Archive for the 'Guns' Category

The Daily Beast:

If you were told a Republican has a 30-point lead in one of the two states that hold off-year gubernatorial elections, in the past you would have guessed Virginia, seat of the old confederacy, certainly not New Jersey. But the politics have flipped. Republican Chris Christie is cruising to victory in the blue state of New Jersey, and Democrat Terry McAuliffe has a big lead in Virginia, topping a ticket that could sweep enough Democrats into elective office to install a Democratic attorney general for the first time in decades and break the GOP’s lock on the Virginia General Assembly.

I’m not so sure, and the author may be whistling through the grave yard.  But continuing:

Seeing opportunity in this once red state on the issue New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg cares most about, gun safety, his Independence USA super PAC, which he founded last year, contributed some $2 million to McAuliffe’s campaign and to the Virginia Democratic caucus overseeing state legislative races. On Tuesday—just seven days before Election Day— Independence USA directed another $1 million into the race for attorney general, where Democrat Mark Herring has a real chance to defeat Republican Mark Obenshain. As a state senator, Obenshain voted to repeal the one-handgun-a-month law and to allow guns in bars and daycare centers. He also supports the bulk purchase of guns and opposes closing the gun show loophole.

If McAuliffe wins, as the polls indicate, he will break a long-standing curse that whatever party holds the White House loses the governor’s race in Virginia. And he will buoy hopes among Democrats that Virginia is reliably purple, if not blue, in the 2016 presidential election.

Seeing opportunity in this once red state on the issue New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg cares most about, gun safety, his Independence USA super PAC, which he founded last year, contributed some $2 million to McAuliffe’s campaign and to the Virginia Democratic caucus overseeing state legislative races. On Tuesday—just seven days before Election Day— Independence USA directed another $1 million into the race for attorney general, where Democrat Mark Herring has a real chance to defeat Republican Mark Obenshain. As a state senator, Obenshain voted to repeal the one-handgun-a-month law and to allow guns in bars and daycare centers. He also supports the bulk purchase of guns and opposes closing the gun show loophole.

If McAuliffe wins, as the polls indicate, he will break a long-standing curse that whatever party holds the White House loses the governor’s race in Virginia. And he will buoy hopes among Democrats that Virginia is reliably purple, if not blue, in the 2016 presidential election … The top three statewide candidates for the GOP are walking billboards for extremism, which gave McAuliffe plenty of running room, even among more rural voters, to the point where he could be more assertive on issues of gun safety than anyone had previously dared, calling for expanded background checks and limits on the size of gun magazines.

For my readers in Virginia, this is awesome.  This is where it’s at.  The fight is on your doorstep, and you must repel the invasion and take it to the enemy.  The State is where the battles for our liberty should be waged, and if you lose I don’t want to hear any bullshit excuses and plans for taking your loss of gun rights before the totalitarian federal court system and whining about the second amendment.

I don’t intend to sound unsympathetic or mean spirited, but if your state elects the ass-clown Terry McAuliffe to the office of Governor, you deserve everything you get.  Again, I’m sorry, but win or move.  The battle lines are drawn, and the federal leviathan will not help you maintain your rights.

Win the battles or move from Virginia and take everything with you when you go.

Bob Unruh writing at World Net Daily:

The anti-gun lobby is running out of excuses and sooner or later will have to admit that they are simply collectivists and don’t want members of the hive to be capable of self defense.

But another thing we learn is that violent crime (whether with a gun or not) is a culturally and racially concentrated phenomenon.  And to further demonstrate the point, what do you notice about this gun crime map?

I’ll let the readers weigh in.

Rachel Alexander writing for Townhall issues a warning.

… the NRA stepped in and got some of the worst language revised last December. Senate amendment 3276, Sec. 2716, part c. prohibits the creation of a firearms database and stops doctors from disclosing or collecting information relating to a patient’s firearms. Ironically, this provision was probably the only positive result of most members of Congress not bothering to read the bill before voting on it.

