Italian Corporatism

Powerline has more on the GM... control?


The United States may have taken a major step toward corporatism today--an economic philosophy more reminiscent of Italy in the 1930s than of American free enterprise (although, to be fair, there were significant corporatist elements in Roosevelt's New Deal, too). I'm not sure whether Barack Obama ever ran a lemonade stand as a child, but if he did, it would be his most salient business experience. Nevertheless, in his apparently boundless self-confidence, Obama evidently thinks that he knows better how to run an automobile manufacturing company than the management of GM or Chrysler. I found this passage from his speech today striking:


Don't worry the President reassures us: "If you buy a car from Chrysler or General Motors, you will be able to get your car serviced and repaired just like always. Your warranty will be safe. In fact, it will be safer than it's ever been because, starting today, the United States government will stand behind your warranty."

That's right. Obama honestly thinks that the goverment can do a better job in the automotive sector than private industry.

Much has been made of Obama's firing of the Chairman of General Motors, Rick Wagoner. My guess, for what it's worth, is that this was mostly misdirection. Months ago, we and many others wrote that what General Motors needs is bankruptcy. Its legacy obligations, especially to retired UAW members, are simply unsustainable. Until those contracts are broken, bailing out GM was pouring money down the drain. It was not so much bailing out GM as it was bailing out the United Auto Workers. Obama more or less admitted as much today.

That's right. Your money was used to pay off Unions and keep these companies around just long enough to be snapped up by the government.


Goldberg explains the Bargain:

The state says to the industrialist, “You may stay in business and own your factories. In the spirit of cooperation and unity, we will even guarantee you profits and a lack of serious competition. In exchange, we expect you to agree with—and help implement—our political agenda.” The moral and economic content of the agenda depends on the nature of the regime.

See what's wrong with that? Check the link to read the... details.

Auto Diplomacy

Jennifer Rubin: "You’d think the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran would require at least the same level of robust action and no-nonsense pressure being applied to a domestic car company."


Why? Pushing Iran like that doesn't help further Obama's plans to give a “tectonic change in the relationship between business and government.”

Hmm... odds that such a tectonic change will decrease government interferance in your life or help the economy run better with less corruption?

Roger Kimball continues

A “tectonic change in the relationship between business and government.” Time was, the role of government in a capitalist society was primarily to secure an environment in which private enterprise could thrive. Today, the role of government is increasingly to nationalize private enterprise, i.e., destroy it in the name of a “higher” good, a “new era of responsibility” in which government bureaucrats tell you how to run your business and whom to employ.

Obama gets questions from Plants? Blame Bush!

What are the odds?

Hope and Change: All Five Questioners So Far Identified at Obama's "Open" Town Hall Were Obama Campaign Backers

President Obama has promised to change the way the government does business, but in at least one respect he is taking a page from the Bush playbook, stocking his town hall Thursday with supporters whose soft -- though far from planted -- questions provided openings to discuss his preferred message of the day.

How is this "from the Bush playbook"? Yes, I do remember that his appearances were tightly controlled, but he didn't portray them as open to everyone, either. And fairly high-ranking Republicans and campaign donors were not "randomly" chosen to ask questions of him.

It's from the Bush playbook because every bad thing Obama does EVERY one is Bush's fault.

Ace continues

How on earth does the WaPo reporter here have enough information to reassure readers -- based on their own supposed authority -- that the questions were "far from planted"? Given that all of the people so far identified were in fact Obama supporters, doesn't this raise serious questions about how Obama was so fortunate as to just happen to call on friendly forces for his questions?

The reporter simply asserts this offering no evidence for it. Ashamed, it seems, of his own report.

Because Obama > Truth.

It's the power of Hope. THey're hoping the public doesn't notice their lies.

Which Side are you on?

For Earth Hour the environmentalists want to have you turn off the lights for an hour. "Lights will go out around the world."


On the other Human Achievement Hour celebrates humanity and what we've done.

Watch and see all that humanity has done.

There are some that look to the past and spurn advancement and see humanity and freedom as the problem. For just a small example banning black cars.

One group wants you without choice and literally in the dark. Which side are you on? Where do you want humanity to go?

O'S Foreign Failures

Here we go on the Foreign Policy front.

Ralph Peters lists the massive bungles with China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico, Poland and Russia.

