This guy should be put in a museum, because if you looked up “Northeastern Republican” in the dictionary, I think you’d find a picture of this fossil. Â In this he claims that Republican Party is becoming a regional party of the South. Â While to some degree that’s true, I think guys like this are a big part of the reason the GOP has virtually lost all of the Northeast, including the Philadelphia Suburbs. Â The nature of their environment changed, and they were unable to adapt. Â We know how that worked out for the dinosaurs, and so it seems to have worked out for Northeastern Republicans.
Month: August 2009
Snow Leopard
Ran out to the Apple Store in King of Prussia yesterday to pick up a copy of Snow Leopard. Â Installation went off without a hitch, and the main reason I decided to upgrade quickly, which were the time machine speedups, seem to work OK. Â The integration of Apple Mail with Exchange 2007 seems to work well. Â My iCal synchronizes with my Exchange calendar just fine, and the e-mail part works fine too. Â I’m happy about this because it gives me an opportunity to stop using Entourage, which works fine, but is a bit more slow and bloated compared to Mail. Â I also switched to using Safari instead of Firefox, because it’s much faster, so I thought I’d give it another chance. Â We’ll see how it goes.
NRA Threatening Pittsburgh
The NRA Annual Meeting, which draws upwards of 70,000+ people every year, is scheduled to be in Pittsburgh in 2011. Looks like NRA is threatning to pull the convention out of Pittsburgh if they continue with their threat to ban assault weapons. As much as it would pain me, since I can easily drive to Pittsburgh, pulling the meeting is the right thing to do if Pittsburgh wants to continue demonstrating they have no respect for gun owners, or for state law.
The more I find out about the ordinance, the less I understand the need for it. If a police officer orders you to disperse, and the order is lawful, it doesn’t matter what you’re in possession of.
Cat Trouble
Jeff points to this article on men who don’t want to admit they love cats. I don’t know, maybe it’s because I have enough guns to compensate for my inadequacies, as the anti-gun folks would surely believe, but I have no problem admitting to loving cats. In fact, it’s a problem in our house, because Bitter is a dog person, and is allergic to cats. I will have to wait until I live somewhere with enough land that I can have an indoor/outdoor cat.
Boned by Bonefish Grill
Glenn Reynolds has a picture of a sign outside a Bonefish Grill in Tennessee. That’s interesting, because we have several around here, and I’ve not seen any signs outside of them. I should note that Bonefish is operated by OSI Restaurant Partners, which also owns Carrabba’s Italian Grill, Cheeseburger in Paradise, and Outback Steakhouses.
I’ve never seen any one of those restaurants posted here, or anywhere else.
North Carolina Ruling on Felons in Possession
Joe Huffman has the most thorough coverage of it, close enough to what I would have written to save me the time. I generally think it’s constitutional to deprive people convicted of certain crimes of their right t0 bear arms, but I think retroactively applying what is essentially a sentencing enhancement is ex post facto. As Clayton Cramer is fond of saying, in the time of the founding, we deprived felons of their right to breathe oxygen, so it wasn’t a problem ever considered in the time. Plus, I don’t think the founders ever considered felonies for putting lobesters in the wrong bag.
But despite the fact that I think some violent criminals can be constitutionally deprived, that’s not to say I agree with the current federal and many state regimes on this matter. If the courts are willing to agree that blanket bans on gun possession by felons, violent or no, is unconstitutional, I have no issue.
Down Memory Lane
Thanks to Greg for pointing out that Google has newspaper archives, and you can search through and look at old newspaper archives. For instance, this article from the Eugene Register, dated October 29th, 1981, certainly would make the folks down at the Brady Campaign pine for the good old days:
What is the fastest growing outfit in the country? A likely candidate for that honor is Handgun Control, Inc., which recently announced a current membership of 451,000.
Just six months ago it was only one-quarter that size, and thus has quadrupled its membership in the half-year that saw the killing of singer John Lennon and the wounding of President Reagan, both with handguns.
They had a goal of reaching a million members by March 30th 1982. Looking at articles from around that time, it would seem they never reached their goal. In this March 29th article, they speak of having a bit north of 565,000 members, only 165,000 of which had contributed any money.
