Archive for the 'Obama Administration' Category

The Hill:

President Obama is quietly moving forward on gun control.

The president has used his executive powers to bolster the national background check system, jumpstart government research on the causes of gun violence and create a million-dollar ad campaign aimed at safe gun ownership.

The executive steps will give federal law enforcement officials access to more data about guns and their owners, help keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill, and lay the groundwork for future legislative efforts.

It is unclear whether the National Rifle Association (NRA) will challenge any of the executive actions in court. A spokesman for the NRA did not return a request for comment.

The moves, which have not been widely touted by the administration, come as Obama ups his pressure on Congress to take action on gun control in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. The Senate is expected to begin floor consideration of legislation when it returns in April.

Efforts to renew a ban in semi-automatic weapons with military-style features and high-capacity magazines have stalled in Congress. Democratic senators still hope to move gun control legislation that includes tougher background checks, but conservative Republican senators have threatened to filibuster it.

If approved by the Senate, any bill would then face tough sledding in the GOP-controlled House.

Gun control groups say Obama’s piecemeal approach falls short of what could be accomplished by legislation overhauling the nation’s gun laws. Still, they argue the actions remain important and will reduce gun violence.

“They’ve taken direct aim at some of the bigger problems in the regulatory part of the issue and they’re doing it in the right way and that’s going to be very helpful,” said Mark Glaze, the director of Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns group.

“Ultimately you need to close the loopholes in the law that will continue to undermine enforcement, but what they’re doing is precisely right.”

They also illustrate the administration’s power to change gun laws despite inaction on Capitol Hill, a practice the president may need to duplicate in other policy areas amid congressional gridlock.

Because, you know, he doesn’t especially get into that concept called balance or separation of powers.  That’s for those who live in a republic.

Obama moves to shame Congress into approving gun control.

President Obama moved Thursday to put the muscle of the White House and his network of supporters behind a gun control package tracking toward the Senate floor, calling on voters to pressure Congress into backing it as the proposal runs into resistance on Capitol Hill.

The president, in a set of brief remarks from the White House Thursday surrounded by the mothers of shooting victims, raised concern that the shock from the Newtown elementary school shooting could soon fade.

“Less than 100 days ago that happened. … Shame on us if we’ve forgotten,” Obama said. “I haven’t forgotten those kids. Shame on us if we’ve forgotten.”

Let’s recast that shame in a more truthful light.  Shame on you Obama for surrounding yourself with the props of hurting mothers in order to pass your Fascist measures.  Shame on you for lying to the gullible American people and claiming that any measure you take would have changed the outcome of a dedicated person bent on doing harm.  Shame on you for deceiving the public into thinking that this has anything to do with school shootings.

Shame on you for inferring that any change you make to the laws governing law abiding people has any affect on criminals.  Shame on you for pushing measures more suited to communist China (who supports your gun control efforts) than a free America (I can recall such a thing, although many youth today cannot).  And finally, shame on you for nurturing a Fascist ideology that would turn our freedoms on their head and focus power in the hands of ruling elites who confiscate not only firearms but wealth too.  Shame … shame … shame.

God will soon condemn you, and your empty philosophies of liberation theology and warmed over Fabian Socialism won’t be able to save you on that awful day of judgment.

Hartford Courant has a silly editorial demanding that we hold gun manufacturers liable for crimes committed with their products.  Ain’t going to happen.  In one more small victory for freedom, the Senate blocked the wicked witch of the East, Caitlan Halligan in her bid to fill a vacancy on the D.C. circuit court of appeals.

President Barack Obama’s nominee to fill one of the vacancies on the powerful appeals court in Washington withdrew Friday, two weeks after the Senate blocked her from a getting a confirmation vote.

The National Rifle Association had opposed New York attorney Caitlin Halligan due to her involvement while Solicitor General for the state of New York in a lawsuit against gun manufacturers. The NRA said she had tried to undermine a federal law which prohibited lawsuits against gun manufacturers in cases involving criminal misuse of firearms.

The NRA made that claim because it’s true.

Caitlin J. Halligan, who in her tenure as Solicitor General of the State of New York, attempted to hold firearms manufactures and retailers responsible for crimes committed with guns. In 2006, Halligan also filed a brief arguing that handgun manufacturers were guilty of creating a public nuisance.  This caused an almost incredulous rejection by the New York Court of Appeals.