Clearly, the quesiton of do you "Want him to fail" is academic. As Obama is full of failure.

Will he Fail? Has he already failed?

Prospect Magazine circumvents the "I wish he fails." with the article "No, He Can’t"

They show in many ways that Obama has already failed.

Barack Obama was always going to disappoint. When you promise almost everything to almost everybody—I’ll stop the fighting in Iraq but I’ll also keep going after al Qaeda there; I’ll make the economy grow more but I’ll spread the wealth around, and so on—you will inevitably let many people down. Human beings, even those who read fluently from teleprompters, simply cannot walk on water.

But few expected the wheels to come off the new administration so quickly. Just weeks into its existence, the Obama White House is in trouble. The US stock market has lost a quarter of its value since Obama’s election. While a Rasmussen poll in early March had his approval rating at 56 per cent, his net approval (the number of people who strongly approve of what he’s doing subtracted from the number who strongly disapprove) had contracted from 28 per cent the day after his inauguration to around 6 per cent for March—worse than Bush at the same time in his first term. The administration is in a fully fledged staffing crisis: having lost a record ten high-profile picks, it has scores of senior executive jobs unfilled—including every single treasury position below the department’s top job. The head of Britain’s civil service, Gus O’Donnell, has complained about the trouble he’s had finding key administration personnel ahead of the G20 conference in April. “There is nobody there,” he said. “You cannot believe how difficult it is.” Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner looks terrified before executives and television cameras alike. Five months after the election he has yet to deliver a plan for the banking system, much less restructure a single financial asset.

Even the sympathetic press is starting to speak of an “incompetence” crisis. Abroad, North Korea, Russia, China and Iran have all turned up the heat, as have Hamas and Chavez. At home, Obama’s Trojan horse agenda—using the economic crisis as an excuse to advance radical social change in areas unrelated to returning growth to the economy—threatens to pull his government into ideological quicksand when all the public really want are jobs.

This is why the left is pushing comments of "I hope he fails" so hard. They want to distract from the President's existing failures both in performance and to his own promises. It also paints the Republicans as mindless obstructionists and traitors and hypocrites.

This is helped by how inept the Republican response to Obama's bungles is.

The Republican party is in such disarray that it is letting Obama’s crisis go to waste. The 37-year-old Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, a rising Republican star, delivered a wooden speech in response to the president’s congressional address. The new head of the Republican national committee, Michael Steele, recently had a public spat with conservative talk radio titan Rush Limbaugh. Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee are dividing the working class and religious right between them and Mitt Romney is staying quiet for now. A few congressmen, senators and governors have begun to make hay out of the natural antipathy of their constituents towards huge increases in welfare, debt, and state interference, but none has so far managed to stand out from the crowd.

One would think a good dodge to the "Do you hope Obama fails?" question is to point to where he has already failed.

The way to take away your rights? Fear and Lies!

About the Assault Weapons Ban from the Examiner

Actually, the term "assault weapon" is made up. It is a derivative of the real phrase "assault rifle" which is a selective fire (can switch between automatic and semi-automatic) rifle or carbine firing ammunition with muzzle energies intermediate between those typical of pistol and high-powered rifle ammunition. If you look at the above pictures again, only one of the above is an assault rifle, and that is "B", a M-16. Both the AR-15 (A) and the SIG 556 (C) are semi-automatic only. But the gun grabbers want to ban them because they are evil looking black rifles.

Since there is a very specific definition of an assault rifle, the gun control crowd needed something that sounded similar and scary so that they could apply that label to this scary looking class of firearms. So, they made up "assault weapon". Sounds close enough.

That's right, they made up a type of weapon because the existing name covered guns that were fully-automatic and thus already illegal.

The truth is that most of the firearms they designate as assault weapons are less powerful than many hunting rifles. They can't be fired any more quickly than other guns semi-automatic firearms that happen to be a different color or configuration and don't look as evil. But this isn't about reality, it is about disarmament. If they can play on the public's fears and get them to turn on a group of guns for no reason other than looks, that is one step closer to getting rid of guns altogether. As was pointed out by Kurt Hofmann, the St. Louis Gun Rights Examiner yesterday, an assault weapons ban depends on those lies in order to succeed.

That's the core of it. They are using lies and fear to disarm you.


And where are all those "evil guns" that are destroying Mexico coming from?

