It was only a matter of time.

Code Pink is now resorting to witchcraft to beef up the number of its supporters protesting Berkeley’s controversial Marine Corps Recruiting Center.

The women’s anti-war group has told ralliers to come equipped with spells and pointy hats Friday for “Witches, clowns and sirens day,” the last of the group’s weeklong homage to Mother’s Day.

“Women are coming to cast spells and do rituals and to impart wisdom to figure out how we’re going to end war,” Zanne Sam Joi of Bay Area Code Pink told FOXNews.com.

The group’s week of themed protests, which included days to galvanize grannies and bring-your-daughter-to-protest, appears to have done little to boost its flagging numbers.

Seen at LawDog’s. Strangely, taking care of me when I am sick or old on the government dime isn’t in there. Who knew?

I wouldn’t be surprised if most people had committed a felony by accident these days.

Tam: You don’t have to be a vote-pandering, dumb-as-a-stump, collectivist simpleton to get into politics. But it helps.

Uber liberal editor of the Knoxville News Sentinel Jack McElroy prints the “you don’t need guns because America is so safe” liberal fantasy from Professor Paul Campos of the University of Colorado.

What Glenn Reynolds is to conservatives Paul Campos is to extremist liberal fanatics. I had a brief post on Der Professor Campos on SayUncle last week.

What do you make of a person who first writes, “The ongoing overreaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks is only the most vivid example of how our leaders cynically exploit our fears by making wildly exaggerated claims, such as that Islamic terrorism poses an “existential threat” to America.” Then Professor Campus follows that inane derangement with this, “we should be more afraid of having our children stolen from us by Republicans than by kidnappers.”

Only Jack McElroy would find any value with Paul Campos’s disjointed ramblings.

I found this little gem at KnoxViews. It seems so innocuous and reasonable. Yet if you take the time to read it, you will find an important message.

What is that message? And more importantly, why should you care?

The TSA has mixed up Air Marshals with people on the terror watch list.

Most folks think we’re electing a priest-king.

Update: Or Priestess-Queen, lest I be thought sexist

Seems politicos always want to appear to be tough on crime. And the first thing they actually get tough on are your rights. If you’re caught with a prostitute, the local authorities want to seize your car.

Say it ain’t so.

But wait, there’s more.

It’s a sad day when you cannot trust a religious man like Al.

In England:

A “why bother?” economy has been created in Britain which has left thousands with no motivation to work, a report published today concludes.

Successive governments have encouraged a welfare culture that has left every family facing a £1,300 bill because the poor stay poor, it claims.

The findings by the public services think tank Reform suggest that increased welfare dependency has made it more difficult for those on the lowest incomes to do better.

One crime = four charges.

In the country of California, Mark Vargas installed some solar panels. Trouble is that, in a colossal case of failure to plan, his solar panels were installed in the shade of his neighbors’ redwood trees. But get this:

Richard Treanor and Carolynn Bissett of Sunnyvale, Calif., were criminally prosecuted because redwood trees in their backyard cast shadows over their neighbor’s solar panels.

A judge ordered in December that two of the trees be trimmed back. The couple have had one trimmed, hoping that will satisfy the judge.

Criminally prosecuted and threatened with fines of $1,000/day because their neighbors put solar panels in the shade of their trees. Wow. And, seriously, there’s a law that covers that. Governor Moonbeam signed it back in 1978. Mark Vargas was rewarded by the state despite being stupid enough to install solar panels in the shade. More:

“I still think it is sad that we couldn’t have figured it out between neighbors,” Vargas said. “I offered to pay to remove the trees.”

There’s no figure it out you want X and your neighbors wanted exactly the opposite of X. There’s no figuring that out. Unfortunately for your neighbors, there’s also no shortage of stupid in California law.

Update: I think I’d go find one of those spotted owls and let it live in the trees.

Now, congress is calling for an investigation into Big Football!

On big brother:

You know, I’ve gotta tell ya’ll - with every city, town, and slightly populated area with an intersection making kissy-faces at Redflex, my rebellious streak has gotten worn down. Let’s face it. Robo-Smokey is the unstoppable wave of the future.

