Yet another story is in the news about a child pretending to have a gun getting punished by teachers and school administrators:
A Suffolk school suspended a second grader for pointing a pencil at another student and making gun noises.
Seven-year-old Christopher Marshall says he was playing with another student in class Friday, when the teacher at Driver Elementary asked them to stop pointing pencils at each other.
"When I asked him about it, he said, 'Well I was being a Marine and the other guy was being a bad guy,'" said Paul Marshall, the boy's father. "It's as simple as that."
Christopher's father was a Marine for many years. . . .
So how did the school justify their insanity?
"A pencil is a weapon when it is pointed at someone in a threatening way and gun noises are made," said Bethanne Bradshaw, a spokesperson for Suffolk Public Schools.
Ummmmm, no, its not. It is still a pencil. There is no chance whatsoever that a pencil becomes an actual gun. There is no chance of anyone being hurt, nor is there any chance of anyone, teacher or administrator included, being put in even momentary fear that the child is operating an actual gun on school grounds.
So what is really going on? It seems obvious that the teacher and administrators are trying to teach these toddlers that real guns are bad and unacceptable. They are certainly entitled to their opinions, and it is a gray area whether they should share their opinions with children, but that is not at issue. The teachers and administrators engaging in this insanity are going the step further and using their authority under state law to punish children for even pretending to have a gun. That crosses a big red line.
Everyone in this country is born with certain "inalienable rights," one of which is the right to keep and bear arms under the 2nd Amendment. Now no one will argue that the school system has every right to use their state power to demand that children do not bring actual guns to school. And if a child brings in something that a reasonable person could mistake for a weapon, well, the school would be within their rights to discipline the child just to keep good order. But punishing a child for utilizing an imaginary gun - that is punishing a thought crime. More, it is using the power of the state to punish a child for even thinking of bearing a gun - and that is Constitutionally protected territory. Some enterprising lawyer really needs to start suing these school systems for this abuse of their state power.
I concur with his remarks. Do note that as it stands now, the UN is attempting to severely limit the ability of the citizens of the world to bear arms. It is the dream of all those of a left wing authoritarian bent to disarm the citizens. It is all about control and the perfection of society.
The Supreme Court decision in Heller established that the Second Amendment provides an individual right to "keep and bear Arms," leaving the broad contours of the right for future decisions. A major development occurred today in Woolard v. Sheridan, a Maryland federal district court case. Maryland law requires applicants for a carry permit show a "good and substantial reason" that they need to carry a weapon. The District Court held that the law violates the Second Amendment for several reasons, the most important being that the Second Amendment extends a general right to carry outside of the home for self defense:
In today’s decision on the merits, the “good and substantial reason” requirement was ruled to violate the Second Amendment. The court held that the Second Amendment right is not limited to self-defense in the home. It also includes the militia and hunting. None of the Second Amendment rights can logically be confined solely to the home: “In addition to self-defense, the right was also understood to allow for militia membership and hunting. To secure these rights, the Second Amendment‘s protections must extend beyond the home: neither hunting nor militia training is a household activity, and ‘self-defense has to take place wherever [a] person happens to be’.”
In the prior landmark Second Amendment case, Heller, the Supreme Court held 5-4 that the Second Amendment provided an individual right to keep and bear arms, at least on land subject to direct federal control. Left unanswered was the question whether the Second Amendment also applied to the fifty states. That question was answered the other day in McDonald - yes.
The decision did not identify the precise contours of the Second Amendment right, such as, for example, whether concealed carry is part of the right, or to what extent the full faith and credit clause requires jurisdiction to honor gun permits issued in another state, etc. Nor did the decision adress directly to what degree the right can be regulated by government. For example, immediately after the McDonald decision was announced, Chicago's Mayor Daley announced his intention to place onerous restrictions on gun ownership within Chicago - a city where "homicide victims during the current year equaled the number of American soldiers killed during that same period in Afghanistan and Iraq."
The McDonald decision, authored by Justice Alito, was notable for several reasons beyond just the holding of the case. One, the decision was again 5 to 4, with Justice Stevens writing the dissent in which he argued for applying tests that would allow the activist wing to make of the Second Amendment a nullity. Justice Scalia responded to Justice Stevens in a separateconcurrence. The arguments by Stevens and Scaliaframe the battle ongoing between originalists and liberal activists. The McDonald decision was one largely based on the original intent of the drafters of the Second and Fourteenth Amendments. The Stevens dissent proposes alternative theories to undermine the Second Amendment that, as Scalia points out, are wholly subjective and, in reality, are nothing more than legal cover for the personal opinions of the activist judges.
Two, the McDonald opinion was notable for the concurring opinion of Justice Thomas. He would find the Second Amendment applicable to the states on the basis of the 14th Amendment's "privileges and immunities" clause - something of great interest to academics and likely as boring as a rock to everyone else. Were the Court were to revive the "privileges and immunities" clause of the 14th Amendment, something rendered a nullity since shortly after the Civil War, it would open a potential Pandora's box of litigation as the Court struggled to outline the contours of the clause. All that said, from a layman's point of view, most interesting about Thomas'sconcurrence is his painstaking recounting of the origins of state and local firearms restrictions. The regulations arose largely out of an effort by Democrats to control blacks in the post civil war period. One need only to look to Chicago's Mayor Daley - or most other liberal state and local leaders - to see that, at least in terms of ultimate goals of controlling the unwashed masses, nothing has changed.
While the McDonald decision represents a good decision reached on the basis of judicial interpretation rather than activism, the polar opposite is presented in Hastings Christian Fellowship v. Martinez. In that case, the activist wing of the Court held that a college may refuse to certify a Christian student group that limited admission to individuals willing to certify both to their belief in God and to their adherence to a sexually moral life - i.e., sex only within the confines of a marriage between a man and a woman. As Justice Alito points out in his dissent, the activist wing began by twisting the facts of the case and ignoring the issues that relate to freedom of association and freedom of religion. Indeed, the facts of this case were truly appalling:
As Hastings stated in its answer, the Nondiscrimination Policy “permitted political, social, and cultural student organizations to select officers and members who are dedicated to a particular set of ideals or beliefs.” App. 93. But the policy singled out one category of expressive associations for disfavored treatment: groups formed to express a religious message. Only religious groups were required to admit students who did not share their views. An environmentalist group was not required to admit students who rejected global warming. An animal rights group was not obligated to accept students who supported the use of animals to test cosmetics. But CLS was required to admit avowed atheists. This was patent viewpoint discrimination. “By the very terms of the [Nondiscrimination Policy],the University . . . select[ed] for disfavored treatment those student [groups] with religious . . . viewpoints.”
