Amidst all the hysterical screaming of leftist politicians, pundits, and the mind controlling socialist media in the wake of the Tucson lunacy of Jared Loughner, it is easy to lose sight of the “elephant in the room”.
The Second Amendment has nothing to do with “hunters’ rights”. It is not even to protect us from burglars, rapists, muggers, or even lunatics like Jared Loughner. These uses of a firearm for food or self defense are actually “spin offs” of the original intent of 2A.
An armed citizenry is a polite citizenry, this is true. However, an armed citizenry is the ONLY way to insure, to guarantee, that the potentially megalomaniacal egos of politicians, authoritarian police hierarchs (like Sheriff “Dimwit” Dupnik of AZ) and the military leadership are kept under a quiet, and yet very emphatic, restraint.
An armed citizenry whispers into the ears of every politician, soldier, and cop: “Steady there. Think again. Remember, if you get too far out of line, and come to enslave us, ‘We the People’ have retained the power to kill you."
After all, these tax consumers all blithely refer to themselves as “public servants” don’t they? Then that makes “We the People” the masters, doesn’t it?
Don’t misread my words. All those hysterically addled leftist mind manipulators out there secretly know this is true. They hate it. But they know it is true, even through the fog of their gun phobic mental illness. Read "Raging Against Self Defense".
If someone wants to accuse me of “hate speech” they’d better first begin by indicting, in absentia, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and virtually the entire cast of our Founders. I’m just an ordinary American who cherishes the liberty they created for me and my loved ones to enjoy. I, and millions of others, take this stuff very, very seriously.
A friend of mine once said it rather succinctly, right to the face of a 2A sympathetic police officer, a righteous and loyal American cop: “Obey the Constitution, and we won’t shoot you.”
The police officer was stunned…at first. And then he smiled and offered his hand to my friend. As these two patriotic
Americans (my friend was a Marine Corp veteran) shook hands, the police officer said: “You got a deal.”
Want to learn more about these outstanding American police officers and soldiers? Go to the “Oathkeepers” website.
In closing: Friends, if you don’t own a gun, get one immediately (with at least 100 rounds of ammunition). Learn to use it well. And then pray that you never have to use it for the true reason our American Founders intended.
And one final suggestion: The more they tell us to “turn down the rhetoric”, the louder we must become. History teaches that this approach, and nothing else, will preserve our freedom. We cannot compromise with evil.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
The Elephant in The Room: An Armed Citizenry vs. A Tyrannical Government
This is by Kirby Ferris @ Jews For The Preservation Of Firearms Ownership.
Call it the Elephant or the 800lb. Gorilla in the room.
Sadly this is a possibility with the Obama administration.
To borrow a quote from Sean Connery in The Untouchables.
You see what I'm saying is,what are you prepared to do?
The possibility scares me,but I will do what I need to survive.
“What if the American government ever “goes bad” and becomes a police state? That tyrannical government, IF it could enlist the willing support of every American soldier and every American cop (which is thankfully doubtful), could field perhaps a total of 1.5 million armed personnel.
These duped soldiers and cops would have to go to their jobs each day facing a bare minimum of 10 MILLION very, very motivated and angry armed American citizens. The other 55 million would sit on the fence waiting, with their guns, to see which way the tide was flowing.
Additionally, you must logically ask WHY the present government is so obsessively committed to “gun control”. If our government has become so overpowering, so omnipotent, and it’s a waste of our time to even imagine resisting tyranny, then why do “They” even worry about the citizens being armed?
And why did the political regimes that committed genocide though the history of the 20th Century, first REGISTER and then CONFISCATE firearms before marching unarmed masses off to killing fields?
If an armed government is so omnipotent, why have so many armed governments gone to the effort and expense of gun confiscation?
The Turks did it to the Armenians. Lenin did it to Russians. Hitler did it to many Germans and all Jews. Stalin gave Russians a horrific double dose. And Mao, the world record holding mass murderer, did it to Red China.”
JPFO Founder Aaron Zelman, in an “Open Letter to Michael Savage” in 2009
Additionally, you must logically ask WHY the present government is so obsessively committed to “gun control”. If our government has become so overpowering, so omnipotent, and it’s a waste of our time to even imagine resisting tyranny, then why do “They” even worry about the citizens being armed?
And why did the political regimes that committed genocide though the history of the 20th Century, first REGISTER and then CONFISCATE firearms before marching unarmed masses off to killing fields?
If an armed government is so omnipotent, why have so many armed governments gone to the effort and expense of gun confiscation?
The Turks did it to the Armenians. Lenin did it to Russians. Hitler did it to many Germans and all Jews. Stalin gave Russians a horrific double dose. And Mao, the world record holding mass murderer, did it to Red China.”
JPFO Founder Aaron Zelman, in an “Open Letter to Michael Savage” in 2009
Friday, January 28, 2011
"What if"
I was at work and during break we got to discussing a "what if?" Suppose a massive gun control ban/confiscation was to happen due to some tragedy like a massive school shooting or something along that line and the president and congress push through a law that all guns have to be turned in and the police with military back up would search houses for illegal firearms. Several of my friends were of the mind that it would cause upheaval and chaos. I was of the mind that the vast majority of the military and police would refuse to obey such an order because as I remember when I was sworn in long ago to uphold and defend the constitution of the United States that such an order would constitute an illegal order and we would be honor bound to refuse such an order.
I remember from my history that after the end of WWII that the allied powers brought members of the nazi government to trial in Nuremburg trials. the frequent defence of the members was " Dienst ist Dienst" or it was my job. Their general staff and government was based on the prussian model of unquestioned obedience. We as a military followed a different belief that we don't obey an illegal order, our code of honor and the UCMJ reflects that.
I am of the belief that the vast majority of the military and police would refuse such an order due to the oath we took and the belief in our system. the only way for this to be circumvented was for the state to form an independent paramilitary force like the Noriega's paramilitary Dignity Battalions or something like that where the force swears loyalty to a person rather than to a system of government.
The Posse Comitatus Act is a United States federal law (18 U.S.C. § 1385) passed on June 18, 1878, after the end of Reconstruction, with the intention (in concert with the Insurrection Act of 1807) of substantially limiting the powers of the federal government to use the military for law enforcement. The Act prohibits most members of the federal uniformed services (today the Marine Corps, Army, Navy, Air Force, and State National Guard forces when such are called into federal service) from exercising nominally state law enforcement, police, or peace officer powers that maintain "law and order" on non-federal property (states and their counties and municipal divisions) within the United States.
The statute generally prohibits federal military personnel and units of the National Guard under federal authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within the United States, except where expressly authorized by the Constitution or Congress. The Coast Guard is exempt from the Act.(compliments of Wiki)
The above named law would prevent the U.S. Military from getting involved with law enforcement. the government would have to remove this law to get the military or a paramilitary group involved.
If there was an attempt to do a massive seizure it would cause large amounts of casualties because the former law-abiding citizens would fight and the newly formed security forces would have spilled American blood. The actions would inflame the citizenry unless they have been already cowed or bribed into silence. I remember Ronald Reagan commenting during a speech that freedom is but 1 generation from extinction.
I am optimistic that we as a society will never get to such a point where an event like this would happen.
An educated populace is the best defence against tyranny
I remember from my history that after the end of WWII that the allied powers brought members of the nazi government to trial in Nuremburg trials. the frequent defence of the members was " Dienst ist Dienst" or it was my job. Their general staff and government was based on the prussian model of unquestioned obedience. We as a military followed a different belief that we don't obey an illegal order, our code of honor and the UCMJ reflects that.
I am of the belief that the vast majority of the military and police would refuse such an order due to the oath we took and the belief in our system. the only way for this to be circumvented was for the state to form an independent paramilitary force like the Noriega's paramilitary Dignity Battalions or something like that where the force swears loyalty to a person rather than to a system of government.
The Posse Comitatus Act is a United States federal law (18 U.S.C. § 1385) passed on June 18, 1878, after the end of Reconstruction, with the intention (in concert with the Insurrection Act of 1807) of substantially limiting the powers of the federal government to use the military for law enforcement. The Act prohibits most members of the federal uniformed services (today the Marine Corps, Army, Navy, Air Force, and State National Guard forces when such are called into federal service) from exercising nominally state law enforcement, police, or peace officer powers that maintain "law and order" on non-federal property (states and their counties and municipal divisions) within the United States.
The statute generally prohibits federal military personnel and units of the National Guard under federal authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within the United States, except where expressly authorized by the Constitution or Congress. The Coast Guard is exempt from the Act.(compliments of Wiki)
The above named law would prevent the U.S. Military from getting involved with law enforcement. the government would have to remove this law to get the military or a paramilitary group involved.
If there was an attempt to do a massive seizure it would cause large amounts of casualties because the former law-abiding citizens would fight and the newly formed security forces would have spilled American blood. The actions would inflame the citizenry unless they have been already cowed or bribed into silence. I remember Ronald Reagan commenting during a speech that freedom is but 1 generation from extinction.
I am optimistic that we as a society will never get to such a point where an event like this would happen.
An educated populace is the best defence against tyranny
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Something to think about....
From a circulated e-mail—no author listed. Think of it this way: A clunker that travels 12,000 miles a year at 15 mpg uses 800 gallons of gas a year. A vehicle that travels 12,000 miles a year at 25 mpg uses 480 gallons a year. So, the average Cash for Clunkers transaction will reduce US gasoline consumption by 320 gallons per year. They claim 700,000 vehicles so that's 224 million gallons saved per year. That equates to a bit over 5 million barrels of oil. 5 million barrels is about 5 hours' worth of US consumption. More importantly, 5 million barrels of oil at $70 per barrel costs about $350 million dollars So, the government paid $3 billion of our tax dollars to save $350 million. We spent $8.57 for every dollar we saved. I'm pretty sure they will do a great job with our health care, though.
An educated citizenry is the best protection against government tyranny
An educated citizenry is the best protection against government tyranny
Monday, January 24, 2011
Poisoned soul.....
This is from "American Mercenary" I read the post and and it resonated with me.
The idea of a "poisoned soul" is pretty universal. In stories it can be used as a plot device for a saga of redemption, or it can be used to tell the tale of the fall of Lucifer. The very concept of a poisoned soul, has been on my mind.
But the details of what corrupts has been debated by philosophers through history. "As you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares into you." Nietzsche's take on the subject is probably the most popular. In literature we have Smeagol turning into Gullem. Perhaps Tolkein took Gullem from "Ghollem", a soulless monster. But whatever source you choose, there exists this idea that souls start in a state of innocence or purity and become poisoned or lost through a persons actions.
At the heart of this is "violent and predatory" verses "violent and protective". But there are those who believe that it isn't the predatory or protective part that poisons the soul, that it is the violent part.
The impact of your fist on someone also hurts your fist, according to a proverb I read somewhere.
The idea that "spiritual wounds" are caused by violence has taken ground in our culture. Some have gone so far as "spiritual wounds causes a poisoned soul". Examples of the "deranged veteran" stories such as "Taxi Driver", "Rambo", or "Apocalypse Now" show how some are willing to create a false link between violence and a damaged soul.
How did we as a culture go from "The Big Red One" to "Taxi Driver"? From the Greatest Generation celebrating the victory of freedom over oppression in WWII to a public with no coherent concept of sacrifice for the cause of freedom?
Because looking back through the mirror of history, it is easy to see who poisoned their souls. Not with violence, but with drugs, free love, and undisciplined thoughts. The men and women who went to Vietnam did come back changed, and some did come back with PTSD, but neither is a symptom of a corrupt soul. However back home others were corrupting themselves as fast as they could. Sex is not love, drugs do not expand your consciousness, and having a mind open to all ideas makes it a breeding ground for nonsense.
So thinking about what poisons a soul, I've come up with the following.
It is not violence that corrupts. It is hate.
It is not righteous anger that corrupts. It is selfish anger and frustration.
It is not desiring a better job or position that corrupts. It is refusal to humble yourself to the job you have.
Arrogance corrupts. Power corrupts.
Someone who believes that they should be given power over other people has a poisoned soul. Poisoned with the seductive but fatally flawed belief that one person can make correct decisions for others. Poisoned with the arrogance to believe that by simple virtue of who they are that they should be obeyed.
I am very thankful that I work in a job where there is never absolute power. That no matter how much rank someone wears our actions are accountable to the citizens of the U.S. Even beyond any individual faith and accountability to God, we are always under the microscope.
This breeds a lot of self reflection. This is not always productive, but it is generally helpful in avoiding actions that would poison your soul. The attitude of a servant has been most helpful for me. By focusing on the welfare of my men I focus instead on their loved ones. If you love your men you train hard as a unit so that everyone can come home. If you love your men you will work hard to ensure they never lack for intelligence or supplies. Working to bring those men home is a tough job, and I am grateful for the opportunity.
The idea of a "poisoned soul" is pretty universal. In stories it can be used as a plot device for a saga of redemption, or it can be used to tell the tale of the fall of Lucifer. The very concept of a poisoned soul, has been on my mind.
But the details of what corrupts has been debated by philosophers through history. "As you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares into you." Nietzsche's take on the subject is probably the most popular. In literature we have Smeagol turning into Gullem. Perhaps Tolkein took Gullem from "Ghollem", a soulless monster. But whatever source you choose, there exists this idea that souls start in a state of innocence or purity and become poisoned or lost through a persons actions.
At the heart of this is "violent and predatory" verses "violent and protective". But there are those who believe that it isn't the predatory or protective part that poisons the soul, that it is the violent part.
The impact of your fist on someone also hurts your fist, according to a proverb I read somewhere.
The idea that "spiritual wounds" are caused by violence has taken ground in our culture. Some have gone so far as "spiritual wounds causes a poisoned soul". Examples of the "deranged veteran" stories such as "Taxi Driver", "Rambo", or "Apocalypse Now" show how some are willing to create a false link between violence and a damaged soul.
How did we as a culture go from "The Big Red One" to "Taxi Driver"? From the Greatest Generation celebrating the victory of freedom over oppression in WWII to a public with no coherent concept of sacrifice for the cause of freedom?
