The Benghazi cover-up is finally unraveling. A well-reported piece in the Weekly Standard exposes the process by which the intelligence estimate on Benghazi was laundered to remove all mention of Islamic militants. The claims that the drivel put out by the administration were the intelligence community’s best estimate are an outright lie.
The piece really needs to be read in its entirely, but a graphic illustrating the laundering process is extracted here. And here is the reason why:
The talking points were first distributed to officials in the interagency vetting process at 6:52 p.m. on Friday. Less than an hour later, at 7:39 p.m., an individual identified in the House report only as a “senior State Department official” responded to raise “serious concerns” about the draft. That official, whom The Weekly Standard has confirmed was State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland, worried that members of Congress would use the talking points to criticize the State Department for “not paying attention to Agency warnings.”
There, in black and white: the estimates were laundered for political reasons.
On the night of the Benghazi terror attack, special operations put out multiple calls for all available military and other assets to be moved into position to help — but the State Department and White House never gave the military permission to cross into Libya, sources told Fox News.
We don’t know who the sources are, I hope they are among the whistleblowers so we can get them on record. But we already know that the CIA operators who defended the consulate personnel were ordered twice to leave them to die, so this is entirely plausible.
Third, the Benghazi attack was an Al Qaeda attack. While we ponder that entirely unsurprising development, think of what transpired the morning after the Benghazi attack: Our feckless diplomats responded to a terrorist attack (one we now know, but always suspected, was an Al Qaeda attack) by apologizing. Mitt Romney said (paraphrasing) maybe we shouldn’t be apologizing to terrorists while we are still burying our dead, and virtually the entire media attacked Romney for it!
All of this shows massive malfeasance on the part of the administration, and the media that covers for them, but it misses the true scandal. The administration put a filmmaker in jail over the Benghazi attack, and he is still there. I can scarcely imagine a greater dereliction of presidential duty than jailing a man for exercising his free speech because it offended foreign Islamists. (Glenn Reynolds isn’t letting this go either.)
ASIDE: Please, no nonsense about how Nakoula Nakoula is in jail for parole violations. Yes, those were the charges they used to jail him, but they never would have cared about a minor parole violation if not for him making the video that they claimed was responsible for the Benghazi attack. In fact, they never would have known his identity if not for a federal investigation that pierced his pseudonym. We need to know who ordered that investigation and why (although we can guess). Efforts to get to the bottom of Benghazi won’t have even begun until we know that, as far as I’m concerned.
The basic problem at Sandy Hook and other shooting incidents comes down to this: There were too many armed bad guys, and not enough armed good guys. You can resolve the problem by having fewer armed bad guys (hard to accomplish), or more armed good guys.
However, this administration has worked to have more armed bad guys, and fewer armed good guys. This is sheer idiocy.
A quick note about the Manchin-Toomey gun-control bill that failed today: David Kopel explains that while the bill purports to forbid a gun registry, it actually authorizes one, and that, and while the bill purports to strengthen interstate transport protection, it actually eviscerates it. (UPDATE: Much more here.) Others have pointed out that, despite purporting not to do so, the bill’s vagueness and arbitrariness effectively require background checks for all private sales.
Are those interpretations correct? There is one thing on which you may depend: If the bill had passed (or if it still yet passes), the people who are complaining today about the supposed lies against the bill are the very same people who will be calling for the courts to adopt that strongly anti-gun interpretation.
This is why there is no such thing as moderate gun control. Whatever the bill is supposed to say, indeed whatever it does say, bears no resemblance to how it will look once Obama’s regulation-drafters and solicitors are through with it. And they know it. That’s the whole point.
Last week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KT) staged a 13-hour filibuster to try to extract from the Obama administration an answer to a very simple question: Under what circumstances does the president have the power to kill Americans on US soil without any judicial process?
The answer to this question is not obvious. Even in a purely law-enforcement context, sometimes an active criminal needs to be shot on sight. But, at the other extreme, no one would suggest that the president may assassinate Americans for political differences. Clearly the power should exist but is severely limited.
But what exactly are those limitations? The problem is that the administration won’t say. Paul succeeded in getting the administration to admit that its power to kill Americans is not unlimited:
Dear Senator Paul:
It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: “Does the president have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill Americans not engaged in combat on U.S. soil?” The answer to that question is no.
Sincerely,
Eric H. Holder, Jr.
Yes, that’s the entire letter. (ASIDE: Either due to a strange oversight or a fit of pique, the White House released the letter to the media but never actually sent it to Paul.) It’s good that the administration admits to some limits, but this tells us virtually nothing about where they see those limits.
On September 11, 2001, while the Pentagon was still burning, the Justice Department was already at work drafting legal rules that would govern the War on Terror. Some of those rules came under fire, of course, but the Bush administration put them out forthrightly and abided by them. That’s called respect for the rule of law.
Later, when the Bush administration’s critics (most of them hypocritically, but some in good faith) attacked those rules, they had specific legal opinions to dispute.
Barack Obama’s attitude toward all this is clarified by a revealing exchange with Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV):
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) confronted the president over the administration’s refusal for two years to show congressional intelligence committees Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memos justifying the use of lethal force against American terror suspects abroad. . .
In response to Rockefeller’s critique, Obama said he’s not involved in drafting such memos, the senators told POLITICO. He also tried to assure his former colleagues that his administration is more open to oversight than that of President George W. Bush, whom many Democratic senators attacked for secrecy and for expanding executive power in the national security realm.
“This is not Dick Cheney we’re talking about here,” he said.
Instead of offering a legal justification (which the administration refuses to give), Obama explains that he (unlike Dick Cheney) is a good guy. To paraphrase: We don’t need legal strictures when the right person is making the decisions. More tersely: I don’t need legal justification; I’m Obama.
That’s called disrespect for the rule of law.
This matter is too important to allow the Obama administration to make it up as they go along. If the administration will write and publicize rules governing domestic drone strikes, we can debate those rules. But if they refuse to do so, Congress needs to do it.
The canceled tours prompted a pointed question to Obama from House Administration Committee Chairwoman Candice Miller (R-Mich.) during the president’s meeting with House Republicans on Wednesday. Miller asked why Obama put an end to the tours instead of just cancelling the congressional Christmas party or the congressional picnic.
When Obama said the decision was prompted by the Secret Service, some lawmakers groaned in disbelief.
“Now, now, let’s be respectful,” Obama replied.
Note that, when he says “let’s be respectful”, he means “you be respectful to me”. He’s not going to respect them even enough to refrain from obvious, ridiculous lies.
POSTSCRIPT: By the way, if a well-deserved groan in private is disrespectful, what was this?
When it comes to horribly complicated legislation, Obamacare was no piker (1600 pages!), but the legislation itself pales to what it became once the bureaucrats got their hands on it:
That’s 20k pages and counting. When we started letting Congress delegate its power to bureaucrats, this was the inevitable result.
It used to be that Congress’s time would impose some practical limit on the number of rules they could impose on us, but now that the executive branch makes most of the rules without the messy process of legislation, there’s no practical limit on the rules they can burden us with.
The top U.S. immigration enforcement official acknowledged Thursday that the Obama administration has in fact released thousands of illegal immigrants from local jails over the last month despite prior claims that the release was only in the hundreds.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton, at a House appropriations subcommittee hearing, said the agency released a total of 2,228 illegal immigrants from local jails “throughout the country” between Feb. 9 and March 1 for “solely budgetary reasons.” . . .
But Morton’s acknowledgement that more than 2,000 were released appeared to conflict with prior claims from the administration, which said it was only releasing hundreds.
The Associated Press first reported March 1 that the administration had released more than 2,000 illegal immigrants since at least Feb. 15 and planned to release 3,000 more in March due to looming budget cuts, but Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said days later that the AP’s report was “not really accurate” and that the story had developed “its own mythology.”
(Emphasis mine.)
Do not believe anything the Obama administration says, ever.
President Obama said his administration was looking at ways to resume White House tours for school groups. “This was not a decision that went up to the White House,” noted Obama in an ABC News interview aired on Wednesday, saying the directive came from the Secret Service.
White House spokesman Jay Carney, March 7:
In order to allow the Secret Service to best fulfill its core mission, the White House made the decision that we would, unfortunately, have to temporarily suspend these tours.
