Well, ain’t that just shiny. Seems the ATF decided on it’s own, without any supporting law, that straw purchases were illegal, and added that question to the 4473 back in ’95. There is now a case before the supremes about it, Bruce J. Abramski v. United States. The potential for an epic spanking of the BAFTE is in the offing. If we needed any more evidence of their lawlessness, we’d have it here.
Category Archives: Current News
FBI, IRS- just another gang?
After people within the IRS basically admitted they targeted political opponents such as Tea Party groups for harassment, the FBI was finally called in to investigate because the behavior by the “impartial” IRS was so egregious. The head of the investigation, who “just happens” to be an Obama donor, decided there was nothing illegal going on, so they dropped the investigation, filing no charges.
I’m not sure how our decent into Banana Republic corruption and political abuse could happen so fast, unless the rot has been going a lot deeper, longer, than I thought, and it just took the Audacity of Dope to really bring it out in such an obvious way. We can only hope for a monumental backlash come election time. If not… time to start milking the system for all it’s worth, bring it down as fast and hard as possible, so the rebuilding can begin sooner.
More Free Bracken
More free Matthew Bracken stuff. Continue reading
Free Bracken
Today only, three Matthew Bracken novels are free at Amazon.
Thought y’all might want to know, being into books more than on a typical day.
Health insurance company political myth
Some, perhaps most, people believe the health insurance companies supported Obamacare. It is commonly believed they were thinking, “All those previously uninsured people will be forced to pay us money!”
This isn’t really true.
I recently talked to a former health insurance lobbyist who still works in the industry. I was told that if they were to publically oppose “affordable healthcare” they “might as well set themselves on fire”. They are highly regulated and those regulatory agencies, as well as the SEC, IRS, and media, would have been employed by the politicians to punish any company that put up resistance. As dustydog recently reported, “90% of legislative work is strong-arming businesses into paying protection money – threatening to pass detrimental legislation if the money isn’t paid.”
Do gun companies and gun shops back talk to the ATF? The NRA, yes, but they aren’t regulated by the ATF, the gun industry is very careful what it says to politicians. Insurance regulators may not stomp kittens to death and slam pregnant women against walls but insurance companies fear their regulators too.
Insurance companies know Obamacare cannot succeed. They knew it long before any of us did. The best they could do was build up cash reserves to make it through until the law is changed. It’s happened before in various states (such as Washington) and they believed they could stay in the game long enough for the political winds to change. It was like being forced to play in a card game where you know the dealer is crooked but if you play what you are dealt carefully enough you probably can hold out until the dealer is replaced.
Yes. They did have input into the legislation. They got the individual mandate put in. It was relatively easy to demonstrate that they would hemorrhage to death in short order if that provision didn’t exist. They avoided direct opposition to the politicians and they deflected damage as best they could but they did not “support” it.
Here is what they publically say about Obamacare:
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) expands access to coverage to millions of Americans, a goal health plans have long supported, but major provisions will raise costs and disrupt coverage for individuals, families, employers, and Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries.
The broad market reforms outlined in the ACA took effect on January 1, 2014. Individuals and families purchasing insurance in the individual market will be guaranteed coverage for pre-existing conditions, and their premiums cannot vary based on their gender or medical history. There will also be subsidies to help consumers afford the cost of coverage, and new health insurance exchanges will help consumers find the policies that best meet their needs.
At the same time, other provisions take effect that will significantly increase the cost of coverage, such as the health insurance tax, minimum essential benefits, and restrictions on age rating. The cumulative impact of all of these provisions increases the likelihood that some individuals will choose to purchase insurance only after they become sick or injured, further increasing the cost of coverage for everyone else with insurance.
The ACA also takes a number of preliminary, but promising, steps toward reforming the delivery system to improve patient safety and quality in Medicare and Medicaid. Many of these initiatives build on successful private-sector programs that health plans have pioneered and implemented.
Ultimately, the ACA coverage expansion will not be sustainable until policymakers and stakeholders take meaningful steps to reduce the rate of growth in medical costs.
It doesn’t take much squinting to read between the lines and realize they know they are playing a rigged game with a gun to their heads and believe private-sector solutions are better for everyone.
Full faith and credit…
…in a gang of thieves.
You know all those crazy, wild-eyed loons living in trailer parks who’ve been warning us about the Federal Reserve? Yeah; what a bunch of maroons (cough cough).
And no; your safe deposit box isn’t really all that secure either. Not anymore. There’s already talk of reaching into people’s bank accounts on a large scale and taking some of it, they’ve already set up the “infrastructure” to do that, and it’s already been done at least once as a trial balloon.
