I don’t know, Brain … having the IRS audit the Justice Department’s phone calls about Benghazi … I mean, who would be left to blame for the next scandal?
UPDATE—
Are You Pondering What I’m Pondering?
Reply
Category Archives: Political Correctness
First, the Tea Party, …
… then, the Jews, and now, Billy Graham.
UPDATE—and a St. Louis local news anchor who asked the wrong questions.
Gosnell’s Sentence
Prosecutors say they will seek the death penalty for Kermit Gosnell who has been convicted of murdering three children who survived botched abortions.
He’s 72 years old.
Given the mean time between a conviction and an execution (something over 25 years), we can expect that he will die in prison, but not necessarily as the result of a lethal injection.
Plus Ça Change, Plus C’est la Même Chose
And then there was last week, one of those exceptions that proves the rule—especially for the Main Stream Media. Da Tech Guy has some thoughts on conventional wisdom, Benghazi, the IRS, and gun control.
What Difference, At This Point, Do the Facts Make?
Stacy McCain has a post up analyzing the Democrats “How Dare You?” defense of the Benghazi fiasco.
It seems to me that the Democrats’ positions is best summed up by the remark made by Rep. Simpson (D-Springfield)—
Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true.
UPDATE—Roger L. Simon reflects on Hillary de Medici.
I’m Not Making This Up, You Know
Some guy named William Blaine Richardson says Senator Rafael “Ted” Cruz isn’t Hispanic.
But Laws Are For The Little People
Mayor Bloomberg was denied a second slice of pizza at a Brooklyn eatery.
I’m sorry sir, there’s nothing I can do. Maybe you could go to several restaurants and get one slice at each. At least that way you’re walking. You know, burning calories.
Hizzoner had to walk down the street for his second slice.
I wonder … how soon the restaurant will have its next round of inspections?
UPDATE–If it were only true …
Pigford
Today is the day that part of the blogosphere is focusing on the Pigford story. It’s basically about a scam wherein the Department of Agriculture was to pay settlements to certain “farmers”–whether a settlement is owed or not.
Breitbart broke the story and the Main Stream Media sat on it for years, but the New York Times did a 5,000 word story on it last week that confirmed the work done by the bloggers and Breitbart. So congratulations to all those who helped to expose the fraud, especially to my friend Lee Stranahan.
What Will He Do When the Lights Go Out?
Lee Siegel has a screed over at The Daily Beast in which he invites the South, by which he means all of flyover country, to leave the Union–and in which he imagines how great his new North would be in the aftermath. Read the whole thing. I’m serious; go read it.
When you do, you’ll find these words describing his new, improved North:
In short, a society on a par with most of the rest of the industrialized world—a place whose politics have finally caught up with its social and economic realities.
More likely, he would wind up with a place where it’s social and economic realities finally catch up with its politics. Greece, Cyprus, California, …
Where will his new North get the electricity to run its cars? When the lights go out, will Mr. Siegel favor fracking in upstate New York or off-shore drilling in California waters to get the fuel to run power stations? Or will he support new nuclear power stations running on uranium? Will he favor mining the uranium deposits in the Pacific Northwest and development of a processing facility nearby, say at Hanford?
I doubt that the social situation in Siegel’s new North would be any better than its economy.
Although I now live in a blue state, I’m a native of Tennessee. If I thought that anything remotely like Mr. Siegel’s suggested future were on the horizon, I’d head for home as soon as I could.
It’s Only a Constitutional Right
What could go wrong? All these Democrats are proposing is to make a right enumerated in the Bill of Rights subject to the whim of unelected bureaucrats who can suspend it by placing your name on a secret list you can’t see without any due process and no judicial review.
Oh, and they claim that banning gun purchases by persons on the terrorist watch list would have stopped the Boston Marathon bombers. How? Will pressure cooker purchases be subject to background checks? Or the common household chemicals available at most supermarkets that can be used to homebrew explosives?
You know, it would be easier for these control freaks to run our lives for us if they’d simply repeal the Bill of Rights wholesale.
UPDATE–Prof. Reynolds notes that what the politicians control they use against us.
To borrow a word: Indeed.