(Emphasis mine.) One of these two statements, certainly, is a lie.
Almost certainly, it’s the former. Is the White House really going to cease tours without directions from the White House? Come on. Besides, we have plenty of examples of the White House directing its people to make the sequester as painful as possible, so this would be well within precedent.
Moreover, when Jay Carney was questioned on this, he explained that the decision absolutely did go to the White House. (Trying to square the circle, he also explained that the decision nevertheless was really made by the Secret Service.)
If you’re a fan of electric cars, you won’t like this:
A 2012 comprehensive life-cycle analysis in Journal of Industrial Ecology shows that almost half the lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions from an electric car come from the energy used to produce the car, especially the battery. . . When an electric car rolls off the production line, it has already been responsible for 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide emission. The amount for making a conventional car: 14,000 pounds.
While electric-car owners may cruise around feeling virtuous, they still recharge using electricity overwhelmingly produced with fossil fuels. Thus, the life-cycle analysis shows that for every mile driven, the average electric car indirectly emits about six ounces of carbon-dioxide. This is still a lot better than a similar-size conventional car, which emits about 12 ounces per mile. But remember, the production of the electric car has already resulted in sizeable emissions—the equivalent of 80,000 miles of travel in the vehicle.
So unless the electric car is driven a lot, it will never get ahead environmentally. And that turns out to be a challenge. Consider the Nissan Leaf. It has only a 73-mile range per charge. Drivers attempting long road trips, as in one BBC test drive, have reported that recharging takes so long that the average speed is close to six miles per hour—a bit faster than your average jogger.
It gets worse:
To make matters worse, the batteries in electric cars fade with time, just as they do in a cellphone. Nissan estimates that after five years, the less effective batteries in a typical Leaf bring the range down to 55 miles. As the MIT Technology Review cautioned last year: “Don’t Drive Your Nissan Leaf Too Much.”
And if you replace the batteries, you get to start your carbon footprint all over. Bottom line:
If a typical electric car is driven 50,000 miles over its lifetime, the huge initial emissions from its manufacture means the car will actually have put more carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere than a similar-size gasoline-powered car driven the same number of miles. . . Even if the electric car is driven for 90,000 miles and the owner stays away from coal-powered electricity, the car will cause just 24% less carbon-dioxide emission than its gas-powered cousin.
(Emphasis mine.)
But, electric cars put a lot of money into the pockets of Obama’s cronies, so they have that going at least.
Remember when the Obamacare’s health exchanges were supposed to make shopping for health care easy? The reality is quite the opposite:
Applying for benefits under President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul could be as daunting as doing your taxes. The government’s draft application runs 15 pages for a three-person family. An outline of the online version has 21 steps, some with additional questions. . .
That’s just the first part of the process, which lets you know if you qualify for financial help. . . Once you’re finished with the money part, actually picking a health plan will require additional steps, plus a basic understanding of insurance jargon. . .
Some are concerned that a lot of uninsured people will be overwhelmed and simply give up.
Of course, giving up isn’t actually allowed. With the individual mandate, giving up means paying a heavy fine.
Another new technology for nuclear reactors is reaching maturity: the molten-salt reactor. One important aspect of the design is it’s “walk-away safe”. That means it doesn’t require any power to remain safe; you can walk away from it and it will safely coast to a halt.
A company says it’s ready to commercialize the design. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, government is in the way:
Bringing the new reactor to market will be challenging. Although the basic idea of a molten-salt reactor has been demonstrated, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s certification process is set up around light-water reactors. The company will need the NRC to establish new regulations, especially since the commission must sign off on the idea of using less steel and concrete if the design’s safety features are to lead to real savings.
The Obama administration is cutting White House tours and national park visiting hours, but a $704 thousand gardening project in Belgium for the US ambassador to NATO is going ahead.
(Somehow, that bunch got away with portraying the Romneys as out-of-touch with ordinary people. Amazing.)
UPDATE: The White House says they weren’t responsible for the decision to cancel tours, and they’re trying to figure out a way to restart them. Amazing how little influence the White House has when it doesn’t want one.
One obvious way to restart them (other than just, you know, restarting them) would be to accept the contributions of variouspersons who have offered to pay for tours, “but the White House has turned down the request, saying that it could not allow private individuals to pay the Secret Service.” Because that would defeat the purpose of cancelling tours in the first place.
Gabby Gifford’s husband buys an AR-15. Having been caught, he now says he’s not going to keep it.
POSTSCRIPT: I wonder if this story is burying the lede, though. Mark Kelly impulse-bought an AR-15. That means there’s a gun store in Arizona that has AR-15s in stock!
UPDATE: C’mon, this doesn’t even pass the laugh test:
Appearing on CNN’s The Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer on March 11, Mark Kelly said he planned from the start to hand over an AR-15 rifle he purchased to the Tuscon Police Department.
Please. If you’re doing it to make a point, you make a media circus out of it. Doing it quietly accomplishes no purpose but throwing your own money away.
People argue against universal government-run preschool on grounds like (1) it’s too expensive, or (2) it doesn’t work, or (3) the government has no business doing it anyway. All of that is true, but Katherine Mangu-Ward has an even better point:
Which do you think is more likely?:
(a) We make preschool universal and that starts a cascade of awesomeness into the general public school system, or
(b) we graft a universal preschool entitlement onto the existing universal K-12 entitlement, and preschool starts to suck just as much as the rest of the system?
Another federal employee has come forward to claim the Obama administration resisted efforts to ease the impact of sequester.
A U.S. park ranger, who did not wish to be identified, told FoxNews.com that supervisors within the National Park Service overruled plans to deal with the budget cuts in a way that would have had minimal impact on the public. Instead, the source said, park staff were told to cancel special events and cut “interpretation services” — the talks, tours and other education services provided by local park rangers.
“Apparently, they want the public to feel the pain,” the ranger said.
Yesterday I spent much of the day in a waiting room with Fox News on the television, and they were going after the administration hammer and tongs, with case after case of the administration deliberately making cuts hurt. I don’t think it’s going to work. The White House tours and national parks won’t stay closed forever, and when they reopen them, how will they explain it?
Meanwhile, while cutting services that people can see, the administration has advertised for 2596 new jobs since sequestration went into effect.
Glenn Kessler, who has been doing yeoman’s work debunking the White House’s stream of sequestrationlies, debunks another. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan:
It just means a lot more children will not get the kinds of services and opportunities they need, and as many as 40,000 teachers could lose their jobs. … There are literally teachers now who are getting pink slips, who are getting notices that they can’t come back this fall.
Lie. After being pressed for days for an example, the White House finally produced a single district in West Virginia, but even that wasn’t true. In Kanawha County, five or six teachers (not 40,000) are being transferred (not laid off), due to a change in state policy (not due to sequestration).
These aren’t matters of opinion where the administration can simply argue assumptions; these are easily checkable statements with hard numbers attached. From this I infer that the administration is having a hard time finding concrete examples of bad things that the sequester is going to do. Nor is that a huge surprise. Whether you’re for or against the sequester, we are talking about relatively small sums, in the scope of the federal deficit. They’re simply not going to show up in much measurable way as devastating hardship.
POSTSCRIPT: Despite being on the front line of the administration’s lies, Kessler still wants to give them the benefit of the doubt:
In other words, Duncan’s scare story about teacher layoffs — right now, at this moment — was apparently too good to check. If the Obama administration had learned anything about the Susan Rice-Benghazi debacle, you would have thought it was to make sure the talking points for the Sunday shows are rock-solid. Given that Duncan had made this claim once to reporters, couldn’t anyone in his office have bothered to pick up the phone and double-check the information?
It’s not a matter of checking. The Benghazi misinformation wasn’t a mistake; it was a lie. So is this.
Caught on tape: Jan Schakowsky (D-IL, Democratic chief deputy whip) admitting that the proposed “assault weapons” ban is just the first step, and they will ultimately try to ban all guns, Second Amendment or not.
Has there ever been a US president who spent more time bellyaching about about the constitutional separation of powers than Barack Obama? It’s really quite unseemly.
But more worrisome than the president’s disdain for constitutional government is the left’s lack of concern about his disdain. If half the country and nearly the entire media are tired of constitutional government, we are in serious trouble.
