A remote-controlled aircraft owned by an animal rights group was reportedly shot down near Broxton Bridge Plantation Sunday near Ehrhardt, S.C.

Steve Hindi, president of SHARK (SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness), said his group was preparing to launch its Mikrokopter drone to video what he called a live pigeon shoot on Sunday when law enforcement officers and an attorney claiming to represent the privately-owned plantation near Ehrhardt tried to stop the aircraft from flying.

“It didn’t work; what SHARK was doing was perfectly legal,” Hindi said in a news release. “Once they knew nothing was going to stop us, the shooting stopped and the cars lined up to leave.”

He said the animal rights group decided to send the drone up anyway.

“Seconds after it hit the air, numerous shots rang out,” Hindi said in the release. “As an act of revenge for us shutting down the pigeon slaughter, they had shot down our copter.”

I take note that Mr. Hindi is quite clear in his implication that his activity is completely legal and, therefore, he should not be hassled in his pursuit of said activity. It would be nice for him to take note that the activity in the Broxton Bridge Plantation was just as legal.

I have a number of issues with what went on, here, most of them with Hindi’s group, but I’d like to make a comment on the actions of those shooters that decided to engage the drone in flight. While I understand completely the urge to shoot the thing down, I must give credit to Mr. Hindi’s concern about the line of fire. Those shooters are responsible for where their bullets land when they shoot them, up into the air or anywhere else. The event they were attending was no doubt located there specifically to provide sufficient backstop to the bullets fired so as to keep them safely contained. By engaging the drone, they might very easily have overcome that barrier and some of their rounds might have flown into populated areas unsafely. Not cool, folks.

However, that shooting was severly provoked. While flying that drone may have been perfectly legal – and I would emphasize may have been – it is morally questionable to say the least. I would ask Mr. Hindi and his team to picture themselves at their home where their spouses and children are enjoying a lovely, sunny day relaxing in the sun. In order to provide the family with a comfortable place to enjoy the outdoors the team members all built privacy fences around their yards or patios. Some next door neighbor who happens to sit opposite of them on some issue or another decides to collect video of the family in hopes they’ll do something they’d be uncomfortable having splashed all over YouTube and erects a 35-foot-post in his own yard with a camera mounted atop it so the family can be viewed. Would Mr. Hindi and his team be ok with that?

Or are they presuming they have a reasonable expectation of privacy?

I’m guessing they would not be ok with the ongoing taping of their family on their own property, especially when they went to the trouble of putting privacy safeguards in place, albeit safeguards that proved to be ineffective. So, sure, what “SHARK” did may have been legal. But I would propose that it shouldn’t be.

Either way, a nation’s airspace is all of that above the ground that nations owns or controls. Should private citizens also be able to protect their airspace from unwanted trespass?

To the members of the plantation or anyone else suddenly facing this kind of invasion of privacy, I would recommend a solution that’s far less problematic than firing 9mm rounds into the air. I don’t know what model of drone the SHARK people were using but it appears to me a helicopter-type arrangement and it appears to cost several hundred dollars. May I propose that those targeted by SHARK equip themselves with an Air Hogs R/C Eagle Ray Redeco instead and, rather than fire ballistics, pilot a missile instead? At $30 a pop, you’ll win the economic battle with these people pretty quick.

Mason-Dixon’s latest polling shows the Virginia Senate race between George Allen and Tim Kaine dead even with both candidates getting 46% of the vote and 8% of voters undecided.

That’s good information but I would suggest that it might also be showing some skew because the GOP hasn’t decided on a candidate yet. George Allen is certainly well-known across the Commonwealth. He was, after all, the holder of this very Senate seat before our illustrious and nearly-invisible Jim Webb took up the space for the last 6 years. But he isn’t the only person wanting the GOP nomination and we haven’t made up our party’s mind on the matter as yet. Jamie Radtke, Bob Marshall, Christopher Shays, E.W. Jackson, Tim Donner, David McCormick, Rob Wittman and Corey Stewart are all in the race for that nomination and that’s a tremendous number of candidates. And, to be honest, I really haven’t seen much from any of them in the way of campaigning for the nomination. Perhaps it’s a bit early to be hearing anything – and I’ll likely be cringing over how much I’m hearing from them all later on – but I think there’s a lot of people out here waiting to see who gets the nod before they start talking about the vote in November.