And once again they lie. Mentioning machine-guns, grenades and rocket launchers, things that are already illegal in the US and not sold to civilians as reasons to ban other weapons.

The enhanced weaponry represents a wide sampling from the international arms bazaar, with grenades and launchers produced by U.S., South Korean, Israeli, Spanish or former Soviet bloc manufacturers. Many had been sold legally to governments, including Mexico’s, and then were diverted onto the black market. Some may be sold directly to the traffickers by corrupt elements of national armies, authorities and experts say.

And note that threats of mass amounts of drugs and people and even guns flowing over the border are not used to build a fence or try to secure the border. Instead they're being used as an excuse to take away your rights.

Lovely....

Powerline, on the real "shreeding of the constitution".

I'm stupefied to find that some people are defending the constitutionality of Nancy Pelosi's discriminatory, confiscatory and retroactive tax on people who receive bonus income from companies that got TARP money. I would have considered it a bright line rule that the government can't identify a class of unpopular people and impose a special tax on them. What's next? A 100% income tax on registered Republicans, retroactive to last year? If Pelosi's bill passes muster, why not?

One theory, presumably, is that since the government is contributing TARP money it can put whatever strings it wants on that money. (Including, I guess, strings imposed after the fact that would deprive employees of agreed-upon consideration for work they've already performed.) But that theory has been rejected in a variety of contexts. The government cannot condition its spending on a relinquishment of constitutional rights. Here's a thought experiment: how about putting a condition (retroactively, of course) on TARP money that says no employee of any bank that receives such money (or his spouse) can get an abortion? Would Nancy Pelosi think that's constitutional?

And remember the Democrats are doing this to deflect anger at the consequences of the bill they passed. This is their way to latch onto a small facet of failure and try to appear "popular."


The comic XKCD has a bit on scale and context.

Obama said he would change the nature of Washington, and boy did he deliver.

He just didn't tell us which direction the change would go.

"Let's uh... let's not uh... I'm just gonna leave it at that."

Wow, Gibbs uses "uh" almost as much as Obama does.

From Ace.


Also from Ace a very scary graph

It shows non-defense federal spending as a percent of GDP.

Odds on that giant spike (where it reaches ner 25%), staying a spike and not becoming a plateau?

Just Imagine....

Just Imagine if Bush had said this:

“That’s very good, Mr. President,” Leno said sarcastically.

It’s “like the Special Olympics or something,” the president said.

When asked about the remark, the White House had no comment.

That really happened.

In an email exchange, the point was made that Obama seems to be everything the left projected about Bush. The stumblebum suit being operated from behind. All those projections. You know about projection, right? It is when you take the thing that is inside you; hate, fear, insecurity, malicious motives, etc - and you project it on to someone else. For instance, during the election, I kept getting emails from folks on the left insisting that Bush - the powermongering fascist - would never allow another election to happen.

Again with Vet Healthcare

Powerline has it in short:

There was a time when an American President would worry about incurring the wrath of the American Legion. That time is probably gone, but still: the Obama administration is trying to socialize medical care. It wants the government to pay for everyone's health care, except--unbelievably--the care of veterans who were wounded in battle while serving their country. Can this be possible? Can even the Obama administration be so perverse? As I say, this is one of those news stories that make you wonder whether you read them correctly.

Oh Russia... or More "Smart Diplomacy"

Things tend to balance out. The US is going to do massive cutbacks on our military spending, and the Russians are going to boost theirs. Focusing on their nuclear capability.

If only we had some kind of foreign policy genius to sort this out.

And here's even more Smart Diplomacy. Nice to see Obama's repairing relations with allies that Bush so thoughtlessly damaged

Oh wait... it looks like Obama's started a trade war. Maybe you can give the Mexican Government a pretty speech instead.

Obama: Weapons and Government.

So who doesn't Obama trust with guns?

People that are trusted to pilot passenger aircraft.

I can see Obama's logic. Guns are "scary", while an airliner. What's the worst it could do?

So, Obama doesn't trust commercial pilots with guns.

How about the Military?

Uh oh... Pentagon Ready To Announce Weapons Cuts


Ace's thoughts: "Because Lord knows, we wouldn't want to create or save any jobs in an industry that actually employs Americans, what with this whole recession thingy going on."

And in the news story, Gates gets to the real humor.

The United States "cannot expect to eliminate national security risks through higher defense budgets, to do everything and buy everything," Gates said.