In the latest instance, Obama complains in his radio address that “our democratic debates messy and often frustrating.” Which they are, of course, but that’s by design.
Obama goes on to say that “what makes us special is when we summon the ability to see past those differences.” Wrong. What makes us special is not when we get past differences, but when we see the beauty in having differences!
On the issue of the janitors, if you work for an hourly wage and you earn overtime, and you depend on that overtime to make ends meet, it is simply a fact that a reduction in overtime is a reduction in your pay.
Glenn Kessler looked at this one too:
Still, the White House has kept up its spin offensive, claiming that a cut in “overtime” was a de facto pay cut and thus the president was right — or at least not wrong.
So, we wondered: How much overtime do Capitol Hill janitors actually make? . . .
It averaged $304 per employee in fiscal year 2012 and $388 per employee thus far in the current fiscal year. “Cleaning technicians do not earn what I would consider to be a great deal of overtime pay,” Swanson said.
In other words, overtime amounts to only pittance of the overall pay — about $6.50 a week on top of wages of $1,000 a week. That’s much different from Carney’s claim of having to “depend on that overtime to make ends meet.” Indeed, even before the sequester was implemented, Capitol Hill janitors have already earned more overtime pay than they did in all of last year.
A White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
I’ll bet.
Finally, Kessler had an insight on how the White House messaging machine works:
First of all, we should note that the White House’s story kept evolving as we reported last week’s column. It’s almost as if the president’s aides had to scramble to come up with reasons why the president could be correct, without actually knowing the facts.
So, when we forwarded to White House aides an AOC memo saying no furloughs were planned, White House aides latched onto a line about overtime reductions. For a couple of hours, we were also told that the janitors were on contract — and contracts were being curtailed. But that line of reasoning turned out to be incorrect. Then, after the statements from the Capitol were issued, there was no longer any response.
But, as seen by the quotes above, the talking point about “overtime” did not fade away.
Kessler is too charitable. When this bunch repeatedly says things “without actually knowing the facts”, it’s reasonable to assume that they don’t actually care what the facts are. Still, I’m glad he’s starting to figure this out. Maybe he will be less willing to cover for them in the future.
The gun banners are telling us that shotguns are the responsible alternative to semi-automatic rifles. (Well, Joe “shoot through the door” Biden doesn’t exactly stress the responsibility part. . .) But the gun control bill that looks likely to pass in Colorado would ban semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns, which is to say nearly all shotguns in use.
A leaked email from the Agriculture Department shows the administration rejecting plans to mitigate the consequences of the sequester:
We have gone on record with a notification to Congress and whoever else that “APHIS would eliminate assistance to producers in 24 States in managing wildlife damage to the aquaculture industry, unless they provide funding to cover the costs.” So, it is our opinion that however you manage that reduction, you need to make sure you are not contradicting what we said the impact would be.
(Emphasis mine.)
It would an injustice of historic proportions if the Democrats get away with blaming Republicans for the sequester when the Democrats are deliberately making it as painful as possible. But with the press on their side, they might still get away with it.
Remember when Obama promised if you like your health care you could keep it? Yep, that was a lie. Obamacare’s Medicare cuts which will push millions of seniors from their Medicare Advantage plans into standard Medicare, are going ahead.
Remember when the Democrats were strongly against so-called domestic surveillance? Back then, we were talking about Americans who take phone calls from foreigners under surveillance. Now we’re talking about Americans just going about their business, and Democrats think it’s hunky-dory.
I think there ought to be a simple bright-line rule: DOD can have drones (but posse comitatus applies), DOJ and DHS cannot.
Fox News has a column running down some of the out-of-control NLRB’s most outrageous rulings. I think the most outrageous is its decision that employers must turn over the names of whistleblowers to the union, so the union can punish them. A close second is its decision that stores cannot forbid clerks to post signs telling customers to take their business elsewhere.
Fortunately, these rulings are all likely to go away, since they were issued by illegal recess appointees. Unfortunately, once Obama loses the appeal, he’ll just appoint the same lunatics again, and they’ll make the same decisions again.
Time was when our presidents were proud to be part of the Constitutional system, limited by checks and balances. George Washington turned aside an effort to make him king. Thomas Jefferson famously was wracked with guilt for carrying out the Louisiana Purchase without clear Constitutional authorization.
Obama says that we don’t need the sequester because he’s already made $2.5 trillion in budget cuts. It turns out that that figure is based on current law, which includes the sequester. He’s arguing that we don’t need the sequester, because we’ve got the sequester.
In a recent post, I argued that gun-control advocates want you to be at the mercy of aggressors, and you’ll probably never find a better example of their mandatory victimhood than this one:
A Florida high school student wrestled a loaded gun away from another teen on the bus ride home this week and was slapped with a suspension in return. . .
The student said the suspect, a football player, threatened to shoot a teammate because he had been arguing with his friend.
Authorities confirmed to WFTX the weapon was indeed loaded, and the arrest report stated the suspect, identified by WVZN-TV as Quadryle Davis, was “pointing the gun directly” at the other student and “threatening to shoot him.”
That’s when, the teen told the station, he and two others tackled the suspect and wrestled the gun away. The next day, all three were suspended. . . The school’s referral slip said he was given an “emergency suspension” for being involved in an “incident” with a weapon.
The hero of the incident, who was unarmed and did nothing wrong, is being punished for preventing a shooting. Tar and feathers are too good for these jackals.
A brief history of the sequester: (1) Democrats and Republicans were supposed to work together to devise a deficit reduction plan based on spending cuts and no tax increases. (2) If the parties couldn’t agree, the sequester would automatically impose spending cuts. (3) Both parties were supposed to be motivated to avoid the cuts, but Democrats never negotiated in good faith because they planned to renege on the ground rules and demand tax hikes. (4) Once this became clear, Republicans decided that it would be better just to let automatic cuts take place, but proposed legislation that would give the president the power to allocate those cuts to the least damaging places. (5) Senate Democrats killed that legislation, because they want the sequester to be as painful as possible. (6) The Obama administration, now, is making sure the sequester is as painful as possible.
Before the sequester, the White House promoted sequester pain by lying about what would happen. For example:
Starting tomorrow everybody here, all the folks who are cleaning the floors at the Capitol. Now that Congress has left, somebody’s going to be vacuuming and cleaning those floors and throwing out the garbage. They’re going to have less pay. The janitors, the security guards, they just got a pay cut, and they’ve got to figure out how to manage that. That’s real.
That’s President Obama, telling an outright lie. Glenn Kessler obtained two different documents explaining that capitol janitors and guards would not be effected. In Kessler’s assessment, “nothing in Obama’s statement came close to being correct.”
Now that the sequester is under way, the White House plan is to promote pain, using the time-honored “Washington Monument strategy”, in which you cut key functions but preserve the waste. Thus, in one example, the Department of Agriculture is cutting meat inspectors, but preserving a wine-tasting junket.
Will Obama get away with this cynical strategy? I wouldn’t bet against it. It all depends on the honor of the press: will they act as the administration’s lackies, and report only the painful cuts, or will they also report the wasteful spending that the administration did not cut? We’re in trouble.
There is a bizarre, pernicious myth that the left are the defenders of civil liberties. I can’t fathom how they managed to get that reputation, since they always are coming out in opposition to free speech. In Minnesota, Democrats have proposed an “anti-bullying” bill that would prohibit K-12 students from saying anything unkind about another student.
If this story in the Huffington Post is true, Justice Department officials have admitted to Congress that Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for his support for open information:
A Justice Department representative told congressional staffers during a recent briefing on the computer fraud prosecution of Internet activist Aaron Swartz that Swartz’s “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” played a role in the prosecution, sources told The Huffington Post.
Swartz’s 2008 manifesto said sharing information was a “moral imperative” and advocated for “civil disobedience” against copyright laws pushed by corporations “blinded by greed” that led to the “privatization of knowledge.” . . .
The “Manifesto,” Justice Department representatives told congressional staffers, demonstrated Swartz’s malicious intent in downloading documents on a massive scale.
This is the Huffington Post, so the story could well be bogus. But it’s worthy of note because it would confirm my theory of the reason for the Swartz prosection, which is otherwise hard to explain.