And yet still, the liberal wing of the Court, through smoke, mirrors and very selective recitation of facts, was able to find this direct attack on Christianity to be constitutional. It is not a major decision, but just one more in a line of such decisions dating back to half a century ago when the activist Court began to strip religion from the public sector.
And on that note, let us hope and pray that none of the originalist members of the Court are forced from the bench between now and 2012. If so, we will soon become gunless as well as Godless.
The NRA has started running a series of ads that paint Obama as a pro gun-control, anti-Second Amendment politician. Here are a few of them:
Factcheck.org has insinuated itself into this issue, challenging the NRA's assertions in what looks like an Obama press release, ignoring facts and refusing to acknowldge gaping ambiguities between Obama's words and deeds. Factcheck states "A National Rifle Association advertising campaign distorts Obama's position on gun control beyond recognition." No, its Factcheck doing the distorting.
In June, I did a a detalied post, "Identifying Obama's Real Position On The Second Amendment." It addresses virtually every claim made by Factcheck.org and the NRA with the exception of the issue raised in the last ad about ammunition. Confederate Yankee addresses that one. I would highly recommend both posts to anyone who questions whether the NRA has it right. The bottom line, Factcheck.org has dropped the ball on this one completely. You can find other links to posts on this topic at Memorandum.
The most interesting posts from around the web, all below the fold . . . __________________________________________________________
Art: The Declaration of Independence, John Trumbull
Second Amendment
Slapstick Politics hosts a guest blogger who was particularly impressed by the precision of Scalia’s opinion in Heller. It is well worth a read to savor the taste of the seminal originalist opinion of our time.
As Transterrestrial Musings points out, a lot of people who support a robust Second Amendment right will pulling the lever for McCain in November. The reason – as I also pointed out here - an Obama presidency will likely see the Heller decision rendered a nullity. Power and Control thinks likewise.
Carl at No Oil For Pacifists has a great post on the whining and lamentations of the left in the wake of the Heller opinion. The whine that really gets me comes from those who claim the 1939 Miller case was precedent for holding that the Second Amendment did not grant an individual right. The only people who can possibly spout such nonsense and believe it are people who have never read the case and have no understanding of the law.
In the UK, from whom we inherited the Second Amendment right, the Adam Smith organization ponders the erosion of their own rights.
Seven years after 9-11, the war on terror has been a great success on all major fronts. Four Right Wing Whackos have the new Dem line: "Success against the Taleban. Enemy giving way in Iraq. Al-Qaeda on the run. Situation dire. Let's retreat!"
A very good post from Callimachus giving his thoughts on the reality of war, total war, and the costs of finding war too brutal to fight to win.
On Jan. 5, Lance Cpl. Robert Crutchfield, home on leave, was shot in front of his girlfriend during a mugging and later died. Red Alerts is following the story and posts that the two thugs who committed this crime will face the death penalty.
Oil & Economics
From Markedmanner, oil hit another all-time high today. Supply is so tight that any problem with any large producer causes a big jump in the futures contracts. That combined with the weak dollar is causing tremendous problems.
From This Ain’t Hell, Dems latest attempts to tie the explosion in oil prices to some highly nebulous Bush big oil agenda. It does not seem to be working. Kollarow is blogging on polls showing the vast majority of Americans favor drill for oil offshore and in ANWR. Even 40% of Democrats are starting to think that a rig or two in ANWR is sounding pretty good. From Pam Meister, Drill Here, Drill Now. Freedom Now ponders our oil woes and Democratic obstructionism – not only at home, it seems, but abroad also.
Matt at Weapons of Mass Discussion has a great blog addressing the canard repeated ad infinitum concerning there is no need to lift the moratorium on ANWR, offshore drilling or the exploration of oil shale when "Big Oil needs to drill in the 68 million acres they already have leased."
Obama
Discriminations post on former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger who compares Obama’s pre-emptive race bomb with the tactics he observed from Joe McCarthy.
Eye on the World posts that Obama tosses Wessley Clark under the bus after Clark’s unconscionable comments on McCain’s service to our country yesterday. Clark is pure ambition unsaddled with ethics.
Comments Confederate Yankee, the saddest thing about Obama’s military experience is that "the only person he knows with the experience of getting a bomb on target is Bill Ayers."
Jammie Wearing Fool notes the new Democratic talking point: "so McCain was tortured, big deal." These people have a deficit of class matched by their deficit of sense. Gay Patriot also weighs in, and then notes "The more attacks I see from the left the more convinced I become that theirs is a party of hate." In truth, the default position for an increasing majority on the left is not to argue issues, but to demonize those whom they do not agree with. I think "party of hate" only scratches the surface.
Vocal Minority posts on Larry Elder, a black conservative, who responded to a query from a fellow African American. Elder explains in detail why he is supporting McCain over Obama. It makes for a good read.
Joshua Pundit posts on Iraq’s decision to sue the UN over the oil for food program – and there is an Obama connection.
Are Obama trolls gaming Google to get anti-Obama blogs shut down? It appears that way. The Irate Nation has the story. The Anchoress also blogs this, along with other stories.
I concur with Stop the ACLU that unions are no longer of benefit to our nation. The benefits unions provided to America ended long ago when the worst of employer abuses likewise ended. And with that thought in mind, please note that full and accurate information is the very coin of democracy – and literally so when it concerns the taxpayers coin. Apparently, unions in Washington do not see it that way.
Republicans
Matt at Weapons of Mass Discussion questions the efficacy of donating to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Their strategy is apparently to hide their affiliation and run against McCain. Who dreamed up this strategy, Howard Dean?
Insanity in the UK posted by Dhimmiwatch. The UK is about to deport a Pakistani family that converted to Christianity even though they face a threat of death for that in their home country. This as the UK hosts a rogues gallery of the world’s worst terrorists that they cannot deport for precisely the same reason. Meanwhile, Shield of Achilles blogs on another honor killing of a young girl in the UK.