But we can expect to eliminate domestic policy problems by throwing billions at it?


Obama's spending for next year: 28% of GDP

Then again this is a man that wants to cut medical coverage for military vets to save... $560 million

Barack Obama wants to shove off the cost of medical care for injuries and illnesses sustained in combat in order to find $560 million in fresh revenue streams. This amounts to just over half of what Obama just gave Hamas in Gaza to rebuild after their disastrous war with Israel this winter, and about 1/300th of what the government gave AIG in a bailout.

He doesn't care about the acutal money, it's the ideology to him.

Military and guns are bad, domestic spending to "change" America good.

Hang onto your hats.

How DARE they doubt the One!

Ace takes it up.

Liberal NY Daily News Doubts Obama's Basic Competency

From the Article:

Which brings us to the heart of the matter: the doubts about Obama himself. His famous eloquence is wearing thin through daily exposure and because his actions are often disconnected from his words. His lack of administrative experience is showing.

His promises and policies contradict each other often enough that evidence of hypocrisy is ceasing to be news. Remember the pledges about bipartisanship and high ethics? They're so last year.

The beat goes on. Last week, Obama brazenly gave a speech about earmark reform just after he quietly signed a $410 billion spending bill that had about 9,000 earmarks in it. He denounced Bush's habit of disregarding pieces of laws he didn't like, so-called signing statements, then issued one himself.

I speak for the rest of the Obama-skeptics. We told you so.

What do you expect from a group with such deludedly high rhetoric that is then forced to... explain the difference between economy being “strong” and “sound”

Or that wants universal goverment-paid healthcare for everyone... but Vets.
Damn...

Here they come...

Fresh on using tragedy to peddle lies...

Here's the Brady Campaign.

Bob Owens takes apart the Brady Bunch and the supposed "Assault Weapons Ban"

The 1994 Assault Weapon ban that our über-intelligent Vice President liked to take the credit for authoring banned by name less than two dozen firearms, and attempted to ban others by making rifles or pistols with detachable magazines and two or more cosmetic features—pistol grips, flash hiders, bayonet lugs and other features that had no effect on accuracy or rate fire—illegal.

What effect did this law have on the legal sale or possession of these "evil" weapons the Brady Campaign and so many gullible Congressmen and Senators rushed into law?

It increased the popularity of these firearms. Yes, you read that correctly.

Legal sales of these kinds of firearms grew during the so-called ban. Manufacturers of some rifles, for example, removed flash hiders and bayonet lugs, and put these same firearms into the hands of eager customers the very day the "ban" took effect, and every day of the ten years afterward until it expired. Manufacturers of banned pistols made similar modifications, and had similar results. It might also be noted that an entire new class of concealable handguns was the direct but hilariously unintended consequence of this law, but that is a tale for another time.

And he gets to the meat of it.

An assault weapon, by proper military definition, must be selective-fire, fitted with a selector that enables the shooter to fire either single shots or a burst for each trigger pull. None of the guns in the assault weapons ban was actually an assault weapon, which I guess is appropriate, as they weren't actually banned, either.

Because of thoroughly dishonest groups like Brady and unethical men like Helmke, the term "assault weapon" has evolved into a political term that can be applied to almost any semi-automatic firearm, even though using it thus is factually incorrect.

These people lie and obscure the facts; all with the aim of taking away your rights.

But hey the ends justify the means!

Going from sad joke to grim joke.

This is why Obama's having so much trouble... well... doing his job:

Third Would-Be Treasury Official Withdraws This Week

Odd that there seem to be so few prominent Democrats with clean bills of health.

What lessons should we draw?

Obviously: That Bush is to blame.

And then there's this: Vivek Kundra Obama's Chief Information Officer has his office raided by the FBI in a bribery sting.


Yeah... high-tech, ethical... Sure.

It gets worse

Don Surber notes how bad it really is.

Delegation, leadership, and staffing are an executive's chief jobs.

Let's see how Obama's doing

After 51 days in office, Barack Obama has appointed only 73 people to 1,200 jobs that require Senate confirmation.

If they require Senate approval, they are important jobs.

But Obama is too busy to properly vet the people and appoint them to fill the jobs to get the work done.

That is his job.

And he shirks it.

And many of those 72 are tax cheats.

