Are You Ready?

Pot, Meet Kettle

Congress says that “veterans deemed too mentally incompetent to handle their own financial affairs [should] be prevented from buying a gun”. I say that anyone deemed “too mentally incompetent to handle their own financial affairs” should be prevented from serving in Congress.

Arming Mexican Drug Cartels

(to the tune of “Mexican Radio” by Wall of Voodoo)

I’m on a mission from Eric Holder
Because Obama is getting bolder
I throw the guns into my K-car
I gotta work underneath the radar
I tell the sellers, let ’em buy it
And whistleblowers, don’t you try it
Fast and Furious, the DOJ
Won’t testify what I did today

I’m arming Mexican drug cartels
I’m arming Mexican (don’t tell!) drug cartels

I’m working for the Democrat goal
Trying to prove the need for gun control
Need to find guns at the crime scenes
And the ends justify those means

I’m arming Mexican drug cartels
I’m arming Mexican (don’t tell!) drug cartels
I’m arming Mexican drug cartels
I’m arming Mexican (don’t tell!) drug cartels

I wish I could be overnighted
To where I can’t be extradited
Don’t want to answer the Congressmen
We’re gonna stonewall them again
I hear them talking law and order
US guns found south of the border
Know what they’re thinking, can they show it
What did we know, when did we know it?

I’m arming Mexican drug cartels
I’m arming Mexican (don’t tell!) drug cartels
I’m arming Mexican drug cartels
I’m arming Mexican (don’t tell!) drug cartels

Drug cartels, what the Hell?
Drug cartels, what the Hell?

I’m arming Mexican drug cartels
I’m arming Mexican (don’t tell!) drug cartels
I’m arming Mexican drug cartels
I’m arming Mexican (don’t tell!) drug cartels

Drug cartels, what the Hell?
Drug cartels, what the Hell?

We’re Sorry (The Fast and Furious Song)

MisfitPolitics

The Obama Downgrade, Alphabetically

This one is by Bret Stephens at the WSJ (H/T: HillBuzz) and contains an entry for every letter of the alphabet. I’m just going to quote a few of my favorites, but you should read the whole thing.

A	is for the Arab world, and our standing in it: This year, Zogby International found that 5% of Egyptians had a favorable view of the U.S. In 2008, when George W. Bush was president, it was 9%. Wasn’t Obama supposed to make the Arab world love us?
D	is for—what else—the federal debt, which grew to $14.3 trillion this month from $10.7 trillion at the end of 2008. D is also for the dollar, which has lost almost half its value against gold since Aug. 2008.
E	is for energy. The average retail price of a gallon of gas hovered near the $1.80 mark when Mr. Obama was inaugurated. It has since more than doubled. E is also for ethanol, the non-wonder fuel the U.S. continues to subsidize to the tune of $5 billion a year.
G	is for Guantanamo, which remains open, and for Gadhafi, who remains in power, and for Greece, which offers a vision of America’s future if we don’t reform our entitlement state.
I	is for Israel, a Middle Eastern country the president claims to support even as he routinely disses its prime minister, seeks to shrink its borders and—why not?—divide its capital. I is also for insane, for all the Jews who vote for Obama’s reelection next year.
J	is for jobs. In November 2008, president-elect Obama promised he would create 2.5 million jobs by 2011. By October 2010 the economy had shed 3.3 million jobs. For the seventh time, he’s now claiming to have shifted his attention to creating jobs.
M	is for Mexico, a country that manages 5.4% unemployment and 4.2% annual growth even as it fights a war against the drug cartels. Obama, meanwhile, is arming those cartels.
Q	is for QE2, the most disastrous experiment in monetary policy since Fed Chairman William Miller’s low-interest rate policy crashed the dollar in 1978. There is talk of QE3 coming soon.
T	is for taxes, which Mr. Obama would like to see raised for “millionaires and billionaires”—curiously defined as people making $200K and up.
X	is for Liu Xiaobo, an example of what a deserving winner of the Nobel Peace Prize looks like. X is also for Xanax, likely to be remembered as the drug of choice of the Obama years.
Z	is for zero, which is the likelihood that one of the current GOP hopefuls will defeat Mr. Obama in 2012. I hope this is wrong, but I fear it isn’t.

