Archive for the 'Politics' Category

David Codrea:

Admitting that legislation it passed Monday will not stop violent crime, Cleveland politicians instead came up with excuses for imposing it on citizens anyway, Northeast Ohio Media Group reported. All but one Council member, Zack Reed, voted in favor of the new edicts, which in many areas duplicate state law, but supposedly will allow the city to keep resulting fines.

Whether any such coveted revenues will outweigh further legal costs the city will face is a question taxpayers should be asking their representatives who insisted on reopening an issue presumably already settled in the courts.

Yea, duplication of laws came immediately to mind when I read about this legislation.  Take note that there is a nexus between this sort of thing and the requirement to get CLEOs to approve of gun permits, even in “shall-issue” states like my own of North Carolina, where the permitting process costs a non-trivial amount of money.  A source of revenue, it is.

Mike Vanderboegh has returned safely home.  Good.  Here is his speech.

TREASON TO A GOVERNMENT BASED UPON TREASON TO ITS OWN FOUNDING DOCUMENT IS NO TREASON AT ALL! It is merely obedience to God and the truest expression of the inalienable and natural rights to life, liberty and property that HE gave us. It is also an act of fidelity to the rule of law and the Founders’ constitutional republic. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.

Read it all here.

Via WRSA, this from Spiegel:

The spies were to find out as much as possible about the target towns: Who lived there, who was in charge, which families were religious, which Islamic school of religious jurisprudence they belonged to, how many mosques there were, who the imam was, how many wives and children he had and how old they were. Other details included what the imam’s sermons were like, whether he was more open to the Sufi, or mystical variant of Islam, whether he sided with the opposition or the regime, and what his position was on jihad. Bakr also wanted answers to questions like: Does the imam earn a salary? If so, who pays it? Who appoints him? Finally: How many people in the village are champions of democracy?

The agents were supposed to function as seismic signal waves, sent out to track down the tiniest cracks, as well as age-old faults within the deep layers of society — in short, any information that could be used to divide and subjugate the local population. The informants included former intelligence spies, but also regime opponents who had quarreled with one of the rebel groups. Some were also young men and adolescents who needed money or found the work exciting. Most of the men on Bakr’s list of informants, such as those from Tal Rifaat, were in their early twenties, but some were as young as 16 or 17.

The plans also include areas like finance, schools, daycare, the media and transportation. But there is a constantly recurring, core theme, which is meticulously addressed in organizational charts and lists of responsibilities and reporting requirements: surveillance, espionage, murder and kidnapping.

You listen to me very carefully.  This is coming to America.  In addition to the flood of illegals across the Southern border for whom we will have to provide SNAP and medical care, along with an increasingly totalitarian government who wants to control every aspect of our lives, we will soon face totalitarian Islam unlike anything we have ever seen up close.  Be prepared.  Listen to me.  Be prepared.  If you’re not prepared now, then get prepared – immediately.

David Codrea:

As for the first part of his statement, it’s funny he prefaced it with “But I’ll be honest with you,” and then failed to mention who has done comparison shopping in such neighborhoods and then reported which purchase offered more quantity and variety selections, was quicker, easier, less expensive and scary, and carried fewer inherent risks. It’s also funny he failed to mention why that was the fault of gun owners, and where he got the talking point from.

Barry is a liar, and he’s not very creative either.  He has to use the lies created by other people in order to have talking points.  It’s a far cry from his lofty rhetoric and prediction of the cessation of the “rising of the tides” with his advent.  David has written a good article and vetted Obama’s sources on this one.  I find it amusing when we know their tricks.  Similarly, their astroturfing has been such an abysmal failure that it does more for our side than theirs.  Read all of David’s piece.

Kurt Hofmann:

This unimaginably courageous man, “armed” only with a shopping bag, is one of CSGV’s despised “insurrectionists”? Granted, one could make the case that refusing to meekly surrender to the government’s unlimited coercive force is indeed “insurrectionist” behavior, even when unarmed, and thus doomed. The Chinese government no doubt believes it was. But isn’t that a good thing–something to be admired, even revered?

Very good catch, Kurt.  Go read what Kurt is talking about.  And no, CSGV couldn’t care less about ending totalitarianism’s rule over the people, leading to such things as the murder of children under the still-enforced one-child policy.  As long as the collective is unhindered in its aims, then the CSGV is happy.  That says all sorts of remarkably bad, ugly, obscene things about Josh Horwitz, doesn’t it?

From Glenn Reynolds, backyard grilling targeted by the EPA.  Glenn responds, I’M INCREASINGLY IN FAVOR OF BACKYARD TARRING-AND-FEATHERINGS THAT TARGET THE EPA.  David Codrea also notes this today.

