Monday, December 26, 2011

Reducing Ron to Racism

Well said.

Taki's Magazine
Verbatim Post

Brian Anderson

While interviewing Ron Paul a few days ago, CNN’s chief political analyst Gloria Borger avoided discussing his policies and instead dredged up the already exhausted newsletter scandal.

On multiple occasions, Paul has stated that he: (1) doesn’t know who the author was, (2) takes full responsibility for the newsletters being published under his name, and (3) denounces their content. Yet Gloria wouldn’t let up with her antics.

Goodbye,” Paul said, then calmly walked away. Although initial news reports gave the impression that Borger’s badgering caused him to stomp out of the interview, this wasn’t the case.

“Obama apologists can feel free to hold up that race card when the debates get tougher, but libertarians can hold it up longer.”

Sean Hannity and other right-leaning pundits have asked Paul equally stupid questions over the years, so it isn’t only left-wing news outlets.

One of Paul’s most popular stances is his strong rejection of the War on Drugs, which had been a non-issue until he came into the mix. Substance prohibition in American history has frequently been entwined with anti-minority ideology. In the early 1900s, marijuana was denounced as a drug that polluted the white race and turned Mexicans into murderous lunatics. The same thing was carried out against Chinese immigrants and blacks through anti-opium and anti-cocaine legislation, respectively.

Anti-drug laws still disproportionately affect minorities. A 2009 Human Rights Watch study concluded that “an estimated 67 percent of convicted felony drug defendants are sentenced to jail or prison.” Relative to population, “blacks are 10.1 times more likely than whites to be sent to prison for drug offenses.”

The Root, a black-oriented website, referred to ending drug prohibition as the “most meaningfully pro-black policy today.” The NAACP accepts this thesis and passed a resolution earlier this year to end the War on Drugs.

Nelson Linder, president of the Austin NAACP, speaks favorably of Ron Paul’s campaign, especially his foreign-policy stance. Which other candidate expresses stricter antiwar sentiments than Ron Paul? The Texan congressman has consistently opposed US imperialism from the beginning of his career—there’s a book detailing these speeches. He even went where few politicians would in supporting WikiLeaks.

If he was racist, why would he continue to speak out against the outrageous number of civilian deaths resulting from these wars in the Middle East? And why is he one of the only candidates who sternly opposes the TSA’s racial profiling here at home?

Capital punishment disproportionately affects blacks. After the practice was reinstated in 1976—it had been suspended for four years due to the Furman v. Georgia ruling—University of Iowa law professor David C. Baldus published a study on the pre-suspension environment. He discovered in examining over 2,000 homicide cases in Georgia that capital punishment was more often applied to black defendants, especially when the victim was white.

The ACLU concurs. “If you’re rich, you get away with it. If you’re poor and you’re from the inner city, you’re more likely to be prosecuted and convicted,” Paul has stated. Ron Paul disagrees with capital punishment for that very reason.

The current president has extended these policies, as well as the Middle East wars, without much protest from the standard news outlets. He overrides state laws to enforce the harmful drug war. And he set a record on the border front, deporting nearly 400,000 illegal immigrants in the last fiscal year.

Nowhere on Ron Paul’s campaign website does the word “deport” exist. In fact, one of his immigration reforms includes streamlining the entry process for foreigners.

Assuming Paul gets the GOP nod, we’ll be left with a choice between the candidate who takes $500 from a racist and uses it to stop the wars or the one who takes millions from big banks and uses it to escalate them.

Obama apologists can feel free to hold up that race card when the debates get tougher, but libertarians can hold it up longer.

“This isn’t your country anymore. It is our country now.”

Half a century ago, American children were schooled in Aesop’s fables. Among the more famous of these were The Fox and the Grapes and The Tortoise and the Hare.

Particularly appropriate this Christmas season, and every Christmas lately, is Aesop’s fable of The Dog in the Manger.

The tale is about a dog who decides to take a nap in the manger. When the ox, who has worked all day, comes back to eat some straw, the dog barks loudly, threatens to bite him and drives him from his manger.

The lesson the fable teaches is that it is malicious and wicked to deny a fellow creature what you yourself do not want and cannot even enjoy.

What brings the fable to mind is this year’s crop of Christmas-haters, whose numbers have grown since the days when it was only the village atheist or the ACLU pest who sought to kill Christmas.

“This mockery and hatred of Christmas testifies not only to the character of those who engage in it, it says something as well about who is winning the culture war for the soul of America.”

The problem with these folks is not simply that they detest Christmas and what it represents, but that they must do their best, or worst, to ensure Christians do not enjoy the season and holy day they love.

