Hmmm... remember all the arguments about how Obama’s ‘executive experience’ as the head of a political campaign provided a basis for judging his capacity to serve as President? Now, we’re seeing his performance as the head of the transition, and it looks quite different.
Beyond that, if any member of al-Qaeda had ever bought a gun at an American gun show, we would have heard about it, endlessly. The fact that these two are the only examples citable out of the millions of transactions at gun shows over the past decades suggests that on the list of threats to U.S. national security, the probability of a terrorist buying a firearm at a gun show ranks just above an invasion from Mars.
They may select schools and shopping malls because of the large number of defenseless victims and the virtual guarantee no on the scene one is armed.
As soon as they're confronted by any armed resistance, the shooters typically turn the gun on themselves."
Unfortunately, too many in the media and the gun-control community are too stupid to recognize it as obvious. You might think that this startling result could be the basis for a more sensible policy, but judging by the election results, I fear not. Particularly if someone like Eric Holder becomes Attorney General.
If a job application included a question about religion, especially for a government position, First Amendment advocates would rightly go ballistic. The ire of Second Amendment activists is easily understood, then, arising from the questionnaire prospective Obama administration employees must complete. The 59th question demands to know whether the applicant or anyone in his/her family owns a firearm
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Team Obama isn’t interested in enforcing gun laws through job applications. They don’t want gun owners working in the administration, and they’re screening for that right up front.
Gun ownership is a constitutional right. Employment discrimination on that basis should be illegal. It certainly should be exposed so that we can get a sense of how the man who will swear to protect and defend the Constitution plans on doing either for the entire Constitution.
Will a religious test come next in the Obama vetting process?
Who is the conservative — the person who wants the taxpayer to maintain the status quo at the cost of future wealth generation, or the person who favors letting the market work its course and redeploy the economic resources in a more fruitful direction?
There was another politician who abhorred "change," implementing policies to preserve wages and prices, even jailing people for charging five cents too little for cleaning shirts. In reaching back decades to the failed philosophy of Franklin Roosevelt, which was what made the Great Depression great, extended its duration by seven years, and prevented the creation of an unknowable amount of wealth that might have stood us in good stead in World War II, Barack Obama isn't offering us "change we can believe in." He isn't offering us change at all. He's simply come up with an economically destructive conservatism and stasism, as old as FDR and Mussolini — or even Karl Marx, if not older.
Whether you believe in Prop 8 or not, judges, supposedly, derive their power to overturn legislation based on laws' purported conflicts with The Constitution -- it is the Constitution from which their power derives entirely.
How on earth can they claim that constitutions themselves are unconstitutional?
This is a simple admission that they do not base their opinions on the Constitution at all, but simply upon their own sense of That Which Is Good. Shorn of any theory which even plausibly hints at such a residuum of judicial power, their decisions are now lawless and themselves unconstitutional, without even a pretext of principled, limited theory of judicial intervention legitimizing their actions.
Russia now plans to send five brigades of Iskander (60 launchers, each with one missile, plus reloads, which could amount to over a hundred missiles) to Kaliningrad. Iskander is just entering production, and it would take several years, at least, to produce that many. Actually, it might take five or more years to produce enough missiles for five brigades, because Russian missile production capabilities have sharply deteriorated since the end of the Cold War in 1991. This is one reason why the current Russian government is making so much noise about this imaginary NATO plot to surround and subdue Russia. Losing the Cold War did not go down well in Russia. Rather than forget and move on, many Russians prefer to remember, and use the imagined evil intentions of their Cold War foes to explain away defects in the Russian character.
This Russian deployment to Kaliningrad is all about a unique feature of Iskander, which is that it is not a traditional ballistic missile. That is, it does not fire straight up, leave the atmosphere, then come back down, following a ballistic trajectory. Instead, Iskander stays in the atmosphere and follows a rather flat trajectory. It is capable of evasive maneuvers and deploying decoys. This makes it more difficult for anti-missile systems to take it down.
Among many other problems, such a force is, frankly, creepy and dangerous. But it's difficult to express a fear of a large domestic paramilitary devoted largely to a Cult of Personality without bringing up the H-word. Maybe the H-word is appropriate-- but it sounds nuts. It Can't Happen Here and all that.
What is Obama's goal here if not to undermine one of the main attractors of military service? The campaign continues running on the claim that military recruitment is low. Why does he strive to lower it further?
Given that there is so little upside to the notion of a permanent civilian paramilitary, the serious chance of small political mischief, and the small chance of serious political mischief, weight against this, um, audacious plan.
If Republicans are not prepared — right now — to resist the liberal policies that will be proposed after January 20, they will get steamrolled. Waiting until January to get up to speed will be too late.
If Republicans haven't figured out from the election campaign that the powerful combination of Obama as a cultural phenomenon, a worshipful media, and a populace anxious about the economy will give liberals an almost unparalleled opportunity to enact an unalloyed liberal agenda, Republicans will be beaten before they even lace-up their boots.
As I've stated before, this doesn't mean Republicans should oppose merely for the sake of opposition. But they must be alert and prepared, they must be marshalling their arguments right now against the harmful policies that Democrats have made abundantly clear they plan to enact.
Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year.
The required service Obama proposes is nothing more than dressed-up impressment or conscription, and is unpaid forced labor. Stripping the racial overtones from slavery by requiring all to participate doesn't make it any less degrading. Involuntary servitude is reprehensible in any guise, and we should not suddenly embrace it as a consequence of "change" under the Fresh Prince of Bill Ayers.
