Category Archives: Politics

Quote of the day—Mike Weisser

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Advocacy organizations can play an important role in any public debate regardless of their size. But the trick is to figure out who you’re really talking to and whether or not they will listen to what you have to say. If Moms wants to have a real impact on the argument over guns, why don’t they talk to gun owners and stop wasting their energy on convincing people who don’t need to be convinced? And you don’t talk to gun people by throwing up a website or a Facebook page and ‘invite’ them to post a comment or engage in a chat. Maybe that strategy works when you’re selling a product, but it’s rank arrogance to confuse marketing a product with marketing an idea.

Mike Weisser
December 29, 2013
The Confrontational Gun Control Strategy That Just Might Work
[The anti-gun people have an incredible amount of arrogance. And ignorance. And profound disregard for the U.S. Constitution.

Don’t expect them to ever understand why they do and should loose the battle they are fighting. They have mental problems and even as they are swept into the dustbin of history by the legislatures and the courts they will still believe they are right. Their mindset does not, and will never, have a significant difference from that of the KKK of the last century. We are the “gun n***ers” of the 21st Century and they want us “put in our place”.—Joe]

Are you part of the problem or part of the solution?

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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.

Quote of the day—Predator

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Interestingly, and not surprisingly coming from The Left, he is advocating capital punishment for possessing a philosophy rather than committing an act. Looking at history, that appears to be a constant.

That said philosophy is supported by, and adheres to, centuries of documented, established rights, which in turn is supported by the natural laws of this particular planet, is irrelevant to him; it is the philosophy he considers so dangerous.

This is certainly a real stretch – for the moment, anyway – but at what level does such a threat constitute basis for justifiable defensive action? For now it’s just talk; I suspect as political power waxes and wanes it may not always be.

Predator
December 19, 2013
Referring to This is what they think of you
[To answer the question, it depends upon what your definition of “justifiable defensive action” is.

I consider defensive training, stocking up on ammo, and keeping my home location difficult to find “defensive action” and more than justified by the current enumerable threats to my philosophy, person, and family. If you are talking about using deadly force as the “justifiable defensive action” then the answer is when the threat is eminent and of a nature that it would result in death or permanent injury to an innocent person.

Other than that I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Chris Stirewalt

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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]

Second Amendment Foundation kicks additional butt

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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?

Quote of the day–Sen. Ed Markey

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We need a ban on assault weapons. We need to stop the flow of high magazine clips, like the ones used in Aurora and Newtown.

Sen. Ed Markey
December 16, 2013
Markey calls for assault weapons ban
[H/T to NRA News for the Tweet.

If it weren’t so common I would say it is ironic that someone so ignorant of firearms that they say something like “stop the flow of high magazine clips” thinks he knows enough about them to make firearm law. But I suspect ignorance of the subject matter and the desire to use force to impose your will on those that are not ignorant are highly correlated. Think of school bullies versus the nerds, the KKK versus people of color, and Anti-Semitists versus Jews.

Philosophically, Senator Markey has a lot of close and dangerous company throughout all known history. And this is why we need to protect our specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. It is a last ditch safeguard to protect innocent people from ignorant bigots with power like Senator Markey.—Joe]

Admitted subterfuge

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Seattle Times opinion writer Jerry Large is no friend of gun owners but he did do us a bit of a favor by revealing to us that our opponents explicitly admit to deliberate subterfuge:

The panelists leaned toward discussing treatment of gun violence as a public-health issue, partly to avoid the blowback attached to the idea of gun control.

This tactic isn’t anything new. They have been doing it since at least the late 1990s. But this is the first time I have seen it explicitly admitted they were trying to call it something other than what it is. Gun control. The infringement of a specific enumerated right.

Delusions are not “incredibly successful”

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Brian Malte, of Handgun Control Inc. (aka The Brady Campaign), says:

The laws that Colorado passed are still on the books, and even the senators that were recalled said they would do it all over again for public safety. And when you have nine out of 10 Americans feeling strongly that background checks are the right thing to do, we will prevail. We’ll do everything we can to protect those gun laws, and we don’t think they’ll be repealed. We think they’re popular enough.

But law enforcement in Colorado says:

Some sheriffs, like Sheriff Cooke, are refusing to enforce the laws, saying that they are too vague and violate Second Amendment rights. Many more say that enforcement will be “a very low priority,” as several sheriffs put it. All but seven of the 62 elected sheriffs in Colorado signed on in May to a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the statutes.