“The New York Court of Appeals has never recognized a common-law public nuisance cause of action based on allegations like those in this complaint. Moreover, other jurisdictions have dismissed public nuisance claims against firearms manufacturers on similar or other grounds… In light of the foregoing, we believe it is legally inappropriate, impractical and unrealistic to mandate that defendants undertake, and the courts enforce, unspecified measures urged by plaintiff in order to abate the conceded availability and criminal use of illegal handguns.” (People Of The State Of New York v. Sturm & Ruger Co., 309 A.D.2d 91, 2003).

When the New York Court of Appeals thinks you’re too radical, you have a problem.  There is much ground to be tilled before we’ve seen the last of Obama’s gun-grabbing efforts.  But this is a small victory, and one to relish.  Now, on to the next task, perhaps destroying the recapitulation of the U.N. gun grabbing efforts.

Ever to be late to the debate and wrong with the facts, Fluffington Post discusses Hitler and guns.

When the president of Ohio’s state school board posted her opposition to gun control, she used a powerful symbol to make her point: a picture of Adolf Hitler. When a well-known conservative commentator decried efforts to restrict guns, he argued that if only Jews in Poland had been better armed, many more would have survived the Holocaust.

In the months since the Newtown, Conn., school massacre, some gun rights supporters have repeatedly compared U.S. gun control efforts to Nazi restrictions on firearms, arguing that limiting weapons ownership could leave Americans defenseless against homegrown tyrants.

But some experts say that argument distorts a complex and contrary history. In reality, scholars say, Hitler loosened the tight gun laws that governed Germany after World War I, even as he barred Jews from owning weapons and moved to confiscate them.

Advocates who cite Hitler in the current U.S. debate overlook that Jews in 1930s Germany were a very small population, owned few guns before the Nazis took control, and lived under a dictatorship commanding overwhelming public support and military might, historians say. While it doesn’t fit neatly into the modern-day gun debate, they say, the truth is that for all Hitler’s unquestionably evil acts, his firearms laws likely made no difference in Jews’ very tenuous odds of survival.

“Objectively, it might have made things worse” if the Jews who fought the Nazis in the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising in Poland had more and better guns, said historian Steve Paulsson, an expert on the period whose Jewish family survived the city’s destruction.

It’s difficult to imagine how it could be worse than gas chambers and ovens to commit genocide, but they aren’t reluctant to cite an absurd comment like that because it’s a failing organization.  It’s a wonder anyone will write for or talk to them.

The record is clear.

… the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 was consolidated by massive searches and seizures of firearms from political opponents, who were invariably described as “communists.” After five years of repression and eradication of dissidents, Hitler signed a new gun control law in 1938, which benefitted Nazi party members and entities, but denied firearm ownership to enemies of the state.

Furthermore, regarding the specifics:

… control over weapons that have collapsible or telescoping capabilities, easy take-down and modularity, lights, no so-called “sporting purpose,” and magazines more than a pre-determined amount has its roots in Nazi Germany.

Again, the record is clear.  Today, potential enemies of the state includes everyone except law enforcement, and the controls that the current administration advocates are to be found in Nazi Germany.

No one has ever claimed that either the Obama administration or Adolf Hitler wanted the disappearance of all guns.  They just want guns in the “right hands.”

Random thoughts and guns has an interesting post up on Bracken’s cube (h/t WRSA).  I think the way to see it is lines of tension that may act to oppose, may act symbiotically or may couple (with forces in opposite directions but with a common outcome).  You can decide for yourself.

At any rate, it is in the best interest of the hive that the rulers do all they can to eradicate the lines of tension.  This means a number of things, but an interesting line of effort appeared today.

Last Friday’s headlines focused on President Obama’s address at Argonne National Laboratory, where he proposed to spend $2 billion on an energy-security trust fund for renewable fuel research. Obama boldly pledged “to shift our cars entirely . . . off oil.”

How exactly is he planning to do that? Research will have an effect over time, but “entirely off oil” is either a greatly exaggerated or a very incomplete account of the administration’s energy plans. The New York Times story on Obama’s speech dryly notes that although the president “has vowed to make addressing climate change a priority in his second term . . . he has provided only scant details on how he intends to act.”

Look closely, however, and it’s possible to spot some troubling plans. The Times, and just about every other major news outlet, neglected to note that on the day of Obama’s Argonne speech, the Department of Energy released a series of coordinated reports called “Transportation Energy Futures” (developed in cooperation with Argonne). This DOE project explores a variety of strategies designed to curb America’s greenhouse gas emissions up to 80 percent by about 2050.

