Free Republic

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,...

Pastor David Jones and his wife Mary have been told that they cannot invite friends to their San Diego, Calif. home for a bible study....

A San Diego pastor says county officials have told him he needs a permit to host a weekly Bible study in his home. Pastor David Jones and his wife, Mary, were hosting the weekly study near their church, when they say they were visited by a county code enforcement officer. According to Dean Broyles, an attorney for the Joneses, the county official asked the pastor if they hosted a regular weekly meeting in their home, and if they prayed and said "Amen" and "Praise the Lord" at those meetings. After replying in the affirmative to those inquiries, a subsequent citation...

Pastor David Jones and his wife Mary have been told that they cannot invite friends to their San Diego, Calif. home for a bible study — unless they are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars to San Diego County. "On Good Friday we had an employee from San Diego County come to our house, and inform us that the bible study that we were having was a religious assembly, and in violation of the code in the county." David Jones told FOX News. "We told them this is not really a religious assembly — this is just a...

NICKTOWN — When she wakes from restless sleep in the middle of the night, Susan Miller thinks about the man who put her family out of their rural Blacklick Township farm. The Amish mother would like to talk to Cambria County Judge Norman Krumenacker, who ordered the house, barns and outbuildings padlocked because she and her husband John violated building codes and sewage regulations at their 49.5-acre homestead. "I sat up in bed the other night, and I was thinking that I feel bad he has to do this to us. I wanted to write him a letter to tell...

A San Diego pastor and his wife claim they were interrogated by a county official and warned they will face escalating fines if they continue to hold Bible studies in their home. The couple, whose names are being withheld until a demand letter can be filed on their behalf, told their attorney a county government employee knocked on their door on Good Friday, asking a litany of questions about their Tuesday night Bible studies, which are attended by approximately 15 people. "Do you have a regular weekly meeting in your home? Do you sing? Do you say 'amen'?" the official...

Surprise, Ariz., doesn't look very surprising. It might be anywhere in the suburban West. Home Depot and Wal-Mart rise like islands from an ocean of pavement, and late-model SUVs gleam in the midday sun. Homes with red-tiled roofs line up like stucco boxes on a giant supermarket shelf. There's little to distinguish this from the hundreds of square miles of housing developments that have sprouted around Las Vegas and San Diego. If it weren't for the palm trees, you could be in suburban Salt Lake City. But only Surprise has the Radiant Church. Inside this 55,000-square-foot behemoth, 50-inch plasma-screen televisions...

Beverly Anderson is mad as hell. She just started to get tickets for parking in her own driveway. That's right. The District of Columbia is ticketing people who park their cars in their own driveways. ---- So what does the law say? "Any area between the property line and the building restriction line shall be considered as private property set aside and treated as public space under the care and maintenance of the property owner." ----------- Basically what that means is most property owners in the District don't own the land between their front door and the sidewalk, but they...

Tim Clements was excited about getting his new business up and running. Several weeks ago, he put up an impressive sign on the gate of his 10-acre horse farm on remote Hampstead Drive, tucked away in a pastoral setting in southeast Hernando not far from the Pasco County line. He named the business the CJ Dude Ranch, combining his last name and that of David Jennings, co-owner of the property. "I just named it for us two dudes,'' he said. "Two guys on a farm with horses.'' Clements put the finishing touches on a new Web site, cjduderanch.com, that features...

Idaho town could ban drive-thru windows02:39 PM MDT on Monday, April 13, 2009 SANDPOINT -- Residents in this northern Idaho city might have to start waving bye bye to drive-through businesses. A proposal to prohibit drive-through services recently passed the city's planning and zoning commission and goes before the city council in May. If approved the ordinance would regulate drive-through restaurants, banks, coffee shops, pharmacies, dry cleaners and other businesses that cater to customers in cars. Existing drive-through businesses would be allowed to continue but not rebuild. "Conceivably, as these existing drive-throughs degrade if they're not maintained, this could lead...

Looking back three years ago, it is hard to fathom how much has changed from the frenzied pace of development then going forward. Land and housing prices were still rising, ever-larger development projects were being launched, and growth debates were raging across Southern California. That’s all gone now. As key real estate players suddenly find themselves without jobs, as more developers file bankruptcy, and more projects bite the dust, the depth of this “downturn” is sinking in. Many, of course, have “been through this before.” By that they mean, they’ve weathered the cyclical postwar busts that have intermittently interrupted the...

Like so many others, I have long been a visitor to New Orleans. In my case, the first visit was 1979, when we studied the city to influence the design of the new town of Seaside. I have been back often – for New Orleans is one of the best places to learn architecture and urbanism in the United States. My emphasis on design might seem unusual, but it shouldn't be, for the design of New Orleans possesses a unique quality and character comparable to the music and the cuisine that receives most of the attention. During those visits, sadly,...

LAKEWOOD, Ohio -- Lakewood residents could be charged up to $400 if they don't recycle. A new law makes recycling mandatory starting July 1 for people who get municipal trash collection, NewsChannel5 reported. If people do not separate recyclable materials, the city can charge a fee. For the first violation, it's a minimum of $50, $100 for the second offense and up to $400. The new law authorizes the city to either charge residents a fee for city employees to separate recyclable materials or to stop trash collection to a home altogether. An educational handbook will be sent out to...