In the Netherlands, charges dropped by prosecutors against Geert Wilders for insulting Islam. Dinah Lord posts that the decision included the finding that the legislator's comments were part of a legitimate debate. That debate does not extend to the utterly ludicrous UN Human Rights Council which will now, per Europe News, entertain no discussion of Islam. Anyone who does not realize that this is an existential conflict isn’t paying attention.
Seraphic Secret has an articulate and chilling post on "jew hating savages of Paris" and wherein he makes the point that "Jews are the canaries in the coal mine of civilization."
Political InSecurity posts that MI-5 is warning that al Qaeda is planning suicide attacks in the UK using NHS ambulances.
From LGF - According to the study "Imams in Germany," up to 20 percent of preachers belong to the more conservative, fundamentalist strand of Islam. The study also discovered that only one fifth of imam’s possess academic qualifications."
IslamistWatch posts that surgical hymen restoration – i.e., to present as a virgin – are the rage in Europe among Muslim women. And it is on the welfare dime in the UK and Denmark because the women face threats of violence if they are not virgins when married.
RightTruth posts on a fascinating book by John Press, Culturalism. It poses the opposite of the insane doctrine of multiculturalism. "Culturism holds that majority cultures have a right to define, protect and promote themselves. By that light, preventing the building of mega-mosques is a reasonable culturist policy. Multiculturalism holds that all cultures are the same and that Britain has no core culture. That is obvious rubbish. Then they use the word racism to slander anyone who does not agree. Culturism is a word that can combat the abuse of Western nations with the words multiculturalism and racism." You could also call it common sense.
Dutchblog Israel posts on the slow diminution of democracy as violence by Islamists comes to be seen as a justifiable method of political expression. To call what is going on in the UK a decline in academic standards at the hands of the socialist Labour government is a grotesque understatement. MK has the story.
Dave in Boca has a fascinating post with a lot of personal insights on the al Dura affair and the circle the wagons irrespective of the facts approach being taken by the French media to protect a reporter who should be jailed for life for the bloodshed he has caused.
And see Shrinkwrapped’s exceptional essay on the al Dura affair and its reverberations. "The parallels between the Al-Dura blood libel and the Haditha slander suggest that the American elites are coming to closely resemble the Israeli elites in their ready acceptance of guilt and their aesthenic reactions to accusations of evil intent and atrocity against those who protect us."
Islam
Ironic Surrealism has a chilling highlight reel from the film "Suicide Killers", by Pierre Rehov – a documentary at the culture, ideology and tactics that go into the making of Islamist suicide bombers.
Verum Serum reports on a Saudi marriage officiant who says that there is no minimum age for marriage – you can marry as young as one year old - though the groom should wait a few years before sexual intercourse. The Dhivehistan, a Maldives blog, posts on two pre-pubescent child brides in Yemen who have run away and both filed for divorce. In fairness to Yemen, this is a major story who many in the country are hoping will lead to a reexamination of the practice. The problem is that the Koran records the 50+ year old prophet taking a 6 year old bride and then having sex with her when she was 9.
From Gates of Vienna: "Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don’t speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun."
The Truth posts on the decision of the Canadian HRC to dismiss charges against Mark Steyn and Muslim unhappiness therewith.
The good folk at Vast Right Wing Conspiracy have felt the muse and been moved by Obama to write new lyrics for an old song, Hey, Hey, Hey, Another One Under The Bus . . .
If you think the issue of the Second Amendment and gun rights went away with the Supreme Court decision in Heller, you are sorely mistaken. The issue has just bloomed into what will shortly become a full-scale battle to determine the contours of the Second Amendment right. Outside of the justices sitting on the Supreme Court, the individual who will most effect how that right will be interpreted will be our next President. With that in mind, how would a President Obama effect the Second Amendment? _________________________________________________
The Supreme Court decided in Heller that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right. While a momentous decision, it was also a very limited one. All Heller decided was that anyone living on federally administered land has an absolute right to keep a pistol, rifle or shotgun in their home and that they have an absolute right to keep the firearm loaded and ready to fire. We also know that some level of restriction on both gun ownership - i.e., who may own them - and the type of firearm that may be owned – e.g., limits on machine gun and short barrel shotguns – are permissible limitations on the right. Everything else about the Second Amendment awaits future litigation.
The phrase "everything else" includes, for example, the seminal issue of whether states can enact a complete ban on gun ownership, either directly or indirectly. As explained here, Heller did not decide that issue. If the Second Amendment does not apply to the states, then states are free to enact any restrictions they want on gun ownership. Further, gun-control advocates, localities, states and even the federal government can enact an endless variety of gun control restrictions in the wake of Heller in an attempt to severely limit the Second Amendment right to the point that it becomes a nullity. [Update: D.C. is already attempting to limitHeller by maintaining a ban on all semi-automatic pistols, the most popular type of handgun in the U.S.] The next President’s Justice Department will also have a key role to play in the Supreme Court's hearing of Second Amendment litigation, either in support or in opposition to gun rights.
In light of this, where Obama stands both on the judiciary and the Second Amendment are of critical importance, The most important is of course the type of judges Obama would appoint to the Supreme Court. We saw in Heller four activist liberal justices tie themselves in knots trying to make the argument that the right to keep and bear arms - an individual right at inception - into a collective right two hundred plus years later, based on a balancing test of today's equities while the two most junior Supreme Court Justices, Roberts and Alito, both joined the majority decision.
Obama joined a handful of the most liberal Senators to oppose the appointments of both Judges Alito and Roberts on ideological grounds. A President Obama would appoint judges who resemble the dissenters in Heller. And after the Boumediene decision, anyone who believes the activist wing of the Supreme Court see themselves as restrained by either original intent or precedent is partaking of fantasy. There can be no question that an activist majority on the Supreme Court would limit, if not outright emasculate the Second Amendment right. It is likely a President Obama would have at least one and as many as three Supreme Court appointments (and a bevy of appeals courts appointments). One of those could well tip the balance of the Court, giving the activist wing of the Court an outright majority.
Beyond judges, there is the still important question of how a President Obama would approach Second Amendment rights. Both through the legislation he would approve and the positions he would have the Justice Dept. take in litigation, he would play a direct role in shaping the contours of the Second Amendment. If you listen to Obama in the wake of Heller, the answer is that his views are the same as McCain's and, indeed, the same as what was expressed by Justice Scalia in the Supreme Court opinion, District of Columbia v. Heller. That bald assertion stands in near total opposition to Obama's record and prior pronouncements.