If you haven’t done much research into these candidates, now might be a good time to start getting up to speed. We have a lot of important decisions to make this year.

Now, wait a minute, you say, that work was in the public domain! It’s not under copyright! Oh, it was in the public domain, you’re told, but it’s been taken back out and it’s under copyright now. Oh, and make that check out to Mister….

What I’ve just described is not some kind of police-state chain-yankage, it’s a very real, very likely consequence of the recent Supreme Court ruling in Golan v. Holder, handed down this past week. (SCOTUSblog has their usual wonderful coverage of the Supreme Court’s actions in this case right here in case you’d like to look it up.) The Washington Times editors made their dismay with this decision known on Friday and called for Congressional action to start reigning this in:

Members of Congress had been promoting these bills at the behest of Hollywood. Motion-picture and record studios have always feared the march of technology. In 1976, Universal and Disney sued Sony to try to stamp out the videocassette recorder. In 1999, the industry launched lawsuits to stop peer-to-peer file-sharing software and music downloads. Tinseltown has been wrong at every step. Once they resigned themselves to adapt to the market place, studios made billions on sales of videotapes and music downloads.

That’s why it’s time Congress told Hollywood to take a hike. Copyright law has strayed far beyond the original intent of the Founders. Justices Stephen Breyer and Samuel A. Alito Jr. made this point in their dissent to Wednesday’s Golan v. Holder decision. They cited correspondence between James Madison and Thomas Jefferson to show copyright was meant to be a strictly utilitarian device for the promotion of the arts and sciences. “The statute before us, however, does not encourage anyone to produce a single new work,” the justices wrote. “By definition, it bestows monetary rewards only on owners of old works – works that have already been created and already are in the American public domain.”

The logical consequence of the majority’s decision and the ever-expanding copyright push by Hollywood’s congressional fan club is that one day we could be forced to pay a toll to read documents as seminal as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, just as current law requires paying a tithe to the family of Martin Luther King Jr. for the privilege of using his famous speech on his national holiday.

I’m afraid I have to agree. I’m all for protecting the rights of authors, entertainers, musicians, and artists of all stripes to profit from their work. But, all due respect to the Justices, the clear meaning of the language in the Constitution was that there was to be a period where that profit was to be protected and then a release of those works into the public domain. According to SCOTUSblog’s analysis, the arguments made to the Court that Congress did not have the authority to put back into effect a copyright on a work that had been previously in the public domain all failed:

Those were the arguments that drew no support from the Court majority.   Noting that the challengers had argued that the Copyright Clause posed “an impenetrable barrier to the extension of copyright protection to authors whose writings, for whatever reason, are in the public domain,” the Court answered by saying: “We see no such barrier in the text of the Copyright Clause, historical practice, or our precedents.”  Neither the words of that Clause, nor the way it has been understood since the first U.S. copyright law was passed by the First Congress in 1790, supports the claim that the public domain is “inviolate,” the opinion declared.

I would argue that to reach that conclusion, you have to ignore the meaning of the term “public.” That term, defined as “of, pertaining to, or affecting a population or community as a whole,” can be characterized in logic as a set that contains all people. That’s all people. Within the scope of the legal boundaries of the Supreme Court of the United States, that’s all people governed by the laws of the United States and obligated to follow those laws. Once something is released into the public domain, that effectively means that it’s owned by all off us, individually and collectively. All of us have the right to make use of that material without further requirement to remunerate anyone – it’s ours. SCOTUSblog says further:

No one, the Court said flatly, obtains any personal right under the Constitution to copy or perform a work just because it has come out from under earlier copyright protection, so no one can object if copyright is later restored.

Again, only if you ignore the concept of what “public” means. In the 1st and 2nd Amendments (and elsewhere, I’m just using these 2 as examples) reference is made to rights of “the people.” As the Court held in Heller v. DC the rights referred to in the 2nd Amendment are individual rights, just as those referenced in the 1st are individual. Each and every member of “the people” holds the right to keep and bear arms and the fact that the amendment refers to the larger group does nothing to diminish that. So, too, the fact that the term is “public domain” does not somehow rob an individual of his personal right of ownership of anything within the domain of the “public,” of which he is a member. Indeed, what is the “public” if not a collection of individuals?

