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Levin Nearly Stumbles Into Truth About Ukraine

Saturday, March 5th, 2022

Levin lays out the initial case on March 5th 2017 for Spygate

Only one day after I reflected on Mark Levin’s amazing ability to sift through piles of mainstream media reports to assemble the hidden truth, he very nearly did it again on Friday evening’s broadcast.  He still hasn’t clarified for his audience that the claims of cluster-bombs and thermobaric bombs are unverified, unconfirmed reports, much to my chagrin, but in discussing the goings-on in Washington DC he swerved ever so close to the truth, again.  I keep hoping he’ll step back from the Ukraine story just a little farther, just enough to clear his senses and conquer his emotions.  If he does, he’s a man with the resources and skills to finally sort out the truth of this mess.  At this point, Levin should begin asking himself that question that any good lawyer must do when trying to formulate a theory of a case: What’s the motive driving the behavior of the Biden administration in Ukraine?  I believe Levin is so close to the truth that if he sets aside his emotions about Ukraine for a few moments, and sinks his teeth into all of this, it’s game over.  He’ll sniff it out, and he’ll realize that what’s happening in Ukraine isn’t purely about Ukraine or Putin at all.  That’s the side-show.  That’s the pay-off.  That’s the clean-up on aisle twelve.  He came very near to the central issue, and I hope he soon realizes it.  I believe he could very well blow the lid off of Washington DC for a generation or more. Today, at the last possible moment before the “Eureka!” that should have come, he swerved off down another emotionally-driven side issue.  He’s so maddeningly close that I almost wish he’d happen by this website.  It’s time for Mark Levin to return to his lists of facts and his prosecutorial style.

As a reminder, if you haven’t see it before, or simply need the refresher, this is what it’s like when Levin gets on one of his epic tears, here laying out the case that the Obama administration spied on Trump from Fox and Friends on March 5th, 2017, five years ago today:

The questions you must ask require that you first recognize that the Ukraine catastrophe is not an isolated event, separate and apart from all other events. I urge Mark Levin and anybody else digging into this to consider that we see all the same players involved in all of these matters, from Ukraine during the Obama administration, to the Russia Hoax of the Trump campaign, to SpyGate that extended into the Trump administration, the “Mueller Probe,” the first impeachment, the January 6th event, the second impeachment, and the election theft of 2020.  What’s conspicuous by its absence from this list, that we ought not to omit?  Once we add it to the list, the smoke begins to clear, and it all begins to make more sense:  The Iran Nuclear Deal.  Remember that the Iran Nuclear Deal was only made possible by a sell-out Republican Senator from Tennessee, Bob Corker(RINO,) who concocted a bill that allowed the Senate to bypass the treaty clause of the constitution, ignoring the necessity for a two-thirds vote for its ratification. Combine it all with the situation in Ukraine, and the behaviors of the Biden administration, and it all makes so much more sense.

I won’t tell you that I have all the details, but instead, I’m going to paint a broad-strokes picture.  It would take somebody like a Levin to assemble a clearer picture, and indeed, today, Mark Levin provided another piece of the puzzle.  He is so, so very close, and I believe if he returns to his dispassionate review of facts, and digs into this a bit harder, he’s going to put it together.  I can almost hear the beginnings of the percolating of connections as he covers some of the facts.  What Levin revealed is that the Biden administration is permitting the Russians to negotiate with Iran on behalf of the United States for the new nuclear deal.  Remember the pallets of cash?  There’s going to be much more. Much, much more.  Biden has made concessions to the Russians, which is why this administration won’t do anything about Ukraine.  It’s part of the deal.  This is the part Mark Levin isn’t quite guessing yet, at least not clearly.  Levin made mention of Ted Cruz’s National Security advisor, Victoria Coates.  I hope he posts a link to the paper or article from which he’s drawing this information. (Update: One of my sharpest followers on Twitter found the story here. Thanks @ginthegin! If you don’t already, give her a follow!)

There is more that stinks in Ukraine than just the money-laundering of the Obama-Clinton-Biden gang. I told you nearly one week ago that based on reports of Biden providing security intelligence to the Russians via China, that I believed this was being done purposefully because Putin is going to carry out the cleanup in Ukraine, in exchange for the ability to have his way with that beleaguered, historically corrupt former Soviet satellite.  This is the reason for the ineffective and purposefully ineffectual sanctions against Russia.  In the end, I expect the Russians to control at least the Eastern half of Ukraine, if not the whole.  This is being done with a wink and nod from the Biden administration.  Why?

What would make people of this supposed stature so desperate that they would give up their money-laundry in Ukraine?  What would make people like this yield and let the RUSSIANS(!!!!!!) carry out negotiations on behalf of the United States with Iran?  What would make them do so? Talk about “COLLUSION!”

This is speculation, but Russia would be free to discuss anything they liked with the Iranians, even things quite damaging to the Americans involved, without any worry that it would ever be disclosed.  There’s no FOIA to worry about in Russia.  There’s nothing they couldn’t hide within these negotiations. As long as the final product is something they can shove through the Congress in the next few months, the sausage-making aspects of the agreement will remain forever opaque.  The American people will never know, but Putin will have a permanent lever to use against these people. That lever will be whatever the Iranians already have, or at least knowledge of it.  I don’t know what the Iranians have on the American Political Mafia, but it’s big.  One rumor several years ago, a rumor I could not confirm, was that they had Osama bin Laden. Alive. It sounds just as fantastic now as it did then, but there was always something about the story that rang true.  Of course, an extraordinary story of that sort would require equally extraordinary evidence, so I won’t posit this as the actual dirt, but if you use it as a proxy for the kind of dirt they must have, it would require something of that magnitude to explain the behavior we’ve witnessed.

The problem is that Putin was always going to demand “cash on the barrel-head” from these people. There will be no IOUs with Putin from this gang of American political mobsters.  He needed payment up front, which meant: No sanctions of lasting consequence; any sanctions must be a functional fan-dances, but also, no interference in or substantial aid(particularly lethal) to Ukraine.  Putin is going to clean up the evidence for these “DeepState” players, but the price is that he gets Ukraine, and who knows what else, ultimately.  They pretend Putin’s insane.  That’s misdirection and misinformation: He’s as coldly calculating as he’s ever been. He’s still a murderer, but right now, he’s their contract-killer.

Why? Why would they give up all of this?  In part, the answer lies in the clean-up Putin is doing, but the greater will be in the clean-up he’s doing for them on the new Iran Deal he’s negotiating on their behalf.  Levin has the first part of this figured out.  He sees that the reason the Biden administration is doing nothing effective with respect to punishing Putin is because they’re in league with Putin.  He may not be a team-mate, precisely, but he’s a contractor. He’s a hired hit-man.  He’s behaving as their agent.  If he disappears or outright kills Zelenskiy, so much the better.  Despite what you may have heard, Zelenskiy is no angel either.  He just has better press than his predecessor, and slightly less corruption.  Rather than seeking to protect Zelenskiy, the American mobsters may very well want him taken out.

Why?  I think they’re desperate to make the new deal with Iran.  I think the reason Obama and Kerry and others spent so much time trying to talk to the Iranians during Trump’s presidency was to say “look, we’ll fix this, don’t burn us, we’ll fix it and we’ll get you greater concessions and even more cash. Just stick with us until we ditch Trump.”  Remember Obama’s world-wide private shuttle-diplomacy during Trump’s presidency?  Obama and his crew are being blackmailed by the Iranians.  For what?  They used Ukraine as a cut-out and as a money laundry.  We’ve all assumed it was for mere greed on their parts, but was it something more?  Who else was in on the grift?  The reason they had to bring Putin in was because the Iranians no longer trust the Obama-Clinton-Biden gangsters.  If you can imagine it, the Iranians consider Putin to be an “honest broker,” or at least a devil they’ll trust. He stands to gain mightily in all of this, as he’ll undoubtedly make sure Russia provides them the nuclear expertise to finally build their own nuclear-tipped ICBMs.

This is why they had to dispense with Trump.  It has to be.  Their actions were so outrageous, they pulled every string, they called in every marker, they sacrificed sleepers, and they made their play to steal the election with no regard to how obvious it would be.  They pulled in every RINO, every DeepStaters, they used their corrupt federal judges, they played all their crooked friends at DOJ, including Bill Barr.  They worked every line. Had they gotten Garland onto the Supreme Court, they’d have had this crook in the most important court.  That doesn’t mean they didn’t sneak one in anyway.

You wonder why Amy Coney Barrett and Bret Kavanaugh now look to have been dud picks?  Can you see it?  Washington DC is full of people, everywhere, and in every guise, who are on the hook with this crowd.  They played every angle.  If they’re ever discovered and proven guilty, they’re on the hook for more than election fraud.  This is treason, pure and simple.  This is their gang making war against the United States and her people.

What is it that the Iranians have on these people? That’s what really lies at the bottom of this cesspool.  If Mark Levin figures out that piece of it, and if he can substantially tie it back to the rest of these pieces, he’ll blow the lid off of it all like he did five years ago this week, when he put together the Spygate story, at least the basic guts of it.  I fear for Mark.  These people are ruthless.  They’ve killed other prominent people to hide their crimes.  If he uncovers too much, will he end up like Antonin Scalia?  (Dead in bed with a pillow over his face?  No autopsy, assumptions about his heart conditions and age, a quick cremation, and a family that looks as though they’ve been told: “Hey, everybody can be gotten-to?”)

I know this must all sound a little bit crazy, but I want you, my reader, to think carefully about what you’ve seen over the last dozen years.  Why did Lindsey Graham do a two-year stint as chairman of a committee, shifting from another when he did?  Mitch McConnell didn’t make that play accidentally.  He put Graham there to guide through nominees for a particular purpose.  It’s all very peculiar once you think about it.  Lindsey Graham’s tough-talk about Putin is a smokescreen.  The last thing he wants is Putin dead.  That was a message to Putin.  It was a signal, but not the sort you’d think based on its content.  There’s a reason Kamala is being sent to Europe again, and it has nothing to do with peace.  It has everything to do with avoiding the ever-listening ears of the NSA.  Who better than the 3rd Term of the Obama Administration to understand the capabilities of our surveillance?  It has to do with the fact that you never say over any electronic communications platform that which you do not want overheard, intercepted, or copied by anyone.

The freedom of the Ukrainian people is being sacrificed on the altar of the American political mafia that is the DC UniParty.  Putin is not a mad-man. He’s a hired gun who will be paid handsomely for his efforts.  Crimea was the first installment.  At least the Eastern half of the Ukraine will be the second installment.  Ask yourself what Rosemont Seneca was really all about.  Why did it have dealings with EcoHealth Alliance?  Ask yourself who really got paid after Rosatom secured the Uranium.  It’s the same crowd.  They’re in on all of it.  “I’ll have more flexibility after this election.”  You’re witnessing treason.

If somebody ever puts the full story together, we’re going to discover that these people are willing to see all of us reduced to glowing, irradiated ash, hopefully before they resort to that action.

As one positive note, it’s clear that Levin has finally realized that Bill Barr isn’t a good guy. Score that as a win. One of Levin’s biggest weaknesses is that he’s too easily played by the personal congeniality of these monsters, and they exploit it, and him, repeatedly.  Their real aim is ever to exploit his audience.  Dearest Mark needs to view them all as ruthless killers, smile at them, make nice, and assume they’re preparing to stick a shiv between his ribs, striking them first instead.  (Figuratively speaking, of course.)  We need Levin at the top of his analytical game, more now than ever.  Maybe this time, it will fall to somebody else to figure it all out.  There are amazingly enterprising researchers and investigators still around.  The excellent reporter Julie Kelly comes to mind.  She’s a pitbull when she sinks her teeth into a story.  Let’s hope one of them picks up the mantle if Levin fails to spot it this time. I’m still hoping Mark will put it together. He’s a sharp guy, and I think he’s really close now. It’s too simple and it would be foolishly naïve to think it’s only about the left’s normal agenda of destroying America.  It’s bigger than that, and it’s more brutally criminal than that.  These people are personally invested in seeing this through in a way that suggests they’re covering-up something much more diabolical than the usual political subterfuge.  There’s a reason Obama isn’t enjoying retirement, and it isn’t because he dreams of spending his days wrecking America from his basement in Martha’s Vineyard.  His third term is about the survival of the American political mafia, or the “Deep State,” if you prefer.  They’re all in now.  Everything is on the line. Everything.

Update: At the time I wrote this post, Levin’s show of Friday, March 4th, 2022 was not yet available on his audio rewind page. It is now. Listen here.

Update 2: How convenient: Bill Clinton announces the Clinton Global Initiative is back!  The DC Mafia won’t give up the grift.

Editor’s Note: For those who think the notion that Vladimir Putin could be “in on it” with these people is a ludicrous proposition, I’d remind you: Nothing in geopolitics is ever as it seems. Remember when Putin was loved in Hollywood? No? Remember this, from the era of Hillary’s infamous reset button:

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Posted in DC Mafia, DC UniParty, Deep State, Featured, Mark Levin, News, Obama, Politics, Treason, Ukraine, War | 1 Comment »

The Treason of the Anointed

Saturday, April 14th, 2018

Short Reception Wedding Dresses
If you’re an American, or if you’re a British subject, or if you’re a citizen of a European country now subsumed into the catastrophe called the European Union, you should know that your nations are in the process of being stolen from you.  There is not a single government among them that is eligible to remain, and every one of those governments is infected with the virus of treason. The United States, of the most central interest to this blog, is now in the throes of its present death, not by some armed foreign invader, but by an infectious agent deposited among our alleged “elite” political establishment.  These people are a disease unto themselves.  They have sold their country out to the world’s thugs, and the time has come to pay up.   Donald Trump was elected president under the rules of our constitution, but he will not be permitted to exercise that office in any but the most superficial way.  Every long-time visitor to this blog knows I had been no particular fan of Donald Trump, the man, or Donald Trump, the candidate.  Quite to the contrary, I have been very critical of many of his positions and pronouncements, and I doubt very seriously that this is likely to change.  One of my most thoroughgoing criticisms of Donald Trump has been(and remains) that he exhibits no particular devotion to any specific, or self-consistent body of principles.  That criticism and all of the lesser complaints that fall out of it are easy enough to understand, but what may cause some confusion is what I will say next:  If we are to save this republic, if that is our actual goal, we must preserve and rescue the presidency of Donald J. Trump, warts and all, even from itself, lest we lose our nation forever.

This seems a rather obnoxious claim, and on its surface, I would generally dismiss such claims as radical hyperbole.  Let me attempt to support that claim, or reference others who have done a masterful job in so doing.  Let me begin by making the following assertion:  Donald Trump was elected President of the United States through a process during which he took no steps that would ordinarily be considered illegal or even quite unfair under the political system in operation since our founding.   In fact, it might well be said truthfully that Donald Trump had managed to overwhelm a system that had been unfairly rigged against him.  Does anybody seriously wish to contend that the outcome of the 2016 primary season had been reduced to another Bush-Clinton showdown until Donald Trump came down that escalator in June 2015?  Do you know who are the Never-Trumpers still in existence at this late date?  They are the people furious with Donald Trump for interrupting this precise outcome.  “By what right?”  “He’s not even really a Republican!”  You can hear their shrill contempt still echoing in establishment media, and through the halls of Congress.  If in the primaries of 2016, you voted for Donald Trump, you put your finger in the eye of this establishment.  I  must here note that I did not vote for Donald Trump in the primary in 2016.  Let me also confess that had I known two years ago all I have learned since, I would have done so enthusiastically.  It is not that I believe Donald Trump is a great president, or that my opinion of Donald Trump as an unprincipled man has changed, but that I now see the true enemy more clearly than ever I had seen it before.  The real enemy is far more frightening than Donald Trump could ever be, because Donald Trump does not hate this country.  Our real enemy is out to destroy the USA, and is well along that path.  Donald Trump is the final possible obstruction.  Will Donald Trump save the republic?  I don’t know.  I only know that his will likely be the last opportunity to do so in our lifetimes, and perhaps ever.

The entire “Russian Collusion” narrative was cooked up to confound and demolish the Trump presidency.  I want you to know that any sophist who approaches you with another argument about it is either a knowing participant in the treasonous conspiracy, not merely against Trump, but against our republic, or is a willing political tool of those conspirators, believing themselves to be on the same “team.”  Think of the latter(and more numerous) group as our contemporary version of Stalin’s “useful idiots.”  This includes the more innocent “NeverTrumpers” out and about in the conservative movement, who believe their principled opposition to Trump ought now lead them to participate in the “resistance.”  These must come to understand the truth:  Trump is the duly elected President, and all efforts to interfere with his authority as such are born of the real collusion between the two parties’ DC establishments in an ongoing treason against the whole body of the American people, and the republic to which they were born.