Obama’s animus towards an individual right to own guns and to use them in self defense is well documented. As a threshold matter, DC’s draconian gun laws, just overturned in Heller as violating an individual right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment, are a mirror image of the law in Chicago. Both have an indirect ban on handguns and require guns legally kept in the home to be rendered non-functional. Yet after Obama became a state Senator representing a Chicago district, he never proposed anything that would liberalize Chicago’s laws nor the gun laws in the state of Illinois. To the contrary, Obama’s proposals would have added onerous restrictions and his votes were strongly against any provision that would have allowed law abiding individuals to protect themselves with guns.
In 1994, while Obama was still in a private legal practice, he accepted appointment as a director on the board of the Joyce Foundation, a position he held from 1994 through 2002. According to No Quarter, "the NRA calls the Joyce Foundation an activist foundation whose ‘shadowy web of huge donations’ leads ‘straight to puppet strings that control the agenda of gun ban groups.’"
According to the the NRO, during Obama’s tenure on the Joyce Foundation, they funded the Violence Policy Center for a sum total of $15 million. The Violence Policy Center "touts themselves as "the most aggressive group in the gun control movement" and actively campaigned for a national ban on handguns. The Joyce Foundation also funded the pro-gun control Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research with over a $1.2 million. That organization argued that "guns in the home were more dangerous than protective" and primarily acted in "litigation designed to change the way guns are designed, marketed, distributed, and sold."
Then in 1996, when Obama was first running for office as an Illinois State Senator for Chicago’s Tenth District, an influential local political organization asked Obama to complete a survey on his positions as an integral part of their process to determine which candidate to endorse. The completed survey ascribed to Obama a series of very far left positions on a variety of hot button issues, one of which was support for a total ban on handguns. After the survey came to light, Obama’s aides said he "never saw or approved" the questionnaire. They asserted the responses were filled out by a campaign aide who "unintentionally mischaracterize[d] his position." Indeed, Obama today claim’s that he has never supported a total ban on handguns.
But then additional facts emerged. Obama, it turned out, had met with the organization and was interviewed directly upon the basis of his answers to the survey. Further, the day after the interview, Obama filed an amended survey with hand-written comments in the margins. Once this came to light, according to the Politico, "[t]hrough an aide, Obama, . . . did not dispute that the handwriting was his. But he contended it doesn’t prove he completed, approved — or even read — the latter questionnaire." Several members of the local political organization that accepted the questionarie call Obama’s current claims "unbelievable."
Then in the April debates, Obama not only disclaimed any knowledge of the answers on which he was quizzed, but even claimed that the handwriting wasn’t his on the amended survey. This seems even more unbelievable under the circumstances. And indeed, according to Factcheck.org, it is Obama’s handwriting on the document, though it is not precisely clear how they made that determination. Though this issue now trancends gun rights and goes directly to Obama's honesty and character - and thus his fitness to be President - the MSM seems distinctly uninterested.
Obama claims he believes in the Second Amendment as an individual right, but with room for "common sense" laws. Obama gave us an idea of what he considers "common sense" laws in 1999, when he proposed an incredibly restrictive plan for anti-gun legislation at the state and federal level that would have made the D..C. laws just overturned look as if they had been crafted by the NRA. The following article, reprinted at the Volokh Conspiracy, appeared in the Dec. 13, 1999 edition of The Chicago Defender:
Sweeping federal gun control legislation proposed by Sen. Barack Obama (D-13th) would increase the penalties on gun runners who are flooding Chicago's streets with illegal weapons. . . .
Obama outlined his anti-gun plan . . . Obama is proposing to make it a felony for a gun owner whose firearm was stolen from his residence which causes harm to another person if that weapon was not securely stored in that home.
He's proposing restricting gun purchases to one weapon a month and banning the sale of firearms at gun shows except for "antique" weapons. Obama is also proposing increasing the licensing fee to obtain a federal firearms license.
He's also seeking a ban on police agencies from reselling their used weapons even if those funds are used to buy more state-of-the-art weapons for their agencies. Obama wants only those over 21 who've passed a basic course to be able to buy or own a firearm.
He's proposing that all federally licensed gun dealers sell firearms in a storefront and not from their homes while banning their business from being within five miles of a school or a park. He's also banning the sale of 'junk" handguns like the popular Saturday Night Specials.
Obama is . . . also asking that gun manufacturers be required to develop safety measures that permit only the original owner of the firearm to operate the weapon purchased.
. . . Obama is also seeking to increase the federal taxes by 500 percent on the sale of firearms, ammunition [sic] -- weapons he says are most commonly used in firearm deaths.
Some of the provisions discussed above would make it prohibitive to own a firearm – and essentially impossible to buy one. Anyone who faced a felony with over a year in jail for a stolen firearm would logically have to keep the gun under lock and key at all times, assuming one was willing face such severe criminal penalties to own a gun in the first place. The costs Obama would add to gun ownership and the banning of lower priced "junk" handguns would effectively leave only the financially well to do able to own a weapon. The technology Obama wants on the gun raises its own problems, including for weapons available inside homes for any family member to access in an emergency and the ability to resell the weapons. But the most onerous is last. His call for a federal law limiting sales to storefront businesses and banning all firearms sells from "any gun store within five miles of a school or park . . . would eliminate gun stores from almost the entire inhabited portion of the United States." I think it safe to say that inability to legally buy a handgun in the U.S. would likely serve as a significant narrowing of the Second Amendment right Obama claims to believe in so fervently in the wake of the Heller decision.
Although 40 states currently allow concealed carry permits, Obama "told the Chicago Tribune in 2004 that he favored a national ban" on such permits. He did so on the basis that allowing states to issue concealed carry permits threaten residents of Illinois, even though the permits are only valid in the state of issue.
Interestingly enough, Obama voted to allow concealed carry permits in one instance – for retired Illinois police officers. Not to suggest that Obama would alter his position if there were political gains to be had, but his vote happened to come during the period in which "Obama was battling with his GOP opponent to win the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police."
And Obama does not see self-defense as a reasonable justification for carrying handguns. In 2001, as a state senator, Mr. Obama voted against allowing people who had received injunctive domestic violence protective orders dispensation to carry handguns for protection. It is not clear why he objected to law abiding people facing a threat of violence from obtaining a hand gun permit for self-protection. But his subsequent vote in the case of Hale DeMar make clear he sees state control of guns as more important than any individual right to own weapons and use them for self defense.