However, the provision does not go as far as prohibiting doctors from asking their patients if there are any firearms in their home. In January, Obama issued 23 executive actions and orders regarding firearms. Order 16 stressed that Obamacare does not prohibit doctors from asking patients about their firearms, and the fact sheet includes, “Clarify that no federal law prevents health care providers from warning law enforcement authorities about threats of violence.” What constitutes a “threat of violence” could be very arbitrary. This puts doctors in a difficult position by suggesting they act as pseudo-law enforcement agents. It is damaging to doctor-patient privilege. If doctors have a patient with PTSD or mental illness, and they fail to ask the patient about their firearms, or report them to law enforcement, they could be on the hook later. It encourages them to err on the side of snooping into their patients’ guns. This is especially troubling considered the definition of mental illness keeps expanding.

In Guns And The Mentally Ill: A Professional Assessment, I noted yet again that the mental health profession couldn’t possibly sustain the load of predicting violent behavior and that mental health maladies have no particular association with propensity to violence.

Yet mental health continues to be the whipping boy du jour of the gun control fanatics, which led my commenter and former member of the military Will to comment:

I absolutely regret seeking care from the VA for PTSD for just this reason.

I’m so sorry.  I am so very sorry to the members of the military who have seen combat, earned the combat action ribbon (or Army equivalent), or who have sought care for PTSD.

For those who thought we had their backs, I’m so sorry that the country let you down by sending you to fight in a war with obscene rules of engagement that caused you danger, sent you to fight without enough troops, and now places you at risk upon return to lose your right to own weapons.

America will answer for its sins one day in time, and then in eternity.

As readers know I’m usually bored with polls.  But The Washington Post had an interesting piece entitled The Start Divide Over Gun Laws – In Two Charts.

The best way to describe Americans’ overall attitude to current gun laws? One word — split.

A new Gallup poll shows that nearly half of adults say laws concerning guns sales should be tightened, while 50 percent say they should be unaltered or loosened.

Wait.  You mean all that stuff about 90%+ of all people wanting universal background checks was all just horse shit?  You mean they were just making that up because they know the GOP just sticks its fingers into the air to see which way the wind is blowing rather than make laws based on principle?  You mean the collectivists can’t be trusted?

Gosh.  It seems that someone should have said something about that before now.

David Codrea:

“At the Burlington City Council Meeting on Monday, Councilor Norm Blais, the driving force behind the gun control ordinance campaign in Burlington, proved what [we have] stated from the beginning,” VFSC explained. “Burlington [is pursuing] the dismantling of the Vermont Sportsmen’s Bill of Rights so that towns and cities all over Vermont will have the power to enact gun control, hunting, shooting, fishing and trapping regulations. We would then face a patchwork of conflicting municipal ordinances.”

I am a long standing and diehard advocate of State’s rights, even to the extent that I don’t think the federal court system should be invoked when local gun control is concerned.  All gun politics is local, I have said.  The corollary is that in order to prevent local hicks, ne’er-do-wells and criminals from acting out their Napoleon fantasies upon other men, association with the state means that – assuming robust gun rights laws already exist – local municipalities and townships shouldn’t be able to preempt state laws.  The state is the right size for law-making and control.  Our founding fathers were wise.  Oh, and David is of course correct.  The goal of progressives is complete control over everything.  They’re control freaks and they think they know better than you.

Kurt Hofmann:

And it’s all bogus. As this column has noted before, John Fund debunked the claim handily in the National Review. More surprisingly, the shrilly anti-gun, fawningly pro-Obama Washington Post found the claim very unconvincing (soon updated to even less convincing than that, with a much more defensible figure being 14-22%), and when Obama continued to repeat the “40%” fiction, they realized that they had still been giving him too much slack.

Kurt covers some lies told by the collectivists.  There are so many from which to choose.  Kurt is of course correct to note that a good tactician goes after the weakness of his opponent – in this case lies concerning polling statistics – while at the same time Kurt acknowledges that polls or not, we’ll keep our guns.  Good.  Very good.

