The NRA has staked out a position on another Obama presidency:

The National Rifle Association will oppose President Barack Obama’s re-election next year, because the group expects an assault on Second Amendment rights if the president serves a second term, the organization’s leader said Wednesday.

Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice president and CEO, told The Associated Press on Wednesday — the eve of its annual convention in Pittsburgh — that the group’s opposition to President Obama is “no surprise,” but it felt a need to come out early and strongly.

LaPierre believes the president has tried to “fog the issue through the 2012 election” and obscure his long-standing opposition to gun owners’ rights.

“President Obama gives lip service to the Second Amendment, but what I really believe is going on is it’s just not a convenient time for a fight on the Second Amendment” politically for Obama, LaPierre said.

LaPierre said Obama, as an Illinois state senator, voted for or otherwise supported handgun bans, semi-automatic weapons bans, eliminating right-to-carry laws and raising excise taxes on guns, among other things.

“Then he announced for president and leafleted the country saying there’s no difference between Barack Obama and John McCain,” LaPierre said.

Although Congress approved expanded rights for people to bring guns onto Amtrak trains and carry them in national parks during his first term, President Obama’s administration includes “people who’ve spent their lifetime trying to destroy the Second Amendment,” LaPierre said, naming Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, UN Ambassador Susan Rice and Obama’s two Supreme Court appointees, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

“You’ve got two Supreme Court nominations that pretty well throw down the gauntlet about what this election’s about,” LaPierre said. “One more (Obama) Supreme Court nominee breaks the back of the Second Amendment in this country.”

“That’s what’s in store for gun owners in this country” if President Obama is re-elected, LaPierre said.

The issue of firearms in National Parks is a ruse.  Mr. Obama didn’t give us that – the Congress did, and Mr. Obama merely acquiesced.  Besides, I submitted a FOIA request for crime statistics in National Parks over the past twenty years, and have compared the data for 2010 with previous years.  The great apocolypse of murderous rampages and robberies in National Parks due to legal carry didn’t occur (I will be releasing that data soon).

But LaPierre has a point, in that the reaction in the lower courts to McDonald v. Chicago isn’t certain, while it is certain that at least one justice has it on her agenda to overrule the Heller decision.

My decision to keep my NRA membership was a wise one.

The reaction to President Obama’s April 13 speech at George Washington University has been, predictably, partisan and all over the map.

Democrats have hailed it as “real leadership” and Republicans have denounced it as harsh and misleading.

After reading the text of the speech, I have an altogether different reaction.  I wonder if any of you share it.

Obama’s speech leaves me with a profound sense of loss.

It is a sense of deep disbelief, that we, as a nation, could have drifted so far from our original moorings that we are reduced to this kind of speech.   That feeling is deepened by the events of  early April where the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, faced with a 2011 Budget they inherited from a reckless Democrat-controlled Congress that is on course to spend more than $1.7 trillion beyond revenues, did not have the nerve to push for more than a pittance in spending reductions.

Even the budget proposal put forward by Rep. Paul Ryan (R- OH) is no, real encouragement.  It takes such small steps over such a long period of time and does nothing to address the looming budget killer– Social Security– that it requires an impossible leap of faith to believe that intervening elections will not derail even this modest attempt at fiscal sanity.

Now we are being told that the national debt limit must— MUST!– be raised again just one year after it was raised to $14.294 trillion.

A friend recently pointed me to an opinion piece by David Brooks in The New York Times that is notable only for its inane quality.  I include it here as just a sample of how utterly clueless the State-run Media seem to be about current events.

Brooks’ main point is that, while everything may look much the same in today’s political landscape as it has since the 1980′s, his clairvoyance is telling him that some sort of change is coming:

If you dive deeper into the polling, you see the country is not mobilized by this sense of crisis but immobilized by it. Raising taxes on the rich is popular, but nearly every other measure that might be taken to address the fiscal crisis is deeply unpopular. Sixty-three percent of Americans oppose raising the debt ceiling; similar majorities oppose measures to make that sort of thing unnecessary.

There is a negativity bias in the country, especially among political independents and people earning between $30,000 and $75,000 (who have become extremely gloomy). It is hard to rally majorities behind immigration, energy or tax reform.

At some point something is going to happen to topple the political platform — maybe a debt crisis, maybe when China passes the United States as the world’s largest economy, perhaps as early as 2016. At that point, we could see changes that are unimaginable today.

New political forces will emerge from the outside or the inside. A semi-crackpot outsider like Donald Trump could storm the gates and achieve astonishing political stature. Alternatively, insiders like the Simpson-Bowles commission or the Senate’s bipartisan “Gang of Six” could assert authority and recreate a strong centrist political establishment, such as the nation enjoyed in the 1950s.

Neither seems likely now. But in these circumstances, rule out nothing.

