Archive for the 'Politics' Category

David Codrea:

While massive spending appears to have paid off against Parrish, but not against Sturtevant, Republicans holding on to all of their seats in the Senate is a major disappointment for both Bloomberg, who saw that out-of-state money isn’t everything, and McAuliffe, who will not be able to establish a “progressive” legacy in Old Dominion much beyond the destruction he’s already done there. But there are also lessons to be learned for Republicans in general and gun owners in particular …

Read the rest of David’s analysis.  Clever and well-researched, concerning who won and who lost, and what role gun rights played.  As a sidebar comment, I know good folks from Virginia, and their only answer to Terry McAuliffe is that it was those folks from Northern Virginia who elected him to begin with.  If Virginia doesn’t watch it, you’re in danger of becoming too bifurcated to continue when the times get rough, as they doubtless will in the future.  How can two men walk together unless they are agreed? (Amos 3:3)

Via Mike Vanderboegh, an interesting history of the M1 Carbine.

“It was an easier gun to carry than the Garand,” Wicklund said. “It was shorter, it was lighter, it was reliable, it was easier to shoot and easier to clean and it had a 15-round magazine. It was easy to tape two magazines together and get 30 rounds to fire. Stopping power was not there with the carbine, but you could fire it more times.”

Well, I’ve got mine.  If you don’t have one, you should get one – soon.  But I will offer the caveat that the reliability is a function of the ammunition you feed it.  Feed it crappy ammunition, you get crappy performance.  Feed it good ammunition, it’ll function as long as you can.  Of course, it’s like that for all guns isn’t it?

Mike also notices this: “Of course this got a top-of-the-page link on Drudge. Now I am the leader of an “anti-Muslim militia” and my rhetoric “overlaps” with “white supremacist groups” that I have fought all my life.”

Hey, it’s from rawstory.com.  What do you expect from a gaggle of gargoyles?  I wouldn’t worry too much about it.  Attention is good, and those who spend ten minutes trying to understand any of this will know the truth much better than explained by Raw Story.

Reince Priebus.  I heard him briefly a few minutes ago talking about what “they” are calling the Cruz Missile.  I didn’t have the debate on, but my wife entered the room and turned it on just in time for me to see Cruz upbraid the folks running the debate.

There is a lot of disapprobation over the internet concerning the CNBC hosts, and properly so.  They are worms, and always have been.  But that misses the bigger picture.  The GOP has an awful lot of candidates, and the field needs to be winnowed.  Cruz seized the opportunity with an outstanding extemporaneous speech.  Furthermore, a good spanking of the MSM is always meaningful for GOP voter morale.

Reince may not have know exactly how it would go down, but he knows that progressives just can’t contain themselves.  They must be who they are (“Can a Leopard change it spots?).  He only knew that at this point in the campaign, a good fight with the MSM to show America how worthless the media is would be in proper order.

CNBC obliged because they couldn’t not oblige.  Oh to be sure, he is publicly indignant (“I cannot believe the candidates were treated that way!”).  Behind closed doors, he is lighting cigars and giving high fives to his staff.  I never knew the names of the CNBC hosts, and if I ever did, I wouldn’t know them now.  They’ll go down in the dust bin of history as irrelevant dimwits.  Reince is the winner.  He played them like a drum, or if you wish, he used them like a cheap hooker and kicked them to the curb.

I had pointed out almost three years ago that Paul Ryan was a gun controller.

“I think we should look into someone who is not legally allowed to buy a gun going to (a show), buying one, and let’s figure that out,” he said. “I think we need to find out how to close these loopholes and do it in such a way that we don’t infringe on Second Amendment rights.”

All controls of these kinds infringe on second amendment rights by their very nature.  Go ahead, I told Ryan.  Look into it.  He’s a collectivist and statist of the first order.  I was surprised that no one has brought any of this up when Ryan’s name was floated as the great savior of the House of Representatives.  But in fact they have brought it up.

