The Washington Times reports this morning that the Obama Administration, not content to change firearms regulations are looking at expanding the definition of switchblade knives in an effort to restrict access to all knives that can be opened with one hand;
“Boy Scout knives, Swiss Army knives – the most basic of knives can be opened one-handed if you know what you are doing,” said Doug Ritter, executive director of Knife Rights, an advocacy group fighting to defeat the measure.
“The outrage is gaining steam,” he said.
Customs officials dismiss fears that the new language will outlaw ordinary pocket knives, saying the change was issued to clear up conflicting guidelines for border agents about what constitutes an illegal switchblade that cannot be imported into the United States. The rule could be imposed within 30 days if not blocked.
Even Congress is worried about the regulation;
The bipartisan Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus, boasting one of the largest memberships on Capitol Hill, last week sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who oversees CBP, urging her to quash the proposed rule change. The letter was signed by 61 Republican and 18 Democratic lawmakers.
“This classification could render millions of law-abiding knife owners in violation of the law and expose major market retailers, manufacturers, dealers and importers to possible federal felony charges, and could drive domestic manufacturers and importers out of business, potentially costing thousands of jobs,” said caucus member Rep. Robert E. Latta, Ohio Republican.
More of the nanny state trying to protect us from ourselves.
Robert Reich, that little-bitty fella from the Clinton Administration, has an editorial in the Wall Street Journal this morning entitled “Why We Need a Public Health-Care Plan“. Unfortunately, Reich doesn’t mention a single reason about why we need a public health-care plan – instead he rambles on about why we need to raise taxes so there can be a public health care plan. But, Reich is a big government guy what should we expect?
The biggest lie in his piece is this line;
Critics say the public option is really a Trojan horse for a government takeover of all of health insurance. But nothing could be further from the truth. It’s an option. No one has to choose it.
He’s right that no one has to choose the government plan for their family, but no one has a choice to opt out of paying for it, do they? Talk about a Trojan Horse. Obama has used the same line continuously. It’s like the folks who pay for social security benefits they’ll never receive. Just like social security, the health care plan will depend on financing from people who’ll never see a return on their money.
Another joke line from Reich;
The public plan would merely force profit-making private plans to take whatever steps were necessary to become more competitive. Once again, that’s a plus.
Yeah, government is great source of competition. Like the Post Office versus UPS and FedEx. When the Post Office loses money, they impose restrictions on UPS and FedEx so the government can be more competitive with the public sector. How does that benefit the consumer? It doesn’t, in fact it usually hurts the consumer.
As a practical matter, the choice people make between private plans and a public one is likely to function as a check on both. Such competition will encourage private plans to do better — offering more value at less cost. At the same time, it will encourage the public plan to be as flexible as possible.
Anyone who has ever been under military of veterans care can attest as to how “flexible” the government can be. Here’s an example of the efficiency of military health care. I had an appointment on the fifth floor of Walter Reed to get ready for surgery. A week later, I had another appointment on the sixth floor that they called a “pre-op” appointment. The second appointment was for the sole purpose of me taking my paper work from the fifth floor to the sixth floor in the age of computer networks. That’s efficiency, boy.
Here’s the part I don’t get – this administration tried to force veterans with service-connected disabilities to get health insurance to reimburse the government for their care. The President was adamant about it and said he needed the $540 billion that would generate, and that was just for the small portion of veterans that have service-connected disabilities. How in hell does he figure he can afford health care for the whole country?
So our President had a short-notice press conference today to rescue his plummeting numbers. From what I read in Fox News it looks like he pretty much told the Iranian protesters “Adios”;
“What’s happened in Iran is profound and we’re still waiting to see how it plays itself out,” Obama said. “It’s not too late for the Iranian government to recognize that there is a peaceful path that will lead to stability and legitimacy and prosperity for the Iranian people. We hope they take it.” He said there is a path for the country to engage with the global community.
Obama also downplayed concerns that he’s not speaking out forcefully enough in support of the protesters, saying the Iranian people can “speak for themselves.”
He keeps saying this is up to the Iranian people…problem is the people trying to ‘debate’ are being gunned down. Obama won’t say that he won’t recognize a government imposed by force.