This is an incredibly dangerous precedent. Is it really that far-fetched to imagine that the companies responsible for the creation and development of all manner of medicines might somehow re-institute their copyrights on the forumlas, rendering any generic copy of their drug illegal unless licensed? You know what happens to the cost of drugs, then, of course. Or, perhaps, AT&T, as the decendent company of Bell Labs, might get the copyright on the transistor re-engaged. Every single electronic device in widespread use today depends on transistors. What do you think happens to all of that when the companies making all of these things have to suddenly pay royalties and license fees on everything they produce?

Like the Kelo v. New London decision, I feel the Supreme Court has just abdicated their judgement when they made this decision. Clearly, Congress needs to address this in a fashion that not even the slickest lawyer can turn onto its head.

First, understand that my position on America’s use and development of our own energy resources hasn’t changed. We need to be making use of them. And there’s a very, very good reason why, as I said back in 2008:

Within the span of 3 generations we now consider it so commonplace as to be unworthy of comment that people carry around phones in their pockets that are capable of making a voice call from almost anywhere in the country at any time, day or night. Those phones contain more computing power than entire buildings possessed 60 years ago. My phone is a Motorola Q, one of those combination phone/PDA devices. It connects me to my office e-mail, it stores our company’s entire employee directory, maintains a copy of my schedule calendar, and allows me to connect to the Internet from anywhere I can receive signal. (And in the eastern US, especially here in the DC area, that means virtually everywhere.) The average US household is expected, in the next 5 years, to be producing as much data flow to the Internet on a daily basis as the entire Internet saw in 1995. Every house. Every day. The pace of our advancements in information technology, medicine, telecommunications, propulsion, materials fabrication, and host of other disciplines is accelerating at a phenomenal pace and many of us are completely unaware of the ride we’re on. That pace depends – completely – on 1 thing: power. Without the energy to power our research and development efforts, we will go nowhere.

…

Obama’s take on things is that people just need to understand that their lives have to change and they have to use less. He’s fine with sky-high gas prices, he’s just sorry they shot up quick enough for us to notice. His plan for our energy needs, should he be elected, is to somehow make America use 15% less electricity by the end of his 1st term. There’s only 2 ways to do that, ladies & gentlemen, and that’s either to have all of the things you do now take 15% less energy than they do today or that you make do with 15% less of the things you do. To achieve a 15% improvement in energy efficiency in all of the things we use on a daily basis requires research and development. Those activities take power. If we’re going to actually cut the power usage by 15%, how much longer will it take to bring those 15% energy efficiencies to our devices? It takes money to make money, folks, and it takes power to make power efficiencies.

We can’t get there with a power system that we don’t have in place. We can only use the one we’ve got:

As has been said a number of times around the blogosphere, we have a particular energy infrastructure that’s been built over the last century. Like it or not, that’s the infrastructure we have. Only by using that infrastructure to provide the necessary energy for our research and continued production can we build an infrastructure that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels. Trying to do otherwise will bankrupt us at the very least. We should be developing every single domestic energy source we can and there’s absolutely nothing keeping us from pursuing those cleaner sources while we use what we have.

Well, nothing except half-billion-taxpayer-dollar “green” boondoggles that produce nothing and a President who makes decisions like this one.

The obvious mistake made in this decision is the deliberate refusal of an energy source from, literally, our closest ally via a transportation method that doesn’t run through hostile territory and can’t be easily disrupted by unfriendly foreign governments. We hear all the bleating about having to deal with nations overtly hostile to our interests – *cough* Venezuela *cough* – and yet when we’re virtually handed a solid source from arguably the most friendly nation to the US on the planet, President Obama turns up his nose? And pipelines like this are among the most stable of transport methods, unaffected by weather at sea and fully accessible to maintenance crews. Obama and his supporters would rather we have to transfer oil to ships, sail across the sea, transfer it back off…?

It was a mistake from a relationship stance, too. Canadians are feeling justifiably affronted at an American government that refuses to buy oil from them but cheerfully deals with the likes of Hugo Chavez and whatever leadership OPEC has this year. PM Harper isn’t going to just let the oil sands sit and sulk while America comes to its senses. The day after Obama made his announcement, Harper was talking to the Chinese. They’ll be happy to take the oil – which has to be shipped to them, by the way, increasing the chances of a major spill.