Because looking back through the mirror of history, it is easy to see who poisoned their souls. Not with violence, but with drugs, free love, and undisciplined thoughts. The men and women who went to Vietnam did come back changed, and some did come back with PTSD, but neither is a symptom of a corrupt soul. However back home others were corrupting themselves as fast as they could. Sex is not love, drugs do not expand your consciousness, and having a mind open to all ideas makes it a breeding ground for nonsense.
So thinking about what poisons a soul, I've come up with the following.
It is not violence that corrupts. It is hate.
It is not righteous anger that corrupts. It is selfish anger and frustration.
It is not desiring a better job or position that corrupts. It is refusal to humble yourself to the job you have.
Arrogance corrupts. Power corrupts.
Someone who believes that they should be given power over other people has a poisoned soul. Poisoned with the seductive but fatally flawed belief that one person can make correct decisions for others. Poisoned with the arrogance to believe that by simple virtue of who they are that they should be obeyed.
I am very thankful that I work in a job where there is never absolute power. That no matter how much rank someone wears our actions are accountable to the citizens of the U.S. Even beyond any individual faith and accountability to God, we are always under the microscope.
This breeds a lot of self reflection. This is not always productive, but it is generally helpful in avoiding actions that would poison your soul. The attitude of a servant has been most helpful for me. By focusing on the welfare of my men I focus instead on their loved ones. If you love your men you train hard as a unit so that everyone can come home. If you love your men you will work hard to ensure they never lack for intelligence or supplies. Working to bring those men home is a tough job, and I am grateful for the opportunity.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Are we serious about survival??!
Now read this piece by Stella Paul from yesterday's American Thinker:
America didn't elect a president; we chose a rapper-in-chief. Obama gets all the fun of truly livin' large: transforming the White House into a party palace straight out of "MTV Cribs" and zooming around on Air Force One like a hotshot celebrity on his private jet. All he has to do is smile at his screaming groupies, recite some catchy twaddle, and jet off to his latest vacation, serene with the knowledge that whatever misery and carnage may unfold below, his hands are clean.
Obama is America's first post-responsibility president, and the degrading spectacle of the Tucson aftermath proves it. A quick reminder to Krauthammer, Noonan, et al., who have resumed tossing love notes at their favorite star: Obama is so indifferent to the safety of Arizonans that he actually sued the state for trying to protect them.
What if the Tucson killer had been an illegal alien? What if "Javier Lopez" had shot up the crowd, after sneaking past the billion-dollar "virtual fence" that Obama just quietly canceled? What if he had murdered a border patrolman along the way, like Federal Agent Brian Terry, who was shot in the back with an AK-47 in December? Would Obama have borne any responsibility for that?
After all, a full-scale gang war is raging directly south of our border, and Obama's only response has been to sue Arizona for a law, passed by 70% of its voters, that allows police to ask crime suspects about their citizenship. Obama is so proud of this dangerous idiocy that he bragged about it to the tyrants of China and the United Nations. And his minions in Congress shamelessly leaped to their feet and cheered Mexico's president when he had the brass to excoriate Arizona for "racial profiling."
So would Obama be blamed for Javier Lopez's crime spree? Of course not! The story would have been buried faster than the victims by an obediently adoring press. Various MSNBC nutters would have screeched about Arizona's climate of hate, but a few words sent from the presidential golf links would have shut them up quick. If it doesn't help the rapper-in-chief, it doesn't exist. Has anybody said a word about the murder of Brian Terry?
OK, let's play a slightly different game. What if "Abdul el-Muhamed" had snuck across the border to unleash the Tucson carnage? Not such an unlikely scenario: Rep. Sue Myrick recently warned that Hezb'allah terrorists are invading from Mexico and that Obama's Homeland Security Department is refusing to answer her letters on the issue.
Myrick's letter outlined the growing collaboration between Mexican drug cartels and Iranian-backed Hezb'allah members, who are thought to be learning Spanish in Venezuela before getting false papers to enter the U.S. as Mexicans. One chilling piece of evidence: gang members in America's southwest prisons are increasingly sporting tattoos in Farsi.
So would Obama bear any blame if a Hezb'allah terrorist went on a bloody rampage in Tucson? Uh, no. This is Obama we're talking about. From his memorable performance after the Fort Hood murders, we can formulate his response. Grumpily, he'd interrupt his latest vacation to shamble before the cameras in T-shirt and flip-flops. After a casual "shout-out" to some union cronies, he'd launch into his best-selling, all-time classic rap: I'm Here to Save You from Your Never-Ending Sin of Islamophobia. Worship Me For Healing You, O America. Through Me, You Shall Attain Forgiveness. The media would sob with admiration, as Chris Matthews suffered a near-fatal electrocution by leg-tingle.
And now we come to the actual tragic events, in which a pot-smoking schizophrenic erupted in an orgy of insane violence. Obama's operatives swiftly seized the chance to permanently taint Obama's most formidable rival, Sarah Palin. After four days of increasingly apocalyptic accusations, it was time for the rapper-in-chief to work his wordy magic.
The concert hall promoters had done their pre-production work well. Souvenir T-shirts bedecked the chairs, imprinted with the song title of one of Obama's lesser-known numbers from his blockbuster year of 2008. The screaming fans were all in place. At last, He appeared and performed a fresh new rap, a sparkling stew of platitudinous poppycock about not disappointing the dreams of a child. His fans shrieked and applauded, their ebullience trampling the dignity of the mourners among them.
Has Obama taken one single action to make the people of Arizona safer? Was the border more protected? Has the mental health apparatus of Arizona been appraised and improved? Has the sheriff been chastised for "acting stupidly" and possibly compromising the integrity of the investigation? Has anything "presidential" actually been done?
No. But what does it matter? As Obama flew away, a grateful punditry wept with joy that they had lived to behold such a day, when the great rapper-in-chief had descended among us and softly blessed us with his font of sacred nonsense.
It's enough to make you think that God has withdrawn his blessing from the Republic.Think back to the 2008 presidential election. Conservatives became so excited by the presence of Sarah Palin on the ticket that we tend to forget exactly what America did have to choose from? A street punk from the most corrupt city in the nation who had absolutely no experience or record of achievement to recommend him for the office and an old man with serious anger management issues who has spent his entire political life running to the "other side of the isle" to help the left move its agenda forward for no other purpose than to have entities like the New York Times say flattering things about him.
This was not the choice that was given to America on Election Day it is the choice that America made for itself. Obama and McCain were the men who rose to the top after a long and contentious primary process during which every registered Republican and Democrat had the opportunity to make his or her choice known.
And what did we get? A choice between disaster and calamity.
The American Republic is in serious danger of losing its economic prosperity, its liberty and its standing as a world power. In fact it may be too late to salvage any of those things. However if we do have any chance to survive our last chance to change course and restore the nation to what it once was will come in 2012 when we will have a chance to elect a new president and hand control of the Senate to the GOP.
However it is not enough to place Republicans in charge of the White House and the legislature. They must be conservatives as well. This means that organizations like the Tea Party will have to be more active than ever and American voters will have to understand that the leadership of the GOP is, for the most part, not their friend.
We must accept as an unquestionable axiom that any candidate who holds ideas which can save the nation will be regarded as a mortal enemy by the ruling elites of both parties and we will have to nominate these candidates and support them in the face of the bitterest opposition possible.
Only in this way do we have the slightest chance of reversing America’s decline and restoring it to its proper place in the world.
America didn't elect a president; we chose a rapper-in-chief. Obama gets all the fun of truly livin' large: transforming the White House into a party palace straight out of "MTV Cribs" and zooming around on Air Force One like a hotshot celebrity on his private jet. All he has to do is smile at his screaming groupies, recite some catchy twaddle, and jet off to his latest vacation, serene with the knowledge that whatever misery and carnage may unfold below, his hands are clean.
Obama is America's first post-responsibility president, and the degrading spectacle of the Tucson aftermath proves it. A quick reminder to Krauthammer, Noonan, et al., who have resumed tossing love notes at their favorite star: Obama is so indifferent to the safety of Arizonans that he actually sued the state for trying to protect them.
What if the Tucson killer had been an illegal alien? What if "Javier Lopez" had shot up the crowd, after sneaking past the billion-dollar "virtual fence" that Obama just quietly canceled? What if he had murdered a border patrolman along the way, like Federal Agent Brian Terry, who was shot in the back with an AK-47 in December? Would Obama have borne any responsibility for that?
After all, a full-scale gang war is raging directly south of our border, and Obama's only response has been to sue Arizona for a law, passed by 70% of its voters, that allows police to ask crime suspects about their citizenship. Obama is so proud of this dangerous idiocy that he bragged about it to the tyrants of China and the United Nations. And his minions in Congress shamelessly leaped to their feet and cheered Mexico's president when he had the brass to excoriate Arizona for "racial profiling."
So would Obama be blamed for Javier Lopez's crime spree? Of course not! The story would have been buried faster than the victims by an obediently adoring press. Various MSNBC nutters would have screeched about Arizona's climate of hate, but a few words sent from the presidential golf links would have shut them up quick. If it doesn't help the rapper-in-chief, it doesn't exist. Has anybody said a word about the murder of Brian Terry?
OK, let's play a slightly different game. What if "Abdul el-Muhamed" had snuck across the border to unleash the Tucson carnage? Not such an unlikely scenario: Rep. Sue Myrick recently warned that Hezb'allah terrorists are invading from Mexico and that Obama's Homeland Security Department is refusing to answer her letters on the issue.
Myrick's letter outlined the growing collaboration between Mexican drug cartels and Iranian-backed Hezb'allah members, who are thought to be learning Spanish in Venezuela before getting false papers to enter the U.S. as Mexicans. One chilling piece of evidence: gang members in America's southwest prisons are increasingly sporting tattoos in Farsi.
So would Obama bear any blame if a Hezb'allah terrorist went on a bloody rampage in Tucson? Uh, no. This is Obama we're talking about. From his memorable performance after the Fort Hood murders, we can formulate his response. Grumpily, he'd interrupt his latest vacation to shamble before the cameras in T-shirt and flip-flops. After a casual "shout-out" to some union cronies, he'd launch into his best-selling, all-time classic rap: I'm Here to Save You from Your Never-Ending Sin of Islamophobia. Worship Me For Healing You, O America. Through Me, You Shall Attain Forgiveness. The media would sob with admiration, as Chris Matthews suffered a near-fatal electrocution by leg-tingle.
And now we come to the actual tragic events, in which a pot-smoking schizophrenic erupted in an orgy of insane violence. Obama's operatives swiftly seized the chance to permanently taint Obama's most formidable rival, Sarah Palin. After four days of increasingly apocalyptic accusations, it was time for the rapper-in-chief to work his wordy magic.
The concert hall promoters had done their pre-production work well. Souvenir T-shirts bedecked the chairs, imprinted with the song title of one of Obama's lesser-known numbers from his blockbuster year of 2008. The screaming fans were all in place. At last, He appeared and performed a fresh new rap, a sparkling stew of platitudinous poppycock about not disappointing the dreams of a child. His fans shrieked and applauded, their ebullience trampling the dignity of the mourners among them.
Has Obama taken one single action to make the people of Arizona safer? Was the border more protected? Has the mental health apparatus of Arizona been appraised and improved? Has the sheriff been chastised for "acting stupidly" and possibly compromising the integrity of the investigation? Has anything "presidential" actually been done?
No. But what does it matter? As Obama flew away, a grateful punditry wept with joy that they had lived to behold such a day, when the great rapper-in-chief had descended among us and softly blessed us with his font of sacred nonsense.
The essays by Paul and Steyn fit together like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. At a time when America is facing what is perhaps its greatest hour of peril we have B. Hussein Obama for a leader.
It's enough to make you think that God has withdrawn his blessing from the Republic.
This was not the choice that was given to America on Election Day it is the choice that America made for itself. Obama and McCain were the men who rose to the top after a long and contentious primary process during which every registered Republican and Democrat had the opportunity to make his or her choice known.
And what did we get? A choice between disaster and calamity.
The American Republic is in serious danger of losing its economic prosperity, its liberty and its standing as a world power. In fact it may be too late to salvage any of those things. However if we do have any chance to survive our last chance to change course and restore the nation to what it once was will come in 2012 when we will have a chance to elect a new president and hand control of the Senate to the GOP.
However it is not enough to place Republicans in charge of the White House and the legislature. They must be conservatives as well. This means that organizations like the Tea Party will have to be more active than ever and American voters will have to understand that the leadership of the GOP is, for the most part, not their friend.
We must accept as an unquestionable axiom that any candidate who holds ideas which can save the nation will be regarded as a mortal enemy by the ruling elites of both parties and we will have to nominate these candidates and support them in the face of the bitterest opposition possible.
Only in this way do we have the slightest chance of reversing America’s decline and restoring it to its proper place in the world.
Steyn on the future of English speaking nations....
f I am pessimistic about the future of liberty, it is because I am pessimistic about the strength of the English-speaking nations, which have, in profound ways, surrendered to forces at odds with their inheritance. “Declinism” is in the air, but some of us apocalyptic types are way beyond that. The United States is facing nothing so amiable and genteel as Continental-style “decline,” but something more like sliding off a cliff.
In the days when I used to write for Fleet Street, a lot of readers and several of my editors accused me of being anti-British. I’m not. I’m extremely pro-British and, for that very reason, the present state of the United Kingdom is bound to cause distress. So, before I get to the bad stuff, let me just lay out the good. Insofar as the world functions at all, it’s due to the Britannic inheritance. Three-sevenths of the G7 economies are nations of British descent. Two-fifths of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council are—and, by the way, it should be three-fifths: The rap against the Security Council is that it’s the Second World War victory parade preserved in aspic, but, if it were, Canada would have a greater claim to be there than either France or China. The reason Canada isn’t is because a third Anglosphere nation and a second realm of King George VI would have made too obvious a truth usually left unstated—that the Anglosphere was the all but lone defender of civilization and of liberty. In broader geopolitical terms, the key regional powers in almost every corner of the globe are British-derived—from Australia to South Africa to India—and, even among the lesser players, as a general rule you’re better off for having been exposed to British rule than not: Why is Haiti Haiti and Barbados Barbados?
