This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Author: Jonn Lilyea

  • DC gun ban appeal at the USSC

    The Supreme Court is listening to arguments for and against DC’s gun ban – the first time the Second Amendment will be discussed among the judiciaries for more than 70 years. The 33-year-old DC law absolutely forbids private ownership of handguns and shotguns and requires long gun owners to have their weapons rendered useless and in pieces, locked away. It is arguably the most draconian of gun regulations in the country. The Washington Examiner prints the District’s main points before the court;

    Dellinger, along with D.C. Solicitor General Todd Kim, Akin Gump partner Thomas Goldstein and Covington & Burling’s Robert Long, will argue the case on three points: That the city’s existing law is manifestly reasonable, that the District has the same right as states to restrict firearms, and that the 2nd Amendment speaks only to state militias, not individuals.

    Well, let’s look at the Second Amendment;

    A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

    On first blush, the District could have a point on the fact that amendment “speaks only to State militias”, however, that’s without understanding the main reason for the entire Constitution – to protect people from their government. A “militia”, using today’s terms, is also an arm of government – the entity that the Constitution recognized as the main enemy of personal freedom.

    I will not argue that the District doesn’t have the same right as States to reasonably restrict gun ownership, however, that’s not a carte blanche to forbid ownership by law abiding citizens. Contrary to what I’ve been told by the Left, the Right doesn’t agree that mentally-impaired people and criminals (what’s the difference really) should have guns. A DC judge once told me that the NRA thinks everyone should own guns – that’s just bogus leftist crap used to cloud the issue of the Second Amendment.
    But the District also claims their regulations are “reasonable” – reasonable to the point that law abiding citizens are unable to protect themselves and their families from gun-wielding malcontents. That’s not even in the same ball park as “reasonable”.

    By the Metro Police’s own admission, they recovered almost 2300 illegal weapons from DC’s streets last year (2007). Thirty three years after the law was enacted, DC cops are still taking an average of six guns everyday from law breakers – that’s 6 guns everyday since 2002. That tells me that the only people who aren’t armed are the people who don’t break laws. So how can the District argue that’s it’s reasonable for anyone except criminals.

  • Democrats’ idea of change

    I have to laugh when I read about the Democrats’ presidential debates. It reminds me of a buncha Dungeon and Dragons players arguing over what women want from men. In the Washington Times this morning Christina Bellatoni writes about just such a debate last night in New Hampshire.

    Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama sparred in a debate here last night over the two themes that have defined the Democratic presidential battle — experience and change.

    Mrs. Clinton aimed to pull off a win here that would halt the momentum Mr. Obama gained after winning the Iowa caucuses Thursday, so she slammed him on his health care plan, past votes where he shifted position and suggested he was all talk and no results.

    Mr. Obama, of Illinois, said Mrs. Clinton of New York wasn’t being truthful and defended himself.

    “What I think is important that we don’t do is to try to distort each other’s records as election day approaches here in New Hampshire,” he said. “Because what I think the people of America are looking for are folks who are going to be straight about the issues and are going to be interested in solving problems and bringing people together.”

    Being the wife of the only Democrat President in the last 27 years doesn’t mean that Clinton has any experience – she understands that making empty promises to the inattentive masses gets her some votes, but that’s the extent of her experience.

    Obama has made enough foreign policy mistakes during the campaign, angered enough of our traditional allies in doing so, and attracted enough of our enemies to support his candidacy to prove he doesn’t understand the job. Not to mention that he doesn’t even understand events in Iraq that have happened while he was campaigning for president (as reported by Crotchety Old Bastard).

    Edwards is no better than Clinton – he makes lots of popular promises, beats the class warfare drum like he invented socialism – but his experience is limited to the courtroom where he’s accustomed to lying for his own monetary benefit.

    Gateway Pundit has the video of Charles Gibson trying to get the Democrats to admit that the surge in Iraq worked – they don’t want to own their failures, and that even includes their failures over the last fifty years – including standing against the the Civil Rights movement.

    Democrats are real good at understanding the process that gets them elected, but when it comes to producing results, that part escapes them. Name one policy that Bill Clinton promised in either of his presidential campaigns that he actually followed through upon. Out of everything that Congressional Democrats promised the voters in last year’s midterm election, the only promise they kept was for a minimum wage hike.

