90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, June 9, 2015

How Law Enforcement Can Take Your Stuff, Explained in 2 Minutes

Through a procedure called civil asset forfeiture, local, state and federal law enforcement officials have the power to seize property and money if it’s suspected of being related to a crime. In many cases, though, the property owner is never charged with a crime, and a trend has emerged of local and state law enforcement using civil asset forfeiture to raise additional money.

The issue is gaining traction at the state level, as state legislatures have begun to tackle reforms. Additionally, following policy changes at the Department of Justice and the introduction of legislation called the Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration Act (FAIR), Congress is turning to address civil asset forfeiture.

Here’s what you need to know about civil asset forfeiture and what experts are saying Congress needs to do to protect the rights of innocent property owners.

Girls With Guns

With the papal encyclical on climate change scheduled for a June 18 release, the liberal media can be expected to portray the Vatican document as a major step forward for the United Nations agenda of controlling and taxing the use of natural resources by governments and people. But a group of retired NASA scientists is taking on the pope directly, armed with the expertise that has come through decades of planning U.S. space missions and dealing with the most complex and difficult issues of climate science.

Their verdict: the pope is risking his moral status and his credibility.

In fact, this group is directly warning Pope Francis that if he embraces the climate agenda of the United Nations, he will be violating both scientific principles and the religious values he embodies that are supposed to be reflected in direct aid for the poor people of the earth.

But the pope is apparently counting on his status as “the most popular person on the Earth,” in the words of Dan Misleh, executive director of the Catholic Climate Covenant organization, to make the “moral” case that we live on “an abundant yet finite planet,” and that global limits to industrial growth have to be imposed on a worldwide basis.

The battle, now taking shape, will likely help determine whether U.S. sovereignty will be sacrificed in order to...

Every day there seems to be another article focused on how many individuals might lose their subsidies if the Supreme Court rules in favor of the plaintiffs in the King v. Burwell case.

Yet, an even bigger group of individuals harmed by Obamacare has an equally good claim for relief that hasn’t gotten as much attention—the people who, thanks to Obamacare, must pay more for health insurance but who never got subsidies.
The Obamacare subsidies were intended, in part, to hide the law’s unpopular effects. At their root, Obamacare’s costly regulations, dictating what insurers can sell and what individuals and employer can buy, have resulted in premium costs going up, not down. In the 34 states potentially affected by the Court’s ruling, those regulations have driven up costs not only for...

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