“The refutation of Crist, Murkowski and Castle is a wonderful thing, regardless of how it plays out in November. … In three primaries Republican voters decided they didn’t like what they saw in the three candidates presented by the establishment. In all three cases, the instincts of the voters were completely confirmed — by the subsequent actions of the hacks they drummed out of the party. Crist, Murkowski and Castle have made it abundantly clear they are devoid of anything resembling principles or party loyalty. All three have made something else clear as well: contempt for the average American has revealed itself to be far more ‘bipartisan’ than ever before. Such contempt has become so transparent and pervasive that the term ‘ruling class’ resonates like it never has: many Americans have become completely alienated from their representatives, regardless of party affiliation. Here’s a scary thought for Democrats: think what’s happening to the Republican party can’t happen to yours? Think again. A Congress with an approval rating of 23.6% while your party’s in charge can’t be reassuring. In November, if the public purges Democrats from the majority less than two years after Democrat political strategist James Carville’s proclaimed they would rule for the next forty, expect the kind of finger-pointing and blood-letting that will make the current Republican purge look tame by comparison. Americans may not agree about many things but one thing is certain: they are sick to death of selfish phonies selling themselves as ‘servants of the people.'” –columnist Arnold Ahlert
Archive for the ‘mysandry’ Category
Draft DOJ Report Faults BATFE, But Not Gun Control
September 25, 2010A draft report prepared by the Justice Department Inspector General’s Evaluation and Inspections Division calls into question the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives’ (BATFE) performance in carrying out the mandates of its Project Gunrunner program, established in 2007 to combat the trafficking of firearms to Mexico. The report also contradictorily suggests that BATFE’s ability to meet the program’s objectives might be enhanced by federal laws requiring the filing of multiple sales reports on long guns, and requiring some or all private sales of firearms to be screened by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).
One contradiction is that the report complains that BATFE’s “focus remains largely on inspections of gun dealers and investigations of straw purchasers, rather than on higher-level traffickers, smugglers, and the ultimate recipients of the trafficked guns.” But requiring multiple sales reports on long guns and requiring private sales to go through NICS would mainly facilitate even more investigations of straw purchasers. And there’s another contradiction. If, as some claim, straw purchasers are the primary source of firearms bought in the U.S. for resale to the cartels, and that straw purchasers can defeat NICS checks, the smuggling of firearms from the U.S. to Mexico can’t be significantly reduced by requiring that private sales be subject to NICS. After all, a straw purchaser who can pass a NICS check can pass it regardless of whether the gun is being bought from a dealer or someone who is not a dealer.
Also, BATFE doesn’t follow up on most of the multiple sales reports it receives on handguns, so there’s little reason to think it would do things any differently with reports on long guns. Theoretically, more multiple sales reports and NICS checks would make it easier for BATFE to conduct commercial record traces on firearms, but as the report points out, “most trace requests that are submitted to ATF from Mexico are considered ‘unsuccessful.'” Only 27 percent of traces between 2007 and 2009, on firearms seized in Mexico, were successful.
BATFE traces are of such dubious value that, the report notes, “Mexican law enforcement authorities do not view gun tracing as an important investigative tool. . . . One Mexican official stated that U.S. officials talk of eTrace as if it is a ‘panacea’ but that it does nothing for Mexican law enforcement. An official in the Mexico Attorney General’s office told us he felt eTrace is ‘some kind of bad joke.'”
To its credit, the draft report correctly points out that Mexico requests BATFE to trace only about one quarter of the firearms that it seizes from the cartels, a fact which implies that a significant share of the cartels’ guns come from countries other than the United States. To put it simply, if the Mexican police recover a machine gun with Communist Chinese markings on it, they know it didn’t come from the U.S., and they are not going to waste time requesting a trace from BATFE. The Mexicans are interested in squashing the cartels, not in racking up trace numbers to spruce up BATFE press releases.
“Nice Try, But No Cigar” For Brady Campaign’s Paul Helmke
September 25, 2010“The NRA is wrong again,” said Brady Campaign president Paul Helmke on Tuesday, in his 176th (and counting) blog post on the left-wing Huffington Post website. Helmke was upset because of three things we pointed out in our annual “More Guns, Less Crime” fact sheet and Grassroots Alert last week.
First, the number of guns has risen to an all-time high. Second, for decades Brady Campaign has repeatedly predicted with unfettered confidence that more guns would necessarily cause crime to rise. But third, the nation’s violent crime and murder rates have instead fallen to 35- and 45-year lows, respectively.
Our fact sheet and alert didn’t say that crime has gone down because the number of guns has risen. And we didn’t even mention that crime has gone down in large part because in the 1990s many states adopted laws that NRA called for, to require violent criminals to spend time behind bars, to increase the length of violent criminals’ prison sentences, and to reduce their ability to obtain parole and probation (we’ll do that in next year’s fact sheet. Thanks for the reminder, Paul).