Gun-controllists complain that “assault weapons” (i.e., rifles that look scary) have no legitimate self-defense purpose, but that complaint is being undermined by the Department of Homeland Security, which says select-fire weapons can be “suitable for personal defense”.
In a recent solicitation, the DHS is looking to buy “5.56x45mm NATO, select-fire firearm[s] suitable for personal defense”. Basically, this refers to either the M-16 or M-4. In particular, select-fire means that the weapon can be switched from semi-automatic to fully automatic.
So the DHS is saying that fully automatic weapons (in particular the M-16 and M-4) are suitable for personal defense. The AR-15 is the same gun, except it does not support select fire, and is semi-automatic only. So while the controllists claim (falsely) there is no self-defense use for the AR-15, DHS is saying that a strictly more effective weapon is suitable for self-defense.
The University of Michigan is following Vanderbilt’s lead and forcing Christian student organizations off-campus. As at Vanderbilt, the pretext is the organizations’ refusal to allow non-Christians to be leaders of the group.
The end goal of the gun-controllists is to confiscate all firearms. Some Democratic politicians try to deny this, but their denials are undermined by the rhetoric of gun control groups, their own unguarded remarks, historical precedent, and by the actions of politicians (such as in New York, Oregon, Missouri, etc.) who are proposing and indeed enacting gun confiscation bills.
California authorities are empowered to seize weapons owned by convicted felons and people with mental illness, but staff shortages and funding cuts have left a backlog of more than 19,700 people to disarm, a law enforcement official said Tuesday.
Those gun owners have roughly 39,000 firearms, said Stephen Lindley, chief of the Bureau of Firearms for the state Department of Justice.
Leftists who say that we should get past our obsession with the Constitution don’t realize the slender thread on which their tyranny rests. Glenn Reynolds puts it well:
Here’s the problem with public officials . . . deciding to ignore the Constitution: If you’re the president, if you’re a member of Congress, if you are a TSA agent, the only reason why somebody should listen to what you say, instead of horsewhipping you out of town for your impertinence, is because you exercise power via the Constitution. If the Constitution doesn’t count, you don’t have any legitimate power. You’re a thief, a brigand, an officious busybody, somebody who should be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail for trying to exercise power you don’t possess.
Hunters across Louisiana are outraged after state health officials ordered a rescue mission to destroy $8,000 worth of deer meat because venison is not allowed to be served in homeless shelters.
The Dept. of Health and Hospitals ordered the staff at the Shreveport-Bossier Rescue Mission to throw 1,600 pounds of donated venison in garbage bins – and then ordered then to douse the meat with Clorox – so other animals would not eat the meat. . .
The mission’s chef asked if they could at least return the meat to the processing plant – but the state officials said no. “They actually took it out to the dumpsters, split the packages open and poured Clorox on it,” Martin told Fox News.
Remember, government does not operate on autopilot. Some human being thought it would be a good idea to destroy $8000 of venison and leave homeless people hungry. Which brings us back, once again, to this.
This is two years old, but it’s appalling enough to be still worthy of note. The Bank of England is telling people (or, at any rate, told people two years ago), to stop saving money and spend their savings:
Savers should stop complaining about poor returns and start spending to help the economy, a senior Bank of England official warned today.
Older households could afford to suffer because they had benefited from previous property price rises, Charles Bean, the deputy governor, suggested. They should “not expect” to live off interest, he added, admitting that low returns were part of a strategy. . .
He continued: “Savers shouldn’t necessarily expect to be able to live just off their income in times when interest rates are low. It may make sense for them to eat into their capital a bit.”
Now, this is manifestly awful, but it’s even worse than it appears at first appears. Those who do as they are told and blow through their savings are still going to need income to survive. They will have to go on the public dole. So what the British government is doing is taking people who want to provide for themselves, and have saved their whole lives in order to do so, and move those people into dependency on the government.
This isn’t just bad economic administration. It’s immoral.
It’s a good thing that voter fraud never happens, because otherwise I might be worried about the news that unknown fraudsters nearly obtained 2,552 absentee ballots, and they remain at large.
The very same people who want to lecture us about how dangerous guns are haven’t the first clue about how to safely handle firearms. On some level, I suppose that isn’t surprising, but they ought to be required to get some basic firearms instruction before prattling on about banning guns.
This story perfectly illustrates the point, while also providing yet another instance of our vice-president being a blithering idiot. No one should ever take Joe Biden’s advice. If you do, you could go to jail:
I did one of these town-hall meetings on the Internet and one guy said, “Well, what happens when the end days come? What happens when there’s the earthquake? I live in California, and I have to protect myself.”
I said, “Well, you know, my shotgun will do better for you than your AR-15, because you want to keep someone away from your house, just fire the shotgun through the door.”
As any responsible gun owner could tell you, you never pull the trigger without being sure of your target, which is difficult to do when firing through a door.
Not for the first time, taking Joe Biden’s gun advice could get you arrested for reckless discharge of a firearm. In fact, a Virginia man has been arrested for exactly that. We don’t know that he actually got the idea from Biden (although if Biden is to be believed, he gives the advice often), but he did exactly what Biden suggests — fire his shotgun through a door — and, sure enough, was arrested for reckless discharge of a firearm.
A pernicious notion has entered our universities that reflects a deep and very strange misunderstanding of free speech. The notion is that if you don’t approve of what someone is saying, you can stop them from saying it, and that doing so is actually an exercise of free speech.
Thus, if you don’t like a speaker, you can go to the talk and shout him down, and you’re simply exercising your free speech. Or if you don’t like a display, you vandalize it, and that vandalism is an act of free speech.
It should be self-evident that this is wrong. Stopping other people’s expression is not free speech, it’s the opposite of free speech. But people seem profoundly confused by this, and it’s not just our students, but the administrations:
On January 22, 2013, the DePaul chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), having attained the required permits, erected a pro-life display. . . That afternoon, numerous DePaul students vandalized the display. . .
With the investigation completed, DePaul Assistant Dean of Students Domonic Rollins provided Del Campo with a report from the Department of Public Safety, containing the names of 13 DePaul students who had admitted to vandalizing YAF’s display. On February 5, the national YAF organization posted this document on its website. . .
DePaul found Del Campo responsible for the charge of “Disorderly, Violent, Intimidating or Dangerous Behavior,” as well as a charge related to “Judicial Process Compliance.” Del Campo has been placed on disciplinary probation and is prohibited from all contact with the students named in the public safety report. DePaul has also required that Del Campo complete an “Educational Project” in the form of a reflection letter.
As yet, the vandals have apparently not been punished, but the university is punishing the victim for publicly naming them. This is insanity.
I think the slogan Censorship is Peace would go very well with War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength.
The New York Times reports that you can buy access to President Obama for $500k:
President Obama’s political team is fanning out across the country in pursuit of an ambitious goal: raising $50 million to convert his re-election campaign into a powerhouse national advocacy network. . .
Those contributions will also translate into access, according to donors courted by the president’s aides. . . Giving or raising $500,000 or more puts donors on a national advisory board for Mr. Obama’s group and the privilege of attending quarterly meetings with the president, along with other meetings at the White House.
Watch Jay Carney struggle to defend this, and ultimately give up and walk out:
What is hilarious — beyond his repeated efforts to change the subject, and his inability to make eye contact as he does it — is how transparently bogus his defense is. He tries to shuck this aside as the activities of an “independent group”, as if (1) Obama’s own campaign crew could be independent of the president, (2) a truly independent group would have even a prayer of becoming one of the nation’s top pressure groups overnight, or (3) the fact that they are selling access to the president — the very issue he’s being questioned about — doesn’t eviscerate any idea that they could be independent.
The memo, under the name of one of the Justice Department’s leading crime researchers, critiques the effectiveness of gun control proposals, including some of President Barack Obama’s. . .
The memo says requiring background checks for more gun purchases could help, but also could lead to more illicit weapons sales. It says banning assault weapons and high capacity ammunition magazines produced in the future but exempting those already owned by the public, as Obama has proposed, would have limited impact because people now own so many of those items.
It also says that even total elimination of assault weapons would have little overall effect on gun killings because assault weapons account for a limited proportion of those crimes.