Which brings up the mistake of thinking that the environment’s going to be somehow better for this decision. So, instead of buying the oil that we need and are going to buy elsewhere, anyway and having the pipeline company and refineries held to US environmental standards, we’re going to watch the oil sold to a nation that doesn’t give a crap about any of that stuff. The environment – the global environment that the greens all claim to be so concerned about – is going to be worse off, not better, with that oil in China’s hands.

Lastly, all of that work on the pipeline, in the refineries, and the related industries that serve both of them would have to be done to see this project completed. That’s a lot of jobs, and well-paying ones, too. Some estimates run as low as several thousand jobs. Taken collectively, it would likely be tens of thousands. And this from just 1 project, paid for completely by private enterprise and taking not 1 dime of public money. As opposed to the President’s darling Solyndra who sucked up a half-billion in taxpayer dollars and is now throwing literally millions in assets into trash dumpsters.

This isn’t a glitch or some kind of off week for the President. This decision was made with his strategy firmly in mind and he couldn’t care less what the long-term ramifications are. He’s focused completely on getting past November so he can ride another 4 years of this nonsense. I said in 2008 that elections have consequences. This is one of them. America made a mistake electing someone so completely out of his depth to the top executive position in our federal government. We don’t have to repeat that error but we do have to stay alert for the evidence before our eyes.

It was the first real application of the “Army of Davids” effect written about by Prof. Glenn Reynolds. An ad hoc gathering of highly skilled professionals applied their collective abilities and tore the veil of CBS’s authority away to reveal the truth and it shone a very uncomfortable light on Rather and his team.

Fast forward to this week and we’re seeing it all over again. ABC News is at the heart of it this time, giving air time to the ex-wife of Mr. Gingrich who boldly claimed that she could destroy his career with a mere utterance. Without any attempt to actually authenticate anything she was saying, ABC simply spread as vicious a spate of gossip as they could and they did it the night before a presidential primary. This isn’t news, folks, this is just trying to air anything that might be harmful to a particular candidate in the hopes that something, somehow will stick. You’d have thought that ABC would know better – and that CNN and John King would know better than to make it the lead question in the debate CNN hosted – than to try this kind of crap given the state of how easy it is to get background information on these matters and how easy it is for people to respond to such obvious bias.

I haven’t made any decisions about who I support and there are things about Newt Gingrich I don’t like. But I, and many of my fellow Americans, are fed up with the so-called mainstream media’s constant slant to the left and the impetus of the media to do less reporting and do more “gotcha!” hunting.

For anyone who may have missed Gingrich’s response to CNN’s John King, here it is:

The Second Amendment Foundation and Association of  New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs will appeal a federal judge’s ruling Friday  that “the Second Amendment does not include a general right to carry handguns outside the home.”

Federal Judge William H. Walls, a Clinton appointee, dismissed a case filed by both organizations challenging New Jersey’s handgun carry laws, which have all but eliminated the right to self-defense with a firearm outside the home.

The text of the 2nd Amendment is quite clear in that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed and there is nothing in it that even remotely implies that said right only operates on property you own. No other protection offered by the Consititution is limited in this fashion. Can you imagine for a second the firestorm that would be unleashed were the right to free speech or to worship or to be free from  unreasonable search and seizure to be ruled invalid outside your own home? Preposterous.

And yet, this appointee of President Clinton saw fit to look at existing case law and guidance from the Supreme Court in Heller v. DC and McDonald v. Chicago and conclude that this 1 right out of all of them suddenly doesn’t apply past your property line. SAF intends to appeal this to the Supreme Court where, I would hope, the honored Justices will overturn Judge Screwloose with extreme predjudice. Obviously there are people on the Federal Bench who don’t consider their oaths to uphold the Constitution to be binding. They need a reminder.

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman is expected to withdraw his bid for the Republican presidential nomination and throw his support to Mitt Romney, Fox News learned Sunday.

Huntsman is set to announce his withdrawal from the race Monday at 11:00 a.m. ET at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center in South Carolina, at which time he will endorse his former rival.

Huntsman may have some good ideas and positions but you have to be able to do the work to at least get on ballots if you want to be taken as a serious contender. I mean, in 2008 people were busting Fred Thompson’s chops about “not really wanting it” and he managed to get on the ballot.

It’s starting to look like that failure to get on the ballot isn’t really going to make much of a difference in Virginia, tho. At this rate, Romney and Paul will be the only people still left in the race by Super Tuesday.