Some Things Are Too Ghastly to Make Up
The New York Post offers evidence that Kermit Gosnell may not be much of an outlier among abortionists. (H/T, Patterico)
We’re From the Government, And We’re Here to Help
An Instapundit reader tells how the narcs keep his wife safe from her pain meds.
We’re From the Government, and We’re Here to Help
And more and more Americans are beginning to say, “No, thank you.” Why? Peggy Noonan suggests this answer in a post at WSJ.
A major problem for those who want an immigration bill is lack of faith in government to do all the jobs it’s set itself well. People don’t trust it to be able to execute—to do, adequately, the thing it’s set itself to do in its big new laws. We always look at the motives and politics behind a big bill, and talk about that. But simple noncrisis execution—the ability to track and deal with a Tamerlan Tsarnaeu, or to patrol and control a huge border—is a big reason why which people lack faith. Because, you know, they read the papers.
Most of us have to work pretty hard to get things right. Babe Ruth had a lifetime batting average of .342—which means he failed to make it to first base almost 2/3 of the time. Government doesn’t seem to be doing nearly as well as the Sultan of Swat, and as it has become more unsuccessful in many of its basic functions, it has tried to meddle in area outside its rightful sphere. Managing public safety is one thing. Regulating Big Gulps is another.
Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism outlines the history of what I call “nannystateism,” a form of socialism with a smiley face. The control freak forms of socialism split into two main streams a bit over a hundred years ago. In Europe, they wound up with totalitarian forms such as Italian Fascism, German National Socialism, and Russian Communism. They were police states. In America, we flirted with police state socialism during the Wilson Administration, but returned to normalcy during the ’20s. When the Progressives returned to power during the Great Depression and the Second World War, the horrors of the gulag and the holocaust kept Americans away from that kind of state brutality. Instead of control through fear, our politicians have tried to practice control through gift giving.
And so we have a kind and gentle form of control freak meddling by the government. The path we’re on doesn’t lead to Orwell’s Room 101, but it seems headed to a place very like Huxley’s Brave New World. The problem is that there isn’t enough soma to go around, and there probably never will be. Most of us will have to work to support ourselves and our families. So when folks see that a couple of immigrants who never had jobs were supported well enough that they had cell phones and nice clothes and leisure time to party and guns and explosives with which to attack us, they naturally begin to wonder about what’s going on. Some will ask, “Where’s my share of the goodies?” Others will ask, “Why are we supporting these creeps?”
I hope that the second group is larger.
GE Capital and the M134
It’s reported that GE Capital is quietly getting out of the business of providing financing for gun stores.
Interesting.
By the way, here’s a video of a GE product in action.
That’s an M134 minigun. 7.62 mm NATO at 3,000 rounds per minute. My personal favorite door gun for a Huey.
UPDATE—The Navy nomenclature for the M134 is Mark 25 Mod 0, and the Air Force designation is GAU-2/A.
He’s in Big Trouble Now
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is under 21 and therefore not eligible for a gun license in Massachusetts. He now faces the possibility of a mandatory one year jail term for carrying a firearm without a license.
Perhaps he can serve that time on federal death row.
Reduced Capacity Magazines and Fingerprints
It’s been reported that the police who engaged in a gunfight with the Tsarnaev brothers last week fired over 200 rounds of ammunition. They didn’t kill the older brother outright. The autopsy says that he died of gunshot and blast wounds (from his own explosives). The younger brother was wounded but still in action a day later.
And Gov. O’Malley wants the already below-normal 20 round limit on magazines here in Maryland reduced to 10 rounds.
It’s also been reported that neither of the Tsarnaev brothers ever filled out any state paperwork for any of the handguns they used.
And Gov. O’Malley wants to fingerprint folks who fill out the paperwork to legally buy handguns.
Which Choice Are You Pro?
All of us are pro-choice to the extent that we believe that we should be free to choose the way we wish. The anarchists among us would agree with that point of view wholeheartedly. Libertarians might moderate that to the extent of limiting choices that affect another person. At the other end of the spectrum, nanny-statists and Progressives would say that choice must be limited by their understanding of what is good for us, by which they really mean the choices they choose.