Ryan’s 2014 gun control vote came amid the emotional outpouring that followed Elliot Rodger’s May 23, 2014, Santa Barbara attack. Although Rodger passed a background check, registered his guns with the state–as is required in California–and only used ammunition magazines of 10 round or less, Ryan voted for Representative Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA)’s (D-CA-5th) amendment providing $20 million to expand the amount of information states are putting in the National Instant Criminal Background System (NICS) database. Thompson’s House webpage showed that the amendment was supported by Gabby Giffords’ gun control control PAC Americans for Responsible Solutions, as well as “Everytown for Gun Safety, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Sandy Hook Promise, Third Way, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence… [and] States United to Prevent Gun Violence,” among others.

In addition to this, there was an example of Ryan showing an openness to more gun control in the wake of the heinous attack on Sandy Hook Elementary. Just over a month after Adam Lanza stole guns then used them to attack innocents in the gun free zone at Sandy Hook, Ryan told Meet the Press’s David Gregory that Congress needed to look at background checks and “[make] sure there aren’t big loopholes where a person can illegally buy a firearm.”

His running partner, Mitt Romney, was also a complete sellout, but this has an extra twist in it.

Conservative radio show host Rush Limbaugh revealed on his Monday program he had “been sitting on a story for almost a week” to see if members of the media would cover it.

“I wanted to see if this got any play anywhere,” Limbaugh said on his program, according to a transcript posted to his official website.

The story was posted to a conservative news website last week and detailed an interview Mitt Romney recently did for David Axelrod’s podcast. In the interview, the former Massachusetts governor suggested some of today’s divide in politics was because of the rise of online conservative and liberal media outlets.

“It was out there for everybody to see,” Limbaugh said of the story. “It was out there for everybody to react to. And honestly, folks, I didn’t see anything on it ’til yesterday. I’ve been holding this story.”

He added, “Mitt Romney is on record in the David Axelrod podcast as lamenting and complaining about the fact that there is now a conservative media, both on talk radio, in print, in broadcast, and on the World Wide Web. Romney told Axelrod that the demise of legacy media had empowered conservative insurgents like this show and others, which has prevented collaboration in Washington.”

Prevented collaboration in Washington.  Except he has no idea how serious this is, and neither does the GOP establishment.

I have no feeling for the electorate anymore. It is not responding the way it used to. Their priorities are so different that if I tried to analyze it I’d be making it up – John Sununu.

Here’s the deal fellows.  Trump’s popularity will fade when voters realize his sensibilities are anti-conservative.  Carson’s support will fade if and when voters realize he is a pro-immigration freak.  The GOP is in shambles, but the voters will not put forth an establishment candidate, one wholly-owned by the chamber of commerce, who supports immigration – legal or illegal – so that crony corporatism can benefit from low wages that can be paid to Hispanic workers because America has SNAP, welfare and free medical care for the poor, all on the taxpayer dime as corporate welfare.  Middle America won’t fund expensive cars, houses on the lake and the college educations for the children of the members of the boards of directors and corporate executives any more.

Animal Farm is alive and well, and we don’t care if our hard work is helping the poor or the rich.  Boxer won’t work harder.  Boxer will only work for his family – his children, and his children’s children.  As for me, I don’t care if the GOP ever fields another candidate.  It can cease to exist as far as I’m concerned.  There comes a time when it all has to end, when the reaper comes calling, when we’ve sowed the seeds of our own demise and it’s grown into a great, invasive pestilence.

If the GOP puts up another milquetoast candidate who thinks conservative insurgent media is a problem, universal background checks are a good idea, and it’s all going to be okay if we just get the illegals to be legal so we “know who’s here,” I’ll walk my dog, grill out and ignore the election returns.  But I won’t vote any more.  Ever.  I have long harbored doubts that America can stay together as it is.  It’s too diverse, too different, too ideologically divided, and too geographically far-flung.  It seems to me more likely that it will split into three or four countries anyway, so let it be now.

Burn it all down, burn it to the ground.  Bring on dystopia.  Bring the revolution.  The long delay is beginning to bore me.

David Codrea:

Are You Sleeping, Bourgeoisie (Traditional American song, sung in rounds to the tune of “Frere Jacques”). Are you sleeping, Are you sleeping, Bourgeoisie, Bourgeoisie, And when the revolution comes, We’ll kill you all with knives and guns, Bourgeoisie, Bourgeoisie …

I think he doesn’t understand what that word means – i.e., revolution.  He uses it, but I think he is seriously out of touch with reality.  You bring it bad boy.  Let’s see how long your “revolution” lasts.

