Gag Reflex

BIG STORY OF THE DAY #1: Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, BB&T and other big American banks are trying to pay back their share of Federal TARP money early and the Treasury Department doesn't want them to do that - the Feds want to maintain government control over the financial system until they decide to let go. See also the Treasury Department's decision to convert the government's TARP investments in these institutions into common stock, meaning the Feds would literally own America's major banks and dictate the flow of capital wherever they wanted, and also the DJIA tanking almost 290 points as a result: How much punishment does the market have to absorb before the morons in the Obama administration get it?

BIG STORY OF THE DAY #2: Hugo Chavez rants about American imperialism at the Summit of the Americas, gets in a photo op shaking hands with Barack Obama and boosts his popularity even higher among the hate-America-first crowd. President Obama lets a two-bit Commie buffoon pee on his shoes and calls it diplomacy.

BIG STORY OF THE DAY #3: The Department of Homeland Security issued a report warning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans that they could be recruited by "right-wing militias" without specifically naming any right-wing militias or why, exactly, combat veterans would be more susceptible to racism or the violent overthrow of the country they swore to protect. A report issued by DHS in January detailed specific left-wing terror groups, specific crimes they had committed and specific people they might recruit, illustrating the predisposition of our government and the legacy media to believe the worst about conservatives whether they have proof or not. How reassuring it is to know that you're suspected by the very people you're defending at the risk of your life. "I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it." Colonel Nathan R. Jessup


Source: http://www.foxbusiness.com/story/treasury-convert-tarp-shares-common/

Source: http://www.foxbusiness.com/story/markets/futures-remain-red-despite-bofas-results/

Source: http://www.foxbusiness.com/story/markets/industries/finance/american-bankers-association-fed-tarp/

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/first100days/2009/04/19/napolitano-veterans-targets-right-wing-extremist-recruiters/

Resist

On the evening of 16 December 1773, a group of Bostonians dressed as Indians boarded three British cargo ships then docked in the harbor and over the course of several hours, broke open and dumped some 350 chests of tea into the water. This act of rebellion, since called the Boston Tea Party, was a response to an attempt by the British Crown to impose taxes on the American Colonies even though the colonists were not represented in Parliament - in short, tyranny. Following the Stamp Act, the Townsend Acts and the Boston Massacre and followed by the closure of Boston Harbor, the quartering of the King's troops in private homes and summary arrests of leading dissidents, the Boston Tea Party was one of the signal events leading to the American Revolution and eventual independence, a display of defiance triggered directly by the arrogance of the British Empire.

Shift to 15 April 2009. At some four hundred venues, from Boston to Juneau and everywhere in between, tens of thousands of ordinary people gathered to protest the tax-and-spend policies of President Barack Obama and his Democrat allies: 1000 people in Des Moines; 2000 in Beaumont; 4000 in Lansing; another 4000 in Cincinnati. These were honest, hard-working, law-abiding citizens who were mad as hell that their government is blowing their tax dollars in the trillions and sticking them - and their great-grandchildren - with the check. They understood that the President's agenda has nothing to do with "middle-class tax cuts" or "fairness" or "putting money in the pockets of deserving Americans" but with remaking America into a socialist workers' paradise. They understood that the bottom fifty percent of wage earners, who pay only four percent of all Federal income taxes right now, will receive free health care, subsidized mortgages, jobs, car loans and insurance under this new regime, while the top ten percent of wage earners who pay 65% of the total bill will pay even more and be represented less. And they understood the lesson of the original Boston Tea Party, contrary to pinheads like Janeane Garofalo and Keith Olbermann, that tyranny by a lawful government is tyranny nonetheless and must be opposed. They are not stooges of the Republican Party as the liberal media has opined, they're not being manipulated by FoxNews or Rush Limbaugh or the "vast right-wing conspiracy." They are exercising their rights as American citizens to lawfully protest the reckless behavior of the government that claims to represent them but which really represents the interests of the most radical elements of the American Left.