In 2003, someone broke into the home of Hale DeMar in Wilmette, Illinois. DeMar used a handgun – banned from the locality – to defend his family. DeMar was prosecuted by the town for this offense. A bill was introduced into the Illinois Senate in response that would have given citizens "a legal defense against prosecution for violating a local handgun ban if they actually used the firearm for lawful self-defense on their own property." Obama was one a handful of Democratic Senators to vote against that bill, which passed overwhelmingly in 2004 despite Obama’s opposition.
In 2004, while running for the U.S. Senate, Obama stated that he was in favor of renewing the assault weapons ban on over 200 different types of guns instituted during the Clinton Presidency. He said "I believe we need to renew -- not roll back -- this common sense gun law."
As a U.S. Senator, in 2005, Obama voted against Senate Bill 397 that would have protected gun manufacturers and stores that sell firearms from law suits by cities and states because of gun crime arising solely out of the misuse of their product.
Obama’s sole vote in support of the right of gun owners came in the wake of Katrina, when police and federal agents were breaking into the homes of law abiding citizens to confiscate their weapons. Obama joined with the vast majority of the Senate in voting for a bill to prohibit federal agents from confiscating firearms during a declared state of emergency.
While most of the above has stayed well out of the pages of the MSM, Obama has repeatedly been questioned on whether he supported the D.C. law restricting gun ownership and usage – which Obama clearly does and far more. Obama has changed his publicly stated position from "yes" to "never" to "I don’t know" and back again, all within the space of several months, and all without ever being challenged on his responses.
In November, when his campaign was asked about Obama's position on gun control and the D.C. ban on handguns, the campaign responded that Mr. Obama thought the D.C. gun laws constitutional. No correction was issued until seven months later when, immediately after the Heller decision was released, Obama claimed that he always had believed the opposite. As Charles Krauthammer wryly observed:
Last week, when the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the District of Columbia's ban on handguns, Obama immediately declared that he agreed with the decision. This is after his campaign explicitly told the Chicago Tribune last November that he believes the D.C. gun ban is constitutional.
Obama spokesman Bill Burton explains the inexplicable by calling the November -- i.e., the primary season -- statement "inartful." Which suggests a first entry in the Obamaworld dictionary -- "Inartful: clear and straightforward, lacking the artistry that allows subsequent self-refutation and denial."
Q: You said recently, "I have no intention of taking away folks' guns." But you support the D.C. handgun ban, and you've said that it's constitutional. How do you reconcile those two positions?
A: . . . Because I think we have two conflicting traditions in this country. I think it's important for us to recognize that we've got a tradition of handgun ownership and gun ownership generally. And a lot of law-abiding citizens use it for hunting, for sportsmanship, and for protecting their families. We also have a violence on the streets that is the result of illegal handgun usage. And so I think there is nothing wrong with a community saying we are going to take those illegal handguns off the streets. And cracking down on the various loopholes that exist in terms of background checks for children, the mentally ill. We can have reasonable, thoughtful gun control measure that I think respect the Second Amendment and people's traditions.
The problem is of course that, while Obama pays lip service to the Second Amendment, those "reasonable, thoughtful gun control measures" that Obama has supported severely restrict lawful gun ownership. They are inconsistent with a Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms for self defense.
According to a February 15, 2008 AP article, "[a]t his news conference, [Obama] voiced support for the District of Columbia's ban on handguns"
During the April 16, 2008 Democratic debate, Obama was asked about the D.C. gun law and whether he saw it as "consistent with an individual's right to bear arms?" Obama, the Constitutional law Professor, sidestepped the specific issue of the D.C. gun law – despite the fact that D.C.’s law is, in all relevant respects the same as Chicago’s. He said that he could not take a position because he had not read the briefs, and then added:
"As a general principle, I believe that the Constitution confers an individual right to bear arms. But just because you have an individual right does not mean that the state or local government can't constrain the exercise of that right, in the same way that we have a right to private property but local governments can establish zoning ordinances that determine how you can use it. "
And Obama’s latest pronouncement on the Supreme Court decision in Heller has been that the decision mirrors what has always been his own deeply felt beliefs. In an article ": "Obama clarifies position on D.C. gun ban", Obama is quoted as saying:
"What I said was that I believe Second Amendment as being an individual right and have said that consistently. I also think that individual right is constrained by the rights of the community to maintain issues with public safety. I don't think those two principles are contradictory and in fact what I've been saying consistently is what the Supreme Court essentially said today."
Obama's big lie there is claiming that what he believes should be the law is what the Heller Court decided. As to his lie about supporting the D.C. law, with special thanks to Hot Air, here it is in video form:
As amply demonstrated above, what Obama has supported are gun laws far more onerous and restrictive than D.C.’s. It is wholly at odds with his claim to have always supported an individual right to keep and bear arms that mirrored the Heller decision. While Obama mouths the words that the Second Amendment is an individual right that he supports, his belief in "common sense" laws restricting that right are such as would render it a nullity. All of this tells us as much about Obama's character, honesty and trustworthiness as it does about his real position on the Second Amendment.
In a post below, responding to a post by Dr. David Abbott at Brits At Their Best, I added my agreement to his assertion that the British have forgotten - or as I see it, have been taught to devalue - their history. In either case, both roads lead to the current circumstance, where the British have passively acceded over time to giving up the freedoms and liberties hard earned by their progenitors. One of the freedoms the British people held for centuries was an individual right to own and bear guns. That right has been extinguished over the past century. This is at variance with America, yet we both started from precisely the same place in 1776. In the U.S. Supreme Court's decision yesterday in Heller v. District of Columbia, Justice Scalia explained the British history of this right to bear arms. ________________________________________________________
This from Justice Scalia's opinion in Heller [citations removed for ease of reading]:
. . . Between the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution, the Stuart Kings Charles II and James II succeeded in using select militias loyal to them to suppress political dissidents, in part by disarming their opponents. Under the auspices of the 1671 Game Act, for example, the Catholic James II had ordered general disarmaments of regions home to his Protestant enemies. These experiences caused Englishmen to be extremely wary of concentrated military forces run by the state and to be jealous of their arms. They accordingly obtained an assurance from William and Mary, in the Declaration of Right (which was codified as the English Bill of Rights), that Protestants would never be disarmed: “That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defense suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.” This right has long been understood to be the predecessor to our Second Amendment. It was clearly an individual right, having nothing whatever to do with service in a militia. To be sure, it was an individual right not available to the whole population, given that it was restricted to Protestants, and like all written English rights it was held only against the Crown, not Parliament. But it was secured to them as individuals, according to “libertarian political principles,” not as members of a fighting force.