And of course the pre-eminent power of the age derives its political character from eighteenth-century British subjects who took English ideas a little further than the mother country was willing to go. In his
sequel to Churchill’s great work, The History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Andrew Roberts writes:
Just as we do not today differentiate between the Roman Republic and the imperial period of the Julio-Claudians when we think of the Roman Empire, so in the future no-one will bother to make a distinction between the British Empire–led and the American Republic–led periods of English-speaking dominance between the late-eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries. It will be recognized that in the majestic sweep of history they had so much in common—and enough that separated them from everyone else—that they ought to be regarded as a single historical entity, which only scholars and pedants will try to describe separately.
If you step back for a moment, this seems obvious. There is a distinction between the “English-speaking peoples” and the rest of “the West,” and at key moments in human history that distinction has proved critical.
Continental Europe has given us plenty of nice paintings and agreeable symphonies, French wine and Italian actresses and whatnot, but, for all our fetishization of multiculturalism, you can’t help noticing that when it comes to the notion of a political West—one with a sustained commitment to liberty and democracy—the historical record looks a lot more unicultural and, indeed (given that most of these liberal democracies other than America share the same head of state), uniregal. The entire political class of Portugal, Spain, and Greece spent their childhoods living under dictatorships. So did Jacques Chirac and Angela Merkel. We forget how rare on this earth is peaceful constitutional evolution, and rarer still outside the Anglosphere.
Decline starts with the money. It always does. As Jonathan Swift put it:
According to the cbo’s 2010 long-term budget outlook, by 2020 the U.S. government will be paying between 15 and 20 percent of its revenues in debt interest—whereas defense spending will be down to between 14 and 16 percent. America will be spending more on debt interest than China, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain, Turkey, and Israel spend on their militaries combined. The superpower will have advanced from a nation of aircraft carriers to a nation of debt carriers.
What does that mean? In 2009, the United States spent about $665 billion on its military, the Chinese about $99 billion. If Beijing continues to buy American debt at the rate it has in recent years, then within a half-decade or so U.S. interest payments on that debt will be covering the entire cost of the Chinese military. This year, the Pentagon issued an alarming report to Congress on Beijing’s massive military build-up, including new missiles, upgraded bombers, and an aircraft-carrier R&D program intended to challenge American dominance in the Pacific. What the report didn’t mention is who’s paying for it. Answer: Mr. and Mrs. America.
Within the next five years, the People’s Liberation Army, which is the largest employer on the planet, bigger even than the U.S. Department of Community-Organizer Grant Applications, will be entirely funded by U.S. taxpayers. When they take Taiwan, suburban families in Connecticut and small businesses in Idaho will have paid for it. The existential questions for America loom now, not decades hence. What we face is not merely the decline and fall of a powerful nation but the collapse of the highly specific cultural tradition that built the modern world. It starts with the money—it always does. But the money is only the symptom. We wouldn’t be this broke if we hadn’t squandered our inheritance in a more profound sense.
Britain’s decline also began with the money. The U.S. “Lend-Lease” program to the United Kingdom ended with the war in September 1946. London paid off the final installment of its debt in December 2006, and the Economic Secretary, Ed Balls, sent with the check a faintly surreal accompanying note thanking Washington for its support during the war. They have our soul who have our bonds: Britain and the world were more fortunate in who had London’s bonds than America is seventy years later. For that reason, in terms of global order, the transition from Britannia ruling the waves to the American era, from the old lion to its transatlantic progeny, was one of the smoothest transfers of power in history—so smooth that most of us aren’t quite sure when it took place. Andrew Roberts likes to pinpoint it to the middle of 1943: One month, the British had more men under arms than the Americans; the next month, the Americans had more men under arms than the British.
The baton of global leadership had been passed. And, if it didn’t seem that way at the time, that’s because it was as near a seamless transition as could be devised—although it was hardly “devised” at all, at least not by London. Yet we live with the benefits of that transition to this day. To take a minor but not inconsequential example, one of the critical links in the post-9/11 Afghan campaign was the British Indian Ocean Territory. As its name would suggest, it’s a British dependency, but it has a U.S. military base—just one of many pinpricks on the map where the Royal Navy’s Pax Britannica evolved into Washington’s Pax Americana with nary a thought: From U.S. naval bases in Bermuda to the Anzus alliance down under to Norad in Cheyenne Mountain, London’s military ties with its empire were assumed, effortlessly, by the United States, and life and global order went on.
One of my favorite lines from the Declaration of Independence never made it into the final text. They were Thomas Jefferson’s parting words to his fellow British subjects across the ocean: “We might have been a free and great people together.” But in the end, when it mattered, they were a free and great people together. Britain was eclipsed by its transatlantic offspring, by a nation with the same language, the same legal inheritance, and the same commitment to liberty.
It’s not likely to go that way next time round. And “next time round” is already under way. We are coming to the end of a two-century Anglosphere dominance, and of a world whose order and prosperity many people think of as part of a broad, general trend but which, in fact, derive from a very particular cultural inheritance and may well not survive it. To point out how English the world is is, of course, a frightfully un-English thing to do. No true Englishman would ever do such a ghastly and vulgar thing. You need some sinister rootless colonial oik like me to do it. But there’s a difference between genial self-effacement and contempt for one’s own inheritance.
Not so long ago, Geert Wilders, the Dutch parliamentarian and soi-disant Islamophobe, flew into London and promptly got shipped back to the Netherlands as a threat to public order. After the British Government had reconsidered its stupidity, he was permitted to return and give his speech at the House of Lords—and, as foreigners often do, he quoted Winston Churchill, under the touchingly naive assumption that this would endear him to the natives. Whereas, of course, to almost all members of Britain’s governing elite, quoting Churchill approvingly only confirms that you’re an extremist lunatic. I had the honor a couple of years back of visiting President Bush in the White House and seeing the bust of Churchill on display in the Oval Office. When Barack Obama moved in, he ordered Churchill’s bust be removed and returned to the British. Its present whereabouts are unclear. But, given what Sir Winston had to say about Islam in his book on the Sudanese campaign, the bust was almost certainly arrested at Heathrow and deported as a threat to public order.
Somewhere along the way a quintessentially British sense of self-deprecation curdled into a psychologically unhealthy self-loathing. A typical foot-of-the-page news item from The Daily Telegraph:
A leading college at Cambridge University has renamed its controversial colonial-themed Empire Ball after accusations that it was “distasteful.” The £136-a-head Emmanuel College ball was advertised as a celebration of “the Victorian commonwealth and all of its decadences.
Students were urged to “party like it’s 1899” and organisers promised a trip through the Indian Raj, Australia, the West Indies, and 19th century Hong Kong.
But anti-fascist groups said the theme was “distasteful and insensitive” because of the British Empire’s historical association with slavery, repression and exploitation.
The Empire Ball Committee, led by presidents Richard Hilton and Jenny Unwin, has announced the word “empire” will be removed from all promotional material.
The way things are going in Britain, it would make more sense to remove the word “balls.”
It’s interesting to learn that “anti-fascism” now means attacking the British Empire, which stood alone against fascism in that critical year between the fall of France and Germany’s invasion of Russia. And it’s even sadder to have to point out the most obvious fatuity in those “anti-fascist groups” litany of evil—“the British Empire’s association with slavery.” The British Empire’s principal association with slavery is that it abolished it. Before William Wilberforce, the British Parliament, and the brave men of the Royal Navy took up the issue, slavery was an institution regarded by all cultures around the planet as as permanent a feature of life as the earth and sky. Britain expunged it from most of the globe.
It is pathetic but unsurprising how ignorant all these brave “anti-fascists” are. But there is a lesson here not just for Britain but for the rest of us, too: When a society loses its memory, it descends inevitably into dementia. As I always try to tell my American neighbors, national decline is at least partly psychological—and therefore what matters is accepting the psychology of decline. Thus, Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road to Serfdom, which he wrote with an immigrant’s eye on the Britain of 1944:
There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought. It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel.
The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.
Within little more than half a century, almost every item on the list had been abandoned, from “independence and self-reliance” (some 40 percent of Britons receive state handouts) to “a healthy suspicion of power and
authority”—the reflex response now to almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government “do something.” American exceptionalism would have to be awfully exceptional to suffer a similar expansion of government without a similar descent, in enough of the citizenry, into chronic dependency.
What happened? Britain, in John Foster Dulles’s famous postwar assessment, had lost an empire but not yet found a role. Actually, Britain didn’t so much “lose” the Empire: it evolved peacefully into the modern Commonwealth, which is more agreeable than the way these things usually go. Nor is it clear that modern Britain wants a role, of any kind. Rather than losing an empire, it seems to have lost its point.
This has consequences. To go back to Cambridge University’s now non-imperial Empire Ball, if the cream of British education so willingly prostrates itself before ahistorical balderdash, what then of the school system’s more typical charges? In cutting off two generations of students from their cultural inheritance, the British state has engaged in what we will one day come to see as a form of child abuse, one that puts a huge question mark over the future. Why be surprised that legions of British Muslims sign up for the Taliban? These are young men who went to school in Luton and West Bromwich and learned nothing of their country of nominal citizenship other than that it’s responsible for racism, imperialism, colonialism, and all the other bad -isms of the world. If that’s all you knew of Britain, why would you feel any allegiance to Queen and country? And what if you don’t have Islam to turn to? The transformation of the British people is, in its own malign way, a remarkable achievement. Raised in schools that teach them nothing, they nevertheless pick up the gist of the matter, which is that their society is a racket founded on various historical injustices. The virtues Hayek admired? Ha! Strictly for suckers.
When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the modern British welfare state in 1942, his goal was the “abolition of want,” to be accomplished by “cooperation between the State and the individual.” In attempting to insulate the citizenry from the vicissitudes of fate, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams: Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity. Churchill called his book The History of the English-Speaking Peoples—not the English-Speaking Nations. The extraordinary role played by those nations in the creation and maintenance of the modern world derived from their human capital.
What happens when, as a matter of state policy, you debauch your human capital? The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers; marriage is all but defunct, except for toffs, upscale gays, and Muslims. For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what lbj’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population. One-fifth of British children are raised in homes in which no adult works. Just under 900,000 people have been off sick for over a decade, claiming “sick benefits,” week in, week out, for ten years and counting. “Indolence,” as Machiavelli understood, is the greatest enemy of a free society, but rarely has any state embraced this oldest temptation as literally as Britain. There is almost nothing you can’t get the government to pay for.
Plucked at random from The Daily Mail: A man of twenty-one with learning disabilities has been granted taxpayers’ money to fly to Amsterdam and have sex with a prostitute. Why not? His social worker says sex is a “human right” and that his client, being a virgin, is entitled to the support of the state in claiming said right. Fortunately, a £520 million program was set up by Her Majesty’s Government to “empower those with disabilities.” “He’s planning to do more than just have his end away,” explained the social worker.
“The girls in Amsterdam are far more protected than those on U.K. streets. Let him have some fun—I’d want to. Wouldn’t you prefer that we can control this, guide him, educate him, support him to understand the process and ultimately end up satisfying his needs in a secure, licensed place where his happiness and growth as a person is the most important thing? Refusing to offer him this service would be a violation of his human rights.”
And so a Dutch prostitute is able to boast that among her clients is the British Government. Talk about outsourcing: given the reputation of English womanhood, you’d have thought this would be the one job that wouldn’t have to be shipped overseas. But, as Dutch hookers no doubt say, lie back and think of England—and the check they’ll be mailing you.
After Big Government, after global retreat, after the loss of liberty, there is only remorseless civic disintegration. The statistics speak for themselves. The number of indictable offences per thousand people was 2.4 in 1900, climbed gradually to 9.7 in 1954, and then rocketed to 109.4 by 1992. And that official increase understates the reality: Many crimes have been decriminalized (shoplifting, for example), and most crime goes unreported, and most reported crime goes uninvestigated, and most investigated crime goes unsolved, and almost all solved crime merits derisory punishment. Yet the law-breaking is merely a symptom of a larger rupture. At a gathering like this one, John O’Sullivan, recalling his own hometown, said that when his grandmother ran a pub in the Liverpool docklands in the years around the First World War, there was only one occasion when someone swore in her presence. And he subsequently apologized.
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” But viewed from 2010 England the day before yesterday is an alternative universe—or a lost civilization. Last year, the “Secretary of State for Children” (both an Orwellian and Huxleyite office) announced that 20,000 “problem families” would be put under twenty-four-hour cctv supervision in their homes. As the Daily Express reported, “They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.” Orwell’s government “telescreen” in every home is close to being a reality, although even he would have dismissed as too obviously absurd a nanny state that literally polices your bedtime.
For its worshippers, Big Government becomes a kind of religion: the state as church. After the London Tube bombings, Gordon Brown began mulling over the creation of what he called a “British equivalent of the U.S. Fourth of July,” a new national holiday to bolster British identity. The Labour Party think-tank, the Fabian Society, proposed that the new “British Day” should be July 5th, the day the National Health Service was created. Because the essence of contemporary British identity is waiting two years for a hip operation. A national holiday every July 5th: They can call it Dependence Day.
Does the fate of the other senior Anglophone power hold broader lessons for the United States? It’s not so hard to picture a paternalist technocrat of the Michael Bloomberg school covering New York in cctv ostensibly for terrorism but also to monitor your transfats. Permanence is the illusion of every age. But you cannot wage a sustained ideological assault on your own civilization without profound consequence. Without serious course correction, we will see the end of the Anglo-American era, and the eclipse of the powers that built the modern world. Even as America’s spendaholic government outspends not only America’s ability to pay for itself but, by some measures, the world’s; even as it follows Britain into the dank pit of transgenerational dependency, a failed education system, and unsustainable entitlements; even as it makes less and less and mortgages its future to its rivals for cheap Chinese trinkets, most Americans assume that simply because they’re American they will be insulated from the consequences. There, too, are lessons from the old country. Cecil Rhodes distilled the assumptions of generations when he said that to be born a British subject was to win first prize in the lottery of life. On the eve of the Great War, in his play Heartbreak House, Bernard Shaw turned the thought around to taunt a British ruling class too smug and self-absorbed to see what was coming. “Do you think,” he wrote, “the laws of God will be suspended in favor of England because you were born in it?”
In our time, to be born a citizen of the United States is to win first prize in the lottery of life, and, as Britons did, too many Americans assume it will always be so. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favor of America because you were born in it? Great convulsions lie ahead, and at the end of it we may be in a post-Anglosphere world.
