Category Archives: Politics

H222 (Campus Carry) Senate Hearing Friday

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The following is via an email alert from the Idaho Sport Shooters Alliance. I have added the counties for the various district in red.

Shooters:
 
This Friday the 25th the Senate State Affairs Committee will hold a hearing on the campus carry bill. The anti-gun college administrators are pulling out all the stops to try to kill this bill. We need those of you who live in one of the districts below  ( whose Senator is on the state affairs committee )  to call your senator and let them know that you support the right of faculty, staff, students, and members of the public to defend themselves on college campuses and that violent predators do not respect gun-free zones.
 
You may also have heard that the Governor has not expressed support for this bill. Everyone: please contact his office ASAP and politely ask Governor Otter to support this bill.
 
Governor Butch Otter
(208) 334-2100
  
Senator Curt McKenzie (R-12), Chairman (A co-sponsor: Thank him for his support!) (part of Canyon County)
 
Senator Russell Fulcher (R-21), Vice Chairman (part of Ada County)
 
Senator Bart Davis (R-23) (Owyhee County)
 
Senator Brent Hill (R-34) (Fremont and Madison County)
 
Senator John McGee (R-10) (part of Canyon County)
 
Senator Patti Anne Lodge (R-13) (part of Canyon County)
 
Senator Chuck Winder (R-14) (part of Ada County)
 
Senator Michelle Stennett (D-25) (Blaine, Camas, Gooding, and Lincoln County)
 
Senator Edgar Malepeai (D-30) (part of Power County)

Today daughter Kim sent me images from the University of Idaho school newspaper. There were several editorials telling everyone how terrible this bill is. How it removes choices from the students and the administration. Choices they would and have made to make the campus safer. And how dangerous it will be if people with permits are allowed to carry firearms on campus.

“Choices”? What about the choices of the students that will be expelled if they choose to carry everyday self-defense tools which they carry off campus on a regular basis? Would they use the same argument if the bill were to allow mixed race couples on campus? Or allowing Jews and Muslims on campus? Or how about forbidding the university administration to expel students who obtained abortions? Would those be “choices” the administration should be allowed to make?

The right to keep and bear arms is a specific enumerated right protected by both the U.S. and Idaho State Constitutions. The University does not and should not have an exemption to infringe upon the Bill of Rights.

Quote of the day—Milton Friedman

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Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.

Milton Friedman
[We are likely to get a lot of this in the near future.

But the main reason I was reminded of this was because of gun control without legislation being contemplated.

I wonder if there is a special name for that like “inflation” for taxation without legislation? Other than “unelectable” of course.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Sebastian

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There’s no middle ground on this issue that will make our opponents surrender and give up. That’s why I’m interested in giving up as little as possible, and taking everything from them that I can. I’m not in this fight to keep people worried. I’m in this fight to win, and to make what my opponents advocate about as publicly acceptable as someone who thinks we ought to ban newspapers.

Sebastian
March 17, 2011
On Obama’s Bully Pulpit
[The most important point here is that we need to change society attitudes not just get the politicians to vote our way. If we change society the votes will be there and other good things will follow. Just having votes without a change in society means we will have the same fights over and over.

I generally use the phrase, “Make belonging to the Brady Campaign the social equivalent of a membership in the KKK.” But Sebastian’s choice of words is probably better than mine for most audiences.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Chuck Schumer

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We’re not interested in curtailing the rights of gun owners…

Chuck Schumer
U.S. Senator from New York
March 16, 2011
Mayor Bloomberg scolds nation for not standing up to gun lobby
[I choked when I read that even though I wasn’t drinking anything.

To get a better idea of Schumer’s interest you need a little background. Here is a good example:

We’re here to tell the NRA their nightmare is true!. We’re going to hammer guns on the anvil of relentless legislative strategy! We’re going to beat guns into submission!

U.S. Rep. Charles Schumer
November 30, 1993
NBC Nightly News

I’m reminded of how you can tell when a politician is lying—his lips are moving.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Joshua Horwitz

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Now that there is proven resolve to keep military-style weapons off of America’s streets, we hope Congress and the President will get behind a truly effective assault weapons ban – one that includes ‘copycat’ weapons just as deadly as those already banned.

Joshua Horwitz
March 2, 2004
Executive Director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence
CSGV Claims Victory in Defeating Gun Immunity Bill
[As is typical with anti-gun people, their claims are usually worthless. The “Gun Immunity Bill” later passed and the “assault weapon” ban expired a few months later.