Maybe it is just the cozy, isolated, elitist cocoon that Brooks inhabits, but it is fairly clear that the “new political forces” that Brooks is searching for have been on exhibition since 2009: the Tea Party movement.   How did Brooks miss the entire 2010 elections?  The enormous change in the House and even the Senate could not have slipped Brooks’ notice, could it?

And what about the Union Mobs in Madison, Wisconsin, trying to intimidate duly elected officials from carrying out their duties (with the direct and coordinated aid of Democrat “flee-bagger” lawmakers who hid out in Illinois)?

I am in my mid-forties, so my direct recollection of U.S. history prior to the early 1970′s is rather limited, but does anyone remember a time when the Federal government was so hamstrung and a President so disconnected from reality?

Where does this lead us?  The U.S. is on a collision course with the proverbial, economic iceberg and what passes for leadership at the moment is debating whether our final meal should be in the dining room or out on the ship deck.

Approximately three years ago the Taliban broke more than 1000 prisoners out of a prison near Kandahar, including some 400 Taliban fighters.  It’s happened again with more than 450 insurgents, but this time as a function of an innovative plan from both the inside and outside.

The BBC’s Quentin Sommerville said prisoners did not break out but in fact people outside broke into the jail.

More than 470 inmates at a prison in southern Afghanistan have escaped through a tunnel hundreds of metres long and dug from outside the jail.

Officials in the city of Kandahar said many of those who escaped from Sarposa jail were Taliban insurgents.

The Kandahar provincial governor’s office said at least 12 had since been recaptured but gave no further details.

A spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai said the escape was a “disaster” which should never have happened.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said it had taken five months to build the 360m (1,180ft) tunnel to a cell within the political wing.

He said it was dug from a house north-east of the prison that was rented by “friends” of the Taliban, and had to bypass security checkpoints and the main Kandahar-Kabul road.

About 100 of those who escaped were Taliban commanders, he added. Most of the others are thought to have been insurgents. The prison holds about 1,200 inmates.

“A tunnel hundreds of metres long was dug from the south of the prison into the prison and 476 political prisoners escaped last night,” said prison director General Ghulam Dastageer Mayar.

One escapee told the BBC it had taken him about 30 minutes to walk the length of the tunnel. The escape took most of the night and vehicles were waiting at the exit point to take prisoners away.

Kandahar’s provincial authorities said a search operation was under way.

So far, only about a dozen of the prisoners have been recaptured. Police said they were looking for men without shoes – many escaped barefoot.

The jailbreak is the second major escape from the prison in three years.

In June 2008 a suicide bomber blew open the Kandahar prison gates and destroyed a nearby checkpoint, freeing about 900 prisoners, many of them suspected insurgents.

After that, millions of pounds were spent upgrading the prison. The 2008 breakout was followed by a major upsurge in violence.

The BBC’s Quentin Sommerville in Kabul says the escape is a further setback for security in the area, and for the fight against the insurgency.

“This is a blow,” Afghan presidential spokesman Waheed Omar said. “A prison break of this magnitude, of course, points to a vulnerability.”

The Afghan politician and former MP, Daoud Sultanzai, told the BBC that the escape exposed “the porousness of our security apparatus”.

In the end it matters little from the vantage point of Taliban fighters in the countryside.  As I have observed before, given the catch-and-release program, the radicalization of half-way insurgents in these prisons, and the reflexive reversion to capture rather than kill, ISAF operations that capture insurgents are becoming a literal joke among the Taliban (see prior articles).  I pay absolutely no attention whatsoever to ISAF press releases that begin with “Taliban fighters detained …”

If this is offensive to sensibilities, if this causes an outcry over advocacy of harsh rules of engagement, if this causes moral preening over the rules of war, then so be it.  Withdraw from Afghanistan and end the campaign now.  In either case, prisons do not work in counterinsurgency.  Kill them or let them go, but putting them into a fake justice system is a worthless enterprise.

On another level, this is bad for the campaign in that it causes continued inability to trust anything associated with the Karzai regime, whether from ineptitude or malfeasance.

Prior:

Because Prisons Work So Well In Counterinsurgency

Afghan Prison an Insurgent Breeding Ground

Prisons Do Not Work In Counterinsurgency

Hamid Karzai: Defeater of the High Value Target Program

The Ineffectiveness of Prisons in Counterinsurgency

Jirgas and the Release of Taliban Prisoners

Prisons in Afghanistan

Prisons in Counterinsurgency

Hundreds of Taliban Loose After Prison Break

We’ve discussed the use of prisons in counterinsurgency before, but new reports are interesting, and maybe will even change our minds on the issue.

The Government of Afghanistan decides to set free the jailed Taliban fighters from Afghan jails as part of the Afghan peace process aiming to reintegrate the Taliban rebels with the Afghan government, officials said in Kabul.

