Category → Government Of the People…
Interesting times…ancient Chinese curse
An ancient Chinese curse goes “May you live in interesting times,” meaning that turbulence should mar your life.
Well, turbulence has arrived: Tom Ridge is now joining anti gun activist Mike Bloomberg in a new effort to destroy the Second Amendment. At a time when murders are at record lows, due in great part to greatly liberalized concealed carry opportunities across America, it’s impossible to justify Bloomberg’s obsessive focus on stopping that increased self defense. Ridge has been a political hero of mine, and he was an excellent governor. How sad.
Another oddity is the unlikely presence of a primary competitor to present governor Tom Corbett. Political activist Bob Guzzardi will remain on the ballot, despite PA GOP efforts to remove him. I’ve never met Guzzardi, but I do believe in competition and political choices for voters. Guzzardi represents those values. Corbett has nothing to fear, and he should use the challenge to strengthen his responses to the ridiculous attacks by Democrat candidates for governor, specifically the bizarre claim that budgets have been cut for schools.
Happy Passover: Freedom for Everyone
Happy Passover to those who observe the holiday. It is the holiday of freedom, and liberty.
Is it any surprise that the Bundy ranch was liberated on the eve of Passover? While no shots were fired, the standoff at the Bundy ranch had all the ingredients of another Waco or Ruby Ridge. Except that today, millions of Americans are ready to leap to their fellow citizens’ defense. Many patriots who joined the Bundy family made the point that another civil war could start over the standoff. While later news reports indicate that the desert tortoise had zero to do with the BLM removing the Bundy’s cattle, and rather US senator Harry Reid’s son wanted the land for a solar project, the bigger specter of an over-reaching, unnecessarily aggressive, thuggish government mixing it up with armed citizens, and then backing down, was not lost on most watchers.
America regained a shred of liberty this week. Whether you are sitting down to a Seder tonight, or not, you should give thinks for the liberty we have and that which we just won back.
No “severance tax,” unless
A “severance tax” on deep shale gas would be on top of, in addition to, the Capital Stock and Franchise Tax, an astronomical Corporate Net Income Tax, and the Act 13 Impact Fee that is collected from wells and distributed to hosting counties.
Adding an additional tax, no matter what you call it, is stupid. It’s bad public policy, it’s bad government. Tax-and-spend officials always like spending other people’s money. That’s the worst sort of government.
A severance tax could make sense if one or all of the other taxes and fees were eliminated. Then there’d be balance. That’s good public policy, good government.
If you want higher prices in your own house for many food items, grill gas, heating gas, etc. and you want to open up your own wallet, take out more money than you need to pay, and just donate it, OK. But don’t demand that everyone else also dig deeper into their wallets for their money to cover your bad ideas. The severance tax will be passed on to the public with higher costs for lots of things.
Just leave it alone.
What should happen in Arizona
The federal government is over-reacting, as usual, tossing cows off of long-time federal grazing land in Arizona, as it is now magically no good for grazing.
Apparently desert tortoises never got along with huge buffalo, which look and weigh a lot like cattle…but wait…the tortoises did get along with the buffalo. So it is tough to see what the US government needs to do this for.
It is certainly another Obama attack on self-reliant rural Americans.
It is certainly another opportunity for hopped-up federal agents to play cowboy with American citizens in their gunsights. They set up “First Amendment Zones” that are ridiculous to see, and they are arresting people trying to document how many valuable cattle (beef is at an all-time high now) the government stormtroopers are taking away.
It is a bad situation, like Ruby Ridge and Waco were unnecessarily bad situations.
You know what should happen? A posse of militia should go out there and throw the federal agents off the land. Have an armed stand-off. Show this heavy-handed government that we, the people, are not going to take it any more.
This sounds radical to you? Well, then, the Boston Tea Party, Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill were “radical,” too.
C’este la revolution. C’este America.
Beating that dead horse? You bet
Religious freedom is specifically protected in the US Constitution’s First Amendment. It is one of the hallmarks of American liberty, one of our claims to fame.
Enter liberalism AKA fascism.
If you are Brendan Eich, founder of Mozilla, and you believe in the Bible and you vote that way, and you donate money to causes and candidates who represent that view, why…you are FIRED. Yes, fired for your religious and political views.
If you are Elaine Huguenin of Elaine Photography in Albuquerque, New Mexico, you are now in violation of a state law that prohibits discrimination based on sexual behavior. So Elaine was sued because she didn’t want to photograph a gay wedding. Our super lame US Supreme Court refused to stand up for Elaine’s rights.
Wedding cakes for same-sex couples have also become cause celebre.
So apparently it is now against the law to believe in the Bible, to follow the Bible, and to follow your religious conscience. It appears that it is now illegal to be against gay behavior. And it appears that you can be fired for being insufficiently supportive of gay behavior. Is it against the law to be against gay behavior?
