Category Archives: Politics

What Will He Do When the Lights Go Out?

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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

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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.

Don’t Give Up Your Day Job

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Yeah, I know that there’s some folks out there who view the President’s standup routine at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner as first-rate, but I’m in the camp of those who disagree. My usual advice to people who really shouldn’t be on the stage is “don’t give up your day job,” and I would offer it to Barack Obama even if I thought he had been brilliant.

Visualize President Biden.

We’re From the Government, and We’re Here to Help

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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.

Reduced Capacity Magazines and Fingerprints

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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?

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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

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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

I’m Not Making This Up, You Know

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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 …

Hello, Foot. Meet Gun.

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I’m told that shooting oneself in the foot is a bad idea. I suppose so. I’ve never tried it, although I have been around more than my share of negligent firearm discharges.

There are four very simple rules which will make a negligent discharge unlikely.

1. All firearms are always handled as if they are loaded.
2. Never point the muzzle of a firearm at anything you are unwilling to destroy.
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until the sights are aligned on the target.
4. Be sure of your target.

Those rules are simple, and following them will keep you from negligently shooting yourself or any one or thing else. The rules and laws governing who can have a gun and under what circumstances are more complicated, and failure to attend to those rules can also be quite painful.

Here in Maryland, for instance, for almost 20 years we have had strict controls on the transfers of certain kinds of rifles and magazines. Here’s how that affects me.

I have a collector’s item WWII vintage M1 Carbine made by National Postal Meter. It isn’t on any of the state no-no lists, at least not yet. However, the 30-round magazines commonly used with M1 Carbines are restricted in that they cannot be transferred to another individual in Maryland. So if I take my Carbine to the range, I can shoot it using one of my old 30-round magazines, but if I allow someone else to shoot it (lending it is a transfer), they must use a 15-round magazine because I can’t transfer the 30-round magazine to them.

I also have a Colt AR15 Sporter Carbine. It doesn’t use the usual .223 Remington/5.56 mm NATO ammunition; it’s chambered for 7.62 X 39 mm Russian round that is legal for deer hunting in Maryland. The only magazines I have for it are the 5-round units provided by Colt. Since an AR15 is regulated firearm, I can’t just hand it to whomever I wish. So-called “gratuitous” temporary loans are OK, but anyone other than a family member, close friend, or licensed dealer can be risky. All transfers are supposed to go through a licensed dealer. However, the 5-round magazines have no restrictions whatsoever.

This is what happens when laws are cobbled together by people who have little understanding of what they are trying to regulate. When I was a federally licensed dealer a couple of decades ago, there were over 20,000 federal, state, and local gun laws in the book that the ATF sent me, some of them contradictory. There are more of ‘em now.

Sigh.

Quote of the Day

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Some Socialists seem to believe that people should be numbers in a State computer. We believe they should be individuals. We are all unequal. No one, thank heavens, is like anyone else, however much the Socialists may pretend otherwise. We believe that everyone has the right to be unequal but to us every human being is equally important.

—Margaret Thatcher

I’m Not Making This Up, You Know

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From the official White House statement (H/T, Vodkapundit):

Here in America, many of us will never forget her standing shoulder to shoulder with President Reagan, reminding the world that we are not simply carried along by the currents of history—we can shape them with moral conviction, unyielding courage and iron will. Michelle and I send our thoughts to the Thatcher family and all the British people as we carry on the work to which she dedicated her life—free peoples standing together, determined to write our own destiny.

Emphasis mine.

Obama carrying on Margaret Thatcher’s work? Where did I put that brain bleach?

It’s a Feature, Not a Bug

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The Maryland Legislature has joined with New York, Colorado, and Connecticut in passing a gun control law of doubtful constitutionality. Our governor will certainly sign the bill, and the law will certainly be petitioned to referendum. We’ll see how thing go from there.

Companies such as Magpul in Colorado and Beretta in Maryland will be moving to states that respect the Second Amendment. Some Maryland residents are beginning to talk about voting with their feet. However, many supports of these laws view these exoduses as feature rather than a bug. Having those bitter clingers move away gets them out of the neighborhood.

Sigh.

There are days when I wonder why I ever left Tennessee.

The AP is Technically Correct

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The AP has changed it’s Style Book to deprecate the term “illegal immigrant.” Their reason is that the person is not illegal, and that’s true. The act of crossing the border or being in the country without lawful authorization is an illegal act, but the person committing the act isn’t illegal. He’s a criminal.

Thus, a more accurate term would be criminal immigrant.