The nine-page document says the success of universal background checks would depend in part on “requiring gun registration,” and says gun buybacks would not be effective “unless massive and coupled with a ban.”
The administration calls the memo “an unfinished review of gun violence research”. That’s because it’s never finished until it supports the president’s policy.
That ban on big sodas being pushed by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is about to spoil family pizza night.
The ban on sodas over 16 ounces takes effect on March 12, and the New York Post reports it has some previously uncontemplated effects. For instance, ordering a 2-liter bottle of Coke, Pepsi, Sprite or whatever the family desires with a pizza delivery won’t be allowed. Even pitchers of soda at children’s birthday parties are going to be a no-no under Bloomberg’s far-reaching ban, according to the paper. . .
Customers will have to order smaller bottles, which cost more and increase plastic waste. It doesn’t seem to matter that the big bottles are typically meant to be shared – as are the pitchers of soda served up at kids’ pizza parties. . .
The ban will even take a toll on nightlife in the city that never sleeps. That’s because when clubgoers spring for a big bottle of booze, they expect to get the mixers thrown in. The typical carafe holds 32 ounces of soda, juice or tonic water. Under the ban, only water or pure juice will be allowed in containers measuring more than 16 ounces.
The primary form, prepared by the government, had an error. The price was copied from the invoice, but DHS changed the currency from Canadian to U.S. dollars.
It has language at the bottom with serious sounding statements that the information is true and correct, and a signature block.
I pointed out the error and suggested that we simply change the currency from US $ to CAD $ so that is was correct. Or instead, amend the amount so that it was correct in U.S. dollars.
I thought this was important because I was signing it and swearing that the information, and specifically the price, was correct.
The DHS agent didn’t care about the error and told me to sign the form anyway. “It’s just paperwork, it doesn’t matter,” she said. I declined.
She called another agent and said simply “He won’t sign the form.” I asked to speak to that agent to give them a more complete picture of the situation. She wouldn’t allow that.
Then she seized the boat. As in, demanded that we get off the boat, demanded the keys and took physical control of it.
What struck me the most about the situation is how excited she got about seizing the boat. Like she was just itching for something like this to happen. This was a very happy day for her.
This man will probably get his boat back eventually, but it will cost him thousands in legal fees. However, under the doctrine of official immunity, the DHS agent who was too lazy to fix a form but was delighted to steal a man’s property won’t face any sanction whatsoever. This is our government today. We are being occupied by a hostile power.
Vanderbilt is taking its persecution of Christian student organizations to the next level. Among a variety of other petty oppressions, they are not permitted to include persons from outside Vanderbilt in their activities, even though Vanderbilt is already denying them any recognition, and therefore has no business telling them who they can associate with.
They can employ a staff worker, but that staff worker must submit to a criminal background check conducted by the university. Vanderbilt actually has the audacity to claim that this provision is to protect the students.
Democrats and their allies in the legacy media like to call Republicans the party of big business. This is the exact opposite of the truth. Republicans are the party of free markets, while Democrats are the party of big business. In reality, big business opposes free markets much more often than it supports free markets. It’s small business that really wants markets to be free.
In the latest example, Minnesota Democrats are proposing a big new tax on business-to-business transactions. Such a tax wouldn’t affect big businesses very much, since they can do most of their legal and marketing work in house. However, small businesses, which need to contract all of that out, will be hit hard. This, of course, is just what big businesses want; they don’t want small competitors nipping at their heels and are happy when small businesses are driven out of business. In fact, rent seeking — such as driving out small competitors — has historically been the purpose of most economic regulation.
The now-public FBI file on Aaron Swartz supports my theory about what was behind his persecution at the hands of the US Attorney. The FBI long had their eye on him because of his PACER caper, in which Swartz tried to download public court documents and make them available to the public. (The government quickly shut down the program that Swartz used, defending the important principle that public court documents should not be easily accessible by the public.)
I speculated that the government later threw the book at Swartz, not because of JSTOR (even the nominal victim didn’t want to press charges), but because of PACER. The fact that they were watching Swartz for years because of PACER makes that all the more likely.
That provision in the Washington State gun-control bill calling for warrantless searches of anyone owning an “assault weapon”, the one that Democrats assure us was just an accident (all three times it was proposed), has turned up in Oregon’s gun-control bill as well.
This is not an accident. This is what these people want. If they don’t respect the 2nd Amendment, why would they respect the 4th?
POSTSCRIPT: Also, the bills allows you to possess only one “assault weapon”, even if you give up your 4th Amendment rights. Any more than one are to be confiscated. Remember this when they tell you they’re not looking to confiscate guns. It’s a lie. It’s always a lie. They are just waiting for the opportunity. Don’t ever believe them again.
Lew, being a good lawyer and a loyal presidential adviser, then shifted to denial mode: “Senator, the demand for an enforcement mechanism was not something that the administration was pushing at that moment.”
That statement was not accurate.
(Emphasis mine.)
But this is also interesting:
The final deal reached between Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in 2011 included an agreement that there would be no tax increases in the sequester in exchange for what the president was insisting on: an agreement that the nation’s debt ceiling would be increased for 18 months, so Obama would not have to go through another such negotiation in 2012, when he was running for reelection.
So when the president asks that a substitute for the sequester include not just spending cuts but also new revenue, he is moving the goal posts. His call for a balanced approach is reasonable [If you say so. -Scofflaw] . . . But that was not the deal he made.
Of course, expecting Obama to honor a promise is foolishness.
fundamental principle that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen.
Ponder that while we consider a basic question: What drives gun-control advocates? I think there are two camps: stupid and evil.
Some controllists are clearly stupid: Anyone who actually believes that criminals obey gun-control laws is stupid. Anyone who thinks that a madman planning mass murder will be deterred by an additional weapons charge is stupid. Anyone who thinks that gun-free zones turn away criminals rather than attract them is stupid. It is self-evident to anyone with an ounce of common sense that only law-abiding persons abide by gun-control laws.
More common than that, perhaps, are those who are functionally stupid. These are the people who do have some common sense, but don’t exercise it when it comes to guns, perhaps out of a visceral distaste for them. For practical purposes, the truly stupid and functionally stupid are the same group.
That’s the first camp. The second camp knows perfectly well that gun-control laws affect only the law-abiding, and that is precisely their aim. This is the evil group. Their ultimate goal is to abolish self-defense.
That much should be clear by looking at their aims: they wish to ban weapons for precisely the people who will use them against humans only in self-defense. But we can also look at history. The United Kingdom, the country at the end of the slippery slope that the controllists see as their model, has explicitly banned, not only any device that can be effectively used for self-defense, but the very act of self-defense itself. For just one example:
The TV presenter and Marks & Spencer model Myleene Klass has been warned by police for waving a knife at teenagers who were peering into a window of her house late at night. Klass was in the kitchen with her daughter upstairs when she spotted the youths in her garden just after midnight on Friday. She grabbed a knife and banged the windows before they ran away.
Hertfordshire police warned her she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an “offensive weapon”, even in her own home, was illegal. . .
“She is not looking to be a vigilante, and has the utmost respect for the law, but when the police explained to her that even if you’re at home alone and you have an intruder, you are not allowed to protect yourself, she was bemused.”
(Via International Liberty.) Got that? “If you’re at home alone and you have an intruder, you are not allowed to protect yourself.” Frankly, I think “bemused” is the wrong reaction.
It’s not just across the pond. In the District of Columbia, a man used a gun to save a 11-year-old boy from being mauled to death by three pit bulls, and the police are considering charging him with a crime. Message: if you save a child, you risk jail. Just let the kid die.
If you aren’t permitted to protect yourself and your family, will the government do it? Usually they can’t, of course. As the saying goes, “When seconds count, the police are just minutes away.”
But if they can, will they? Don’t count on it. (Well, probably they will, but that’s because most cops are good people, not because of institutional requirements.) In Warren v. DC, the court found that the government has “no general duty” to protect you. (In the horrifying incident behind Warren, the victims were brutalized for fourteen hours, hoping for the police who never came.) This principle has been affirmed by a whole series of rulings going all the way up to the Supreme Court.