There are a great many people attempting to chronicle the truth about what is going on, but I think if I had to credit one person in media for making it more understandable and aggregating all the bits of this monstrous situation into  a single, cogent narrative, I would have to credit Dan Bongino.  Bongino has a daily podcast, and since episode 628, he’s done more to put this story together in one coherent story that the average person can easily understand, without appealing to a single “conspiracy theory.” In fact, everything Bongino has put together is backed up by public news reports, in much the same way Mark Levin had done a little more than thirteen months ago, when he made the public accusation that FISA warrants had been used by actors within the Obama administration to conduct surveillance on the Trump campaign and administration under color of law.   For his part in bringing this to light, and for his continuing efforts to expose this, we mustn’t forget that Mark Levin has done more to lay the groundwork than any other person in media.

Before we go further, I am going to ask you something extraordinary.  Please go listen to Dan Bongino’s Episode 698. Read his show notes for that episode.  Here’s the episode, posted on YouTube:

How many of you know or remember these names:

  • Kathryn Ruemmler
  • Robert Bauer
  • Greg Craig

If you want to know who is orchestrating the theft of your country, you’d better learn these names and the deeds associated with them. Bongino has been unmasking this plot against the American people since episode 628 of his daily podcast, back on January 8th of 2018.  It just happened to be the case that I first stumbled into Bongino’s podcast for the first time on the very next day, and it happened to be part 2 of that same story.

If you want to save the Republic, let me tell you how that can be accomplished at this very late date:  Robert Mueller must be fired.  Rod Rosenstein must be fired.  The Republicans threatening to impeach President Trump should he fire Robert Mueller must be exposed.  They are part of the plot.  They are the Republican co-conspirators who are participants in stealing your country.   There are more than these vocal Republicans, a list that includes scum like my own Senator, John Cornyn, and others  like Lindsey Graham.  Trump must fire Mueller now, and he must assemble a team empowered to take down the conspirators.  You will be shocked by the breadth and depth of the conspiracy, but you must know it all if you are going to rescue your nation.  Robert Mueller must be fired to have any chance to save this republic.  The whole DC Uni-Party knows it. What remains is for you to recognize it, rise up in indignant rejection of it, and to reclaim your country.  Whether you’re a fan of Donald Trump, or perhaps instead held your nose and voted for him rather than see the epic criminal shrew win instead, or even if you didn’t vote for him at all, unwilling to “hold your nose,” it’s time to recognize that he is the president, and he is now the only person of significant governmental power standing between our Republic and the abyss.  Act accordingly.

 

Editor’s Note: On a more personal note, I realize now that many of you had hoped my previous string of posts signaled my re-emergence. Obviously, that wasn’t the case, but I do believe that day will come before this year elapses.  Between health concerns, the various burdens of my personal and professional life, it will be some time yet.  It just so  happens to be the case that occasionally, a story or bit of information comes to light that I believe must not be missed, and this is one such story.  I remain fiercely committed to our constitution and the form of government it had established, but the ugly truth of what has been done must be widely known if we are to defend and preserve it.  Forces much more violently aggressive to our liberties are afoot, and they are striking back at us now for the impertinence of electing an unapproved President. These self-anointed “elites” are nothing more than modern-day brigands hijacking a nation, or a whole collection of them.  Even now, the rats, having eaten numerous holes in the hull of our ship of state, are fleeing our capital in an orderly fashion to prevent a panic or questions. These are the conspirators who now believe too much has leaked, and too much is out  in the light for them to evade criminal culpability if they remain in Washington DC.  The ones who remain are on the hook, and there’s no way out of it for them, so they are staying to fight this all the way to the bitter end, whichever way it goes. They have nothing to lose, but everything to gain, including avoiding the noose.  Yes, this conspiracy is as serious as that, and it’s why Obama and his circle of conspirators remain in Washington DC: Should all this be revealed to any substantial degree, they’re all going to prison at the very least.  This is why we must insist that President Trump fire Robert Mueller.  Mueller is the key to this operation, and this is why people like Trey Gowdy are not to be trusted.  Ever.   

Note Two: Ever Since Facebook locked my Mark America account(last post there in June 2016) during the primary season in 2018, I’ve only had access to post to my MarkAmerica Fan Page on Facebook via a friend who has administrative rights to that page.  Instead, look for my posts on minds.com, here:

https://www.minds.com/MarkAmerica

Also, stop by and seemy friend Mr.L’s most recent video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvFrF8Ag1lY

Check this out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL5OsCXUTNg

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Posted in Constitution, DC UniParty, Donald Trump, Featured, Leftist Cabal, Mark Levin, News, Obama, Politics, Sabotage, Treason | 1 Comment »

It’s Islamic Terrorism, Stupid

Saturday, December 5th, 2015

Over the last two days, I’ve watched in utter amazement as our media and government go out of their collective way to avoid talking about the nature of the incident in San Bernadino, CA, on Wednesday.  To listen to most public officials in the Obama administration, including the Jihadi-in-Chief himself, one might draw the conclusion that there is something wrong with mentioning Islam and Terrorism in the same sentence.  In fact, one might just as well never use the word “Terrorism” ever again.  We’ll call it “work-place violence,” or we’ll call it “street violence,” and we’ll pretend it had all been just a random occurrence with no ideological or religious linkage of any kind.  Our culture is breaking down, in part because so few seem interested in identifying plainly, and without apology, the nature(s) of our affliction(s.)  You cannot beat an enemy you will not name.  You cannot vanquish and evil you refuse to admit exists.   One cannot overcome a social ill when one will not name it, never mind naming its cause.  We rational folk must lead the way.  We mustn’t let some contrivance of political correctness impede our statement of the absolute, unvarnished truth.  Our President, most of our political leaders (appointed and elected,)  and average citizens refuse to state the plainly obvious, but I will not: The shooting in San Bernadino was an act of terrorism motivated in part or in whole by adherence to political Islam.

I have heard it at least ten-thousand times: “Islam is a religion of peace.” If that’s all Islam is, we’d have no problem with Islam, but Islam is much, much more.  Islam is also a cultural and political doctrine.  It is a legal doctrine.  It is a system of beliefs that countenances no breach among the facets of adherents’ lives.  Even non-adherents are liable for their conduct according to Islam.  Even those who are ignorant of Islam’s existence are required to give their fealty to it.  Practiced consistently, every Muslim would a Jihadi become.  Islam does not accept or tolerate substitution.  It does not permit free will.  Like pro-abortionists in our political sphere, it loves choice, so long as the choice made is in concert with their beliefs.  In other words, no actual choice is to be permitted.   In fact, this is why I argue that the rabid left in our own political sphere are the “Jihadis” in our midst.  Political Islam is statism, as thoroughly and as fundamentally as any other flavor.  It favors the interests of the state over the rights of the individual, and it relies upon anointed guardians to determine what are those interests. If you wonder how it could be that the left is as fundamentally fanatical as militant political Islam, this is the answer.

In San Bernadino, what we have seen is another expression of the extension of political Islam into American culture.  Just as American culture is fundamentally at odds with secular flavors of statism, so also is it incompatible with religious flavors.  Rand liked to describe these two seemingly opposing brands of statism as the mystics of muscle and spirit.  The left’s dogmatic mysticism is based entirely on the secular humanistic concerns of the body.  The religiously motivated mysticism of militant Islam is concerned only with one’s spirit in the great beyond.  The first seeks to own and dominate all on Earth, while the latter seeks to dominate on Earth for the alleged sake of the hereafter.  Both are frauds, and both are intrinsically evil.  Our American system had been founded to be effectively Laissez Faire both in terms of the body (economics and ethics) and the spirit (religion and ethics) since it was understood by our founders and the framers of our constitution that no collectivized version of either could be countenanced in freedom.

The terrorist attack in San Bernadino was the act of a conspiracy by radicalized adherents of political Islam.  Any other notion is mere foolishness propagated by those who would just as soon see you unarmed in a battle they will deny exists.  The French poet Charles Baudelaire observed that “the finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.” Whether this is so, it is certainly true that the radical militants of political Islam would just as soon have you doubt their existence, and the full evil of their intentions.  The same can be said of the rabid-dog left, and it is this that should clue us in to their fundamental similarity.   As the terrorist act in San Bernadino was underway, female shooter Tashfeen Malik posted a pledge of allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on Facebook. (CNN)   CNN’s site goes on to say that it seems the shooting may have been inspired by ISIS.  This weak wording is exemplary of our cultural collapse.  “Seems?”  “Inspired by?”  This rhetorical disarming merely accentuates the actual disarming, when one discovers that deaths by guns is on the decrease all over the country except in one narrow class of locations: Gun free zones.

If that’s not bad enough, we have a US Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, vowing to prosecute those who use “anti-Muslim” speech that “edges toward violence.”(DailyWire)  This sort of absurdity is precisely what’s destroying our nation, and it’s an excellent parallel to so-called “moderate Republicans” (a.k.a. “liberal Republicans”) who will not fight the left. Do you know why Donald Trump is leading?  It’s because he’ll say what many are thinking but are too damned frightened to say.   Of course, Trump is a stalking-horse who will eventually self-destruct conveniently ceding the lead at some future date, or perhaps even after the nomination is his, but either way, his current popularity signifies something important:  America is crowded with the cowed, silent majority who have been collectively beaten into submissive silence by the popular media culture.   None will speak it plainly until it’s staring them in the face, and lopping their head off for their trouble. It’s time to speak up, Loretta Lynch be damned, and we need to name this evil, denounce it, and commence the fight against it.  Until then, you can expect the collapse to continue apace.  Americans are dying because we will not name it, never mind fight it.  Its name is political Islam, and while our leaders fiddle us into the ashes, it’s advancing, it’s gaining ground, and we don’t dare speak its name.

 

 

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Posted in Featured, Militant Islam, News, Obama, Politics, Statism, Terrorism | 3 Comments »

President Ebola: The Pandemic Administration?

Tuesday, September 30th, 2014


News is now spreading faster than the disease: A patient has been diagnosed with Ebola in Dallas, Texas.  In a recent speech on the Ebola crisis in Africa, President Obama urged Americans not to panic.  If we should have learned anything from nearly six years of presidential malfeasance, it is that whatever he says, the opposite is likely true.  Where was our Commander-in-Chief when people were flying from Ebola-stricken African nations either directly or more often indirectly into ours?  How does that open border look now?  It’s not only Ebola, but also Tuberculosis, among others, about which Americans must now begin to worry.  President Ebola is an irresponsible political hack, pursuing his political agenda at the expense of live of the American people.  Where is the opposition party?  Seemingly, they are in hiding, trying to run out the clock hoping to take over in the US Senate.  They have responsibility in this matter, too.  Where are the committee hearings to place a spotlight on the ineptitude or malfeasance of President Ebola?  If Americans begin to die due to an outbreak of Ebola on this continent, to which this virus is a stranger, the blood will be on Obama’s hands, but also on the hands of all the open-borders advocates in both parties who carry his water on this issue. This is despicable.

The United States has the capability to shut down its borders, its airports, and its seaports at will.  All of this nonsense about not being able to control our borders is insufferable bilge.  With this sort of threat brewing in Africa, the President could have instituted a virtual quarantine preventing persons traveling from those countries to this, and if US citizens and legal residents, quarantined them at any of our numerous offshore bases and facilities, to be sure they weren’t bringing home anything more lethal than a sun-tan. Instead, this farce of an “administration” took no substantial steps, although the Centers for Disease Control(CDC) today issued guidelines to mortuaries and funeral homes on the handling of the remains of those who die of Ebola. Yes, we just had our first domestic diagnosis, but the CDC is getting out in front on this issue.

If Barack Obama had wanted a legacy to call his own, it appears he will have it.  Not only is the US economy in shambles, but it may be that we have a brewing pandemic on our hands.  At the time of this story, it is unknown how many others may already be infected, or how many people with whom the infected individual in Dallas may have had contact, but it is certain that the infected individual arrived state-side less than one week ago.  Had people arriving from Africa been quarantined pending a negative diagnosis, none of this would be an issue, except for the fact that our Southern border remains wide open and we’re reliant on the Mexican government to close down traffic from Africa.

This may seem a bit shrill in tone, but frankly, it bears consideration: The United States really only sees the worst communicable diseases these days by importation.  Tuberculosis was all but eradicated in this nation until successive Presidents and Congresses failed to do anything substantive to secure our borders.  National security is more than guns and bombers.  It’s about protecting the nation at large from a wide variety of threats.  It’s the rational basis for the existence of the Centers for Disease Control.   This president is a walking calamity, and his presidency has been a slow-motion train-wreck from which it seems only the well-connected can escape.  President Ebola and the Ebola Administration: The true plague upon America.

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Posted in Featured, News, Obama, Politics | 15 Comments »

Obama’s SOTU: Blah Blah Blah – Here’s the Truth

Tuesday, January 28th, 2014

Do Any Believe?

There’s nothing more annoying than the dishonest spectacle that has become of our traditional State of the Union address.  President Obama will address Congress, and with it, the nation, and he will lie unconditionally and remorselessly.  He will tell us how we’re creating jobs, but that we can do more.  He will talk about the gap increasing between the rich and the poor, never telling you that it is his policies that are expanding the gap, while adding many more people to the poverty category. He will almost certainly discuss green energy, but he will not mention how he has used crony capitalism in that field to rob the American people.  What he probably will not mention is “Obama-care,” at least by that name. He may reference the Affordable Care Act and promise that things will get better for the disastrous program.  Whatever he says, it is likely to be a lie, in part or in whole, because he can’t very well go before the Congress and the American people and speak the truth about either his aims or the true State of the Union. Let us speak the truth.

As we have witnessed, there are now fewer Americans working than at any time since the Carter administration, and there are more people receiving government subsidies than ever before.  To the degree Wall Street has been doing well, it is only because the Federal Reserve has been pumping funny-money into the economy through Wall Street.  Government debt is growing at a phenomenal rate, unsustainable by any rational measure, and none of his so-called “stimulus” has born any fruit for the general economy, no matter how much his cronies on Wall Street and K Street may have benefited.

Our defenses haven’t been in such sorry shape since Carter, and our foreign policy is a mess.  Iran will have nuclear weapons, because Obama won’t do a thing to intervene.  At virtually every opportunity, this president can be seen to support the enemies of the United States while often snubbing long-time allies.  On the home-front, he continues to use the intelligence apparatus of the US against the American people.  Indeed, he is turning the entirety of the Federal Government into his own political police force even as his purge of senior military officers continues unabated.

He is stripping us of our defenses in a violent world, while advancing the cause of despotism at home. If you happen to publish anything even vaguely disagreeable, you can expect some arm of the Federal Government to pay you a visit, or otherwise persecute and prosecute you on any trumped-up charge.  Obama is converting the United States into a police-state, in which government has unlimited discretion but individuals have none.

“Vengeance is mine!” sayeth Obama.  He is pursuing revenge against the free market, political enemies, the rights of citizens and anybody else he believes must be punished.  Most of all, this means America as we have known it is under constant attack; the virtues that had begotten its prosperity are being stripped away.  The larger body of the American people feel set-upon, and they are under the gun.  Every virtue they had practiced in pursuit of their happiness is being punished.

Expect the President to tell us again that if Congress will not act, he has a phone and a pen, with which he will bring down further terror against the American people.  Will you have health insurance within the span of another year?  Wonder. Worry.  Watch and see.  Will you be able to keep any of your earnings by the time he is through?  What will they be worth once he finishes inflating the money supply?  Will you be permitted to speak your mind?  Will you be permitted to keep (never mind ‘bear’) arms in your own defense?  Will you be secure in your person against unreasonable searches and seizures?  Will you be immune from indefinite imprisonment? What measure of your liberties will he leave unmolested?

Now we prepare to listen to the dictator lay down the law, as if that had been his constitutional function all along. His stooges and henchmen go out into the press and broadcast that now is the time for “action” and “direct action” and “real action.”  When you hear or read this, what you’re really witnessing is leftist code for mob violence. Obama is losing his grip on the hearts of Americans charitable enough to have given him a chance.  He has capitalized on this tendency of Americans, but their patience has worn thin in most quarters.  His enchanting sing-song of 2008 no longer “plays in Peoria.”  As things stand, he certainly won’t gain control of the House and could still lose the Senate in November, but he does not wish to be obstructed.  Obama is carrying out a coup d’etat and the media won’t tell you much about it, because they’re largely complicit, if not directly assisting in bringing it to fruition.

Now is the time when the left will act to consolidate its power, and to cement the “fundamental transformation” of America they had promised, and this means making certain it can never be undone.  Prepare yourselves, Americans, for the tyrant-king has set the stage, but up until now it’s been a warm-up act.  He knew he couldn’t complete his mission in four years, but with a second term and three years remaining, now he can afford to take more dramatic steps.  Do not be astonished by what you hear tonight, if watch this spectacle you must, but instead watch for the unspoken words behind the sentiments that will herald the beginning of the end of the republic.

 

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Posted in Barack Obama, Demagogues, Election 2014, Featured, News, Obama, Politics, War | 7 Comments »

Three Courses Among Which None Wish to Choose

Saturday, January 25th, 2014

Easier not to choose?