Tam on the religious weirdos in Texas: The seriously outgunned (by a ratio of several hundred to zero) religious weirdos in the facility, which has been downgraded from “compound” to “ranch” to “retreat”, claimed they were terrified that they were going to be attacked. And given the track record (no pun intended) of mechanized law enforcement against nut-fudge religious types in Texas, can you really blame them?

I’m just glad no one was set on fire.

They had one in Memphis. It resulted in some traffic and drug violations. I feel safer.

Sad but true edition:

The real problem is that our culture worships at the altar of democratic governance. Power to the people, and all that. Not enough stop and think that maybe the people, when they act collectively through voting, are actually pretty collectively stupid.

Law-enforcement once again raided a compound populated with people whose religious views were found to be icky by other people. The bad part about it is that the authorities were preventing journalists from seeing what was happening on the property. And that’s shady. Someone should watch the watchmen. The good news is that nobody was set on fire.

Update: KAG has more and notes a shift from ignoring to doing too much.

Update 2: In comments, everyone is telling me that it goes beyond their religious views being icky and their views amount to abuse. I don’t disagree. Still, I’m happy that no one is on fire.

Having a false compartment in your vehicle is illegal in Cali.

I’ve been having a bit of fun with congress’ little dog and pony show about how those evil oil companies make all that evil money while the little guy has to shell out $3 for gas. Oops:

Oil company profits — 643 billion

Tax revenue collected by the Government on gasoline — 1.34 trillion.

The oil companies making that much is supposedly bad, says congress. But the .gov making more than twice that is fine and dandy. But the oil companies are evil! say the hippies.

Let’s do some more math! And we’ll use simple numbers and some estimates. The federal tax on gas is 18.4 cents. And that’s pure profit. Based on that, I figure a good SWAG puts big oil’s margin at about 8.8 cents per gallon of gas or (assuming $3 per gallon) a profit margin at about 2.6%. Those evil bastards making pennies per gallon! (and you might want to check my math. I’ve only had one cup of coffee and was pretty loose with my assumptions).

Bear in mind that big oil probably makes more money selling you chips, beer, smokes, and ice cold Coca Cola than it does on gas.

Via Billy Beck, comes this:

Yesterday, Manhattan federal prosecutors used a brand new law to charge McGuinn with posing as a war hero - making the Flushing, Queens, man one of the first in the New York region to face prosecution under the Stolen Valor Act.

The law, which took effect in January, makes it a felony to falsely claim to have received an award authorized for members of the U.S. armed forces.

Now, I’m with Billy and wouldn’t mind seeing this guy get his ass kicked. Or even seen him thrown in jail for fraud.

But that is a crime? I mean, that is such a pressing need that someone has to pass a law making it illegal? Fraud is fraud.

Turns out Congress’ half-assed attempt at banning internet gambling by making it unlawful for banks to process transactions to gaming sites is unclear, vague, and almost impossible to implement.

And, as is usually the case, Congress passed a bill it doesn’t understand.

Yahoo! headline: Congress demands oil companies justify record profits

Hmm, I would justify them by saying I’m not a commie and, to my knowledge, they are the only people who think profits are bad.

Continuing: Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., noting the hearing was being held on April Fool’s Day, said, “The biggest joke of all is being played on American families by Big Oil.” The national average cost of gasoline was hitting a record $3.29 cents a gallon.

No, the biggest jokes here are that congress is having a hearing that chastises successful industry and that congress thinks it can even come close to fixing the problem.

Update: Kinda related: I bought a gallon of milk today.

You were supposed to turn out the lights damn it.

How can we save the planet if you can’t remember the simplest things?

Does this look like solidarity?

The country formerly known as Great Britain.

In comments here, Marko (who looks like a young Rutger Hauer - seriously check out the pic in the upper right) says:

You can lock and unlock the weapon without ever removing it from the holster, and the holster is designed so that the bar of the lock (or the handcuff, for cop use) goes behind the trigger, not in front of it.

