Category: Gummint

Petty Tyrants

Bureaucracy

We’ve all seen stories about homeowners’ associations (HOAs) setting themselves up as mini-fiefdoms, and holding people accountable for stuff like “maintaining community standards” and “keeping property values healthy”.  The stories are legion, and I can bear witness to some of them myself — the best one being that when we were encouraged by the Plano authorities to start collecting rainwater in large storage barrels (a Good Thing, in semi-desert north Texas), we went off and bought from the city one of said barrels — i.e. the thing was city-approved.

So I installed the blessed thing at the side of the house and attached a drip hose system so that the lawn at the side of the house could get watered.  Two weeks later some dickless wonder knocked on my door and said that the barrel was “unsightly” and we had two days to remove it, or face “consequences”.  When I asked if any of my neighbors had complained (they hadn’t), he said that their “inspection team” had made the determination.

My response should not be repeated in polite company, but it did contain the words “fuck” and “off”, as well as a few choice words of a personal nature and a warning that any attempt to force “consequences” on me would be met with, shall we say, strong opposition.  He left, never to be seen again, and the barrel stayed (it’s still there, some twelve years later).

One could only imagine my response, then, if I lived in Port St. Lucie, Florida, and was faced with an HOA ruling that forbade carrying of guns.

And the local cops feel about the same way as I would:

Breitbart News reported on the HOA’s gun ban May 18, 2026, noting that the St. Lucie Police Department made clear they would not enforce it.

AG Uthmeier contacted the HOA and gave them a deadline to cease enforcement or face legal action.

In a post to X, Uthmeier wrote: “Enforcement of its discriminatory policy against anyone for exercising the constitutional right to keep and bear arms will be met with legal action by my office.”

Needless to say, the HOA has backed down.

And these little gauleiters  thought they could get away with this bullshit… in Florida?

Then & Now

Drive Time, Gummint

It’s not just humans who have been getting Fat & Bloated in recent times:

I know, I know:  the Kraut Minis are bloated because of all the Gummint-mandated safety regs — just another reason to get among them with machetes (the regulations, I mean, not the Gummint bureaucrats perish the thought).

I’m Thinking Jail

Government Thugs

…with weekly ball-kickings, having committed this piece of bureaucratic foulness:

This entire monstrosity started when the ATF sent a confidential informant to buy machineguns from Adamiak, who never sold any machineguns, of course. Adamiak never had any machineguns.  Instead, Adamiak sold the informant barrel shrouds, which were even cut up into pieces.

Barrel shrouds surround a machinegun barrel. They’re meant to keep a young soldier from burning their hands on a hot machinegun barrel. The weapon can fire full-auto with or without a shroud. They certainly aren’t vital parts. They definitely are not a “machinegun.”

Anyone who misclassifies cut up barrel shrouds as machineguns shouldn’t be working for the ATF, but that’s exactly what ATF Firearms Enforcement Officer Ronald K. Davis did. He put this deception into a report, which ATF Agent William S. Harston, Jr., quickly used as evidence to obtain a search warrant of Adamiak’s home. Hairston, the ATF’s lead case agent, even held up a toy during Adamiak’s trial, which of course was also classified as a machinegun.

“If they never lied about those shrouds, they never would have gotten a search warrant,” Adamiak said Wednesday.

During his trial, Adamiak’s defense team tried to argue that the barrel shrouds weren’t machineguns, so the search warrant was flawed, and the ATF’s entire investigation was based on lies… but the judge cut them right off.

So the ATF agents who cooked up this specious bullshit (up to and including the senior officer who signed off on it), the prosecutor and team who decided to prosecute it, and the judge who allowed the cooked-up evidence into court:  each and every one of them should be charged and imprisoned because every single thing they did subverted the course of actual justice in one way or another.

And screw this “hearing next month” nonsense.  Patric Adamiak should be freed within the next hour, following a pardon by President Trump.

One last word to POTUS:  inactivity on manifest injustices such as this one are the kind of thing that persuade once loyal supporters to stay home at the next election.  Yes, it’s that important — because what happened to Adamiak could happen to any one of us, if allowed to proceed unchecked.

Get it done.  Hundreds if not thousands of people have been pardoned for far greater crimes — and Pat Adamiak never committed a crime in the first place.

Yeah, I Don’t Buy It

Bureaucracy, Politics

Here’s a piece about former-AG Blondie and the power hierarchy she inherited at the DoJ:

She inherited an agency riddled with holdovers, careerist prosecutors, and institutional muscle memory tuned to the prior regime’s priorities. Her mandate, executed with the cold ferocity of a Florida prosecutor who once stared down the Clintons and lived to tell it, was never to play the long public game of show trials. It was to do the lethal, invisible labor: purge disloyal elements, redirect investigative task forces, shutter the foreign-influence shops that had become political protection rackets, and…most critically…build the factual scaffolding of cases that could survive judicial scrutiny once the political headwinds shifted. That is precisely what she delivered.

