Get your guns now.

From the "new" Whitehouse.gov

Address Gun Violence in Cities: Obama and Biden would repeal the Tiahrt Amendment, which restricts the ability of local law enforcement to access important gun trace information, and give police officers across the nation the tools they need to solve gun crimes and fight the illegal arms trade. Obama and Biden also favor commonsense measures that respect the Second Amendment rights of gun owners, while keeping guns away from children and from criminals. They support closing the gun show loophole and making guns in this country childproof. They also support making the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban permanent.

I think this got all the gungrabber keywords: commonsense measures, won't somebody think of the children!, gunshow loophole, expanding the info the state has on you, and the Assault Weapons Ban.

Which prettmuch means they intent to restrict firearms in any way they can get away with.

Jim Geraghty weighs in.

How, precisely, does the Obama administration plan on "making guns in this country childproof"? Mandatory trigger locks?

That's a start. And how to they make sure everyone has said trigger locks? Well a national inspection and search would do.

Change!

Seriously, if you want a gun, buy one now, because it doesn't look like they really "respect" your rights.

UPDATE:

On the Barack Obama website there's a different version

Address Gun Violence in Cities: As president, Barack Obama would repeal the Tiahrt Amendment, which restricts the ability of local law enforcement to access important gun trace information, and give police officers across the nation the tools they need to solve gun crimes and fight the illegal arms trade. Obama and Biden also favor commonsense measures that respect the Second Amendment rights of gun owners, while keeping guns away from children and from criminals who shouldn't have them. They support closing the gun show loophole and making guns in this country childproof. They also support making the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban permanent, as such weapons belong on foreign battlefields and not on our streets

Emphasis added on the changes between versions.

Stimulus Math.

Here's ten questions on the Stimulus bill.

An example:

1) President-elect Obama claims that spending approximately $800 billion will create 3.675 million new jobs. That comes to $217,000 per job. This doesn't sound like a very good value, especially with the national average salary around $40,000. Wouldn't it be cheaper to just mail each of these workers a $40,000 check?

They just keep getting better. These are serious questions. Will anyone in the media or congress ask them?

Riedl ends with one last question: "Given the 11,000 annual earmarks, why should taxpayers trust politicians to spend this money better than they would spend it themselves?"

Now that we've seen the questions. Here's some answers

A Dozen Fun Facts About the House Democrats' Massive Spending Bill

1. The House Democrats' bill will cost each and every household $6,700 additional debt, paid for by our children and grandchildren.

2. The total cost of this one piece of legislation is almost as much as the annual discretionary budget for the entire federal government.

3. President-elect Obama has said that his proposed stimulus legislation will create or save three million jobs. This means that this legislation will spend about $275,000 per job. The average household income in the U.S. is $50,000 a year.

4. The House Democrats' bill provides enough spending - $825 billion - to give every man, woman, and child in America $2,700.

Read all those too.

It's almost like this Stimulus bill is a massive, massive scam designed to take government money and spend it on all sorts of Pork.

Hope and Change!

Obama's personal... men/troops/cult

Obama keeping a personal force?
Did anyone expect man that has always used his current positon as a springboard to his next position would have actually disassembled his campaign apperatus? Right now the idea seems to have them provide a form of NGO disaster releif.

Which begs the question... how much faith does Obama have in the competence of the govermant under his "Hope and Change" platform?

Guy Benson is a creeped out:

Has a president ever had an organized political relief squad, independent from the federal government? This strikes me as quite creepy. "Hi we're here to help...on behalf of Barack Obama....federal relief workers will be here shortly..."

To which Geraghty adds:

The proposal is now starting to sound like what happens when project meetings get out of control. "They'll help elect Democrats to Congress! And they'll pressure wavering lawmakers! And, hey, what if we promised they'll mobilize in natural disasters! And they could fight crime! And they'll have special uniforms!"

What do you think the media/left reaction would be if Bush or McCain were to try this?

I think the term "Brownshirt" would be used myself.


Ace's thoughts: Unacceptable. Obama is seeking to create a shadow bureaucracy answerable not to the taxpayer but only to himself.

More on Obama continuing to cultivate what can kindly be called a "cult of personality" after the election.