The pilot in question removed the weapon from the holster and manipulated the trigger, that’s all. It didn’t discharge by accident while he was trying to lock or unlock it. I’ve sold a few of the holsters in question, so I’m pretty confident about how they work.

Now, I’m not familiar with the holster in question and that may be correct. However, TSA’s policy of stowing the weapon adds unnecessary gun handling into the equation. And that is problematic. Additionally, the photo of the holster in question (seen here) looks to me like it is possible for the lock to come into contact with the trigger. The guy was stowing the weapon (which he was doing per this article) in accordance with policy. That’s an unnecessary bit of handling of a firearm. The only time the pilot should handle the gun is when it’s being drawn to fire. Otherwise, it should remain holstered and out of sight.

Feds stifling open government in VA?

This past Friday, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a Freedom of Information Act suit against the Virginia Department of State Police in an effort to uncover whether the federal government has been interfering in the state’s open government legislation. EPIC suspects that the feds are trying to use the state police to pressure the Virginia legislature into passing a bill that will put limits on the state’s open government laws and will encourage citizens to inform on one another by protecting anonymous tipsters from defamation and invasion of privacy lawsuits.

In a bit of irony, it seems that a big government law and order liberal got busted by some big government law and ordering. So reports News Week:

The Patriot Act gave the FBI new powers to snoop on suspected terrorists. In the fine print were provisions that gave the Treasury Department authority to demand more information from banks about their customers’ financial transactions. Congress wanted to help the Feds identify terrorist money launderers. But Treasury went further. It issued stringent new regulations that required banks themselves to look for unusual transactions (such as odd patterns of cash withdrawals or wire transfers) and submit SARs—Suspicious Activity Reports—to the government. Facing potentially stiff penalties if they didn’t comply, banks and other financial institutions installed sophisticated software to detect anomalies among millions of daily transactions. They began ranking the risk levels of their customers—on a scale of zero to 100—based on complex formulas that included the credit rating, assets and profession of the account holder.

And it wasn’t just evidence that continued to mount.

So, Spitzer puns still funny?

This guy sent me a link to his page. Apparently, he says the DOJ is lying and engaged in misconduct. But I can’t find a quick synopsis of events. Anyone have a clue?

They looked at my passport too! And, strangely, no one cared.

The story so far: some state politico goober decided to sue a gas station for price-gouging. Seems said station owner had the audacity to put up a big sign advertising his price and people agreed to pay it. You know, capitalism. Some smart ass blogger decided to, well, be a smart ass. Prompting another smart ass blogger to opine on the issue thusly in comments:

Funny. You say “reach an agreement on a price” as though there’s some sort of negotiation that went on, beyond “take it or leave it.”

Now, I dunno where Tom shops, but most retail establishments operate under that principle. I mean, they usually have signs that say something like Crocs $39.99 or my Sam Adams that I bought yesterday had a sticker on it that read $8.49 or something similar. I decided to test negotiating on the way home yesterday. The Mrs. calls and asks me to pickup a bale of straw so we can seed a portion of our lawn. I walked into Lowe’s and said I’d like one bale of straw. The cashier uses her ray gun to scan a bar code. She says: that’ll be $4.49.

I say: I’ll give you $3.

Her: Sir, it’s $4.49.

Me: You drive a hard bargain. $3.50.

Her: Sir, do you want the straw or not?

Me: Yes. But some hippie told me to oppose your take it or leave it approach to retail sales. So, I’m here to tell you I’m not gonna take it anymore. And, you know, speak truth to power and give peace a chance and all that. $4?

Her: [speaking into the microphone] I need management assistance to lawn and garden.

Me: Does he have the authority to negotiate price?

Her: [rolls eyes]

The line is getting backed up at this point.

Manager: May I help you, sir.

Me: Yes, I’m trying to negotiate a price for this bale of straw. $4.49 is too much. And I am tired of bourgeoisie having the gall to expend its capital and resources to dare bring me desired goods and services at a price that’s, well frankly, a few cents too high in my opinion. I mean, I don’t really know anything about straw production and its associated cost. But, dude, it’s dried grass. And you have some nerve trying to make a profit and do things in the best economic interest of your shareholders while providing your employees wages and benefits and stuff. It’s evil!