Also I would like to point out that the AWB was created and passed on the basis of “menacing looks”. Then they turned around and wanted to ban guns that matched the “assault weapons” in terms of “deadliness”.

So anything with a menacing look should be banned. And then 10 years later anything that is the functional equivalent of something that looks menacing should be banned as well.

Does that mean Michelle Obama should be banned because she is the functional equivalent of Hillary Clinton 15 years ago?—Joe]

Quote of the day—Barack Obama

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Now, like the majority of Americans, I believe that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms. And the courts have settled that as the law of the land. In this country, we have a strong tradition of gun ownership that’s handed from generation to generation. Hunting and shooting are part of our national heritage. And, in fact, my administration has not curtailed the rights of gun owners – it has expanded them, including allowing people to carry their guns in national parks and wildlife refuges.

The fact is, almost all gun owners in America are highly responsible. They’re our friends and neighbors. They buy their guns legally and use them safely, whether for hunting or target shooting, collection or protection. And that’s something that gun-safety advocates need to accept.

Barack Obama
March 13, 2011
We must seek agreement on gun reforms
[All the gun safety advocates that I know (most are NRA firearms safety instructors) do accept this. It’s the anti-gun activists that don’t accept it.

Other than that minor point I don’t have anything to disagree with in those two paragraphs. He could have suggested grief counseling for Brady Campaign and Violence Policy Center supporters but my read of the tone is that he wouldn’t have really meant it.—Joe]

Campus carry in Idaho up for a vote

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Via the Idaho Sport Shooters Alliance:

Shooters:

H222 (the campus carry bill) will be on the House floor tomorrow for a final vote. Please contact your representatives ASAP and ask them to vote for the right of faculty, staff, students, and the public to have the means to defend themselves in the current gun-free university zones.

Find your representative here.

Contact info here.

Executive Director/General Counsel
Idaho Sport Shooters Alliance
www.idahossa.org

Quote of the day—Ayn Rand

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Government “help” to business is just as disastrous as government persecution… the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.

Ayn Rand
[A friend of mine once compared government aid to candy that causes cancer. It tastes sweet and is almost irresistible but eventually it will kill you.

Some lessons are taught over and over with only a few ever really grasping it.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Barron Barnett

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This agency needs to be put down like a rabid dog and it’s behavior and rate of growth reminds me of some other agencies in the early 1990s.  The only difference  is they haven’t shot a woman holding a baby or burned a bunch of people to death. Instead they are giving people extra unnecessary dose of radiation at the point of the gun, claiming necessity, but in reality it’s pointless.

Barron Barnett
March 13, 2011
TSA Body Scanners Giving 10x Dose
[With the clarification that it is the agency and not the people that need to be put down I’m in complete agreement with this.—Joe]

The ATF can do some things right

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According to CBS the ATF Chief Public Affairs officer sent out a memo early on the week of February 28th to all their “Public Information Officers” with the instructions:

Please make every effort for the next two weeks to maximize coverage of ATF operations/enforcement actions/arrests at the local and regional level. Given the negative coverage by CBS Evening News last week and upcoming events this week, the bureau should look for every opportunity to push coverage of good stories

It just so happens I have an subscription to some of the ATF news updates. For the entire month of February I received seven updates. During the three days of February 28, March 1, and March 2 I received eight updates. Here is a typical update.

So it appears they have Public Information Officers that can deliver when asked to. It’s good to know our government has quality people in their employee even if it is in the spin department. If they could only engage the “wash” cycle before the “spin” we would all be much better off.

Quote of the day—Elbert Hubbard

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So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.

Elbert Hubbard
[This is an appealing notion. And I’m pretty sure it is subscribed to by a large number of people. However I think it is exceedingly naïve. Examples are not the sole guide to future behavior.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Lyle @ UltiMAK

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As the communists have been saying; never let a good crisis go to waste. It follows logically then that they should never waste the opportunity to manufacture a good crisis. It’s just good policy. It’s what you do if you want to keep the funding coming in.

Lyle @ UltiMAK
March 2, 2011
In a comment here.
[The manufacturing of crises not limited to communists. The “War on Drugs” was created by a conservative hero. History is filled with them by Fascists, the Green Party and probably nearly every political party.

I always marvel at the number of people that seem to think all solutions involve “doing something”. I suspect it is in our genetic code. The witch doctor has to dance before it will rain and a virgin has to be sacrificed to prevent the volcano from exploding, right?