The principle has been applied frequently, as recently as last month in New York City. In February 2011, Joseph Lozito subdued a knife-wielding maniac (who had already killed four people during his rampage) on the New York Subway, incurring seven stab wounds in the process. Lozito could not carry a gun (this being New York City), but the police were present for the whole incident. Unfortunately, the police just stood by, watching from behind a locked door until Lozito finished subduing the man. Lozito sued the city, but last month the city moved for dismissal, citing the long-standing rule that they aren’t required to lift a finger to help anyone.
But I don’t mean to give the impression that the controllists’ campaign against self-defense merely leaves us vulnerable to rare incidents of police negligence. Too often, the government’s failure to protect the people is part of a deliberate campaign of oppression:
The classic example of this is the postbellum South, in which officials felt limited in how far they could go officially to oppress freed slaves, but could easily stand by while the mob put “uppity” blacks in their place.
In the 1991 Crown Heights riot in New York City, police (under orders from the mayor, David Dinkins) allowed the pogrom to go on for three days before finally marshalling enough force to restore order.
In the District of Columbia during the mid-1990s, Mayor Marion Barry once threatened to pull the police out of the wards represented by councilmen who refused to support his budget.
After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the police looted stores, gunned down unarmed innocents, and went door-to-door illegally confiscating (i.e., stealing) firearms and assaulting their owners. The perpetrators of the Danzinger Bridge shootings were eventually punished, after a failed police cover-up, but (as far as I can tell) no police were ever punished for looting or for stealing firearms. (The police made a big show of investigating accused looters, but in the only cases I can find they “cleared” them of the charges.) New Orleans even refused to return the stolen weapons and had to be forced to do so.
What each of these incidents have in common is they took place were guns were restricted. In New York City and the District of Columbia it was (and largely still is) basically impossible for individuals to obtain guns legally. In Louisiana, citizens have the right to own guns, but New Orleans police would routinely seize any weapons they found anyway, and as soon as Katrina hit they started going door-to-door.
The experience of blacks in the postbellum South is particularly instructive. The gun-control movement in America began out of a desire to keep blacks unarmed and defenseless. Racist anti-gun laws predate the Civil War (indeed they predate the United States), but racial gun control advanced to whole new level after the emancipation of the slaves. The KKK actually began as a gun-control organization; their mission was to take guns from blacks when the government failed to do so.
This is the intellectual lineage of the non-stupid camp of the gun control movement. They want you to be defenseless, because defenseless people make less trouble. Just as they want you to depend on the government for the necessities of life (food, health care, etc.), they want you depend on them for protection from the mob. But even if you do, you still might not get that protection, because just maybe you are someone who needs to be put in his place, or be made an example of.
There’s been an interesting revelation in the case of Washington State’s proposed law that would revoke 4th amendment protection from people who own “assault weapons”. It turns out that the bill’s sponsor, who claims that the provision was somehow a mistake, has proposed legislation with the search provision twice before.
Are we to believe that the provision was inserted into a bill by mistake three different times? The notion is fanciful once, and simply preposterous three times.
Interestingly, the Washington State constitution has been found to protect the right to own an AR-15 (the canonical “assault weapon”), so the provision is explicitly attempting to revoke a constitutional right for anyone who exercises another constitutional right.
Just a few months into the Obama administration, Sheldon Richmond wrote this:
A rule we can rely on to be unfailingly applied is this: No matter how much the government controls the economic system, any problem will be blamed on whatever small zone of freedom that remains.
Finally, after a 12-year delay caused by opponents of genetically modified foods, so-called “golden rice” with vitamin A will be grown in the Philippines. Over those 12 years, about 8 million children worldwide died from vitamin A deficiency. . .
Yet, despite the cost in human lives, anti-GM campaigners—from Greenpeace to Naomi Klein—have derided efforts to use golden rice to avoid vitamin A deficiency. In India, Vandana Shiva, an environmental activist and adviser to the government, called golden rice “a hoax” that is “creating hunger and malnutrition, not solving it.”
For all the claims of “murder” thrown at the NRA over its policy arguments, the usual suspects are much quieter on this subject, where the connection between policy-advocacy and dead children is much clearer.
Indeed, for some perspective, consider this: 8 million children over 12 years works out to four Sandy Hook massacres every hour of every day for over a decade. Why isn’t the president surrounding himself with children and demanding golden rice?
As the Colorado legislature considered a bill that would ban the carrying of guns on college campuses, Representative Joe Salazar explained that women aren’t competent to judge whether they are really in danger or not:
According to the University of Colorado, here’s what women are supposed to do instead of defending themselves:
Be realistic about your ability to protect yourself.
Your instinct may be to scream, go ahead! It may startle your attacker and give you an opportunity to run away.
Kick off your shoes if you have time and can’t run in them.
Don’t take time to look back; just get away.
If your life is in danger, passive resistance may be your best defense.
Tell your attacker that you have a disease or are menstruating.
Vomiting or urinating may also convince the attacker to leave you alone.
Yelling, hitting or biting may give you a chance to escape, do it!
Understand that some actions on your part might lead to more harm.
Remember, every emergency situation is different. Only you can decide which action is most appropriate.
I particularly like the last one: “Only you can decide which action is most appropriate.” Except for using a gun to defend yourself. We’ll decide that one for you. Try vomiting instead.
POSTSCRIPT: On this topic, it’s not just Colorado rapists who want to practice their hobby safely. The pro-rape, anti-gun lobby is active in Ohio too:
Convicted rapist organizes gun control demonstration at Dayton gun show; Media fails to note his sex offender status
Don’t worry. No matter how often this happens, it’s always an isolated incident:
Richardson claimed she had submitted an absentee ballot, but was afraid her vote would not count so she also voted in person. She also said she voted in the name of her granddaughter and yet another person.
“There was absolutely no intent on my part to commit any voter fraud,” she insisted.
The culprit in this case, was a veteran poll worker. But don’t worry, I’m sure she kept her jobs as an election fraudster and as a poll worker separate.
In a revealing development, a new gun-control bill in Washington State would allow citizens who currently possess a so-called “assault weapon” to keep it, but then the police may search their home once a year without probable cause or a warrant:
In order to continue to possess an assault weapon that was legally possessed on the effective date of this section, the person possessing shall … safely and securely store the assault weapon. The sheriff of the county may, no more than once per year, conduct an inspection to ensure compliance with this subsection.
The bill’s sponsors say the provision is a mistake and they don’t know how it got there. Yeah, I’ve heard of legislative language spontaneously inserting itself into text files without any human action. That can happen.
Good grief, Media Matters will say anything. Like this:
what press cannot bring itself to report this week: Dems have NEVER EVER mounted a campaign to block cabinet pick the way GOP is w/ Hagel
“NEVER EVER” except for lots of times. I guess this hinges on a narrow and unspecified meaning of “the way GOP is w/ Hagel”, because there have been plenty of defeated cabinet picks:
Henry Dearborn (War) under Madison
James Porter (War) under Tyler
James Green (Treasury) under Tyler
Thomas Ewing (War) under Andrew Johnson
Henry Stanbery (Justice) under Andrew Johnson
Charles Warren (War) under Coolidge, twice
Lewis Strauss (Commerce) under Eisenhower
Robert Wood (HUD) under Lyndon Johnson
John Tower (Defense) under George H.W. Bush
That’s including only the nominations that were formally rejected, not those that were withdrawn in the face of opposition, or that prevailed against opposition. It’s not easy to find out who fought the long-ago nominations, but certainly Democrats mounted the efforts to defeat Warren, Strauss, and Tower. That’s three times, indeed four if you count Warren twice.
Finding the full list took some Googling, but John Tower at least is obvious. The campaign against Tower was fairly recent, and was quite memorable, because it hinged on the argument (offered with a straight face!) that womanizers were not fit to serve in the cabinet. (Yes, Ted Kennedy was among the 52 Democrats who voted against him.)
So when Media Matters bleats about the right-wing bias of the mainstream media, they are lamenting that the media is only 97% in the tank for Democrats. Sometimes a left-wing talking point is too absurd even for them.
I’m not sure why this is news again; I first saw it months ago. But people are buzzing about the claim that President Obama’s blistering attack on Paul Ryan — with Ryan in the audience — was just a big mistake. The story goes that Ryan was invited to the speech by accident, and when they noticed that he was there it was just too late to change the tone.