The Progressives (Democrats and Republicans) have already spent your money, you understand (and your children’s money and their children’s money). Now it’s CYA time for the perpetrators.
If you never understood why government types are so terrified of the concept of an armed populace that they’re willing to make complete asses of themselves and risk prosecution for depriving citizens of a constitutionally protected right, maybe you begin to understand a little bit better. It’s not that they’re all that stupid, necessarily– They’re fucking terrified at the prospect of their chickens coming home to roost. Criminals fear armed victims more than anything else. They’re already starting to act like the cornered predators they are, and a cornered predator is a very dangerous thing indeed.
Chicago gun ban tossed
The US District Court of Appeals for Northern District of Illinois struck down Chicago’s gun ban. Legalese here, or a plain English analysis here. They said:
The ban covers federally licensed firearms dealers; even validly licensed dealers cannot sell firearms in Chicago. The ban covers gifts amongst family members; only through inheritance can someone transfer a firearm to a family member. Chicago does all this in the name of reducing gun violence. That is one of the fundamental duties of government: to protect its citizens. The stark reality facing the City each year is thousands of shooting victims and hundreds of murders committed with a gun. But on the other side of this case is another feature of government: certain fundamental rights are protected by the Constitution, put outside government’s reach, including the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense under the Second Amendment. This right must also include the right to acquire a firearm,although that acquisition right is far from absolute: there are many long-standing restrictions on who may acquire firearms (for examples, felons and the mentally ill have long been banned) and there are many restrictions on the sales of arms (for example, licensing requirements for commercial sales). But Chicago’s ordinance goes too far in outright banning legal buyers and legal dealers from engaging in lawful acquisitions and lawful sales of firearms, and at the same time the evidence does not support that the complete ban sufficiently furthers the purposes that the ordinance tries to serve. For the specific reasons explained later in this opinion, the ordinances are declared unconstitutional.
Are you part of the problem or part of the solution?
A human right is a bit like the sun. The sun is essential to life. You can bask in it, or hide from it. You may be able to change people’s attitudes toward it, or even start a religion around it. You may hate it or love it, or be largely indifferent to it, or think anything you want to think about it. If you fail to deal with it properly it can burn or even kill you, but without it you are dead. You could get a group of sun haters together in the street and carry picket signs denouncing the sun, and you might even be able to lobby enough idiots and criminals in Congress to get laws passed denouncing the sun.
But two things will remain true no matter what you think or do. A) your life depends on the sun, and B) neither you, nor any group of people, any committee or government body, no force on Earth, has the power to alter it in any way. You did not create it and you cannot alter or destroy it.
Similarly, human rights can be respected and honored, or they might be despised and violated, but they cannot be created, granted, altered, revoked or destroyed by any force on Earth no matter how popular or powerful that force may be. That’s where we get the term “unalienable” as applied to human rights in the Declaration of Independence.
This in partially in response to McThags post here;
http://mcthag.blogspot.com/2013/12/better.html
“He’s head and shoulders above A&E who may be in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act for suspending him. Oh yeah, everyone who’s been saying that A&E had every right to fire him over his remarks forgot the religion clause of that law, didn’t they?”
But it apples to all such discussions. I’d comment over there, but commenting seems to require a google account and I’m not starting a google account.
The “Civil Rights Act” does not create, enhance, or modify any right, any more than a law can create, enhance or otherwise modify a star in some other galaxy or a physical law of the universe, though it certainly may be used as a tool or an excuse to violate some rights. Mostly it’s just some words written by people who don’t understand the meaning of rights, or hope that the rest of us don’t understand.
More guns = less crime, part 22
From Reason comes a report of a study about An examination of the effects of concealed weapons laws and assault weapons bans on state-level murder rates. Their conclusion, unexpectedly of course, is that assault weapon bans don’t do squat, and limiting the legal ownership and carry of guns for self defense (or, presumably, other purposes) increases crime rates. I’m sure we are all shocked that enforcing and encouraging defensive passivity and defenselessness encourages criminals, but there you have it.
Mikhail Kalashnikov, RIP
From Yahoo News I hear that Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK 47, has died at age 94.
Quote of the day—Chris Stirewalt
The worse apples now being pushed by Obama don’t provide much money to offset the risks, and that’s even if insurers are able to keep pace with the ever-changing Obama position on what is good and what is bad for American insurance consumers. The possibility of systemic collapse in the New Year looks increasingly real.