I’ve remained still these last weeks waiting to see the outcome of things in my own world.  My wife suffered a heart attack in early December, and while she survived and is on the mend, it put me into a pensive mood during which I’ve said little while simply absorbing what’s going on in the world around us.  I don’t have all of the answers, but what I do know is that we have a choice to make.  It struck me with a certain clarity when I realized that for all the efforts of good and conscientious conservatives, we’re barely making a dent.  The American people are thoroughly dispirited in a way not seen since Carter, and maybe even the pre-war era of FDR’s long and loathsome administration.  Nothing is improving.  Jobs are scarce.  The printed currency is piling up, and with it a stack of IOUs that would reach from Earth to the no-longer-planet Pluto.  What strikes me most is the unwillingness to choose, perhaps because all of the options seem so depressingly bad.  We are now at a stage in our civilization’s collapse that we must fight, reform, or surrender.  Make no mistake about it, as while we defer the choice, the available options only become more severe in their fullest meanings.  In time, the choice will be taken from us, and surrender will be replaced by slavery, whether we’d choose it or not. Even now, the embrace of the police state is transforming from a gentle, confidence-instilling hug into a death-grip from which it seems there may be no escape.

Maybe it’s time you had that blunt bit of talk with loved-ones who may not realize what’s afoot.    I know I’ve tried.  Some never listen because it’s too painful.  More often, because it is a complicated problem with implications that will reach into every life, most refuse to consider it.  Our nation is well on its way to becoming Rome.  We witness now the harbingers of our moral collapse, with an unconscionable display of motherly pride in a son who literally prostituted himself to homosexual pornography to support her household.  Lot’s wife had at least the advantage of a husband who would tell her to avert her eyes.  This scandalous decline in our cultural moral standards has left us with a nation that is rudderless not only in Washington DC, but in Everytown, USA, where plain, ordinary citizens no longer seem to muster much moral indignation about anything of consequence, while others rush to uphold the vile, the obnoxious, and the nonsensical.

Don’t misunderstand me: There are still many Americans who feel as I do, and you may well be among them, yet we are a declining proportion of a population overwhelmingly beset with endless distractions that will mean nothing when they find themselves at some future date languishing in the gutter.  I don’t believe it must end this way, but if we don’t choose another course, and soon, it will end this way.  As one friend constantly reminds me, “nothing ends well or it would never end.”  There’s a certain pragmatism to that view against which I would like to rebel, but like most of my readers, I feel the crushing weight of history pressing down upon us.

Will we fight?  Will a beleaguered people take up arms?  Many an American has made oaths, not all of them idle, about the nature of how they will go down, but I wonder if when faced with it, how many will simply fold.  More, one could wonder if this is not precisely what certain statist elements are attempting to provoke.  Against the combined forces of the modern government, who could long endure?  Who would desire this sort of outcome?  Who would want a fractured nation consumed by civil war?  Still, if it became the only viable option for our survival, I wonder how many would stand and fight, and for what they’d be fighting.

Will we surrender?  Will we yield to the historic march of statism, giving up first the last measures of our personal sovereignty; our property, such slim wealth as we may have managed to preserve, and all personal discretion to a police state that will command our every action, and make our every choice?   The evidence today would suggest that this shall be our path.  Despite its clear predatory aims against our liberties, observe the fact that at least one-third of Americans still believe the failed roll-out of the monstrous “Obama-care” should continue.  Such people do not deserve freedom, and will not long cling to it, precisely because such measures of freedom they tend to demand are merely vestiges of the concept.

Will we reform?  Here lies the last option for salvaging the nation, yet it is also the historically slimmest probability. The singular advantage we may possess when compared to all the collapsing civilizations that have before us descended into ash is that our basic law has been so difficult to amend that it has succeeded only twenty-seven times in more than two-hundred years.  What this means is that some vital portions have been left intact, leaving to us an escape-clause of sorts, and a method by which to reach from the grave’s brink at the last moment to reform our dying civilization.  This makes us undeniably unique with respect to opportunity, but the question remains as to whether we can summon the character in sufficient numbers to reach for that constitutional kill-switch.

I have become convinced that while we may tinker around with this office or that, and while we may occasionally elect a competent, sincere conservative, the federal authorities in Washington rule almost without respect to our laws, never mind our wishes.  Mark Levin has stated often and with growing impatience that we will almost certainly fail to reform by focusing on the federal government and its elected office-holders.  We must reach into the constitutional tool-kit and utilize its most powerful weapon against the centralization of power in Washington DC: Article V. holds the entire mechanism for reforms we seek.  It is not an easy road, and there will be no instant gratification, but if we are to overcome the gaping maw of the all-powerful government now consuming us, it is upon the authority of Article V that our salvation may rest. If you’ve not yet read The Liberty Amendments, I would urge you to consider picking up a copy soon.

Even now, we can observe the Obama administration’s predatory, despotic intentions.  While a review board declared that the NSA’s spying on US citizens should cease, the Obama administration rejected the board’s conclusions.  While we watch, the Obama administration makes it plain that they are checking their enemies list and checking it twice, and the only way to escape it is to be perpetually nice to the administration and its aims.  No dissent of any sort will be tolerated, whether you’re Dinesh D’Souza or a Tea Party activist.  Worse, the Republicans on Capitol Hill are joining in, with Mitch McConnell saying the Tea Party needs a punch in the nose.  There is really no longer any question about it: The war on the American people, their culture, their traditions, and their dreams is in full force, never mind the complete destruction of any prosperity they had once known.  There is no accident in it, and it’s all going according to plan.  My question for you remains: Will we submit to this historic script, with our part as helpless victims played to the hilt?

It’s time for us to consider whether we will be led down that same old path.  We’re barely more than nine months from the mid-terms, and the evidence is that we are yielding momentum as the Republicans in Washington DC continue to throttle our efforts. One might wonder how this can be, but I understand it: We are exhausted, our morale has taken a beating, and more and more of us find we’re under an economic strain that makes other efforts seem too tiring.  Some of us have noticed the expanding police state, deciding it best to lie low and to refrain from open activism.  Myself, I feel as though I must now get all of my personal effects in order, in the manner of a soldier preparing for a deployment to war.  Sometimes, I wonder if that’s merely my perception, but something tells me I’m not alone.

Like any other movement, it’s time to assess our position, our options, and our next move.  Waiting for the “Republicans” to save us clearly won’t yield any fruit, so we must ask whether we now huddle in darkness waiting for the end, or instead rise in some fashion. I credit Mark Levin for reminding us of the one way out of all of this that remains, but now the challenge is before us:  We have a choice, and we’d best make it before it’s made for us.

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Posted in Activism, Featured, Mark Levin, News, Obama, Politics, Tea Party, War | 44 Comments »

Poll: Which of these Harmed You?

Sunday, December 22nd, 2013

[polldaddy poll=7666786]

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Posted in Featured, News, Obama, Politics, Poll | 2 Comments »

Veterans March on DC – Palin, Cruz, Lee Run Interference

Monday, October 14th, 2013

In Washington DC on Sunday, an unknown number of veterans(we’ll never get an honest estimate out of DC officials) together with Governor Sarah Palin, Senators Ted Cruz(R-TX) and Mike Lee(R-UT) gathered to visit the World War II memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, and later, the vets marched to the White House and the Capitol, depositing and discarding a pile of “Barry-cades” at the White House.  According to a report on Shark-tank.net, Palin and her contingent were greeted by riot police who were there to attempt to shut down the event.  Gov. Palin reportedly thanked the officers for their service before joining in the barricade removal and continuation of the event.  Senators Cruz and Lee joined her in making remarks to open the event. Here’s video posted on youtube:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_6GZJGvtoU]

A clip repeating a small segment of Sarah Palin’s remarks with Senator Cruz’s remarks:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFYiIgtRv-U]

A clip of Greta Van Susternen talking with Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, and Mike Lee at the event:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwOrU4JJ6q8]

Not surprisingly, this group of leaders show up for the important things.  Other so-called leaders were nowhere to be seen.  Certainly, President Obama wasn’t around, and Marine 1 was seen leaving the White House during the extended event that included veterans carrying and depositing sections of “Barry-cades” at the White House, notably, one double-amputee on a Segway who loaded a section of the barricade and carted it with him.

These are the men and women our President and Harry Reid choose to dismiss.  These are the people who are “radicals,” “extremists,” and “zealots” in the estimation of the Washington DC elitists.  The simple truth is that men and women who have given their service honorably and often at great(or ultimate) personal cost to this country should never be barricaded from memorials.  Never in any previous shutdown have these memorials been barricaded, and the truth is that it costs more money to barricade them than to have left them open.  This spectacle was brought to you by none other than Barack Obama, along with his cronies and henchmen, all attempting to bring unnecessary pain to the American people.

Naturally, it wasn’t over there.  Vets carried barricade section up to the White House, and riot police soon filled the area, along with mounted police.  There were alleged to have been a few minor scuffles, with protesters chanting everything from “Obama must go” to “Shame on you.” Here’s a video clip:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD5KMm-pCZA]

As police v. protester “clashes” go, this one was pretty mild, thankfully, and you could hear in this and similar video clips the veterans urging one another to remain “cool” and to otherwise prevent the situation from getting out of hand.  These are America’s vets, mobilized, honorable, and patriotic.  Meanwhile, the DC elite bring out the riot police to try to close down an event that should never have been necessary but for the President’s insistence on closing down memorials that have never been closed before.

I would like to thank all my honorable brothers and sisters, young and old, who showed up for this event.  I also think we owe significant thanks to Governor Palin, along with Senators Cruz and Lee, for running interference and making it more difficult for the riot police to attempt to sweep this up and bury it.  The media did its level best to either ignore or mock the event.  The truth is that American veterans and patriots rallied on Sunday in defense of our liberties and against a tyrant, and whether the mainstream media covered it or not, you should know of their efforts. This must be the beginning of taking our country back.

 

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Posted in Activism, News, Obama, Obama Shutdown, Sarah Palin, Veterans, video | 1 Comment »

Closing Oceans, Furloughing the Almighty – How to Beat the Bully

Saturday, October 5th, 2013

He’s Winning?

One of the lessons most of us managed to learn in confronting bullies early in life is that few things can overcome the power of mockery and ridicule.  The biggest, baddest schoolyard bullies are often overwhelmed when their victims band together and belittle them.  The same rule holds true in politics, and indeed, it’s a standard political approach. Catching politicians eating corn-dogs, or making a mockery of their off-the-cuff comments has been the stuff of political mockery for centuries.  It’s effective because most people like to laugh, particularly at the expense of the high and mighty.  Who on Earth is higher and mightier than a US president?  Who is more open to ridicule than the man who occupies the Oval office?  We conservatives often worry that we’re not “winning” the public opinion because we’re painted as dour or heartless or humorless.  Laugh a little.  This President is affording us every opportunity to prevail as he undertakes every extreme action to enhance the pain of the shutdown for Americans.  Yes, some of it is enraging, but it also speaks to the self-aggrandized view this man holds of himself.  If you want to defeat a despot, mock him.  Ridicule him.  Make him the joke around town.  None are more eligible for this treatment than Barack Hussein Obama.

It’s not as though we don’t have the evidence.  After five days of the government shutdown, during which conservatives have taken to the airwaves to mock and ridicule this preposterous man, questioning his every action in light of his constitutional limits, his daily tracking-poll numbers are falling like a stone.  Conventional wisdom had held that he could not be beaten, and that Republicans would take all the blame, but that hasn’t been demonstrated by the tracking polls.  With every day this goes on, and with every joke that is told, Obama is seeing his approval numbers dip to all-time lows.  If you want to know how to make a lame-duck of this President, it really comes down to credibility.  After Putin humiliated him, and after a month of haughty lectures and accusations leveled at Republicans, he’s beginning to sound like an excuse factory.  Whatever else may be true, the American people are catching on to this.  It’s having an effect on his ability to carry out his threats.  Think of the imagery of 90-year-old veterans at the WWII memorial being greeted with “Barrycades” erected by order of a president that desperate to make his political points.  It’s an open invitation to ridicule.

On Saturday comes the news that Obama has “shut down the oceans,” and people are laughing about it.  On Friday, it was made public that he’s ordered the Pentagon to shut down religious services in military chapels, and Americans emboldened by the zeitgeist begin to proclaim: “Obama is Furloughing G-d.” Now they mock his closure of Mt. Rushmore, asking if he will throw a curtain over it.  Jay Leno asked his audience if they were more scared of the shutdown, or more afraid of it opening back up to uproarious laughter.  The Obama-Reid shutdown is having precisely the opposite effect of what had been intended, and the more ludicrous the President’s actions, the more his approval drops.  He tries to inflict more pain, and Americans are disgusted by it but then go on to laugh in the face of it all.  At every turn, Americans are looking for new and more humorous ways to dismiss this president as the bullying lout he has become.

In social media, particularly on Twitter, the mockery goes on continuously.  It’s having an effect, as each time some shrill leftist makes some idiotic claim on behalf of the administration, they are met with derision and mockery.  The more this happens, the more it becomes difficult for Obama to have the impact he had hoped this shutdown opportunity would present.  Early in the shutdown, the White House insiders whispered that they thought they were winning, and now, even that comment is mocked.  Most of the Republicans in Washington don’t know how to handle this. Their heads are stuck in DC media coverage, and they don’t understand the mixed signals.  From their districts, and in social media, support when they stand firm, while the establishment press insists that they are losing.

Naturally, a few of the smarter ones have instigated or joined in the mockery.  Senator Ted Cruz has tweeted his share of appraisals of the Obama-care roll-out and the Obama-Reid shutdown, and it’s beginning to take a toll.  Republicans questioned Cruz over his strategy during a caucus lunch this week, and the weak-kneed Republicans were bothered and accusatory, suggesting Cruz had “led them into a cul-de-sac” to borrow the phrase.  What their shortsightedness reveals is how out-of-touch they are with the American people.  If they understood the dynamics of our modern culture, they would recognize as has Senator Cruz that the American people are just beginning to engage fully and that they will demand that DC listen to their complaints.  The tide has turned and the momentum is now gathering against the President, and if the surrender-set on Capitol hill would merely join the “Cruzade,” not even the establishment media would be able to rescue the Obama presidency from lame-duck status.

Given what we know about Obama’s designs and intentions, this may be the best way in which to stop him in his tracks. It may be the only way in which Obama-care is finally ejected into the ditch.  What we conservatives can do is to join in the mockery and the ridicule of the bully.  Obama wants to push old men around at the WWII memorial, and at Normandy, and anywhere else he can inflict pain.  He wants to shut down religious services on military bases, and he wants to make the shutdown as painful as possible.  We’re Americans, and we have always known throughout our history how to deal with pain.  We laugh at it when we can muster the humor.  Let us laugh in the face of this dictator-in-waiting, and show him we still know how to overcome bullies.  This man won’t build a wall on our Southern border to keep out illegals, but he’ll throw up “Barrycades” around our treasured memorials?  Such a man deserves all the contempt and ridicule we can muster.

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Posted in Activism, Featured, Media, News, Obama, Political Humor, Politics, Polling Data | 4 Comments »

Who’s Really Trying to Shut Down Government?

Saturday, September 21st, 2013

“Take a pill…”

The conventional wisdom in Washington DC is that if the Republicans in the House take the fight over funding of Obama-care to the limit, they will pay a price at the polls in 2014 should government shut down.  The fact of the matter, however, is that the House of Representatives has as one of its constitutional powers the primacy over federal taxation and expenditures.  There should be no doubt that if the government shuts down, it will not be because House Republicans hadn’t passed a bill to fund government, but that Senate Democrats conspiring with the President insisted on funding a program to which nearly sixty percent of Americans remain opposed.  Why wouldn’t Americans oppose Obama-care?  It’s driving up costs, killing jobs, reducing wages, and stealing the foundation of middle-class America.  There is only one party committed to the notion of shutting down government in the name of such a program, and it is that party, driven by a highly ideological president that will insist on the shutdown.  Everybody acknowledges that Obama-care isn’t even close to being fully ready for roll-out, including the President, who has delayed various portions of the law, including the employer mandate, but none of this will stop him if he can help it.  Who’s willing to shut down government?  President Barack Obama and his henchmen in the Senate will do and say anything to take over your health-care.

The Republicans should stand ready to shut down the government to prevent this atrocity in economic and human terms.  Obama-care is worse than a disaster.  It is a sole-source national wrecking ball that will kill.  It will lead to the death of businesses, small and large, the death of the middle-class, and ultimately, to the premature deaths of countless Americans who will be denied care or given substandard, delayed medical attention that almost certainly could have saved or extended their lives.  Perhaps worse, the government’s estimates suggest that it won’t really reduce the number of uninsured Americans, but it will drive our nation’s debt to an insanely, unsustainable new high from which we will never escape.  Republicans ought to be willing to stand forth and take credit for shutting down government if that’s what it takes to stop such a program, but one can understand the fear tactics in play, so that politicians don’t wish to be associated with it if it’s possible to avoid.