Sad to think that the once great and mighty British Empire, which did so much good for the world (while being admittedly imperfect) has come to such a place.
Pay special attention to what he has to say about the USA.
In the days when I used to write for Fleet Street, a lot of readers and several of my editors accused me of being anti-British. I’m not. I’m extremely pro-British and, for that very reason, the present state of the United Kingdom is bound to cause distress. So, before I get to the bad stuff, let me just lay out the good. Insofar as the world functions at all, it’s due to the Britannic inheritance. Three-sevenths of the G7 economies are nations of British descent. Two-fifths of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council are—and, by the way, it should be three-fifths: The rap against the Security Council is that it’s the Second World War victory parade preserved in aspic, but, if it were, Canada would have a greater claim to be there than either France or China. The reason Canada isn’t is because a third Anglosphere nation and a second realm of King George VI would have made too obvious a truth usually left unstated—that the Anglosphere was the all but lone defender of civilization and of liberty. In broader geopolitical terms, the key regional powers in almost every corner of the globe are British-derived—from Australia to South Africa to India—and, even among the lesser players, as a general rule you’re better off for having been exposed to British rule than not: Why is Haiti Haiti and Barbados Barbados?
And of course the pre-eminent power of the age derives its political character from eighteenth-century British subjects who took English ideas a little further than the mother country was willing to go. In his
sequel to Churchill’s great work, The History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Andrew Roberts writes:
Just as we do not today differentiate between the Roman Republic and the imperial period of the Julio-Claudians when we think of the Roman Empire, so in the future no-one will bother to make a distinction between the British Empire–led and the American Republic–led periods of English-speaking dominance between the late-eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries. It will be recognized that in the majestic sweep of history they had so much in common—and enough that separated them from everyone else—that they ought to be regarded as a single historical entity, which only scholars and pedants will try to describe separately.
If you step back for a moment, this seems obvious. There is a distinction between the “English-speaking peoples” and the rest of “the West,” and at key moments in human history that distinction has proved critical.
Continental Europe has given us plenty of nice paintings and agreeable symphonies, French wine and Italian actresses and whatnot, but, for all our fetishization of multiculturalism, you can’t help noticing that when it comes to the notion of a political West—one with a sustained commitment to liberty and democracy—the historical record looks a lot more unicultural and, indeed (given that most of these liberal democracies other than America share the same head of state), uniregal. The entire political class of Portugal, Spain, and Greece spent their childhoods living under dictatorships. So did Jacques Chirac and Angela Merkel. We forget how rare on this earth is peaceful constitutional evolution, and rarer still outside the Anglosphere.
Decline starts with the money. It always does. As Jonathan Swift put it:
A baited banker thus desponds,Today the people who have America’s bonds are not the people one would wish to have one’s soul. As Madhav Nalapat has suggested, Beijing believes a half-millennium Western interregnum is about to come to an end, and the world will return to Chinese dominance. I think they’re wrong on the latter, but right on the former. Within a decade, the United States will be spending more of the federal budget on its interest payments than on its military.
From his own hand foresees his fall,
They have his soul, who have his bonds;
’Tis like the writing on the wall.
According to the cbo’s 2010 long-term budget outlook, by 2020 the U.S. government will be paying between 15 and 20 percent of its revenues in debt interest—whereas defense spending will be down to between 14 and 16 percent. America will be spending more on debt interest than China, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain, Turkey, and Israel spend on their militaries combined. The superpower will have advanced from a nation of aircraft carriers to a nation of debt carriers.
What does that mean? In 2009, the United States spent about $665 billion on its military, the Chinese about $99 billion. If Beijing continues to buy American debt at the rate it has in recent years, then within a half-decade or so U.S. interest payments on that debt will be covering the entire cost of the Chinese military. This year, the Pentagon issued an alarming report to Congress on Beijing’s massive military build-up, including new missiles, upgraded bombers, and an aircraft-carrier R&D program intended to challenge American dominance in the Pacific. What the report didn’t mention is who’s paying for it. Answer: Mr. and Mrs. America.
Within the next five years, the People’s Liberation Army, which is the largest employer on the planet, bigger even than the U.S. Department of Community-Organizer Grant Applications, will be entirely funded by U.S. taxpayers. When they take Taiwan, suburban families in Connecticut and small businesses in Idaho will have paid for it. The existential questions for America loom now, not decades hence. What we face is not merely the decline and fall of a powerful nation but the collapse of the highly specific cultural tradition that built the modern world. It starts with the money—it always does. But the money is only the symptom. We wouldn’t be this broke if we hadn’t squandered our inheritance in a more profound sense.
Britain’s decline also began with the money. The U.S. “Lend-Lease” program to the United Kingdom ended with the war in September 1946. London paid off the final installment of its debt in December 2006, and the Economic Secretary, Ed Balls, sent with the check a faintly surreal accompanying note thanking Washington for its support during the war. They have our soul who have our bonds: Britain and the world were more fortunate in who had London’s bonds than America is seventy years later. For that reason, in terms of global order, the transition from Britannia ruling the waves to the American era, from the old lion to its transatlantic progeny, was one of the smoothest transfers of power in history—so smooth that most of us aren’t quite sure when it took place. Andrew Roberts likes to pinpoint it to the middle of 1943: One month, the British had more men under arms than the Americans; the next month, the Americans had more men under arms than the British.
The baton of global leadership had been passed. And, if it didn’t seem that way at the time, that’s because it was as near a seamless transition as could be devised—although it was hardly “devised” at all, at least not by London. Yet we live with the benefits of that transition to this day. To take a minor but not inconsequential example, one of the critical links in the post-9/11 Afghan campaign was the British Indian Ocean Territory. As its name would suggest, it’s a British dependency, but it has a U.S. military base—just one of many pinpricks on the map where the Royal Navy’s Pax Britannica evolved into Washington’s Pax Americana with nary a thought: From U.S. naval bases in Bermuda to the Anzus alliance down under to Norad in Cheyenne Mountain, London’s military ties with its empire were assumed, effortlessly, by the United States, and life and global order went on.
One of my favorite lines from the Declaration of Independence never made it into the final text. They were Thomas Jefferson’s parting words to his fellow British subjects across the ocean: “We might have been a free and great people together.” But in the end, when it mattered, they were a free and great people together. Britain was eclipsed by its transatlantic offspring, by a nation with the same language, the same legal inheritance, and the same commitment to liberty.
It’s not likely to go that way next time round. And “next time round” is already under way. We are coming to the end of a two-century Anglosphere dominance, and of a world whose order and prosperity many people think of as part of a broad, general trend but which, in fact, derive from a very particular cultural inheritance and may well not survive it. To point out how English the world is is, of course, a frightfully un-English thing to do. No true Englishman would ever do such a ghastly and vulgar thing. You need some sinister rootless colonial oik like me to do it. But there’s a difference between genial self-effacement and contempt for one’s own inheritance.
Not so long ago, Geert Wilders, the Dutch parliamentarian and soi-disant Islamophobe, flew into London and promptly got shipped back to the Netherlands as a threat to public order. After the British Government had reconsidered its stupidity, he was permitted to return and give his speech at the House of Lords—and, as foreigners often do, he quoted Winston Churchill, under the touchingly naive assumption that this would endear him to the natives. Whereas, of course, to almost all members of Britain’s governing elite, quoting Churchill approvingly only confirms that you’re an extremist lunatic. I had the honor a couple of years back of visiting President Bush in the White House and seeing the bust of Churchill on display in the Oval Office. When Barack Obama moved in, he ordered Churchill’s bust be removed and returned to the British. Its present whereabouts are unclear. But, given what Sir Winston had to say about Islam in his book on the Sudanese campaign, the bust was almost certainly arrested at Heathrow and deported as a threat to public order.
Somewhere along the way a quintessentially British sense of self-deprecation curdled into a psychologically unhealthy self-loathing. A typical foot-of-the-page news item from The Daily Telegraph:
A leading college at Cambridge University has renamed its controversial colonial-themed Empire Ball after accusations that it was “distasteful.” The £136-a-head Emmanuel College ball was advertised as a celebration of “the Victorian commonwealth and all of its decadences.
Students were urged to “party like it’s 1899” and organisers promised a trip through the Indian Raj, Australia, the West Indies, and 19th century Hong Kong.
But anti-fascist groups said the theme was “distasteful and insensitive” because of the British Empire’s historical association with slavery, repression and exploitation.
The Empire Ball Committee, led by presidents Richard Hilton and Jenny Unwin, has announced the word “empire” will be removed from all promotional material.
The way things are going in Britain, it would make more sense to remove the word “balls.”
It’s interesting to learn that “anti-fascism” now means attacking the British Empire, which stood alone against fascism in that critical year between the fall of France and Germany’s invasion of Russia. And it’s even sadder to have to point out the most obvious fatuity in those “anti-fascist groups” litany of evil—“the British Empire’s association with slavery.” The British Empire’s principal association with slavery is that it abolished it. Before William Wilberforce, the British Parliament, and the brave men of the Royal Navy took up the issue, slavery was an institution regarded by all cultures around the planet as as permanent a feature of life as the earth and sky. Britain expunged it from most of the globe.
It is pathetic but unsurprising how ignorant all these brave “anti-fascists” are. But there is a lesson here not just for Britain but for the rest of us, too: When a society loses its memory, it descends inevitably into dementia. As I always try to tell my American neighbors, national decline is at least partly psychological—and therefore what matters is accepting the psychology of decline. Thus, Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road to Serfdom, which he wrote with an immigrant’s eye on the Britain of 1944:
There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought. It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel.
The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.
Within little more than half a century, almost every item on the list had been abandoned, from “independence and self-reliance” (some 40 percent of Britons receive state handouts) to “a healthy suspicion of power and
authority”—the reflex response now to almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government “do something.” American exceptionalism would have to be awfully exceptional to suffer a similar expansion of government without a similar descent, in enough of the citizenry, into chronic dependency.
What happened? Britain, in John Foster Dulles’s famous postwar assessment, had lost an empire but not yet found a role. Actually, Britain didn’t so much “lose” the Empire: it evolved peacefully into the modern Commonwealth, which is more agreeable than the way these things usually go. Nor is it clear that modern Britain wants a role, of any kind. Rather than losing an empire, it seems to have lost its point.
This has consequences. To go back to Cambridge University’s now non-imperial Empire Ball, if the cream of British education so willingly prostrates itself before ahistorical balderdash, what then of the school system’s more typical charges? In cutting off two generations of students from their cultural inheritance, the British state has engaged in what we will one day come to see as a form of child abuse, one that puts a huge question mark over the future. Why be surprised that legions of British Muslims sign up for the Taliban? These are young men who went to school in Luton and West Bromwich and learned nothing of their country of nominal citizenship other than that it’s responsible for racism, imperialism, colonialism, and all the other bad -isms of the world. If that’s all you knew of Britain, why would you feel any allegiance to Queen and country? And what if you don’t have Islam to turn to? The transformation of the British people is, in its own malign way, a remarkable achievement. Raised in schools that teach them nothing, they nevertheless pick up the gist of the matter, which is that their society is a racket founded on various historical injustices. The virtues Hayek admired? Ha! Strictly for suckers.
When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the modern British welfare state in 1942, his goal was the “abolition of want,” to be accomplished by “cooperation between the State and the individual.” In attempting to insulate the citizenry from the vicissitudes of fate, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams: Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity. Churchill called his book The History of the English-Speaking Peoples—not the English-Speaking Nations. The extraordinary role played by those nations in the creation and maintenance of the modern world derived from their human capital.
What happens when, as a matter of state policy, you debauch your human capital? The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers; marriage is all but defunct, except for toffs, upscale gays, and Muslims. For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what lbj’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population. One-fifth of British children are raised in homes in which no adult works. Just under 900,000 people have been off sick for over a decade, claiming “sick benefits,” week in, week out, for ten years and counting. “Indolence,” as Machiavelli understood, is the greatest enemy of a free society, but rarely has any state embraced this oldest temptation as literally as Britain. There is almost nothing you can’t get the government to pay for.
Plucked at random from The Daily Mail: A man of twenty-one with learning disabilities has been granted taxpayers’ money to fly to Amsterdam and have sex with a prostitute. Why not? His social worker says sex is a “human right” and that his client, being a virgin, is entitled to the support of the state in claiming said right. Fortunately, a £520 million program was set up by Her Majesty’s Government to “empower those with disabilities.” “He’s planning to do more than just have his end away,” explained the social worker.
“The girls in Amsterdam are far more protected than those on U.K. streets. Let him have some fun—I’d want to. Wouldn’t you prefer that we can control this, guide him, educate him, support him to understand the process and ultimately end up satisfying his needs in a secure, licensed place where his happiness and growth as a person is the most important thing? Refusing to offer him this service would be a violation of his human rights.”
And so a Dutch prostitute is able to boast that among her clients is the British Government. Talk about outsourcing: given the reputation of English womanhood, you’d have thought this would be the one job that wouldn’t have to be shipped overseas. But, as Dutch hookers no doubt say, lie back and think of England—and the check they’ll be mailing you.
After Big Government, after global retreat, after the loss of liberty, there is only remorseless civic disintegration. The statistics speak for themselves. The number of indictable offences per thousand people was 2.4 in 1900, climbed gradually to 9.7 in 1954, and then rocketed to 109.4 by 1992. And that official increase understates the reality: Many crimes have been decriminalized (shoplifting, for example), and most crime goes unreported, and most reported crime goes uninvestigated, and most investigated crime goes unsolved, and almost all solved crime merits derisory punishment. Yet the law-breaking is merely a symptom of a larger rupture. At a gathering like this one, John O’Sullivan, recalling his own hometown, said that when his grandmother ran a pub in the Liverpool docklands in the years around the First World War, there was only one occasion when someone swore in her presence. And he subsequently apologized.
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” But viewed from 2010 England the day before yesterday is an alternative universe—or a lost civilization. Last year, the “Secretary of State for Children” (both an Orwellian and Huxleyite office) announced that 20,000 “problem families” would be put under twenty-four-hour cctv supervision in their homes. As the Daily Express reported, “They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.” Orwell’s government “telescreen” in every home is close to being a reality, although even he would have dismissed as too obviously absurd a nanny state that literally polices your bedtime.