Don’t you believe it. First of all, the story makes no sense. They saw Ryan there before the president appeared at the podium, but it was too late to change the speech? Nonsense. They just didn’t want to. Even if Obama was unwilling to go off teleprompter, they could have taken a few minutes to soften the speech. It might be hard, but this is a professional communication operation. Come on.
Moreover, Obama is from Chicago and he likes to do that sort of thing. This is the in-your-face president. Remember him gloating over his election victory at the 2009 stimulus meeting, and at the 2010 health care summit? And those meetings were (ostensibly) for the purpose of forging bipartisan agreement! Remember when — in a direct parallel — he used the 2010 State of the Union address to attack the Supreme Court justices to their faces?
No, Obama said what he meant to say in the manner he wanted to say it. In your face. That’s what he does. It’s the Chicago Way.
The Obama administration, through its professional liar Jay Carney, is still claiming that the sequester was the GOP’s idea:
Question: Looking at all this, do you regret that this White House suggested [the sequester] in the first place?
Jay Carney: The notion much propounded by the spin doctors on the Republican side that the sequester is somehow something that the White House and the president alone wanted and desired is a fanciful confection.
In this case, Carney is using a bit of misdirection, by answering a different question than he was asked. But the message is clear, and Barack Obama himself has been less careful, claiming at the third presidential debate:
The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed.
This is an outright lie. Here’s the photo that Republicans have been circulating, of a page from Bob Woodward’s book on the subject:
Also note the final line, below the highlighted box. “We have to get people to turn against the Republicans.” That was the entire plan. They don’t have a fiscal plan; they never did. This was all about setting the stage for attacking Republicans.
Here’s something I did not know: The Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizures does not apply at the border. More precisely, arbitrary searches at the border are not considered unreasonable. Thus, customs agents and the like do not need probable cause, much less a warrant, to search people entering the country.
Okay, maybe that makes sense. But the Department of Homeland Security claims that it can use its powers of suspicionless search, not only at the border, but within 100 miles of the border! The ACLU has prepared this handy map, showing where the government says it can search you without probable cause:
The Supreme Court will probably squash this eventually, but it’s an outrage that that’s necessary.
A lot of people have written about the government’s strange decision to throw the book at Aaron Swartz, when even JSTOR (the nominal victim in the case) didn’t want to press charges.
But is it really so strange? Instead, let’s suppose that the US Attorney was faithfully carrying out government policy. What does the prosecution tell us about that policy? Swartz was a crusader for open information. (For example, before JSTOR, Swartz was making public court records available to the public.) The Obama administration — which is notoriously opposed to open information — threw the book at him.
So maybe this was a rogue US Attorney, losing sight of the big picture and of common decency. Maybe. But Occam’s razor suggests a simpler explanation: the US Attorney, taking her cue from her boss, wanted to make an example of Aaron Swartz, so she did.
UPDATE: Adding credence to my theory, an unchastened White House is cool to the idea of passing “Aaron’s Law”, which would scale back criminal penalties for harmless terms-of-use violations.
I don’t expect much from Mother Jones, an unrepentant far-left rag, but I thought that the Atlantic was supposed to be a respectable magazine. This story makes me question that. There’s a lot here that could be debunked, but I want to look at just one statement:
“Not one of 62 mass shootings in the United States over the last 30 years has been stopped this way [by an armed civilian],” reported Mother Jones’s Mark Follman, adding that the majority of mass shooters killed themselves. . .
It’s true that most mass shooters kill themselves in the end, but what about the first part? There are at least three problems with it.
The first is a logic error. Yes, mass shootings are rarely stopped by an armed civilian. Of course. Because when an armed civilian stops the incident, he stops it promptly, before it becomes a mass shooting. The civilian, you see, is already there, while the police are minutes away, at best. Those minutes are what gives the shooter the chance to become a mass shooter.
Second, armed civilians avert mass shootings not infrequently. For example, there were two instances the very same week as the Newtown shootings: one in San Antonio and one in Clackamas, Oregon. And there are plenty of others.
In short, Mother Jones’s claim — echoed by the Atlantic — might be narrowly true (although I don’t know that), but it certainly doesn’t demonstrate anything like what they suggest it does.
Remember when officials use to cover up reports in order to hide dangers? That’s old school. Today, they cover-up reports showing that industries are safe:
Thanks to a leak from an anonymous insider, we learned Thursday that a report commissioned by the State of New York has given fracking a clean bill of health. The insider “did not think it should be kept secret” and released the document, which is now nearly one year old, to the New York Times, which reported:
The state’s Health Department found in an analysis it prepared early last year that the much-debated drilling technology known as hydrofracking could be conducted safely in New York.
The eight-page analysis is a summary of previous research by the state and others…[that] delves into the potential impact of fracking on water resources, on naturally occurring radiological material found in the ground, on air emissions and on “potential socioeconomic and quality-of-life impacts.”…[It] concludes that fracking can be done safely.
The analysis and other health assessments have been closely guarded by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and his administration as the governor weighs whether to approve fracking.
Of course, covering up the report is a last resort. It’s preferable to falsify the tests, like the EPA is doing.
Why are they doing this? Possibly they believe that fracking is dangerous, despite the scientific consensus. (I believe that’s called being “anti-science”.) More likely, they’re just on the take, like Matt Damon and Al Gore.
Iowahawk explains how to do business in Obama’s America:
Perhaps instead of starting a small business, young Matt should have taken the time-honored liberal approach and started a BIG business. Those rules are simpler: (1) come up with idiotic idea, (2) give large wads of cash to a politician, (3) reap ginormormous government contract.
Good ideas — which usually involve producing a product that people want and will pay for — are for suckers now.
The Weekly Standard notes that President Obama is violating his own stimulus law, which requires quarterly progress reports. By law, he should have issued 14 such reports by now. He has only issued 8, the last one for Q2 2011.
Did Congress quietly pass a bill prohibiting smartphone unlocking and send it to President Obama’s autopen? No. What happened was the Librarian of Congress was empowered by the execrable Digital Millennium Copyright Act to decide what modifications of our own electronic devices we are permitted to perform. In short, Congress delegated the power to make law to this functionary, and last October he exercised his power to prohibit smartphone unlocking.
It is supposed to be unconstitutional for the Congress to delegate its legislative power, but the courts have been permitting it for a long time, provided Congress provides an “intelligible principle” for the delegate to use. This is a very bad thing.
It’s bad because the bar for an “intelligible principle” is now so low as to be meaningful. But more importantly, it’s bad because the limits of Congress’s time ought to be a safeguard against tyranny, but it’s not.
It used to be that Congress was a part-time job, but the workload of the average Congressional office has doubled every five years since 1935 (according to Senator James Buckley). That means more and more laws to burden the American people.
One might think that the absolute limit of 168 hours per week would cap the amount of rules that our legislature could generate, but not if they can delegate rule-making power to others. With delegated power, the government’s ability to generate new rules is literally unlimited.
With a limit, the government would be compelled to use its power selectively, and only address high priorities. Without a limit, government issues rules for absolutely the most trivial matters. (Yes, even for spilled milk.)
There ought to be no rule binding the American people that is not passed by Congress and signed by the president (or passed over his veto). This wouldn’t ensure that Congress would exercise good judgement, but at least it would require them to set priorities, and we could hold them accountable for every rule on the books.
UPDATE: Corrected the Congressional workload doubling period.
It’s not just Sen. Menendez’s staff that are in trouble with the law, Menendez himself is in big trouble:
Emails show FBI investigating Sen. Bob Menendez for sleeping with underage Dominican prostitutes
If true, and they seem to have considerable evidence, his actions were not just unethical, they were criminal in both the Dominican Republic and the United States:
The age of consent in the Dominican Republic is 18. The PROTECT Act, a U.S. law passed in 2003, made it a federal crime for Americans to engage in sex for money with anyone under 18, even in countries where the age of consent is lower.
What might save Menendez is the fact that Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, would appoint his replacement. Faced with losing a Senate seat, the Justice Department might try to make this thing go away. (Don’t tell me they wouldn’t. These people traffic guns to Mexican drug cartels.)