“I think the president has it correct. … It is very crucial as I see it that we not have our fingerprints on this. That this really be truly inspired by the Iranian people. We don’t know where this goes. And I sure wouldn’t want to be responsible for thousands of people being killed, which is a distinct possibility.”
The same type of namby-pamby BS that put the mullahs in power in the first place. Since the Obama administration has already decided to defund the democracy movement in Iran, I’m pretty sure they’ve already made up their minds about who is going to come out on top and they’re fine with the Iranian people being silenced as long as Obama can look like he’s making nice with the mullahs.
In the meantime, he can’t afford to take his eye off the ball on domestic issues – so a safer world will just have to wait while he takes away our healthcare and drives taxes higher. That’s the priority right now – just ignore the unarmed Iranians facing the Islamic Republic’s thugs.
Last Friday I wrote about the USS John S. McCain shadowing the North Korean-flagged ship, the Kang Nam. Today more details about the operations are coming out. Associated Press reports the ship is carrying missiles to Myanmar;
The South Korean news network YTN, citing an unidentified intelligence source in the South, said on Sunday that the U.S. suspects the cargo ship Kang Nam is carrying missiles and related parts. Myanmar’s military government, which faces an arms embargo from the United States and the European Union, has reportedly bought weapons from North Korea.
US News and World Reports writes that the North Korean government is issuing some of their usual rhetoric;
“As long as our country has become a proud nuclear power, the U.S. should take a correct look at whom it is dealing with,” said a commentary in the Rodong Sinmun newspaper, which is regarded as a source of official viewpoints.
“It would be a grave mistake for the U.S. to think it can remain unhurt if it ignites the fuse of war on the Korean peninsula.”
The newspaper also blasted President Obama’s recent pledge to protect South Korea, saying it was an attempt to attack the North with atomic bombs.
SInce the US and the UN both decided to make public that they won’t authorize the use of force against North Korean shipping, is it really surprising that the Norks would engage in illegal arms sales? The crew of the McCain is probably on the decks practicing their fist shaking as I write this.
We really can’t expect the President to worry about weapons proliferation while he’s busy handing over tobacco regulation to the FDA, can we?
I was held hostage today at a Walter Reed waiting room for about an hour (I got the cast off, by the way, if anyone is interested) and was forced to listen to CNN while reading my Kindle. As much as I hate Fox, I hate CNN even more. I burst out laughing at one point when they were talking about the Iran protests and Obama’s interview on CBS this morning.
The news reader at one point reported, deadpan serious, that some Republicans supported Obama’s wishy-washy speech last Saturday. i waited with bated breath to see which Republicans made such a thought public. Ready? OK:
Henry Kissinger and Pat Buchanan.
C’mon, admit it, you chuckled, too.
Henry Kissinger is a Republican in the narrowest definition of the word. He’s famous for detente with the Soviet Union – and arming Jimmy Carter with that massive failure.
Can anyone tell me the last time Pat Buchanan supported any Republican foreign policy? He’s a cro-magnon-conservative – his brand of Republicanism goes back to the isolationists of World War Two. He criticized both Presidents Bush, so of course he’s going to support a policy that keeps us from being engaged in events in Iran. Hell, Buchanan thinks we should withdraw from Europe and Japan, too.
“I think the president has it correct. … It is very crucial as I see it that we not have our fingerprints on this. That this really be truly inspired by the Iranian people. We don’t know where this goes. And I sure wouldn’t want to be responsible for thousands of people being killed, which is a distinct possibility.”
Ya know what – that’s the same kind of shit that kept us racing troops back to Kuwait every time Hussein farted through the 90s. It’s the same kind of empty thought that allowed the Taliban to take over Afghanistan. It’s the same pretty words that Jimmy Carter thought during the first Iranian Revolution that lost democracy in Iran in 1979. It’s the same empty intellect that tried to force us out of Iraq in 2006-2008. It’s the same idiot ideology that has caused every problem we’ve had in the last fifty years. So let’s do it all again.
“We don’t know where this goes”. Did George HW Bush know we’d cake walk through Kuwait to the gates of Baghdad? Did Ronald Reagan know for a fact that the Soviet Union would collapse in his lifetime? Did FDR know he’d defeat the both the Nazis and the Japanese in less than four years.
