Free Republic

Obama’s Ocean Policy Initiative: Washington’s latest power grab As if the sputtering U.S. economy weren’t in enough trouble already, the Obama administration is cooking up a new scheme that will extend the heavy hand of Washington to somewhere it has never gone before. Unveiled with precious little fanfare on July 19 in the form of an Executive Order, the White House’s Ocean Policy Initiative will subject America’s waterways — oceans, rivers, bays, estuaries, and the Great Lakes — to federal zoning. Under the scheme, these areas would be managed according to the Orwellian-sounding notion of “coastal and marine spatial planning.”...

DeKalb County is suing a man for growing too many vegetables on his own land, Channel 2 Action News reported. Steve Miller of Clarkston said he plans to fight the county and has gotten his 2-acre property rezoned so that he can have his garden. But he still faces nearly $5,000 in fines, Miller told Channel 2. Miller has been growing a variety of vegetables for 15 years, and his neighbors support him. He sells what he grows at local markets and gives some away, he said. "It's a way of life, like it's something in my blood,” Miller told...

Quintanilla, 58, broke down in tears when I visited her last week. She fears for her livelihood after the county Code Enforcement Division gave her a warning notice on April 29. "Cease and desist,'' the official document screamed. They gave her seven days, then extended it to 30 so she could appeal. Never mind the other forms posted on the wall of her enclosed kitchen — the state license and the Pasco County tax receipt. Never mind that she has been doing business for five years, or that some form of lunch stand has stood in the same place for...

A small Protestant church in Leon Valley, an enclave within the city of San Antonio, is challenging a zoning code that prohibits the church from holding Sunday worship services. The city code excludes religious assemblies from some zoning areas because they decrease the city’s tax revenue and interfere with commercial activity. In 2007, revisions to the city code excluded churches from most of the city to maximize tax revenues, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty reports. Auditoriums, convention centers, private clubs and schools are free to locate in the city’s retail zones, but churches are not. The Elijah Group, an...

Despite a federal government assessment that South Haven has “excellent” potential for generating wind power, the Lake Michigan resort community has no rules in place to regulate wind turbines that could alter its skyline. “We know that there is a potential big push for alternative forms of energy like solar and wind,” said City Manager Brian Dissette. “We know that the wind is very good here so we want to have something in place that will balance quality of life with these new technologies.” The city’s Planning Commission in August began to consider a zoning amendment that would regulate wind...

Gun store posters take flak By Geoffrey Cooper - Rocky Mount Telegram Tuesday, October 20, 2009 NASHVILLE — For more than a week, a local gun shop owner has been under scrutiny regarding certain advertisements outside his front door. Nashville Guns owner Dennis Nielsen has been met with the watchful eyes of a few county officials and town residents for the storefront posters of women holding guns. Facing two documented complaints, Nielsen maintains that he has done nothing wrong and runs a clean business. Facing the Washington Street sidewalks are two posters inside of Nielsen’s gun shop windows. The first...

CANTON, Ohio — After taking a class that covered global warming last year, Jill Saylor decided to save energy by drying her laundry on a clothesline at her mobile home. "I figured trailer parks were the one place left where hanging your laundry was actually still allowed," she said, standing in front of her tidy, yellow mobile home on an impeccably manicured lawn. But she was wrong. Like the majority of the 60 million people who live in the nation's roughly 300,000 private communities, Saylor was forbidden to dry her laundry outside because many people viewed it as an eyesore,...

Consider nature...as Tennyson saw it, "red in tooth and claw." To glimpse a state of nature as Hobbes imagined it, where human life is "nasty, brutish and short," visit the Whole Foods store on River Road in Bethesda...you will see proof of this social equation: Four Priuses + three parking spaces = angry anarchy. Anger is one of the seven deadly sins. Therefore advanced thinkers are agreed that conservatives are especially susceptible to it. As everyone knows, all liberals are advanced thinkers and all advanced thinkers are liberals. And yet... Recently Paul Schwartzman, a war correspondent for The Post, ventured...

They praised the Lord by singing their hearts out and chanting prayers at packed services. But members of a congregation in north London have abandoned their church - because of a council noise ban. The Immanuel International Christian Centre was ordered to keep its amplified music and sermons quieter after a neighbour complained. But the church's pastor Dunni Odetoyinbo claimed Waltham Forest council had only told them to keep quiet so as not to offend the Muslim community. The church also argued the council had 'taken away its ability to praise God', and that congregation numbers had dwindled from 100...

Montclair might be one of New Jersey's more progressive communities, but even in a town known for its tolerance, a working fetish "dungeon" -- complete with a spanking bench, "interrogation cell" and stocks -- doesn't belong on the busy downtown strip. So says the township attorney in a decision that has bitterly disappointed Ed and Karen Dougherty, aka "Master Ed" and "slave Duchess," the owners of Dressing for Pleasure, a Bloomfield Avenue shop that sells fetish clothing and tools of the bondage-and-discipline trade, from flogs and paddles to masks and spiked collars. For years, the couple hosted discreet "play parties"...