By the time of the founding [i.e., the drafting of the U.S. Constitution in 1789], the right to have arms had become fundamental for English subjects. Blackstone, whose works, we have said, “constituted the preeminent authority on English law for the founding generation,” cited the arms provision of the Bill of Rights as one of the fundamental rights of Englishmen. His description of it cannot possibly be thought to tie it to militia or military service. It was, he said, “the natural right of resistance and selfpreservation,” and “the right of having and using arms for self-preservation and defence.” Other contemporary authorities concurred. Thus, the right secured in 1689 as a result of the Stuarts’ abuses was by the time of the founding understood to be an individual right protecting against both public and private violence. And, of course, what the Stuarts had tried to do to their political enemies, George III had tried to do to the colonists. In the tumultuous decades of the 1760’s and 1770’s, the Crown began to disarm the inhabitants of the most rebellious areas. That provoked polemical reactions by Americans invoking their rights as Englishmen to keep arms. A New York article of April 1769 said that “[i]t is a natural right which the people have reserved to themselves, confirmed by the Bill of Rights, to keep arms for their own defence.” They understood the right to enable individuals to defend themselves. As the most important early American edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries (by the law professor and former Antifederalist St. George Tucker) made clear in the notes to the description of the arms right, Americans understood the “right of self-preservation” as permitting a citizen to “repe[l] force by force” when “the intervention of society in his behalf, may be too late to prevent an injury.”
There seems to us no doubt, on the basis of both text and history, that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms. . . .
While the British wrote down the right of individuals to bear arms as against the Crown in the 1689 Bill of Rights, they wrote down no limitation on Parliament circumscribing Parliament's ability to extinguish their rights. Thus Britain lives under a tyranny of sorts today. Without any recognized Constitution, and with Parliament over a century ago having claimed for itself unlimited sovereignty, there are no permanent rights in Britain. Thus today you have in Britian a populace that has not only been largely disarmed of firearms over the past century, but a populace wherein the law abiding among them are prevented from carrying any sort of weapon for self defense. Even carrying the innocuous pepper spray is illegal.
And then of course there is the penultimate tyrannical act. In what amounts to a coup, the current Labour government has broken its promise to the people of Britain, given but three years ago, to give the people a vote in the decision to extinguish the sovereignty of Britain and become a province in a socialist and anti-democratic EU superstate. By this act, and in the even larger sense that this transfer of sovereignty severly and forever more degrades the democratic right of the British to choose their government, Labour evinces utter disdain for the liberty of Britian's citizens. And with that in mind, there is at least one more passage highly apropos from Justice Scalia's decision:
St. George Tucker’s version of Blackstone’s Commentaries, as we explained above, conceived of the Blackstonian arms right as necessary for self-defense. He equated that right, absent the religious and class-based restrictions, with the Second Amendment. See 2 Tucker’s Blackstone 143. In Note D, entitled, “View of the Constitution of the United States,” Tucker elaborated on the Second Amendment: “This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty . . . . The right to self-defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine the right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.” . . .
I think the appropriate phrase to finish on is the truism, "those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it."
The case of District of Columbia v. Heller has been decided by the Supreme Court in a bare 5 to 4 decision with a majority opinion authored by Justice Scalia. The opinion is seminal in establishing that the Second Amendment provides Americans with an individual right to keep and bear arms, leaving open for future cases the outer contours of the right. The holdings of the opinion are: ____________________________________________________________
1. The right to keep and bear arms is an individual right related to the right of self defense.
2. The right protects against any absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.
3. The right protects against any law that would require a lawfully owned firearm to be rendered unfireable in the home, or otherwise not immediately firable for self defense.
4. The right protected by the Second Amendment is the right to keep and bear arms that were “in common use at the time” of the Second Amendment's passage. The Court interprets this to mean there can be limitations imposed on possession of modern advanced weaponry and does nothing to disturb the holding in the 1939 case of Miller v. that upheld federal law restricting possession of classes of weapons, such as automatic weapons and sawed off shotguns.
5. Prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons are lawful.
6. This case leaves open the door for federal regulation of guns in certain aspects. Quote: "Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms."
[Update - should have included this: 7. The Court makes clear that licensure and registration requirements are acceptable so long as they do not otherwise infringe on the right to keep and bear arms.]
8. The critical issue of whether states must respect the Second Amendment is still an open issue. The Heller Case involved the District of Columbia - an area subject to federal law and without the rights of a state. The Bill of Rights protects against federal law encroachment on rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, but at the time it was written did not clearly apply stop state law encroachment on the same rights. It wasn't until passage of the Fourteenth Amendment after the Civil War that at least some of the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights were held to apply equally to limit state interference. The relevant part of the 14th Amendment is the "privleges and immunities" clause:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States;
U.S. Const., 14th Am., Sec. 1.
This clause has been held at various time to "incorporate" protections against fedral law encroachment articulated in the Bill of Rights against similar state law encroachment. You can find a good discussion of this legal issue here.
The Court in Heller does not decide whether the Second Amendment limitation against federal infringement of the right to individually keep and bear arms similarly limits the right of a state to do so. The Court intimates that it will. As the explained at the Volokh Conspiracy:
The majority doesn't clearly signal its view on the question, but it does suggest that simply citing some late 1800s cases which rejected incorporation (at a time when incorporation was generally being rejected as to nearly all of the Bill of Rights) will not suffice. Here's footnote 23, on page 48 of the majority oinion:
With respect to Cruikshank’s continuing validity on incorporation, a question not presented by this case, we note that Cruikshank also said that the First Amendment did not apply against the States and did not engage in the sort of Fourteenth Amendment inquiry required by our later cases. Our later decisions in Presser v. Illinois, 116 U. S. 252, 265 (1886) and Miller v. Texas, 153 U. S. 535, 538 (1894), reaffirmed that the Second Amendment applies only to the Federal Government.
Cruikshank's judgment that the First Amendment wasn't incorporated was of course reversed by "later cases" starting in the 1920s.