Feinstein said she didn’t want to be responsible for thousands of deaths – um, she wouldn’t be responsible. It looks like thousands of Iranians are willing to die for their freedom. Don’t we owe it to them to help them try to cast off the chains of the mullahs? The same mullahs who financed the killing of US troops in Iraq and, lately, Afghanistan? Don’t we have a dog in this fight, too?
It’s no wonder the world is falling down around our ears, if this is how the Democrats plan on “leading” this country for the next four years.
And ya wanna know why? It’s so the Democrats can buy patronage with their domestic problems and not be distracted by the flames creeping closer to our shores.
Do they think by keeping out of Iran, that’ll stop terrorism? The mullahs are already blaming us whether we’re involved or not – if we’re going to do the time, we might as well do the crime.
It’s kind of hard to blog these days without a post about Iran. So here’s my first for the day. Start with the hour-old AP update for those who tried to ignore Iran this weekend;
Drew M at Ace of Spades writes that the Islamic Republic’s regime overestimated the number of phony ballots by only a couple of million.
But they aren’t sure if the 3 million extra votes really matter given how much of a landslide Ahmadinejad won by.
Iran’s Guardian Council has suggested that the number of votes collected in 50 cities surpass the number of people eligible to cast ballot in those areas.
His camp, meanwhile, denied reports that he had proclaimed himself ready for martyrdom on Saturday.
“Mousavi has never said this,” his close ally, Qorban Behzadiannejad, told the AP. Mousavi’s Web site also said statements that Mousavi was preparing for death were inaccurate.
But the Washington Post reports that Ahmadinejad is willing to help Mousavi achieve martyrdom;
The semiofficial Fars News Agency, which has strong ties to the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, quoted a law professor at Tehran University as saying that Mousavi’s actions were criminal.
“Through uncivil and illegal means, he created an environment for unrest and hooliganism,” Firouz Aslani told Fars News. “Contrary to his claims of lawfulness, he acted against the security of the nation and the interests of the system.”
Five members of former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani family were arrested and released yesterday, ostensibly to send a message to the popular ex-president who reportedly supports Mousavi’s call for a revote.
Many are upset at our own President for taking his kids for ice cream during this critical moment in time on Saturday – but not me. I’m afraid if we criticize every single thing he does, we risk sounding like the crackpots on the Left did for eight solid years. Sean M makes the same point, sort of, at doubleplusundead. But I will make this point about our President – if he doesn’t start using this unrest in Iran to our advantage (vis-a-vis nuclear proliferation and Iran’s support of the Taliban) he’s going to miss his opportunity and he’ll be blamed for a nuclear Iran and every death of US troops in Afghanistan. It’s Back Obama’s problem now and he can’t blame it on George Bush from this moment forward.
In an interview on CBS’ Early Show, Obama said;
President Obama says he does not want to become a scapegoat for Iran’s leadership as postelection upheaval continues, but Republicans are still saying the new president is being too cautious.
“The last thing that I want to do is to have the United States be a foil for those forces inside Iran who would love nothing better than to make this an argument about the United States,” Obama said in an interview broadcast Monday on CBS’ “The Early Show.” (Fox News link)
“We shouldn’t be playing into that,” he said in the interview, which was recorded Friday.
In other words, he’s declared the popular movement dead on arrival. If he had confidence in the uprising, Obama would praise them without caring what the mullahs thought – like Jimmy Carter when he bet on the wrong horse in 1979. Ronald Reagan bet on democracy in Nicaragua and Central America and was vindicated. Obama would rather deal with the status quo at the cost of democracy and lives of brown people.
A few hours ago, I mentioned the Code Pink statement made on Friday that Obama was doing the right thing by staying out of the Iranian protests. Of course, the following day Obama reversed course and issued his toughest statement on the situation to date.
That’s the way I’d do it – if Code Pink thought I was right about something, I’d change course, too. But I set out to look at what the far Left is saying about the protests and they all seem to think that President Bush is still pulling the strings.
I also mentioned Paul Craig Roberts’ piece seething with Bush Derangement Syndrome. As evidence that the Iranian protests are a CIA plot, Roberts cites Kenneth Timmerman of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran; (more…)
Finally, President Obama, after a week of trying to remain neutral in the conflict in Iran, summoned some testicular fortitude and stood up for freedom yesterday. The Washington Post called it a “cautious response”;
[T]he president called on the Iranian government “to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people.”