All our fact sheet and alert pointed out was that, contrary to Brady Campaign predictions, an increase in guns didn’t cause crime to go up.
Nevertheless, Helmke whined, “The NRA is misleading again.” The NRA is trying “to wave and shout and dance and steal the credit” for crime going down. NRA’s leaders “treat us as fools.”
Helmke didn’t deny that there is less crime. And he didn’t deny that there are more guns. Instead, he paraphrased some of Violence Policy Center’s hogwash, saying, “the average number of guns per owner has gone up, but the percent of American households with a gun? That’s right: it’s gone down.”
What Helmke didn’t mention is that polls measuring the percentage of households that acknowledge having at least one gun don’t accurately measure gun ownership by household or the number of Americans who own guns.
In its 1996 National Survey of Private Ownership of Firearms in the United States (NSPOF), the Police Foundation identified one of the limits of surveys attempting to measure gun ownership by household.
“For households headed by a married couple, 49 percent of the husbands report a gun in the home, compared with just 36 percent of the wives. Since this difference is far larger than can be explained by chance, it appears that many wives either do not know about their husband’s guns or are reluctant to discuss it with a stranger. The NSPOF estimates based on a respondent’s report of all guns in the household is 107.2 million working firearms. The NSPOF estimate based on a respondent’s report of his or her own firearms is 192.1 million working firearms.”
Similarly, criminologist Gary Kleck has noted that in his and Marc Gertz’s landmark survey of defensive firearm use, “50.1% of married men reported a household gun, but only 37.4% of married women did. . . . Fourteen consecutive General Social Surveys found married women to report household guns at lower levels than married men.”
Kleck added that a person is more likely to acknowledge that he or she own guns, than to acknowledge the ownership of guns by someone else in the household, but that while “it is most commonly a male who owns the household guns . . . . [M]arried women make up around 31% of the usual adult survey samples.”
Helmke also didn’t note (but Kleck did) that the percentage of people telling pollsters that they have guns in their homes dropped precipitously during the years of the Clinton Administration’s war against gun owners, from the 40+ percentage range, down into the 30s.
And there is one other, factor that Helmke didn’t take into account: The population of the country rises by about one percent, or three million, every year. Surveys began showing a decline in “household” gun ownership in the 1980s, but since 1985, for example, the population of the country has increased 30 percent, from 239 million to 310 million. That’s more than enough to compensate for the decline in “yes” responses to pollsters asking whether people have any guns in their homes.
So, we’d say we hate to be the one to tell you, Paul, but that wouldn’t be honest. We’re glad to tell you. There are more Americans owning more guns than ever before and, as we both agree, violent crime is way, way, down.
Analysis: Summers exit lets epic failure obama retool team and message
September 21, 2010Sheer idiocy, sheer idiocy I tell you! Socialism and Communism just don’t work great leader with Romulan ears! Such an epic failure! The American people deserve so much better in their leaders!
Read on…
(Reuters) – The departure of economic adviser Larry Summers opens the way for President Barack Obama to shake up leadership of his economic team and show he is taking seriously growing public frustration over the sluggish economic recovery.
Whoever replaces Summers will have policy options constrained by a record $1.47 trillion budget deficit and the possible Democratic loss of control of the House of Representatives in November 2 congressional elections.
* With slow economic growth and nearly double-digit unemployment the central issues in the elections, Summers’ exit continues the overhaul of Obama’s economic team, after White House budget director Peter Orszag and top White House economist Christina Romer departed recently.
Obama’s team had been widely criticized for overly optimistic forecasts about an economy that has not gathered enough steam to erode stubbornly high unemployment.
Word of Summers’ departure followed a town hall meeting on Monday where Obama came face-to-face with supporters disillusioned with his economic recovery efforts.
Full story HERE
Read it… Then go and find a royal throne to puke in.
Our impostor in chief yet again fails to accomplish anything, anything at all that the fools that voted for him wanted. I personally think that is a good thing. A very good thing.
Remembering: The day the earth stood still 9/11
September 10, 2010Remembering this day… I think that perhaps the best way to honor the thirteen men that I knew, trained, and worked with might be best served by simply not posting. That is why this is an hour and fifteen minutes early. Our attention, rather, should be guided toward remembrance of those that died that day. The professionals that did their duty, and paid the ultimate price, as well as the overt victim’s.
America, as in the United States of America. Is not about bowing, even a head nod, to those that wish the destruction of Freedom and Liberty.
The “American Dream” is not about owning a home. It is not about being overpaid for the work that you do. It is not about gaining personal power. It is about having the ability to actually do those things!
Read the Declaration of Independence.
Read the Constitution.
Read the Bill of Rights.
Think about it… Being an American, philosophically is a Natural Human Right!
Time is up. I’ll post links tomorrow.
