All Blog Posts from Political Hotsheet

On August 4, White House aide Macon Phillips announced the launch of flag@whitehouse.gov, which encouraged Americans to report "fishy" information related to the the Obama health care proposal. Phillips' announcement was titled "Facts Are Stubborn Things."

Well, so is public opinion, as the White House acknowledged on Monday by quietly pulling the plug on the flag@whitehouse.gov e-mail address.

Messages sent there are now bounced back with this response:

: host mailhub-wh2.whitehouse.gov[63.161.169.140] said: 550 5.2.1 ... The email address you just sent a message to is no longer in service.We are now accepting your feedback about health insurance reform via:http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck (in reply to RCPT TO command

The "Reality Check" Web page on WhiteHouse.gov doesn't encourage reporting misinformation to Washington, D.C.; instead, it features some videos about President Obama's proposal. There is an option to submit comments, but the Web form stresses "Please refrain from submitting any individual's personal information, including their email address, without their permission."

That's almost the opposite of the original flag@whitehouse.gov program, which had no obvious privacy safeguards -- and which became the focus of spirited criticism over the last two weeks.

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Last year's U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the Second Amendment did not, contrary to what you may have heard at the time, resolve very much.

Unanswered are questions about carrying firearms in public, gun sales on government property, firearm registration, guns in government housing, handgun restrictions that aren't exactly the same as the District of Columbia's, zoning and gun stores, and so on. And so far, at least, lower courts have been overwhelmingly hostile to gun owners' rights.

The latest example is a decision late Thursday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, which said that a criminal defendant may not be allowed to present a Second Amendment defense to a federal jury in Utah. It came after the appeals court granted an extraordinary emergency appeal, called a writ of mandamus, from the Justice Department after the district judge agreed to allow those jury instructions.

The defendant, Rick Engstrum, has an earlier misdemeanor domestic violence conviction and has been charged with possessing a firearm in violation of a federal law that applies to anyone "who has been convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence." He has pleaded not guilty.

(The prosecution arose when Engstrum broke up with his girlfriend, who subsequently told police that he had a gun in his bedroom. Engstrum voluntarily showed police the gun, which he inherited from his father; there's no evidence he has ever used the firearm, let alone threatened anyone with it.)

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Nearly two years ago, the Bush administration sided with the major record labels in their civil lawsuit against an alleged, and briefly famous, Kazaa user named Jammie Thomas. Now the Obama administration is as well.

In a legal brief filed on Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice said the whopping $1.92 million fine that the Recording Industry Association of America slapped on Thomas was perfectly constitutional.

Federal prosecutors argue the relevant law is "carefully crafted" and consistent with "due process" and part of a necessary "regime to protect intellectual property. Under current law, copyright holders can sue for up to $150,000 per work (such as an MP3 file, DVD, or book).

Their brief adds: "Congress took into account the need to deter the millions of users of new media from infringing copyrights in an environment where many violators believe that they will go unnoticed." It does not take a position on issues other than the constitutional ones.

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When William Kostric showed up outside President Obama's town hall meeting in Portsmouth, N.H. on Tuesday, he didn't expect to be the object of a storm of media scrutiny. The handgun that was -- legally -- strapped to his leg in full view of the television cameras may have had something to do with it.

Kostric's name has popped up in over 72,000 Web pages posted in the last few days, according to a date-limited Google search. A New York Times columnist used him as an example in a piece that claimed members of Congress are looking "semiheroic" by comparison; Salon.com's headline read: "Who was that gun-toting anti-Obama protester?" After featuring Kostric at least twice on Tuesday, MSNBC returned to him the next day when asking Rep. Ron Paul, the former Republican presidential candidate, what he thought of being armed in public.

In an interview with CBSNews.com on Wednesday, Kostric said he is a strong supporter of the Second Amendment and has carried his firearm openly in accordance with state law before. "We have a regular open carry contingent in New Hampshire," he said. "We do litter pickups and normal everyday events. People do that with their firearms... A right not exercised is a right lost."

The image of an armed man who was not a policeman anywhere near a presidential event sent TV commentators into fits -- especially when this one happened to be carrying a sign saying "It Is Time To Water The Tree Of Liberty," a reference to Thomas Jefferson's famous phrase. It also seemed to fit the theme of escalating violence and undercurrents of racism at town hall meetings, even though the first person hospitalized appears to have been one Kenneth Gladney, 38, a black conservative activist from St. Louis, who was handing out literature.

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An Opinion Column From Declan McCullagh:

New Hampshire state law is pretty clear about protecting its citizens' rights to carry firearms in public. Carrying a pistol or revolver openly is permitted without a license; carrying a concealed weapon requires a license from the state or local police.

William Kostric took advantage of that law on Tuesday to show up outside President Obama's Portsmouth, N.H. town hall meeting and hold a sign saying "It Is Time To Water The Tree Of Liberty." That invokes a phrase from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Kostric did not immediately respond to an interview request from CBSNews.com.