Here is a Boston jerk.  And I didn’t say thanks to you for anything, especially the idea that your boot-licking attitude would have served you well during the revolution.  You haven’t earned the right to clean the toilets of the men who led the separation from King George, much less to take credit for their actions.  Jerk.  I’ll never go within two hundred miles of Boston.  As far as I’m concerned, they live in a different country than me.

Topo maps for free.  This could come in very handy.

Austrian town drowns in migrant trash and feces.  But they must endure it for the children.  Er … there are no children.  They must endure it because of … something.

Muslim migrants in Germany take selfies with stolen goods.  This is coming to our shores.  You understand that, right?

Finally, there is this.  But ask you self honestly, is this any worse than the MS13 gang members El Salvador is shipping North across our border?  Pay close attention to the English subtitles.

David Codrea:

“Inspired by our dialogue with Pope Francis, let all Americans engage in a politics that forges cooperation and sees the passage of just legislation that may bring us closer to grace” … Attaining “grace” is not within its scope, and thus remains outside the realm of delegated powers.

Many a problem in our history if we had simply followed the precept that the church is responsible for the administration of grace, the state for justice.  The one institution should not infringe on the purview of the other.

Smokey is dead, and he didn’t have to be.

Finally, you’re not under the impression that the Syrian and other Muslim immigrants respect you or intend to be peaceable, are you?

David Codrea:

If I have occasion to speak to the media, as I do on a regular basis with talk radio and other venues, I do so as an individual, not as an Oath Keepers spokesman.  To present myself in any other way would be inappropriate unless the board specifically asked me to field a statement, and unless that statement adhered to deliberated and approved positions.

There’s no shortage of people who would love to discredit Oath Keepers, because the group presents obstacles to their agenda of accumulating power at the expense of rights. We need to keep that in mind when interacting with the media and the public, and in how we conduct ourselves, especially while attending Oath Keepers functions or wearing articles of clothing with the Oath Keepers insignia. And we need to be careful to make it clear when we’re speaking on behalf of the organization, such as while participating in directed operations and outreach efforts, and when we’re speaking solely for ourselves.

It’s just this simple: You don’t commit someone else to your priorities without their OK.

Well, yes, but this is a sticky wicket indeed.  How does a large organization with loosely coupled rules and no means to enforce those rules, ensure discipline among the ranks?  For Oathkeepers, it just might be that they need to focus more on dissemination of literature, persuasion on the core essentials, and education.  Otherwise, they are going to face the need to enforce discipline within the ranks.  There is no means that I can see to make that happen.

Keep praying for Mike Vanderboegh.

Via Uncle, this from Glenn Reynolds: “The high school junior was hailed as a hero for intervening after he saw the ‘visually impaired’ student being repeatedly hit round the head during lunch break at Huntington Beach High School, California on Wednesday. Footage, filmed by a bystander, shows the teen knocking the bully to the ground with a single punch to stop the attack. . . .No arrest is expected for the intervening teen who has been praised by his peers and online for standing up for his classmate. But his school took a different approach and are believed to have kicked the have-a-go-hero off the football team after he breached their ‘zero-tolerance’ policy on violence.”

So now, do you remember when I said this to a young man?

I know very little about you, but I assume (you can correct me if I’m wrong) that you do not have children of advanced school age (and I have no idea whether you are married). If your children one day attend public schools (I home schooled mine for the last several years except for one), they will find this notion in spades in the school system. Let me tell you how it plays out.

The kids that know they aren’t attending college know the kids who intend to attend college. The school system has given up on the idea of finding facts, finding fault and finding intent. Hence, the kids who have no intention of attending college abuse the ones who intend to attend college. It happens this way, and hundreds of others.

Let’s say that the school lunch line of a five minute wait. The bad kids will break in line and even punch the good kids. The good kids take it, run away, and avoid conflict at all costs. They do this because they know that the principal will make no attempt whatsoever to find facts or intent if a fight breaks out. Fights means that a kid is defending himself, or even that he isn’t and sits in a corner getting the hell kicked out of him. When it’s finally broken up, both kids get suspended, it goes on record, and colleges don’t accept kids with records. End of story. The competition is too high to accept kids with records, regardless of the fact that it’s disputed. All such records are disputed by every student.