    The only “change” that Clinton and Obama offer is a vote for them for WHAT they are rather than WHO they are. Clinton even wants us to believe she’s more qualified than the rest of the candidates because Mrs. Bhutto was assassinated – I don’t know how her twisted logic gave birth to that stillborn idea.
    The Democrats’ concept of change is a return to the failed social policies of the 1960s and the failed foreign policies of the Carter era. I guess that makes Democrats less “liberal” and more “reactionary” than they’d like to think. A rational person would think that’s the reason Democrats haven’t had more than 49% of the popular vote since 1976 – 32 years.

  • Chavez shuffles deck chairs

    An apparently innocuous story appears in the Financial Times this morning announcing that Chavez is appointing new cabinet ministers;

    Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced a major cabinet reshuffle on Thursday after a poll defeat last month wrecked his hopes of winning new powers to push ahead with his declared socialist revolution.

    Chavez named a soft-spoken replacement for his combative vice-president, Jorge Rodriguez, and said he was making 12 other cabinet changes.

    Mr Rodriguez was blamed by many government supporters for the referendum defeat in December, when voters rejected Mr Chavez’s bid for new powers and the right to run for reelection indefinitely

    In recent days, an apparently humbled Mr Chavez has dropped his grandiose revolutionary speeches and has instead promised to tackle issues like crime and garbage collection that more directly affect his grass roots supporters

    But there’s a little more to the story than FT lets on. Daniel at Venezuela News and Views expounds;

    There is so much to post on such as the way higher murder rate in Venezuela than in Iraq or how Cabezas fiscal policies failed miserably as Venezuelan inflation reached 23%, almost the double of the set goal, the highest of the continent, about 4 times as high as the average. And let’s not even mention the very partial, very selective, very meaningless “amnesty”….

    Gateway Pundit wrote on Wednesday that the murder rate in Venezuela is higher than the murder rate in Iraq. El Universo reports more than 12,000 murders last year in Venezuela. Earlier this week, Las Armas de Coronel posted pictures of Chavez’ garbage issues;

    At The Devil’s Excrement, Miguel guesses that inflation is probably higher than what the government publishes and agrees that Chavez is just shuffling deck chairs while the Titanic sinks;

    Clearly, Chavez is still shuffling people around, rather than looking for experts. He wants loyalty more than effectiveness and management capability. This bodes badly for him (and us!) in the near future, as there are significant problems that need to be resolved and tackled with true expertise. The most important positions that needed to be filled were the Vice Presidency and the Ministry of Finance, we shall see what the latter brings.

    Tomas Sancio at Venezuelan Politics says it’s because Chavez is too rigid;

    In the end, Chávez’s binary way of thinking is hurting him more than he would expect. The highlights of 2007 were that he closed RCTV for criticizing his government and pushed a Constitutional Reform that few people had any input in. In spite of record oil prices and largesse, his popularity suffered and will continue doing so in 2008 if he doesn’t become more flexible. Again, we wouldn’t bet on this.

    But I think it’s because he’s a moron pretending to be one of the literati. He doesn’t understand economics, he doesn’t understand politics – I’m surprised that while he was a paratrooper, he could find the ground. Chavez thinks that things happen just because he says it happens. Look at the other members of his “gran revolucion” – nose picking mouth breathers all.

    He’s assembled the biggest group of idiots across the globe with no other goal than to stick his finger in the eye of the United States, and George Bush in particular. What kind of vision is that? And how does that help the Venezuelan people?

    Funny that it took the Spanish King to point out that Chavez has no clothes. And FARC.

  • The REAL reason FARC negotiations broke down (UPDATED)

    Someone go tell Ollie Stone that the Miami Herald reveals the real reason that Chavez’ negotiations with FARC failed last weekend;

    The man who dropped off the suspected baby of a kidnapped woman at a rural Colombian infirmary two years ago was given a deadline of Dec. 30 by FARC rebels to return the boy, Colombian authorities said Thursday.

    ”In 2005, members of the FARC came to his house to give him the child because they weren’t able to care for him during troop movements and combat,” said Col. Eugenio Ramos, head of police in the rebel-controlled province of Guaviare.

    ”They returned last month and gave him a deadline of Dec. 30 to produce the child, saying he and his family’s lives were in danger if he didn’t,” Ramos told RCN television.

    From Las Armas de Coronel, the quotes from Stone as he left Chavez’ company of boobs;

    Oliver Stone has just declared, in his way back to Caracas after the Colombian hostage fiasco, that “Chavez is a great man” and Uribe is “the guilty party, a fraud”.