Portsmouth police spokesman Lt. Frank Warchol told the Boston Globe that because Kostric was on private property -- it belongs to a church near the school with the town hall meeting -- he would not be arrested. "We can't do anything about it," Warchol said. "Obviously he's on our radar screen at this time."

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One question left unanswered by the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Second Amendment ruling last year is this: When do law-abiding Americans have the right to carry firearms in public for self-defense?

In a lawsuit filed against the city of Washington, D.C. on Thursday, the Second Amendment Foundation aims to find out.

The plaintiffs are four gun owners who were denied licenses to carry firearms in public on their person, which nearly all states permit. All U.S. states except Illinois and Wisconsin grant licenses for concealed carry, and 36 states require local police to issue the licenses unless there's a valid reason (such as a criminal history) not to do so.

The District of Columbia is a special case. Its city code says nobody may carry "either openly or concealed on or about their person, a pistol, without a license." But a law enacted in December 2008 appears to have curbed the ability of the police chief to grant those licenses.

"This really isn't about concealed carry," Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, told CBSNews.com in an interview on Thursday evening. "It's about being able to carry a gun, period. D.C. can prescribe some form or fashion or regulation or restrictions, but there's no way they can say you can't do it at all."

Part of the blame for this uncertainty -- how far does the Second Amendment extend? -- can be laid at the doors of no less an authority than the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Sensitive files including Secret Service safehouse locations, military rosters, and IRS tax returns can still be found on file-sharing networks, according to a report to a U.S. House of Representatives committee on Wednesday.

In many cases, that's because federal government employees or contractors installed peer-to-peer software on their computers without paying attention to which documents would be shared, Robert Boback, the chief executive of Tiversa, told the panel.

Boback said his company found the Secret Service's evacuation plans for the first lady and motorcade routes. (See an interview with Tiversa about Marine One documents found on a peer-to-peer network this spring.)

That led some politicians to announce that new federal laws were necessary to stop inadvertent file sharing.

"I'm planning to introduce a bill," said Rep. Edolphus Towns, a New York Democrat who heads a House oversight committee. He said his legislation would limit the use of peer-to-peer software on all computer networks operated by the federal government or its contractors.

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The Obama administration is raising the stakes in a fight over states' rights and firearm ownership by arguing that new pro-gun laws in Montana and Tennessee are invalid.

In the last few months, a grass-roots, federalist revolt against Washington, D.C. has begun to spread through states that are home to politically active gun owners. Montana and Tennessee have enacted state laws saying that federal rules do not apply to firearms manufactured entirely within the state, and similar bills are pending in Texas, Alaska, Minnesota, and South Carolina.

Yet the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and Explosives now claims that that not only is such a state law invalid, but "because the act conflicts with federal firearms laws and regulations, federal law supersedes the act."

Tennessee's law already has taken effect. The BATF's letter on July 16 to firearms manufacturers and dealers in the state says "federal law requires a license to engage in the business of manufacturing firearms or ammunition, or to deal in firearms, even if the firearms or ammunition remain within the same state."

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Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor refused on Wednesday to elaborate on her views about firearms regulations and the Second Amendment, saying she would "make no prejudgments" about future firearms-related cases.

President Obama's first nominee to the high court did say that she believed Americans do not currently enjoy a fundamental right to bear arms, which echoes her two previous rulings on the topic as an appeals court judge.

Existing Supreme Court decisions indicate the Second Amendment only limits "the actions the federal government could take with respect to the possession of firearms" and can't be used to strike down broad state laws, Sotomayor told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual right from overreaching federal laws (and in federal enclaves like the District of Columbia). The case is called D.C. v. Heller.

But the justices chose not to rule on the broader question of whether the Second Amendment's guarantee of the right to keep and bear arms applies to state laws. Attorneys in two cases raising that question -- including an appeal of Sotomayor's January 2009 decision -- have petitioned for Supreme Court review in the last few weeks, and another petition is likely by the end of the summer.

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The twin questions of whether Americans have the constitutional right to keep and bear arms, and precisely what Judge Sonia Sotomayor thinks of that proposition, have surfaced this week during her U.S. Senate confirmation hearings.

Both questions are timely. In two separate cases before the 2nd Circuit, Sotomayor took a narrow view of the Second Amendment right of self-defense, and her more recent decision is likely to end up before the U.S. Supreme Court later this year.

That case is called Maloney v. Rice, and it addresses whether the Second Amendment can be invoked to strike down restrictive laws against weapons that individual states have enacted.

A three-judge panel including Sotomayor unanimously rejected that view in January 2009, ruling that the Second Amendment "imposes a limitation on only federal, not state, legislative efforts." All members of the panel agreed with this sentiment, but because the opinion was unsigned, it's not clear who wrote it.

"As a result of this very permissive legal standard -- and it is permissive -- doesn't your decision in Maloney mean that virtually any state or local weapons ban would be permissible?" asked Sen. Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, during Tuesday's meeting of the Senate Judiciary committee.

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