Arguably the most controversial of those reports covers the “effects of the built environment on transportation.” To put it plainly, the “built environment” report lays out strategies the federal government can use to force development away from suburbs and into cities, supposedly for the sake of reducing carbon dioxide emissions given off by all those suburban commuters. The Obama administration wants to force so-called smart growth policies on the country: get out of your car, stay out of the suburbs, move into small, tightly-packed urban apartment complexes, and walk or take public transportation instead of driving.

After all, those country boys with guns will be much easier to control if they collect them into the hive than if they leave them in the mountains and woods to cause trouble for the collective.

Do you understand?

Or perhaps the proper title would have been “You the Extremist and Tannerite.”  David Codrea.

An “Unclassified/For Official Use Only” Federal Bureau of Investigation WMD Intelligence Analysis Section Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center intelligence bulletin issued Tuesday “assesses with high confidence recreationally used exploding targets (ETs), commonly referred to as tannerite, or reactive targets, can be used as an explosive for illicit purposes by criminals and extremists and explosive precursor chemicals (EPCs) present in ETs can be combined with other materials to manufacture explosives for use in improvised explosive devices (IEDs).”

[ … ]

“The term extremists,” the bulletin explains in a footnote, “includes international terrorists, homegrown violent extremists, domestic terrorists, and lone wolf offenders operating in the United States or abroad.” Previous Gun Rights Examiner reports have demonstrated the federal government applies those terms liberally to include groups as innocuous as “preppers” and “Constitutionalists,” among others.

Good Lord.  Seriously?  Really?  Western Rifle Shooters reacts:

Boo!

Tannerite!

Hold me close, Uncle Bob — I’m a-skeered.

Boo!

On a serious note (because the FBI is so unserious these days), note what is not happening in all of this.  The FBI is not chasing down illegal aliens crossing the border.  They are not targeting the Mexican drug lords.  They are not eradicating MS-13.  They are not burrowing down deep into organized crime in the inner cities.  The folks who work in the field offices might get killed doing those things.

No, those things are hard to do.  They would rather wring their hands over “extremists” and Tannerite.  So there you have it.  Your tax dollars at work.

Read it at Examiner.

Bob Owens:

On January 15 I penned Shock the System: Just one example of how the government could lose a civil conflict.

It was a warning of how patriots could selectively shut down the capitols of states and nations by eliminating the electrical substations and residential transformers that service those cities. Though I stated nothing new either tactically or strategically (power stations were always the first targets of bombers and saboteurs dating back to before World War II), the post absolutely terrified the powers that be.

Hershel Smith at The Captain’s Journal referenced that article in Surviving The Apocalypse: Thinking Strategically Rather Than Tactically three days ago, in a continuation of his thoughts on tactics for “lone wolf”operations in a domestic insurgency.

He referred back to a post he wrote almost two and a half years ago, A Terrorist Attack That America Cannot Absorb, which discussed attacks on the main step-up transformers at coal power plants.

Unlike the residential transformers and smaller substations I discussed in Shock the System that would create short-term, comparatively isolated blackouts, the sort of attack that concerned Smith were well-coordinated attacks that would effectively strike a blow against the entire national grid, by knocking-out the system at the points of generation, taking out very rare pieces of equipment that would take years to replace. If attacks took out even a small number of step-up transformers, it would force the entire nation to ration power, and would have a crippling effect on the national economy.

Some people seem appalled at the fact that the sort of attacks that American forces have used so successfully overseas (Iraq’s electrical grid is still in the process of recovering from two wars) might be used against American cities… and that is the exact point both Smith and I were trying to make. Neither of us are advocates of such attacks, as both of us probably have a better idea than the layman of the effect such attacks would have. I’d likely lose several people I love very much who have medical conditions were such an attack to affect this region. these aren’t things we want. these are things we fear.

Smith and I are pointing out the fact that if states or the federal government is willing to push citizens into a Second Revolutionary War over the natural right to self defense, they will feel the wrath of the right of revolution that is the birthright of ever American.

Read Bob’s entire post.  Exactly.  I felt the necessity to make a similar point in one comment I made.

This article does not “promote this plan.” This article acknowledges reality. Confiscatory policies for guns will never work in America because gun owners will not relinquish their God-given rights to bear arms. Next logical step. Gun owners will not stand down confiscation teams day after day after day on their dootsteps. They will find another strategy. The one I discussed here is but one – there are many more, all of them painful and involving “pressure points.”