Yes, tar and feathers.  It seems to me that it’s past time for disobedience and threats.  Until the federal government has a healthy fear of the people, they will continue to perpetrate this sort of obscenity.

Ned Weatherby:

We all like to complain about the so-called “criminal justice system,” with DA offices just down the hallway from judges, ex parte conversations, prosecutorial discretion used for ill intent, pet peeves and politics, and on and on the list goes.  This is an example of how the system can be used for good.

We only have one Paypal address active (the one for the Arms Expo this summer), but people are donating to that link and just marking it for bail money.

http://www.arms-expo.com/?page_id=113

Or, you can send money to donations@arms-expo.com with Paypal, etc.

If you have any problems, let me know. kit@arms-expo.com

Thank you for this. I really appreciate it. And they do too.

And you certainly know folks that will be involved.  See also David at WoG on this same subject.

The Greenville News:

Jon Bailey spent a Friday afternoon over Christmas break taking his 13-year-old son, Connor, to shoot pistols at Allen Arms Indoor Range in Greenville.

He showed Connor how to load, aim and fire the weapon, but he also instructed him on what to do if he ever saw friends playing with a gun or found a gun lying around.

“He knows to get the heck out of the room and talk to adults,” Bailey said.

Bailey doesn’t call himself a gun fanatic. He wanted to demystify the idea of guns for his son.

But he does think more children should have knowledge of gun safety.

Who instructs children on the gun rights and safety has traditionally been left out of the state’s school systems, but bills pre-filed in both chambers of the South Carolina Legislature would bring gun rights squarely into focus in the classroom.

Whether schools are the right place to instruct students about firearms will be up for debate.

Zero-tolerance policies regarding guns at South Carolina schools has led to a backlash against citizens’ gun rights and a lack of knowledge on how to safely use firearms, Republican state legislators said as they prepared to open a new session in the state Legislature.

State social studies standards that instruct teachers to explain how the Constitution and Bill of Rights helps protect limited government. But schools don’t go far enough to explain gun rights, they said.

One bill — pre-filed in the state House — would create a Second Amendment Awareness Day to be held on Dec. 15 each year in all state schools, complete with a poster or essay contest centered on the theme “The Right To Bear Arms: One American Right Protecting All Others.”

Students — at every grade level — would receive at least three weeks of education on their gun rights based on a curriculum chosen by the state Department of Education and approved or recommended by the National Rifle Association.

[ … ]

His idea for the bill came after an incident in a Summerville high school in September where police were notified and a 16-year-old student’s locker searched after he wrote a fictional essay that mentioned purchasing a gun to kill his neighbor’s pet dinosaur.

The student was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after police said he became belligerent.

Clemmons said the incident “shocked” and “offended” him.

“In this case, it squelched a student’s first amendment rights, in responding to an assignment, to talk about the second amendment,” he said.

Students are being punished when they choose to “write about one of their precious American rights,” he said.

Rep. Garry Smith, R-Simpsonville, who co-sponsored the bill, along with Rep. Richard Yow, R-Chesterfield, said the second amendment deserves more instructional time than other amendments because it is the lynchpin for the rest of democracy.

This is all well and good, but I have a better idea.  If South Carolina citizens really want to teach children about the second amendment, then get rid of gun-hater and elitist establishment ruler S.C. State Senator Larry Martin (from Pickens) and institute open carry throughout South Carolina.  Patriots need to initiate a beat-down to establishment GOP in South Carolina.  Until then, it’s just all bluster and hot air to me.

During a recent trip.

David Codrea:

The thing is, transporting these children, sheltering them, feeding them, clothing them, bathing them and dealing with the waste they generate will all have an environmental impact, and while seemingly negligible compared to the totality of things, that’s added to the millions of heretofore illegal aliens already in the country now empowered to stay, and to those on their way, attracted by seeing “migrants” who came before them rewarded for lawbreaking. Their long-term impact as an aggregate on the environment and on the resources needed to provide energy, sustenance and disposal, can hardly be considered negligible. Nor can the immediate and continuing impact of environmental destruction left in their wake …

How much more of an impact will the president’s immigration directives have on the environment than the off-chance a person defending their life may (or may not) need to fire off rounds of ammunition that may (or may not) leave traces within national park boundaries? … Why not figure out the best jurisdiction to get an injunction halting Obama’s action until an environmental impact study can be completed.

Progressives are liars.  They pretend to care about the environement but don’t.  If they did, they would lobby for the startup of nuclear power plants.  Rather, progressives use their pretensions as a cudgel for their other causes.  As for the environmental impacts of immigration and lack of border security, we’ve discussed that here.  They don’t care.  Perhaps a judge can be found who would pay attention only to the law, but s/he wouldn’t care about the morality of the situation.

