Politics – Page 74 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Colorado Anti-Gun Bills Up in Senate

The Denver Post has live coverage of the debate & upcoming votes in the Colorado Senate on the package of anti-gun bills.

It’s interesting that they say the campus carry ban may be pulled today partially because of the national negative attention associated with the outrageous comments by lawmakers about rape victims. It’s not officially pulled yet, but several Democrats are trying to pressure the sponsor by telling the press that it’s dead. However, the sponsor is running around to the press saying that he’s got 10 hours to find votes.

The press is covering the various business angles to the issue, noting the recent threat by Outdoor Channel to pull production from the state. With 70% of voters listing the economy as the biggest issue influencing their vote going into the next election, Colorado lawmakers would do well to listen to the economic impact of gun control.

Dueling Ad Campaigns

NSSF released three commercials they produced with Colt, Stag Arms, & Mossberg that focus on the jobs angle of the gun debate. They are nearly identical, but here’s the Colt version which I liked best for the blue dome visual:

I’m almost ashamed to admit that as often as I drove by that blue dome when I was just getting involved with Second Amendment activism, I had no idea it was associated with Colt.

While gun control group leaders who react very emotionally to the debate may find this angle absurd, it’s really not. When MAIG polled Pennsylvania districts with Republicans they plan to attack (Reps. Fitzpatrick, Meehan, and Gerlach), they didn’t jump right into the gun issue. Instead, they asked “Which of the following issues will be most important to your vote for Congress inthe next election [first and second choice selected]?” Given the option to list two answers, not just one, the top issue was by far the economy. Nearly 70% of respondents (69% to be precise) said it was the big issue heading into 2014’s races. Where did gun control fall? It depends. When they worded it as “fixing gun laws,” it was at the very bottom with 3% – a particularly notable number since that’s a solid 2 percentage points below the poll’s margin of error. When they worded gun control as “gun violence prevention,” the number of people who say they’ll consider it in 2014 skyrocket to a whooping 8%, just two spots higher than “not sure” of any issue they’ll care about in the election. In other words, people care about jobs, they don’t care about gun control.

On the other side, Bloomberg is putting up money to run another ad with six Pennsylvania mayors, among others, to push for more gun control.

They are encouraging people to call Congress, so feel free to call…

Bloomberg is going to spend far more money than the gun industry and the pro-Second Amendment grassroots could ever spend, so it’s important we out-organize them. But still, it’s nice to see attempts to get more ads out there on our side that address serious issues voters care about.

Division of Government

One key theme of Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster speeches was that the filibuster was about reinforcing the advise and consent function of the Senate against the Executive. There was quite a bit of discussion going on in my social media corners about how Congress should stand up to the President more – regardless of who is in power. In general, it got people talking about the limitations of government and how government should be effectively run. It was all rather refreshing to watch.

But that got me thinking about another nomination process issue that has been overlooked. The last couple of weeks, folks have been talking about the fact that unlocking your cell phone is now a felony with a penalty of up to 5 years in jail. Yes, 5 years in jail for wanting switch cell phone carriers. Who the hell made that decision? Well, the Librarian of Congress, James Hadley Billington, is ultimately charged with the task.

That got me looking up just who the hell the Librarian of Congress thinks he is if he is ultimately tasked with making regulatory decisions that make people who want to switch cell phone companies into felons. He was nominated in 1987, more than 10 years before the DMCA would even become law and leave such decisions up to the Library of Congress. He was approved on a voice vote, and the issue of his nomination has never been revisited again as far as I can tell in a few searches of Thomas. I would argue that once a man is given such power, it would probably be wise to haul him in for questions about how he plans to do with his new authority to make Americans using common technology into felons, and maybe revisit who should have this role.

Of course, some might argue that because I was using a pretty handy tool of the Library of Congress to do some digging on the Librarian of Congress, maybe the Library just stepped out of bounds on this one issue. Well, as Reason highlighted this week, a retired guy with just a high school diploma and some computers has created a database of historic newspapers with 22 million newspaper pages with just the expense of some equipment he bought himself and an internet connection. Meanwhile, the project to do the very same thing that Billington has created costs taxpayers $3 a page and only managed to archive 5 million newspaper pages. Even with the credibility of the Library of Congress behind it, Billington’s historic newspaper project sees less than half of the traffic of the archive of an amateur.

I guess with all of the enthusiasm that accompanied Rand Paul’s reminder of Senate checks and balances, I wonder if questioning past appointments who haven’t faced nomination scrutiny in more than a quarter of a century will ever be on the table. In the case of the Library of Congress, there are clearly questions about their copyright policies if Americans can become felons for wanting to unlock the cell phones they legally purchased and there are also clearly some questions about smart spending of resources. Maybe it’s time to again question the authority of someone who has been in power with little oversight for 26 years.

Turn Down the Damn Music

Is there anything Mayor Mike doesn’t want to regulate? He’s like the most obnoxious version of Gladys Kravitz with the power to annoy the hell out of you no matter where you are in his city. His new target is on personal music players with headphones. Because, let’s face it, you can’t be trusted to make your own decisions on how loud you prefer your music that isn’t even disrupting anyone else.

Sebastian better watch his back for an assault on one of his other favorite hobbies – listening to music too loud. I’m always complaining about his music volume. However, unlike Mike Bloomberg, I have no desire whatsoever to have someone regulate or spend someone else’s money to nag him about how loud he plays it. I believe that Sebastian can make his own decisions about it, and I’ll get up and leave if I don’t like it.