And:

First-term chaos taught the lesson: the Senate-confirmed loyalist who survives confirmation must serve as the institutional wrecking ball. The public demands scalps; the law demands airtight cases. Bondi supplied the latter while the former were still being assembled. Those who call her tenure “incompetent” reveal either their ignorance of how the executive branch actually functions or their desire to keep the machine broken so it can never be turned against its former masters. She was never meant to be the permanent face of the Justice Department. She was the architect who laid the rebar and poured the concrete under fire. The structure now stands. The new tenants can furnish it with indictments. That is not failure. That is lethal, disciplined statecraft.

Yeah.  Unfortunately, while I may be ignorant of the big-league governmental powerplays and what have you, I’m not ignorant of the need to look after the interests of ordinary folk, i.e. the voters, who put this lot in power to do all the above, but also to address and right the wrongs perpetrated by the previous bunch of scumbags on ordinary people.

How difficult would it be for the AG to look at, say, the case of Patrick Adamiak — you know, the innocent man railroaded by the ATF (who fall under the DoJ, lest we forget) — and get him out of jail?  Or to withdraw the dozens upon dozens of criminal cases that are still being prosecuted by the DoJ despite the cases being prima facie contrary to both new policy and the law?

Doing both the above may be difficult, but when you are the CEO of an outfit, it’s easy to say to a small task force, “Find all the cases that are being prosecuted but shouldn’t be;  set out a legal (or Constitutional) rationale for nolle prosequi, and I’ll sign the authorizations.”  That’s called “delegation” and it’s what good managers do.

And Pam Bondi didn’t do that.

Let’s just hope that her successor does.

Get Busy

Anti-Gun Nannies, Politics, Rights, The Gun Thing

Here’s something I can only describe as a wake-up call:

Rep. Andrew Clyde (R) is leading a coalition of GOP House members urging President Donald Trump to pick an Attorney-General who will “immediately” wipe away Biden-era ATF gun controls.  Clyde and 32 other House members signed an April 21, 2026, letter, asking Trump to choose and A-G who will “immediately cease enforcement of Biden-era gun rules and secure permanent – not temporary – relief.”

Yes, yes, and again yes.

I’m getting heartily sick of a Department of [alleged] Justice which pays lip service to the Constitution — and especially to the Second Amendment — but either fails to redress wrongs through inaction or by continuing to slavishly enforce older regulations which tramp all over the Founding Document.

Clyde and his colleagues also ask Trump to choose an A-G who will reform and clean house at the ATF. They view this task as including:

    • Purging the ATF of gun-grabbing bureaucrats;
    • Opposing any effort to create, operate, or maintain a federal firearms registry in any form;
    • Stopping the ATF’s release of sensitive firearm trace data in violation of the Tiahrt Amendment*;
    • Shutting down and deleting the ATF’s illegal, searchable gun registry known as the Out-of-Business Records Imaging System (OBRIS); and
    • Reducing NFA application processing times.

That “purging the ATF of gun-grabbing bureaucrats” should only be a precursor to moving the A and T part back to the Treasury (where it belongs), and a complete deletion of the F, because fuck them.

Clyde and his colleagues pointed to the support Trump received from gun owners during the November 2024 elections, suggesting he should now support them as they supported him: “Mr. President, American gun owners have been some of your most loyal and enthusiastic voters. They delivered for you at the ballot box, and they deserve to see their constitutional rights respected in return.

“The roadmap above requires no new legislation – it only requires leadership, will-power, and a Department of Justice that is genuinely committed to your agenda rather than protecting its own institutional inaction.”

Clearly, ex-AG Blondie wasn’t up to the job.  If I were Trump, I’d make Alan Gottlieb (of the Second Amendment Foundation) the AG, let him clean the place out for (say) two years, and then let him get back to doing his proper job at SAF.

Frankly, I don’t actually care what Trump does.  What I want is for the DOfuckingJ to stop harassing gun owners and go after the real criminals.  And to do it quickly.  If DJT can achieve that with his choice of Blondie’s replacement, so much the better.

*The Tiahrt Amendment is a provision of the U.S. Department of Justice 2003 appropriations bill that prohibits the National Tracing Center of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) from releasing information from its firearms trace database to anyone other than a law enforcement agency or prosecutor in connection with a criminal investigation. This precludes gun trace data from being used in academic research of gun use in crime.  Additionally, the law blocks any data legally released from being admissible in civil lawsuits against gun sellers or manufacturers.