As a Washington Times editorial relates, the number of anti-Christian bigots is growing, and their malevolence is out of the closet:

Department of Justice claims blacks are incompetent

Milton Wolf
Verbatim Post

The (not so) soft bigotry of low expectations continues...

The DC: DOJ claims minorities cannot know candidates' party affiliation

At issue: The City of Kinston, NC voted to hold "non-partisan" elections by printing ballots that did not list the candidates' party affiliation. Personally, I'd prefer the party affiliation be included on the ballot. Heck, I'd like them to include the candidates's voting and arrest records too. Heh!:)

Anyway, the Department of Justice claims the party affiliation omission, hits minorities hardest, or something.
Under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department must approve changes to election law in regions with a history, however distant, of racial discrimination.

The Justice Department prevented the 2008 referendum change, arguing in part that “the elimination of party affiliation on the ballot will likely reduce the ability of blacks to elect candidates of choice.”
First, Section 5 of the VRA is another piece of evidence that every piece of legislation should come with an expiration date.

I find it offensive that Barack Obama's Department of Justice, under the leadership of Eric Holder, has demonstrated such a dim view of black Americans. Sadly, it's not the first time.

'Unbelievable' rise in weapons permits

Via Survival

The number of Iowans seeking permits to carry handguns and other weapons has increased 170 percent during the first 11 months of 2011 — a trend one Iowa sheriff calls “unbelievable.”

During the first year in which a new law gave sheriffs less discretion over which residents can be denied permits, 94,516 Iowans sought and received non-professional weapons permits from January through November, the Iowa Department of Public Safety reports.

Data from the state’s three most populous counties show an even greater surge in weapons permits in key urban areas. In Polk, Linn and Scott counties, the number of permits issued thus far in 2011 is 271 percent higher than in 2010.

“It really has been amazing,” Cerro Gordo County Sheriff Kevin Pals said. “Interest has continued the whole year here.”

The increase is attributed to a change in state law that took effect Jan. 1 that requires Iowa sheriffs to give weapons permits to almost everyone who asks for one. Previously, a sheriff could deny a permit for any or no reason.

A spot check statewide shows:

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Three myths about the detention bill


I missed this one.

In sum, there is simply no question that this bill codifies indefinite detention without trial (Myth 1).

There is no question that it significantly expands the statutory definitions of the War on Terror and those who can be targeted as part of it (Myth 2).

The issue of application to U.S. citizens (Myth 3) is purposely muddled — that’s why Feinstein’s amendments were rejected — and there is consequently no doubt this bill can and will be used by the U.S. Government (under this President or a future one) to bolster its argument that it is empowered to indefinitely detain even U.S. citizens without a trial (NYT Editorial: “The legislation could also give future presidents the authority to throw American citizens into prison for life without charges or a trial”; Sen. Bernie Sanders: “This bill also contains misguided provisions that in the name of fighting terrorism essentially authorize the indefinite imprisonment of American citizens without charges”).

STURMGEWEHR 44 assault rifle

The first assault rifle, continuing the rant........



The StG44 (Sturmgewehr 44 or "Assault rifle model 1944") was an assault rifle developed in Nazi Germany during World War II and was the first of its kind to see major deployment. It is also known under the designations MP43 and MP44 (Maschinenpistole 43, Maschinenpistole 44 respectively), which denotes earlier development versions of the same weapon.

Jackie Kuhls: Moron Or Liar?

Spurred by Blue's post
which has two videos of this knowledgeable person........::)

FATWHITEMAN
Verbatim Post

I've heard the anti-freedom, anti-American and anti-gun crowd spit up their nonsense before. These idiots are scattered around the country in small numbers but, hands down, the biggest concentration of them has to be in New York. From the world's biggest hypocrite, Mayor Bloomberg to the dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks Carolyn McCarthy and her infamous shoulder thing that goes up speech, I think there may be more liberal nuts in New York than anywhere else in the country. Anti-gun blogger MikeB introduced me to another yesterday, and of course she is from New York.

Listen to her drivel ( At Seriously...) and you have to realize that she is at best, an idiot and at worse a bald faced liar. She can't complete a single thought without lying or contradicting herself.

Rather from a low IQ or from deliberate deception, everything this woman says is blatantly wrong.

"An assault weapon is a gun that is designed to spray-fire from the hip."

Wrong, an assault rifle is a RIFLE. It is select-fire meaning that it can be fully automatic and it fires a rifle-length or abbreviated rifle cartridge. While you might make the argument that a submachine gun is designed to be fired from the hip (and I stress might) they will fire pistol sized cartridges and may or may not be select fire. They also are not assault rifles. An assault rifle has sights and is designed to be fired as a rifle—not "spray fired from the hip".