Manager: Sir, that’s the price.

Me: Take it or leave it, eh? Well, I guess I’ll take it or my wife will be mad and probably send me back under orders to pay the full price. I knew that woman was in with the bourgeoisie. Damn you, capitalism, you got to her too! Do you take Visa?

I paid and left.

OK, some of that might be made up. But I don’t know of many establishments other than car lots and maybe some mom and pop appliance stores where you negotiate a price any more. So, take that head of lettuce for $0.99 or leave it.

And Tom continues:

If you think predatory pricing and/or price gouging are bad, then you’re a dirty communist. Just thought you might like to know.

When you stop businesses from taking advantage of people and/or ripping them off, you’re destroying the American Way, comrade!

But it gets more amusing. Seems everyone plugged the addresses into Google Maps and, funny story, right next door was cheaper gas. And the original alleged price gouging was a mistake over diesel prices. So, obviously, we need to bring the power of the state government down on this evil price gougers! I mean, it’s not like customers could have gone elsewhere. Because that would be hard.

Man, that free market can be hard work. Clearly, we need government involvement when you’re too stupid to go across the street to save a buck.

Update: Related: I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that part of the problem is that at some time in our past, manufacturing jobs became considered “middle class”. It’s one thing for a job to provide a “living wage”, the term so beloved by the collectivists on the other side of the aisle. It’s another thing to think that putting bolts in holes all day should pay enough for a bass boat, two cars, a used Harley, and a time-share in Destin.

So, two parties reach an agreement on a price in exchange for goods and services. Communism ensues.

Nashville blogger has a run in with the police because he was taking a picture:

You wanna be charged with somethin’? I’ll charge you with disorderly conduct, if you wanna be charged with somethin’.

Via MCB.

He’s out of the race so I no longer have to use 1337!

Per the Politico:

Recently we’ve been told that this increase in the already intolerable invasion of our privacy was justified because the purpose was to apprehend terrorists. We were told that the massive amounts of information being collected on Americans would only be used to root out terrorists. But as we can see today, this monitoring of private activities can also be used for political reasons. We should always be concerned when the government accumulates information on innocent citizens.

Spitzer was brought down because he legally withdrew cash from a bank–not because he committed a crime. This should prompt us to reassess and hopefully reverse this trend of pervasive government intrusion in our private lives.

We need no more Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act! No more Violent Radicalization & Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Acts! No more torture! No more Military Commissions Act! No more secret prisons and extraordinary rendition! No more abuse of habeas corpus! No more PATRIOT Acts!

Indeed.

And, now watch closely, as I will quickly pull a Spitzer pun from thin air:

Spitzer pulls out!

Via AC.

On that video I linked yesterday, says Tam:

How shocked they’d be to find that on so many issues we’re on the same page. The difference between us is that I plan on using something more, ummm… authoritative than an iPod to keep from being shoved into the cattle car.

Indeed. I’m sure the aging yuppies who are trying to sell hip to the teen masses had some sort of conservative Chimpy McHitlerburton disregarding the constitution blood for oil spiel burning a hole in the back of their little noggins when they produced that ad. And thought this was some sort of War On Terror shtick. But when I saw it, I wondered if the folks on the cattle car had carbon footprints that were too big, someone was home-schooling, or if one of them didn’t sign up for Free Federal Health Care^tm.

I mentioned yesterday the mom who was charged for being a good mom. Looks like a rare case of smart broke out in Illinois and the charges have been dropped.

Study says the cause accidents.

Meanwhile, red light cameras are good at tattling on themselves, particularly when people monkey with the timing. Glitch in the computer programming? Tell me another one.

A woman was arrested for being a good mother.

Story here:

Marshals Say Teens Wait For A Name To Be Called At The D.M.V. If The Person Doesn’t Show Up, They Walk Up To The Desk, Pretend To Be The Person And Use The Real Information And Take The Picture.

Boy, do I feel safer.

No, I don’t know why every word in the article is capitalized.