My boys could have beat the hell out of anyone who they fought, but one of them needed to attend a scholarly college to do what he does, and for him we simply planned classes to avoid the bad kids, sent him with his lunch, and prayed that he got out without being in a … ahem … “fight.” Daniel, my Marine, just beat the hell out of anyone who accosted him. It cannot be that way for everyone. The ones who need to go to college behave differently. Daniel is in college now because of the Marines.

You see, smarts comes from books. Wisdom comes from age and experience. I have that. Been there, done that, got the tee shirt. And if you have children of advanced age one day, they will get the hell beaten out of them in school, or they will defend themselves and not go to college, or you will home school them. Welcome to fact-less, intent-less jurisprudence and lack of lawsuits against schools.

Oh … listen to the older men among you, youngsters.  As the Scriptures say, ” … rise up before the hoary head” (Lev 19:32).

John Jay has created a functioning plywood gun.  No, seriously.

David Codrea:

Agreeing with federal prosecutors, U.S. District Court Judge David Bury ruled on Friday that testimony regarding guns tied to Operation Fast and Furious “gunwalking” will be barred from the murder trial of the two men accused of killing Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Per KVOA News 4 Tucson, the jury “will not hear any details of how two guns found at the murder scene were part of a U.S. government-sanctioned weapon program.”

Mike Vanderboegh in Trump being a Charlatan (or Mike citing Jack Kelly).  Well of course he is.  He’s also an egomaniac, believer in a single payer health system, and has promised to bring all the Mexicans back across the border “legally” just as soon as they go home (which of course means that you would take care of those little Hispanic babies until they are 85 years old, just legally rather than illegally).  And he has a squirrel on his head.

Remington’s problems aren’t over yet.  I told you so.  I told you the better thing to do would have been to acknowledge the problems and recalled the Walker Fire Control System.  But then the lawyers and corporate executives got involved.

He left camp without survival gear or the proper clothing.  As we’ve discussed many times before, don’t be that guy.

Sebastian:

Stop making strife within the party. I agree with Ace that this bickering between the coalition partners isn’t accomplishing anything … The term “States (sic) Rights” needs to be banished from the Republican vocabulary.

Well, there you go.  A loser’s strategy if I ever saw one.  The last milquetoast candidate did all of that and lost.  But so what?  He wouldn’t have changed anything anyway.

Don’t bicker, says Sebastian.  Banish the term state’s rights.  Perhaps he thinks we can vote our way out of the mess we’re in.  And the best way to do that is to elect politicians who will slow the train as it heads over the cliff, rather than turning or stopping the train altogether.

None of this matters anyway, since the GOP has already banished the term state’s rights from its vocabulary.  They are all statists, which is why they lost the last election.  If you want to lose the patriot vote, saying out loud that you’re banishing the term state’s rights is the surest way to ignominious defeat since no one will show up at the polls.  But at least it would be honest.

And we learn again how differently Sebastian and I think about things, how different our world views are.

Via WRSA, Robert Gore posts this piece.  Robert’s place should be a regular stop through your daily or weekly reads, and I normally like the stuff that Gore writes, but I have to disagree on this, and profoundly so.  The problem is more than just missing the point.  Missing the point just happens to be missing a very important point, one that needs to be made.

The Greeks blame not just the banker cartel, but the Jew banker cartel for their state of affairs.  And to be fair, the global banker cartel is responsible for much of the financial woes we face now, even if indirectly.  But that’s the important point to be made.

Goldman-Sachs (as a mere example) appears to be just as influenced by the United Methodist Church as it is Jews, but let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that Jews run the global banks.  Without the direct involvement, assistance, and even incestuous relationship with the politicians, the banks couldn’t do a thing to harm the financial system.

Banks cannot make fractional reserve banking legal – only politicians do that.  Banks cannot create debt-based economies – only politicians can do that.  Banks cannot create money-printing – only politicians can do that.  The entire crumbling edifice upon which Keynesian economics is built requires the willing participation of politicians who couple with bankers to fleece the people.

