NYC sues a gun store owner, and its attorneys ask the Court not to let the defendant reference the Second Amendment in his defense.  In such a jackbooted thuggish request, the city is essentially asking the Court to step on the defendant’s First Amendment right to say what he needs to say in his own defense!  Hey, who needs the Constitution in this court, right?  From the NY Sun:

Lawyers for Mayor Bloomberg are asking a judge to ban any reference to the Second Amendment during the upcoming trial of a gun shop owner who was sued by the city. While trials are often tightly choreographed, with lawyers routinely instructed to not tell certain facts to a jury, a gag order on a section of the Constitution would be an oddity.

“Apparently Mayor Bloomberg has a problem with both the First and the Second amendments,” Lawrence Keane, the general counsel of a firearms industry association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, said.

The trial, set to begin May 27, involves a Georgia gun shop, Adventure Outdoors, which the city alleges is responsible for a disproportionate number of the firearms recovered from criminals in New York City. The gun store’s owner, Jay Wallace, says his store abides by Georgia and federal regulations and takes steps to avoid selling firearms to gun traffickers. Mr. Wallace’s store is one of 27 out-of-state gun shops sued by New York City, and the first to go to trial.

City lawyers, in a motion filed Tuesday, asked the judge, Jack Weinstein of U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, to preclude the store’s lawyers from arguing that the suit infringed on any Second Amendment rights belonging to the gun store or its customers. In the motion, the lawyer for the city, Eric Proshansky, is also seeking a ban on “any references” to the amendment.

“Any references by counsel to the Second Amendment or analogous state constitutional provisions are likewise irrelevant,” the brief states. …

Bloomberg sucks.  Sorry, but that’s about as deep of an analysis I have of him as I can muster.

From FNC (h/t Kanaka Girl):

Poor residents will be rewarded for good behavior — like $300 for doing well on school tests, $150 for holding a job and $200 for visiting the doctor — under an experimental anti-poverty program that city officials detailed Monday.

The rewards have been used in other countries, including Brazil and Mexico, and have drawn widespread praise for changing behavior among the poor. Mayor Michael Bloomberg traveled to Mexico this spring to study the healthy lifestyle payments, also known as conditional cash transfers.

In New York, the two-year pilot program with about 14,000 participants will use private funds Bloomberg has raised because he did not want to spend government money on something that is highly experimental. More than $43 million has been raised toward the $53 million goal, Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs said.

The theory behind cash rewards is that poor people are trapped in a cycle of repeated setbacks that keep them from climbing out of poverty. A person who doesn’t keep up with his vaccinations and doctor’s visits, for example, may get sick more often and struggle to stay employed.

Bloomberg, a billionaire Republican, said he believes paying people in such circumstances to make good decisions could help break those patterns. The program “gives New Yorkers in poverty a financial incentive to look ahead and make decisions that will improve their prospects for the future,” he said in a statement.

Seems like a patently ludicrous idea. However, something even stupider follows:

But some critics have raised questions about cash reward programs, saying they promote the misguided idea that poor people could be successful if they just made better choices.

“It just reinforces the impression that if everybody would just work hard enough and change their personal behavior we could solve poverty in this country, and that’s not reflected in the facts,” said Margy Waller, co-founder of Inclusion, a research and policy group in Washington.

Wow. Just “wow”. The idea that poor people could be successful if they made better choices is “misguided”? Poor people changing their self-destructive personal behavior wouldn’t help get them out of poverty? Simply astonishing!

No wonder this lady served as a domestic policy adviser to Bubba! She reinforces leftist politicians’ warped and perverted view that people are simply unable to help themselves out of their predicaments and need the heavy hand of Big Mama Government to provide for them for the rest of their lives. After all, keep a person dependent on government, and you’ve got a guaranteed Democrat voter for the rest of that person’s life (and, in the case of Democrats, even after that person is dead).