With that in mind, however, the President is willing to shut down all the other departments of government in order to preserve this one new unsustainable program.  What sort of arrogance must consume him?  This president is willing to delay Social Security payments, medicare reimbursements, military pay, and all the other pre-existing obligations of government in order to preserve a program that has come to bear his name.  This is vanity written on a presidential scale.  For all the blathering of Democrats about compassion, they are willing to sink an entire nation for the sake of a program that was mortally flawed from the moment of its conception.  In order to preserve a program that they consider important to their political futures, they are willing to submarine a nation, its freedoms, its economic opportunities, and its people.  Who is willing to shut down government?  The President and his party are willing to sacrifice the entire nation to this extension of their miserable misunderstanding of the laws of nature and economics.

The fact of the matter is that Democrats are scared to death.  They ought to be, because if this program goes into effect as it is currently written, the results will be tragic for most Americans.  “Death panels” are a feature, and not a bug, as we in the computing field might say.  They’re important to any cost-savings Obama-care claims to achieve, although no evidence exists that such savings will be realized.  More, the government will now collect data not only on your health, but also on your behavior, your preferences, and all manner of characteristics with respect to you and the way you choose to live your lives.   Politically-favored groups will get special dispensations in the name of some alleged notion of “fairness,” while others will be punished relentlessly through higher premiums and denied care.  The worst thing a nation can do is to politicize its health-care, and that will be among the strongest results of the entire Obama-care tragedy.

I wish more Republicans had the guts to stand up and take credit for trying to stop this law.  I wish fewer Americans were so easily manipulated by media.  Nevertheless, the truth is what it is: Obama-care is the greatest attack on the American way of life in four generations.  It will kill more Americans than al-Qaeda’s wildest dreams, and it will bankrupt us more rapidly than even our already spiraling expenditures would manage, reducing the whole nation to poverty.  Who is willing to shut down government in order to carry this monstrosity forward, and what must be the nature of their motives?  They might claim “compassion,” but the truth is that Obama-care represents the naked aggression of the state against its people.

After all, where is the compassion of Democrats for all the people who won’t be hired tomorrow because employers do not wish to increase their liability under the law?  Isn’t it cheaper and easier to outsource to Asia than to hire an American?  Where is the compassion of Democrats for all the Americans who are having their hours cut, in order to get below the Obama-care maximum part-time hours?  Where is the compassion for all of the people who will now die prematurely, unnecessarily, because Obama-care will limit what sort of procedures may be done or which medical devices might be used on a particular patient?  If you want to know the real compassion of Obama-care, it is encapsulated in the President’s infamous counsel to a 2009 town-hall questioner that granny ought to just take a [pain] pill rather than put her survivors through the expense of keeping her alive.

The truth about Democrats’ alleged compassion is that it extends in every direction in which they can easily buy political support, but in no direction at all when it cuts into their power.  Democrats’ compassion isn’t for all the individual lives they will wreck in all the ways Obama-care will accomplish, but instead for the sake of their own political advantage.  For power, they are willing to shut down government, starve granny, and hand her a pain pill if she becomes too loud in her agony.   When people argue over who is willing to shut down government, we should all recognize the sad fact of the matter at least in this case: The Republicans are merely trying to stop a disaster from wrecking the whole country, but otherwise willing to continue funding government pretty much as-is.  The President and his party of shameless power-hungry looters are willing to starve anybody if it will carry their newest program forward.

Americans should be calling their Senators, Democrat and Republican, to insist on joining Ted Cruz and Mike Lee on the de-funding of Obama-care, or simply resign themselves to take their pills and be quiet about it.

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Posted in Featured, Healthcare, News, Obama, Obamacare, Politics | 4 Comments »

The Failure of the Affirmative Action Presidency

Saturday, September 21st, 2013

Hopelessly Unprepared

Barack Obama has been President for nearly five years.  With all the promises of “hope and change,”  one might have expected a bit more from the nation’s forty-fourth president.  Instead, we have now the lowest labor participation rate since Jimmy Carter, and the most rapidly spiraling debt in our nation’s history.  We have a health-care debacle that is threatening to ruin what remains of the entire nation’s economy, and a foreign policy that appears to have been concocted on the fly by a session of fourth-grade group-think. We have escalating violence in our cities, where people of all colors have become all too familiar with blood in the streets, of children, and racial tensions are at their highest in at least a generation.  Barack Obama was never really qualified for the job, and dismissing all the flowery rhetoric, what the litany of failures demonstrates is that affirmative action even in politics is a failure.  The good wishes and good will of the American people who elected him in part precisely because of his race could not overcome an unpreparedness for the job.  Like so many promoted more quickly merely on the basis of race as a matter of affirmative action, Barack Obama is an unrivaled failure.

Through the course of my working life, I have seen any number of instances in which an individual had been promoted solely on the basis of some affirmative action formula.  It was true even in the Army, and while results did vary, on average, the results would generally be considered failures.  This is because affirmative action often causes pressure to promote individuals who may not be ready, yet, and at a pace that exceeds the merit of their records.  Some proponents of the scheme will argue that a given individual “just needs a chance,” but too often what the beneficiaries of this program really need is more experience and seasoning.  Instead, dropped into a position for which they are not entirely prepared, errors in judgment and immaturity for the role often surface, sometimes in the form of disaster.

In 2008, a majority of Americans made a decision that it was time that America had its first black President, the claims of Bill Clinton to that title notwithstanding.  Polling results at the time indicated that there was a significant proportion of voters who had cast their votes simply as part of a notion about the historic implications of electing a black man to the office.  Sadly, five years later, what we find is what one often finds when following up on affirmative action hires: Failure.  The good intentions of those doing the hiring cannot overcome the lack of actual qualifications of the applicant, and bad things will happen.

Barack Obama had been a state senator from Illinois, and then elected to the United States Senate from his home state.  His scant state legislative record didn’t justify his rapid elevation to the federal body, and his even lighter federal record didn’t begin to justify his rapid ascent to the presidency.  In short, he had been only slightly more qualified to be president by virtue of his record than a person picked at random off the street.  The American people, reaching into the well of their vast compassion and good will, elected a man who had no business becoming President of the United States at least in part simply to further an affirmative action motive, and this decision has led to utter disaster.

In the presidency, Barack Obama has demonstrated at times a petulance about the job.  When the American people don’t respond favorably to something he has done or said, it is assumed that they did not get the message.  When the American people voice their disapproval, it’s “reactionary” opposition, and in too many cases, the President’s political allies have resorted to the claim that he’s met such resistance “only because he’s black.” That’s balderdash, of course, but what makes it more galling is when one recognizes that a fair proportion of the reason he is in office at all is precisely because he is black.  The American people elected him with respect to that particular trait virtually without regard to any other, including his preparedness for the job.

Barack Obama’s ideology is such that I would never find myself in agreement with him.  His notions about law and government are virulent expressions of statism from which this nation will not soon or easily recover.  All of that aside, he might have been a better president if he had been even slightly ready for the job.  Another decade of seasoning might have tempered some of his greatest errors, miscalculations, and simple bad policy with a greater respect for the scope of the job to which he had been elected.  Instead, having obtained the job too easily, and frankly unjustifiably early in his career, he seems not to have any sense of the gravity of the office.  This leads inevitably to the instances in which he has made absurdly foolish statements, from “the Cambridge police acted stupidly,” to “if I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”   A decade of greater experience, perhaps seeking gubernatorial election in his home state, or otherwise tempering his tone with a broader contextual experience might have made it possible to avoid such spectacles.

Instead, in a rapid process of affirmative action promotions through the political system, Barack Obama went from community organizer to President of the United States much too rapidly.  Thomas Sowell has observed the effects of affirmative action in college admissions, and the great pain it inflicts on the objects of this alleged benevolence, because they stroll onto a campus for which they are entirely unprepared, simply on the basis that they are part of some favored group, class, or race.  What we have in the person of Barack Obama is somebody who has jumped up a ladder, skipping rungs, many rungs at a time, because affirmative action born of a sense of compassion or fairness demanded it.  What we have as a result is a president who is wrecking the nation in stubborn indifference to the fact that he had been unprepared for the job, and who did not have the perspective or temperament to understand his own experiential shortcomings.

He wasn’t qualified.  No summation of the good intentions of the American people could overcome that simple fact.  No number of well-wishes or aspirational hopes could arrest the almost inevitable disasters that are accumulating. When a people who claim to be color blind use their racial motivations to select their leader, nothing good can result, because it permits a sort of self-blinding foolishness to predominate.  Those who elected him out of a sense of racial solidarity will overlook virtually anything he does.  Those who elected him from a notion of affirmative action will likewise try to look past his failures, no matter how severe.  None of these motives centering around his race will begin to repair the damage that has been done, either to the country, or to the man.  One could almost be tempted to feel badly for Barack Obama because he was thrust into an office for which he had neither the training nor the temperament, and in the end, it’s destroying him.  Viewing his treatment by Vladimir Putin, it is impossible to believe that Obama feels anything but contempt for the office he now occupies.  He’s been played for a fool on the global stage in scandalously bad fashion, and with him, the entire country is diminished.

There is a silver lining in all of this, if you’re willing to find it.  One could hope that the American people would recognize the error of their way, taking greater care in future elections to select leaders on the basis of factors excluding race, sex, and age.  There are any number of qualified men and women of every conceivable racial background who are much more qualified to the office than Barack Obama had been, and it is my hope that America is able to recover from its bad choices.  Let us refrain from making electoral decisions on the basis of superficial characteristics that have no relevance to the job, instead focusing on the question of a candidate’s suitability, temperament, and experience for it.  Being a color-blind society means refusing to consider race, either to the detriment or the benefit of those under evaluation.  Infusing a choice with these sorts of notions will always come out wrong, whichever direction the motives might have been leaning.

There is still a great deal of damage that will be done by Barack Obama’s intransigent inexperience.  Even a decade later, the added wisdom might have provided a buffer between his most radical views and the reality of the world in which he operates.  Instead, Obama’s central flaw is the belief that he is somehow entitled to the job, or that he is infallibly capable of executing it without counsel from more experienced people. The full measure of the tragedy of this presidency will never be calculated, because there are so many moving parts, and so many imperceptible tiny effects, but what must be known and measured is the catastrophic large-scale result: We are again a nation beleaguered by a leadership that is intractably fixed upon the worst of all worlds in policy and temperament because we elected a man who was not ready to govern, whatever one thinks of his particular worldview.  This presidency is the living evidence of the failure of affirmative action taken to its logical limits, and the results are breathtakingly and painfully clear.  Good intentions have once again paved the road to Hell, and once more, we are marching silently down its smoldering surface, paying the price in wasted human potential in every field for the sake of an ideal that had remained impossibly flawed.

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Posted in Barack Obama, Featured, News, Obama, Politics | 2 Comments »

Confronting Our Worst Fears About the GOP

Friday, August 2nd, 2013
sweet sixteen dress

Peas in a Pod

It should come as no surprise to conservatives that we’re being shafted on virtually every issue by some gang-of-eight or other assembly of Republicans who simply will not stand up to the Democrats.  Normally, I don’t spend much time guessing at their motives, instead tending to examine the results of their positions. I don’t necessarily assume that our GOP establishment opponents are evil, but merely misguided.  This view has been changing, because the more closely I examine their positions, the more baffled I become by any logical standard of measurement.  The problem is that discovering their motive has become increasingly important to the prospect of defeating them.  If we understood what it is that they’re after, we might find it somewhat easier to beat them or make them irrelevant. Sadly, I have begun to conclude that my worst fears may be true.  The GOP’s establishment wing clearly runs the show, leading us to perpetual defeat. It is time to ask ourselves why by considering the issues on which they’ve abandoned conservatism.

My first question must go to folks like Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan(R-WI) on the issue of immigration reform: “Are you stupid?” I know this will seem a bit blunt to some people, but it’s a sincere question.  The Senate Gang-of-Tr8ors bill offers to create between twelve and thirty million new citizens over the coming decade.  We already know that the overwhelming majority of them will be Latinos of Mexican origin, and that their tendency is to vote for the Democrats by a seven-to-two ratio or worse, once they become eligible.  What sort of complete and utter moron must one be to believe this could in any way redound to the benefit of the Republican party, conservatism, or even our nation’s future?  Given the stance of Ryan and his cohorts, we are left to conclude that there can be only two things driving their position.  Either they are among the most pathetically irrational and moronic persons, or they must know what will happen and wish to gain that result.  There are no alternatives.

On the issue of the budget, the establishment Republicans insist that we must support Paul Ryan’s pathetic, tinkering attempt at reform, even though it establishes no concrete foundation of reform, instead promising to reduce the rate of growth of the deficit, but not arresting it entirely, never mind addressing the mounting debt.  More, when you call members of the House or Senate to demand an explanation as to how the official National Debt count has been stuck for two months running, despite the fact that the government is taking on more debt, none of the Republican members seem all too interested in finding an explanation.  Once again, we are confronted with the question: Are these people simply oblivious?  Why aren’t they screaming at the top of their lungs? Here you have an administration that is exceeding the statutory debt limit by billions of dollars, and in order to disguise it, they’ve stopped the debt clock. Other than the frozen clock, they’ve continued business as usual.  What good is a sequestration of funds?  What good is a debt limit fight if the guys who must engage have already surrendered?  Do you believe for one moment that Paul Ryan or the rest of the RINO phalanx in Washington DC is unaware?  Do you believe they are so incompetent as to miss the significance of these Treasury Department actions?  It is either true that they are so incompetent that we must for the good of the nation replace them, or they are willing to let Obama do what he’s doing, in which case we must be rid of them for the same reason.

I have said many times that it doesn’t really matter whether they’re simply foolish or guilty of collusion, but I’ve come to change my view on this.  One can’t forgive negligence born of incompetence, but one must punish willful misdeeds more harshly as a warning to other would-be scoff-laws.  It’s a matter of intent.  Are the establishment Republicans in Washington DC, under the “leadership” of John Boehner(R-OH,) Mitch McConnell(R-OH,) and all the other big-government Republicans simply guilty of foolishness and incompetence, or is their behavior evidence of malice?  This is the ugly question we must ask ourselves, because we may choose one or the other alternative postulate, but never both.

It’s now clear to me that the Republican party as expressed by its “leaders” in Washington DC is in open collusion with the Democrats and President Obama.  There is no other way to explain their willingness to go along, knowing what the results will be.  On Benghazi, they help the Democrats obfuscate, and on the IRS scandal, they gum up the works, but on legislative matters of significance, they are lending an assist to Democrats: On immigration, the budget and debt ceiling, the funding of Obama-care, and a range of somewhat less significant issues at the moment, they are not merely capitulating, but assisting the Democrats.  They must be either the largest collection of stupid people in any government on the planet, or they intend the results their efforts are obtaining.  It cannot be both.

A conservative must now ask with pointed clarity: Does it matter if John Boehner or some lunatic Democrat wins his seat in 2014?  Does it matter in the least if Lamar Alexander or some Tennessee Democrat wins that Senate seat in 2014?  The answer is yes:  The prospective Democrat in either case is at least being honest about his or her  intentions, in the main, at least to the degree that by running as Democrats, we voters may make an accurate guess about what sort of legislation will result.  This cannot be said of the RINOs in the GOP.  By running as Republicans, there has been at least the implicit idea that such candidates will oppose statism, but that simply hasn’t been the case. If ever there had been a time in American history when the willingness of voters to be true to themselves was the most critical aspect of their political activism and engagement, now must be that time.  We must admit in the open what we have long suspected: The establishment wing of the GOP consists of traitors to every value and ideal we hold sacred, because they are in open collusion with those who are actively seeking the destruction of our country.

Make no mistake about it: They want the destruction too.