At the silly end of things, nanny-statists such as Mayor Bloomberg want to take away your right to choose a Big Gulp. They argue that it’s bad for your health and that you’ll be a burden on the healthcare system, yada, yada, yada. At the serious end of things, they want to take away your right to choose to defend yourself with a modern sporting rifle loaded with a normal capacity magazine. They argue that … umm … well, actually they don’t have a logical argument; they just don’t like the idea that you might have a gun. They have to make a stretch to bring some other party’s interest to limit your choices.
OTOH, most Progressives favor a right for a mother to end the life of her child in utero. For those of us who look at the DNA of a child and see a member of our species from conception, it’s clear that an abortion affects an innocent party. Others may disagree about when that child deserves protection, but essentially no one advocates the killing of viable children born alive. The question of when to protect a child’s life is one of those inconvenient questions that many would rather not wrestle with.
That, I think, is the reason for the main stream media’s avoidance of the Gosnell murder cases. I brings that question into focus.
Quote of the Day
When I say that terrorism is war against civilization, I may be met by the objection that terrorists are often idealists pursuing worthy ultimate aims—national or regional independence, and so forth. I do not accept this argument. I cannot agree that a terrorist can ever be an idealist, or that the objects sought can ever justify terrorism. The impact of terrorism, not merely on individual nations, but on humanity as a whole, is intrinsically evil, necessarily evil and wholly evil.
—Benjamin Netanyahu
NPR Suggests Boston Bombing a Birthday Present for Hitler
Five Pinocchios for Joe Biden
Joe Biden invents bogus illegal gun buyer statistics on the fly. Video here.
Such blatant misrepresentation of the facts earns five out of a possible four pinocchios.
Some Good News
The Senate has voted, and none of the “anti-gun” legislation (as Dingy Harry called it) has survived. Indeed, the proposed bans on modern sporting rifles and standard capacity magazines were soundly defeated.
Good.
UPDATE—Snicker.
Dingy Harry Makes My Day
Senator Reid makes a slip of the tongue and accidentally tells the truth about his legislation.
The Marathon Murders
I have no idea who is responsible for the bombings in Boston yesterday, but I’m willing to bet they will never be tried in a state court in Massachusetts. Massachusetts has abolished its death penalty.
A decade ago, the Beltway Sniper team terrorized Maryland, DC, and Virginia. They were caught by the Maryland State Police, but tried in Virginia. Virginia has an enforced death penalty. John Allen Muhammad, the adult shooter, was executed in 2009.
Whoever is charged in the Marathon Murders will face a federal court and a federal death penalty statute such as 18 USC 844(d).
On Political Correctness
When someone would point out an “inconvenient truth” to the left-wing folks I used to hang out with back in the ’60s (I’m a recovering Democrat), they would be told that it could not be discussed because “that’s not politically correct.” Truth has never been a defense to political incorrectness. Only those stories which advance the “proper” narrative may be spoken.
We see the result of that perverse approach in much of what passes for main stream journalism today. If coverage of the trial of a physician accused of mass murder might cause people to stop and think about what happens to babies in an abortion “clinic,” the story must be spiked. If it turns out that a District Attorney wasn’t murdered by right-wing extremists … we’ll be back after these brief messages. If the wacko who shot the congresswoman is a crazed lefty … [crickets]
The printing press broke a stranglehold on information by allowing the mass production and distribution of books, etc., but even into the 20th century, there were still relatively few mass media outlets. The Internet is changing that. Inconvenient facts are becoming harder to hide.
The truth is out there.
I’m Not Making This Up, You Know
The new gun control law passed by the Maryland Legislature created the following section in the Criminal Law:
§ 4-102 (b) A person may not carry or possess a firearm, knife, or deadly weapon of any kind on public school property.
The prohibition on knives has no exception for cafeteria staff. Or tableware in the cafeteria.
UPDATE—@MSchumacher asks, “Baseball w no bats?” A fair question. I seem to remember that Al Capone murdered someone with a baseball bat.
UPDATE 2—Conviction of a violation of this section can result in 3 years imprisonment. That is a sufficiently long possible sentence to cause loss of the right to possess a firearm under 18 USC 922(g) for any conviction under 4-102.
Think of it.
Someone walks into a school to pick up his sick child and forgets to take the Swiss Army knife out of his pocket …