Having a couch, love seat or spare mattress on your porch could be illegal in Pittsburgh if City Council makes final a tentative vote it took yesterday. All of the council members present voted for legislation banning mattresses, box springs, sofas and upholstered chairs from non-enclosed porches, primarily to prevent the celebratory burning of such items, as has happened repeatedly in Oakland. After showing council video of couches, ignited in the streets of Oakland after the Steelers Super Bowl win and during a street festival, Councilman Bruce Kraus urged his colleagues not to repeat last week's postponement of his legislation....

Pittsburgh City Council today gave its unanimous, initial approval to legislation banning mattresses, box springs, sofas and upholstered chairs from city porches, primarily to prevent the celebratory burning of such items, as has happened repeatedly in Oakland. Councilman Bruce Kraus showed council video of couches, ignited in the streets of Oakland, after the Steelers Super Bowl win and during a street festival. Last week council postponed the legislation for a week and asked for the Law Department's opinion, and though it hasn't been provided, he urged prompt action. "Rome is burning, and we just wasted a week," he said, shortly...

Contrary to a parade of films and books demonizing life in the 'burbs, those who live there love it ___ Suburban angst makes for good novels and films, but people who live between the country and the city in the United States like their lawns and driveways. Suburbanites are significantly more satisfied with their communities than people who live in cities, small towns or rural areas, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center's Social & Demographics Trends Project. "Ever since there have been suburbs, there have been harsh critiques of suburbs - a common one being that they...

THE lawns are green and well-tended. The swimming pools are filled with water, not mosquitoes. Steve Cushman, head of the local chamber of commerce, counts just 27 empty storefronts out of 410 along the city’s main shopping street—a rate that many cities in California would envy. In the past year Santa Barbara County has seen a slight increase in employment. The secret to its health? Hostility to development and lack of youth. Nowhere in California is immune to recession, but the oldest areas are proving most resistant. Of the ten counties with the lowest unemployment rates, nine, including Santa Barbara,...

To many in Old Town Alexandria, the sex shop that opened recently on King Street is nothing short of scandalous, a historical desecration just blocks from the boyhood home of Robert E. Lee. But to Michael Zarlenga, it's justice. Zarlenga spent $350,000 on plans to expand his hunting and fishing store, the Trophy Room. He worked with city officials for almost two years and thought he had their support -- until the architectural review board told him he couldn't alter the historic property. Furious and out of money, Zarlenga rented the space to its newest occupant, Le Tache. "I can't...

CLEARWATER, Fla. – It's a fish story that's turning into a whale of a legal tale. The owners of a Florida bait and tackle shop have filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Clearwater to defend their right to display artwork of marine life on the outside of their business along with a banner of the First Amendment to the Constitution. The salty dispute started in December 2007 when Herb and Lori Quintero invested their life savings to purchase and renovate a dilapidated building they turned into the Complete Angler, selling fishing accessories such as rods, reels and live...

HOUSE BILL No. 6394 September 3, 2008, Introduced by Reps. Elsenheimer and Walker and referred to the Committee on Intergovernmental, Urban and Regional Affairs. A bill to amend 2006 PA 110, entitled "Michigan zoning enabling act," (MCL 125.3101 to 125.3702) by adding section 409.

Like many other artists inhabiting the cluster of old brick ware­houses in Fort Point, Andrew Woodward had cast a wary eye toward the wave of development sweeping the neighborhood near the Boston waterfront. But rather than getting priced out, Woodward is moving into a 92-unit converted warehouse topped by a gleaming glass-and-steel canopy. Woodward and his wife, a furniture maker, were able to purchase one of three affordable live/work spaces at FP3—which opened last summer with penthouse units starting at $1.8 million and studios at $350,000—thanks to a program aimed at keeping artists in Boston. With its concierge and swanky...

When clothes dryers account for at least 6% of the electricity used by U.S. households, is it any wonder that line-drying is coming back? In places where the practice is banned as an unsightly nuisance to neighbors, right-to-dry activists and blogging eco-moms are forming an alliance. Their cause: to reduce energy consumption and to call upon sunlight rather than bleach to get those whites even whiter. The movement also includes homeowners pinched by rising electric bills as well as some celebrity converts. Yes, there's even a blog dedicated to tracking who's who in L.A. line-drying. (For the curious, it's blog.linedryit.com/eco_facts/,...

Accessory apartments benefit society and the economy, and it's time for tax credits to promote them ___ Twenty years ago, we separately produced publications urging that governments should provide incentives for the creation of accessory apartments (sometimes called "mother-in-law apartments") in owner-occupied housing. Our writings pointed out that there was a shortage of small-unit housing; that household sizes had dropped, rendering many large homes ripe for partial use by renters; that it was irrational to maintain regulations that discouraged extended families from living next to each other; and that Germany, Japan and Finland had provided such incentives as housing policy....

