I have a new polling plugin, so I’m going to try this sucker out.
[poll=2]
[poll=3]
Your feedback is appreciated.
Category: Politics
It’s Only February …
… and I’m already tired of this election year. Tired because I find myself defending John McCain, and I don’t even really like the guy. McCain is pretty far from being a classical liberal I could really get behind, and tends to fall more into the category of “National Greatness” conservative, who are open to a lot more state meddling in things the state ought not meddle in than I’m comfortable with.
But there are more crazy claims about McCain circulating out there than I can shake a stick at. The first is that he’s anti-gun, and no better than Hilly or Obama. Brady gives McCain a career rating of 17%. Obama and Hillary both have 100% ratings, as did John Kerry. The other is that McCain is a socialist. Other than Ron Paul, McCain’s federal budget is the lowest of any remaining Republican candidate. McCain is not in favor of socializing 7% of the US economy in the same manner Obama would. I think McCain on fiscal matters will be a significant improvement over Bush, let alone Obama or Hillary.
To my mind, campaign finance reform is his biggest sin, and there were a lot of other folks, including Fred Thompson and President Bush, and five members of the Supreme Court, who all took their turn to drop their dookie into the constitutional swimming pool.
But given that I’m the only person in the gun blogosphere who is thinking, “McCain! Why did it have to be McCain!?!?” but still planning to vote for him regardless, and encouraging others to do so as well, I find myself wondering if the more apt analogy is Han Solo telling Chewbacca, “Get in there, you big furry oaf! I don’t care what you smell!”
Be Afraid …
“He walks into a room and you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere,” George Clooney told talk show host Charlie Rose.
“I’ll do whatever he says to do,” actress Halle Berry said to the Philadelphia Daily News. “I’ll collect paper cups off the ground to make his pathway clear.”
If it was just vapid Hollywood stars who liked this guy, I wouldn’t be that worried, but it’s enough people that I’m beginning to fear the prospect of an Obama presidency more than a Hillary presidency. Is this fervent and religious devotion to Obama among the young a product of schools long ago hijacked by the left?
I don’t like Hillary Clinton, and I despise her politics. I was initially rather irrationally happy to see Americans thumb their noses at her. But no one really likes Hillary Clinton all that much, even the people who vote for her. Lacking any real mandate, she’d be limited to what she can accomplish as President.
If Obama sweeps into office on a wave of near religious devotion, at the risk of invoking Godwin, I can’t help but thinking about the other times this has happened. I’m not at all making the comparison of Obama to Hitler, or suggesting he’s going to burn down Capitol Hill to create a pretext, but just the kind of blind devotion I’m seeing in Obama supporters leads to that kind of thing, and if this is the road our young people want to go down, they need to spent more time learning history, with a skeptical eye toward human nature.
Hat tip to War on Guns for the link.
Quote of the Day
From John Derbyshire of National Review:
Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.
All to effectively explains the difference between people who want liberty, and people who want to be relieved of its burden.
Hillary’s Rules for Radicals
Dr. Helen does a nice job of tying the story about Hillary being a Life Long Hunter and her graduate thesis on Saul Alinksy together. She asks:
Will Americans fall for Clinton’s manipulative tactics, especially in the area of gun control? It’s possible, but then again, many Americans know when they are being fed a big pile of bull. Or at least, I hope they do.
Read the whole thing. It would seem as if Americans are already rejecting Hillary, but I’m not sure how good that makes me feel considering they are rejecting her in favor of following The Messiah to The Promise Land.
Mumia Appeal Rejected
Darling of the international left, Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted in 1981 and sentenced to death in the shooting death of Officer Daniel Faulkner, has been denied his appeal by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in a unanimous decision.
Philly Preemption Lawsuit Update
Thanks to reader Jack, we have an update on the lawsuit by the City of Philadelphia to overturn state preemption through the court system, talked about several months ago here.
Bochetto said some things have changed since [the 1996 ruling upholding preemption], including the recent increase in Philadelphia’s gun violence. Also, the state Supreme Court recently ruled the city can impose its own rules when it comes to campaign finance.
And three justices who issued the 4-0 decision in 1996 have since left the court.
“I’m playing Texas Hold ‘Em — of my seven cards, I now get six new cards,” Bochetto said.
Clarke and Miller first sued in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court in July, but the case was later transferred to Commonwealth Court, where disputes between Pennsylvania governmental bodies often end up. The March 12 hearing concerns whether the case should be thrown out or allowed to continue.
So basically, the City is just going to keep playing poker with your rights until they get a winning hand, and gun owners in or near Philadelphia lose. I sincerely hope that Commonealth Court throws this case out based on the Ortiz precedent, and this stops here. The law is not a card game, and preemption in Pennsylvania is well established.
Bogus Parking Tickets
The Allentown Morning Call talks about how an Allentown woman got labeled a scofflaw in the City of Philadelphia. It seems that parking enforcement officers (a.k.a. meter maids) have problems with dyslexia:
”What is probably happening is that the ticket writer is transposing the H and the M characters because they are next to each other and they are shaped the same,” Martinko, a 19-year veteran, wrote in an e-mail. ”I have done this when running license plates on my in-car computer.”
Going on that hunch, Martinko ran a slight variation of Hersch’s license plate: GMH-7177. Sure enough, that plate traced to an Oldsmobile registered to an owner who lives in the neighborhood where the tickets were issued.
A transposition error sounds like a reasonable explanation, said Linda Miller, the parking authority’s deputy executive director. It’s one of the first explanations the parking authority looks at when someone contests a ticket.
”Unfortunately, when you have someone keying in or writing a plate, they sometimes make mistakes,” Miller said.
Mistakes are understandable, but it shouldn’t take six months to fix the problem. I had a friend who got nabbed by the PPA for having an unregistered vehicle on city streets even though the car had valid and current Iowa tags and registration on it. When she contested it, PPA claimed the plate was stolen. There are reasons why the city’s tax base has been eroding steadily for decades; it’s not a nice place to live. The government is hopelessly corrupt and incompetent, the taxes are horrible, and the only people who live there tend to do so out of neccessity rather than choice.
Hillary Clinton, Life Long Hunter?
Pandering like this is almost enough to make me sick, but you have to imagine it’s not half as sickening to me as it is to the folks in the gun control movement:
Well, well. We wondered, did she have any hunting tales to tell? Did she ever shoot anything?
“A duck,†she answered a bit later in a press availability. “And a lot of tin cans, and a lot of targets, and some skeet.â€
Maybe she was spending time hanging out with that other life long hunter, Mitt Romney, in the duck blind, but I’m not buying it. Still, if people weren’t fooled by this stuff, politicians wouldn’t do it.
Central American Commies for Obama
Daniel Ortega likes him. For those of you who didn’t grow up during the cold war, and think Ortega is a line of taco products:
Ortega led a Soviet-backed government that battled U.S.-supported Contra rebels before he lost power in a 1990 election. He returned to office last year via the ballot box.
Now all we need is an endorsement from Hugo Chavez.