Michael Bane notes what he believes to be the utility of AR pistols as a PDW.  I’m not so convinced that one needs a high velocity round like this, but I’m more convinced than ever that a SBR has specific utility as a PDW, especially inside homes (regardless of caliber or muzzle velocity – and I would probably choose a pistol caliber SBR).  Of course, SBRs are illegal unless registered as such with the ATF, and I’ll have my fingernails pulled off before I’ll ever register any weapon with the ATF to get a tax stamp.

Mike Vanderboegh:

John Lott has written another book. No big surprise there. The surprise, forwarded to me by David Codrea, is that Lott has sanitized the story of the Fast and Furious scandal by writing me out of it.

John Lott has written another book. No big surprise there. The surprise, forwarded to me by David Codrea, is that Lott has sanitized the story of the Fast and Furious scandal by writing me out of it.

Now, it is no surprise that John Lott doesn’t like me very much. He took the trouble to personally look me up when I was resting and chatting with supporters on the steps at the side of the Connecticut state house right after my Hartford speech back in April (he also spoke at the rally) to take me to task for my “lawbreaking,” saying that I was alienating the vast majority in the center and playing to gun confiscationists’ worst characterizations of American firearm owners.

I told him if he was waiting for the “vast middle” to agree with us or to save us from the determined minority of collectivists who sought to disarm us he would be waiting a very long time. He left, frustrated and obviously angry that I could not see his “wisdom.”

John Lott is a jerk.  I’ve known this for some time now.  I interacted with him on an article I wrote about cases involving firearms in national parks and also so-called “assault weapons” and their ban in D.C.  John responded by saying that neither case was good to take to the supreme court and that, basically, me thinking so showed that I didn’t read his blog and should and I’d know more than I did.  Or something like that.

Frankly, I hadn’t known about him or his blog until just before that note, and so his point was irrelevant.  But his ass-clownery towards me wasn’t irrelevant at all.  Never read John Lott, never will.  That fact that Lott wrote Vanderboegh out of F&F only shows again what a jerk he is.

I don’t often do this, but I must proffer several unfortunate object lessons for many of us, if not most or even all of us.  The example comes from Nevada.

The parents of a seventh grade student who killed a teacher and wounded two students before taking his own life could face charges if police determine the boy got the semi-automatic gun from home, police said today.

“The potential is there [for charges to be filed],” said Sparks Police Department Deputy Chief Tom Miller. He said that decision would have to be left up to the local prosecutor’s office.

Miller said investigators believe the 12-year-old obtained the Ruger 9mm semi-automatic handgun from his home, however authorities are still trying to confirm the origin of the firearm.

He declined to identify the boy out of respect for his grieving family, but said he was a seventh grade student at Sparks Middle School.

One day after the shooting that took the life of a Marine veteran turned math teacher and left two students wounded, police said they were trying to determine what caused the student to snap.

Miller declined to address reports that the shooter may have been bullied, but Faith Ebans, a student who said she had math class with the gunman, told ABC News she believed he had been made fun of at school.

“I saw kids pushing him around and doing a lot of mean things to him,” she said.

“I guess one day he got tripped and my friends said, ‘Trip them back,” she said. “But I guess he just decided just to shoot them.”

The first object lesson has to do with education.  It may not have been fifty years ago, but public education has turned into an opportunity for the statists to indoctrinate gullible children into the ideas of communism, train them in atheism, and teach them to ignore all that is holy, good and righteous in favor of that which is manipulative, self serving and abusive.

Furthermore, it is becoming increasingly unsurprising that children snap in such environments.  As I tried to explain to a younger man in the context of “criminal intent” – a man who lacked my wisdom and years – in a very heady conversation, children are left virtually defenseless in public schools.

I know very little about you, but I assume (you can correct me if I’m wrong) that you do not have children of advanced school age (and I have no idea whether you are married). If your children one day attend public schools (I home schooled mine for the last several years except for one), they will find this notion in spades in the school system. Let me tell you how it plays out.

The kids that know they aren’t attending college know the kids who intend to attend college. The school system has given up on the idea of finding facts, finding fault and finding intent. Hence, the kids who have no intention of attending college abuse the ones who intend to attend college. It happens this way, and hundreds of others.