 

 

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Posted in Activism, Budget, Conservatism, Featured, GOP Establishment, Idiotic Politicians, Immigration, News, Obama, Politics | 17 Comments »

Sarah Palin’s “Redneck Whiteboard”(Video)

Saturday, July 27th, 2013

Redneck Whiteboard

I take some knocks from a few of the haughty sorts of Republican who believe the conservative base of the GOP mustn’t be trusted with leadership. In their view, riffraff like me are simply “too extreme” (read: consistent) to be taken seriously.  Their shills head out onto to television to offer the best thinking of the establishment’s intelligentsia, but despite their theorizing, and their whiteboards, they simply don’t understand why the average conservative can’t see things their way.  One of the things that causes some eye-rolling amongst the “elites” in my own locality is to mention my ongoing, unwavering support of Sarah Palin.  In their view, she epitomizes the sort of conservatism they abhor: Honest, plain-spoken, and trustworthy fighters who tend not to bite their tongues.  In this context, as the eyes roll, I hear in response: “Oh, that makes perfect sense.”  On Greta’s show on FoxNews last night, Governor Palin displayed these simple virtues that make GOP establishment hacks roll their eyes.  On full display was a white envelope,  covered in the names of scandals surrounding Barack Obama.  In open mockery of Karl “Tokyo” Rove, she called it her “redneck whiteboard.” Here’s the video:

One can only imagine how this went over within the confines of the Republican establishment’s inner circle.  Gov. Palin’s plain-spoken truth on the matter is why despite the eye-rolling of the Republican elite, the conservative base of the party supports the former Alaska governor.  Her message is much too rare in GOP circles, and while the establishment in Washington DC helps to delay and obfuscate on Barack Obama’s behalf, the truth out in fly-over country is that the American people want the answers on all those issues listed on Palin’s “redneck whiteboard,” and despite the assistance of certain Republicans in helping to cover them, eventually, we’re going to have at the truth.  One might run out the clock on this administration, but one cannot run out the clock on the truth.  Governor Palin rightly points out that the 2008 McCain campaign failed to make an issue of any of the negative material swirling around Barack Obama, ultimately forbidding her from raising questions about his personal history on the campaign trail.  How can anybody be expected to win when they’re fighting with one hand tied?  Governor Palin is right: It’s time to deal with these scandals, and Barack Obama should be ashamed for pretending they are all phony, when it’s clear there is so much more to these matters.

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Posted in Featured, GOP Establishment, Media, News, Obama, Politics, Sarah Palin, Tokyo Rove, video | 4 Comments »

Miscarriage of Justice

Saturday, July 13th, 2013

Judicial Intemperance

In the case of the State of Florida vs. George Zimmerman on Thursday, Judge Nelson stepped out of line.  The purpose for which a judge serves in any trial is to be sure that the evidence is presented, and that a fair trial is conducted that by its processes, procedures, and by the judge’s own conduct, does not prejudice the jury flagrantly either for or against the defendant.  Whether you believe that George Zimmerman had been merely defending himself, or instead that he had shot Trayvon Martin with other motives, he is entitled to a fair trial.  What occurred on Thursday in Nelson’s courtroom was a travesty, and everything about it stinks of corruption or malfeasance on the part of the judge.  There can be no excuse for the conduct of the judge, so that whatever you think of Zimmerman’s alleged guilt or presumed innocence, you ought not be satisfied with the conduct of this trial.  From the very start, the deck has been stacked against George Zimmerman, and to see our system of justice perverted in this manner is one more piece of evidence in the case that we are entering post-constitutional, post-American conditions.

To begin, there should have been no trial.  The trial is the result of a special(read: “political”) investigation conducted by a state government that was seeking a political solution arising from a purely legal problem: The original investigation by Sanford, FL police found no cause to prosecute George Zimmerman, finding there was insufficient evidence to support prosecuting him.  All bizarre conspiracies aside, what Sanford investigators concluded was that George Zimmerman had acted in self-defense when he discharged his weapon, resulting in the death of Trayvon Martin.  At that point, the usual suspects in the unending meme of racial discontent took the stage, including our aggrieved President, who proclaimed “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”  From the moment these words issued forth from Barack Obama’s mouth, the die had been cast, and there could be no fair process for George Zimmerman. For an alleged “constitutional scholar,” Mr. Obama exhibited the prudence one might expect from a drunken lout making off-hand declarations.

The prosecutors spent the course of their case contradicting themselves, putting on witnesses that damned their case against Zimmerman, and mostly making a spectacle of their own incompetence.  If one didn’t know better, one might conclude that the prosecution had given up making any serious case against Zimmerman, and was merely going through the motions as a matter of political obedience to those same authorities, including the governor and attorney general of the State of Florida who insisted on bringing this case despite the clear lack of evidence for prosecution, and in spite of exculpatory evidence and witnesses that would tend to confirm the defendant’s claim of self-defense.  This has been a show-trial in mockery of justice, and throughout the presentation of their case, the prosecution didn’t manage even to put on a good show.

On Thursday, the judge permitted the prosecution to seek a conviction on the lesser charger of manslaughter, a charge that could still carry up to thirty years behind bars for Mr. Zimmerman, despite the fact that throughout the course of the trial, they had been seeking a second-degree murder finding.  While not unprecedented, it shows the degree to which the court has been accommodating to the prosecution’s interests.  It also clearly demonstrated that the prosecution knew it would never get a guilty verdict on the legal standard of second-degree murder, but they are hoping the jurors are willing to play Solomon and cut this baby in two, by finding Zimmerman guilty of the lesser charge despite the fact that their case hadn’t even met that standard.

More, judge Nelson entered into an interrogatory with the defendant in an entirely improper way, using her power of the bench to silence defense attorneys in what can only be regarded as a gross violation of the defendant’s civil liberties.  Zimmerman had the right to remain silent, and he had the right to reserve the matter of whether he would testify until the conclusion of the case being put on by his defense team.  In ordering the attorneys to be silent, the judge effectively deprived Mr. Zimmerman of counsel.  There is no other way to describe this, and it is an unconscionable breach of her duty to remain impartial to either party.  On the one hand, she was sabotaging Zimmerman’s defense, and on the other, she was providing clear appellate cause if there should be a conviction, and she admitted that might be the case in her own remarks to the court, but this did not deter her actions.  Why?

Some suspect foul play, inasmuch as it is not beyond the conceivable bounds of the Obama administration.  By opening his mouth on the matter, Obama now has a huge personal stake in this.  His prestige as President is on the line, and while he is mocked overseas from Europe to the Middle East to Asia, and while our foreign adversaries continue to consider him as a less-than-serious threat who has no credibility, at home he remains something of a cultural icon among minorities and youth.  His credibility is on the line, and if George Zimmerman is acquitted, after all the tampering by he and Attorney General Eric Holder at the Department of Justice, in many quarters, they will lose face on the street.  This may explain why the DOJ helped facilitate anti-Zimmerman protests at the outset of this case. Yes, to add insult to injury, tax-payer dollars went to support the creation of the spectacle of a racially-motivated rent-a-mob at the beginning of this case.

Should Zimmerman be convicted of manslaughter, I would not be surprised if on appeal, he may either get a retrial or have the conviction overturned.  Cynics might argue that this is the intention of the judge: Set Zimmerman up for conviction knowing that he will likely find relief in the appellate system.  In this way, the immediate threat of violence will be deferred so that when he finally finds relief from courts of appeal, people will have forgotten about him and the case, and the specter of riots averted.  If that’s the intention of any person connected with this case, they ought to be disbarred, removed from public offices in any capacity, and prosecuted for their misdeeds.  It is a heinous crime to rig the system of justice on the potentially false assumption that they will find justice at some later date.

Judge Nelson is a life-long Democrat, and a Jeb Bush appointee.  None should be surprised at this since we know Bush is no conservative.  If Zimmerman is convicted on the basis of this sabotage by the judge, Bush may face questions should he seek the nomination of the Republican Party about the quality and temperament of his judicial appointees, as well he should.

As all of this goes on, the same media that worked devilishly to rig public opinion by editing the 9-1-1 tapes is continuing to push the violence meme, replaying clips of the same old garbage, with perpetual vermin like Al Sharpton being looped repeatedly across the networks from the beginning of this case, when he added his voice to those comprising the lynch mob seeking Zimmerman’s blood.  It’s a sorry spectacle, but do not be dissuaded: If an injustice is carried out in this case, it will have been because our judicial system upon which we must all rely for a fair hearing in court has been bastardized and corrupted like so much else in our rapidly devolving culture.

As this goes to press, the jury is continuing their deliberations, and one can only hope that whatever their verdict, that these people will not be swayed by faulty process, misrepresentations, threats of violence, or any other factor except the law and the evidence.  If that is the case, justice will be done, and that’s all we can ask, but given the circus-like atmosphere of the court proceedings, it’s difficult to imagine the jury remaining completely untainted.  With this firmly in mind, like all the world, we must await a verdict, fervently hoping a further injustice will not have been done, but given the conduct of judge Debra Nelson, a grave miscarriage of justice has already occurred irrespective of what verdict may be handed-down by the jury.

Note: Some of the site update work has been delayed due entirely to my work schedule.  As outages are expected, I will let readers know.  Thank you for your patience.

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Posted in Barack Obama, Crime, Ethics, Featured, Florida, Idiot Judges, Idiot Lawyers, Law, News, Obama | 6 Comments »

Why Sarah Palin Is Right About Syria

Sunday, June 16th, 2013

Why Should We Go to Syria?

At Saturday’s session of the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference in Washington DC, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin made some remarks, and among those that prompted the media to go berserk, she said of the potential of US involvement in that conflict that we “should let Allah sort it out.”  I actually saw one site on which she was referred to as an “isolationist” for this view, but such claims are laughable given her in-depth understanding of international trade and national security.  I saw another site suggesting that she didn’t know what she was talking about, or wasn’t qualified to comment.  Either way, it seemed more likely that the sites and authors in question had more trouble with who said it, or how it was said, because I believe the vast majority of Americans probably side with Governor Palin on this issue.  Apart from the fact that most Americans haven’t the patience for another middle-eastern  military engagement with indistinct goals and a muddled mission, there are some very practical reasons why she is right about all of this.  Mostly, it comes down to the fact that it’s a no-win situation for us, because while the horrors of what is going on in Syria is tragic in human terms, nothing the US can do will effect an end to the suffering, instead only adding to it with our own losses.

The reports this past week that the Assad government had crossed Obama’s “red line” on chemical weapons seem not to be as certain or as specific as our engagement should require.  There are reports that Sarin nerve gas had been used, and that more than one-hundred had been killed in this manner.  If true, it’s an egregious and brutal use of some very insidious weaponry, but it must also be said that if killing one-hundred or more civilians by this manner is a trigger for war, why did it take so long for us to engage Saddam Hussein? In the early years of the Clinton administration, Hussein used precisely this sort of weapon on his own civilians in Southern Iraq.

Advocates of intervention in Syria claim that what we should do is enact a “no fly zone” over that country.  They insist that this is as far as we need go, but there are a few problems with this thinking.  Russia has recently delivered more advanced surface-to-air missile capability to Syria, meaning that our aircraft would be subject to shoot-down in a much more threatening fashion.  Is all of this really worth losing our airmen and our aircraft?  I don’t see a rational justification.  If this were about defending the United States, our men and women will go to the ends of the Earth in pursuit of our defense, but I know few who think we ought to spend their lives frivolously or as a matter of charity, particularly in a place where we have no particular interests or friends.

The fact is that the so-called “rebels” are simply al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda-backed fighters much like those who took down Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Nobody misses Gaddafi, but as the events at Benghazi last September demonstrate, the volatile nature of an environment only loosely-controlled by provisional governments but dominated on the ground by foreign fighters is not the sort of outcome for which Americans should be fighting.

Bashir Assad is a brutal dictator, but those “rebels” who face him are not much better.  We have seen this scenario play out before, and we’re witnessing its aftermath in Libya and Egypt.  The attack on our facilities at Benghazi was born of a similar situation, inasmuch as after we provided air cover for the “rebels” in that country, they immediately shifted gears and wanted us out as they began to build their Islamic Republic.  In this sense, we have no friends at all, by any definition, so that it’s impossible to understand why we would put Americans’ lives at risk to assist any of them.  In this context, it is easy to understand Governor Palin’s sentiment.  We don’t have any friends there, no real national security interests, and therefore, no justification for jumping in.

At the same time, the Russians are heavily invested in Syria and the Assad regime.  Iran is pledging forces to his defense.  Should we really consider placing our already over-stretched forces at risk for this?  Do we risk a wider war in the region if some Russian technical advisers are killed in a raid on a surface-to-air missile site?  More, if al-Qaeda-connected groups were to take over Syria as they have done in Libya, what will that mean for Israel that must live under the constant threat of Syria.  Which is worse for that island of liberty:  A neighbor that is predictably antagonistic and dangerous, or a volatile tempest filled with elements that feel no restraint born of relations to Russia or any other major power?  I’m not inclined to guess as to how the Israelis might feel about the matter, but I suspect that an al-Qaeda-driven neighborhood is not the most pleasant prospect the Israelis could imagine.

There is one final consideration in all of this, and it goes to the absolutely detestable leadership we’ve had over the last few years:  Americans can hardly trust a foreign policy that has squandered opportunities and lives in the manner that has been the hallmark of the Obama administration.  Do we wish to subsidize a foreign policy that is concocted by the likes of Samantha Power?  Do we wish to see the United States entangled in yet another quagmire in that region in which we have far too few friends given our more than two decades of exertions?  How much treasure has been spent, and how much of our blood has been spilled in the pursuit of policies with only vague platitudes about creating or supporting “democracy?”  In which pest-hole has that so far succeeded?

When critics of her remarks launch into their narrow-minded tirades against her alleged lack of foreign policy knowledge, or her supposed “isolationist” views, I can’t help but remember that these same critics would attack Governor Palin whatever her position had been.  Instead, her remarks serve as a flashpoint not for their true policy objections, but instead for their unabashed, unremitting hatred of Sarah Palin, the person.  When one carefully evaluates the facts on the ground in Syria, the hopelessness of the situation becomes evident, and the foolishness of any American engagement there becomes clear.  In Syria, we have no friends, but only enemies, who hate us as much or more than they hate one another.  Were we to intercede on behalf of the so-called “rebels,” were they to prevail, we would soon find ourselves under the gun to get out.  Most Americans are well beyond fatigued by this procedure, as it has been the trend in all our engagements throughout the Muslim world in the last two decades, so that unless the United States or its interests come under direct threat of some sort from actors in the region, our answer should be as Governor Palin wryly noted:  “Let Allah sort it out.”

 

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Posted in Arab Spring, Featured, Foreign Policy, Global Jihad, News, Obama, Politics, Sarah Palin, Terrorism, War | 6 Comments »

Service in the Military is about…Service

Friday, January 25th, 2013

Good of the Service?

One of the most frustrating things revealed about American culture these days could be seen in the wake of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s move to include women in front-line combat.  Media outlets immediately sought out comments particularly from women, and particularly from veterans and current service members. The responses portrayed were almost uniformly positive, but most of the responses I saw or heard in media were entirely vapid.  In local media, one younger man was asked his opinion, and his response was approximately that it’s “a good thing that women will be treated equally.”  Two things about this exercise are particular despicable to me, and I don’t know which is worse:  The degree to which the media helps drive public opinion, or the simple fact that public opinion is so easily driven. To me, it’s obvious that far too many of our citizens no longer think before speaking, because that sort of assessment misses the entire point of military service, and the purpose of the military altogether.  Simply put, service in the military isn’t at all about you.

To those who may be somewhat confused, let me preface the discussion with a few simple facts.  The purpose of the military is to be the war-fighting appendage of the nation, and its role ought to be nothing more or less than to obtain victory in the missions into which the chain-of-command thrusts the services, with the goal of victory at minimal cost.  Victory first, cost minimization second.  Everything else the military does is pointless if it doesn’t accomplish these things, in this order.  We could have a much larger military spending our entire GDP in support of it, but that would defeat the purpose of defending the country, since nobody would have the funds for any other purpose.  Let us admit then that we wish to spend roughly that which it takes in blood and treasure, but no more, in defending the country and carrying out the war-fighting missions of our nation.

Naturally, a military unable to defend the country, or to obtain victory, is pointless in most respects.  If the military force we fund is unable to protect the nation, one must ask: Why fund it at all?  Do we like parades so well that we will support them with hundreds of billions of dollars, in perpetuity, with no hope that the force we’ve built can defend the nation and win its wars?  This would be preposterous, both from an economic and a moral standpoint.  Let us then admit that the first mission of the military, and the most critical end for which it is formed is to fight our battles, win our wars, and to do so while spending as little in blood and treasure as we’re reasonably able.

Having said this, let us examine the notions advanced by the vast bulk of those approving publicly the notion of women in combat as a matter of fairness and equality to women.  Let it be noted at the outset that the purpose of the military is not fairness, and not some contrived notion of radical egalitarianism, but the defense of the nation, and any policy imposed on the force must meet the singular test posed by the premise that the purpose of the military is to win our wars, and to defend our country while exacting the lowest reasonable cost in lives and money.

If a policy is implemented that doesn’t serve that end, or improve that goal, we must ask why our leaders would undertake it.  I would like for one military logistical analyst or one combat veteran to explain how either of the two goals explained above are augmented by including women in front-line combat.  There may be a good deal of emotionally-charged political grandstanding, but the factual answer is that combat effectiveness of units will be degraded by the mass-inclusion of women in combat roles.  You may not like reading these words, but they are no less true for your opposition.

