Eric Holder Strikes a Blow for Liberty

We had to wait six years, but finally, Attorney General Eric Holder does something good and useful.

U.S. attorney general bans asset seizure by local police

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - State and local police in the United States will no longer be able to use federal laws to justify seizing property without evidence of a crime, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said on Friday.

Local governments act as criminal gangs, stealing people's property. The worst of it is, if you are found not guilty, your property may be gone. If not, you have to pay massive storage fees to get your property out of impoundment.  I wrote about this back in 2010: 

How a working man in Denver lost his truck and his tools...

Mechanic Robin McAnally was driving to a work site in his GMC and needed a place to turn his rig around, so he went down a side street and as he was turning around, a woman opened the passenger side door, hopped in and offered him a Lewinski.  He turned her down, she got out and he headed back up the street.  Before he could get back onto the main thoroughfare, armed men came out of nowhere and forced him to stop and get out of his truck.

They took him to a warehouse where he realized he was not the only victim.  He was surrounded by others who had met a similar fate.  The armed men were taunting the victims as they made each man pose in front of his vehicle before it was towed away.

Criminal activity?  Yes, But...

I just described a “reverse john” sting staged by the Denver Police Department.  Robin was found not guilty by a jury of his peers after only 15 minutes deliberation.

Now exonerated, Robin went down to the Denver impound yard to retrieve his truck, only to be subjected to further abuse by the City of Denver. They informed him he must still pay $5,000 to get it back, even though he has done nothing wrong.

Illegal immigrants rob and kill, gangs run rampant, even killing a Denver Bronco football player, but the Denver Police have nothing better to do than entrap innocent citizens trying to get through a work day? And the city insists on collecting all fees even when they wrongly impounded the vehicle? This is state-sponsored theft.

Big Government Progressivism!  Behold Thy Fearsome Results!

Local talk show host Peter Boyles featured this story on his morning show, and boy did the progressive statists come out of the woodwork to criticize this man and stand up for a tyrannical government:

One person said it served him right driving through that bad neighborhood and he should learn a lesson from it.

Many noted that the man said his truck wasn’t worth the $5,000 impound fee so he should just forget it.

Activists scream that Denver's impoundment law violates the rights of illegal immigrants since they often drive with no license, no plates, no insurance, no right to be in the country...  But not one of the shrieking socialists stood up for a wrongly-charged man who needs his truck and tools to earn his bread.


Progressive Statism Destroys All It Touches, including Denver

I lived in Denver when I was a young man.  It was a nice place, full of working class people, college students and downtown yuppies.  Now it’s a fetid sewer, homeless bums wandering downtown, gangs shooting it out nightly, illegal immigrants taking over whole neighborhoods and killing citizens with drunk driving and outright murder.

Leftwing Libertinism disguised as liberalism twists a culture, causing a society to eat itself from the inside out like ants in a rotten log.

Denver can’t stop gangs from running rampant, and it has no will to stop illegal immigrants from bleeding the city dry, but it can sure go after law-abiding taxpayers to fund it all!  This dysfunction is not just confined to this once-great city.  This is a cancer that is progressively rotting the soul of this nation.
 
The heavy-handed state knows how to treat innocent citizens like criminals, but cannot stop the real criminals.  Over 3,000 people lost their lives on 9/11, but nobody lost their job.  Government officials who strip search us at airports can’t stop someone with a security clearance from harvesting a treasure trove of secrets and releasing them to the public.  Those charged with protecting us have failed, so they’ve turned on us, treating us all as criminals in the process.

Progressives of all parties dream of a Utopia America, while we realists dream of simple competence where lawbreakers are rolled up and law-abiding citizens are left to their liberties.

I want to congratulate Attorney General Holder for dealing a blow to tyranny and championing personal liberty.

Now, if I could only figure out why he did it...