David Codrea:

 Obviously both of these individuals were not part of what the citizen disarmament cult disparages as “the gun culture,” as the lack of respect for even the most basic of safety rules indicated by the report points to people absolutely unfamiliar with basic rational gun-handling. The obvious ridiculous and senselessly dangerous way this woman evidently ended her own life unsurprisingly brought out ridicule-based comments, including predictable “Darwin Award” references.

“She deserved to die,” a gay Huffington Post reader from Yale weighed in. “Trailer lady deserved it.” Talk about tolerance and concern for “different” people of perceived lower economic status!

Progressives only pretend to care about the lower class.

From Uncle, here is a list of top handgun manufacturers.  I’m kind of surprised that Springfield Armory isn’t on the list.

Don Surber: Do not rebuild in Ferguson.  Yea, but when I said the same thing, I was somehow the devil.

News from the great progressive Northeast, via The Boston Globe:

MILFORD — On Friday, Milford fifth-grader Nickolas Taylor was in line for lunch, just a few hours from the weekend.

But like most 10-year-old boys bursting with energy, he didn’t wait quietly. Instead, he played shoot-em-up by himself to pass the time, pointing his index finger like a ray gun and making “pew-pew” sounds.

As he battled his imaginary foes, he passed two girls in the lunch line. They told the assistant principal, according to Nickolas’s father, Brian Taylor. Later that day, the principal told the boy he was being suspended for two days for making a threat.

Upset over the suspension, Brian Taylor, 40, said he went to the school Monday morning to meet with the assistant principal in hopes of explaining it was just “innocent playing.” But the official said Nickolas had pointed at the girls, which amounted to a threat.

“He just kept saying it was against policy,” the father said in an interview Wednesday at his Milford home. “He wouldn’t see the common sense.”

Taylor said he understood that schools were on heightened alert these days to any perceived threats or potential bullying, but he said the suspension was an extreme overreaction.

“He wasn’t pointing at anyone in particular,” he said. “He was just playing. There were other ways they could have handled it.”

Taylor said his son had never gotten in serious trouble before, and that he was confused by the punishment.

“He didn’t really understand why” he was suspended, Taylor said.

Taylor said he thought the girls must have been annoyed that his son cut in front of them, and he was surprised school officials didn’t simply tell Nickolas not to do it again.

Nickolas loves video games like Minecraft and told him that all the boys play pretend shooting games at recess, shouting laser-like sounds as they chase each other.

We live in a country where SWAT teams shoot little puppies running away from them, innocent victims are assaulted and shot in their own homes by the police, and it’s all okay.  But if a little boy plays like a little boy is supposed to, he has “threatened” little girls.  Notice too the lack of discretion and wisdom on display by school administration.  This reminds me of a comment I made to a younger reader on this same kind of thing, from the perspective of graying hair and many years of wisdom.

You’ve told me what IS, rather than what SHOULD BE. I fully concur with the notion that intent is increasingly disappearing from American jurisprudence due to laws and somewhat [from] prosecutorial discretion. Nothing I’ve said denies this. And in fact, this law would have been yet another example of that lamentable fact, and one of the hundreds of reasons to oppose this bill.

That said, it isn’t disappearing completely, as there is still a difference between manslaughter and first degree murder, and there always will be. Where the secularists can make inroads to English common law, they do. Where they can’t because the people would revolt, they leave it alone.

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 needs 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.

“He just kept saying it was against policy.”  Of course it was.  Everything is against policy for little boys.  They are the oppressors.

David Codrea:

Although recently set back at the national polls, Democrats could still dominate the legislative agenda on guns and other crucial issues for the next 10 months if the Republican leadership allows a long-term continuing resolution to pass, Gun Owners of America warned members Monday in a national action alert. If that happens, GOA cautioned it will “allow the repudiated Democrats currently in control of the Senate (until January 5) to make all of the spending and policy decisions [and] set policy and spending until the end of the fiscal year (September 30, 2015).

Will the GOP go along to get along like they always do?  Codrea concludes:

That makes a recent “rare Capitol Hill appearance” suspect when the purpose of Christie’s visit was to encourage newly-elected lawmakers to “embrace compromise and common ground.” If those representatives heed the governor’s advice, they will pass the long-term CR GOA warns about, and give the Democrats what they want on all other issues as well, including and especially on guns.

Read all of David’s piece and share the link with others.  As for the legislative agenda on guns, it’s like everything else.  The GOP is in control of the House.  It’s that simple.  The GOP could stop anything they wanted, dead in its tracks, and without delay.  Nothing happens on Capital Hill without GOP concurrence.  So David is right to point out that the real threat lies within the GOP lack of will and principle.