I think Libertarians could legitimately claim any number of crises exist but nearly everyone ignores them even if it is true. Probably because the solutions are to defund action rather than to fund action. Solutions that involve not “doing something” instead of more “doing something” don’t resonate with the majority of people. At some level our politicians/witch-doctors know this and always continue dancing and sacrificing virgins.—Joe]

Alright, Classmates…

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We’ve been talking about this for several years here.  Who can tell us how Rand Paul utterly failed in this interview;


ETA; YouTube imbedding has been disable for this video, but you can still see it here.


Letterman make a pretty good attempt at it, but Paul is left like a deer in the headlights and didn’t even make the attempt.  As Rand herself would say; “Blank-out.”  Then she would go on to explain how the self described conservative voices are the worst, most deadly enemies of conservatism.


I give him a C minus as a junior high school student.  He did show having done some homework and some listening in class, but I’d flunk him from high school.  Maybe it was just nerves, but I don’t buy that.  You don’t forget your main point– the thing you’ve ostensibly been striving for all your professional life.  I kept waiting for it– fully expecting it, but alas.  Maybe he’s just another Republican.


Anyone?


HT to theblaze.com

Campus carry in Texas

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For being published in a San Francisco newspaper this is a fairly balanced article claiming Texas will soon ease the restrictions on both students and professors exercising their right to keep and bear arms on college campuses.

Reality check

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I haven’t followed the happenings in the Mid-East all that closely but my co-worker Chet frequently comes into my office to update me with the latest news.

According to Chet, in the Mid-East at least some of the protesters are demanding the government give them a house and a job. From my viewpoint that is just Moon-bat crazy talk. Government is force. Except for sale and leases of natural resources owned by the government (I’m thinking of oil, trees, mining rights, etc. on government owned lands) the government obtains its money via taking it from someone else at the point of a gun. If you are demanding money from the government you are demanding they take it from someone else and give it to you. This can work as long as the parasites don’t overwhelm the hosts. Once the host can no longer provide for both itself and the parasite both die. Many people don’t seem to understand this.

As Lyle pointed out in his post earlier today Chomsky compares protesters in Wisconsin to the protesters in the Mid-East. What is it these people expect to happen? The money simply does not exist. In the case of our domestic governments they have been borrowing money for years and the “credit card” is nearly maxed out. The governments are attempt to reduce the hemorrhaging by a small amount. They aren’t even actually stopping the bleeding yet there are those advocating “revolution” if “the people” don’t get what the government can’t physically give them. The taxpayers (the hosts) have almost been bled dry and are dying (both businesses and individuals are going bankrupt). The parasites are being told they have to stop sucking so hard and they respond by demanding they be given blood that does not exist or else they will destroy the infrastructure that feeds everyone.

There are a lot of people that are in dire need of reality check. The sad part is I’m pretty sure the only way reality is going to penetrate their thick skulls is after a lot of parasites and a fair number of hosts have died.

Public Servants

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The term has often been one that garners respect, as though the public servant is someone donating his or her time out of a sense of duty and purpose.  “Serving” the public and milking the public are somewhat different concepts though.  Someone who makes over $100K in a small town public school, for example, with a nice medical insurance policy and a nice pension is a “servant” while someone doing much the same thing in the private sector for half the pay and no pension, supporting himself while paying the taxes to support the Public Servant, is not a servant at all.  The private entrepreneur is “greedy”.  Right?  Greed and the profit motive are one in the same thing, right?  That’s what you’ve been taught, I bet.


What do you call a group of public servants, coercively funded, that has been organized, has huge political influence, and is currently helping to bankrupt several states?  Is that public service, or is it something else?


Some state governments are starting to realize that the gravy train for the selfless public servants is running dry– that something major needs to change.  The response from the selfless servants is that they’re taking to the streets.


I’ve been saying for years that public education, by its very nature and structure, was destined to become a de facto political party (which of course it is) with one of its goals being the indoctrination of the students to a certain political and world view amenable to the desires of the government/education complex.  It’s a given.  It’s an inevitability.  A guarantee.  A system based on coercive funding, that would teach and promote the principles of liberty, and the protection of property rights that are fundamental to liberty, would be in a perpetual conflict of interest.  That cannot last.  I did not last.


That has been considered an ultra-extremist point of view by many.  You just don’t say those things in mixed company.  I’ve also pointed out that the fastest way to lose a friend who’s complaining about his “small budget” or “low pay” in a public position, is to tell him he can always quit, get a job in the private sector and find out exactly what he’s worth.  You’d better step back before you say something like that, because violence will be on his mind.  Who’s more “extreme”; the person stating a simple truth, which is obvious to anyone who’s operated a business, or the person who wants to punch you in the face for saying it?  If a simple truth is now to be considered extreme, what does that say about the current state of our culture?