Chris Stirewalt
December 20, 2013
How about them apples: ObamaCare rewritten again
[Yesterday my friendly neighborhood health insurance expert read part of King Obama new Obamacare decree to me. There was “a tone of voice” in the reading that made me think carefully about my response. I thought about it for a couple seconds and said, “What does that even mean?”
The response was sharp, “Exactly! I don’t even know. How can this possibly work?” I told them insurance companies should just forget about people actually enrolling and paying premiums. What they need to do is just have healthcare providers send the bills to them and they should just pay them. That will cut down on all the confusion, excess paperwork, and reduce costs just like Obamacare was originally intended.
I’m fortunate their sarcasm detector was fully operational and the exasperation was vented in a direction other than toward me.—Joe]
This one is simple
I usually stay away from stupid pop culture stuff, but this one has a lesson to it and maybe some on the left can learn from it (yeah I know; don’t say it).
GQ Magazine has every right to bait the Duck Dynasty dude in an interview.
Duck Dynasty dude had every right to fall into the trap, providing GQ with some juicy stuff about homosexuals to peddle their stupid magazine to stupid people.
A&E had every right to lay off Duck Dynasty dude or fire him outright, or do nothing, or whatever they wanted, so long as it’s within their contractual prerogative.
The Duck Dynasty stars have every right to stay or to leave A&E, so long as it’s within their contractual prerogative.
A&E watchers have every right to quit watching, or keep watching, that stupid network as they choose and/or as they can afford it.
Any other network has every right to take on the Duck Dynasty people in a new show, and everyone has the right to watch that one, or not, as they choose and/or can afford it.
See? That’s how freedom works. No one goes to jail or gets robbed or beaten up, no one has to sign a contract at gunpoint, everyone has free choice so long as it doesn’t violate anyone’s rights, and no one has the right to be free from the inevitable consequences of their own stupid mistakes.
No politician on the face of this Earth properly has anything to say, in any official capacity, about any of it. That’s not their job, and they should be smart enough to say so when questioned about it, though unfortunately they’re not that smart. Not by a mile.
Fake moral controversy resolved. Now mind your business.
Second Amendment Foundation kicks additional butt
In the grand scheme of things it’s a small win, but we’ll take what we can get;
CITY OF SEATTLE SETTLES SAF PUBLIC RECORDS LAWSUIT FOR $38,000
BELLEVUE, WA The Second Amendment Foundation has accepted a $38,000 settlement from the City of Seattle for the city’s failure to release public records about the city’s gun buyback in January.
As part of the agreement, the city has acknowledged that it did not promptly or properly provide all of the documents sought by SAF under the Public Records Act. SAF was represented by Bellevue attorney Miko Tempski.
“It is a shame that this had to drag out so long,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb, “but the important thing is that the city, and outgoing Mayor Mike McGinn’s office has been held accountable for sloppy handling of our request. One would have thought the city had learned something earlier this year when the police department had to pay the Seattle Times $20,000, for also not providing requested documents.
“Maybe the citizens of Seattle can consider this a Christmas gift from the departing mayor,” he remarked. “This would not have been necessary had McGinn’s office done its job.”
SAF had pursued e-mails and other documents related to the January buyback, which was conducted in a parking lot underneath I-5 in downtown Seattle. The operation was something of an embarrassment that even Washington Ceasefire President Ralph Fascitelli had advised against, the recovered e-mails revealed.
Earlier the city had supplied some of the requested documents, but a story in the Seattle P-I.com revealed there were other materials that had not been provided to SAF by Mayor McGinn’s office.
“It seems hard to conceive,” Tempski said, “how you could accidentally overlook hundreds of documents and how that could be unintentional.”
“The settlement,” said Gottlieb, “will help SAF continue its legal work. Hopefully, we will see better performance from a new city administration in January.”
Bureaucrats care very little when they’re playing with other people’s money, but eventually they get booted out of office for their douchebaggery.
What the Seattle government critters were trying to hide through their obfuscation of course is that gun “buy-backs” (as if they were ever their guns in the first place) are nothing but a cheap, stupid sham. They knew they’d be called on it, so they were willing to take their very slim chances in court at the citizens’ expense.
At a minimum, the settlement should come of out their salaries. That is after they’re arrested for using their position in an attempt to chill the exercise of a constitutional right.
How about a printer and ink “buy-back” as a means of “fighting” counterfeiting? Yeah; shockingly stupid. Insane, actually, if anyone were to think it could ever help anything.
If you trust people who do this sort of thing to hold positions of power there is something wrong with you.