A final parting thought. How much in danger are our rights from an activist Court? But for one vote, the right of an individual to keep and bear arms could have been taken away from us. By the skin on our collective teeth, we dodged that bullet today. But we are in every bit as much danger from an activist court as we are from external enemies.
. . . within moments [of the decision], a commenter to the liberal blog Crooks and Liars said Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority decision on the case, should be murdered. . . .
Update: As noted by a sharp-eyed "Jabba the Tutt" in the comments, this is the same David Ehrenstein that created the meme of Barack the Magic Negro.
The NYT carries a story on the reaction of gun control advocates:
Gun-control advocates across the country reacted with shock and outrage at the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns today, saying the ruling would threaten gun-control measures in other states. . . .
Read the entire article. Shock and outrage? Whether the Second Amendment was written so as to provide an individual right to gun ownership is not a policy decision to be made by an unelected supra-legislature of activists. The mindset of the left is a clear and present danger to the continued freedoms of this country and our viability as a nation.
Finally, at a debate, Obama gets asked some difficult questions - though with minimal follow-up - and he stumbles badly. He was on the defensive most of the night and not only was his performance weak, but some of his answers will very likely come back to haunt him.
The far left is screaming this morn that the questions asked of Obama in last night’s debate were grossly unfair. You can find the high decibel round-up at Instapundit. They absolutely do not want a spotlight shown on Obama’s history from which we can infer the measure of the man. To ABC’s credit, they did ask questions about some of the major issues surrounding Obama’s character. That said, they did so without the follow-up questions to Obama’s facile attempts to sweep them away. Nonetheless, Obama looked bad and on the defensive throughout the night.
The lowest of the low points for Obama during last night’s debate came on the issues of “bittergate” and gun rights. Almost right out of the gate, Charles Gibson asked Obama about bittergate:
[You said] small town Pennsylvanians who have had tough economic times in recent years. And you said they get bitter and they cling to guns or they cling to their religion or they cling to antipathy toward people who are not like them. . . . Do you understand that some people in this state find that patronizing and think that you said actually what you meant?
Obama seems to have really fumbled his answer. He claims he misspoke, but then went on to say:
. . . when people [are] like promised year after year, decade after decade, that their economic situation is going to change and it doesn't, then, politically, they end up focusing on those things that are constant like religion. They end up feeling this is a place where I can find some refuge. This is something I can count on. They end up being much more concerned about votes around things like guns, where traditions have been passed on from generation to generation. And those are incredibly important to them. And, yes, what is also true is that wedge issues, hot-button issues, end up taking prominence in our politics.
Didn’t he just repeat the bittergate remarks, substituting the word “focusing” for the word cling? That is certainly what it seems to me. Just as it seems that he is saying is that its economic concerns that drive concerns about Second Amendment rights and moral issues. So if we only had enough money in our pockets, we would be unconcerned with such things as efforts to restrict gun ownership and moral issues such as gay marriage, abortion and the role religion should play in society. Its pretty clear Obama said exactly what he meant in the “bittergate” remarks to San Francisco’s elite left.
Then on gun rights issues, Obama sidestepped a question about where he stood on the highly restrictive D.C. gun laws, stating that he had not read the legal briefs before the Supreme Court. How that keeps him from forming his own opinion on the matter is beyond me – and his refusal to answer this question appeared very weak. Indeed, he has sponsored incredibly restrictive gun legislation while in the Illinois State Senate (see here), though Gibson did not ask him about that legislation.
Obama did give an answer that could have real long-term problems for him. He stated that he had “never favored a total ban on hand-guns.” Asked about a 1996 survey filled out by his campaign that clearly stated the opposite, Obama disclaimed any knowledge of the survey in the debate, stating “No, my writing wasn't on that particular questionnaire . . .” I blogged in detail about this questionnaire here. Obama was quizzed on the questionnaire the day after his campaign submitted it. The day after that, he submitted an amended questionnaire with both the answer about a ban on hand guns unedited and with what, until yesterday, his campaign acknowledged were Obama's own handwritten comments in the margins. This is not the last we have heard of this issue, by any means.
On his association with Rev. Wright, Obama claimed that he had already fully addressed this issue and again trotted out the frankly unbelievable assertion that he never heard Rev. Wright’s racist screed throughout his entire twenty year attendance at the church. The truth is we have yet to hear a Rev. Wright sermon that is not racist. I am waiting for someone to request copies of the Rev. Wright’s sermons over the past twenty years – and to ask Obama whether he will demand Rev. Wright make them available. And Gibson did not ask Obama about his reference to “white greed” in his book Audacity of Hope – an inclusion that clearly shows Obama not only heard such vile screed over his twenty year association, but that he adopted it. Be that as it may, Clinton had the right take on this:
I think in addition to the questions about Reverend Wright and what he said and when he said it, and for whatever reason he might have said these things, there were so many different variations on the explanations that we heard.
And it is something that I think deserves further exploration because clearly, what we've got to figure out is how we're going to bring people together in a way that overcomes the anger, overcomes the divisiveness and whatever bitterness there may be out there. You know?
It is clear that, as leaders, we have a choice who we associate with and who we apparently give some kind of seal of approval to. And I think that it wasn't only the specific remarks but some of the relationships with Reverend Farrakhan, with giving the church bulletin over to the leader of Hamas, to put a message in. You know, these are problems. And they raise questions in people's minds. And, so, this is a legitimate area, as everything is, when we run for office, for people to be exploring and trying to find answers.
And on his long association with the unrepentent terrorist bomber William Ayers, Obama had the audacity to liken Ayers to conservative Senator Tom Colburn, a man who is virulently anti-abortion but who has certainly never advocated violence against the pro-abortion crowd, let alone carried out such an act. Gateway Pundit has more on this.
Both Obama and Clinton were allowed to repeat their ‘out of Iraq now' canard to softball questioning. Both said they would ignore the advice of Petraeus and Crocker, but neither were questioned on the explicit premise articulated by Petraeus and Crocker that such a precipitous drawdown would be a disaster that would open Iraq to being dominated by Iran and reinfiltrated by al Qaeda.
On the issue of a nuclear armed Iran, when asked whether the U.S. should put Israel under its umbrella of nuclear protection, while Clinton answered forcefully, Obama danced around the answer, never answering with a clear “yes.”