Let’s say that the school lunch line of a five minute wait. The bad kids will break in line and even punch the good kids. The good kids take it, run away, and avoid conflict at all costs. They do this because they know that the principal will make no attempt whatsoever to find facts or intent if a fight breaks out. Fights means that a kid is defending himself, or even that he isn’t and sits in a corner getting the hell kicked out of him. When it’s finally broken up, both kids get suspended, it goes on record, and colleges don’t accept kids with records. End of story. The competition is too high to accept kids with records, regardless of the fact that it’s disputed. All such records are disputed by every student.

My boys could have beat the hell out of anyone who they fought, but one of them needed to attend a scholarly college to do what he does, and for him we simply planned classes to avoid the bad kids, sent him with his lunch, and prayed that he got out without being in a … ahem … “fight.” Daniel, my Marine, just beat the hell out of anyone who accosted him. It cannot be that way for everyone. The ones who need to go to college behave differently. Daniel is in college now because of the Marines.

You see, smarts comes from books. Wisdom comes from age and experience. I have that. Been there, done that, got the tee shirt. And if you have children of advanced age one day, they will get the hell beaten out of them in school, or they will defend themselves and not go to college, or you will home school them. Welcome to fact-less, intent-less jurisprudence and lack of lawsuits against schools.

Public schools are tailor made for abusive treatment, and sometimes Christian schools aren’t much better with the girl-drama and cliques.  Be careful and wise, younger men, on how you educate your children and what you allow them to endure.  Consider home schooling.

The second object lesson pertains to guns.  I don’t know what “secure your weapons” means for you.  I don’t know if you’re an empty nester, or have younger children at home, or perhaps children being abused in public schools.  I know some men who never have a problem even with younger children, where their children know that even touching a gun means a “whooping.”  Others will have to use a different metric.

But if you do not exercise positive control over your weapons, you may find yourself heartbroken, and possibly in prison.  My opinion is that it isn’t within the purview of the state to tell you what “secure your weapons” means for you.  But you must police yourself.  The lives and freedom of you and your loved ones is at stake.

David Codrea:

That’s the type of rhetoric anti-gun hive mind “monopoly of violence” zealots like those at the National Coalition to Ban Handguns call “insurrectionist,” sprinkled with words like “treason” and “traitor.” It’s the type of speech that would prompt U.S. News and World report editor and PBS contributor Bonnie Erbe to demand rounding up its practitioners. And citizens like Vanderboegh, and those who cheered and applauded him, are the type of people that “progressive” cartoonist Ted Rall wants declared enemy combatants and bundled off to Bagram, adding “If ever there were a reason for suspending civil rights, this is it.”

And that’s why it’s important to have guns and ammunition.  They can talk all they want.  We get to vote, and my vote won’t happen in a voting booth if any of the preceding obtains.  David is making a very specific point about how America is subdivided along ideological lines, a point with which none of us can argue.  My reaction, of course, is visceral and pedestrian as usual.

David is talking about the reaction to Mike Vanderboegh’s speech at the Alamo.  His speech is entitled One Country?  Or Two?  There is a video of the speech, but I read it – I’m old school.  I recommend that you read it even if you listen to it later.  It’s must reading.

Mike and David both have earned a debt of gratitude from us for the work they do on our behalf.  As a side bar comment, I notice that somebody said to Mike: “After reading a few of your articles, you so self absorbed it has to be shooting out of every opening you have. Change the name of this “blog” to “mikey can’t get enough of himself”. Your a worthless communist, a welfare junkie, and a general waste of human space.”

First of all, I’m reminded of the following comment to me concerning this article: “You are one of the stupidest assholes on the Internet, and Jim Hoft and Bob Owens are on the Internet.”  The commenter goaded me about not letting the comment see the light of day.  Not only did it see light, I put it up in lights.  So if my commenter is right, I’m a bigger asshole than either David or Mike.  Second, as for the two country thing, that issue was settled for me a long time ago.