Hey; let’s have a Koran “buy-back”, after which we’ll show videos on the evening news of those Korans being shredded for recycling. “Getting these Korans off the streets is another way to help save lives” the announcer would say, as a flock of doves is released. Surely that’ll put a big dent in the jihadist threat, right? Same reasoning. Same anti constitutional behavior. Same insanity.
They have it back asswards of course; crime (both the freelance and the official kind) is the reason we must at all times protect the right to keep and bear ams.
I gave quite a bit (for me) to the SAF this year. How about you?
Wrong hands, right hands… uh, say again?
A good first step
In Bloomberg’s Business Week, of all places, Paul Barrett suggests:
As for the BATFE, drastic reform seems warranted. Why not take the agency’s better agents and fold them into the Federal Bureau of Investigation, under new leadership, and then just get rid of the bumblers who continue to make a mockery of federal law enforcement?
From a purest standpoint I would prefer that all the functions currently “performed” by the ATF be handled at the state level, if at all, and the ATF (pseudo) functionality be completely eliminated at the national level but I understand the political reality of smaller steps.
Politically the situation may be even more nuanced. At one point, many years ago, certain Second Amendment lobbyists actively worked to save the ATF because they could be more easily controlled because of their “F-Troop” reputation. As repulsive as it may be that may still be the case.
That a mainstream media outlet is advocating for the elimination of the ATF is significant. That alone is a good first step.
The setup, the pitch, and… WHACK!
“The nationalized preschool promoters, led by feckless bureaucrats who piled mounds of debt onto our children with endless Keynesian pipe dreams, claim that new multibillion-dollar “investments” in public education will “benefit the economy.” But ultimately, it’s not about the money or improved academic outcomes for Fed Ed. The increasing federal encroachment into our children’s lives at younger and younger ages is about control. These clunkers don’t need more time and authority over our families. They need a permanent recess.”
I was just telling my daughter on the way in this morning that you need to look past the authoritarians’ rationalizations, dismiss them out of hand, and look instead at their behavior and results over time. Then you see the disease for what it is. Malkin is exactly right; they need a permanent recess.
Explain to me how this works
There are more and more people calling for constitutional amendments, or a convention of states.
Let me see if have this right– Those in office aren’t obeying the constitution, so we’re going to change the constitution that they aren’t obeying.
Isn’t that a bit like a “gun free zone” sign, in that those who would obey it aren’t the problem we’re addressing? “We must pass new laws because criminals aren’t obeying the laws” is what we scoff at when it comes from Progressive communists. Now we’re doing it too?
The best I can see coming from a new or revised constitution is that it would represent an official mandate– It might serve as a psychological incentive for the three percent, somewhat like the Emancipation Proclamation which on its surface had no teeth being that there was already a state of active rebellion.
Just don’t think for a second that the dirtbags in power are going to see your shiny new, libertarian constitution and say to themselves; “Golly! Now THERE’S a constitution I can obey to the letter, the spirit, the whole deal! Heck yeah! No problem! No more redistributionist/interventionist/kleptocratic thinking for me! No, Sir! This is GREAT now…all of a sudden…like!”
Really?
No one wants to confiscate your guns…
Except when they do. Even things like a tube-magazine bolt-action 22, because it can hold more than 5 rounds. NYC at it’s stupidest. The 113 year old 1911 .45 ACP has a standard seven round magazine, so you need to get rid of your old magazines and buy… er, I don’t know of any makers of 5-round 1911 magazines. Maybe they exist, but I’ve never seen one.
Quote of the day—Thomas Sowell
President Obama really has a way with words, such as calling the problems that millions of people have had trying to sign up for ObamaCare “glitches.” When the Titanic sank, was that a “glitch”?
Thomas Sowell
November 26, 2013
Random Thoughts
[The government has said the website will be fixed by December 1, just four days from now. That will not be the case. The keel of that ship is broken and it’s headed for the bottom of the ocean. As I have been privately telling Barb L. they did not build the web site with security in mind. They tried to put security in as an afterthought.
Security as an afterthought is like attempting to put brakes on a car after it has been purchased. You end up with solutions like throwing a boat anchor out a window and holding on to the rope really tight. When it fails they put gloves in the car and tell you to use them when holding the rope.—Joe]
ID Verification
I came across this, a story about people getting hung up on the “ID Verification” part of the application, because Healthcare.gov won’t let you shop for plans until it “knows” who you are. So data-security issues aside, could this hangup be used to leverage a renewed call for new universal ID cards, now possibly (probably) tied in with biometrics, DNA, and medical records?
Let me rephrase: I know can be. Any bets on whether or not it does (soon) and who will be the first to call for it?