Women do not meet the same rigorous physical standards as men.  Don’t take it from me, but instead take it directly from the Army’s Physical Fitness Test scoring system.  For the purpose of this discussion, I have built a table with data from the scoring tables available elsewhere. This table is a condensed representation of the difference in standards between male and female soldiers, aged 17-21, as currently in use by the United States Army. The Army uses three events to rate the fitness of soldiers, being the push-up, the sit-up, and the two-mile run, performed in that order by official scorekeepers. The first two events are time-limited to two minutes each. I have placed the top and bottom passing scores possible for each sex, in each event. Please direct your attention to this table:

Push-ups
Sit-ups
2-Mile Run
Repetitions
Points
Repetitions
Points
Time
Points
Male Maximum
71
100
78
100
13:00
100
Male Minimum
42
60
53
60
15:54
60
Female Maximum
42
100
78
100
15:36
100
Female Minimum
19
60
53
60
18:54
60

The entire APFT(Army Physical Fitness Test) is based on a minimum passing score of 180, and a maximum of 300 points. In the Army, this has a bearing on promotions particular from E-4 to E-5 and from E-5 to E-6. I would like readers to observe particularly the vast performance disparity in both Push-ups and the 2-Mile run. Notice that the Maximum Score for women is obtained in Push-ups at the minimum passing score for men, and that the Maximum Score in the 2-Mile Run for women is just eighteen seconds faster than the slowest time acceptable for men.

One can argue over how much these differences would matter in support units(although they could, and probably do,) but on the battlefield, and in combat units, this is an unmitigated disaster. What’s worse, the actual difference in the Push-Up event is much greater than these scores reveal, because the average woman is shorter and lighter, both qualities placing the individual at mechanical advantage in the event. A 5’10” male weighting 170 lbs. will on average find it easier to obtain a high score in the push-up event than a 6’2″ male,perhaps slightly more muscular, but weighing 190 lbs. Due to physiological differences between men and women, these vastly differing standards describe a significant disparity in capacity. We can wonder about how much that might matter in a rear area driving a truck, but in a forward area, heaving 100-lbs 155mm artillery projectiles around, it is bound to be quite inhibiting. Climbing in and out of the foxhole, pulling oneself up over walls and barriers, or having to carry a wounded comrade would quickly expose the difference.

What one cannot seriously argue is that the average woman serving will always obtain the top scores, or that the average man serving will only obtain the bottom.  This disparity describes a vast variance in capability that can be lethal on the battlefield.  It is not to say that there is no variance among men, but it is to say that the difference between the average man in the force and the average woman in the force is certain to be substantial.  Since the military can only make rules that ultimately describe the average, perhaps rewarding those substantially above the mean, while ejecting those well below it, we must deal with the average, but not the exceptions.

The question then becomes:  What does a military combat unit gain and/or lose by including women in direct combat roles?  The simple truth is that in terms of the mission, and the likely costs of achieving it, this is an equation that spells potential or even probable disaster.  The notion being advanced by those who advocate the idea is that the rewards achieved are social and/or individual.  It is said by some that women add something intangible to the force by virtue of their presence, that justifies the additional losses in blood and treasure that their presence will on average impose.  That may seem like a nifty argument unless it’s your blood or your treasure being unnecessarily expended, in which case it’s not such a good idea after all, and all the mystical-sounding social “wisdom” loses its ephemeral sheen.

The other argument is purely individual, and it is made in terms of notions of equality of opportunity.  Let me explain this in simplest terms so that the brutally thoughtless might grasp it:  The Armed Services do not exist to hand out opportunities for self-actualization, career advancement, personal gratification, or anything else of the sort.  One might obtain some or all of those things through military service, but at the very least, this is and ought remain a tertiary concern for the chain of command.  Again, chief concerns must be mission accomplishment and minimal cost, and in that pursuit, the services ought to retain every tool of discrimination at their disposal.

Some will misunderstand my usage of “discrimination” as meaning wanton, arbitrary rejection of some people for irrational cause(s.)  This is not the meaning I intend, instead applying the usage that describes making a rational choice for rational purposes in the manner one shops for automobiles or smart-phones.  In this sense, we all discriminate daily, many times over, and to good effect because it generally results in improved products or services since we will tend to opt for those most likely to satisfy our purposes.

Constructing a fighting force is no different, in fact, but  just as Samsung can’t sue you for discrimination because you opted for Apple’s “iPhone” instead of the former’s “Galaxy,” the military is usually immune from lawsuits by merely stating their decisions in the context of the best interests of the service involved.  What so many people don’t seem to understand is that military service is not an ordinary workplace, to which one can apply at will, and resign at whim.  In the civilian sector, one has every remedy under the sun available if there is irrational discrimination, but under the martial authority that is the military, and as an institution for the nation’s defense, such concepts are foreign and irrelevant.

It highlights the misunderstanding of what military service is, and isn’t.  Too many people in our culture are now possessed of an entitlement mindset, a notion that they too readily apply to the most farcical situation.  There is no entitlement to be an infantry soldier.  You can sign up for the infantry if you like, and if the Army will let you, but if after completing your initial training, the DoD decides that for the moment, they need more cooks, you’d better prepare to learn the ins and outs of a DFAC(Dining Facility – formerly known as the Mess-hall) because irrespective of the MOS(Military Occupational Specialty) for which you enlisted, you serve the needs of the Army first – not your own.

How many very good and able persons have wanted to be pilots in the military only to be told that since their vision requires corrective lenses to be at least 20/20, they are ineligible for that role?  Will the Americans With Disabilities Act now be taken to apply to military service?  There are people advocating such notions already, but what mustn’t be lost in all of this is the reason the military is given extraordinary power to discriminate on the basis of factors that would not be legally acceptable or morally proper in the civilian population:  The function of the military is to keep the rest of us safe.

This is why I am so thoroughly disgusted by the coverage of this change in policy given by the media.  It ignores the fact that this is a politically-based decision that merits no consideration whatever in a professional military.  A professional military would study, objectively – without subservience to politicians’ whims, the impact of replacing approximately half of its combat forces with the average female enlistee.  It would not consider the exceptional few who would describe the upper tail of the bell-curve on physical performance, but instead the median performer.  Under that scrutiny, this entire notion would be abolished in one minute, because it does not serve the interests of the mission, or the minimization of the mission’s costs in blood and treasure.  Our forces must accomplish their missions with as many as possible able to come home alive and in one piece, and that should be the enduring criteria of every person charged with command over troops in combat, from Lieutenant to Commander-in-Chief.

What we must not do is to permit the armed services of the United States to be degraded further in its capabilities for the sake of contrived notions of equality that have no relevance on the battlefield.  We don’t seek equality on the battlefield with our enemies, but instead seek every advantage, as they do.  That’s the nature of war, where a single moment in a single battle can change the fortunes of nations, so that every advantage is precious.  How many advantages do we wish to yield to our present and future enemies in pursuit of a nonsensical notion of equality?  After all, the only real equality that exists on a battlefield is the one obtained in death.

Sadly, if we adopt policies that place more service-members in disadvantageous positions in combat, we will see more equality of the fatal sort too, but that must be the inevitable result when policies are not based on the realities of war, but instead on the basis of the wishes of some impractical, egg-headed “constitutional scholar” in the ivory tower at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and the legion of nit-wits he has convinced to believe that military service is about them.  There’s a reason it’s widely considered a “sacrifice.”  Notions of equality that interfere with or hamper the military’s mission are among the things one voluntarily surrenders.

Editor’s Note: You should not be surprised that this story broke just in time for the Wednesday evening news cycle, because the whole purpose for which this story was pushed to the media at that time was clearly to remove Hillary Clinton’s wretched  testimony in the Senate from the position as top story. This is naturally an important issue, but it is news only in the respect that it’s been pushed to the surface as a way to change the subject.  Period.  Now we’ll argue over this instead of the disgusting dishonesty of Hillary Clinton on behalf of the Obama administration.

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Posted in Activism, Featured, Military Affairs, News, Obama, Politics, Veterans, War | 2 Comments »

Fiasco: Rapper Escorted Out of Pre-Inaugural Event for Criticizing Obama

Monday, January 21st, 2013

Pulled From Stage

Don’t you love the left?  They have such reverence for the First Amendment’s protections of free speech, don’t they?  No, they don’t.  Now some will say that it was in bad form to be an invited performer at the President’s pre-inaugural bash, and then to bash on the the President, and I can’t disagree with any of that, except that these are the people who swear that free speech must be tolerated in every case short of the shouting of “Fire!” in a crowded theater, or anything they consider “hate speech,” or anything else they simply don’t like.  I suppose this performance by rapper Lupe Fiasco must have fallen into the latter categories, because once he started criticizing Obama, the thought police descended on him rapidly.

Check out this video, H/T GatewayPundit:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1t6PyaClBI]

As you can see in the video, once the rapper proclaims he didn’t vote for Obama, it was time to shut him down.  Naturallyy I won’t be shedding too many tears over Fiasco’s…Fiasco, but that’s because he’s another leftwing imbecile who believes the United States causes all of the terrorism against it.  Yes, his chief complaint with Obama is that he’s not liberal enough, but perhaps by throwing the rapper out, he’ll notice where liberalism always leads.

According to the Daily Caller, after the event, the organizers were contacted and they claimed Fiasco hadn’t been forcibly removed, but that’s just cover.  The video clearly displays the rapper getting “the hook…” I’m not much of a rap fan, but I must admit I liked the part “why I ain’t vote for him…” That’s just a classy line.  Of course, lefties will cheer Fiasco anyway, since he first managed to call Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck “racist.”

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Posted in Featured, Free Speech, Leftist Cabal, Obama, Politics, video | 1 Comment »

Obama Preparing for Second Term Rampage

Monday, January 21st, 2013

Readying His Assault

I hope conservatives are up for a battle, because they’re about to find themselves in one.  President Obama will waste no time attacking Republicans, particularly conservatives, as he intends to go for the throat on guns through a legislative agenda.  As I reported to you earlier, David Plouffe is telling the press that Obama has the votes for some kind of gun control measure in Congress, but if you think that all there is to this is some sort of political prognostication, you’re in for a surprise.  It’s time to get proactive, so I’m going to tell you what I think the Democrats and their leftist cabal intend to do.  You will remember that President Obama said in his speech on “Gun Violence Reduction” that pressure should be put on Congressional members from districts that don’t ordinarily favor such measures. Don’t doubt that this President is now preparing to lay siege to your liberties, and that the next four years will make the last four seem almost pleasant. He’s readying his forces, and they’re now ready to attack.

Let me tell you what I believe they are planning, because the left is nothing if not well-organized and shrewd.  They mean to make it very difficult for your House members to stand, and they intend to make a spectacle wherever they are able.  Between now and whenever the legislation already sitting on Feinstein’s desk is brought to the floor of the House, Obama expects that various members of the Republican caucus in the House will go home at some point to hold town hall meetings with constituents.  Remembering the effectiveness of such events when used against Democrats in 2009, on the subject of Obama-care, you can expect leftist groups to fill these town hall meetings in order to put on embarrassing shows from which the previously steadfast members will quickly retreat to contemplate surrender.

This must be prevented, but since town hall meetings should happen, there being nothing wrong with that form of communication with constituents, we must flood the meeting places with our own number, and be prepared to loudly jeer any gun-grabbing malcontents.  Most of these members will only take questions from their own district’s constituents, but that won’t stop the left from simply lying about their residency.  While we shouldn’t lie in order to ask questions of congressional members in whose districts we do not live, there is nothing that says we can’t loudly jeer leftist questioners irrespective of their residency.

It’s hard to make a good YouTube moment out of an attempt to ambush some congressional member with some set-up question if the moment it becomes plain what you’re up to, the rest of the crowd loudly voices its disbelief and disapproval.  If you want to know at least part of what Obama’s minions plan, you should expect variations of this sort of thing.  More, your members should be forewarned of this potential and be prepared to answer idiots with the answers they deserve, while remaining respectful and clear-headed about the intent behind the questions.  A community agitator like Obama will never miss an opportunity to make the most of such situations, but being prepared for the onslaught is the best way to blunt its impact.

The other thing we ought to consider, particularly those of you who live in districts where members are so-called “blue dog Democrats” is that you have a similar opportunity.  In fact, there’s nothing that says a Democrat shouldn’t have to answer your pointed questions about a gun control agenda, and if the members’ answers are asinine, there’s no reason they shouldn’t get a verbal dose of your ire.  After the left got pasted with the negative coverage from town-hall meetings in the summer of 2009, they immediately recognized the value of the tactic and began to try to turn tables on the Republicans.  They met with mixed results, but they haven’t given up, and on an issue so fundamental to the political divide in this country, you can bet they will be putting maximum effort into their propaganda operations.  You shouldn’t permit it, and only your presence at such events offers the chance to deny them their propaganda victories.

Expect them to go so far as to haul out children, and tempt you to “boo” little kids asking their congressional members a question about school shootings.  I’m telling you that the left will stoop that far, and if any Republican member thinks he or she may be unable to withstand such tactics, they ought to quit and go home.  Again, the members must be forewarned, and prepared to answer carefully and respectfully, and the way we can blunt such things is not to jeer children who have obviously been put up to this garbage, but to cheer the members who manage to fetch a proper response from the pits of their bellies.

Of course, Obama won’t stop with these sorts of tactics, but given his predilection for conflict engineering, you should expect the worst.  To pretend that liberty is not under siege in America is a dangerous self-delusion we cannot afford, but there is nothing yet etched in stone that demands our capitulation, and it’s time we began to make our presence felt once again.  Obama will not cease, so it must be accepted from this moment forth that we will need to man the ramparts of freedom from now until he leaves office.  We must prepare Republicans for the onslaught lest they surrender liberty on our behalf.

Naturally, gun control is far from all that is on Barack Obama’s agenda, as he is still seeking some kind of comprehensive immigration reform that will doubtless consist of amnesty, however they will disguise it. As you know, he’s already taken a number of measures through the use of executive orders in a constitutionally questionable fashion, but now he wants to cement this into law so that a future President couldn’t just as easily undo it.  For those who come to think of this as one of the issues where Republicans must modify their position in adjustment for changing demographics, I’d beg you to reconsider.  Many of the people presumed to be the target of this legislation are in fact opposed to it.  What conservatives must by now recognize is that attempting to pander on this issue is more likely to lose them support than to gain any.

Once again, the media will be compliant, and since the RINO wing of the party is much in favor of this, there may be no way to stop an aggregation of liberal Republicans and the Democrats in Congress from pushing legislation through in the same manner as the fiscal cliff deal was passed.  As all of this goes on, we’re hurdling toward another moment for choosing, when Republicans will be compelled to decide whether to stand on principle or abandon them over the Debt Ceiling.  There are already many rumblings suggesting the leadership is looking at surrendering on this issue again, and if so, it will mark the death of a viable Republican majority in the House, at least with the current cast of characters.  Obama knows this, and will push the House Republicans to a sudden fracture.

Part of Obama’s tactic is to carry on as if he has every advantage, and to pretend as though he’s winning every argument, but whatever the weak-kneed Republicans in the House may do, you mustn’t concede the point.  If true character is revealed in moments of crisis, may we find the best within us now, for America is slipping into a deepening crisis, but if it is to be saved, it will be done by the tireless exertions of patriots who will not permit themselves to fail.  Obama will now raise the stakes, and we must contest this all the next four years with a resolve that would make our founding fathers proud.   We mustn’t permit the greatest country mankind has ever known to slip easily through our fingers.  It’s for all the marbles now, and anything less than our best effort may well end in disaster.

Obama’s preparing. Are you?

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Posted in Activism, Conservatism, Featured, News, Obama, Politics | 3 Comments »

Obama Confesses Momentary Defeat

Thursday, January 17th, 2013

Sore winner?

It’s true that President Obama didn’t verbally admit defeat as he announced his new measures and legislative agenda on gun violence(a.k.a. Gun Control,) but that is the meaning of his seemingly tepid measures to combat “gun violence.”  If the grotesque spectacle of the President of the United States reading letters allegedly from children isn’t enough, and delivering this while standing in front of children used entirely as a propaganda tool doesn’t go too far, then the idea that he would exploit the tragedies of Newtown, CT, or Aurora, CO as  impetus for these actions should very nearly push you over the edge.  Sadly, all that will be accomplished even if the entire slate of Obama’s proposals are adopted is to cause the number of children killed by mad-men to increase, ultimately leaving more law-abiding Americans less able to defend themselves and their families.  Despite all of this, there is one hopeful sign in today’s actions, or the lack of more overt ones:  The left knows they could not easily win this battle so they’ve chosen not to engage directly, at least for the moment.  This is more back-door action, aimed at a future situation when they hope to be able to confiscate guns at will. This is the sole reason Obama did not press even more tyrannical measures through the use of executive orders.  Today, Obama soundlessly  admitted defeat, for now, but he’ll be back…with a vengeance.

