The Wall Street Journal reports that a high percentage of the small number of pardons issued by George W. Bush so far have gone to ordinary people eager to regain the right to own firearms for sport or recreation.

On the surface, the list of the 14 people pardoned by the president this week shows few common denominators in terms of time served, geographic location or even type of crime, except that the felonies were non-violent. But a closer look at some of the newly pardoned shows many of them are church-going, blue-collar workers from rural areas (and ardent Bush supporters) who had little trouble finding jobs after their convictions. There is another common thread: the important role firearms once played in their lives.

President Bush has pardoned fewer people — 171 — than any president since World War II, with the exception of his father, who pardoned 74. Presidents don’t discuss their reasons for issuing pardons, with few exceptions. Nor do they tell petitioners why their wish was granted. The Justice Department’s “pardon attorney,” who reviews hundreds of petitions a year and recommends candidates to the president, had no comment.

Coincidentally or not, at least seven of the 14 pardoned on Monday are former hunters or shooting enthusiasts. In interviews, five of them said they wrote in their petitions to the government that a desire to win back the right to bear arms was a chief reason for wanting a pardon.

In one respect, Obama would be lucky if the Keyes and other lawsuits proved him ineligible: presidents evidently are not allowed to use email.

The Times reports that they would be confiscating his Blackberry and shutting down his email account.

Before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, there is the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A final decision has not been made on whether Obama could go against precedent and become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that was unlikely.

But would he be allowed to play on-line RPGs?

Philip J. Berg’s federal lawsuit challenging Barack Obama to document his US citizenship was dismissed last month in Philadelphia on the grounds that the plaintiff lacked standing.

Now, Alan Keyes, who does possess standing, having himself appeared on the California ballot this year as candidate for president of the American Independent Party, is suing the Secretary of State of California in Superior Court in Sacramento, asking the court to order that she refrain from certifying the election of the democrat party’s individual presidential electors until Barack Obama provides proof of his eligibility with respect to citizenship for the presidency.

Keyes v. Bowen pdf

In case Senator Obama cannot present proper documentation verifying his citizenship, he cannot be elected President of the United States, and SOS (Secretary of State) has a duty to bar the casting of votes by California Electors in support of his candidacy.

84. Based on all of the above, it is the duty of the SOS to obtain proper documentation of Senator Obama’s citizenship to confirm his eligibility for the office of the President of the United States.

If Keyes, Berg, et. al. are correct in their suspicions, it appears that Americans will have inadvertently elected Joseph Biden president.

The mainstream media treated Joe the Plumber having a tax lien as a matter of national interest. But, as Jim Lindgren points out at Volokh Conspiracy, obvious ethics violations by a certain former Illinois state legislator are considered unworthy of attention.

The Illinois Governmental Ethics Act (apparently last changed in 1995) provides:

(5 ILCS 420/2-110)

Sec. 2-110. Honoraria.

(a) No member of the General Assembly shall accept any honorarium.

(b) As used in this Section:

“Honorarium” means a payment of money to a member of the General Assembly for an appearance or speech.

and

But State Senator Obama reported accepting honoraria on his 2000 and 2002 tax returns:

2000: On his 2000 Schedule C-EZ, Barack reported that he received $16,500 as a “Foundation director/Educational speaker.”

2002: On his 2002 Schedule C, Barack reported $34,491 for “LEGAL SERVCES / SPEAKING FEES.”

Daily Mail

The Telegraph reports another inversion of the rule of law in contemporary Britain.

A gardener who fenced off his allotment patch with a single strand of barbed wire to protect it from thieves has been ordered to take it down in case intruders hurt themselves.

Bill Malcolm, 61, was told to “remove it on health and safety grounds” by the local council, which owns the allotments.

He erected the deterrent after thieves struck three times in four months, stealing more than £300 worth of spades, forks, hoes and wrecking his potato patch in the process.

But officials instructed Mr Malcolm to remove the waist-high wire from his plot at Round Hill Allotments in Marlbrook, Worcs.

He said: “It’s an absolutely ridiculous situation, all I wanted was to protect my property but the wire had to go in case a thief scratched himself.