The decision takes at the time that the transition of security responsibilities from the international forces to Afghan security forces will start at the mid of July 2011 which is enabling the international forces to pull out troops from Afghanistan.

Officials said that the Afghan government and the reconciliation commission have freed more than 5,000 Taliban rebels from Afghan jails including the Bagram prison running by the United States forces.

According to officials, they aim to encourage the Taliban fighters to give up violence and joint the Government of Afghanistan in an attempt to end up a decade of war in the country.

Recently the Afghan security forces released more than 100 Taliban detainee from prison in Ghazni province in southern Afghanistan where is known as the Taliban stronghold.

Officials in this province said they continue releasing jailed Taliban from government prisons based on the order of the Afghan president Hamid Karzai.

Members of the Afghan Peace Council said they took this decision as an “encouragement “for Taliban rebels to lay down arms and join the Afghan government.

However, there are concerns that the newly released Taliban fighters will rejoin the Taliban and will take part in war against the international forces and the Afghan government.

Responding to the concerns that majority of the newly released Taliban go back to Taliban and take part in war against the Afghan government and the international forces, the Afghan peace council said the newly released Taliban members give them “guarantee” that they will never go back to Taliban and stay with their families in Afghanistan.

“We assure the newly freed Taliban members to protect them from night raids and detention by US forces and to find them jobs.” A member of the Afghan Peace Council said.

Meanwhile, Afghan political experts said the reintegrated Taliban members somehow keep their ties with the Taliban leadership in Pakistan and Afghanistan and they are behind terroristic acts in the country.

They said several jailed-free Taliban members were behind the killing of UN staff in Mazar-I-Sharif and during the protest against the burning of Quran by a Florida based priest.

“Those Taliban members provoked the people to kill the UN staff and burn down their office in Balkh province.” Samad Ebrihiami an Afghan journalist and political expert told La Specula.com.

“The jailed-free Taliban members were among the protestors and they were carrying small-arms with themselves.” adds Ebrihiami.

He said this is big concern for the people in Afghanistan because the jailed-free Taliban members are living in nice houses and hotels in Kabul and other province and the Afghan government allows them to carry weapons for their security, and as he said, no one knows what these jailed-free Taliban are doing.

By the way, the Afghan political analysts said freeing of Taliban members from Afghan jails will strengthen the Taliban and will increase the Afghan security crisis.

But surely the Afghan political analysts are wrong about this, because, you know, prisons work so well in counterinsurgency.  Right?  Isn’t that why we’re spending all of this time and manpower and money imprisoning people?  Because it adds to the effectiveness of the campaign?  It adds so much, in fact, that it’s more important to guard prisoners than it is to go on patrol, find and kill insurgents.  Right?

Quoth Moses, in Exodus 12:12-13.

‘For I will pass through the land of Egypt on that night, and will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the LORD.

Now the blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you; and the plague shall not be on you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.

However, Mr. Obama has a different view of Passover.

Passover recalls the bondage and suffering of Jews in Egypt and the miracle of the Exodus, but U.S. President Barack Obama says its message is reflected in Muslim uprisings.

In his annual message, prior to his third straight participation in the Passover Seder, President Obama stated, “The story of Passover…instructs each generation to remember its past, while appreciating the beauty of freedom and the responsibility it entails. This year that ancient instruction is reflected in the daily headlines as we see modern stories of social transformation and liberation unfolding in the Middle East and North Africa.”

Having constructed a link between the Arab uprisings and Chosen People’s experiencing the miracles of the Creator that led them out of Egypt and towards the receiving of the Ten Commandments, the President concluded, “As Jewish families gather for this joyous celebration of freedom, let us all be thankful for the gifts that have been bestowed upon us, and let us work to alleviate the suffering, poverty, injustice, and hunger of those who are not yet free.”

Passover, which is a Jewish holiday, but which Christians see as a pointer to salvation accomplished in Christ (“The new is in the old concealed, the old is in the new revealed”), is all about a sovereign God accomplishing salvation for His people.  It isn’t about what man does.  In fact, the whole account screams out against reliance on what man can accomplish in his own power and for his own purposes.  It calls mankind to recognize that the only contribution to his salvation is made by God.  Just as the Israelites were powerless against Pharaoh, man contributes nothing.

Yet the best Mr. Obama can come up with is yet another reference to warmed over, recapitulated social gospel, that silly brand of Marxism that came from South of the border called liberation theology.  Worse still, he analogizes passover with a religion that has no concept of grace or mercy.

This is one of the stupidest things I think I have ever heard the man say, and it betrays a fundamental ignorance of everything associated with classical religious doctrine.  I think it might be worse than merely attempting to recast the scene in his own image.  I think the man actually doesn’t understand anything associated with religious doctrine at even an elementary school child level.