The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
Today was an office day, and there was much to do. In addition, I had to swing by MicroCenter on the way home to exchange some memory I bought last week which turned out to be defective. Took a few hours on the memory tests to make sure these sticks were OK, but lo and behold:
We will now return to our regularly scheduled blogging.
Senate Republicans in Pennsylvania are proposing a plan that would proportion our electors in the Electoral college according to popular vote. Maybe if Senate Republicans spent more time trying to live up to their promises, instead of spending time trying to figure out how to get more votes for Republicans, Corbett’s numbers wouldn’t be so far in the toilet.
Given the GOP’s poor luck in the VoterID debacle, if their luck continues, I think it’s likely in 2016 that PA would have gone red, but the GOP candidate will lose by a margin he would have beat in the Electoral College if PA had stayed with the original electoral scheme.
Meanwhile, we still have socialized wine and liquor in this state, and you can’t buy beer at supermarkets or convenience stores.
Jim Geraghty has noticed what most of us have been dealing with forever any time we have contact with activists in the gun control movement: they collectively place the blame for every act of horrific violence at our feet as if we’re the people cause such violence:
Okay, once and for all: Enough with this ‘we’re all to blame, we must all struggle to prevent tragedy’ bullcrap. Because none of us had anything to do with the actions of Jovan Belcher. You and I and every other reader of this newsletter and about 99.999 percent of the American people prevent these sorts of tragedies every day . . . by not committing them, and by never seriously contemplating considering them. We are not all ticking time bombs, one stressful day away from committing mass murder. If we were, civilization would collapse.
The rant continues. I encourage you to read the whole thing, and sign up for the Morning Jolt (Note: NR will hit you with some e-mail ads every once in a while, but not nearly often enough to be obnoxious.). Geraghty also notes this kind of collectivist blame is a common theme in Obama’s rhetoric, noting “Now we see what ‘never waste a crisis’ means: never let any horrific act go unattributed to your political foes.”
… and wondered the same thing. I think before you poll someone, you should probably do a few leader questions to try to successfully ascertain whether the person being polled has any idea what you’re talking about. “Socialism, that’s like, when you’re social and promote being social, right? Oh yeah, I support that.” But I suppose it doesn’t look very good if you release a poll showing that only 30% of Americans have any idea of what socialism even is.
Title of this post is according to Jason Whitlock, who was the author of the original piece that got Bob Costas in trouble. Our opponents in the gun control movement are salivating about this recent rhetoric, but in truth, this is the kind of coverage NRA feeds off of, because people who are even remotely inclined to side with NRA get galvanized by it. I know this is hard for many people in the gun control movement to understand, but suggesting people who enjoy shooting and value the Bill of Rights are the moral equivalent of a domestic terrorist organization bent on enforcing the kind of racial policy only Hitler could be proud of, tends to upset people enough to get more seriously involved:
You know, I did not go as far as I’d like to go because my thoughts on the NRA and America’s gun culture — I believe the NRA is the new KKK. And that the arming of so many black youths, uh, and loading up our community with drugs, and then just having an open shooting gallery, is the work of people who obviously don’t have our best interests [at heart].
That’s crazy tin foil hat stuff right there. What they fail to understand that there are a lot of gun owners, shooting enthusiasts, and other people inclined to our point of view who have better things to do, ordinarily, than to get themselves involved in a political scrap. Any hateful rhetoric such as this, is enabling for an activist. It brings people in, causes them to seek out kindred spirits, gather information, and makes them pay attention. It opens to them the idea that the only way to crush the hateful is political engagement. They begin to understand that people like this can not be compromised with. In short, it makes my job as an activist much, much easier.
Kathleen Kane wanted to sign anti-gun lobbying letters before she ever took office, so NRA is asking gun owners in Pennsylvania to air their opinions about her efforts before she has an official mailing address to ignore.
While it should come as no surprise, Pennsylvania Attorney General-Elect Kathleen Kane is wasting no time in demonstrating her hostility towards your Second Amendment rights even before she takes office next month. …
Please contact Attorney General-Elect Kathleen Kane TODAY and respectfully ask that she reverse her position on this important issue. Her contact information is provided here.
I love this because it uses her resume submission form to contact her. Why? Because it’s the only contact information Kane has bothered to post in her role as Attorney General-elect. She is using the title to “represent” the people of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, but otherwise doesn’t want to hear from those pesky constituents unless they are part of her agency-wide restaffing efforts. So, if she wants to claim a title and start signing lobbying letters, I see no reason why the citizens of Pennsylvania shouldn’t use the website she’s claiming in order to contact her – even if it’s about issues she doesn’t want to discuss.
I like it when I can take a break over a weekend to work on my basement office, get a new crown fitted at the Dentist Monday morning, and not have to worry about some media personality spewing nonsense about guns, because the other parts of the center-right coalition, and even some not part of it, are already on it like stink on s**t. Zumboing has seemingly gone mainstream.
UPDATE: More here.
So says an article at LinkedIn. We can only hope. If the Republicans had any guts they’d abolish the agency, along with the entire Department of Homeland Security.
Remember in 2010 at SHOT when the ATF raided the Smith & Wesson booth? Turns out nothing came from that. All charges were dropped and the informant is in prison. Notes TFB:
So in summery, the BATFE and FBI made a high profile raid during SHOT Show to arrest a 21 gun industry people. Their case was hinged on the word of a thief, druggie and all round morally bankrupt individual. Bistrong got just 18 months while the accused spent two years fighting their case. This hardly seems like justice to me.
This is more and more what Uncle Sam’s justice actually does look like.
NRA is trying to push people to call on the Sportsman Act of 2012, which would destroy at least one avenue for the EPA to regulate ammunition.