For its worshippers, Big Government becomes a kind of religion: the state as church. After the London Tube bombings, Gordon Brown began mulling over the creation of what he called a “British equivalent of the U.S. Fourth of July,” a new national holiday to bolster British identity. The Labour Party think-tank, the Fabian Society, proposed that the new “British Day” should be July 5th, the day the National Health Service was created. Because the essence of contemporary British identity is waiting two years for a hip operation. A national holiday every July 5th: They can call it Dependence Day.
Does the fate of the other senior Anglophone power hold broader lessons for the United States? It’s not so hard to picture a paternalist technocrat of the Michael Bloomberg school covering New York in cctv ostensibly for terrorism but also to monitor your transfats. Permanence is the illusion of every age. But you cannot wage a sustained ideological assault on your own civilization without profound consequence. Without serious course correction, we will see the end of the Anglo-American era, and the eclipse of the powers that built the modern world. Even as America’s spendaholic government outspends not only America’s ability to pay for itself but, by some measures, the world’s; even as it follows Britain into the dank pit of transgenerational dependency, a failed education system, and unsustainable entitlements; even as it makes less and less and mortgages its future to its rivals for cheap Chinese trinkets, most Americans assume that simply because they’re American they will be insulated from the consequences. There, too, are lessons from the old country. Cecil Rhodes distilled the assumptions of generations when he said that to be born a British subject was to win first prize in the lottery of life. On the eve of the Great War, in his play Heartbreak House, Bernard Shaw turned the thought around to taunt a British ruling class too smug and self-absorbed to see what was coming. “Do you think,” he wrote, “the laws of God will be suspended in favor of England because you were born in it?”
In our time, to be born a citizen of the United States is to win first prize in the lottery of life, and, as Britons did, too many Americans assume it will always be so. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favor of America because you were born in it? Great convulsions lie ahead, and at the end of it we may be in a post-Anglosphere world.
Sad to think that the once great and mighty British Empire, which did so much good for the world (while being admittedly imperfect) has come to such a place.
Pay special attention to what he has to say about the USA.
I am TJIC
I am TJIC
ARLINGTON (CBS) – A blog threatening members of Congress in the wake of the Tucson, Arizona shooting has prompted Arlington police to temporarily suspend the firearms license of an Arlington man.Let's ignore for the moment how many people were investigated for making similar comments about George W. Bush. Let's look at the "logic" being exercised by the Arlington Po-Po, shall we?
It was the headline “1 down and 534 to go” that caught the attention. “One” refers to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head in the rampage, while 534 refers to the other members of the U.S. House and Senate.
Police are investigating the “suitability” of 39-year-old Travis Corcoran to have a firearms license
They claim that Corcoran is so dangerous that, while he has done nothing more than put up a blog post, he must be restrained from possessing firearms. However, it appears that it's not worth it for the police to follow him, or stake out his place, or arrest him.
Huh?
Look, guys, if you think that his speech rises to the level of an actual threat of specific harm to specific persons, he should be in jail. If you're not sure, then do the leg work to establish whether it is or not.
So, what do we know about the Arlington Police Department? We know that they're lazy - nobody assigned to watch over this "dangerous" suspect. We know that they're biased - Arlington is a hotbed of George W. Bush hatred, and the last decade would offer a wealth of examples of similar or worse speech, none of which was investigated.
And we know that they're idiots. It's not like there isn't a ton of case law on how the First Amendment applies to threats of political violence. Arlington will lose this, if it ever gets to trial. Post Heller and McDonald, they'll lose even worse. Idiots.
But this is, as JayG points out, an attack not only on the First Amendment, but on the Second as well. An attack of this sort - groundless in logic, and arguably mendacious in nature - is an attack on all. And so I have to stand with TJIC.
I am TJIC. So are you. If you blog, you are hereby authorized to use this image (created by your humble host, using The Gimp, not that it took any skill). Please link back to this post.
It would be one thing if the law were applied equally to all. It's not, and it will be applied disproportionately to us, because we hold views considered by some in power to be Double Plus Ungood. Lefties in particular, this is your moment. You say that you stand for good governance. Prove it.
It was not a famous Massachusetts citizen who said We must all hang together, or surely we will all hang separately. Benjamin Franklin was more circumspect than the men from Massachusetts, such as Sam Adams, who said this:
Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say 'what should be the reward of such sacrifices?' Bid us and our posterity bow the knee, supplicate the friendship and plough, and sow, and reap, to glut the avarice of the men who have let loose on us the dogs of war to riot in our blood and hunt us from the face of the earth? If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!Eliminationist rhetoric right there. Clearly, the Arlington Police would have seized his firearms. What a sad, degraded state for a once proud Commonwealth. It seems that I got out just in the nick of time.
I borrowed this from Borepatch.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
More reasons why obama care needs to be repealed
The article below is from National Review Online.
These are just a few of many reasons Obama care needs killed.
1. You will have the right to lose your job as employers struggle to comply with expensive mandates. According to labor economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth, those hit hardest will be younger, less-skilled workers. The cost of employing them will soar as employers are required to buy health insurance that may cost as much as a lower-wage person’s annual earnings.
High-tech workers will be hit as well. The $20 billion tax on medical-device companies, to take one example, will force companies to lay off researchers and curtail development of new products. And tens of thousands of insurance brokers will lose their livelihoods because of arbitrary regulations from Washington.
2. As a taxpayer, you will have the right to see the federal debt soar as Congress’s budget gimmicks face economic reality. According to former CBO director Doug Holtz-Eakin, Obamacare will cost nearly $1 trillion more than estimated as employers begin dropping health insurance and sending people to the new taxpayer-subsidized exchanges instead.
3. As a business owner, you will have the right to comply with the expensive new mandates in Obamacare or drop coverage and pay fines instead. You will have the right to keep the IRS informed about the coverage you are offering and its cost. And you will have the right to stop hiring and keep your business smaller than 50 people to escape Obamacare’s fines and mandates.
4. As an employee, you will have the right to lose the coverage you have now as you and 80 to 100 million people (according to McKinsey & Company analyst Alissa Meade) are switched to other coverage when Obamacare takes effect in 2014.
5. As a citizen, you will have the right to have the government decide what health insurance you must have and to either buy the expensive policy or pay a fine.
6. If you are a young person, you will have the right to pay higher premiums for mandatory health insurance to subsidize people who are older and sicker.
7. If you are a senior, you will have the right to see half a trillion dollars taken out of Medicare to pay for new health-insurance entitlements — a move allegedly designed to make Medicare stronger.
8. If you are in a Medicaid Advantage plan, you and 7 million other seniors will have the right to go back into traditional Medicare and take your chances at finding a doctor who will see you.
9. If you are already on Medicaid, you will have the right to compete with millions more people trying to get appointments with doctors, especially specialists.
10. If you are one of the estimated 16 million people who will be added to the Medicaid rolls in 2014, you will have the right to wait in hospital emergency rooms for even routine care as the program swells to 87 million recipients by the end of the decade. (As many as 900,000 additional emergency room visits every year are expected — primarily by new enrollees in Medicaid — and from many of the 23 million people who will remain uninsured.)
11. If you are a doctor or nurse, you will have the right to receive lower Medicare payments while filling out mountains of new paperwork to satisfy government “quality reporting” requirements.
12. If you have child-only health insurance, you have the right to lose that coverage as more insurers exit the market. And you have the right to lose dependent coverage entirely as many employers decide it’s just too expensive to offer.
13. If you are an insurance company, you will have the right to figure out how you are going to continue to pay premiums as government adds more expensive, mandatory benefits but caps premium increases at less than the cost of providing the coverage.
14. If you have a preexisting condition and are in a temporary high-risk pool, you and 8,000 others enrolled in the $5 billion program will have the right to pay high costs for your health insurance in the poorly designed program.
15. If you are a governor or state legislator, you will have the right to figure out what state services you will cut further — education? transportation? public safety? — to comply with the federal mandate that you expand Medicaid and set up the huge health-exchange bureaucracies. You also have the right to sue the federal government to protect your state’s rights.
And everyone will have the right to pay more for health insurance as the costs soar from what will surely be a heavily loaded list of benefits that your policy must cover.
Or you have the right to ask Congress to start over again and get health reform right.
These are just a few of many reasons Obama care needs killed.
With the debate over the repeal of Obamacare coming up, President Obama and his supporters in Congress are trying to calm the millions of Americans who strongly oppose the law by focusing only on its early sweeteners — including the right of 26-year-old “children” to stay on their parents’ insurance, the right to “free” preventive care, and the right of uninsured people with preexisting conditions to buy coverage.
While these provisions are all desirable, they are not without costs and consequences. It is therefore helpful to look at what other “rights” you will have under Obamacare when the full impact hits.1. You will have the right to lose your job as employers struggle to comply with expensive mandates. According to labor economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth, those hit hardest will be younger, less-skilled workers. The cost of employing them will soar as employers are required to buy health insurance that may cost as much as a lower-wage person’s annual earnings.
High-tech workers will be hit as well. The $20 billion tax on medical-device companies, to take one example, will force companies to lay off researchers and curtail development of new products. And tens of thousands of insurance brokers will lose their livelihoods because of arbitrary regulations from Washington.
2. As a taxpayer, you will have the right to see the federal debt soar as Congress’s budget gimmicks face economic reality. According to former CBO director Doug Holtz-Eakin, Obamacare will cost nearly $1 trillion more than estimated as employers begin dropping health insurance and sending people to the new taxpayer-subsidized exchanges instead.
3. As a business owner, you will have the right to comply with the expensive new mandates in Obamacare or drop coverage and pay fines instead. You will have the right to keep the IRS informed about the coverage you are offering and its cost. And you will have the right to stop hiring and keep your business smaller than 50 people to escape Obamacare’s fines and mandates.
4. As an employee, you will have the right to lose the coverage you have now as you and 80 to 100 million people (according to McKinsey & Company analyst Alissa Meade) are switched to other coverage when Obamacare takes effect in 2014.
5. As a citizen, you will have the right to have the government decide what health insurance you must have and to either buy the expensive policy or pay a fine.
6. If you are a young person, you will have the right to pay higher premiums for mandatory health insurance to subsidize people who are older and sicker.
7. If you are a senior, you will have the right to see half a trillion dollars taken out of Medicare to pay for new health-insurance entitlements — a move allegedly designed to make Medicare stronger.
8. If you are in a Medicaid Advantage plan, you and 7 million other seniors will have the right to go back into traditional Medicare and take your chances at finding a doctor who will see you.
9. If you are already on Medicaid, you will have the right to compete with millions more people trying to get appointments with doctors, especially specialists.
10. If you are one of the estimated 16 million people who will be added to the Medicaid rolls in 2014, you will have the right to wait in hospital emergency rooms for even routine care as the program swells to 87 million recipients by the end of the decade. (As many as 900,000 additional emergency room visits every year are expected — primarily by new enrollees in Medicaid — and from many of the 23 million people who will remain uninsured.)
11. If you are a doctor or nurse, you will have the right to receive lower Medicare payments while filling out mountains of new paperwork to satisfy government “quality reporting” requirements.
12. If you have child-only health insurance, you have the right to lose that coverage as more insurers exit the market. And you have the right to lose dependent coverage entirely as many employers decide it’s just too expensive to offer.
13. If you are an insurance company, you will have the right to figure out how you are going to continue to pay premiums as government adds more expensive, mandatory benefits but caps premium increases at less than the cost of providing the coverage.
14. If you have a preexisting condition and are in a temporary high-risk pool, you and 8,000 others enrolled in the $5 billion program will have the right to pay high costs for your health insurance in the poorly designed program.
15. If you are a governor or state legislator, you will have the right to figure out what state services you will cut further — education? transportation? public safety? — to comply with the federal mandate that you expand Medicaid and set up the huge health-exchange bureaucracies. You also have the right to sue the federal government to protect your state’s rights.
And everyone will have the right to pay more for health insurance as the costs soar from what will surely be a heavily loaded list of benefits that your policy must cover.
Or you have the right to ask Congress to start over again and get health reform right.
Something to think about....
This I got from National review online.....
Usually, it’s easy for a concerned citizen to find a like-minded pundit with something interesting to say about the political controversy du jour. Except, that is, when the citizen is liberal and the controversy involves guns. If a left-of-center reader turned to his favorite pundits this week to find out what to think about the Tucson massacre and gun laws, he’d have read nothing but clichés and half-truths.
There are at least two reasons for this. First is that most of these columnists have no firsthand knowledge of guns or gun culture. Second is that they haven’t bothered to read any of the countless academic studies of gun control that have come out since John Lott published More Guns, Less Crime in 1998. Perhaps they don’t want to slog through lots of statistics, or perhaps they just don’t care about the issue.
As a gun owner and hunter, and as someone who’s spent a fair amount of time thinking and writing about the legal and empirical debates that surround guns, I’m here to help. Here are some quick and easy tips for anti-gun columnists — if you follow them, you’ll still be wrong, but at least you won’t sound so rediculous.
1. Don’t assume criminals follow laws.
In a way, this goes right to the heart of the gun-control debate. It is a conservative talking point that only the law-abiding will follow — and thus be disarmed by — gun laws.
I’m not asking you to swallow this reasoning whole. I’m just asking that you think twice before contradicting it — especially if you’re Eugene Robinson, who recently wrote about how the Tucson shooting shows that “we must decide that allowing anyone to carry a concealed weapon, no questions asked, is just crazy.” (Or, more frighteningly, Rep. Peter King [R., N.Y.], who says he’s going to introduce a law that would simply make it illegal to bring a gun near a public official.)
Jared Loughner left his house that day intending to assassinate Representative Giffords. There is absolutely no reason to believe that a more restrictive concealed-carry regime would have changed that. If he was willing to violate laws against murder, he was willing to violate laws against concealed carry. Suggesting otherwise just shows that you haven’t bothered to think things through.
2. If you’re going to write that a certain kind of gun is particularly dangerous, consult someone who knows something about guns first. Brady Campaign spokesmen don’t count.