    Well, Ollie, I guess we know who the real fraud is here, don’t we? The party that was trading on the life of a hostage they didn’t have – a hostage they couldn’t even locate.

    So, I guess Stone will be apologizing any minute for flying off the handle.

    Ooops, Kate had this up two days ago.

    UPDATE: CNN reports that a DNA test was taken on the boy thought to be the son of a hostage-taking narco-terrorist;

    DNA analysis indicates a 3-year-old boy living in a Bogota foster home is the child of a woman held captive by leftist rebels for nearly six years, an official in Colombia’s federal prosecutor’s office said Friday.

    The results suggest President Alvaro Uribe was right — and that the leftist rebels misled Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and the world when they promised to release the boy along with his mother Clara Rojas and another hostage from their jungle camps.

    “There’s a very high probability he’s Emmanuel,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and thus spoke on condition of anonymity. “The DNA of the boy is the same as his alleged grandmother.”

    (Emphasis mine) Someone better screen shot that story – CNN says Uribe was right.

    Update: Kate sends me a screen shot. I mean CNN says Uribe was right – next thing you know they’ll be calling Castro mean.

    cnn says uribe was right.BMP

  • My predictions for the primary

    I’m no political wonk, and I don’t pretend to be – but I guess some folks are wondering what my thoughts are on the upcoming Iowa caucus – I dunno. Don’t care. The primaries are a big media circus that are more a test of how well candidates can lie to the voters than they are a way to discern a choice. It’s just a way for the networks to squeeze more money out of people.

    If you want numbers, go to Election Projection. I just can’t summon up an ounce of “give-a-turd”.

    So basically my only predictions are based on what I know – politics. If Republicans vote for the most Republican candidate, it’d be Duncan Hunter or Fred Thompson. If Democrats voted for the most Democrat candidate, it’d be Dennis Kucinich or John Edwards. Given the reality of who’ll get votes, that’d make it a Thompson vs. Edwards match up in the Fall. Thompson wins in a landslide – Democrats couldn’t win an election against a wagon load of crap if they ran on what they truly believe.

    But since Republicans and Democrats are both trying to figure out who the opposition is mostly likely to vote for (instead of who most closely represents the party to which they belong) – when it all shakes out, it’ll be Huckabee vs Obama. Why? Because they’re both idiots and both parties are convinced that the opposite party can’t resist voting for them – and they’re both so close to each other in a lack of experience and incompetent policy, no one can tell the difference between them – so there’s no real choice. It’s a safe race.

    The winner? What difference does it make? It won’t be America.
    Good Lord I hope I’m wrong.

  • Iran ends support of Iraq’s insurgents

    In the Washington Times this morning, Sara Carter writes that Iran has apparently ended their support of the insurgency in Iraq;

    Iran’s leaders are no longer supplying weapons or training to Islamic militants in Iraq, the spokesman for the top U.S. commander in Iraq told The Washington Times.

    Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, sees Iran as following through on assurances it made to Iraqi and U.S. officials last fall not to assist extremists in Iraq, spokesman Col. Steven Boylan said, adding that other U.S. officials have noted declines in Iranian weapons and funds to Iraqi insurgents.
    “We are ready to confirm the excellence of the senior Iranian leadership in their pledge to stop the funding, training, equipment and resourcing of the militia special groups,” Col. Boylan said. “We have seen a downward trend in the signature-type attacks using weapons provided by Iran.”

    Of course the reason that Iran stopped was not because they suddenly have a heart and wish peace for the Iraqi people, but more likely because they were losing their special forces officers in sweeps by coalition forces.

    They were pretty well convinced they’d won a retreat by American forces when Democrats won the midterm elections last year. But then George Bush disappointed them and increased our defense of the Iraqi people and has nearly ended the insurgency. I’m sure Americans will remember this at the polls in November.

  • A World With Oil at $100

    OB-AW546_oil100_20080102152434.jpg

    From the Wall Street Journal

    At the Wall Street Journal this morning is a front page article that pronounces that oil reached $100/barrel yesterday. The article goes to illustrate how the financial markets have changed in the last ten years as oil’s price increased 10-fold;

    The surging price of oil, from just over $10 a barrel a decade ago to $100 yesterday, is altering the wealth and influence of nations and industries around the world.

    These power shifts will only widen if prices keep climbing, as many analysts predict. Costly oil already is forcing sweeping changes in the airline and auto sectors. It is intensifying the politics of climate change and adding urgency to the search both for fresh sources of crude and for oil alternatives once deemed fringe.
    [Go to graphic.]