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A propensity towards tyranny comes easily for statists, and when Obama trumpets his desire for radical change and hope, you would be wise to listen closely to what he is actually proposing and pushing to implement as law. Is he talking about what is best for individual Americans, or is he pushing his belief of how a larger government is better for... someone?
The irony is that Obama arrives at the threshold of the White House steeped in ideas that subordinate individual freedom to the collective. In his campaign and his victory speech, Obama declares that America's "timeless creed" is now, "yes, we can." This is not a defense of liberty. It is a declaration so malleable and generic that it could have applied to anything from Lenin's Bolshevik Revolution to the Little Engine that Could.
I think the goal here, by the way, is to demand what will be claimed to be the moral equivalent of actual military service -- thus denigrating real service by claiming that working in a soup kitchen a weekend a year is no different than putting your life on the line for your country.
Obamabots have been fond of the chickenhawk argument for eight years.
Well, boys, now that your man is in charge, and he needs to deploy three brigades to Afghanistan (which you are presumably foursquare behind), seems like it's time to sign up. And don't give me that crap about "you don't get to choose where you serve" (the left's favorite dodge). For one thing, you do get high preference as to where you'll serve if you specifically ask for combat detail."
ROTC still won't be allowed on college campuses, but I'm sure ObamaCorps will be heavily represented. And if the benefits to joining are remotely comparable to those of joining the Armed Forces — college tuition reimbursement, salary of some kind, chance to score with cute girls, etc. — you can bet that many kids will sign up to build houses in the middle of Atlanta instead of deploying to Whereeverstan to get shot at.
Waiting until Inauguration Day to get geared up is too late. By that time the Fairness Doctrine Express will be at full steam— wavering Democrats will be pressed to support the new Democratic president, weak-kneed Republicans will want to display comity, the mainstream media will not be saddened to see talk radio annihilated and much of the public will be too enraptured by Obama's Camelot inauguration to notice or care.
The model for conservative activism (no oxymoron) on this is the immigration debate of 2007. Conservatives must contact senators now before the congressional holiday recesses. Email, call, write. If you're in D.C, go to the House and Senate offices. You likely won't get to talk to a senator or congressman but you can corral members of their staffs. If you're not in D.C., go to the district offices. Make sure GOP senators hold fast. Let Dem senators know that this is a major issue.
I think this election is going to be a "coming of age" moment for a lot of people. They say, "Be careful what you wish for" and a lot of people got their wish yesterday.
And now they're bound to be disappointed. Not even Jesus could satisfy all the expectations of Obama's most vocal supporters, or fulfill all the promises Obama has made.
I think Obama is going to turn out to be the worst president since Carter, and for the same reason: good intentions do not guarantee good results. Idealists often stub their toes on the wayward rocks of reality, and fall on their faces. And the world doesn't respond to benign behavior benignly.
But there's another reason why: Obama has been hiding his light under a basket. A lot of people bought a pig in a poke today, and now they're going to find out what they bought. Obama isn't what most of them think he is. The intoxication of the cult will wear off, leaving a monumental hangover.
The main reason this will be a "coming of age" moment is that now Obama and the Democrats have to put up or shut up. Obama got elected by making himself a blank slate, with vapid promises about "hope" and "change" -- but now he actually has to do something. Now he has to reveal his true agenda. And with the Democrats also having a majority in both chambers of Congress, now the Democrats really have to lead. And they're not going to do a very good job of it. It's going to be amusing to watch.
In the mean time, those of us who didn't want Obama to be president have to accept that he is. And let's not give in to the kind of paranoid fever dreams that have consumed the left for the last 8 years.
So what are the good sides of what just happened?
Look, I expect to be one of the most severe critics of the Obama administration and the Democrats generally in the years ahead (though I sincerely hope I won't find that necessary). But Obama ran a brilliant race and he should be congratulated for it. Moreover, during the debate over the financial crisis, Obama said that a president should be able to do more than one thing at a time. Well, I think we members of the loyal opposition should be able to make distinctions simultaneously. It is a wonderful thing to have the first African-American president. It is a wonderful thing that in a country where feelings are so intense that power can be transferred so peacefully. Let us hope that the Obama his most dedicated — and most sensible! — fans see turns out to be the real Obama. Let us hope that Obama succeeds and becomes a great president, for all the right reasons.
And it's at least worth remembering that the job of political conservatism is not simply to see Republicans win every election, it's to move the country to the right. Conceding from square one that Obama will be the most leftwing presidency imaginable is not the best way to prevent that prophecy from becoming true.
But, if you can vote, you should vote for McCain despite the apparent odds. You should do this because no one really knows what the odds are. The Obama campaign, the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) want Republican voters to believe that the election is a done deal and that voting Republican is wasted effort. They want to discourage McCain votes and votes for other Republicans down the ticket. They are doing this because McCain and the other Republicans still have a chance to win. That chance will be reduced to the extent Republican voters take the Democrats’ advice. Don’t fall for it, vote for McCain.
Jake Tapper: Why don’t you have a press conference?
Obama : I will. On Wednesday.
Zomblog has obtained an extremely rare copy of the first issue of Osawatomie, a newspaper published by the Weather Underground in 1975. Noteworthy passages are reproduced below, along with exact transcriptions. The full pages, with each passage in context in high resolution, are found at the bottom of this post.
Much of Osawatomie, which was written at a time when the Dohrn-Ayers wing of the Weather Underground was transitioning from terrorism to “working from the inside” for revolution, concerns itself with the need to encourage “organizers” who will work in “communities” and use “audacity” to bring about “socialism” in America.
Don’t believe me? Read the quotes for yourself, and see them in context on the full pages below.