"They were created to be used in trench warfare when soldiers found that regular long rifles did not suit them in the trenches."

Jackie had better read a history book. Trench warfare was last used at any length during the great war. While the "trench broom" was conceived in the trenches, the Tommy Gun was never put into production until well after World War I. The Tommy Gun, of Thompson Submachine gun is also not an assault rifle. The assault rifle, as it is defined, did not see combat until the end of World War II, a generation later. The Soviets and the U.S. did not field assault rifles as standard issue until the early 1950's.

"They were used for decades primarily in war."

She may have at least come close to getting something right.

"About 30 years ago or so, the gun industry in an effort to address declining gun sales modified a weapon for civilian use and began marketing assault weapons heavily towards civilians."

See, she admits what we have said all along: semi-auto only rifles are not assault rifles. They are "modified" for civilian use.

"The danger of an assault weapon is that bullets fired from an assault weapon can go through doors; they generally can pierce many of the bullet proof vests that law enforcement wears so they pose a particular threat to law enforcement."

True, an assault rifle bullet generally can penetrate a bullet proof vest as the majority worn by law enforcement officers. So can any rifle round fired from just about any modern rifle as well as a knife. Protective vests are made to stop a lot of handgun bullets. They are not designed to stop a rifle round. No one but anti-gunners pretend that they are otherwise.

"In fact we know from some data that 1 in 5 law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty is killed with an assault weapon."

Bullshit, nothing else can describe that utter fabrication. 1 in 5 police officers killed in the line of duty are not even killed with any rifle. In fact, assault rifles comprise less than 1% of all gun crimes against everyone. More police officers are killed in traffic accidents every year than by rifles, assault or otherwise.

"The United States had an assault weapons ban for 10 years that expired in 2004. The ban that was in effect was littered with loopholes because this chart shows guns that were originally banned on the left column then the gun industry made a series of modifications that complied with the law. They ended up creating copycat weapons that were not even in the spirit of the law but complied with the letter of the law"

How dare the gun manufacturers comply with the law! What did she want them to do, not comply with the law? And they did comply with the "spirit" of the law as well. The law was designed as a feel good law. It didn't really ban anything but instead banned cosmetics that "looked scary" such as flash surpressors, bayonet mounts and of course those "shoulder things that go up". In the chart she shows, half of the firearms are not even assault rifles and the other half may or may not be. I will grant the ban one success though. During the 10 years that the ban was in affect, there was not one recorded drive-by bayonetting in the U.S. Notice the use of the word "loophole" to describe something that is not illegal but they want it to be in spite of their own law that they crafted.

Finally she closes by ranting about assault weapons "being attractive to the Columbine shooters and Beltway sniper", of course completely ignoring the fact that none of those criminals used an actual assault weapon or even one that would be covered under her glorious assault weapons ban.

So there you have it, 2 and 1/2 minutes of YouTube garbage and the only true thing she manages to come up with is that assault weapons are used in war. We already knew that. Very few actual assault weapons reside in civilian hands in the U.S., criminal or legally. I guess we sold them all to Mexican or British crime gangs.

This lady obviously suffers from severe hoplophobia. I hope she seeks help. One thing she has in common with nearly all anti-gunners, and where she and her ilk differ from MikeB, is that the antis do not want comments. Seems like once they spit out their lies and filth they don't want anyone with facts and rational thought coming around to correct them. I'm just glad these people exist in small numbers. I also would like to wish our brothers and sisters at Long Island Firearms the best of luck in their struggle behind the liberal curtain.

How cultural snobbery went to the Left Coast

This is a very good article which first appeared in The American Prospect on how the American Left was tagged with the cultural snobbery/”elitist” label (class warfare anyone?) which I forgot to include in yesterday’s list.

This response letter I found at The Washington Monthly, which had linked to the TAP article, pretty much explains how Hollywood and the mass entertainment industry works as it does. Indeed, you can find the 1% in more places than just Wall Street:

As a certified member of the “left wing Hollywood writers,” (member of the WGA for 26 years) I believe I have a few answers for this.

Forget all the questions about McCarthyism, since nobody actively working in Hollywood (i.e., people under 40) have a clue what McCarthyism was, other than when (if) they go to a meeting at the local Guild office and see pictures of people who are about the age of their great-grandparents, who they know nothing about since to them an “old” movie is anything made before 1985 and most of them do not watch Turner Classic Movies. So they aren’t out to get revenge on the working class for supporting Old Tailgunner Joe. They barely know who he was.