The gun Loughner used was a semiautomatic 9mm Glock — a weapon that countless people own for various reasons, including target shooting and self-defense. These guns typically come with 10- to 15-round magazines, but they’re capable of accepting larger ones. The fact that they’re “semiautomatic” means they fire one bullet for each pull of the trigger. I own a very similar handgun myself (a 9mm Ruger P95), along with a 30-round magazine; if I fill the magazine before I get to the shooting range, it cuts down on the time I spend reloading on-site.
But Alan Webber complains in the Washington Post about “semi-automatic handguns that serve only one purpose — to shoot and kill innocent people.” The New York Times’s Gail Collins refers to Loughner’s gun as distinct from a “regular pistol,” the kind “most Americans think of when they think of the right to bear arms.” Semiautomatic handguns are “extremely easy to fire over and over” and can carry 30-round magazines, she explains.
Perhaps the most egregious example of this came from someone who knew better: the Brady Campaign’s president, Paul Helmke, who in Collins’s column is quoted claiming that 9mm semiautomatics are “not suited for hunting or personal protection” and that “what it’s good for is killing and injuring a lot of people quickly.” If 9mm Glocks aren’t suited for protecting oneself and others, someone should tell the nation’s police departments, many of which use them — and many more of which use .40-caliber Glocks, which are similar but slightly more powerful.
3. Don’t prattle on about “hunting” or “sport” — and more generally, don’t forget about self-defense.
Robinson is an offender on this count: “We must recognize the obvious distinction between rifles, shotguns and target pistols used for sport on the one hand, and semiautomatic handguns designed for killing people on the other.” (An aside: I think it’s less than obvious that my pistol, which I love shooting at targets, is not suitable for “sport,” and that traditional target pistols are not suitable for killing people.)
But the prize goes to Collins, who actually suggests that gun-grabbers and gun-rights supporters should cooperate to pass laws based on this distinction: “We should be able to find a way to accommodate the strong desire in many parts of the country for easy access to firearms with sane regulation of the kinds of weapons that make it easiest for crazy people to create mass slaughter.”
Sorry, but no. It’s true that many gun-rights enthusiasts are also hunters, but the “strong desire” to preserve gun rights stems from the need for self-defense, not for killing Bambi. We’re actually most protective of guns that are designed to kill people — because we want them in case we need to kill someone to defend ourselves or our families. The Supreme Court has affirmed our Second Amendment right to keep handguns in our homes for this purpose.
And we do use guns for self-defense. Various surveys come to various numbers, but it’s clear that thousands — possibly hundreds of thousands — of defensive gun uses occur every year. And that’s not even counting the crimes that don’t happen because criminals are afraid their victims might be armed.
You can make a plausible case that keeping guns away from law-abiding citizens will keep guns away from some criminals, too — many guns are stolen every year — but this must be weighed against the good that comes from responsible gun ownership. When you write a column about guns — no matter what side you’re on — you need to evaluate this tradeoff.
4. When you think about mental health, think about due process, too.
In the last day or so, some evidence has come to light indicating that the police may have dropped the ball — if they had followed up on some complaints that were made against Loughner, they may have been able to prosecute him for a crime or force him to accept mental-health treatment. Had they done so, it’s possible he would have ended up in the database of people who are not allowed to buy guns, and it’s even possible that he wouldn’t have been able to get a gun illegally (given that we know of no underworld ties or friends who would have bought a firearm for him).
But some liberals seem to think he should have been turned down for the gun solely on the grounds that people found him creepy or menacing. Robinson notes that
Loughner reportedly had a history of drug use and bizarre behavior. Students and a teacher at a community college that Loughner briefly attended found him so erratic, confused, menacing and potentially violent that they persuaded college authorities to bar him from campus pending a psychiatric exam.
He follows with: “Yet on Nov. 30, he was able to walk into Sportsman’s Warehouse in Tucson and purchase the weapon” (emphasis added), as though the judgments of “students,” “a teacher,” and “college authorities” should be sufficient to deprive one of constitutional rights.
Richard Cohen thinks that gun buyers should face “real questions” in addition to a background check. He facetiously proposes the following:
Do you think the government controls grammar and grammar controls the universe? Have you been babbling in class and can you hold a job? Why do you want this gun? Do you, perhaps, want to kill someone? Do you want a Glock 19 because it was one of two handguns used in the Virginia Tech massacre (32 killed, one suicide), and would you please state the name of your intended victim on the form provided?
A constitutional right cannot be revoked for “babbling in class” or failing to “hold a job,” or even for holding out-there beliefs — and though these questions aren’t asked in seriousness, it’s hard to imagine what questions would have gotten Loughner to confess to being a homicidal maniac, or why a gun seller (or government bureaucrat) should be presumed capable of judging the sanity of a customer when rights are at stake.
Yes, we should have a better process for keeping guns away from dangerous and imbalanced people, but we have to stay away from a very slippery slope: By one estimate based on high-school students, nearly one-quarter of people are mentally ill in some sense of the term. Very few of them are potentially violent.
There is room for debate about gun control. The Supreme Court has left many restrictions on the table. But when left-wing columnists — the people many liberals rely on for opinions — can’t stop spouting the same clichés they’ve been filling their columns with for decades, we cannot have a useful conversation. They need to improve their output, and these rules will help them move in that direction.
Usually, it’s easy for a concerned citizen to find a like-minded pundit with something interesting to say about the political controversy du jour. Except, that is, when the citizen is liberal and the controversy involves guns. If a left-of-center reader turned to his favorite pundits this week to find out what to think about the Tucson massacre and gun laws, he’d have read nothing but clichés and half-truths.
There are at least two reasons for this. First is that most of these columnists have no firsthand knowledge of guns or gun culture. Second is that they haven’t bothered to read any of the countless academic studies of gun control that have come out since John Lott published More Guns, Less Crime in 1998. Perhaps they don’t want to slog through lots of statistics, or perhaps they just don’t care about the issue.
As a gun owner and hunter, and as someone who’s spent a fair amount of time thinking and writing about the legal and empirical debates that surround guns, I’m here to help. Here are some quick and easy tips for anti-gun columnists — if you follow them, you’ll still be wrong, but at least you won’t sound so rediculous.
1. Don’t assume criminals follow laws.
In a way, this goes right to the heart of the gun-control debate. It is a conservative talking point that only the law-abiding will follow — and thus be disarmed by — gun laws.
I’m not asking you to swallow this reasoning whole. I’m just asking that you think twice before contradicting it — especially if you’re Eugene Robinson, who recently wrote about how the Tucson shooting shows that “we must decide that allowing anyone to carry a concealed weapon, no questions asked, is just crazy.” (Or, more frighteningly, Rep. Peter King [R., N.Y.], who says he’s going to introduce a law that would simply make it illegal to bring a gun near a public official.)
Jared Loughner left his house that day intending to assassinate Representative Giffords. There is absolutely no reason to believe that a more restrictive concealed-carry regime would have changed that. If he was willing to violate laws against murder, he was willing to violate laws against concealed carry. Suggesting otherwise just shows that you haven’t bothered to think things through.
2. If you’re going to write that a certain kind of gun is particularly dangerous, consult someone who knows something about guns first. Brady Campaign spokesmen don’t count.
The gun Loughner used was a semiautomatic 9mm Glock — a weapon that countless people own for various reasons, including target shooting and self-defense. These guns typically come with 10- to 15-round magazines, but they’re capable of accepting larger ones. The fact that they’re “semiautomatic” means they fire one bullet for each pull of the trigger. I own a very similar handgun myself (a 9mm Ruger P95), along with a 30-round magazine; if I fill the magazine before I get to the shooting range, it cuts down on the time I spend reloading on-site.
But Alan Webber complains in the Washington Post about “semi-automatic handguns that serve only one purpose — to shoot and kill innocent people.” The New York Times’s Gail Collins refers to Loughner’s gun as distinct from a “regular pistol,” the kind “most Americans think of when they think of the right to bear arms.” Semiautomatic handguns are “extremely easy to fire over and over” and can carry 30-round magazines, she explains.
Perhaps the most egregious example of this came from someone who knew better: the Brady Campaign’s president, Paul Helmke, who in Collins’s column is quoted claiming that 9mm semiautomatics are “not suited for hunting or personal protection” and that “what it’s good for is killing and injuring a lot of people quickly.” If 9mm Glocks aren’t suited for protecting oneself and others, someone should tell the nation’s police departments, many of which use them — and many more of which use .40-caliber Glocks, which are similar but slightly more powerful.
3. Don’t prattle on about “hunting” or “sport” — and more generally, don’t forget about self-defense.
Robinson is an offender on this count: “We must recognize the obvious distinction between rifles, shotguns and target pistols used for sport on the one hand, and semiautomatic handguns designed for killing people on the other.” (An aside: I think it’s less than obvious that my pistol, which I love shooting at targets, is not suitable for “sport,” and that traditional target pistols are not suitable for killing people.)
But the prize goes to Collins, who actually suggests that gun-grabbers and gun-rights supporters should cooperate to pass laws based on this distinction: “We should be able to find a way to accommodate the strong desire in many parts of the country for easy access to firearms with sane regulation of the kinds of weapons that make it easiest for crazy people to create mass slaughter.”
Sorry, but no. It’s true that many gun-rights enthusiasts are also hunters, but the “strong desire” to preserve gun rights stems from the need for self-defense, not for killing Bambi. We’re actually most protective of guns that are designed to kill people — because we want them in case we need to kill someone to defend ourselves or our families. The Supreme Court has affirmed our Second Amendment right to keep handguns in our homes for this purpose.
And we do use guns for self-defense. Various surveys come to various numbers, but it’s clear that thousands — possibly hundreds of thousands — of defensive gun uses occur every year. And that’s not even counting the crimes that don’t happen because criminals are afraid their victims might be armed.
You can make a plausible case that keeping guns away from law-abiding citizens will keep guns away from some criminals, too — many guns are stolen every year — but this must be weighed against the good that comes from responsible gun ownership. When you write a column about guns — no matter what side you’re on — you need to evaluate this tradeoff.
4. When you think about mental health, think about due process, too.
In the last day or so, some evidence has come to light indicating that the police may have dropped the ball — if they had followed up on some complaints that were made against Loughner, they may have been able to prosecute him for a crime or force him to accept mental-health treatment. Had they done so, it’s possible he would have ended up in the database of people who are not allowed to buy guns, and it’s even possible that he wouldn’t have been able to get a gun illegally (given that we know of no underworld ties or friends who would have bought a firearm for him).
But some liberals seem to think he should have been turned down for the gun solely on the grounds that people found him creepy or menacing. Robinson notes that
Loughner reportedly had a history of drug use and bizarre behavior. Students and a teacher at a community college that Loughner briefly attended found him so erratic, confused, menacing and potentially violent that they persuaded college authorities to bar him from campus pending a psychiatric exam.
He follows with: “Yet on Nov. 30, he was able to walk into Sportsman’s Warehouse in Tucson and purchase the weapon” (emphasis added), as though the judgments of “students,” “a teacher,” and “college authorities” should be sufficient to deprive one of constitutional rights.
Richard Cohen thinks that gun buyers should face “real questions” in addition to a background check. He facetiously proposes the following:
Do you think the government controls grammar and grammar controls the universe? Have you been babbling in class and can you hold a job? Why do you want this gun? Do you, perhaps, want to kill someone? Do you want a Glock 19 because it was one of two handguns used in the Virginia Tech massacre (32 killed, one suicide), and would you please state the name of your intended victim on the form provided?
A constitutional right cannot be revoked for “babbling in class” or failing to “hold a job,” or even for holding out-there beliefs — and though these questions aren’t asked in seriousness, it’s hard to imagine what questions would have gotten Loughner to confess to being a homicidal maniac, or why a gun seller (or government bureaucrat) should be presumed capable of judging the sanity of a customer when rights are at stake.
Yes, we should have a better process for keeping guns away from dangerous and imbalanced people, but we have to stay away from a very slippery slope: By one estimate based on high-school students, nearly one-quarter of people are mentally ill in some sense of the term. Very few of them are potentially violent.
There is room for debate about gun control. The Supreme Court has left many restrictions on the table. But when left-wing columnists — the people many liberals rely on for opinions — can’t stop spouting the same clichés they’ve been filling their columns with for decades, we cannot have a useful conversation. They need to improve their output, and these rules will help them move in that direction.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Newspaper editor makes the call to reinstate the 1994 AWB
-----Original Message-----
From: georgemason1776
To: letters
Sent: Sat, Jan 15, 2011 7:35 am
Subject: Pia Lopez's ignorant wish for a civil war over firearms.
Pia Lopez, Sacramento Bee editorial writer, declared on Wednesday that: "It is time to reinstate the 1994 ban – without the NRA loophole. Simply ban the possession, manufacture, use or importation of weapons and ammunition clips that can hold more than 10 rounds."
I trust Ms. Lopez will have the courage of her convictions and accompany the ATF raid parties directed to the doors of previously law-abiding firearm owners to enforce that unconstitutional diktat. If Ms. Lopez and her fellow citizen disarmament advocates want our military-pattern semi-automatic firearms and magazines and have the juice to pass a law to that effect, they should by all means come and get them. Come and get 'em and watch what happens.
No doubt Ms. Lopez would willingly comply if the federal government ordered her to turn in her laptop on pain of death. No doubt, too, that California's gelded firearm owners are already putting up with a slightly lighter form of such tyranny -- at least those who haven't voted their principles with their feet and left. But to extrapolate from her own cowardice over principle -- or from that of California's firearm owners hostage to your state's collectivist politics -- to the nation as whole would be making a big mistake. For she would have to kill millions of us "bitter clingers" from Montana to Michigan to Alabama to enforce her proposal, and WE would not go quietly into that tyrannical good night.
For we are still Americans as the Founders understood that concept and we will fight to the death for our natural, God-given and inalienable rights to liberty and property. Ms. Lopez may find that concept alien and condemn us as "throwbacks" to an earlier era. But no matter how insane she thinks we are she cannot wish us away. We are here. We exist and we are armed. Deal with it. If she wants to enforce such a policy she and her friends must kill us. All of us.
Stacking up hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of bodies in a new American civil war over the forcible disarmament of the citizenry seems a curious way to, in her words, "prevent large-scale death and injury."
