Category: Politics

Remember When We Were Going to Close Gitmo

Well that promise like so many others made by the Obamessiah were made with his fingers crossed behind his back. Apparently closing Gitmo has moved down in priority:

Stymied by political opposition and focused on competing priorities, the Obama administration has sidelined efforts to close the Guantánamo prison, making it unlikely that President Obama will fulfill his promise to close it before his term ends in 2013.

I’m betting Gitmo will never be closed. It’s just too convenient to have a prison offshore where we can hold prisoners indefinably without trial. You’re government at work everybody.

Rolling Advertisements and the Lead Ammunition Loophole

Very seldom can you get two completely unrelated topics into one news article. But that’s what I found. The main gist of the story is talking about how California is planning to make money. They’ve tossed around tons of ideas but this one most certainly takes the cake. California is looking into using electronic license plates so they can turn your car into a rolling billboard. The idea is if the car is stopped for more than four seconds the license plate goes from your standard license plate to a billboard displaying advertisements.

I’m sure no mechanism would be introduce to opt out of certain adds leading some hilarity such as a car with an anti-gun bumper sticker displaying an add for the NRA or visa versa. Oh wait this California they probably won’t allow the NRA to advertise. Either way not only would you get the privilege of paying California for a new license plate but you would also get to be an advertisement system for them.

Things I’m curious about are how do they plan on updating the ads? Cellular connection maybe? So then California would have to pay up for cellular data plans to one or more of the big carriers. I also couldn’t wait to see some ingenious hacker get into their electronic license plate and display far more fun and interesting things.

But that’s not all this other little quip was in the same news article:

Lead ammunition would be banned completely from state wildlife management areas under a bill by Assemblyman Pedro Nava, D-Santa Barbara. While state law already requires hunters to use nontoxic shot to hunt waterfowl and big game, certain migratory birds and small game species are not protected. Nava’s AB2223 seeks to close that loophole. He says lead ammunition can spread through the food chain when animals ingest the casings. The bill is scheduled to be heard Tuesday in the Senate Natural Resources and Water Committee.

Emphasis mine. Once again the anti-gunners are claiming a law is a loophole and it needs to be closed. I wonder what got them started with this word. Did Mr. Hennigan open up a dictionary one day and randomly come across this word? Did he think, “Gee golly that’s a neat word. It’s pretty long too so I bet I’d sound smart saying it.”

Also I find it funny how lead ammunition can spread through the food chain by animals ingesting casings. I would think that would happen if the animals ingested the lead shot not the plastic casings. It’s almost as if the person talking about this doesn’t actually know anything about the subject at hand. But that’s impossible, nobody would hire somebody who didn’t know anything about guns to write a law involving guns… oh wait.

Diplomacy Only Works When You Have Guns to Back You Up

I stumbled upon an excellent post on Borepatch titled Why Britain needs America around to shoot bad guys. More or less it talks about how Europe loves to think of themselves as far more civilized than the United States because they solve their problems through diplomacy and negotiations. Of course this only works for them because they can point to us and say if the other negotiating party doesn’t comply Europe can send their friend (the United States) to beat them up.

Do as I Say Not as I Do

That was Obama’s message to a group of graduating Michigan high school students:

President Barack Obama is telling high school graduates in Michigan not to make excuses, and to take responsibility for failures as well as successes.

It’s OK I’m sure if this gets taken out of context Obama can just find a way to blame it on Bush.

Civil Disobedience

Is awesome! Somebody in Tennessee received a $90.00 speeding ticket and was none too happy about it. Being a savvy Internet type he also saw that the issuing police department’s domain name was about to expire so he purchased it and put up his own website detesting the victim-less crimes of traffic violations.

Good on you sir.

A hat tip goes to Uncle this post.

Read the Bills Act

Here’s a novel idea I stumbled upon yesterday. It’s a website proposing an idea for a bill that they title the Read the Bills Act. The idea of the bill is simple, require every bill and amendment to be read aloud before the Senate and House can vote on it:

  • Each bill, and every amendment, must be read in its entirety before a quorum in both the House and Senate.
  • Every member of the House and Senate must sign a sworn affidavit, under penalty of perjury, that he or she has attentively either personally read, or heard read, the complete bill to be voted on.
  • Every old law coming up for renewal under the sunset provisions must also be read according to the same rules that apply to new bills.
  • Every bill to be voted on must be published on the Internet at least 7 days before a vote, and Congress must give public notice of the date when a vote will be held on that bill.
  • Passage of a bill that does not abide by these provisions will render the measure null and void, and establish grounds for the law to be challenged in court.
  • Congress cannot waive these requirements.

Novel concept huh? Just imagine our representatives having to actually read bills and amendments before they pass them. Just thinking about how much this would slow down Congress makes me love this idea. Of course if introduced to the floor it would never pass since it would require those voting on it to do real work in the future (then again they may no actually read it and vote it through anyways, that would be irony).

Inexperience and Government

Yesterday I posted a good article that related to Minnesota’s own “gun show loophole” that isn’t a loophole. Something has been eating at me about that article, namely this:

Paymar has never fired a handgun, nor has he ever attended a gun show. He was moved to act, he says, after seeing a YouTube clip. In it, Colin Goddard, a Virginia Tech massacre survivor who was shot four times, attends gun shows and successfully buys firearms without undergoing a background check or even being asked to show identification.

I touched on it briefly in yesterday’s post but it’s something that has bugged me about government forever. Why do we find it acceptable to allow people with no knowledge or experience in a field to legislate that field? Paymar isn’t the only example. Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens we put in charge of Internet regulation even though he obviously had no knowledge in the field.

This seems to be a common thing with government. We find the most incompetent people and let them be in charge of something. This kind of incompetence doesn’t fly anywhere else but government (normally). Generally if you’re put in charge of something at a company it’s because you portrayed some kind of competence in the area of concern. If you’re not competent you are eventually fired.

But here Paymar has never been to a gun show in his life yet he feels justified in creating legislation that would affect gun shows. Now his bill was shot down in committee thankfully but he’s vowed to reintroduce the bill at a later time. This raises the question, what the Hell is he thinking? He can’t claim it’s to get voter favor since the bill doesn’t seem to have much traction here in Minnesota. The only people who really seem to care are us pro-gunners and the anti-gunners who generally don’t know what they’re talking about.

We shouldn’t stand for this. Instead we should demand that in order to legislate something the person writing the law much either have direct experience with the topic or have hired independent consultants who have said experience.

Obama Really Can Bring People Together

So Obama showed up in San Francisco to help raise money for Barbra Boxer’s campaign (apparently she’s with the program and does what she’s told). One thing I will say about Obama I may not like the man or his policies but he does bring people together:

While wealthy people who had paid as much as $2,000 each lined up to enter the Fairmont, across the street was a large and raucous protest against Obama and Boxer. And it wasn’t just one group, or even one half of the political spectrum. Obama was whipsawed, pummelled from all sides simultaneously. Left-wingers, right-wingers, pacifists, libertarians, communists, conservatives, people angry about the BP oil spill, people angry that Obama’s healthcare reform bill didn’t go far enough, others angry that it went too far, extremists, moderates, and everyone in between on both sides of the aisle.

I love it when people unite.