Update on Magpul:

Magpul Industries Corp., the Boulder County-based maker of gun accessories, threatened to pull out of Colorado if new gun-control laws passed. The laws passed in March, but Magpul is still here.

The Boulder Daily Camera reports that it visited Magpul’s Erie headquarters and found the parking lot full of employees’ cars … According to the Camera, some customers have been leaving comments on Magpul’s Facebook page, criticizing it for not yet leaving Colorado as it vowed.

Well, it takes time, but let me be clear about this.  Magpul had better be about their business.  That’s all I’m going to say right now.

From Michael Bane:

… a local man was attacked by 3 coyotes…he fought them off with a flashlight. As much as I like flashlights, I think there are better anti-coyote strategies … Of course the first recommendation is carry dog/bear spray.

Hey, there’s nothing wrong with OC spray.  It works very well.  But, you know, carry a gun.  That’s all I’m going to say about that.

Finally, cops are appealing the decision on their not being allowed to carry guns to NFL games if they’re off duty.

The crackdown on firearms concerns Minneapolis Police Federation President John Delmonico. He believes a call for off-duty officers to give up their weapons at the gate violates an officer’s rights, as determined by state law.

The Minneapolis Police Federation sites state law, Chapter 624, which gives police officers full police powers 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In other words, they should be allowed to carry their weapons in any public place in the city.

“State law governs the facts that we can carry our guns off-duty in any public facility and any facility in the city of Minneapolis, which encompasses the dome,” Minneapolis Police Federation’s John Delmonico said.

So, Delmonico drafted a letter to Minnesota’s Attorney General.

They’re up in arms because it’s their Ox being gored.  And I have the perfect solution for them.  If they firmly believe that they cannot attend the game unarmed without violating their oath, then don’t attend the game at all.

People sometimes pay good money for counsel like that.  Should I send a bill to the cops?

Emily Miller notes that Washington National Cathedral recently weighed in on gun control.

Once again, the D.C. police are using their resources to provide illegal guns for a public relations stunt intended to pressure politicians to pass federal restrictions on the Second Amendment.

Outside the Washington National Cathedral on Sunday, blacksmiths will “forge firearms into garden tools” as a symbolic enactment of this year’s theme, “Swords into Plowshares.”

The Children’s Defense Fund, which is cosponsoring the event, said in a press release that blacksmiths will be using “illegal guns confiscated by the police.”

The dramatic scene will follows a children’s church service in which the organization’s president Marian Wright Edelman will speak.

It is illegal in the District to possess a firearm that is not registered. When asked about the event, Police Chief Cathy Lanier’s spokesman said that, “These are not firearms. They are scrap parts only, and they are inoperable.”

That’s actually legally irrelevant. According to the District firearms laws written after the Supreme Court’s Heller decision in 2008, even a non-functioning firearm must be registered and can result in criminal liability.

Yea, it may be illegal in more ways than one.  If they take possession of a lower receiver that is technically defined as the part that is controlled by the ATF.  But let’s focus on Washington National Cathedral for a moment.

How very sophisticated of them to beat up guns as part of a worship service.  David Codrea notes – tongue in check – how very hipster Gary Hall is.  Of course, Washington National Cathedral doesn’t believe in any of the classical confessions of the faith (e.g., Westminster Confession of Faith, Heidelberg Catechism, Canons of Dort, etc.).  They don’t believe in anything, and so they aren’t a real church.  You may as well have a Potemkin Pastor for your weekly speaker under those circumstances.  After all, it’s no more than a country club that meets once per week.

A few miles away in Indiana, another pastor takes a different view.

A pistol-packing pastor helped foil a stick-up when he pulled his handgun on a man trying to rob an Indiana discount store Friday night, police said.

Pastor Carl Sanders, who has a permit to carry a firearm, managed to hold the suspect at the Dollar General Store in Evansville on the until police arrived.

Evansville Police said Jermaine Dewayne Marshall, 25, walked into the store and, with a bandanna over his face and an unknown object wrapped in plastic in his hand, demanded money from a worker at the register. The employee refused.