(Comments in red by yours truly.)

It’s Not Penumbras, It’s Plain English

(Gun cozies: because happiness is a warm gun.)

Continuing a theme from my last post about people who don’t give a damn what the Constitution actually says, we have Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer telling us that the Second Amendment doesn’t really say what we think it says; or, even if it does, it doesn’t count because James Madison had his fingers crossed or something.

Gun Control at SCOTUS, Redux

Tomorrow, McDonald v. Chicago goes before the Supreme Court. As Iron Fist put it:

This is a big case any way you look at it. It is to decide whether the Second Amendment, which was found to safeguard an individual right in the 2008 Heller case, applies to States and Local governments. This would seem obvious, but in the twists and turns of the law, it actually isn’t… (more here)

It’s worth pointing out that “the usual suspects” on the left predicted gloom, doom, cats and dogs living together, and mass hysteria after the Heller ruling struck down DC’s gun ban. But, just as the wave of increased fatalities on the highways never actually arrived when the 55 mph federal speed limit was overturned, neither was a there a drastic increase in murders, crime, littering and massacrees in DC after Heller. Just the opposite, as a matter of fact.

…murders in Washington plummeted by an astounding 25 percent in 2009, dropping from 186 murders in 2008 to 140. That translates to a murder rate that is now down to 23.5 per 100,000 people, Washington’s lowest since 1967. While other cities have also fared well over the last year, D.C.’s drop was several times greater than that for other similar sized cities. According to preliminary estimates by the FBI, nationwide murders fell by a relatively more modest 10 percent last year and by about 8 percent in other similarly sized cities of half a million to one million people (D.C.’s population count is at about 590,000). This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who has followed how crime rates change after gun bans have been imposed. Around the world, whenever guns are banned, murder rates rise. Washington’s murder rate soared after its handgun ban went into effect in early 1977… (FOX News)

One can only hope people keep this is mind when McDonald v. Chicago is debated and determined starting tomorrow. After all, gun control has never been about guns or crime – but about control. The only people impacted by gun control are “law abiding citizens”, also known (after gun bans are passed) as “victims”. Criminals are never disarmed by anti-gun laws; by definition, they are lawbreakers. Disarming one side but not the other leads to purely predictable results, which only the ignorant or insane are unable to see … or object to.

The Stupid is Strong With This One

It’s hard to believe that a letter like this could possibly be real, or that anybody could possibly be this stupid. But it is, and they are.

I am a math teacher at Brockton High School, the site of a school shooting earlier this month.

Note that this is a teacher, who is (presumably) an educated person; part of whose job it is to be concerned about students.

Current school security procedures lock down school populations in the event of armed assault. Some advocate abandoning this practice as it holds everyone in place, allowing a shooter easily to find victims. An alternative to lockdown is immediate exodus via announcement. Although this removes potential hostages and makes it nearly impossible for the shooter to acquire preselected targets, it unfairly rewards resourceful children who move to safety off-site more shrewdly and efficiently than others. Schools should level playing fields, not intrinsically reward those more resourceful. A level barrel is fair to all fish.

Allowing the children to run to safety isn’t “fair” because some children will be faster or smarter than others; the only fair solution is to keep them trapped because shooting fish in a barrel (he actually uses that metaphor) presumably gives all of the children equal odds on living or dying… Unfortunately, since more children (all of them, in fact) will be at risk in a “level barrel” scenario, with potentially higher casualties, then the average odds of being shot (number of casualties divided by total number of students) is higher for the student bodies – er, body. Of course, the typical socialist doesn’t care if everybody is sick, poor, and miserable; as long as they are equally sick, poor, and miserable; the same philosophy applies here.