“The council said they were unhappy about the precautions I had made but my response was to tell them that only someone climbing over on to my allotment could possibly hurt themselves.

“They shouldn’t be trespassing in the first place but the council apologised and said they didn’t want to be sued by a wounded thief.

Or maybe you won’t have to. A jury in Britain last Wednesday, encouraged by extreme partisan testimony from chief fraudster James Hansen himself, exonerated Greenpeace vigilantes who vandalized a coal-fired powerplant.

The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage.

Jurors accepted defence arguments that the six had a “lawful excuse” to damage property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even greater damage caused by climate change. The defence of “lawful excuse” under the Criminal Damage Act 1971 allows damage to be caused to property to prevent even greater damage – such as breaking down the door of a burning house to tackle a fire.

The not-guilty verdict, delivered after two days and greeted with cheers in the courtroom, raises the stakes for the most pressing issue on Britain’s green agenda and could encourage further direct action.

————————————————

How could any jury reach such a preposterous conclusion? Testimony from witch doctors on top of a prolonged steady diet of false information from the mainstream media, as in this typical example from the Telegraph.

Recent events have seen the scare campaign over global warming descend to the level of a Monty Python sketch.

Much publicity was given, for instance, to Lewis Gordon Pugh, who set out to paddle a kayak to the Pole to demonstrate the vanishing of the Arctic ice. At 80.5 degrees north, still 600 miles short of his goal, he met with ice so thick that he and his fossil-fuelled support ship had to turn back.

But this did not prevent him receiving a congratulatory call from Gordon Brown, nor boasting that he had travelled “further north than anyone has kayaked so far”.

It took the admirable Watts Up With That blog, run by the American meteorologist Anthony Watts, to point out that in 1893 the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen found the Arctic so ice-free that he was able to kayak above 82 degrees north, 100 miles nearer the Pole than our hapless campaigner against “unprecedented global warming”.

During time of war, the Ancient Romans closed the doors of the Temple of Janus, symbolizing the cessation of normal operation of of the Law during war-time.

Barack Obama fought back against Sarah Palin’s convention speech attack yesterday, but just look at Obama’s idea of an effective counter-offense.

Jake Tapper:

“I have said repeatedly that there should be no contradiction between keeping America safe and secure and respecting our Constitution,” Obama said. “During the Republican convention, you remember during the Republican convention, one of them, I don’t know if it was Rudy or Palin … they said, ‘Well, ya know, Sen. Obama is less interested in protecting you from terrorists than … reading them their rights.’”

(It was Palin, who said “Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America — he’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights?”)

“Now, let me say this,” Obama continued, “first of all, you don’t even get to read them their rights until you catch them. So, I don’t know what, they should spend more time trying to catch Osama bin Laden and we can worry about the next steps later. Hah! I mean, seriously! These folks.

“Catch ‘em first!”

Obama said his position on this “has always been clear. It has always been clear. If you’ve got a terrorist, take ‘em out. Take ‘em out. Anybody who was involved in 9/11 –- take ‘em out.”

But, the former constitutional law professor argued, “What I have also said is this: that when you suspend habeas corpus — which has been a principle, dating before even our country, it’s the foundation of Anglo-American law — which says, very simply, if the government grabs you, then you have the right to at least ask, ‘Why was I grabbed?’ and say, ‘Maybe you’ve got the wrong person.’

“The reason you have that safeguard,” he said, “is because we don’t always have the right person. We don’t always catch the right person. We may think this is Mohammed the terrorist, it might be Mohammed the cab driver. You may think it’s Barack the bomb thrower, but it might be Barack the guy running for president.

“The reason that you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism, it’s because that’s who we are,” Obama said as the crowd rose to its feet, applauding. “That’s what we’re protecting. Don’t mock the Constitution! Don’t make fun of it! Don’t suggest that it’s un-American to abide by what the founding fathers set up! It’s worked pretty well for over 200 years!

Rather than demonstrating Obama’s appreciation of the American Constitution and its roots in Magna Carta and the English Common Law, Barack Obama is really proving the incapacity of the American liberal establishment, including most conspicuously himself, to understand the most elementary distinctions in law, or to remember as far back in time as Vietnam, Korea, or WWII.