If our allies cannot reach us because Barack Obama has failed to appoint someone to answer the phone, how are we to have any friends in the world?

And yet this naïf little twit who barely qualifies to be a back bencher in the Illinois legislature had the nerve to tell reporters last week: “President Obama has accomplished more in 30 days than any president in modern history.”

He really said that.

He really thinks that.

He really thinks that because he could get legislation passed through a Congress that is overwhelmingly Democratic that he is God’s gift to the nation.

That the change you were looking for?

You think things are bad now?

It's like Obama couldn't be doing a worse job it that were his goal.

The Idiot’s Guide to Destroying the Economy: a 12-Step Program


Why has Obama neglected Treasury?

President Barack Obama’s handy excuse for all sorts of goofs and missteps is that he’s too busy working on fixing the economy. In order to do that, one might expect that Obama would concentrate on building his economic team at the Department of the Treasury, where most of those efforts would originate and get managed. Instead, as noted earlier today, phones go unanswered at Treasury — and our allies and trading partners have begun complaining about the lack of effort in the White House.

...

From that, we know that more than four dozen positions remain unfilled — positions that Geithner has to fill himself. But what about positions that the White House has to appoint? I researched that question this morning, and found the list of positions at Treasury that require White House appointment and Senate confirmation.

Worry. The man is either a con-artist or a total bungler


Here's an argument for bungler: A Presidential Crisis of Competence

More Smart Diplomacy

I guess Smart Diplomacy includes incrediably cheap and thoughtless gifts.

"Mr Brown’s gifts included an ornamental desk pen holder made from the oak timbers of Victorian anti-slaver HMS Gannet, once named HMS President." And what does Obama give? A collection of DVDs of American movies... Yeah.

Is he trying to make Bush look like a savy diplomat?

Well at least Obama hasn't sold out loyal allies in echange for... nothing.

Whatever might be said about Bush era diplomacy, Dubya never sold our allies down the river. Disagreement is one thing; converting such stalwarts as the Czechs and the Poles into bargaining chips is quite another.

Oh. Well that sucks.

And again.

“We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?” Clinton asked.

“You got it wrong,” Lavrov said.

Instead of "reset," Lavrov said the word on the box meant “overcharge.”

Not that Hillary touts the "effort" she put into an obvious failure. Doesn't the State Department have fluent Russian speakers she could have asked?


And the White House's excuse for all this ineptness?
They're swamped.

Told you so.

Steve Crowder on Guns

Fun video.



Makes a good point, taking away firearms is job one for totalitarian rule.
And Obama is busy spreading fear and lies to restrict our rights. Change!

So how good were those Global Warming models?

A while back I had a post about a report that tested Global Warming Models

Well now even the biggest Climate Change people are realizing that something is... not up.


Discovery has the story:

Earth's climate continues to confound scientists. Following a 30-year trend of warming, global temperatures have flatlined since 2001 despite rising greenhouse gas concentrations, and a heat surplus that should have cranked up the planetary thermostat.

Continues to confound? That really inspires confidence in their ability to predict climate into the next century. They couldn't even figure out what's currently happening.

Yes, let's use these models to base economic and taxation changes that'll cost trillions!

I like that given a 30 year warming and an 8 year trend in cooling. They still maintain that this is only a "pause" in overall warming.

Over about the last 40 years a nearly quarter of them have been cooling. They don't know why, and yet they're sure it's just a temporary setback.

The discrepancy gets to the heart of one of the toughest problems in climate science -- identifying the difference between natural variability (like the occasional March snowstorm) from human-induced change.

Yes the occasional March snowstorm, or the occasional ice age.

But just what's causing the cooling is a mystery. Sinking water currents in the north Atlantic Ocean could be sucking heat down into the depths. Or an overabundance of tropical clouds may be reflecting more of the sun's energy than usual back out into space.

So there's factors the your models are not taking into account? And they turn out to dramatically affect your results? Shocking.

Swanson thinks the trend could continue for up to 30 years. But he warned that it's just a hiccup, and that humans' penchant for spewing greenhouse gases will certainly come back to haunt us.

"When the climate kicks back out of this state, we'll have explosive warming," Swanson said. "Thirty years of greenhouse gas radiative forcing will still be there and then bang, the warming will return and be very aggressive."

So 30 years of warming, followed by nearly 40 years of cooling, followed by a giant warming spike. And what model are you basing this prediction off of?