The best way to avoid a scenario like this (or similar scenario) is for the government to return to constitutional government.

Why don’t people go to work on that?

And I emphasize that there are many other pressure points.  The electrical grid is only one and the example I happen to choose to make a point.  All of this will be far easier for everyone in the long run if the government honors the constitution.

Is that so hard?  Perhaps so.  Abigail Adams, who is one of my heroes, told John, “Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.”

Washington Times:

After years in the shadows, the administration’s secret drone program burst into very public view Wednesday with lawmakers grilling the attorney general over legal justification for targeted killings and Sen. Rand Paul launching an old-style one-man filibuster to demand answers from President Obama.

The Kentucky Republican held the floor for hours, effectively blocking a vote on the nomination of John O. Brennan, whom Mr. Obama has tapped to be CIA director. He said he would relent only if the administration publicly vowed not to target Americans on U.S. soil.

“This is a long, drawn-out day, but it’s to try to get some answers,” Mr. Paul said after he crossed the eight-hour mark late Wednesday evening. “It’s to try to shame the president into doing the right thing.”

Here’s your answer Senator.  Progressives only fake liberalism.  They are statists and totalitarians, every one.  Scratch a progressive, find a Fascist.  They won’t agree to the illegitimacy of killing U.S. citizens because they believe they have the right to kill U.S. citizens.  It’s as simple as that.

Rand Paul is a hero, and anyone in the Senate who doesn’t support his effort is a friend of totalitarians.

UPDATE: And Mike Lee and Ted Cruz are heroes as well.

CNS News:

In his new book, At the Brink, economist and author John Lott Jr., assesses the presidency of Barack Obama and recalls conversations regarding gun laws they had while working at the University of Chicago.

In Chapter Three, Mr. Lott discusses gun-control and takes the reader back to his time at the University of Chicago, where he and then-professor Barack Obama spoke on numerous occasions about guns in America.

“I don’t believe people should be able to own guns,” Obama told Lott one day at the University of Chicago Law School.

Oh yes he does.

“We should restore the ban on military-style assault weapons and a 10-round limit on magazines,” Obama continued. Both of those proposals “deserve a vote in Congress. Our law enforcement officers should never be outgunned on the streets.”

He just wants the right people to have the guns.  Like I’ve said.  Scratch a progressive, find a Fascist.

Good grief!  Some people just won’t do the world a favor and disappear.  They have to keep bothering us.

Senators on Capitol Hill are telling Gun Owners of America that Harry Reid is twisting arms to get support for one of the most anti-gun judicial nominees in recent memory.

Her name is Caitlin Halligan, and she has a long track record in favor of gun control. In fact, one Senate Republican said that she is the most “anti-Second Amendment nominee Obama has ever put forward.”

As New York’s Solicitor General, Halligan was one of the chief lawyers responsible for New York’s baseless and politically motivated efforts to bankrupt gun manufacturers using frivolous litigation. In so doing, Halligan proved that she places liberal political activism above fealty to the law.

Halligan’s public hatred for firearms was only matched by her zealotry inside the courtroom. In a speech on May 5, 2003, Halligan called for “handgun manufacturers [to be held] liable for criminal acts committed with handguns.”

We have previously seen her handiwork.

Caitlin J. Halligan, who in her tenure as Solicitor General of the State of New York, attempted to hold firearms manufactures and retailers responsible for crimes committed with guns. In 2006, Halligan also filed a brief arguing that handgun manufacturers were guilty of creating a public nuisance.  This caused an almost incredulous rejection by the New York Court of Appeals.

“The New York Court of Appeals has never recognized a common-law public nuisance cause of action based on allegations like those in this complaint. Moreover, other jurisdictions have dismissed public nuisance claims against firearms manufacturers on similar or other grounds… In light of the foregoing, we believe it is legally inappropriate, impractical and unrealistic to mandate that defendants undertake, and the courts enforce, unspecified measures urged by plaintiff in order to abate the conceded availability and criminal use of illegal handguns.” (People Of The State Of New York v. Sturm & Ruger Co., 309 A.D.2d 91, 2003).

But we knew this about Halligan.  She is a traitor.  Actually, we knew this about Obama too.  He is a traitor to the constitution of the United States.  But we are reminded yet again of his traitorous intentions, and it says more about Obama than it does about Halligan.  She is small potatoes.  Obama is the traitor in chief.