Police State

Guns and employee wellness

My employer, as most do, has an Employee wellness program. The wellness program is a voluntary program that gets you a discount on your involuntary (thanks to Obamacare) employee insurance coverage.
Some employers are now saying that, if you refuse to participate in the wellness program, you will lose your employee heath insurance. How is this legal, you ask? After all, multiple Federal laws, including the ADA and the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) state that this is not legal. Well, leave that to the Federal Courts:

Not so, said a federal judge in Madison, Wisc., who ruled on Dec. 31 that employers can deny coverage without violating the ADA as long as the data gleaned from the wellness program is used for purposes of overall health coverage.

This is where guns enter the picture. The anti gun forces in this country want to have firearms added as a public health issue. Now suppose this comes about and your employer wants to use data on gun ownership to enhance your overall health coverage.

Take this one step further: say your employer wants to say that gun ownership is a health hazard, and you must give up your guns or give up your employer sponsored health insurance. You would be forced (by Obamacare in concert with your employer) to have one of three options:

1 Give up your guns
2 Pay a $2100 “tax” each year for not having insurance, plus the full cost of your healthcare
3 Pay a minimum of about $3600 a year for a basic health plan that has a $6000 deductible

By Divemedic, ago

Wholesale ticket writing through automation

Police in Central Florida now have a device that tracks the speed of every vehicle within range, records plates of all moving and parked vehicles, and automatically issues citations. Not only that, the system tracks the location of every license plate it passes, and the information is stored in a police database. Are you a politician or citizen that votes for cop paycuts? Well, the cops know where you have been, and let’s just say that you better change your tune, if you don’t want the information made public, or you don’t want some free lance “asset forfeiture.”

The Ekin Patrol, automated violations.

Welcome to the police state.

By Divemedic, ago

Some pigs are more equal than others

If you are suspected of being under the influence of alcohol, the FHP will require that you take a sobriety test. If you refuse, to
take the test, your license will be suspended for one year for your first refusal. Unless you are a cop, I guess.
According to a May 5 arrest report, Sgt. Meyer was driving an unmarked
sheriff’s department pickup truck with the emergency lights flashing, en
route to an off-duty job at Walt Disney World, when he rear-ended a car
on County Road 535 near Windermere. No one was injured injured in the
crash, which occurred just after 9 p.m.
1 So he was driving to an off-duty job in his official vehicle with his emergency lights flashing?
2 He was intoxicated while operating a department vehicle?
3 He pled “no contest,” which is the same legally as a guilty plea. He should be terminated immediately.

Except that he is a cop.

By Divemedic, ago

Good business, if you can get it

The median household income of my county is just about $44,000 a year. That is for a two income household in most cases. That is down from $47,000 just two years ago, which mirrors the nationwide decline of incomes that 35 of the 50 states saw this past year.

Washington, DC doesn’t have that problem. The median income there rose to $88,000- the highest of any metro area in the nation. This is due to the massive growth in the Federal government under the Obama administration, and the lawyers and lobbyists that this growth is bringing to the nation’s capitol.

What makes this trend REALLY disturbing is just how much the size of government is increasing: the poor in DC are getting even poorer, with the number of households making less than 50% below the poverty line increased. The poverty threshold for a family of four that includes two children under 18 was $23,283 in 2012, meaning that to be in deep poverty, that family of four would have to earn less than $11,641 a year.

So in order for median incomes to rise in DC, they have to overcome the increase in poverty, plus increase the median income. Think about that.

This is the Obama that the poor voted for: Blacks have a 27% poverty rate, and yet they vote for the man that put him there, simply because he is black.

By Divemedic, ago

In France

This article about a French Jeweler, who was being beaten at gunpoint during a robbery, is in jail for shooting the robber has a neat little factoid in it:

In a country where gun violence is rare but
armed robbery is increasingly common, the shooting – and the formal
charges of voluntary homicide – have placed the government in a
difficult position.

 So armed robbery isn’t gun violence? I thought that maybe the armed robbery was with a weapon other than a firearm, but no:


The robbery was carried out with a shotgun, he said. It wasn’t clear whether Asli and the accomplice both had firearms.

In fact, the article is filled with examples of firearm robberies. That can’t be. You see, the anti-gun crowd here in the US tells us that there is no gun crime in Europe because guns are illegal. 


Yet the sister of the 19-year-old who was killed says Turk shot him in the back and deserves prison.

“He shot a kid in the back. He’s a traitor, he’s a coward,” said Alexandra Asli, his older sister.
Asli,
who was shot dead in the street outside the jewelry store, had been
convicted 14 times in juvenile court, according to Eric Bedos, the Nice
prosecutor.

It seems that outlawing guns does indeed ensure that only outlaws will have guns.
By Divemedic, ago

Show me more money

Anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis knows that I think traffic tickets are a form of extortion. I talk about this enough that I have assigned the topic its own label.

The last time I got a ticket was in 2001. I paid the $184 fine. Eleven years later, I began getting letters saying that the court miscalculated the fine, and I actually owed another $32. I refused to pay it. I pointed out that the statute of limitations has passed, and they can’t do a thing about it.

So they sent me to collections. Now I get letters from a collection agency, and have been since last August. So far, I have received 22 letters. Now they are claiming that I owe $45. The letters have been increasing in frequency: from one a month last August, to one a week now. I have repeatedly told them that they can’t put it on my credit report because it is over 7 years old, they can’t do a thing about it legally, so I have no intention of paying. Since I am not going to pay it, they might as well save their money and stop contacting me.
 
Nope. Still getting the letters. Even though collection agencies are legally supposed to stop when you tell them to, in this case they are not required to, because they are collecting for the government. Another case of the government exempting themselves from the laws that the rest of us must follow.

Still not going to pay them. Still, how desperate is the government for more funding when they are reviewing cases that are a dozen years old?

By Divemedic, ago

Killer Cop

There are some lessons to be learned from the case of Phoenix Police Officer Richard Chrisman. He was caught on video and later admitted to planting a crack pipe on a homeless woman in 2005.

 Then, in 2011 he was arrested for murder when he placed his service weapon against a suspect’s head and pulled the trigger, after killing the man’s dog. His own partner turned him in.

So after all of this went down, he accepted a plea deal (according to the questionable reporting at this link) where he will plead guilty to negligent homicide with an opportunity to have the charge expunged from
his record after completing an unspecified term of probation. He was fired from Phoenix, but the plea deal will
allow Chrisman to regain employment as a cop in another jurisdiction or
even in Phoenix.

The family of the deceased boy sued the city for unlawful use of force resulting in death, and the court threw out the suit.

So what are the lessons?

1 There are actually a few honest cops left who are willing to stand up against their fellow officers who are lawbreakers. Thanks to Chrisman’s partner for having the morals to do this.

2 The police union in this case, standing up for a murdering criminal cop that plants evidence makes all unions look bad.

3 There is no limit to what a cop can actually get away with. This guy literally got away with murder.

4 Whatever you do, seriously think about what could happen if you ever need to call the cops.

By Divemedic, ago