These politicians are elected by the people.  This is so in America, which is behind Greece in rottenness of the system, but perhaps not by much.  This is true in Greece as well.  For years now, the Greek voters have elected communists to office, these communists being in bed with the money people like they always are.

People get the government they deserve and demand.  While Gore seems to make much of the supposed revolution against the banker cartel in Greece, even sounding like some sort of purist ideological revolution similar to the founding of America, I know a Greek who is even now visiting Greece, and has known his community of people for a very long time.

His take on Greece is that they are suffering now because they “sit on their asses and do nothing all day.”  True enough, even with people working hard all day, a banker cartel can destroy the economic system of a country.  But his point is that the people elected communists to office because they want a state-run system.  They got what they asked for.  It’s unimpressive to argue now that the poor Greeks are victims of either the government or the bankers.  The Greeks are victims of the choices they made.

So too will Americans be victims not of the government, nor of the bankers, but of the choices the voters made in the voting booth.  And those raging against the machine will suffer in the wake of judgment on the balance of society.  God’s judgment is sometimes corporate and collective.  The bankers and government are like the Babylonians.  God doesn’t approve, but He uses them to create the consequences that teach us all.  In the end, they will suffer punishment.

None of this is to say that the bankers aren’t thieves.  Of course they are, just like the government.  Likewise, the voters are thieves.  Anyone who votes to get something for nothing is a thief.  And no one should be surprised that when two groups of thieves get together, someone wins and someone loses.  The collective moral weakness begets the collective sin, and both groups of thieves will suffer in the postmortem.

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”  — Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Scalia dissented from the recent SCOTUS Obamacare ruling.

“The Court holds that when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act says ‘Exchange established by the State’ it means ‘Exchange established by the State or the Federal Government.’ That is of course quite absurd, and the Court’s 21 pages of explanation make it no less so,” Scalia wrote.

Scalia added, “Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is ‘established by the State.’ It is hard to come up with a clearer way to limit tax credits to state Exchanges than to use the words ‘established by the State.’ And it is hard to come up with a reason to include the words ‘by the State’ other than the purpose of limiting credits to state Exchanges.”

Roberts also dissented, but of course words weren’t so important to him when he created rights out of whole cloth and the supreme court forced every state to accept same-sex marriage.  He wants to pick and choose when words mean something, and get his self-righteousness on when he opposes the policy.

As I had stated to someone else this weekend, you have the political right to advocate what you want, but God will judge us – individually and collectively – for our choices.  But constitutionally, the court has absolutely no business bossing the states around.

This ruling – and many more like it – marks the end of the state.  The grand experiment in states as the laboratories of democracy is finished.  It failed, and not because it couldn’t have worked.  Evil men vandalized the experiment.  If Roberts has his problems, Scalia does too.  In Heller, he stated:

Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited.  It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of fire arms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.  Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.

“Shall not be infringed” means as little to Scalia as ‘Exchange established by the State’ means to Roberts and the other progressive justices on the supreme court.  Scalia is clever, witty, smart, fun to read and biting in his dissents – and just as inconsistent as the rest of them.  Scalia gets a taste of his own medicine in the Obamacare and same-sex marriage ruling.

As I listened to the quiet conversation and whispers this weekend as I went about my business, I think Mike Vanderboegh’s words will turn out to be prescient.

But even as staunch an anti-communist as I am now — as hard-nosed a supporter of the Founders’ Republic and the Constitution as I have become — I can see that the regime has dealt itself a crippling blow to its own legitimacy. I further note with somber acknowledgement that as bad as this confluence of events is for the country as a whole that it makes our job easier for it confirms everything we have been saying about the regime of both corrupt political parties being destructive of liberty and the rule of law. This will swell our ranks with people who are finally convinced that for the purposes of protecting our liberties, the present system has broken down completely and that the only thing we can count on from this point on is ourselves, alone. And our rifles. I will not celebrate this as a Marxist would but I will give a most sincere, albeit grim, “thank you” to the Supreme Court and the two predatory gangs of a tyrannical regime.

I would add that we can always count on God to honor His promises.  God will not be mocked (Galatians 6:7).  His words never change, and will always mean what they have always meant.