The resistance of sheriffs in Colorado is playing out in other states, raising questions about whether tougher rules passed since Newtown will have a muted effect in parts of the American heartland, where gun ownership is common and grass-roots opposition to tighter restrictions is high.

Beyond that are the court challenges to the new laws and the successful recall elections of three (two plus one resignation because of the recall in process) of the politicians who voted for the laws.

Malte says, “I think 2013 was incredibly successful.”

They passed laws which law enforcement is refusing to enforce, politicians are getting recalled over, are being seriously challenged in the courts and he thinks that is “incredibly successful”?

I think his group over reached, is headed for major defeats, and he is delusional.

These people have mental problems.

Signed copy of Emily Gets Her Gun

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Today I received a signed copy of Emily Gets Her Gun: …But Obama Wants to Take Yours from her publisher.

Emily
WP_20131214_006

Thank you Emily. The book is great. And you didn’t really have to do that. I purchased the Audible version and listened to it weeks ago.

Here are earlier posts about her book:

I fear for his job

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Paul Barrett and I have a friendly but somewhat strained “relationship”. But today he wrote something I completely agree with. That he works for Bloomberg means I fear for his job. From his article in Bloomberg Buisnessweek, Why Gun Control Is Basically Dead:

Dispassionate observers must question the simplistic liberal slogan that more guns equals more crime. The U.S. has seen a two-decade period during which private gun ownership has continued to soar (some 300 million firearms are now in civilian hands), while crime has diminished.

…

The strategy adopted by well-meaning activists post-Newtown may undermine their cause. Consider Moms Demand Action, which is allied with Mayors Against Illegal Guns, an organization started by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg Businessweek parent Bloomberg LP). Watts, the Moms leader, describes her campaign as “a war for the culture.” She talks about firearms as a symbol of an America she doesn’t “recognize.”

Watts is fighting on the NRA’s preferred battlefield. Gun rights organizers have become expert at framing any gun control proposal as an attack on their culture. In a Dec. 6 “grassroots alert” to members, the NRA sounded its usual theme that President Obama and gun control backers push an agenda seeking to “fundamentally transform America” and will “exploit any occasion, no matter how crassly, to promote it.”

Gun control advocates often appear not to appreciate that their country, for better or worse, has a widespread and deeply rooted gun subculture that isn’t going away. No lesser body than the Supreme Court, in decisions issued as recently as 2008 and 2010, has interpreted the Constitution as enshrining that reality.

Barrett has spent a lot of time associating with gun people. It would be a stretch to say he is “one of us” but I think it is fair to say he understands and respects us while only partially agreeing with us.

This understanding, his Harvard law background, his living in New York City, and his calm, cool approach means he has a better view into the political and culture gun rights war than most. That he says “gun control is basically dead” is a very good sign we are winning the war more than just superficially.

The setup, the pitch, and… WHACK!

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Home run!

“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.

If it were only true

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20131207_dems

If it were only true for 98% of the politicians in Washington I’d be much happier about our political situation. As it is I am incline to believe we would be better off if the people we sent to Washington were chosen at random or maybe even the ones who tried hardest to avoid going.

Via Tyler Durden.

Quote of the day—John Stossel

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We don’t live in a reasonable world. We live in a big government world.

John Stossel
2012
No, They Can’t: Why Government Fails-But Individuals Succeed
[I’m just finishing up this book. It’s a good book. For me there were lots of examples of how government screwed up things—all with the best of intentions. I knew in general that was the case but having more examples was nice. If you could get them to read the book the most benefit would be gained by politicians and progressive voters reading it. But if they could be convinced by facts and logic they probably wouldn’t be politicians and they certainly wouldn’t be progressives.—Joe]

Ordered thought of the day

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You know; ordered as opposed to random, just because I feel like being a smart ass.

The most ignorant, uninspired person in the room is the one who’s most interested in running things.

The person who’s doing nothing, seeing the person who’s doing something, will become irritated and try to tell the person who’s doing something that he’s doing it wrong or that he shouldn’t be doing it, and/or that the doer is victimizing the non doer with all his inconsiderate and irresponsible doing. Failure in that strategy requires falling back on plan B; taking credit for the works of the doer that could not be redirected or discouraged.

The non doer views the mastery of this simple strategy as incontrovertible proof of superior intelligence and worth.

This is the basis of all politics, in the same sense that space, time, matter and energy are the bases of life– It is a fundamental law of nature.

Not all democrats are slobs

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Ry sent me a link which lead to this article.