UPDATE (3/6): The Washington Post briefly ran a story purporting to debunk this, but the Daily Caller de-debunked their story, and the Post seems to be backpedaling (somewhat dishonestly). We’ll have to wait and see. Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds wants everyone to remember that Menendez has two scandals going at once, and the influence-peddling scandal is unchanged.
The Constitution gives the president the power to appoint officers unilaterally during “the Recess” of the Senate:
The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.
For the first century-and-a-half, this was interpreted to mean that the president could make recess appointments during the period between Senate sessions, of which there were typically two during a two-year Congress. Since 1947, the president has assumed the additional power to make recess during intra-session breaks in the Senate’s business. This power has never been seriously challenged, until now.
For reasons of his own, President Obama decided to arrogate to himself the power to make recess appointments even when the Senate was in session, if he deemed that the Senate wasn’t doing any real work. If this were to hold up, it would give the president the power to bypass the Senate literally whenever he chose.
ASIDE: Obama justified this by an opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel. That opinion was issued just two days before the first such appointment, and overruled a standing opinion to the contrary. That opinion was issued by his own administration, and was authored by Elena Kagan, now a Supreme Court justice.
Obama’s decision to pick this fight now appears to be an unforced error of historic proportion.
The Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has issued a unanimous, devastating ruling. It correctly brushes aside the administration’s claim to be able to decide for itself whether the Senate is in session:
The fourth and final possible interpretation of “the Recess,” advocated by the Office of Legal Counsel, is a variation of the functional interpretation in which the President has discretion to determine that the Senate is in recess. . . This will not do. Allowing the President to define the scope of his own appointments power would eviscerate the Constitution’s separation of powers.
But it goes further. The ruling finds that the recess appointment power only applies during “the Recess” which is to say the period between Senate sessions. Thus, it excludes the power to make intra-session appointments that the president has enjoyed for the last sixty-odd years.
But it goes further still. The ruling also finds that the wording “that may happen” is significant, and requires that the vacancy come into being during the recess as well! (I believe this is correct, but I had little hope that a modern court would decide thus.)
Thus, President Obama has received his comeuppance in truly historic fashion. By trying to arrogate to himself a virtually unlimited recess appointment power, he has invited a ruling that instead makes that power very limited indeed. Constitution 1, Obama 0.
This isn’t the end. The ruling can and probably will be reviewed by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court may scale back the ruling, at least in regard to “that may happen”, but I think it is unlikely to overturn the central holding.
POSTSCRIPT: Although it pales in relation to the Constitutional issues at stake, it’s also important what the ruling does, which is invalidate a full year of NLRB rulings.
UPDATE: Jennifer Rubin lists some of the NLRB rulings that will go away. A lot of bad stuff is being invalidated, like ambush elections and “micro-unions”.
New York’s new gun-control law allows New Yorkers to keep 10-round magazines (for now), but prohibits them from loading more than seven rounds in one. If you miscount, you go to jail.
I defy anyone to name any constructive purpose served by such a rule. If you were to ban 10-round magazines outright, one might imagine — following the usual pattern of gun-controllists’ wishful thinking — that it would make them a little harder for criminals to obtain. But allowing the magazines eliminates even that highly-unlikely salutary purpose.
The sole consequence of this rule will be that law-abiding persons will have seven rounds, while having no effect on criminals whatsoever.
In other words, this law is not about stopping criminals, but about disarming innocents.
Most of the New York legislature can be partly excused for this: due to the illegal haste with which the bill was rammed through, they got no chance to read it. (Of course, they should have then voted no.) But the authors of the law — particularly Andrew Cuomo — have no such excuse. These are simply bad people.
POSTSCRIPT: Of course, there’s more. The law not only bans “high-capacity” magazines, but confiscates the ones you already have. (Oh yes, they explain the provision by saying the banned magazines must be sold out-of-state, but what do you think will happen if you don’t?) They failed to put in an exception for law enforcement. And, they have accidentally banned the biathlon (which uses an unusual 8-round magazine), which Olympic athletes train for in Lake Placid, New York.
Facebook temporarily shut down The Jerusalem Post reporter Khaled Abu Toameh’s Facebook page, possibly in response to a campaign by anti-Israel activists who object to Abu Toameh’s views on corruption within the Palestinian Authority.
(I’m not sure why they say “possibly”, read on.)
On Monday, Abu Toameh posted a link to an Arabic report in a Jordanian newspaper about the corruption trial of former Jordanian intelligence chief. He also posted a link to an acerbic blog post slamming the PA that he wrote for the Gatestone Institute, where he is a contributor. . .
Hate mail and death threats poured into Abu Toameh’s inbox. While the veteran reporter has received hate mail before, he said the response to the last two posts was overwhelming.
Abu Toameh received a message from Facebook stating he had posted an item that violates the terms of use of Facebook. Then, without warning, his Facebook profile was terminated. A notice said that the account was temporarily closed “for security reasons.”
The account was reopened 24 hours later, but with the two posts deleted and no explanation.
If the timing weren’t convincing enough, the fact the two posts were deleted proves that they were the reason for the suspension.
So why is Facebook censoring criticism of the Palestinian Authority? It could be political bias, but it’s more likely simple cowardice. Allowing criticism of totalitarian regimes could result in their being banned from those regimes. Either way, this illustrates the folly of using Facebook as a medium for political dicourse.
The Bread of Life Mission, which has served the homeless community in Pioneer Square for more than 70 years, said the city has directed them to stop feeding the hungry in downtown parks.
Remember, this doesn’t just happen. Some person had to decide that stopping a church from feeding the homeless was a good idea. Which brings us back to this.
The Obama administration wants doctors to question their patients about whether they have guns in their homes. (This is part of their program to denormalize gun ownership, so that they can make the political landscape more favorable for gun bans.) Doctors should not do so:
Doctors already have a professional and legal responsibility to notify the authorities if they believe patients pose an imminent threat to others or themselves. But routine inquiry about gun ownership goes far beyond this obligation. Such inquiries will instead only offend and alienate many responsible gun owners, compromising the trust essential to the doctor-patient relationship. Doctors should not put themselves in a position where patients view them as willing (or unwitting) agents of the government working against their interests.
This illustrates, yet again, how everything in this administration takes a back seat to ideology. When quality medical practice goes up against gun control, medicine will lose.
What do you do with Egypt, a former ally that is rapidly turning into an Islamist hell-hole and is talking seriously of repudiating its peace treaty with Israel? Send them state of the art fighter jets, of course.
The Republicans seem to adopting Charles Krauthammer’s suggestion for how they should deal with the debt limit. Rather than using the debt limit to try to force big cuts in spending, which probably won’t work and will certainly result in them being (unjustly) savaged in the media, they should instead make a demand that is small, unassailable, and nevertheless important: for the Senate to produce a budget.
This is a great idea, because there is no reasonable argument that can be made against it. In fact, the Senate is required by law to produce a budget and thus has been flagrantly violating the law for the last four years. And, it’s nevertheless important because it will force Democrats to put their spending plans in the full light of day.
When Democrats attack the plan, as they will (precisely because they don’t want their spending plans debated in the full light of day), it will be an educational experience for the American people.
A new bill to be introduced into Congress would take contracts out of the sphere of criminal law, and put them back into civil law, where they belong. Lawrence Lessig explains why that’s important.
Remember, this doesn’t just happen. Some person had to decide that hassling people just trying to repair their homes was a good idea. Which brings us back to this.
Remember when the Department of Homeland Security “categorically denied” that they delayed the arrest of a member of Sen. Robert Menendez’s (D-NJ) staff until after the election? Official documents now confirm that their denial was a lie:
Federal immigration agents were prepared to arrest an illegal immigrant and registered sex offender days before the November elections but were ordered by Washington to hold off after officials warned of “significant interest” from Congress and news organizations because the suspect was a volunteer intern for Sen. Robert Menendez, according to internal agency documents provided to Congress.
The Homeland Security Department said last month, when The Associated Press first disclosed the delayed arrest of Luis Abrahan Sanchez Zavaleta, that AP’s report was “categorically false.”
Under a Republican administration, this would be a scandal of the first order. (If anything like this were ever to happen under a Republican administration.)
Posted by K. Crary 
Internet Scofflaw 
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