Written by Jason Bellows on 29 July 2009 Marvin Heemeyer of Granby, Colorado was a profoundly frustrated muffler repair man. In the late 1990s–after years of protests, petitions, and town meetings–it became obvious to the 52-year-old that he was entwined in a gross miscarriage of justice. His business was ruined by some shady zoning changes, and Heemeyer contended that mayor and city council were corrupt. Even as he was forced to give up his legal fight and sell his land, he hatched one last plan to secretly retool his muffler shop to serve a single malevolent purpose: to construct a...

A Saudi-funded academy was granted a zoning exemption Monday that allows it to expand at its 34-acre Popes Head Road campus in Fairfax County, culminating a years-long campaign to enlarge the school at that location...The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, whose permission was required for the expansion, stressed Monday that the 6 to 4 decision was based on zoning questions, not on what happens in the school's classrooms. "The community will get an awful lot of development," said Penelope A. Gross (D-Mason). "I think [it] will improve the community." The academy, founded in 1984, has about 1,000 students in pre-kindergarten...

VIRGINIA BEACH Councilman Bill DeSteph has applied to the city for a permit to sell guns out of a Great Neck home he will be moving into later this summer. DeSteph, a gun collector, said he wants to expand his hobby into a business. If the City Council approves the permit, DeSteph said he will apply to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for a permit to be a licensed dealer. “Once you’re clear with city zoning, the federal requirements for dealers are the same out of your house or a storefront,” ATF inspector Michael Adkins said....

Does anyone know if this is legal? We just got a parking ticket for parking in the grass in our own yard. The ticket says "can not park on grass or unpaved area(even if your own yard). I swear to god this is what the ticket says and its a $50 ticket that doubles to $100 then doubles to $200 Does anyone know anything about this law????

APOLOGY IN SAN DIEGO IS NOT ENOUGH Words Eye View June 7, 2009 Dr. Greg Dixon Has the Conventicle Returned – Part II Well, the “Prayer Police” in San Diego couldn’t take it, anymore than the “Black Boots” of the State of Missouri could. They were the ones who withdrew their Domestic Terrorism report, with an apology, when they received an avalanche of criticism, after calling the followers of Ron Paul, Bob Barr, Chuck Baldwin and their followers “extremists” to be feared as militia types, who might endanger law enforcement officers or worse, in a report revealed this past March....

You may not have noticed, but Hollywood has: you’re miserable. No, really. According to Census Bureau numbers, roughly 75 percent of Americans live in suburbs. And, according to one of last year’s Golden Globe nominees for best picture, that’s eating away at us. “Our whole existence here [in the ’burbs] is based on this great premise that we’re special. That we’re superior to the whole thing,” declares the female lead in the movie Revolutionary Road. “But we’re not. We’re just like everyone else. We bought into the same, ridiculous delusion.” That “delusion,” as depicted in the film, is that a...

San Diego County officials agreed Wednesday to rescind a cease-and-desist order issued to a pastor holding a small Bible study in his home. In a letter to the pastor, the county’s chief administrative officer apologized for the incident involving a code enforcement officer who issued the order after reportedly asking the pastor’s wife inappropriately probing questions about the study. The letter informed Pastor David Jones and his legal counsel Dean Broyles, president of the Western Center for Law & Policy, an Alliance Defense Fund allied organization, that the order was wrongfully issued and that the county would conduct a thorough...

The Bartow County Planning Commission voted Monday to recommend denial of proposed changes to the zoning ordinance that targeted firing ranges. The unanimous vote came after a public hearing that lasted almost two hours in front of a standing-room-only crowd that spilled out from the hearing room into the hall. Now the proposed text amendment will go to Bartow County Commissioner Clarence Brown for a final decision at his scheduled meeting Wednesday. The proposed changes would not only impact new firing ranges, but those already in existence. Facilities would require a minimum lot size of 100 acres. Additionally, ranges would...

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist signed a controversial growth management bill that some say will stimulate the state's economy but others warn will increase urban sprawl. ___ Gov. Charlie Crist on Monday approved changes to Florida growth laws that supporters say will strengthen the economy and opponents predict will increase urban sprawl and traffic gridlock. The bill rewrites Florida's 25-year-old growth management law, principally by allowing developers in the most urban counties to add more housing developments without expanding roads and by allowing counties and cities to designate new urban areas that also would be exempt from certain road-building requirements. Sponsored...

David Jones, a pastor in National City, holds Bible study groups in his Bonita home. (Peggy Peattie / Union-Tribune) - Sweeping issues of religious freedom and governmental regulation are swirling around Pastor David Jones' house in rural Bonita, attracting attention from as far away as China and New Zealand. He says it all started with $220 in car damage. Jones and his wife, Mary, hold a weekly Bible study at their home that sometimes attracts more than 20 people, with occasional parking issues. Once, a car belonging to a neighbor's visitor got dinged. David Jones paid for the damage,...