The Brutality of Math.

EDGELINGS points out the brutal trends, and shows the impending failure of the Mass Media. The internet has made things cheaper, and this is what's changing things.
However people don't see the scale

The thing is, people don’t really understand, even yet, what this change means.

I’m tempted at this point to include equations, but I’ll resist. So think of it this way: the New York Times spends ten million dollars to deliver about as many readers as Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit can for a thousand bucks. This has a lot of implications, but the biggest one is simple: it costs almost nothing these days to become a publisher, so lots of new publishers are coming into the market.

On the other hand, the number of readers really hasn’t changed.

Emphasis added.
When your competitors have a per "viewer" cost of delivery that a hundred thousand times cheaper than yours... the ability of them to undercut you is trivial.

When you face a rival with costs that are lower by six orders of magnitude, what can you do? They've got much, much, much less overhead, to cover, which dramatically lowers the revenue required to merely break even.

Why Diamons are Forever

An Atlantic Article from 1982 explains. If your customers can resell what they bought that undercuts the demand for new ones.

Except for those few stones that have been destroyed, every diamond that has been found and cut into a jewel still exists today and is literally in the public's hands. Some hundred million women wear diamonds, while millions of others keep them in safe-deposit boxes or strongboxes as family heirlooms. It is conservatively estimated that the public holds more than 500 million carats of gem diamonds, which is more than fifty times the number of gem diamonds produced by the diamond cartel in any given year. Since the quantity of diamonds needed for engagement rings and other jewelry each year is satisfied by the production from the world's mines, this half-billion-carat supply of diamonds must be prevented from ever being put on the market. The moment a significant portion of the public begins selling diamonds from this inventory, the price of diamonds cannot be sustained. For the diamond invention to survive, the public must be inhibited from ever parting with its diamonds.

In developing a strategy for De Beers in 1953, N. W. Ayer said: "In our opinion old diamonds are in 'safe hands' only when widely dispersed and held by individuals as cherished possessions valued far above their market price." As far as De Beers and N. W. Ayer were concerned, "safe hands" belonged to those women psychologically conditioned never to sell their diamonds. This conditioning could not be attained solely by placing advertisements in magazines. The diamond-holding public, which includes people who inherit diamonds, had to remain convinced that diamonds retained their monetary value. If it saw price fluctuations in the diamond market and attempted to dispose of diamonds to take advantage of changing prices, the retail market would become chaotic. It was therefore essential that De Beers maintain at least the illusion of price stability.

The article also goes into detail about how De Beers created the entire diamond market and made the various symbols of love that created the demand for their product.

Mixed bag.

The Daily Show gets some more Bush bashing in.


The punchline is that Obama handles the press so much better than Bush...
Sure there's a real joke here, given that the Press is so tame that "They don't even raise their hands anymore"
But no... its called President Goofus and President Gallant.
Imagine that, Obama can handle softball questions from the lapdog media much better than Bush can feild openly hostile questioning.

The commentators do wonder what will happen when Steward runs out of Bush jokes.

On some more meta satire.
Israeli TV goofs on BBC’s Gaza bias

Unpleasant options.

Once again, someone used the dark arts of "math" to pop the favored plans of statists.

So while the CBO projects that current policies will yield deficits of roughly 1 percent of GDP by 2019, Orszag[designated by Obama to run the Office of Management and Budget] anticipates they will be 5 times higher. And that’s after Obama scrubs the federal budget line by line to cut our waste, after he restores economic growth, after he introduces extraordinary new efficiencies to health care, after he restores the solvency of our entitlement programs, and after he fixes the educational system and America’s crumbling infrastructure.

In other words, once Obama has delivered us a better world, the budget will look far, far worse than we think possible today.

There are only a few possible explanations. The first is that Obama genuinely thinks his agenda is terrible for America (possible, but very unlikely). The second is that either his economic team or the CBO is completely incompetent (also unlikely). The third possibility — and the only one that really makes sense — is that Obama is intentionally painting a doomsday scenario here — either to pave the way for huge tax increases, or to make himself look like a miracle worker even if things get much worse from here on out.

What was that about a president hyping up threats in order to get more power...

Oh you mean it doesn't count when a Dem does it?