U.S. officials say Obama is intent on calibrating his comments to the mood of the hour. They say he is seeking to avoid having the demonstrators accused of being American stooges and is trying to preserve the possibility of negotiating directly with the Iranian government over its nuclear program, links to terrorism, Afghanistan and other issues.
I’d agree, if Obama made that statement after the first death in Tehran, but amid unsubstantiated reports of hundreds of casualties, the wording sounds weak. From the Washington Times;
An Iranian who asked to be identified only by his first name, Ali, told The Washington Times that he saw security forces near Azadi (Freedom) Square dropping tear-gas canisters into buildings sheltering demonstrators, driving motorcycles into crowds of people and firing tear gas into demonstrators’ eyes. As he spoke, continuous shooting could be heard in the background, along with cries and shouts.
A graphic video posted on Facebook by Goli Fassihian, a spokeswoman for the National Iranian American Council, showed the body of a young woman whose face was covered in blood. Another video showed a young man with blood on his chest lying on the street, with gunshots ringing out around him.
Here’s some video from yesterday. Sporadic gunfire breaks out at about 3:00 into the video;
And another;
Actually, if Obama’s intent is to avoid being blamed for the riots, that ship has sailed. Last week, the mullahs had already blamed the US, the UK and the west in general for the protests. This morning, the Malaysian Insider published Ahmadinejad’s warning to the west;
Iranian authorities today blamed “terrorists” for clashes in which at least 10 people were killed and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the United States and Britain to stay out of unrest sparked by his disputed re-election.
Iran state television said 10 people were killed and more than 100 others injured in protests held in Tehran yesterday in defiance of a stern warning by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A separate report put the number of deaths at 13.
State television said the violence included the torching of a mosque, which it blamed on “rioters”.
“In the unrest leading to clashes 10 people were killed and more than 100 wounded,” it said. “The presence of terrorists … in yesterday’s event in Enghelab and Azadi avenues was tangible.”
The harshness of the language suggested the authorities could be preparing for a crackdown to end more than a week of protests.
Obama’s reliance on words to resolve the problem is fairly naive (Fox News link);
And Obama cited the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s, famous quote: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
“I believe that,” Obama said. “The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.”
In other words, if we just wait long enough, everything will shake out in the end. Unfortunately, Martin Luther King was talking about rational governments and rational societies. A rational government in Iran wouldn’t have let the current conditions there get this far. The mullahs would have suggested a power-sharing agreement with the opposition by now, if they were indeed committed to peace in the streets instead of the line about an 11 million-vote gap in the elections.
The Iranian government knows, after years of dealing with the pussy-footing West over their nuclear ambitions, their is little chance of a Gordon Brown/Barrack Obama insurgency into Iran. The mullahs can get away with anything, so the Iranian people are pretty much on their. Bullets against voices.
The blame for that can rest on the forlorn wailing of the anti-war crowd who have been protesting direct action against Iran for at least three years that I know of. As recently as this Spring, Code Pink has been praising the Ahmadinejad government and advocating for further suppression of women and minorities in Iran.
The American Left consistently comes down on the wrong side of history. Proof? How about the Code Pink press release from Friday;
CODEPINK calls on the Obama Administration to fulfill its commitment to pursue diplomacy with Iran through face-to-face talks without preconditions; as Obama promised during his campaign, “We should not just talk to our friends, we should be willing to engage our enemies as well. That is what diplomacy is all about.” CODEPINK also affirms the Obama administration’s decision to withhold comment on the Iranian election and its government’s decisions around conducting a recount or reelection.
Furthermore, CODEPINK calls on the United States to cease threats of new economic sanctions, remove existing sanctions, and end threats of war.
These affirmations will lend much needed credibility and legitimacy to Obama’s commitment to improve relations with Iran and the Arab-Muslim world, and uphold his campaign promise to meet with Iranian officials without preconditions.
Emphasis is mine. In other words, Code Pink supports the mullahs on their continued murder of gays and stoning of women as well as the current atrocities on the streets of Iranian cities. Peace at any cost.
In truth, it’s a repeat of the 1979 revolution – Jimmy Carter supported the Shah’s government and we became The Great Satan for three decades. Obama is tacitly supporting the Mullahs, so we’ll get another few decades of being The Great Satan to the rest of Iran.