I must also tell you that there are some very insidious provisions hidden in the plain language of his orders, and it’s time for you veterans to wake up and pay attention.  We have long known that the left would like to go after veterans, because they see us as a potential force of resistance to the tyranny they desire.  One of these executive orders requires information sharing among all departments of government, so I want you to know, those of you who are veterans, that if you permit yourself to be classified as having PTSD(Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,) there is a high probability that they will be coming after your guns, or at least your right to procure one, with this set of  executive orders.  I am not suggesting that those with real cases of PTSD shouldn’t seek help, but I am suggesting that those seeking help should go into it with their eyes open. At first glance, the slate of executive orders this President has issued doesn’t seem to be that obnoxious, but I’d ask you to reconsider.  This president has decided that doctors must violate their confidentiality with patients or face potential sanctions or at the very least, civil liability.  These measures really go too far, but since many Americans seem to be accepting that the President is screwing around with their health-care, they probably won’t mind if he gives orders to their doctors.

Despite all of the ginned-up polls suggesting Americans favor stronger gun control, what you will discover is that this issue doesn’t make the top five in importance. More, there is a great gender gap between men and women.  A majority of men oppose the ban of semi-automatic weapons, while nearly two-thirds of women favor that measure.  More important is the assessment of the root cause of guns violence.  As the pie chart below from CNN demonstrates, the availability of guns is seen as the leading cause of gun violence by less than one-fourth of respondents.  Fully three-fourths of respondents attributed gun violence to the influences of the popular culture or to the way parents raise their children.  This is hardly a glowing endorsement of the proposal that limiting firearms, magazines, or bullets will reduce gun violence.

http://www.cnn.com/POLITICS/pollingcenter/polls/3380

The NRA’s ad attacking President Obama’s hypocrisy would seem to ring true to a larger number of Americans than the intelligentsia inside the DC beltway might otherwise imagine.  In the same round of polls, CNN found that a clear majority of Americans (a larger percentage than re-elected this President,) favor armed guards in schools.  Here’s that pie chart:

http://www.cnn.com/POLITICS/pollingcenter/polls/3381

In typical Obama fashion, the White House Spokes-Puke Jay Carney responded to the NRA ad, accusing them of attacking the President’s children. Naturally, the Fox News Beltway Boys with Bret Baier but featuring Krauthammer and Williams concluded that the NRA was out of line with the ad, but the NRA didn’t attack the President’s children, nor did they suggest the President’s children should not have protection, but the dunderheads on Fox News seemed oblivious to that fact. Instead, each in turn cravenly conceded to the notion that the NRA’s ad had been ugly.  Apparently, most of the people in the country are inclined to agree with the notion that everybody’s children should have protection at school, as that was the actual point the NRA video was intended to make, along with pointing out the hypocrisy of President Obama. Leave it to Beltway media folk to get this one wrong.

Perhaps the most telling portion of the CNN poll is the question of whether stricter gun control would reduce gun violence. Fully three in five Americans believe stricter gun laws will do nothing to reduce violence, while just thirty-nine percent believe the opposite.  Here’s the chart from CNN:

http://www.cnn.com/POLITICS/pollingcenter/polls/3379

Overall, and owing entirely to the gender gap described above, fifty-five percent of Americans currently favor stronger gun laws.  This CNN chart tells the story, although they admit that this has fallen nearly eight percentage points since immediately after the Newtown shooting:

http://www.cnn.com/POLITICS/pollingcenter/polls/3377

 

Many will offer that this poll owes to the ignorance of many people who don’t know a semi-automatic from an automatic rifle, and who do not grasp the obvious truth that bad people will do bad things irrespective of the particular weapons they ultimately choose.  If guns aren’t available, they’ll find something else, like fertilizer, and build a bomb, or crash an airplane into a building.  Most Americans remain sensible enough to realize that crazy and/or evil people will always do immense harm when they see an opportunity to do so.

For my part, I take some solace in the fact that Obama didn’t try to impose even more tyrannical things than those already represented by today’s twenty-three executive orders, and you should expect that he will pursue them if he sees a political opening to do so.  Besides, with Boehner running the House, Obama may yet try an end-around and get some of the weak-kneed Republicans in that body to act in conjunction with Democrats, to re-impose a Federal Assault Weapons ban, or impose limits on magazine capacity, but the problem remains that once you get outside the liberal havens represented by the Northeast corridor, the popularity of such proposals drops dramatically, which is why Obama today encouraged people to put pressure on members of Congress outside those safely blue zones.  In truth, the drive for gun control matches in character the national by-county mappings of Obama’s electoral victory, but in fact, it’s not even that strong since some counties that are blue on that map would inevitably express opposition to gun control.

As bad as this has been, and as ridiculous as Obama’s executive orders may be, I want you to understand that if he sees an opening, it will be far, far worse.  It’s also important to remember that he’s going to be applying maximum pressure against even the more conservative members of the House to see what he can get shoved through, since the Senate will undoubtedly do his bidding.  This President hasn’t given up on his desire to disarm Americans, but for the moment, he clearly doesn’t think the political will exists to ram the whole thing through.  If he did, he would have done so, and the battle would look quite different tonight.  What I would urge patriots to do is to avoid complacency, and to keep pressure on their members of the House, and on Republican leadership as well, to oppose more of this gun control agenda that a wide majority of Americans already recognize will have no impact on gun violence.  We need also to get more people who are currently on the fence, or even opposed to consider our arguments.  Maybe you have a few single women in your circle, some of whom buy into this gun-control nonsense.  It’s time to get them to the range, empower them, show them how guns can provide them far more protection than some poor overworked cop who may be dispatched eventually when they call 9-1-1, but who will frequently arrive much too late.

The dirty secret they won’t tell you about is why they go after so-called “assault weapons” when the vast majority of all gun murders are committed with hand-guns is that over the last number of years, women have been arming-up in record numbers.  That’s right, “Julia” is more likely to be packing heat.  Showing more women that they have less to fear from guns than from lacking them in a moment of need should be a priority for all gun-owners.  The more responsible citizens who have guns, train to use them, and are confident and capable in their own defense, the less relevant this nonsensical drive for gun control will become.  There’s simply no better way for a woman to become the physical equal or superior of her attacker than through arms.  There is no means available by which she can more forcefully defend her family than through the disciplined training and use of firearms should the situation call for it.

If you want to know why I believe Obama unintentionally signaled an at least temporary hold on his gun control agenda, it is because he is confronted with these facts.  When CNN’s own polling makes the case so thinly, it’s a good deal worse for their side than their polls are likely to indicate.  A five-point swing nullifies the gun-grabbers edge, and they know it.  As more people lift the veil of ignorance and seek out facts about guns and gun violence, they’re apt to shift more rapidly in many quarters to favor the rational side of this argument.  Part of being a citizen of this great country is making the effort to inform your fellow citizens about pressing facts they may not know. That must be the root of our continuing efforts to stave off future tyrannical actions.  We still don’t know what the moderate Republicans in the House will do if cornered on such legislation, and with Boehner conducting negotiations, we mustn’t let our guard down.  Despotism often takes root when citizens become complacent, and if today’s stage-show with Obama demonstrates anything, it is the fact that we must grow louder, stronger, and more numerous if we are to defend our remaining liberties, never mind take back those already lost.  You can bet that during the immediate future, Obama and his cohorts will be pushing hard to make as much political hay of this latest horrific event as they are able.  If there’s one line we must not let them cross, this is it, and while national sentiments may be their reason for a moment of pause, we must not take that for granted.

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Posted in Activism, Gun Rights, News, Obama, Politics | 4 Comments »

NRA Video Slams Obama Hypocrisy

Wednesday, January 16th, 2013

There’s not much one can add to the simplicity of this message. Barack Obama’s children go to school and enjoy the protection of armed guards. Why should your kids have any less? This video courtesy of the National Rifle Association’s NRA Stand and Fight website:

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Posted in Featured, Gun Rights, News, Obama, Politics, video | 1 Comment »

Convicting the Innocent in Lieu of the Guilty

Sunday, January 13th, 2013

Franklin’s Proposal

Barack Obama and the forces of the left want to deprive me of my rights.  Naturally, they want to strip you of your as well.  In that sense, let us admit that they are equal opportunity despots.  There’s a problem, however, and it’s simply this: I have committed no crime and no tort, and I have harmed no other living person, and after nearly half a century on the planet, and with nearly thirty years bearing arms, both privately and on behalf of my country, there are no innocent victims littering a bloody trail behind me.  Obama and his minions would have you believe that their intention is to reduce gun violence, but that’s simply not true.  The real intention is to punish the innocent, and to reward the guilty, but decent Americans who abide the law should have the clarity of conscience to reject the charge and to demand that the Obama administration prove our guilt before depriving us of our liberties.  You see, that’s how it is supposed to work:  The Constitution accords us each due process of law before our rights may be suspended, violated or infringed. Rather than confront the real problem, the gun-grabbers are building sentiment for punishing the innocent in lieu of the guilty.

There is no such notion in American law as a collectivized guilt to be shared between the innocent as well as the guilty.  Both our civil and criminal legal systems are based in individualized concepts of justice. The Fifth Amendment as well as the Second guarantee that neither Obama nor Congress can take our guns simply because they concoct a figment of law in order to compel you. The Fifth Amendment’s text explains the context in which your rights may be suspended or violated:

“No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.“(Emphasis added)

The relevant portions of this amendment make it plain that I am entitled to due process of law, and that due process is every bit as much an individual right as any other guaranteed by the constitution, although the government has gotten in the habit of pretending otherwise.  I have a right to my arms, to bear them, and to maintain them in perpetuity without governmental interference, as guaranteed by the Second Amendment.  So long as that Amendment remains in force, in order to strip me of that right, the government must first accuse me of a crime, convince a jury of my guilt, and sentence me accordingly.  I have the right to have my day in court, present a defense, and provide exculpatory evidence on my behalf.  Leftists like to pretend that when Congress passes a law and the President signs it, or he enacts new regulations or dicta, this is all the due process to which individuals are entitled, but this is not the case particularly when we are talking about rights explicitly enumerated in the Constitution.   The due process clause clearly applies to individuals.  The text makes that fact plain, since it is written with a singular pronoun:  In describing the “person” who shall have due process of law,  it says: “himself.” One needn’t be a constitutional attorney or a Supreme Court justice to recognize the plain language of the constitution and to understand its meaning.

On this basis, I wish then to know when each of us will be charged in some manner, according to some law, on the basis of which Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and their host of Marxist brethren will present indictments against each of us.  I want to know the charges against me.  I want to know what is my alleged guilt so that I may be deprived of my explicit liberties guaranteed by the US Constitution.  Passing a law to outlaw this gun or that magazine, subsequently accusing me of violating it, does not pass the constitutional stricture against post facto law, in the first instance, nor is such a law an individualized process.  It is instead mass punishment.  Mass punishment of any sort violates all the principles of the constitution, and yet what Obama and his goons would have you believe is that we must be deprived of so-called “Assault Weapons” on the basis of a collective guilt for the actions of a few criminals who have committed horrendous acts, to which we have no relationship.

Still others like Governor Cuomo pretend that the number of rounds we can have ought to be limited, but as one combat veteran explained to me when I was a young private in the Army, “You won’t know how much ammunition you’ll need until the firefight is over.”  This is undeniably true, and I was reminded of it when a caller to Mark Levin’s show made much the same point.  You don’t know how many bad guys you’ll face, or how they will be armed.  Andrew Cuomo screaming at the top of his lungs about whether hunters have a legitimate need for magazines that hold more than ten rounds is a farce, because the Second amendment has absolutely nothing to do with hunting.  Do hunters enjoy the protections of the Second Amendment?  Certainly, but they are not the object of the Second Amendment, otherwise we would see an amendment elsewhere defining a “right to hunt.”  This illusion the gun-grabbers want you to stumble over is a nonsensical argument because the founders did not enshrine the right to keep and bear arms in the US Constitution so their heirs could shoot deer, or wild turkeys, or ducks.  They ratified it as a protection against governmental tyranny.

Now we are confronted with a President who wishes to deprive us of our right to keep and bear arms.  He presents no charges against any of us, and he offers no evidence in substantiation of the non-existent charges.  Instead, he plans to act with despotic discretion in the matter.  I have been charged with no crime, and knowing the character of my average reader, they haven’t been charged with a crime, yet this President intends to punish us just as surely as any convicted felon in acting to deprive us of our rights.  This is the sort of thing one sees in any growing tyranny, where laws and dicta are written to prevent crimes that may well never be committed by people who may well never have conceived of committing them.  Vice President Biden offered that if so few as one life is saved by the actions they will take, it will have been worth it.  If that is now to be the argument in favor of banning guns, let us apply it equally to every issue.  How many lives will be needlessly ended under Obamacare?  How many children are aborted each day?  How many doctors make errors each day?  How many people are killed in motor vehicle accidents, or are trampled by cattle, or are struck by lightning?  Using such a fraudulent rationale, one must construct an endless list of things to be banned.

We must ban knives because if only one life is saved, it is worth it.  We must ban doctors, because if even one life is saved, we have done something heroic.  We must ban cars altogether, because if even one life is saved…  We can go on ad nauseum, but ultimately, what the left will reveal if they don’t know you’re paying attention is that if it were up to them, they would ban people.  The left now enacts laws, and too often, the so-called moderate Republicans go along, and the object of these laws is inevitably to punish you for being alive.  If you use gasoline, you must be punished.  If you use paper, you must be punished. If you use water, air, or anything at all, you must be punished.  Only when you are reduced to the level of a slave does the punishment diminish in its frequency and severity.

The entire argument being advanced by leftists is that all we who own weapons are guilty each and every time some lunatic commits a heinous act of violence against his fellow men.  It’s largely based on a fear-mongering argument contrived to make people believe that there is something inherently evil about the instrument, and therefore necessarily evil about all those who would possess them.  This is roughly as sensible an argument as the idea that because some people drive drunk, we should therefore do away with the motor vehicle, or because some Islamic supremacist nuts flew four airplanes into buildings and a fourth into the ground, jetliners should now be banned in the name of the public safety.  By this sort of disconnected anti-reasoning, we should blame Wilbur and Orville Wright for 9/11.

I reject such reasoning, as I reject the authority of all those who would advance it.  Law-abiding Americans are not even distantly responsible for the actions of the shooters who perpetrate these crimes, any more than they are responsible for the hundreds of murders on the streets of Chicago.  Taking away my guns or the guns of other law-abiding Americans will do nothing to reduce the actions of murderous predators, but more than that, nobody has made a valid charge against them.  What is being done in this instance is a travesty, with leftist activists making sure the crisis presented by the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut doesn’t “go to waste.”  Americans should incensed at the notion that the actions of a handful of monsters somehow conveys guilt upon the rest of us, yet that is the basis of the emotionalized appeal being pushed by the anti-Second Amendment crowd.

The left pretends to adore the first Amendment, particularly those parts pertaining to freedom of speech, yet they would insist, one mustn’t permit people to yell “fire” in a crowded theater, and to that extent we are able to agree.  For reasons entirely their own, they are unable to see that in order to prevent the yelling of “fire” in a crowded theater, we do not gag people before they enter.  We do not place this prior restraint upon speech because there is a presumption of innocence, and yet this is precisely the thing they refuse to presume on the part of law-abiding citizens who own guns.  Just as with the First Amendment, we do not punish or impede people in advance, but instead seek justice when they commit such a crime, so should it be for every other right of free people that might be abused.  I will not accept a guilt I had not earned, and neither should any other American.

It is for these reasons that I have resolved that neither Barack Obama nor future politicians shall be permitted to have my guns.  If they insist, I will resist them, and they will be compelled to choose whether to murder me, or to relent in their outrageous punishment levied against a man who is peaceful, and who had committed no crime, or otherwise harmed another soul.  Benjamin Franklin had wanted the Great Seal of the United States to include the motto: “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”  If we are to be confronted with tyrants, may we be faithfully obedient to Franklin’s proposition.

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Posted in Activism, Featured, Gun Rights, News, Obama, Politics | 4 Comments »

Note to Obama: America Hasn’t Fallen Short – You Have

Saturday, January 12th, 2013

Blaming America First

This President possesses a peculiar penchant for knocking his own country and countrymen.  In his statement during a joint press conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, he explained how America had fallen short of its ideals in Afghanistan, but I wonder about the meaning and the relevance of this claim.  After all, who has been at the helm of American efforts in Afghanistan (or anywhere else) these last four year?  The other problem with his statement is that he references ideals.  I have serious doubts that he’s acquainted with the ideals of America, as evidenced by his repeated attacks on liberty.  No, when he says America has “fallen short,” what he means is that you and I have fallen short, or that our troops have fallen short, but the punishing truth is that the only manner in which the American people may have fallen short had been in missing the opportunity to eject him from office.  To the degree America may have failed in its engagements anywhere around the globe, the truth is quite easy to observe:  Mr. Obama, America has not fallen short.  You have!

To suggest that our oft-deployed troops who spend more time in foreign pest-holes than they do at home have in any measure failed is to ignore both the scale of their mission and the limitations placed upon them by their Commander-in-Chief.  In Afghanistan particularly, our troops are saddled with the grim task of pacifying a region that is inherently unsuited to that end, while looking nervously over their shoulders to see if our alleged ‘friends’ and ‘allies’ in the Afghan Army will open fire on them from behind.  The Chain of Command has created rules of engagement that are so patently absurd that our soldiers must now fear both to follow them or not follow them, because to follow them can be a suicidal act, and to not follow them can result in punitive legal action against them.