Being liberal means having so little respect for tradition and the past that the current armed conflict must be treated by liberals as if it was the first such crisis in human history. From the liberal perspective (which is shared, I must admit, to a very large extent by the current administration), we must invent new policies and procedures for functioning in time of war. Never before, it seems, in the history of the United States have US forces actually dealt with enemy prisoners or illegal combatants.

Obama, and the rest of the American intelligentsia, is oblivious to the fundamental chasm between domestic civilian life and the very different and distinct regime of war. As the engraving above illustrates, the same distinction long predates habeas corpus, Magna Carta, and the Common Law of England. In the time of the Roman Republic, the principle of Inter arma, silent leges (“The laws are silent during the clash of arms.”) was well understood. The Romans closed the doors of the Temple of Janus during war-time to signal the inaccessibility of divine justice when Roman soldiers were fighting for their fatherland in the field.

No contradiction in supposing that habeas corpus, all the rights and immunities of American citizenship, all the protections of our system of laws, attorney representation and jury trials pertain to enemies of the United States captured overseas bearing arms against US forces and operating in open and flagrant violation of the customs and usages of war?

The notion that latrunculi. armed criminals taken prisoner in the course of their attempting to kill US soldiers, persons representing no country, wearing no uniform, and operating under no lawful authority or command, and routinely violating the laws and customs of war should be considered to have the same rights as a US citizen charged domestically with a crime is completely impractical and totally insane.

Obama’s position is intrinsically self-contradictory. On the one hand, we are apparently perfectly entitled to “take out” Osama bin Laden and persons involved in 9/11. But if US forces reduce to possession alive a bearded jhadi with AK-47 in hand, who moments earlier hurled a grenade at them, it’s time to Mirandize him and give him the phone number of Ron Kubbe. Are we to assume that issues of possible error and uncertainty and all the necessity for proof and assurance required in the case of ordinary illegal combatants vanishes in relation to persons believed to have been “involved” with 9/11?

The University of Chicago Law School should never have hired Obama. His understanding of the limits of the Law is defective, and he is not even sensitive to the grossest sorts of contradiction in his own theory.

Prince George County, Maryland police violated a warrant they were serving for the questionable arrest of the wife of the mayor of Berwyn Heights by staging a SWAT team raid and carrying out an utterly unnecessary forced entry. Two friendly Labrador retrievers were shot dead, and two respectable people were manhandled and manacled for hours.

Baltimore Sun story.

The training and culture of law enforcement has gone outrageously astray in this country.

Remember the federal officers who came to collect Elian Gonzalez equipped with machine guns, wearing tanker helmets and loaded down with paramilitary gear?

Preposterously excessive force, a systematic kind of cringing cowardice expressed by the mentality that sends paramilitary SWAT teams armed with automatic weapons to kick in doors and make arrests of people who’d come down to the police department if contacted by telephone, the overly-prudential point of view that insists on strip searches and manacles for non-violent middle-class members of the public has become typical of today’s police.

It’s been going on for decades. I can remember marveling in Brookfield, Connecticut, years ago, stopping one evening at a fast food joint and seeing a local cop on his dinner break toting around one of those 9mm Beretta semiautomatics and five, count them, five! extra 15-round magazines on his belt. Has anyone ever actually fired upon a police officer in the 200+ year history of Brookfield? I wondered at the time. And was there currently reason to expect a Zulu impi to come over the hill and attack? Why would a local cop possibly need to be carrying 90 rounds of ammunition? That many cartridges are heavy.

I decided back in the early 1990s to get a Connecticut pistol permit. The process required me to stop by the local Newtown police station to pick up a form. Imagine my surprise, when I found the police barricaded away, inaccessible to the dangerous public of upper middle-class suburban Fairfield County, behind locked doors. One communicated with a secretary in a booth protected by bulletproof glass, passing papers back and forth in one of those sliding bank trays. Obviously, Newtown’s police officers led a life of constant fear.

I grew up in a family with many members who were working or had worked in law enforcement. The kind of men who became policemen in the old days were not afraid of criminals. They knew that they were tough and they knew just how uncommon men like themselves were. They knew most criminals are cowardly scum, and incompetent screw-ups to boot. The human being who will initiate violence is rare, and the human being who will initiate violence against a man in authority recognizably skilled at violence is even rarer.