I’m not going to say that just because democrats like Dick Durbin, George Miller, and Chuck Schumer live like slobs all of them do. My understanding is that Al Gore has a very nice home.

Slowing the march isn’t a step in the right direction

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Say Uncle pointed me to this article about MSM whining about the lack of “productivity” of Congress. Apparently slowing down the destruction of freedom with still more laws is considered a bad thing.

In my book Congressional “productivity” would be measured by the net number of laws repealed per unit of time. But no one really knows how many laws we have so we really need a different metric for productivity in Joe’s world.

We do know as of the 1980 we had something on the order of 23,000 pages of Federal law. But we know that Obamacare has about 2,400 pages all by itself! And that doesn’t include the regulations that are derived from the law. The estimates on the number of pages of regulations are on the order of 170,000 pages. And the U.S. tax code has something on the order of 13,000 pages.

I’m thinking a reasonable productivity rate would be something on the order of a page per minute. After an entire year on the the job they would be most of the way through Obamacare. It would take decades to get back to constitutionally enumerated limits. But it took us decades to get here so as long as they are making progress at a rate equal to or greater than the rate we arrived here I can’t really complain a whole lot.

Random thought of the day

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The Federal government has laws against marijuana use, possession, and sales. Although heavily regulated in Washington state you can soon buy pot in stores and people currently openly admit to using it in private. To the best of my knowledge the Feds have not and do not plan to prosecute anyone for violation of their marijuana laws but continue to do so in other states.

But the Feds aggressively fight the Firearms Freedom Act in the states which have passed such laws. And I’m certain that if I started manufacturing guns and selling them in Montana, Idaho or any of the other FFA states without a license or complying with the hundreds if not thousands of Federal laws and regulations on firearms I would soon get an unpleasant visit from the Feds.

What does this mean? Doesn’t it mean that laws are enforced by the whim of the politicians in power? How is this different than having laws against assault and battery but not enforcing them if the victim is of the “wrong” color, religion, or sexual-orientation?

You have to “just know” the law does or doesn’t apply to you this week/month/election-cycle. I firmly believe it would be better that all laws be vigorously and equally enforced. The outrage would result in the stupid laws being repealed.

The existence of a multitude of unenforced laws is a huge risk. How you ask? With so many things being illegal it means our government has the power to arbitrarily imprison anyone at any time. We have fully equipped our government with tyrannical powers just waiting for the “right person” to use them.

Quote of the day—The Responsive Communitarian Platform

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There is, however, one measure sure to gain monumental benefits in the short run. It is politically nearly impossible to take, otherwise low-cost and very effective.

…

What is needed is domestic disarmament. This is the policy of practically all other Western democracies, from Canada to Britain to Germany, from France to Scandinavia. Domestic disarmament entails the removal of arms from private hands and, ultimately, from much of the police force.

The Responsive Communitarian Platform
November 18, 1991
THE CASE FOR DOMESTIC DISARMAMENT
[From the dark ages of gun ownership.

Low cost? The cost would be incalculable.

Effective? At what? The only thing I can see it being effective at is mobilizing people to “recall” (one way or another) all the politicians foolish enough to support it.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Thomas Sowell

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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]

They lie. They can’t help themselves

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Over at Sebastian’s he talks about the distortion of the language by the anti-gun people. In specific the attempt to change the meaning of the phrase “well regulated militia” from “well functioning” to “government regulated”. And how it upset him when he found out about it:

I went through most of the Clinton years not understanding how the Assault Weapons Ban was even remotely constitutional, and wondering why nothing was done about it. When I found out, I became angry.

It was just a few minutes ago when I was having lunch with Barb L. I told her about Speaker of the House Tom Foley losing his seat over the AWB. At about that same time she was a Washington State lobbyist and generally pretty plugged into Washington State politics. But she didn’t understand how he lost his seat.

I explained it was because of the AWB and there were two things that really, really pissed us off above and beyond the ban itself.

One was they called the ban “Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act”. It’s a firearms use protection act that bans guns? They lie. It’s what they do. They can’t help themselves.

And the other was that Foley kept the voting open for several minutes after the stated voting period had expired. The bill failed but by keeping the voting open they got people to change their votes until they had enough for passage. He then closed the voting. The video of him doing that was incredible propaganda for the pro-gun side during his election that fall. Foley became the first sitting Speaker of the House to lose his bid for re-election since Galusha Grow in 1862.

If the gun owners his district in Eastern Washington could have gotten away with it I’m sure you could have sold thousands of tickets to use a horse whip on him.