What happened in Hollywood over the past 30 years is that the system changed. People like myself, who really did come from a lower-middle/working class background, can’t break in any more because we can’t afford to work for free for however many years it takes. Myself, like many others way back when, I was able to learn the business while paying the rent and buying food regularly because I was fortunate enough to get hired to work for Roger Corman. One didn’t get paid much, but did get paid enough if you worked fast enough, and if what you did was good enough to get made you got to work some more and pay your bills while learning. We who went through it call it the “Roger Corman Film School,” and it’s got a pretty good list of grads, none of whom could repeat that today.

That system has been dead for at least the past 20 years.

What happened is that Hollywood became “cool” as a career destination for the upper classes back then. Starting in the early 1990s, kids with trust funds became the majority graduates of USC, UCLA and NYC Film Schools. They came to Hollywood and were willing to work as (unpaid) interns. All of a sudden, the people in those low-paying jobs one learns the ropes in were confronted with the worst kind of low-wage competition: no-wage competition. Why hire someone who needs $500 a week to survive when you can get someone with an Ivy League degree who will work for free????

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M-44 Brake & 10 round mag

The SKS post got me thinking about my M-44 Scout. The brake link below describes what I had to change to prevent the bolts from shearing off.

Waiting list




Sheriff Joe 'suspicious' of motive behind Obama attacks

That's a polite way of stating he believes 100%:)

Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona's Maricopa County has been under fire for his immigration law-enforcement policies from protesters who simply object to what he's doing, in a lawsuit alleging his department profiles on race, and from the federal government which has canceled agreements with his department to check for violators who arrive at his jail.

Now he's wondering just how much of that displeasure from Washington is being generated by the perceived White House alarm over his Cold Case Posse investigation checking out suspicions raised by area tea-party officials that Barack Obama may use or try to use fraudulent documents to be on the 2012 presidential ballot in Arizona.

In an interview with WND, the sheriff said, "I am an elected sheriff. I took an oath of office to enforce all the laws of the state of Arizona. I take that very seriously. I do report to the people."

But he said he's considering the possibility there are political connections to the circumstances that have developed.

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For the Establishment, President Obama is better than a President Paul.

Foreign Policy: Why this issue is Ron Paul's strongest...

Establishment Republicans have become apoplectic over the potential for a Ron Paul victory. They claim his Foreign Policy agenda will destroy America. Translation: President Paul will throttle back the dollars going into the War Machine, and will take the most lucrative market off the table - the American Domestic market.

There are trillions on the table for defense companies in an America that focuses her bayonets inward. Think VIPR Teams, scanners, armored vehicles for the Podunk Police Department, et cetera.

Ron Paul refuses to let that obtain. He points to that troublesome document for support - the Constitution.

What the Republicans fear is genuine: Ron Paul's Foreign Policy positions appeal to the Hard Right and they will appeal to the Hard Left in a General Election.


Ron Paul's economic message appeals to an even broader coalition of Left & Right.

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Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859

Dixie

Elizabeth R. Varon’s Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859 is a history of the concept of disunion in the Early Republic and Antebellum era.

“Disunion” used to be the most powerful and provocative concept in the American political vocabulary. Previous generations had a sense that the American Republic was a voluntary union. It was an alliance of states that was held together by the affection and self-interest of its constituent parts.

The Union of the Founding Fathers was based on Enlightenment rationalism: it was a federation of republics, a compact that had been created for the mutual advantage of all parties, a free government that had been founded to secure the rights of its citizens and the “Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” a government that was based on the “consent of the governed,” etc.

If this sounds unfamiliar to modern ears, it is because the eighteenth century Union expired on the battlefields of War Between the States. In its place, Lincoln and the Radical Republicans created a forced Union and consolidated nation-state based on nineteenth century Northern romantic nationalism, in which the 14th Amendment reduced the South to the status of junior partner.

“Disunion” was originally a dirty word. It connoted the dissolution of the Republic – “the failure of the Founders’ efforts to establish a stable and lasting representative government.” The term was associated with “extreme political factionalism, class conflict, gender disorder, racial strife, widespread violence and anarchy, and civil war, all of which could be interpreted as God’s retribution for America’s moral failings.”

In this sense, “disunion” was invoked as a threat, an accusation, a prophecy, a process, and a program in the Early Republic and Antebellum era. As a threat, disunion was invoked as leverage in making political demands. As an accusation, disunion was invoked in partisan debates to score political points by accusing rivals of being disunionists. As a prophecy, disunion was invoked as a forecast of national ruin to encourage sectional compromise. As a process, disunion was used to describe sectional alienation. As a program, disunion was cooperative or individual state secession which was the mechanism by which states severed their ties to the Union.