Obama was asked about his plans to nearly double the capital gains tax rate. When he was told that each time the capital gains tax rate has been cut, it has brought in more revenue, Obama responded by justifying his sophmoric class warfare on the grounds of “fairness.”
Obama continues to favor affirmative action and considerations of race in college admissions to overcome “current discrimination.” I was floored by that. The group most being discriminated against in college admissions today, according to the most recent surveys, are white male gentiles. How Obama’s support for affirmative action in regards to that reality portends to unite America across the vast racial divide we hear exists from the far left and from race baiters such as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton – and you can add Rev. Wright to the list – is an issue that Obama needs to explain in detail.
You can find the entire debate transcript here. This was not only a poor performance by Obama, it is likely one that will - and very much should - resurface often between now and November. The more I see of Obama, the less I trust this man's judgment to hold any elected office.
The WSJ is reporting that Ron Paul might win the New Hampshire primary. This leads to the inescapable conclusion that the primary system is broken. New Hampshire is not representative of Republicans generally nor sanity apparently.
"Asked for his views on an alternative to the EU, Alan Sked, the founder of UKIP, famously noted that the alternative to suicide was simply not to commit suicide." Brits horrified at their country’s goose step march into that grand experiment in undemocratic socialism, the EU, are looking at an "anglosphere" alternative. Sounds about right to me.
And speaking of Britain, the country which gave us the model for our Second Amendment right of an individual to keep and bear arms with its Declaration of Rights of 1689 (which to my knowledge Britain has never repealed) does not even trust its constabulary to be armed. A female police officer was shot while investigating an armed robbery this morning in Lancashire and one of her assailants escaped.
And the Tories are as bad as the socialist Labour Party in the UK. They are still not making an unequivocal statement that they will allow the people of the UK a referendum on Treaty of Lisbon that establishes the EU as a state and Britain as a province. Labour’s Gordon Brown is refusing to allow a referendum. The Tory’s David Cameron is trying to hint that he will if elected without promising it. What a travesty.
Expected on January 1 in the binge drinking capital of the world - a lot of partying. Expected post January 1, a record number of abortions and STD’s.
"The Roman Catholic Church has vowed to "fight the Devil head-on" by training hundreds of priests as exorcists. Father Gabriele Amorth, 82, the Vatican's Exorcist in Chief, announced the initiative amid the Church's concerns about growing worldwide interest in Satanism and the occult."
Watch German multiculturalism in action. "A top member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives has said Germany has too many criminal young foreigners and that immigrants must stick to the rules of Germany's "Christian-Occidental" culture . . ." Both seem reasonable. But not to Der Speigel and the rest of Germany’s left.
Iran’s greatest fear appears to be from internal dissent. That is not surprising. The IRGC is addressing this by taking better control of the theocracy’s thugs, the Basij, and expanding the force.
Fatah’s armed wing calls for the assassination of Fatah’s Prime Minister Salaam Fayad for "collaboration" with Israel and the US. Someone remind me why we are giving a dollar in aid to Fatah? It certainly has brought no stability.
Cheat Seeking Missles is posting that the court case filed in France against former Sec. of Defense Don Rumsfeld, brought by the French-based International Federation of Human Rights Leagues (FIDH) and the U.S. Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), has been dismissed by the Paris prosecutor’s office on the grounds of official immunity. The suit claimed that Rumsfeld had authorized interrogation techniques that amounted to torture.
Interestingly, the FIDH that brought suit against Rumsfeld has received a significant portion of its funding from that grand experiment in socialism, the EU. The EU regularly uses NGO’s to further their own far left social agenda. The EU have also funded, among countless others, the American Bar Association to campaign against the death penalty in America.
This is just another instance that shows that the EU and a vocal portion of Europe living in their own “irrational” world, as discussed in this piece from The Van Der Galiën Gazette. Actually, I wonder how much of that irrationality flows down to the “street” now days as opposed to the chattering classes. Everything that I read in UK suggests that there is a growing disconnect between the governed and the governing class who own the media and are making skillful use of it not so much as to stifle free speech as to drown it.
Big Lizards has an exceptional post on the Second Amendment issues and how it will impact in the political realm. It’s a very thoughtful post, though I do not share his confidence that the Court will find an individual right to bear arms. My concern is that there are too many activist judges on the Court. It was only two years ago that the activist wing of the Court rewrote the 5th Amendment in Kelo to enhance the power of government. If they can do that, they can certainly find some penumbra somewhere that will allow them to find that the Second Amendment only creates a collective right that can be wholly regulated by the states.
The Glittering Eye considers it a sure sign of the coming apocalypse that he finds himself in complete agreement with Maureen Dowd on Hillary Clinton. The Eye and Ms. Dowd both think Hillary's experience qualifies her to be President about as much as I think Obama’s foreign affairs experience qualifies him for the job. Scott Ott has documented that President Bush, in fact, has the correct slant on Hillary’s qualifications to be the Democratic nominee for President.
The Education Wonks suspects that the Bohemian San Fran’s leftist political leaders – they can be found permanently perched high atop the moral highground – might be secretly motivated by nihilism and a desire to exert ever more restrictive control over the city’s inhabitants. That might be a little bit of stating the obvious, though I am not complaining. When it comes to our neo-liberal, post modernist left, the obvious bears repeating, often and loudly.
The NYT is reporting a shift in strategy in Iraq to transfer more of the security burden to Iraqi forces. With the decline in violence, some troops will redeploy from Iraq while the remaining troops will play more of a role in training Iraqi forces. That said, it is being done with much attention being paid to not losing anything that we have already gained in terms of declining violence. I believe someone long ago described this strategy – as they stand up, we’ll stand down. Who was it that said that?
The Michigan attorney general weighs in on the Second Amendment as an important individual right. Moreover, “experience demonstrates that the broad ban on gun ownership in the District of Columbia has led to precisely the opposite effect from what was intended.”
A Thanksgiving note of caution from Michael Yon in Iraq: "I had the opportunity to spend Thanksgiving with General Petraeus. . . . Bottom line is that progress is clear and real, but there are tough days ahead and al Qaeda, for instance, is far from dead. The mood is of cautious optimism, with a concern that some of the very positive media lately might set expectations too high. (That’s right: many military leaders are concerned that the media lately might be too positive.)"
The party of the fat cats, those damned Rep . . . er . . . Democrats?
Refusing to answer tough questions, refusing press access, using leaks to control the flow of information, . . . one hint, its not President Bush.
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