Interestingly enough, you can do a search and see when the media was speaking most about the issue. The one thing you can definitely see is how assassination of prominent figures does drive the issue. But it seems to be that we, as a nation, most talk about the gun control debate, when gun control is a major political issue. Look at the spikes in the 90s, to see what I mean.
I also found this article from 1967, when the NRA refused to let Teddy Kennedy speak at their annual meeting. Or how about this article from July of 1968 speaking of the NRA trying to derail a bill to register and license guns and gun owners, and this article here which speaks of the Gun Control Act of 1968 being passed by the Senate, and then this one which shows the Senate bill in trouble . They even call us the “gun lobby.” Notice also that most of the articles speak to NRA’s opposition stymies progress every step of the way, despite the fact that many of our modern revisionists like to argue that NRA just rolled over on GCA ’68.
Shame shit, different decade. But man, do I hope the Secret Service is on the ball with Obama. There’s a common thread that runs through all these articles, if you read them. And Ted Kennedy was at forefront of all these bills. No wonder the Brady folks really miss him.
It’s Old Hat
Cemetery points to a rather ridiculous practice, but it’s nothing new. Gun control didn’t poll among the public as well as gun control groups thought it needed to for them to gain any real traffic, so it morphed into “gun safety.” Andrew McKelvey, who founded Monster.com, even created an entire group in order to get this meme to sail, but the ship sank. It was after AGS failed, that we suddenly got AHSA, also founded by leaders in the gun control movement. AGS failed so spectacularly that they are largely gone from the Internet. There’s not even a defunct web site. Let’s hope that’s a metaphor for Corzine’s campaign.
More Bad News for Bloomberg
I mentioned in my final post about breaking down the ranks of Bloomberg’s anti-gun mayors that if your mayor is on the list, go after them on the anti-concealed carry advertisements Bloomberg funded. I said there was a possibility that they had no idea what their names were being signed on to in conjunction with Mayors Against Illegal Guns. Turns out, I was right.
Two mayors resigned from the group specifically over those ads and the position Bloomberg took against concealed carry. I already mentioned the resignation of the Houston mayor in the post, but I just found a reference to the specifics of his departure:
Former comptroller John Sharp, a Democratic candidate to succeed Hutchison in the U.S. Senate, said Monday that Houston Mayor Bill White, another Democrat seeking the Hutchison seat, should resign from a group called Mayors Against Illegal Guns. White’s campaign said he resigned last week, adding that the group’s focus had grown from its original effort to prevent the sale of stolen guns.
Sharp’s campaign pointed to the group’s fight against a proposal to allow those with concealed gun permits to carry them into other states. White’s campaign said he resigned the day that the group took out a newspaper ad denouncing that proposal.
Either he didn’t know about it, or he did and realized that it was a political liability. Either way, Bloomberg’s extremism cost him the mayor of Houston.
It turns out that those ads also caught the attention of Sen. Thune himself.
The ads included lists of mayors. That definitely got the attention of Thune’s office. Someone noticed that one ad suggested Sioux Falls Mayor Dave Munson opposed the amendment. That one stung — Thune lives in Sioux Falls.
Thune’s office placed a call to Munson, who told them he didn’t oppose the amendment, a Thune staffer said. Several days later Munson resigned from the mayors group, Feinblatt says.
So there’s confirmation that Bloomberg is signing mayors onto policy statements they do not endorse. He’s using their names to advance his personal agenda without even consulting them. Those types of actions make pretty much every politician skittish.
Quote of the Day
People carrying guns are acting like jerks. So are the liberals who have created a giant scary amalgam of a right-wing protester, who has done every bad thing that every protester has ever done. More than one person has now asked me how I can defend someone who shows up at a rally holding a gun in one hand and a picture of Obama-as-Hitler in the other, and starts screaming about death panels?
Moreover, having created this horrifying bogeyman, the next rhetorical move is to claim that this constitutes the whole of the opposition to your program.
Does any of this sound oddly familiar? Wait a second . . . it’ll come to you . . . yes, that’s right, it’s 2003 all over again!
RTWT
UPDATE: More from Megan on this topic here, and here. I think Megan brings a useful, non-gun-activist view to this whole thing. She calls out the left for not being willing to put their money where their mouths are when predicting all manner of horrors that are sure to happen if people keep bringing guns to protests.
UPDATE: Doug Pennington’s two cents on McArdle’s posts here.