“Marshall tells the individual again to open the register and points this object he’s trying to pass off as a firearm at the employee,” said Capt. Andy Chandler of the Evansville Police Department.

When the clerk refused again, Marshall struck him several times in the face.

That’s when Pastor Sanders walked into the store.

Sanders told NBC affiliate WFIE Evansville that Marshall came at him with what appeared to be a gun wrapped in plastic.

“He was telling me to get on the ground,” Sanders told WFIE. “That’s when I pulled my weapon and say, ‘No, you get on the ground.'”

“I laid my life down for some people, knowing they were going to be OK,” Sanders said, adding that Marshall “didn’t deserve to be hurt, I wasn’t going to hurt him, but I wanted him to know you can’t do this.”

Sanders called the police and kept Marshall covered until police arrived, Chandler said. Police discovered that Marshall had been trying to pass off a spoon wrapped in a plastic bag as a firearm.

You see, Carl Sanders cares about people, and Gary Hall doesn’t.  If this sounds harsh, you need to think more deeply about the issue since it is clear that you haven’t considered the ramifications of your views.

In what I noted to myself as one of the best lines I have ever heard, the horrible Think Progress had a piece entitled Who Would Jesus Shoot?  The comments are more important than the silly article, as they demonstrate that most people (falsely) equate Jesus with pacifism.

So in order to answer that question let me wax theological for a moment.  Nothing happened in the birth, life, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus that wasn’t ordained, controlled by God, and intended for a specific end (He upholds all things by the “Word of His power,” and He “Works all things after the counsel of His own will,” Hebrews 1:3 and Ephesians 1:11).

One must understand the soteriological import of every event in order to understand what happened to Jesus.  Asking the question Who Would Jesus Shoot? demonstrates that the questioner is an idiot.

But let’s pull this thread a little farther if we may.  I have dealt with the issue of guns, violence and Christianity in another extensive article, looking at the Biblical evidence, the historical evidence and the theological positions of the Church fathers.  Very directly, I state that:

God has laid the expectations at the feet of heads of families that they protect, provide for and defend their families and protect and defend their countries.  Little ones cannot do so, and rely solely on those who bore them.  God no more loves the willing neglect of their safety than He loves child abuse.  He no more appreciates the willingness to ignore the sanctity of our own lives than He approves of the abuse of our own bodies and souls.  God hasn’t called us to save the society by sacrificing our children or ourselves to robbers, home invaders, rapists or murderers.

Self defense – and defense of the little ones – goes well beyond a right.  It is a duty based on the idea that man is made in God’s image.  It is His expectation that we do the utmost to preserve and defend ourselves when in danger, for it is He who is sovereign and who gives life, and He doesn’t expect us to be dismissive or cavalier about its loss.

If you believe that it is your Christian duty to allow your children to be harmed by evil-doers (and you actually allow it to happen) because you think Christ was a pacifist, you are no better than a child abuser or pedophile.

Who would Jesus shoot?  He would shoot anyone he had to in order to save life from harm by evil-doers.  Christ had very specific warnings about those who cause the “little ones” to stumble (Luke 17:2), and He made clear His stipulations concerning their place in the Kingdom (Luke 18:16).

Like I said.  If you think this is some sort of doctrinaire, theoretical debate with ethereal platitudes, you’d better rethink your position.  This is the stuff of life and death – literally.

UPDATE: Thanks to David, Mike and Glenn for their attention to this article.

David Codrea:

“At Nouria Energy, our employees are our most cherished assets,” they unctuously proclaim on their website home page. “Their safety and the safety of our customers is priority number one.”

Somehow, the immortal line spoken by John Vernon in “The Outlaw Josey Wales” comes to mind.

It’s like this for ever company that prohibits its employees from bringing weapons to work, as if security is enough to keep people safe.  And David gets big style-bonus-points for quoting from Outlaw Josey Wales.

Illinois legislators are touring the sites of Rock River Arms, Armalite and Springfield Armory.  What’s going on?  Are we about to see more defections from the North, or are these manufacturers just jumping for all the largesse they can get?  Come to the South, boys, where both the weather and people are more inviting.