Perhaps she should rethink her proposal in the interest of preventing really "large-scale death and injury."
Mike Vanderboegh
The alleged leader of a merry band of Three Percenters.
PO Box 926
Pinson, AL 35126
From: georgemason1776
To: letters
Sent: Sat, Jan 15, 2011 7:35 am
Subject: Pia Lopez's ignorant wish for a civil war over firearms.
Pia Lopez, Sacramento Bee editorial writer, declared on Wednesday that: "It is time to reinstate the 1994 ban – without the NRA loophole. Simply ban the possession, manufacture, use or importation of weapons and ammunition clips that can hold more than 10 rounds."
I trust Ms. Lopez will have the courage of her convictions and accompany the ATF raid parties directed to the doors of previously law-abiding firearm owners to enforce that unconstitutional diktat. If Ms. Lopez and her fellow citizen disarmament advocates want our military-pattern semi-automatic firearms and magazines and have the juice to pass a law to that effect, they should by all means come and get them. Come and get 'em and watch what happens.
No doubt Ms. Lopez would willingly comply if the federal government ordered her to turn in her laptop on pain of death. No doubt, too, that California's gelded firearm owners are already putting up with a slightly lighter form of such tyranny -- at least those who haven't voted their principles with their feet and left. But to extrapolate from her own cowardice over principle -- or from that of California's firearm owners hostage to your state's collectivist politics -- to the nation as whole would be making a big mistake. For she would have to kill millions of us "bitter clingers" from Montana to Michigan to Alabama to enforce her proposal, and WE would not go quietly into that tyrannical good night.
For we are still Americans as the Founders understood that concept and we will fight to the death for our natural, God-given and inalienable rights to liberty and property. Ms. Lopez may find that concept alien and condemn us as "throwbacks" to an earlier era. But no matter how insane she thinks we are she cannot wish us away. We are here. We exist and we are armed. Deal with it. If she wants to enforce such a policy she and her friends must kill us. All of us.
Stacking up hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of bodies in a new American civil war over the forcible disarmament of the citizenry seems a curious way to, in her words, "prevent large-scale death and injury."
Perhaps she should rethink her proposal in the interest of preventing really "large-scale death and injury."
Mike Vanderboegh
The alleged leader of a merry band of Three Percenters.
PO Box 926
Pinson, AL 35126
Sunday, January 16, 2011
I don't civil discourse.
For a decade, from the election of Bush 43 forward, the Left has lied and cheated as it tried to return to power. Al Gore made a mockery out of the American electoral system by being a spoilsport over Florida, which Bush indeed won by 537 votes. Dan Rather forged a document to try to derail Bush’s re-election. Twice Democrats stole U.S. senators from the Republicans. After voting to support the war to get by the 2002 election, many Democrats quickly soured on the war. The profane protests were cheered by liberals who misattributed “dissent is the highest form of patriotism”to Thomas Jefferson; the words belong to the late historian Howard Zinn.
Once in power, liberals were the opposite of gracious.
For two years now, I have been called ignorant, racist, angry and violent by the left. The very foul-mouthed protesters of Bush dare to now label my words as “hate speech.”
Last week, the left quickly blamed the right for the national tragedy of a shooting spree by a madman who never watched Fox News, never listened to Rush Limbaugh and likely did not know who Sarah Palin is.
Fortunately, the American public rejected out of hand that idiotic notion that the right was responsible.
Rather than apologize, the left wants to change the tone of the political debate.
The left suddenly wants civil discourse.
Bite me.
The left wants to play games of semantics.
Bite me.
The left wants us to be civil — after being so uncivil for a decade.
Bite me.
There is grown-up work to do now. Liberals ran up the federal credit card, destroyed the American medical system and undermined the rule of law — which is the foundation of capitalism — with a bunch of unconstitutional fiats from the president and his bureaucracy.
The economy is a mess. The president “inherited” a 7.6% unemployment rate. It’s now 9.4% — after we spent a record $787 billion on a stimulus.
I was not consulted on that stimulus. I had a very good argument against it. I said the money supply was too large and printing more money would fail. I said let the economic downturn run its course.
Lefties were too busy celebrating the 2008 election to listen.
When people protested lefties made vulgar remarks about tea-bagging and giggled.
So screw you and your civil discourse.
I don’t want to hear it.
I have been screamed at for 10 years.
It’s my turn now. I am not going to scream back. But I refuse to allow anyone to dictate what I say or how I say it. I refuse to allow the same foul-mouthed, foul-spirited foul people who dumped on me to now try to tell me what I may or may not say.
My free speech matters more than the feelings of anyone on the left. You don’t like what I say? Tough.
I will not allow people to label my words Hate Speech or try to lecture me on civility. I saw the lefty signs. The left’s definition of civil discourse is surreal.
We have a terribly unfit president who has expanded government control beyond not only what is constitutional but what is healthy for our freedom.
Indeed, this call for civil discourse is itself a direct threat to my free speech.
So screw you.
You don’t like my words? You don’t like my tone? You feel threatened?
Too bad.
No.
Actually, that is what I want. I want the lefties to feel bad. I want them to feel hurt. I want them to cry to their mommies.
That way the field will be cleared so we grown-ups can fix the nation and the economy. If you can’t put up with a little excrement, get the hell out of the barn.
UPDATE: Linked by Ann Althouse. Thanks.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Insurgency
I borrowed this from http://randomthoughtsandguns.blogspot.com/ He is a very good blogger and a favorite bookmark of mine.
We are already in an American Insurgency. The difference between a dissident and an insurgent is a fine one. I will say that the difference is the response of the government in question. If the government tries to crack down on it, it is an insurgency. If the government allows it, it is dissent.
Now as far as an American Insurgency I'm not talking about Loughner and his insanity but the government response to it. Government taking the actions of a crazy person to legally limit the speech of citizens. I'm talking about the insurgency against big media and for government reform. I will use Martial Language here because it is only appropriate, and quite frankly the situation demands accurate descriptions.
But first, let us take a look at some history.
The Assault Weapons Ban turned a rather mild mannered engineer into a competitive pistol shooter and Boomershoot Guy. That is a private citizens response to government oppression. So far Joe has been such a stickler for playing by the governments rules that he has avoided the heavy boot of oppression.
The bottom line is this, if the FedGov wants you in jail, you have already done something to get put in jail. Whenever the FedGov can spin the media to point out the citizen as a bad guy and then go through his/her life with the limitless resources of the State, they will find something and use it.
So I admire Joe for his courage, he has put himself at a position of risk that I personally haven't done. I blog rather anonymously because of my position as a Soldier. I have quite frankly given up some of the first amendment protections that private citizens have.
At the fall of the Soviet Union there was not an armed uprising, but there was a low level media insurgency for decades in the form of Samizdat where the Powers That Be tried to completely control media. Not just mass media, but all forms from poetry, novels, and political tracts.
If you don't think that the FedGov tries to silence dissent, look at what has happened to Len Savage in the form of bureaucratic sluggishness from the ATF. Evidently acting as an expert witness in a few cases that the ATF loses will cause you to get put on their crap list.
So we have a nearly monolithic media owned by the left. You can tell if someone is a leftist because they will argue this point until they are blue in the face. Unfortunately for them both Harvard and UCLA have done studies on journalism bias in the US, and each university found a leftist bias. Both Harvard and UCLA are very liberal schools, so it is only rare intellectual honest that allows them to report their findings accurately. It is intellectual dishonesty on the part of Big Media to not clean house and get back to the true purpose of reporting. To tell, not to advocate.
The reason for freedom of the press in the US is not to advocate on behalf of government. However throughout the history of the US those in power found that controlling public opinion was a drug too addictive to give up. The hate and spite directed against FoxNews are simply the rantings of a drug addict as he vigorously defends his belief that he doesn't have a problem.
Remember the problem with Talk Radio in the early 90's? Here is a snippet from The Center for American Progress about talk radio: Our conclusion is that the gap between conservative and progressive talk radio is the result of multiple structural problems in the U.S. regulatory system, particularly the complete breakdown of the public trustee concept of broadcast, the elimination of clear public interest requirements for broadcasting, and the relaxation of ownership rules including the requirement of local participation in management.
The solution to losing control of that media source is of course: MORE GOVERNMENT. AM radio was dead prior to the repeal of the "fairness doctrine" in 1987. As restrictive regulations were done away with, that particular media source was allowed to meet market demands and we ended up with Rush Limbaugh spouting his politics on a national level. I have no doubt about the impact of Rush Limbaugh on the 1994 Republican Revolution. This is why the Left is still intent on the "fairness doctrine" instead of allowing the market to decide who is on the air, and now on the internet.
Without control of the media the Left cannot control the public, and it scares the crap out of them. They still control the schools. However when a teachers preaches one thing but alternative sources of information are available we begin to see people using their brains. Without the ability of people like Rush Limbaugh, and even Billy Beck, to put their words into a medium that is accessible to anyone with a radio or internet access, the Left would completely dominate schools and media to effectively indoctrinate the youth of the nation.
The most worrisome legislation, and backdoor regulation of the internet, is the idea of "Net Neutrality". So far there has been no significant need for any net neutrality because of any censorship. The net automatically routes around censorship as if it were damage to the network.
If you are reading this, and you agree with these words, welcome to the insurgency. I may not be asking you to smash windows like Dutchman6, or take the Oath Keeper pledge, but I am asking you to fight to keep the flow of information in the power of the people. Because right now members of Congress are considering whether or not to further limit speech by outlawing "martial rhetoric". This is just further proof that we are in an insurgency, because when the government seeks to limit the ability of the insurgent they have openly declared war.
This is not a Dem/Repub issue, this is a freedom issue. And one mans insurgent is another's Freedom Fighter. Now I'm not saying that this will end up in a shooting war, with IED's blowing up UN tanks and anything like that. I am saying that like the USSR, things can turn around in the blink of an eye and we need to be prepared to capitalize on that the same way the Left is trying to capitalize on the attempted murder of Rep. Gifford.
We are already in an American Insurgency. The difference between a dissident and an insurgent is a fine one. I will say that the difference is the response of the government in question. If the government tries to crack down on it, it is an insurgency. If the government allows it, it is dissent.
Now as far as an American Insurgency I'm not talking about Loughner and his insanity but the government response to it. Government taking the actions of a crazy person to legally limit the speech of citizens. I'm talking about the insurgency against big media and for government reform. I will use Martial Language here because it is only appropriate, and quite frankly the situation demands accurate descriptions.
But first, let us take a look at some history.
The Assault Weapons Ban turned a rather mild mannered engineer into a competitive pistol shooter and Boomershoot Guy. That is a private citizens response to government oppression. So far Joe has been such a stickler for playing by the governments rules that he has avoided the heavy boot of oppression.
The bottom line is this, if the FedGov wants you in jail, you have already done something to get put in jail. Whenever the FedGov can spin the media to point out the citizen as a bad guy and then go through his/her life with the limitless resources of the State, they will find something and use it.
So I admire Joe for his courage, he has put himself at a position of risk that I personally haven't done. I blog rather anonymously because of my position as a Soldier. I have quite frankly given up some of the first amendment protections that private citizens have.
At the fall of the Soviet Union there was not an armed uprising, but there was a low level media insurgency for decades in the form of Samizdat where the Powers That Be tried to completely control media. Not just mass media, but all forms from poetry, novels, and political tracts.
If you don't think that the FedGov tries to silence dissent, look at what has happened to Len Savage in the form of bureaucratic sluggishness from the ATF. Evidently acting as an expert witness in a few cases that the ATF loses will cause you to get put on their crap list.
So we have a nearly monolithic media owned by the left. You can tell if someone is a leftist because they will argue this point until they are blue in the face. Unfortunately for them both Harvard and UCLA have done studies on journalism bias in the US, and each university found a leftist bias. Both Harvard and UCLA are very liberal schools, so it is only rare intellectual honest that allows them to report their findings accurately. It is intellectual dishonesty on the part of Big Media to not clean house and get back to the true purpose of reporting. To tell, not to advocate.
The reason for freedom of the press in the US is not to advocate on behalf of government. However throughout the history of the US those in power found that controlling public opinion was a drug too addictive to give up. The hate and spite directed against FoxNews are simply the rantings of a drug addict as he vigorously defends his belief that he doesn't have a problem.
Remember the problem with Talk Radio in the early 90's? Here is a snippet from The Center for American Progress about talk radio: Our conclusion is that the gap between conservative and progressive talk radio is the result of multiple structural problems in the U.S. regulatory system, particularly the complete breakdown of the public trustee concept of broadcast, the elimination of clear public interest requirements for broadcasting, and the relaxation of ownership rules including the requirement of local participation in management.
The solution to losing control of that media source is of course: MORE GOVERNMENT. AM radio was dead prior to the repeal of the "fairness doctrine" in 1987. As restrictive regulations were done away with, that particular media source was allowed to meet market demands and we ended up with Rush Limbaugh spouting his politics on a national level. I have no doubt about the impact of Rush Limbaugh on the 1994 Republican Revolution. This is why the Left is still intent on the "fairness doctrine" instead of allowing the market to decide who is on the air, and now on the internet.
Without control of the media the Left cannot control the public, and it scares the crap out of them. They still control the schools. However when a teachers preaches one thing but alternative sources of information are available we begin to see people using their brains. Without the ability of people like Rush Limbaugh, and even Billy Beck, to put their words into a medium that is accessible to anyone with a radio or internet access, the Left would completely dominate schools and media to effectively indoctrinate the youth of the nation.
The most worrisome legislation, and backdoor regulation of the internet, is the idea of "Net Neutrality". So far there has been no significant need for any net neutrality because of any censorship. The net automatically routes around censorship as if it were damage to the network.
If you are reading this, and you agree with these words, welcome to the insurgency. I may not be asking you to smash windows like Dutchman6, or take the Oath Keeper pledge, but I am asking you to fight to keep the flow of information in the power of the people. Because right now members of Congress are considering whether or not to further limit speech by outlawing "martial rhetoric". This is just further proof that we are in an insurgency, because when the government seeks to limit the ability of the insurgent they have openly declared war.
