Vin Suprynowicz

Civil forfeiture is the government power to take property suspected of involvement in a crime. And unlike cases of criminal forfeiture — the seizure of ill-gotten gains after a criminal conviction — police can seize property without so much as charging the owner with any crime.

This led to some widely publicized cases, a few years back, in which black motorists were routinely pulled over by local police and relieved of large sums of cash while driving on major highways in the South. The motorists weren’t charged, since a criminal conviction requires actual evidence. Instead they were told “We’re seizing this cash because we presume it was intended to buy drugs; if you want to come back here from wherever you live and fight it out in court, good luck.”

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On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 1:11 PM, Cxxxxxx Cxxxx wrote (reproduced below without edit, remarkably):

Dear Mr. Suprynowicz,

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I see where freshman Nevada Congressman Steven Horsford, the Democrat who believes big oil companies receive subsidy checks signed by the Secretary of the Treasury, but who at least is no longer in the position to call last-minute weekend meetings at the Nevada State Senate to shift state moneys out of public-school budgets and into the coffers of the otherwise private Lincy Foundation (is he any relation to the Sonya Douglass Horsford, Ed.D., who then showed up as a Lincy Foundation “Senior Resident Scholar of Education,” do you suppose?) has now weighed in on the Second Amendment, endorsing Democrat Barack Obama’s new-old gun control proposals as “reasonable.”

“I support the Second Amendment and the right of individuals to bear arms for recreation, hunting or self-defense,” Mr. Horsford told the Stephens Press Washington Bureau, last week. “That does not mean we cannot have reasonable gun laws to keep military-designed weapons out of our neighborhoods and communities.”

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The National Resources Defense Council has placed Nevada first in the West and sixth in the nation for heat records broken in the year 2012.

According to the environmental activists, 36 heat records fell across Nevada last year, with 12 of the state’s 17 counties experiencing record-breaking temperatures.
Nevada also experienced 14 rainfall records in seven counties, 11 snowfall records in five counties and 86 wildfires that charred 90 acres or more.

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It’s been half a century since Jack Finney’s 1954 novel (and Don Siegel’s 1956 film adaptation) “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” introduced us to the notion of “pod people” — creatures that look like our neighbors but turn out to be pod-grown clones lacking nearly all human qualities including, presumably, any sense of irony.

If David Letterman convenes an all-races child chorus to sing us a song on his TV show, we’re already laughing even before we find out what Politically Correct cliche he’s going to lampoon. But when the simpletons (or do they just consider us simpletons?) now in charge at the White House surrounded themselves with little children, chosen by race, who had written in letters detailing such well-thought-out policy prescriptions as “I love my country and I want everybody to be happy and safe” in a ceremony announcing yet another try at the standard police-state “disarm the civilians” agenda last Wednesday, did the jaded commentators of the Lapdog Press give them the dose of the ridicule they deserved?

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The divided Republican Party failed to mount much of a get-out-the-vote campaign this fall. Here in the battleground state of Nevada, National Republican forces, wary of a state party whose largest county organization (Clark) was dominated by a disgruntled Ron Paul insurgency, did an end run around the state GOP apparatus (such as it is), pouring in money to support Mitt Romney’s candidacy here through their independent “Team Nevada.”

That effort failed. TV buys were not enough.

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A newspaper in suburban New York has received a wave of criticism from its readers after publishing the names and addresses of all of the local residents with handgun permits in its coverage area, reported WHAS-TV Channel 11, the local ABC affiliate, on Christmas Day.

Hundreds of residents in New York’s Westchester and Rockland counties, north of New York City, were surprised to find their names and addresses listed on a map posted by The Journal News on Sunday, Dec. 23. Users can click any dot on the map to see which of their neighbors has a permit for a legally registered handgun. (Obviously, unregistered handguns possessed by criminals, which are far more likely to be involved in crimes, don’t show up.)

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During this fall’s election campaign, a few far-seeing observers warned “Watch out, Barack Obama and Harry Reid and Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer will end up trying to grab your guns.”

“Nonsense!” responded the mainstream media. ““Gun control hasn’t even been an issue in this campaign. Besides, the Democrats learned their lessons when they lost the House back in 1994: There’s no appetite for further gun control measures today.”

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John Lott, whose ground-breaking 1998 book “More Guns, Less Crime” exhaustively documented the way crime drops when local law is changed to require authorities to issue concealed firearm permits to all qualified applicants, made an interesting observation following the tragic Dec. 14 murders of 20 schoolchildren and six disarmed adults in Newtown, Conn.

Back in July, James Holmes, the accused Aurora, Colo., “Batman” killer of 12 theater-goers, had a choice of seven movie complexes within a 20-minute drive of his home that were premiering the “Batman” movie on which he was fixated.

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“U.S. Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada said Wednesday he would not rule out allowing tax rates to increase for higher-income Americans if it is coupled with substantial spending cuts … in a bid to avoid the ‘fiscal cliff,’” the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported last week.

Few bothered to read further down, where the newspaper reported Sen. Heller has also been in touch with retiring Congresswoman Shelley Berkley, seeking referrals to Ms. Berkley’s plastic surgeon and the designer who provided her with what the junior senator referred to as “that to-die-for wardrobe; do you think I could get away with wearing that shade of red? I mean, ooh, it’s positively carmine!”

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