    The long oil-price boom is posing wrenching challenges for the world’s poorest nations, while enriching and emboldening producers in the Middle East, Russia and Venezuela. Their increasing muscle has a flip side: a decline of U.S. clout in many parts of the world.

    Steep gasoline prices also threaten America’s long love affair with the automobile, while putting strains on many lower-income people outside big cities, who must spend an increasing share of their budgets just on fuel to get to work.

    No one can say for sure whether sky-high oil — part of a price boom in a wide range of commodities, from gold to wheat — is here to stay. But most in the industry agree that a 20-year stretch in which oil was consistently cheap is long gone. The global thirst for oil shows little sign of retreating, and large new discoveries are few. Some in the industry say prices could go far higher; others suspect that speculators — or an economic slump in the U.S. or China — could send prices falling in the near term.

    First of all, this “America’s long love affair with the automobile” has long ago passed – back in the 80s when Americans were paying $15,000 for what they tried to convince themselves were luxury cars – but were nothing more than Toyota crap boxes they wouldn’t have twenty-bucks for ten years earlier. America’s love affair is with gadgets in their cars – that’s what car manufacturers are selling these days – watch a car commercial tonight. It’s all about selling voice-recognition MP3 players, DVD players, talking GPS do-hickeys, little buttons that do all of things you could do yourself much easier.

    In July 1979, Jimmy Carter promised that Democrats would;

    From now on, every new addition to our demand for energy will be met from our own production and our own conservation. The generation-long growth in our dependence on foreign oil will be stopped dead in its tracks right now and then reversed as we move through the 1980’s, for I am tonight setting the further goal of cutting our dependence on foreign oil by one-half by the end of the next decade — a saving of over 4 1/2 million barrels of imported oil per day.

    How did Carter promise this goal would be met?

    To make absolutely certain that nothing stands in the way of achieving these goals, I will urge Congress to create an energy mobilization board which, like the War Production Board in World War II, will have the responsibility and authority to cut through the redtape, the delays, and the endless roadblocks to completing key energy projects.

    We will protect our environment. But when this Nation critically needs a refinery or a pipeline, we will build it.

    So what have Democrats done since? Not one oil refinery has been built in the United States since 1977, not one new oil field has been developed. In fact, China and Cuba are exploring and drilling off of our Florida coast. Oil reserves in Alaska remain untouched, oil off the coast of California lies fallow.

    George Bush tried to develop oil fields in Alaska five years ago – that oil would be flowing towards our markets this instant, except that Democrats and weak kneed Republicans (many of whom are out of office today) blocked it to save some phantom caribou herds. When energy companies tried to build a wind farm off of Massachusetts’ coast, Jabba the Kennedy and John Kerry blocked the structures so as not to ruin the view from the mansions.

    In fact, the Democrats have blocked every meaningful measure to move us away from dependence on foreign energy – except their wasteful “investment” of taxpayer dollars into useless and unproductive “alternate energy” boondoggles. Of course there is no incentive to develop “alternate” sources as long as their stream of free cash into the projects from the government – so the “search” goes on. And Democrats’ promises and posturing continues as well.

    But this is an election year – things can change as long as people are willing to accept the truth about Democrats’ intentions.

    Jack M at Ace of Spades has the story on the guy who drove the price up – briefly.

  • 1998 Nostalgia

    Rush Limbaugh Mug

    Do you still have yours? I still drink from mine every single morning.

    For those of you who don’t recognize it, it’s an official Rush Limbaugh Charter Member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy mug. We got it as a premium in 1998 for subscribing to the Limbaugh Letter. He came up with the idea after Hillary went on TV and claimed a vast right wing conspiracy was out to make her husband play with fat interns.

    Rush was all most of us Conservatives had back then. There was virtually no internet for most of us, Fox News wasn’t out in the sticks where I lived (on the Canadian border with Northern New York). The only cable news we had was CNN (shiver), but we had Fox News Sunday on the Fox Broadcast channel. And Rush Limbaugh.

    Well, I only mention it because everyone is making a big deal about the 10-year anniversary of the Bill Clinton scandal today. Sweetness and Light even has the video of Hillary Clinton giving birth to the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. American Pundit and Gateway Pundit remind us that ten years ago Bill Clinton warned us that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and he intends to use them. Apparently everything changed in the next five years.

    Well, I just used this as an excuse to show everyone that I haven’t forgotten about what the Clintons put us through all those years ago – I’m reminded every morning when I drink my coffee on the patio.