...which not only misunderstands them but ridicules them as well. Here is an exchange between Ms Garofalo and Mr. Olbermann on last Wednesday's Countdown:

Ms. Garofalo: "Let’s be very honest about what this is about. It’s not about bashing Democrats, it’s not about taxes, they have no idea what the Boston tea party was about, they don’t know their history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks."

Mr. Olbermann: "If you spear your television network … towards a bunch of guys who are just looking for a reason to yell at the black president, eventually you will marginalize yourself out of business, won’t you?"

So we first have Janeane Garofalo, a hardcore liberal and Hollywood C-lister whose flagging career has been given a boost by her appearance this season on the decidedly conservative 24, a mainstay of the Fox Network she bitterly criticizes. (She apparently understands the business well enough to ride the best horse in the race.) Ms. Garofalo dismisses the stated objectives of the nationwide TEA Parties, insults the intelligence of those who participated - a typical liberal tactic - then labels them racists and rednecks, the boilerplate epithet of the Left thrown at anyone who disagrees with them, as if people who go to church, work hard, pay their taxes, raise their children without welfare, watch NASCAR and own guns do not have the right to complain about their taxes being wasted. It doesn't occur to her that people could honestly disapprove of President Obama and the agenda he's advancing simply on political grounds: For her, it's literally black and white. She was then answered by the equally liberal host of Countdown, whose show has been regularly trounced in the ratings - The O'Reilly Factor has been the number one cable news program for 100 months in a row and FoxNews outpolls CNN and MSNBC combined. Keith, for his part, simply accepted his guest's ludicrous accusation at face value and wondered aloud if FoxNews' coverage of the TEA Parties would torpedo their ratings, which I can't help but assume was wishful thinking on his part. (He has to understand the business well enough to know that when he consistently sucks against the opposition, cancellation awaits.) Together they form a perfect microcosm of the sheer intellectual and ethical nakedness of the Left, hence the popularity of the TEA Parties: As long as idiots like these defend Barack Obama and his spendthrift policies, resistance will deepen.





Source: http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/teaparty.htm

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/04/15/anti-tax-tea-party-protests-expected/

Source: http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2009/04/17/janeane-garafalo-says-tea-parties-were-for-rednecks/

One Doesn't Follow The Other

America has suffered a welter of violence over the past five weeks. From Alabama to Oakland, from North Carolina to Binghamton, New York, lunatics with guns have killed and wounded police and civilians alike, destroying the lives of hundreds of innocent people:

• Saturday, 04 April 2009 - Pittsburgh, PA
  Three police officers killed


• Friday, 03 April 2009 - Binghamton, NY
  Thirteen people killed, four wounded


• March 29: Robert Stewart, 45, shot and killed eight people at Pinelake Health and Rehab in Carthage, N.C., before a police officer shot him and ended the rampage.


• March 29: Devan Kalathat, 42, shot and killed his two children and three other relatives, then killed himself in an upscale neighborhood of Santa Clara. Kalathat"s wife was critically injured.


• March 21: Lovelle Mixon, 26, shot and killed four Oakland police officers after a traffic stop. Mixon was killed in a shootout with SWAT officers.


• March 10: Michael McLendon, 28, killed 10 people including his mother, four other relatives, and the wife and child of a local sheriff"s deputy across two rural Alabama counties. He then killed himself.

Sometimes the perpetrators have survived to face justice, sometimes they took the coward's way out to avoid that justice (only to usher themselves into the presence of Almighty God to face His justice, and that eternally) but they've always managed to assume ultimate power for a short time and inflict terrific damage, exacting revenge for whatever wrongs they blamed society for doing them and then leaving grief-stricken communities to clean up the mess and figure out how to go on. These maniacs have also provided the rabid ant-gun Left in this country with fresh incentive to ban guns, as if they needed any more. ABC News, for their part, immediately broadcast two stories on the Obama administration's low priority on gun control to try to stir up "righteous anger" over the issue and will broadcast a special tomorrow night featuring Diane Sawyer, who will refute the reasons commonly cited for owning guns. The major line of reasoning they employ is that these mass shootings could be prevented by banning private ownership of firearms altogether, or at least making it so hard that no-one will try. They also paint as irrational the very desire to own a gun, as if no government anywhere at any time in the United States has acted tyrannically, stripping the citizens of their rights, their guns and their lives - we know both arguments to be patently and even laughably false:

• There are approximately 20,000 laws governing firearms in this country at all levels of jurisdiction. Private ownership of firearms is one of the most heavily-regulated activities in our society but contrary to the liberals' thesis, the areas where guns are most tightly controlled usually suffer the highest rates of crime. It is also no coincidence that crime is usually lower in the areas where guns are more available to honest citizens - guns are successfully used to defend lives and property over two million times a year and for every life taken by gun crime, 25-75 lives are saved.

• Washington, DC, where I work, had banned privately-owned handguns since 1976 until the District of Columbia v. Heller decision last summer but suffers from violent crime at three times the national average. In their zeal to ostensibly prevent crime, the liberal city government actually did the criminals a favor by guaranteeing that they would have a permanent and lethal advantage over their intended victims. From Detroit to St. Louis, from Oakland to Baltimore, from Atlanta to Newark, the cities where liberals rule and guns are banned are also ridden by violent crime, and in the event that a felon can't get a gun, he'll simply resort to some other weapon.

• The incident that sparked the Revolution - the Battle of Lexington - was precipitated by a British attempt to seize privately-owned firearms and ammunition stored at Concord, Massachusetts. Since then, our history is littered with examples of oppressive governments and outgunned citizens: the Johnson County War in Wyoming in 1892, the massacres of coal miners and their families from Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914 to Matewan, West Virginia, in 1920, and perhaps most infamously, the incident at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992. In this latter episode, Federal agents relentlessly hounded Gary Weaver for seven years before surrounding him at his ranch. After shooting the family dog to try to lure Mr. Weaver out of his house, they killed his son Samuel as he defended himself, shot Mr. Weaver in the back and killed his wife Vicki while she held their infant son in her arms. While Mr. Weaver was largely exonerated of the charges levelled against him, twelve Federal agents were disciplined and FBI Director Louis Freeh admitted to Congress that Ruby Ridge was "synonymous with the exaggerated application of federal law enforcement." (NOTE: It is interesting that no Federal agent involved at Ruby Ridge was ever prosecuted. Lon Horiuchi, the sniper who killed Vicki Weaver as she stood behind a door - he couldn't even see who or what he was shooting at - was protected by a Federal assertion of sovereign immunity.) It is this last incident that so starkly reminds us that governments in our country aren't to be blindly trusted and that stripping the citizens of their most potent safeguard is literally suicidal.

Despite our own history and the clear, explicit and unmistakable intent of the Founding Fathers as expressed in the Second Amendment, liberals want to exploit these recent tragedies to eliminate the Right to Keep and Bear Arms for precisely the reason I cite above. The advancement of a socialist state or any other authoritarian government can be checked by a population that is intelligent, well-informed and well-armed, thus the liberals will stop at nothing to eliminate our capacity to defend ourselves. The nutcases who have perpetrated these murders must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, make no mistake, but to erase a Constitutional right guaranteed every citizen to prevent its abuse is absurd. Last year, when it became apparent that ACORN had facilitated voter fraud in ten states, the Left never proposed eliminating the right to vote. It is ironic in the extreme that the same people who emphatically advocate for rights that appear nowhere in the Constitution - abortion, gay marriage, euthanasia, legal rights for terrorists at Gitmo - are just as emphatically trying to kill a right deliberately and specifically included, and they must be resisted with all the strength and determination we can muster.

Source: http://www.nraila.org/GunLaws/Federal/Read.aspx?id=74

Source: http://www.nraila.org/heller/proamicusbriefs/07-290_amicus_aaps.pdf

Source: http://www.nraila.org/Issues/FactSheets/Read.aspx?id=245

Source:http://www.mercurynews.com/crime/ci_12068204?nclick_check=1

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,512560,00.html

Source: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2007/offenses/violent_crime/index.html

Source: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0921299.html