This is not a Dem/Repub issue, this is a freedom issue. And one mans insurgent is another's Freedom Fighter. Now I'm not saying that this will end up in a shooting war, with IED's blowing up UN tanks and anything like that. I am saying that like the USSR, things can turn around in the blink of an eye and we need to be prepared to capitalize on that the same way the Left is trying to capitalize on the attempted murder of Rep. Gifford.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
going back to work...
Although I have had to work, the son was out of school due to unexpected snow in the state of GA. The wife is out on sick leave from an operation. It has been nice being a family this week. I was appreciative of the fact of having a loving family is a pleasure that not all have.
An educated populace is the best protection against a tyrannical gov't
An educated populace is the best protection against a tyrannical gov't
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
The 17th Amendment....maybe time to repeal?
The 17th amendment allowed people to vote directly for their senator during the voting cycle. In the past our federalist system of government had the senators nominated by the governors of the states to better represent the interest of the states. Now the senators are voted on by the people like the house of represenative. This serves to better concentrate power on the national level disregarding issues of the states. 100 years ago, we as a society better identified ourselves by our state. Now the states are little more than vassels of the national government. this was not what the forefathers had in mind as a check and balance against a too powerful national government.
An educated populace is the best protection against tyranny by a central government.
An educated populace is the best protection against tyranny by a central government.
More on the senate manipulation by the democrats.....
by Michael E. Hammond, former General Counsel Senate Steering Committee 1978-89.
Senate Democrats in the 111th Congress got a lot of mileage from procedural cheating (fiscal and legislative) –- and from extorting concessions from Republicans by threatening to cheat.
For instance, the accounting tricks used to pass ObamaCare would have, if employed by a private business, put the company’s CEO in prison for the rest of his life:
Answer: They’re using a cheat scheme to try to make it even easier for Reid to cram even more legislation down the throats of the American people.
For those who have spent the last year campaigning for candidates who would change things in Washington, these efforts to reverse those elections through a procedural cheat scheme should provoke an outrage which makes November 2 pale by comparison.
But first, some background:
WHAT DO I MEAN BY “CHEAT SCHEME”?
Democrats are proposing to change the written rules of the Senate by a procedural cheat scheme called the “constitutional option.” What this means is that the Senate, by a simple 50-vote margin (plus Biden) would vote to change the Senate’s written rules to take away the rights of Republicans –- even though those rules require a two-thirds vote in order to change them.
If they go ahead -– and if they succeed -– the written rules of the Senate will become meaningless in any circumstance where they would make a major difference. The will of the Democrat majority will become the only thing that matters; the Senate will become “the House on steroids.”
But, you ask, how can the Senate just ignore its rules?
Democrats argue in broad terms that a legislative body cannot be bound by the actions of a previous legislative body –- a notion that, in theory, would seem to leave the Senate without any rules except those adopted by 50 senators (and Biden). At the very least, this theory would allow the Senate to legally change its rules in any way at any time by majority vote.
In an effort to pretend that this precedent is less far-reaching than it is, it has now become a mantra of the Left that it’s possible to change the Senate rules on the first (legislative) day of the session by majority vote.
The problem is that there is no precedent for any of this, and lots of precedent against it. The entire canon of federal law is not reenacted every two years. The Senate’s Standing Rules are not biennially reenacted. Statutory rules like the Congressional Budget Act are not reenacted. And, furthermore, if it is unconstitutional for one Congress to impede the rules-changing powers of the next, what about the rules changes in ObamaCare which specifically make it out of order to consider changes to them? Does this make ObamaCare unconstitutional?
Indeed, a Senate rule adopted in 1959 declares that the Senate is a “continuing body” and thereby makes it illegal for the Senate, at the beginning of a new Congress, to force a rules change, other than with the two-thirds necessary to break a rules-related filibuster.
And, although both parties have tried, from time to time (e.g., in 1975 and 2005), through non-binding “advisory opinions,” to wrest concessions from the other by threatening to ignore the Senate’s written rules, they have always pulled back from the precipice before actually jumping over the cliff.
If, however, the gun is ever actually fired, it will never again be possible to put the bullet back.
WHAT DO I MEAN BY “CRAM-DOWN” RULES CHANGES
The short answer is that these changes are all intended to achieve one objective: to allow repudiated Democrats to cram even more Big Government legislation down the throats of the American people.
Proposals currently on the table range from abolishing the 60-vote filibuster (Harkin) to abolishing the “hold letter” (Merkley-Udall-McCaskill).
But this is just the beginning.
If Democrats can ignore the Senate rules to abolish the “hold letter,” they won’t hesitate to do the same when the 60-vote requirement is blocking their pivotal “cap-and-trade” legislation or their amnesty bill.
Having said this, some of the most aggressive efforts to curtail the rights of the minority which have already been put forward involve:
ABOLISHING THE “SECRET” HOLD LETTER: There is nothing either binding or talismanic about a “hold letter.” I have written hundreds –- maybe thousands of them. Given that the Senate rules can supposedly be waived most easily through the “unanimous consent” of all 100 senators, a “hold letter” is nothing more than a request that whoever is on the floor not allow a “unanimous consent” agreement to be snuck through without notifying the writer. Ironically, if every unanimous consent request has to be “hotlined” (cleared by phone with all Republican offices), the result may actually be more “gridlock” than currently exists. Alternatively, we could simply see Reid sneaking through a lot more “unanimous” consent agreements on very controversial legislation, with Republicans unable to do anything about it because the junior senator monitoring the floor can’t comply with the notice requirements.
ABOLISHING THE FILIBUSTER OF THE MOTION TO PROCEED:Because Reid cannot buy votes by adopting amendments until the motion to proceed is adopted, filibustering the motion to proceed allows Republicans to fight legislation before the vote-buying can begin. If we had not been able to filibuster the motion to proceed, the effort to pass ObamaCare would have been much easier.
REQUIRING A “STAND-UP” FILIBUSTER: It is a lie to suggest that the Majority Leader cannot currently force the minority to engage in a stand-up “Mr.-Smith-goes-to-Washington” talk-a-thon filibuster. In 1982,under rules more lenient than those in effect today, Majority Leader Howard Baker forced Jesse Helms and John East to filibuster a 4-cent-a-gallon gas tax increase all night by establishing the precedent that the Chair could “eyeball” the presence of a quorum without actually calling the roll. If filibusters are no longer talk-a-thons, it’s because Majority Leaders choose not to keep the Senate in session all night, in part because of the failing health of the Senate’s elderly members. The real game here is to slash the 30 hours of post-cloture debate if the next speaker does not stand up immediately.
ELIMINATING THE 60-VOTE REQUIREMENT FOR A FILIBUSTER. The problems with this are pretty well self-explanatory.
CAN’T WE JUST RELY ON THE HOUSE TO SAVE US FROM LAX SENATE RULES?
No.
First, we can’t be sure of the political landscape in 2013.
Second, those of us who witnessed the passage of the START Treaty, Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell Repeal, and the $4 billion 9/11 entitlement are aware of Obama’s diabolical ability to pick off stupid Republicans –- even on issues which fundamentally destroy their party.
Third, it is much more likely that Reid -– who is ruthless about passing his agenda –- would use a continuing resolution to enact amnesty than it is that Boehner would use it to repeal ObamaCare.
THE BOTTOM LINE
So, what do you care about?
Amnesty for illegal aliens?
Cap-and-trade?
The Bush tax cuts?
Your issue may be won or lost on January 25.
So don’t sit out the fight over the Senate rules -– only to suddenly wake up when the rewritten rules are used to go after you. Because, by that time, it will be too late.
Senate Democrats in the 111th Congress got a lot of mileage from procedural cheating (fiscal and legislative) –- and from extorting concessions from Republicans by threatening to cheat.
For instance, the accounting tricks used to pass ObamaCare would have, if employed by a private business, put the company’s CEO in prison for the rest of his life:
- Majority Leader Harry Reid used bribes, extortion, and corruption to buy the votes he needed to pass vast swathes of liberal legislation, including ObamaCare.
- Reid used a procedural tactic called an “amendment tree” to virtually eliminate Republicans’ ability to offer amendments of interest to them for an entire year.
- Reid scheduled as many as four or five bills simultaneously for no other reason than to buy off votes for his upcoming election -– also blocking all amendments to these bills.
- Reid wallowed in fiscal fraud, claiming that ObamaCare would reduce the deficit -– and, at the same time, sneaking $250 billion in costs onto other legislation.
- Reid used this procedural sleaze to cram more Big Government legislation down the throats of the
American people than in any Congress in the last 40 years.
Answer: They’re using a cheat scheme to try to make it even easier for Reid to cram even more legislation down the throats of the American people.
For those who have spent the last year campaigning for candidates who would change things in Washington, these efforts to reverse those elections through a procedural cheat scheme should provoke an outrage which makes November 2 pale by comparison.
But first, some background:
WHAT DO I MEAN BY “CHEAT SCHEME”?
Democrats are proposing to change the written rules of the Senate by a procedural cheat scheme called the “constitutional option.” What this means is that the Senate, by a simple 50-vote margin (plus Biden) would vote to change the Senate’s written rules to take away the rights of Republicans –- even though those rules require a two-thirds vote in order to change them.
If they go ahead -– and if they succeed -– the written rules of the Senate will become meaningless in any circumstance where they would make a major difference. The will of the Democrat majority will become the only thing that matters; the Senate will become “the House on steroids.”
But, you ask, how can the Senate just ignore its rules?
Democrats argue in broad terms that a legislative body cannot be bound by the actions of a previous legislative body –- a notion that, in theory, would seem to leave the Senate without any rules except those adopted by 50 senators (and Biden). At the very least, this theory would allow the Senate to legally change its rules in any way at any time by majority vote.
In an effort to pretend that this precedent is less far-reaching than it is, it has now become a mantra of the Left that it’s possible to change the Senate rules on the first (legislative) day of the session by majority vote.
The problem is that there is no precedent for any of this, and lots of precedent against it. The entire canon of federal law is not reenacted every two years. The Senate’s Standing Rules are not biennially reenacted. Statutory rules like the Congressional Budget Act are not reenacted. And, furthermore, if it is unconstitutional for one Congress to impede the rules-changing powers of the next, what about the rules changes in ObamaCare which specifically make it out of order to consider changes to them? Does this make ObamaCare unconstitutional?
Indeed, a Senate rule adopted in 1959 declares that the Senate is a “continuing body” and thereby makes it illegal for the Senate, at the beginning of a new Congress, to force a rules change, other than with the two-thirds necessary to break a rules-related filibuster.
And, although both parties have tried, from time to time (e.g., in 1975 and 2005), through non-binding “advisory opinions,” to wrest concessions from the other by threatening to ignore the Senate’s written rules, they have always pulled back from the precipice before actually jumping over the cliff.
If, however, the gun is ever actually fired, it will never again be possible to put the bullet back.
WHAT DO I MEAN BY “CRAM-DOWN” RULES CHANGES
The short answer is that these changes are all intended to achieve one objective: to allow repudiated Democrats to cram even more Big Government legislation down the throats of the American people.
Proposals currently on the table range from abolishing the 60-vote filibuster (Harkin) to abolishing the “hold letter” (Merkley-Udall-McCaskill).
But this is just the beginning.
If Democrats can ignore the Senate rules to abolish the “hold letter,” they won’t hesitate to do the same when the 60-vote requirement is blocking their pivotal “cap-and-trade” legislation or their amnesty bill.
Having said this, some of the most aggressive efforts to curtail the rights of the minority which have already been put forward involve:
ABOLISHING THE “SECRET” HOLD LETTER: There is nothing either binding or talismanic about a “hold letter.” I have written hundreds –- maybe thousands of them. Given that the Senate rules can supposedly be waived most easily through the “unanimous consent” of all 100 senators, a “hold letter” is nothing more than a request that whoever is on the floor not allow a “unanimous consent” agreement to be snuck through without notifying the writer. Ironically, if every unanimous consent request has to be “hotlined” (cleared by phone with all Republican offices), the result may actually be more “gridlock” than currently exists. Alternatively, we could simply see Reid sneaking through a lot more “unanimous” consent agreements on very controversial legislation, with Republicans unable to do anything about it because the junior senator monitoring the floor can’t comply with the notice requirements.
ABOLISHING THE FILIBUSTER OF THE MOTION TO PROCEED:Because Reid cannot buy votes by adopting amendments until the motion to proceed is adopted, filibustering the motion to proceed allows Republicans to fight legislation before the vote-buying can begin. If we had not been able to filibuster the motion to proceed, the effort to pass ObamaCare would have been much easier.
REQUIRING A “STAND-UP” FILIBUSTER: It is a lie to suggest that the Majority Leader cannot currently force the minority to engage in a stand-up “Mr.-Smith-goes-to-Washington” talk-a-thon filibuster. In 1982,under rules more lenient than those in effect today, Majority Leader Howard Baker forced Jesse Helms and John East to filibuster a 4-cent-a-gallon gas tax increase all night by establishing the precedent that the Chair could “eyeball” the presence of a quorum without actually calling the roll. If filibusters are no longer talk-a-thons, it’s because Majority Leaders choose not to keep the Senate in session all night, in part because of the failing health of the Senate’s elderly members. The real game here is to slash the 30 hours of post-cloture debate if the next speaker does not stand up immediately.
ELIMINATING THE 60-VOTE REQUIREMENT FOR A FILIBUSTER. The problems with this are pretty well self-explanatory.
CAN’T WE JUST RELY ON THE HOUSE TO SAVE US FROM LAX SENATE RULES?
No.
First, we can’t be sure of the political landscape in 2013.
Second, those of us who witnessed the passage of the START Treaty, Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell Repeal, and the $4 billion 9/11 entitlement are aware of Obama’s diabolical ability to pick off stupid Republicans –- even on issues which fundamentally destroy their party.
Third, it is much more likely that Reid -– who is ruthless about passing his agenda –- would use a continuing resolution to enact amnesty than it is that Boehner would use it to repeal ObamaCare.
THE BOTTOM LINE
So, what do you care about?
Amnesty for illegal aliens?
Cap-and-trade?
The Bush tax cuts?
Your issue may be won or lost on January 25.
So don’t sit out the fight over the Senate rules -– only to suddenly wake up when the rewritten rules are used to go after you. Because, by that time, it will be too late.
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