The kind of men who used to become police officers were adequately armed with a .38 revolver or even just a nightstick. My father, working as a Marine Corps MP, and armed only with a nightstick, placed a dozen men under arrest and marched them off to the brig. He told them he knew perfectly well there were enough to them to overcome him, but he promised that he’d kill the first one or two who tried. They submitted to arrest.

The Texas Rangers used to boast of a necessary ratio of “one riot, one Ranger.” And the Pennsylvania State Police long had the same policy of sending a single State Trooper to suppress a civil disturbance or quell a mob.

Today, they send jack-booted Storm Troopers armed with machine guns to bring in 8 year olds.

Contemporary law enforcement culture is a disgrace and a genuine public hazard and it needs to change. They should dissolve every single SWAT team, get rid of every single item of paramilitary equipage, and –of course– end drug prohibition and the accompanying crime epidemic providing most of the excuse for the militarization of US law enforcement.

The Washington Post tells us that liberals are suffering from SCOTUS envy.

It could be seen as the sincerest form of flattery: Ask some activists on the left the kind of Supreme Court justice they would like to see a President Obama appoint, and the name you hear most is the same justice they most often denounce.

They want their own Antonin Scalia. Or rather, an anti-Scalia, an individual who can easily articulate a liberal interpretation of the Constitution, offer a quick sound bite and be prepared to mix it up with conservative activists beyond the marble and red velvet of the Supreme Court. …

as the Supreme Court takes its traditional spot in the background of the presidential campaign, there is a longing on the left for a justice who would energize not only the court’s liberal wing, but also the debate over interpreting the Constitution.

“Someone with vision,” said Doug Kendall, who recently helped found a new liberal think tank called the Constitutional Accountability Center. “Someone who looks hard at the text and history of the Constitution, as Justice Scalia does, and articulates a very clear idea of how that text points to liberal and progressive outcomes.”

“It is a court with no true liberal on it, the most conservative court in 75 years,” said Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago, where Obama once taught constitutional law. “What we call liberals on this court are moderates, or moderate liberals, if you want to get refined about it.”

Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and David Souter aren’t liberals?

Heck, liberals don’t even need to win presidential elections to get liberal Supreme Court Justices appointed. Conservative Republican presidents will appoint some for them.

Speaking more seriously, though, I think our friends on the left are missing the point. They are on the defensive on the Court, not really because of a paucity of kindred spirits, but because they have, for decades, been losing the battle of ideas in jurisprudence and Constitutional Law at the law schools and in the law journals.

Face it, what liberals really want is a return to an uncritical era of legal intuitions, emanations, and emotional sloganeering. They want the William O. Douglas and Earl Warren kind of “no brainer” liberal court decisions which merely use a few orotund generalities to raise the consensus of the liberal elite to the status of law of the land.

Liberal woolymindedness reaches even more impressive depths of absurdity in Britain than in the US, as we see when prominent Al Qaeda terrorists cannot be extradited to any of a variety of countries anxious to try and punish him, and an impotent justice system can do no better than house arrest.

So scrupulous in protecting the interests of terrorist is British justice that newspapers like The Guardian are forbidden even to name the beneficiary of this systematic insanity.

The hiding place of a leading terror suspect was inadvertently released by Justice Ministry officials last night after he was freed from jail under unprecedented bail conditions. The man, who can be identified only as U, was released from Long Lartin, Worcestershire, after the appeal court ruled there was no reason to hold him indefinitely as he could not be deported to his native Algeria.

The media has been prohibited from publishing his address, or even identifying the town where he is to reside. When the Ministry of Justice supplied journalists with copies of his bail conditions, however, the document included his exact address in the south-east of England. …

U settled in Britain in 1994 and moved to Afghanistan two years later, where he is said to have forged links with Osama bin Laden. He is accused of presiding over a pre-9/11 al-Qaida network of north African terrorists who trained in Afghanistan in the mid-90s, and has links with men convicted of offences in this country and abroad. Ahmed Ressam, convicted of a plot to blow up Los Angeles International airport on New Year’s Eve 1999, was carrying U’s telephone number when he was arrested with 60kg (130lb) of explosives on the Canadian-US border.

