{"id":4945,"date":"2009-10-06T16:40:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-06T16:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=4945"},"modified":"2010-01-13T07:15:41","modified_gmt":"2010-01-13T13:15:41","slug":"us-department-of-fish-and-wildlife-needs-a-reality-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/06\/us-department-of-fish-and-wildlife-needs-a-reality-show\/","title":{"rendered":"US Department of Fish and Wildlife Needs a Reality Show"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You know what we need to see?  How about a reality show about the tough guys in the US Department of Fish and Wildlife conducting their raids in <a href=\"http:\/\/washingtontimes.com\/news\/2009\/oct\/05\/criminalizing-everyone\/\" target=\"_blank\">defense of helpless orchids<\/a>?<\/p>\n<ul><i>&#8220;You don&#8217;t need to know. You can&#8217;t know.&#8221; That&#8217;s what Kathy Norris, a 60-year-old grandmother of eight, was told when she tried to ask court officials why, the day before, federal agents had subjected her home to a furious search.<\/p>\n<p>The agents who spent half a day ransacking Mrs. Norris&#8217; longtime home in Spring, Texas, answered no questions while they emptied file cabinets, pulled books off shelves, rifled through drawers and closets, and threw the contents on the floor.<\/p>\n<p>The six agents, wearing SWAT gear and carrying weapons, were with &#8211; get this- the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.<\/p>\n<p>Kathy and George Norris lived under the specter of a covert government investigation for almost six months before the government unsealed a secret indictment and revealed why the Fish and Wildlife Service had treated their family home as if it were a training base for suspected terrorists. Orchids.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s right. Orchids.<\/p>\n<p>By March 2004, federal prosecutors were well on their way to turning 66-year-old retiree George Norris into an inmate in a federal penitentiary &#8211; based on his home-based business of cultivating, importing and selling orchids. <\/i><\/ul>\n<p>He failed to fill out the proper forms.  He&#8217;s lucky not to get shot inadvertently resisting regulatory violations or not to get placed on an orchid offender registry.<\/p>\n<p>After that reality show debuts on Animal Planet, maybe we can get one where people get thrown to the ground and beaten with batons for signing the wrong date on a form where they&#8217;ve said they&#8217;ve not knowingly entered fraudulent information.  <b>Because they know today is Tuesday, October 6, not Tuesday, October 5, dammit!<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You know what we need to see? How about a reality show about the tough guys in the US Department of Fish and Wildlife conducting their raids in defense of helpless orchids? &#8220;You don&#8217;t need to know. You can&#8217;t know.&#8221; That&#8217;s what Kathy Norris, a 60-year-old grandmother of eight, was told when she tried to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-federal-government","category-government-overreach","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4945"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5146,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4945\/revisions\/5146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}