Some propose overturning laws that made schools gun-free zones even for teachers who may be licensed to securely carry concealed firearms elsewhere. They argue that barring licensed-carry only ensures a defenseless, target-rich environment. But as a progressive, I would sooner lay my child to rest than succumb to the belief that the use of a gun for self-defense is somehow not in itself a gun crime.

DOUG VAN GORDER
Quincy
Letter to the Editor, The Boston Globe

So not only is he a horrible teacher who doesn’t care about his students, he’s also a horrible parent who would rather see his son die than have him be saved by politically-incorrect methods. Saving his son’s life would be a crime. I have to wonder what this moron’s son thinks, reading this letter in the paper – assuming that his son is even capable of reading, given what a horrible teacher, father, and all-around human being Doug van Gorder is. Someone needs to tell Dougie that Harrison Bergeron was a satire, not a set of guidelines. (H/T Before It’s News)

Assuming They Can Read At All

“This is what happens when bills are passed and signed prior to reading,” says MacDuff:

FOX News — It may sound absurd. But President Obama signed a bill into law Wednesday that requires passengers who carry firearms aboard Amtrak be locked in boxes for their journey. It’s a mistake in the law’s wording. But for now, the clerical error is the law of the land. Earlier this week, Congress sent the president a massive spending bill that funded dozens of federal departments. Tucked into the transportation section of the legislation are safety requirements for Amtrak customers who carry firearms on board the government-backed train system. The bill Congress passed mandates that passengers with firearms declare they have weapons with them in advance and stow them in locked boxes while on the train. The bill text was correct when the House approved the legislation last week. The Senate followed suit Sunday, but somewhere along the line, the language that referred to putting the guns in locked boxes morphed into stuffing “passengers” into locked boxes. … Pelosi’s staff tried to negotiate with Republican aides to see if they would agree to change the text of the bill without revoting the entire piece of legislation. But it was all for naught as Obama had already signed the measure into law…

I want to see someone take a gun on the train and see if they have a lockbox big enough to put him in. They might have to borrow one of Al Gore’s famous lockboxes.

It’s clear the typo alters the legislation’s mandate. But no one quite knows the origin of the mistake.

Well, unless the wording gets corrected before June (according to the law, Amtrak has six months to implement it), the Congress has effectively passed what amounts to a complete ban on guns on Amtrak. I’m not entirely convinced that this was an accident. Simply copying and pasting wouldn’t have changed the wording, someone had to do that manually.

Who Brings a Snowball to a Gunfight?

I grew up in the North, so I love snow. I know how to prepare for it, how to walk in it, how to ski on it, how to drive in it, and so on. I even enjoyed a couple of hours of shoveling it yesterday. However, while that isn’t at all unusual in the Northeast, it makes me practically unique in the DC area. As you may have seen (on the news or in person), the DC area got hit with over a foot and a half of global warming yesterday. People from other parts of the country (or the world – hello, Canada!) don’t believe me when I tell them how batshit insane people in the DC area get over snow. Sure, lots of people would panic over 20 inches of the white stuff, but people here panic over mere inches of it. Worse, they panic over the merest possible forecast of snow; I’ve seen people planning to take sick days over forecasts before single flake hit the ground (up North when I was a kid, they didn’t cancel school until there was already at least a foot on the roads). And don’t even get me started about the drivers!

Still, a cop pulling out his gun because of a snowball fight seems a bit over the top even considering both the snow-induced insanity of the region, and the generally incompetent and unaccountable nature of DC’s “finest”.

A plainclothes police detective allegedly pulled his gun out and waved it at a large group of people in a snowball fight at the corner of 14th and U Saturday afternoon. The incident began when a plain-clothes detective approached the crowd of people throwing snowballs and got into a verbal altercation with members of the crowd, according to police. …the police officer identifies himself as “Detective Baylor” and in response to someone saying that he pulled a gun on a snowball fight he says: “Yes, I did because I got hit with snowballs.”

And yet, it’s the citizens of DC who can’t be trusted with guns.