Uncle is smoking some strange weed.

Revolvers are obsolete. Oh, they’re fun to shoot. I like shooting them. And they’re fantastic as a hobby gun. I’ve only ever owned two (one was given to me) because auto loaders are just superior.

Uh, you better rethink that one boy.  I have a Springfield Armory and S&W polymer frame pistol, and I’ve never been a fan of the boxy look of Glocks, so I’ll pick on Glocks.  So who out there is thinking, “Boy, I’m sure proud of my scratched up, beaten up, plastic pistol that I can turn over to my sons and he can turn over to his sons?”  If you’re out there, keep it to yourself because it would be embarrassing for you.

On the other hand, as the comments to Uncle’s post point out, if revolvers are so outmoded then they should be cheaper.  They’re not, and for good reason.  I’d rather have a good revolver in my hands when the shots count than anything else.  They are more fun to shoot, they’re prettier, they’re more reliable, and I will indeed turn over my revolvers to my sons and their sons.  My polymer frame pistols are throwaway, even the pricier ones.  They will be outmoded when the revolvers are still working well.

Gabby Giffords is being honored again, this time by the military.

“Gabby continues to be a great inspiration and a role model for her community, her state, the Army, the American people and members of Congress. She cared about soldiers and their families and worked hard on their behalf,” Westphal said during a ceremony at the Pentagon Oct. 10.

As a member of Congress from January 2007 to January 2012, she “was a dynamic leader, tirelessly working to ensure that our men and women in uniform had what they needed to keep our country safe,” states her award citation, said Under Secretary of the Army Joseph W. Westphal.

What about Congressman Walter Jones, who repeatedly called attention to the immoral rules of engagement under which our men labored in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially when McChrystal took over?  Oh, I see.  Jones called attention to something that embarrassed the administration (including the gun grabbing McChrystal), while Giffords is still a shill for the philosopher-kings inside the beltway.

What this tells you is that the conversion to the dark side is almost complete.  The generals, strategists and thinkers in the armed forces have been replaced with political hacks.

So the GOP caved.  Of course they did.

At the last GOP conference meeting of the two-week government shutdown, no lawmakers went to the microphones to give their take.

Instead, after Speaker John Boehner told Republicans they had “fought the good fight,” they all rose up to offer a standing ovation. “It was one of the easiest meetings we’ve ever had,” says Representative Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina.

“I think he has strengthened his position in leadership,” Representative John Fleming says about Boehner. “He hung in there with us. He’s been reluctant to go to these fights and now that we have stood up and fought for our values and he’s been there with us, leading, I think his stock has risen tremendously. He has great security as our leader and our speaker.”

The message from Boehner and majority leader Eric Cantor was unity, with warnings not to point fingers of blame.

“Everyone in this room ran on the Republican ticket,” Cantor told colleagues.

“We all agree Obamacare is an abomination. We all agree taxes are too high. We all agree spending is too high. We all agree Washington is getting in the way of job growth. We all agree we have a real debt crisis that will cripple future generations.

Yes, and they did nothing about it.  Instead, they posed, preened and pretended, and pursued power instead of practiced principle.  It’s what they do.  If every GOP Senator had fallen in line with Ted Cruz and filibustered any spending increase until Obamacare had been defunded, it would have happened.  If the GOP House cared enough they could have stopped it all in its tracks.

But Obama didn’t move one inch because he knew the GOP would.  The GOP is to blame for every bit of this debacle.  If they never intended to finish this out – and they didn’t – they should never have started the “fight.”

As far as I’m concerned, they may as well go ahead and proclaim their fealty to Satan and publicly embrace the witchcraft of Keynesian economics.  The GOP is dead.  America as you knew it is dead.  An entitlement once delivered won’t be turned back, and there is no way to save the economic system.  It is a house of cards that will soon collapse.  And who would fear the “warnings” of Boehner and Cantor?  They’re a couple of cowards who fold like a cheap suit.

Finally, Mike Vanderboegh has a U.N. stamp worthy of its name concerning the proposed U.N. gun controls.