darn Republicans" or those "rootin' tootin' Democrats." We're going to try to stay out of hard-line partisanship, although, with Pelosi, and Reid (slow-burner, that one), Dean (& McCain, and Bush, and Cheney, and Newt), there is a lot of low-hanging fruit. One of my pals in Baltimore - no liberal, that one - recently had the street he lives on named in honor of Nancy Pelosi (Via Pelosi) or some such. Now that's irony.

Lot's of changes in the past two years, in the country and in our little world. We hope we can keep up with all of them.

One of those changes: Captain Trevett recently got married. His wife is a gem and we with them great success. Trevett is back in Iraq, his second tour. Godspeed, Captain.

Okay. This message will be on the top of the mast for a couple of weeks, so read through.

You know, boys and girls, we don't post here as often as we did because it's hard to carry the same incredulity about events in the world, day after day.

This video, which I found courtesy of one of my daily reads, Polipundit, is a very nice change of pace:

UN Watch Rips Council on Human Rights

I think the title says it all, there. Nice to see that pack of scoundrels held to account once in a while.