Shortly after homeowner Herbert Harris started to build a wheelchair ramp for his wife and an extra bedroom for his ill daughter, he learned of the violations. Harris lacked permits for the projects, which violated city regulations. So he applied to the Board of Zoning Appeals for a variance, or an exception to zoning rules. At last week' s board meeting, he got the variance, as did eight other property owners. But afterward, Kay Wilson, a city attorney, made a plea to the board's seven members. "Gotta know what the hardship is. Please," she said, a trace of strain in...

What is the single most significant change that can be made in every town and city in America? One that would aid economic development, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, foster healthier lifestyles, reduce dependence on foreign oil, protect open space and wildlife habitats, and reduce wasteful government spending? Scrapping zoning codes.

TOWN OF FRANKLIN, Wis. -- Daniel Borntreger's Jackson County home looks like hundreds of other Wisconsin farmhouses. But it could cost him thousands of dollars in fines. The Amish farmer built it without a permit.

Scattered along the western stretch of the island of Molokai are the deserted structures of a vanquished people. These structures stand as eerie remnants of a years-long battle waged over the future of this island, an oasis of 7,500 with no traffic lights and no buildings taller than a coconut tree; with the state’s highest unemployment and highest percentage of Native Hawaiians; with a sweet way of saying you are welcome to visit as long as you understand its ways. On one side of the fight were the off-island owners of Molokai Ranch, a sprawl of property covering a third...

Many California planning and environmental groups are heralding the passage of legislation designed to address global warming by curbing suburban sprawl as a watershed moment, perhaps the state's most important land-use law in more than 30 years. "It's a sea change in the way we're planning and funding growth and development," said Stephanie Reyes, senior policy advocate with San Francisco's Greenbelt Alliance. "The winds are shifting, and this is the time to get on board." But she and other advocates acknowledge that the importance of SB375, signed into law by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in late September, lies as much in...

...So YOU thought KELO was abusive...??? KLEPTOCRACY 201 - Today's Lesson Today, class, we will learn how to exercise 'eminent domain' without that pesky need to pay the owner ANYTHING for the property... ...and using this new method, you can not only strong-arm the property away from its rightful owner, but you STILL get to keep shaking down the "property owner" for all those great  PROPERTY TAXES on the parcel, AS WELL! ...WHAT could be BETTER than THAT???!!! ...It's a Kleptocrat's DREAM!!!

The smart-development movement has made sprawl worse, not better

<p>La Quinta, Calif., resident says the space was a bedroom when she bought the house 30 years ago, but the city says it's her responsibility to undo the illegal conversion.</p> <p>Ageda Camargo was sitting in her shady frontyard, wondering aloud if jail is as bad as it sounds.</p>

Sarah Palin may be the heroine of the religious right, but Rev. Gene Straatmeyer vividly recalls a public run-in he once had with the now Republican vice presidential candidate over clergy support for a crackdown on bars. It was August 1996, just weeks before Palin's election as mayor of tiny Wasilla, Alaska. And Straatmeyer, a local Presbyterian minister and head of two church coalitions, testified at a City Council hearing for a measure to shorten the traditional 5 a.m. last call by a few hours.

Again, "Smart Growth" is a hot topic. This week Volusia County and most of its cities agreed to start yet another plan for "smart growth" by controlling future growth to certain areas in the county and limiting environmental impact in others. Monday, July 14, 2008 13 Central Florida News DELAND -- Volusia County and most of its cities have agreed to start a plan for "smart growth," limiting growth to certain areas in the county, and limiting the environmental impact to several building corridors. Forget sprawling homesteads. Your neighbors will be closer. That is just one change in how communities...

Jon Tennett loves to tinker in his garage. It's not an uncommon pastime for an 81-year-old man, but what is unusual is the city's response. Because Tennett fixes his neighbours' lawn mowers and other small machines, the City of Pickering has charged him with operating an illegal business - even though he's never charged a penny for his work. "They could get a lot of revenue elsewhere than looking at an old 81-year-old man trying to keep his mind busy," he points out. On the same street, a retired nurse is facing a similar problem. Janice Saroop has a lush...

A fisherman turned drug smuggler turned retired old salt, Floyd Brown claims he can find his way back here – one of the last Florida frontiers – without a compass from anywhere in the Gulf of Mexico. It's a skill, he says, he put to use more than once when he ferried bales of marijuana from Latin America to the Shark River in the 1970s. A direct descendant of the 19th century pirates who first settled here in these 10,000 islands, Brown is like many residents in Everglades City. Together they've managed to engineer a modern day coup in Florida:...

As the military prepares to close Fort Lawton, an Army Reserve base nestled in Seattle's Magnolia neighborhood, a city proposal to develop a 200-home subdivision that includes housing for the homeless angers some residents. ___ A newly released city plan to redevelop the soon-to-be-closed Fort Lawton in Seattle calls for building a 200-home subdivision of market-rate and affordable housing on about 18 acres. At a final community meeting Saturday at Fort Lawton, those living near the Army Reserve base said they didn't oppose housing for the homeless, but they worried that the total number of homes proposed and the percentage...