Attempts to extradite U to the US collapsed when Ressam refused to give evidence against him. Prosecutors in France and Germany said telephone intercept evidence indicated U was the driving force behind a plot to bomb a Christmas market in Strasbourg the following year.

The Counterterrorism Blog, of course, operates outside the United Kingdom, and therefore is free to identify the lucky jihadist as Abu Doha.

——————————–

The Independent:

Among those who became a regular visitor to the Four Feathers and to the Finsbury Park mosque in north London was Abu “The Doctor” Doha, who has since been identified as al-Qa’ida’s main recruiter in Europe. Mr Doha, now 37, was a senior figure in an Algerian terror group called the Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC).

According to the head of the French internal security service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), Pierre de Bousquet de Florian, Mr Doha’s arrest at Heathrow airport in February 2001 as he tried to board a flight to Saudi Arabia came “a little too late”. Mr Doha, he said, was the “principal catalyst” in establishing a network of Islamic terrorists in London.

Before the Algerian was arrested, he organised travel for recruits to al-Qa’ida’s camps in Chechnya and Afghanistan where training included the production of chemical weapons, such as ricin. The recruits have since formed Europe-based cells, financed by fraud and adept at creating false travel documents.

London disciples of Mr Qatada and Mr Doha included Djamel Beghal, a French- Algerian since arrested for masterminding a plot to blow up the US Embassy in Paris, and Zacarias Moussaoui, a French-Moroccan held in America as the “20th hijacker”, suspected of planning to take part in the 11 September attacks.

Randy Barnett, in today’s Wall Street Journal, relishes the results of Heller, and praises Justice Scalia’s work. I love his editorial’s title, which constitutes all by itself an absolutely devastating rejoinder to the jurisprudence of people like Justices Stevens and Breyer.

Justice Scalia’s opinion is the finest example of what is now called “original public meaning” jurisprudence ever adopted by the Supreme Court. This approach stands in sharp contrast to Justice John Paul Stevens’s dissenting opinion that largely focused on “original intent” – the method that many historians employ to explain away the text of the Second Amendment by placing its words in what they call a “larger context.” Although original-intent jurisprudence was discredited years ago among constitutional law professors, that has not stopped nonoriginalists from using “original intent” – or the original principles “underlying” the text – to negate its original public meaning.

Of course, the originalism of both Justices Scalia’s and Stevens’s opinions are in stark contrast with Justice Breyer’s dissenting opinion, in which he advocates balancing an enumerated constitutional right against what some consider a pressing need to prohibit its exercise. Guess which wins out in the balancing? As Justice Scalia notes, this is not how we normally protect individual rights, and was certainly not how Justice Breyer protected the individual right of habeas corpus in the military tribunals case decided just two weeks ago.

So what larger lessons does Heller teach? First, the differing methods of interpretation employed by the majority and the dissent demonstrate why appointments to the Supreme Court are so important. In the future, we should be vetting Supreme Court nominees to see if they understand how Justice Scalia reasoned in Heller and if they are committed to doing the same.

We should also seek to get a majority of the Supreme Court to reconsider its previous decisions or “precedents” that are inconsistent with the original public meaning of the text. This shows why elections matter – especially presidential elections – and why we should vet our politicians to see if they appreciate how the Constitution ought to be interpreted.

Good legal scholarship was absolutely crucial to this outcome. No justice is capable of producing the historical research and analysis upon which Justice Scalia relied. Brilliant as it was in its execution, his opinion rested on the work of many scholars of the Second Amendment, as I am sure he would be the first to acknowledge.

Ilya Somin, at Volokh Conspiracy, advises Gun rights supporters not to rejoice too soon.

For many years, gun rights advocates have fought to persuade the Supreme Court that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms. That battle has now been won in Heller. Indeed, all nine justices (including the four dissenters) seem to agree that there is some individual right to bear arms that goes beyond a “collective right” protection for state militias.

However, the experience of the struggle for judicial protection of constitutional property rights suggests that recognition of the mere existence of a right isn’t enough. If the scope of the right is defined narrowly by courts, recognition won’t mean much in practice.

Read the whole thing.