Looking Down on the Little People

It looks like New York has their own Babette Josephs in their Assembly, but his name is Al Stirpe. It’s not just that Stirpe is anti-gun and voted for the SAFE Act, he also gets pissed off when constituents don’t think the same way he does. When they dare think they can petition his government on issues he doesn’t like, well, Stirpe loses all sense of self-control and lets out an F-bomb-laden tirade.

Several people apparently left once he started cursing out his constituents, but the paper interviews people who report hearing the F-bomb dropped between 1-5 times. It was bad enough that one of the local gun groups mailed him a package with a toothbrush and a bar soap to clean out his mouth. While the lawmaker asserts that his constituents were disrespectful to him by not letting him finish answers, I would argue that it’s just part of the job of being a public official to try and politely work around those situations without calling voters in your district various insults.

But Stirpe admits there are problems with the SAFE Act – namely that it didn’t go far enough to disarm his “f—ing” constituents. He said he wanted to see it with a buy-back program for targeted guns so that they could be destroyed because citizens shouldn’t be allowed to possess them at all. He also opposed exemptions that would allow Remington to stay in business because no New York gun maker should be able to make guns that he doesn’t approve of, even if they will be sold in other states.

It’s About Time

The ACLU would seem to be getting concerned about the increasing militarization of our police forces. I’m glad groups on the left are starting to notice what libertarian minded people have been worried about for years.

But personally, I’m OK with the police having cool toys to play with, as long as I can have the same toys myself to play with. If the military has all this surplus they want to get rid of, why not auction it off at bargain basement prices? Why should we reserve tanks to the 1%?

The need argument …

… apparently only applies to us, not government agencies.

The Shape of Things to Come

What the Obama machine is morphine into:

Obama veterans are building a wide network of deep-pocketed groups and consulting firms independent of government, the Democratic Party and traditional liberal groups, a sweeping â€” if not unprecedented â€” effort outside the White House gates aimed at promoting the president’s agenda and shaping his legacy.

From campaign strategists to online gurus and policy hands to press agents, Obama loyalists â€” including many who discovered that a second term yields fewer administration job vacancies â€” are slicing his agenda into smaller parts and launching highly targeted efforts on subjects including health care, job creation and electoral politics.

Obama’s opponents really don’t have an answer to this, and that is the problem. This group will no doubt aim to rob the American people blind, rob future generations blind, in addition to removing fundamental constitutional rights of Americans. The problem on the center-right is that many of the “deep-pocketed groups and consulting firms independent of government,” are more concerned with exploiting our issues to feather their own nests than they are actually fighting for the cause.

The New Jersey Factor

On an article about Chris Christie:

Politicians who don’t trust law-abiding citizens to own guns do NOT see them as equal members of a democratic republic. To put it bluntly, they see them as serfs. Or children who need to be protected from themselves. And that sort of attitude will NEVER get you the nomination from a Republican Party that wants to keep Conservatives inside the Big Tent. NEVER. The way he treats the voters of New Jersey is the way he will treat the voters of America. Take it to the bank. The Second Amendment is not just one amendment in the Bill of Rights: It’s the Founders’ message to the citizens of America – “We Trust You”. And if you fold on that amendment? You’ll fold on all the others. Guaranteed.

Yep. That’s one reason I believe this issue is so important: it goes way beyond guns and hits at the heart of how a politician views the relationship between the people and their government. How a politician feels about an armed populace tells me a lot about how they think.

New Jersey is actually a great microcosm for how gun politics would play out if we gave into them on a national level. The Garden State is further along the path than many other places. The last gasp, so to speak, for the gun vote in New Jersey was the ouster of Jim Florio. Florio had backed New Jersey’s assault weapons ban in May of 1990, and in 1993 vetoed an attempt by the GOP controlled legislature to repeal the law. Florio managed to piss in plenty of other people’s Wheaties too, and by the time the next election rolled around, he was out and Christie Whitman was in, with promises to gun owners. Whitman then proceeded to do exactly nothing, and that was it for the gun vote in New Jersey.

It’s not that there are no gun owners in New Jersey, there are still many of them, but they have been broken, first by the Democrats, and then by the Republicans. The Republicans in New Jersey no longer view the gun vote as anything worth cultivating. Why? Years of onerous regulation, dating back in 1966, has greatly reduced the incidence of firearms ownership in the Garden State. Gun ownership, unsurprisingly, is a key indicator of one’s views on gun control. Without a lot of gun ownership, you have a fertile garden of ignorance that opponents of civilian gun ownership are very adept at cultivating. You end up with Democrats against gun ownership because they hate it, and the Republicans afraid to touch the issue because they don’t want to risk losing votes of the ignorant who are easily manipulated into thinking they want to to supply weapons to crazies, criminals, and terrorists so they can mow down kindergartens with 50 caliber heavy machine guns. The failure of the gun rights movement in New Jersey to effectively change anything, and their subsequent abandonment by the Republican Party, made a lot of gun owners just give up. They stopped caring or paying attention to the political fight.

And this is exactly the future President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg has planned for the rest of us. What remains to be seen is whether the national Republicans will play along.

Hey, I Made Morning Jolt!

I guess I have now officially arrived. I opened up Jim Gerahty’s daily newsletter to find a Tweet of mine from just after midnight quoted:

Nothing to worry about! I grabbed my double barrel shotgun & blasted #sequester through the door, just like the VP said #BadAdviceFromBiden

— Sebastian (@SebastianSNBQ) March 1, 2013