Northerners and Southerners invoked the language of disunion throughout this period. The Constitution of 1789 was a compromise between the North and the South. It was practical settlement that fully pleased neither side which was necessary to create a stronger federal government while preserving the Union.

The Anti-Federalists believed the Constitution gave too much power to the federal government and that it would prove to be destructive to the rights of the states. Patrick Henry “smelt a rat in Philadelphia” and opposed the Constitution. George Mason objected that “there was no declaration of rights” and that “the five Southern states will be ruined” by commercial regulations and that “the power of providing for the general welfare may be perverted to its destruction.”

In response to these concerns, James Madison claimed in The Federalist #45 that, “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.”

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Mein Kampf is 'perfect Christmas present'

Via Atlas Shrugs

A copy of the Adolf Hitler book was included in a seasonal promotion at a branch in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, bearing a festive label describing it as “an essential read”.

The display was removed after a complaint from a customer. A Waterstone’s spokesman said: “A customer spotted that one shop had used a seasonal point-of-sale wraparound promoting the book as the ‘perfect present’.

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Troy, Michigan Rejects Federal Money

There is no greater pleasure to a conservative heart to see the media serfs of the socialist political establishment scream in pain when a person is faithful and uncompromising in standing on their moral principles. It always reminds me of the Gospel stories where demons screamed of pain when Jesus cast them out. When immorality, wickedness, and deceit meet integrity, faithfulness, and truth, the excruciating pain in the heart of evil is a sight to see.

Such pleasure I had reading an article in The New York Times today: “Michigan City Turns Down Millions of Dollars, Saying Federal Money Is Not Free.”

Janice Daniels, the Mayor of the City of Troy elected with the votes of the Tea Party – and herself one of the founders of the local chapter of the Tea Party – urged the City Council to turn down the federal grant. “There’s nothing free about government money,” she said in an interview. “It’s never free, and it’s crippling our way of life.” That’s exactly according to the principles of the Tea Party. And exactly according to the principles this Republic was founded upon. It is about moral principles.

The liberal New York Times just can’t get it. How come? If Mayor Daniels was a liberal, she would have sacrificed every single moral principle for money – that’s what liberals always do, money trumps ethics every day of the week if one is a liberal. And they think everyone else is like them.

So they have an explanation:

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‘Tight oil’ holds promise of ending U.S. oil imports

The drilling rigs puncture the horizons and tuck into the valleys of the bald North Dakota landscape. Their steel towers have taken root on a tableau of badlands and treeless plains that extends for more than 100 kilometres.

They are like steeples in the French countryside, erected in ever greater numbers, more every month, by an industry whose only deity is oil. Near many are the flares, the votive candles of the hydrocarbon age, where natural gas not worth enough to save is burned in enormous fireballs, some the size of small cars, so brilliant they blind drivers at night.

Cutting through it all are the roads – paved, gravel, red rock – that carry the rumbling parade of trucks, some burdened with supplies for the rigs, others with the oil they have prodded from the earth.

This is the place the energy companies call the Bakken, an oil play that has erupted across a forgotten corner of the U.S. It is a frenzy of drilling and pumping and moneymaking. It is also a place where a new energy future is emerging, one that holds the promise of ending U.S. dependence on overseas oil and kick-starting the country’s stagnant economy. Government estimates suggest it could yield 4.3 billion barrels of oil. One industry estimate is five times higher, which would mean the Bakken alone could hold as much recoverable oil as the rest of the country. And it’s just the beginning.

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Fiction is not keeping up with reality

Oleg Volk
Verbatim Post

When John Ross wrote his seminal Unintended Consequences, people accused him of being overly dramatic. After all, ATF agents wouldn’t frame people or commit murder., right? When Matt Bracken wrote Enemies Foreign and Domestic series, most readers thought the idea of ATF committing and facilitating mass murder far-fethced, and certainly didn’t expect militarized TSA roadblocks all over America.

The trouble with fiction is that it has to remain plausible. Stupidity and abuse of power have no such restrictions. We have plenty of examples from other countries to suggest that this misconduct will escalate until they either run out of victims (Rwanda and Burundi in 1993-94), get killed by people acting in self-defense (the fate of quite a few redcoats around 1780s) or rescued by foreign invasion (as was the case with Pol Pot’s Cambodia, 1979). I wonder how this will play out with ATF and TSA. It’s already disturbing that the only reason their depredations came to light was the killing of another Fed. The press paid no attention while only regular people were being murdered or wrongfully imprisoned.