Bloomberg Felon News: Just keep on fibbing…
September 10, 2010The Straw Purchase felon just can’t seem to get anything right, and on the anniversary of the terrorist attack on NYC at that!
No one in this country knows better than New Yorkers what “devastation” looks like. On September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center buildings and their surrounding area were reduced to rubble, burying nearly 3,000 Americans. To this day, the images are difficult to comprehend; they show a concentration of man-made destruction unprecedented in the United States and perhaps anywhere on Earth.
New York’s current murder rate pales in comparison to that of 2001, of course. But it also pales in comparison to what it was in other years gone by. Due in part to crime-fighting programs adopted under former mayor Rudolph Giuliani, New York City’s murder rate is only a fifth of what it was 20 years ago.
Presumably, New Yorkers are well aware of the relative safety in which they live today. However, the current mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has a skewed perspective even though the September 11 anniversary is front and center in every news outlet today due to other controversies.
With New York City’s and the nation’s murder rates lower than anytime since the 1960s, Bloomberg sounded the alarm, saying “Illegal guns and their accompanying violence devastate communities across our country.”
Bloomberg revisited his perennial cause célèbre —gun control—because his anti-gun group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG), has issued an Issue Brief urging Congress to “close the gun show loophole”—gun control supporters’ Orwellian “doublespeak” for “prohibit private sales of firearms at gun shows and everywhere else.”
Since U.S. crime rates are so low, MAIG invoked Mexico’s war with its drug cartels, repeating the soundbite first heard in 2009, when Attorney General Eric Holder tried to use Mexico’s problem as the excuse for reinstating the federal “assault weapons” ban. “In fact, 90% of guns recovered and traced from Mexican crime scenes originated from gun dealers in the United States,” MAIG says.
Discovering that geography is more than a subject taught in elementary and middle schools, MAIG adds its revelation that “four in ten of the U.S. guns recovered in Mexico between 2006 and 2009 were originally sold by gun dealers in Texas. The three other states that share a border with Mexico – Arizona, California, and New Mexico – were the source for another one-third of the U.S. guns.”
Of course, the operative words in the “90 percent” soundbite are “and traced.” The GAO has already reported that most guns seized in Mexico, from cartels or anyone else, have not originated in the United States. For example, GAO noted, “In 2008, of the almost 30,000 firearms that the Mexican Attorney General’s office said were seized, only around 7,200, or approximately a quarter, were submitted to ATF for tracing.” The others were not submitted for tracing, presumably in many cases because their markings indicated that they were not traceable to the U.S.
For all their effort, Bloomberg and MAIG got scant coverage by the news media. But the debate will likely continue over how many guns are smuggled from the U.S. to Mexico, what percentage of the cartels’ guns originate in the U.S., and from which countries the cartels obtain their machine guns, grenades and other weapons that are unavailable in the United States.
One thing is sure, however: Americans have greater access to U.S. guns than does anyone in Mexico, and our murder rates pale in comparison to those of our southern neighbor. For example, the murder rate of Juarez is nearly 100 times higher than that of El Paso, just across the border. If anything, that’s a criticism of Mexican laws, which prohibit honest people from getting guns with which to protect themselves.
Epic Fail obama: Woof!
September 7, 2010Sorry epic failure, but no, we don’t talk to you like you are a dog. Simply put, it’s the economy stupid! It’s what you and your cronies are doing to the nation. It’s what you are doing to the Constitution that you swore to uphold and defend. It’s about the Bill of Rights. It’s about the rule of law, all laws, not just the cherry picked ones that you happen to like. It’s about you paying off your cronies in the unions and other places. Like the Joyce Foundation and others.
What’s this about? Go read THIS!
Oh, and I almost forgot. Are you an illegal alien obama? Those ears make you look a lot like a Romulan…
Arizona’s Illegal Immigrant Law: A quick and dirty fix?
September 1, 2010Having lost a position that was perhaps the best that I ever was privileged to enjoy, at least in part, because of caring for illegal immigrants. The place simply went broke…
Those that are opposed to the courageous stand taken by Arizona are for the most part simply race baiting, or dislike law enforcement in general.
Here is my quick and dirty fix, and it should pass Constitutional muster as well as show the race baiting segment that it is about public safety, not race.
ANYONE stopped, for anything, would have to have their citizenship status verified. The vast majority of police contacts are traffic related, and most states now require proof of citizenship. Same for state identification cards. Would this add to an Officers burden? How? Every contact get’s ran for wants and warrants and if the drivers license or I.D. is phony somebody is going to the Gray Bar Inn! Make it a state misdemeanor, like Arizona did, in every state to be there unlawfully, and let the feds take it from there. Six months should be plenty of time for them to act. Especially if there were also other related charges.
But, that would probably be to simple a fix for government to wrap their minds around.
Conservative Libertarian Outpost 