So it has came to pass, that the teachers have taken to the streets, bringing their students with them (and you said public education was never about indoctrination.  No; couldn’t be.  That would be bad, and we all know that teachers are saints) to demand more goodies from a state that they helped bankrupt.  To hell with the state government.  To hell with the governor who’s trying to keep the state out of bankruptcy.  To hell with everything and everyone; we want more goodies!  To hell with the public!  (Look at the signs they’re carrying)


These are our sefess “servants” who care about nothing in the world but the common good, and we’re going to be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing from them.  It is an inevitability, where ever and when ever we have the arrogance to believe that WE can get away with having a coercion-based system, because WE can afford it, because WE are so very, very smart and compassionate.  This is going to keep happening as sure as you are reading this, and it is going to escalate.  This is the result of our “Compassion“.

Get involved in Florida

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Robb is requesting your help. Getting involved is how we make a political difference.

Quote of the day—Henry Louis Mencken

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The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.

Henry Louis Mencken
Minority Report, H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks, Knopf, 1956.
[Note that he said, “Enforce”. If there is nothing to enforce, as in a law was repealed it must necessarily be a good thing, right?—Joe]

Quote of the day—Violence Policy Center

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The defeat of Proposition B in Missouri is another nail in the coffin of the National Rifle Association, proof of its waning influence over American politics. The NRA unleashed a massive campaign of spending and grass roots mobilization, with personal appearances by leaders such as NRA President Charlton Heston. Nonetheless, Missourians rejected the ill-conceived hidden handgun proposal.

…

After losing in Missouri, where can the gun lobby count on victory? This defeat, coming on the heels of a resounding referendum vote in Florida to crack down on gun shows, proves that states once considered the heart of the NRA’s power base are rejecting its extremist pro-gun message. As Americans’ support for sensible gun control grows, the NRA’s power continues to crumble.

Violence Policy Center
Press release April 7, 1999
[Note that the year is 1999. Those were dark days for us.

I was reminded of this by the closing of the office of a gun control group.

One could also point out the observation made by Mark Twain, “The report of my death is an exaggeration”, would also be applicable here.—Joe]

‘My Gunsmith Says…’

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I’ve put off saying this for about ten years, but it’s gotten to be too much.  “Sorry” to you good gunsmiths.  I know you’re out there.  I’d say that you know who you are, and I’m sure you do, but the problem is; the bad ones also think they’re the good ones.  They’re super good, even.  That’s always the way it works.  I began to realize this some time in the 1970s when I was in the early stages of my career as a musical instrument mechanic with an alternate career as a live sound mixer (“technician” or “engineer”, respectively, for those who feel it needs to sound exciting and hard to reach).


The really smart sound engineers could quote you all the specs of every piece of gear they had.  They could recite from memory the center frequencies of all 31 bands of a graphic equalizer, for example.  After they had everything all set up and the system response tweaked using the pink noise generator with the front-of-house EQs, monitor EQs and active crossovers, when the performance actually started (which is when the real job of actually making it all sound good actually begins) they’d turn around satisfied, sit down, and have a sandwich and a little chat about sweet nothings.  Man, those guys were really smart, and they often made sure everyone around them understood that they were smart.  Why, they went to college, and stuff, don’t you know?


It seems we get an inordinate proportion of failed or stalled UltiMAK mount installations, an inordinate number of misunderstandings of how the system works, from, you guessed it– gunsmiths.


Apparently, they know and understand far too much to be bothered with reading and following the instructions.  Even when they contact me about this or that perceived problem, they are too smart to accept my explanations.  They, you see, understand mechanics better than the person who designed the system, built the first prototypes using hand tools and common power tools in a musical instrument shop, did the majority of testing, wrote most of the patent claims, and used the system for over ten years.  They tell me all the reasons why it can’t possibly, ever work, why my hands-on experience is wrong, why the experience of over ten thousand users of a single model is all wrong, and how I’m being a dumb jerk for suggesting they might just go ahead and follow the simple instructions to the letter anyway and then see how it goes.


Since an inordinate number of damaged mounts have come from such gunsmiths also (again, because they are smarter and more experienced) I have to wonder how many of them go on to become politicians, city administrators, professors, or left wing community organizers.  There is an uncanny set of parallels.