Was it one that can predict the current trend? Oh wait no... that's a "mystery".

Let me be clear. This is not science.

Science does not pull predictions out of thin air, or worse pull them out of a model they know is flawed.

Strengthening ties with our Allies & Making the World love us again.

Turns out this is another thing Obama is better talking about than doing...

Tim Shipman notices Obama snubs England.

British Embassy staff, irritated themselves, had to twist Robert Gibbs' arm to get even two questions per side in a quick oval office doorstep. The press availability was initially going to be a 'pool spray' with softballs lobbed by the agencies. No10 and the embassy have managed to get this changed. But they were caught spinning that a Rose Garden presser had been cancelled because of the weather. The White House denies a presser was ever planned. In the old days we had cold weather pressers in the Old Executive Office Building, across from the White House.

Why does this matter? Three reasons:

- Major British hack involvement in a full blown press conference has always been regarded as useful by the White House press corps. We ask different questions from them, usually more aggressively and get answers they could not. There were several spiky and revealing moments between President Bush and the BBC political editor Nick Robinson. It is bizarre that Mr Obama is less willing to answer questions than Mr Bush. It reflects very poorly on his tendency towards control freakery, which has been in evidence since his campaign.

- It's discourteous to Mr Brown, who was desperate for his big moment with the podiums. On his two set piece trips to see Bush there were proper pressers at Camp David and then in the Rose Garden. Why gratify him with the first European trip and then snub his big PR moment? There will be no private relaxation time for Mr Brown with Mr Obama, a given on previous prime ministerial trips. I know he's busy but it shows that he is not really that interested, as my sources were telling me last week.

- Obama has been running scared of the international media and the British press in particular since the start of his campaign. He didn't give a single interview to a British outlet even when he was in the UK. This is very unusual, particularly from a man who so desperately wants to be loved on the world stage. We know we're not special, given Obama's general contempt for beat reporters (as opposed to his schmoozing with editors), but it is still peculiar.

Yes Obama loves the media, provided that it's tame.

Meanwhile, let's see what "Smart Diplomacy" does.

Look, if we could get the Iranian nuclear program stopped with Russian's helping us in return for selling out the Poles and the Czechs on missile defense, I'm enough of a cynic and a realist to say we would do it the same way that Kissinger agreed to delegitimize and de-recognize Taiwan in return for a large strategic opening with China.



But Kissinger had it done. He had it wired. What happened here is it was leaked. The Russians have dismissed it. We end up being humiliated. We look weak in front of the Iranians, and we have left the Poles and Czechs out to dry in return for nothing.



The Czechs and the Poles went out on a limb, exposed themselves to Russian pressure, and we have shown that Eastern Europe is not as sovereign as it appears if the Russian influence is there, and we will acquiesce in what they consider their own sphere of influence.



This administration has prided itself, flattered itself on deploying smart diplomacy. "Smart diplomacy" is a meaningless idea, but if it has any meaning at all, it is not ever doing something as humiliating, amateurish, and stupid as this.

Remember when?

Remember when Bush would have is Pres Sec go out and mock people that questioned his economic judgment?


Oh wait...

White House Knocks Jim Cramer For Calling Obama Budget "Greatest Wealth Destruction By a President"

So all you out there that thought Obama had such great temperament... you like having an administration that feels the need to go out and mock anyone that dares question them?

A commentator said it all : MOST. THIN. SKINNED. ADMINISTRATION. IN. HISTORY.

Hat tip: Ed Driscoll Follow the link for more information.


And here's Cramer speaking

What you can take away from it: The White House cares more about its agenda than what happens to the average American. "Government Mandated Wealth Desctruction."

Something Lighter?

Jim Geraghty ponders Obama's Mexican stance.

I'm fascinated by the Obama administration's mentality that the fact that violent Mexican drug cartels are raising hell just over the border doesn't justify additional border security or a fence, but it does justify making it harder for American citizens to own a gun.

It's quite simple building a fence upsets the special interests that he wants to bribe into supporting him. While restricting civil rights merely upsets those that don't support him.

That it fits his leftist worldview is simply a nice bonus.

Hat Tip: Glen Reynolds

And as Reynolds wuold say: They told me that if I voted for McCain/Bush that the President would then use threat of violent foreigners as an excuse to "shred the constitution"... And they were right!