Of course, before we descend even to the nuts-and-bolts of a particular policy, we must examine what Mr. Obama considers the “ideal.”  For most Americans, the ideal in Afghanistan is to exterminate the terrorists, and to gain victory by totally annihilating the people who together with al Qaeda fashioned the capacity to attack the United States on 9/11, and in other places and times.  That’s the American ideal.  Obama’s ideal in Afghanistan is something else altogether, and it’s patently clear that it’s an end never to be achieved:  To make peace with an intractable enemy whose only wish and desire is to kill us, even if they must strap bombs on their own children to do so.  Obama’s notion of the ideal is in conflict with what America is and has been all through its nearly two-and-one-half centuries long history, requiring America to volunteer as a sacrificial lamb for those who want to kill it anyway.

To make friends of enemies that hate you is an impossibility.  We did not seek to make friends of the Germans or the Italians or Japanese in WWII.  Only after pounding them into complete submission did we seek to make peace, but even then, we did not make peace with those who had been conducting the ideology driving the conflict on their side.  We merely asserted that they would now be in full compliance with our will, or we would pummel them into dust, resuming the combat against them.  This is the American ideal of how a war is to be conducted, because the American ideal recognizes the sad realities of war, and the sickening aggregation of human frailties that leads inevitably to them.

Mr. Obama does not adopt the American ideal for war-making, or near as this writer can discern, much of anything else.  If America has fallen short of his ideals, that may be just as well because his ideals are not attainable on this Earth.  His ideals lead to the construction of walls, and the building of gulags, and to the unemployment and welfare lines.  His ideals end with an unarmed citizenry unable to oppose a growing, oppressive state.  Those will be your choices if you are to be governed by the ideals of Mr. Obama and his henchmen.  It is not possible to attain the Utopia he has imagined in his narrow mind, but he doesn’t care how great will be the human carnage left in his wake because he sees those things as “bumps in the road,” much as Mayor Bloomberg now suggests that if his new pain medication regulations in New York cause some unnecessary pain to patients, they must simply suck it up.

Imagine living your entire life dominated by these people, who disregard the torments they inflict on your lives with a shrug.  Given a chance, that will be the nature of our existence, but for our soldiers toiling away in kill-zones like Afghanistan, this is already the case.  There, Obama’s ideals have obtained the condition to which we might all look forward under the next four years of his so-called “leadership.”  There is death everywhere, and behind every corner lurks another killer who is sheltered by rules of engagement that permit him to slip away again, unharmed, and free to work his terror against you.  Famine and human need are monumental, but no amount of distributing goods and services can satisfy the want.  Afghanistan is a grim disaster in human terms, on all sides of the battle, and all is being directed and managed from the office of the “idealist” at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington DC.

For the President of the United States to stand before the world and proclaim that America has “fallen short” of ideals that he has constructed within the narrow confines of his skull is not to impeach America, but instead to admit that his own ideals are unattainable on this Earth.  Our soldiers have not failed this President, but he has failed them, and awfully so.  Soon, this same despotic mind will tell us, the American people, how we have failed to live up to the twisted ideals with which he has been inculcated and indoctrinated by such thoroughly bent minds as those of Bill Ayers and Frank Marshall Davis. The truth is that on our current course, America will soon resemble Afghanistan in both imitation and mockery of Obama’s bloody “ideal.”

The American people are as fallible as any other, but it takes a peculiarly wretched mind to lead us to the disasters we now endure both at home and abroad.  In this moment, and in this speech lies a grave confession for all those with the courage to recognize it: Barack Obama has established a bizarre and twisted ideal that is unattainable, but he now blames America for failing to reach it.  You see, in his view, the ideal is wonderful, but it is only your human failings that prevent you from meeting the challenge.  As a narcissist, in his view, there is nothing wrong with the ideal to which he adheres, but only with you (and America) for failing to approach it.  In his view, it is you who fail to perfect yourselves, but not his failure for expecting compliance with an ideal that would require you to drink his preferred flavor of the same deadly koolaid.  This false attribution of guilt is the hallmark of statists, seeking always to blame their victims for the vast failures they have initiated.  The truth is something else, and it’s simply this:  Barack Obama’s vision has fallen short of America’s ideals, and the sooner we re-establish them, the sooner our long national nightmare will come to an end, because unlike his, they are attainable on this Earth.

It’s not America, Mr. Obama.  It’s you.

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Posted in Featured, Foreign Policy, News, Obama, Politics, War | 2 Comments »

Combating Ignorance About Guns

Sunday, January 6th, 2013

He’s Coming for Yours…

One of the things that causes me the most consternation about the entire argument over gun control is how so many people who express opinions on the matter exhibit a complete lack of knowledge on the instruments at the center of the discussion.  More, it’s frustrating to realize that among all the voices chiming-in, there are a great number who have no idea why it is that we have the Second Amendment, or what all the fuss is about.  To them, it’s a simple matter: Collect up all the guns and the problem is solved.  Sadly, simplistic views like this aren’t very likely to bear fruit, and there is good reason to be skeptical about those who express them.  After all, before launching into a tirade against guns, or anything else for that matter, one ought to know a bit about the subject matter, but it seems to have become the fashion in America to speak with conviction on issues about which one may know precisely nothing.  This article is an attempt to lift the veil of ignorance that seems to shroud so much of the public discourse, and while my readers may know much of this material, I have no doubt but that there are millions who might benefit from the information contained.

The first thing that every person ought to know about guns is that many things have been mislabeled by politicians so as to more easily sway the ignorant.  Understanding what is and what isn’t true about guns first requires learning what they are, how they function, and what the different types of guns are, as well as their uses.  One often hears politicians talking about “fully automatic” weapons.  This is by itself a misnomer, because I’ve not seen a weapons system that is fully automatic outside of military applications, for instance like the Phalanx Close-In Weapon System used in our Navy.   That is a system that once turned on, automatically aims and fire projectiles at targets without any further human intervention.  You would not be able to contain one of these even in a fairly large garage, so let’s dispense with the nonsense about “fully automatic weapons.”

In practical terms, however, when most people talk about fully automatic weapons, what they are describing is a gun that will continue to fire one cartridge after the next by merely squeezing and holding the trigger.  I am always perplexed when media outlets describe a shooting with a semi-automatic weapon as “spraying the room with bullets,” since “spraying”  implies a continuous stream.  If the trigger is being re-pulled with each round, there is no “spraying” involved.  “Peppering” is a better descriptor, but naturally, the media blows everything out of proportion.  They may share an anti-gun agenda, but I believe another explanation is that most people in the media are equally ignorant about guns. Only with automatic weapons is something remotely like “spraying” possible.  Automatics are very rare in fact, and have been strictly licensed for decades.  There is a great deal of paperwork and taxation and licensing fees involved in maintaining an automatic weapon.

In stark contrast, what is generally regarded as a semi-automatic weapon requires an additional pull of the trigger for each round to be sent down-range.  The confusion arises because there are any number of guns that look just like their automatic cousins, but are instead purely semi-automatic weapons.  What most people know as the AR-15 is simply the semi-automatic cousin of the fully automatic M-16 rifle, first tested and fielded by the Army in the 1960s.  This family of rifles has been through several stages of development, and there’s no denying that they even share many common parts, but I can most thoroughly assure readers that an off-the-shelf AR-15 is not an automatic, and is not capable of “spraying” anything in the sense of a fully automatic M-16.  An M-16 has a maximum cyclic rate of around 700 rounds per minute.  This assumes you could feed it a continuous stream of ammunition, and that the barrel would not bow like a banana from the heat well before a full minute had elapsed.

A semi-automatic is in fact a self-loader, or an auto-loader, in that when you squeeze off one round, the rifle will by a combination of spent propellant gases and mechanical action eject the spent cartridge and reload the next round, provided one is available.  One must release and again squeeze the trigger to fire the next round and send it down range.  Military rifles like the M-16 have a select-fire feature that permits the user to place the weapon in automatic or semi-automatic mode.  Civilian rifles like the AR-15 do not have the automatic setting, and can only fire in semi-automatic mode.

The same thing is true of the much-discussed AK-47.  There are as many versions of this rifle in the world as there are manufacturers, plus some, but those legally imported into the US are all of the semi-automatic variety.  In fact, while it is theoretically possible to convert many of these rifles to fully automatic function, the jail time one would incur for having done so is hardly worth the trouble of modifying one, and depending on which model and so forth, you may have some substantial but delicate machining ahead of you.  It’s simply not worth it, either in terms of any perceived benefit, or in terms of the probable criminal liabilities.  In all the hundreds upon hundreds of gun-owners I know and have known, I’ve never known so much as one willing to entertain the idea.  We rational gun-owners enjoy our right to keep and bear arms far too much to put it all at risk over something so foolishly wasteful.

One of the questions I am asked by people who aren’t aware of the reasons for the so-called “Assault Weapons Ban” of 1994  given the differences in function between an automatic weapon and a semi-automatic weapon is why it was that such weapons were ever banned at all.  The answer is purely political.  So-called “Assault Weapons” merely look menacing, and as we should all know by now, politics is frequently all about perceptions.  If you want proof, consider one of the features banned in that law: The Bayonet Lug.  A bayonet lug is a machined block or other appendage on a rifle that permits the mounting of a bayonet.  I have never heard of a single person committing a crime with a bayonet attached to an “assault rifle,” and yet we are told that this is a feature that makes them more dangerous.  I don’t have any statistics to back this up, but given what I know about the world in which I live, I am willing to bet that more people are killed by meteorites hitting them in the head than have been killed by a madman with a fixed bayonet.

Since this is the case, one must ask what rational purpose there is to this classification of so-called “assault weapons.”  The answer is that all of the criteria are purely cosmetic.  Much is made of the question of magazine capacity, but frankly, this is a lot of steam.  Take your average Glock 17, a weapon that is fairly common, and sadly has been used in a number of the high profile crimes of which we’re all aware.  There are those who, apart from simply calling for an outright ban, want to restrict the number of rounds one can store in a magazine to just ten.  I say “just 10,” but 10 shots are plenty in the hands of a practiced shooter, because if you’ll head over to Youtube, you can watch videos of competitive shooters who are able to change magazines and resume fire in less than one second.   In other words, any perceived hitch in reload time is very minimal for somebody who is well-practiced.  On the other hand, for those less-experienced shooters who may simply be trying to fend off some home-invader(s,) a magazine change could take several seconds, costing them time and permitting the assailant(s) to close the ground between them.  Having a higher-capacity magazine is a distinct advantage for the less-than-expert home-defender, because having nearly twice the rounds on tap probably increases their chance of successfully defending their home particularly against multiple assailants.

The point is, however, that with practice, the difference between two ten-round magazines and one seventeen-round magazine is negligible.   Some will ask: “But what about Assault Rifles? Surely their magazines cannot be changed so quickly!” Really?  Try this video.  As you can plainly see, magazine changes, no matter how frequent, are of little consequence to somebody trained to shoot.  There are those who will say “But that proves our point about semi-automatics.”  Not really.  Watch this gentleman firing and reloading his revolver.  As you can see, there’s nothing about this that would suggest that some of the most horrific shootings we’ve witnessed over the years would have been even slightly different in terms of the results by eliminating semi-automatics. Perhaps this will lead you to believe that I’ve made the case against all semi-automatics, but before you jump to conclusions, take a look at this video of a seventy year-old bolt-action rifle.

What nobody seems willing to discuss is how often firearms are used in the defense of innocence against the insane or malignant people who manage to get their hands on them.  In one recent case, an off-duty Sheriff’s Deputy in San Antonio, TX prevented what could well have turned into another theater shooting by engaging a suspect who ran into a theater shooting.  This story received virtually no press coverage, but once again, what is demonstrated is how guns can and are frequently the instruments of salvation for the innocent.  Just days ago, a woman in Georgia shot an intruder who had broken into her home.  She hid with her children in the crawl-space, but when the thug came into view, she unloaded on him.  There won’t be a widespread push to get this into widespread circulation, either.

Just as our society is beginning to break down, and you may find yourself more frequently needing the defensive capacity of firearms, the Obama administration is trying to fast-track legislation to ban them.  This is another example of how the emotions of Americans are used against them by shrewd politicians who take advantage routinely of crises to advance what is nothing more than a political agenda.  It does nothing to change the reality that there are some sick and evil people who will make use of whatever weapon is available to do some of the most horrific things.  As Charles Krauthammer recently explained on FoxNews, the real problem is that we have made it nearly impossible to get a troubled person committed for psychiatric treatment.  That was true with the individual who carried out the massacre at the Sandy Hook elementary school, and it was undoubtedly true of many others.

Given enough time and opportunity, the insane and the evil will find ways to turn almost anything into a deadly instrument of mass murder, whether it’s a handgun or a fertilizer bomb or a Boeing airliner.  None of that changes the fact that one’s 2nd Amendment rights are not subject to popular vote.  None of that changes the purpose of the 2nd Amendment.  The founders, in their wisdom, understood that one might well have need to defend himself, and that police would not always be available to respond in time to prevent a crazy or a villain from doing their absolute worst.  At the recent school shooting, this was clearly the case, since by the time the police arrived on scene, the killer had taken his own life, and there was no exchange of gunfire with police.  In fact, given the circumstances, the killer could have used ‘slow’ revolvers to equally tragic effect, and nothing about the outcome would have changed.

The purpose of our 2nd Amendment is to afford you the possibility of repelling attackers, and dealing with insane and evil people who prey upon their fellow man.  They understood that there would always be good cause for self-defense, and given their recent experiences, they also understood all too well that some times, the evil and the crazy act from behind the shield of official power.  One would think that somebody would eventually consider the death tolls governments have inflicted on their own people over the last century, but somehow this death toll, numbering in the tens or hundreds of millions always manages to escape notice.  No other sort of institution has inflicted that sort of carnage whether private or individual, and yet we have some number of people who suffer under the delusion that governments are to be trusted as the sole armed defender in a given society.    I saw an interesting image on Twitter Saturday being re-tweeted around and what it said was that “a movie about a society in which only police and military are armed has been made,” and when you click into the picture, you see a scene of execution and the title of the movie:  Schindler’s List.

If this doesn’t make plain the truth of the matter, I don’t think you’re willing to be convinced of the truth.  Some people choose ignorance because it’s more comforting than actual knowledge, or because it permits them to take up the support of evil while pretending not to have known better.  Either way, readers should understand that there can be no rational argument for stripping the hundreds of millions of guns from the American people for the purposes of crime prevention.  The truth is that guns are simply an instrument like any other, and as long as there is man, there will be senseless violent murders, whether guns are available or not.  The only thing achieved by banning firearms is to leave millions of Americans virtually defenseless, and that’s immoral.  Instead of going after the crazies, the politicians are using this as an opportunity to go after the rights of law-abiding citizens, and for all the reasons you can already guess, you have every reason and right to resist it.  Ignorance should no longer be an excuse.  Those who advocate the banning of firearms are simply damning many more innocent Americans to deaths from which they might have protected themselves.  So much then for “good intentions.”

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Posted in Crime, Featured, Gun Rights, Obama, Politics | 4 Comments »

Video Flashback: Thomas Sowell Compares Derrick Bell to Adolph Hitler

Thursday, March 8th, 2012

Thomas Sowell

Breitbart has managed to dig up a small segment from C-Span2’s Book TV, in which Thomas Sowell is asked about Derrick Bell by interviewer Brian Lamb on the question of what sort of ideology Derrick Bell was pushing at the time.  The interview is from May, 1990, when Bell was using his radical approach of protest and occupy to try to force the administration of Harvard University to hire a professor based on whether that professor accepts the ideological viewpoints of Bell, at the time, a tenured professor at Harvard Law.  This is a stunning interview, inasmuch as Sowell was will to go so far as to compare Bell to Hitler.  If you’re familiar with Dr. Sowell, you’ll know that he doesn’t throw such comparisons around in jest, or thoughtlessly.

Here’s the video:

I think this demonstrates that even as early as 1990, in the same time-frame in which Bell was Barack Obama’s mentor, Bell’s Critical Race Theory wasn’t considered merely controversial, but radical, and this is the ideology Barack Obama was recommending when he embraced Bell, saying:

“Open your hearts and open your minds to the words of Prof. Derrick Bell.” -Barack Obama(Video Here)

To pretend that Derrick Bell wasn’t a radical, or that the philosophy of law he professed wasn’t controversial is a ridiculous position, but since the unveiling of the Obama-Bell video Wednesday evening, the media has been doing all it can to downplay its importance. In this case, Sowell was condemning Bell’s ideological bigotry, that demanded a complete agreement among faculty and students. This should be interesting because at the time, he was one of Obama’s mentors.

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Posted in Barack Obama, Bigotry, Media, News, Obama, Politics, Video | 8 Comments »

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