My question is, Can a gay baker be compelled to make a birthday cake for an anti-gay activist? Like, say, anti-gay Westboro Baptist members?
Like so much of this issue, the whole thing stinks to high heaven of double standards. Tolerance for one should be tolerance for all. First Amendment rights are clearly under attack by the very fascists who proclaim themselves to be the most tolerant and open minded of all.
American rights are being lost, and I will keep beating on this dead horse, until it gets up and starts running like it used to. Giddy up!
Guns – Your individual right
Gun ownership is an individual right, not a “collective” right.
There is no such thing as a “collective” right in the American liberties enumerated in our Constitution.
If you think otherwise, you really must study the Constitution more. Local to the Harrisburg area is an organization that provides classes on Constitutional issues: http://reclaimliberty.com/
The “collective right” idea was ginned up out of thin air in the 1970s by anti-freedom activists. The US Supreme Court has rejected it twice, and there is not an honest scholar anywhere who believes in it.
The Bill of Rights is exactly that – a list of individual rights and liberties that belong to American citizens. No one can take them away. Whether you choose to exercise those rights, or not, is your choice.
Fort Hood – A “Gun Free” Zone, Round II
If you want to see how effective “Gun Free” zones are, look at Fort Hood, now the scene of yet another massacre. This time, a deranged Soldier took advantage of disarmed military staff, and killed them in cold blood. He also wounded many more, before killing himself. All of his victims were disarmed, by Pentagon policy. Seems that the US military expects its staff to bear arms abroad, and to go unarmed at home. Why a serviceman cannot carry a sidearm on base is beyond my understanding. It makes no sense, and leaves our personnel at risk.
Gun Free zones are wishful thinking. Without the ability to stand and fight, everyone in a Gun Free zone is a sitting duck. Whoever came up with this idea is a fool.
Is it time to recall PA AG Kane?
In 2012, Pennsylvania’s Attorney General Kathleen Kane campaigned on being fresh, new, unconnected to party politics. She challenged the ultimate Republican insider, and crushed him by a good 15%. Kane became Pennsylvania’s first Democrat AG only because so many Republican voters defected from the GOP and voted for Kane.
Within six months into her four-year tenure, signs were evident that she was not this politically dispassionate, politically disconnected professional and fair-minded arbiter she represented herself to be.
Rather, it became clear that she was politically correct (dogmatically liberal) and willing to use the AG office to score partisan political points, going so far as to choose not to enforce or defend state laws with which she personally disagrees. That right there is pretty much the end of democratic government, when elected officials stop enforcing laws they personally disagree with. Democracy only works if everyone agrees that whatever the law is, it is, and it is the law of the land until it is changed.
Kane’s icing on the cake was to cold-stop an investigation of four Democrat elected officials in the Philadelphia area. Kane does not deny that the four had been caught on tape or video taking bribes. One of the officials can be heard saying “Well, happy birthday to [me]!” as he pockets a wad of illegal cash.
In what stinks of political favoritism, Kane simply made up a lame excuse and stopped the ongoing investigation of obvious official corruption.
When Kane was called out about it by the Philadelphia Inquirer, a newspaper unused to criticizing Democrats, she showed up to a meeting with the paper’s board with her libel lawyer in tow. A subsequent show of legal force and more open threats of a lawsuit against her critics, by Kane, has only made things worse for her. But she is not backing down. Mind you, the Inquirer merely reported the facts; the paper did not ascribe motive or allege that Kane herself was part of the cash scandal. So it is hard to see what kind of libel suit this elected official thought she was going to actually win. Intimidation was her first and last approach, however, which tells you all you need to know about her very low quality as an elected official.
Additionally, Philadelphia City DA Seth Williams, a Democrat, has criticized Kane for ending the investigation. Seth and I were close friends while students at Penn State, and yes, he is an active Democrat, and he is also a straight shooter.
Now, Kane says she supports another newspaper’s open records effort to get the documents about the terminated investigation. Well, actually, after opposing it, Kane only now supports releasing “certain” documents; you know, the documents that support her position. The investigation’s documents that will cast her political activism in a bad light, well, they should remain sealed, she says.
Governor Tom Corbett may well be a one-term governor, which presently it appears is his sad destiny, if the polling data is even close to accurate. Well, folks, let’s make this Kathleen Kane a half-term AG. She is incompetent, she is politicizing Pennsylvania’s established laws, and she is using blunt force legal intimidation to blunt honest criticism of her official job performance. Let’s start a recall of AG Kane, and get someone in that office who is a plain vanilla enforcer of The Law, as that role is supposed to be.
In an ideal world, party affiliation should not matter in the AG office. I myself am partial to the potential AG candidacy of Ed Marsico, Dauphin County’s present District Attorney. Marsico is an honest guy, a hard working guy, and has shown few partisan inclinations in his day to day work of making Dauphin County a safe place to live and work. Marsico would be a big enough improvement over Kane to warrant a recall effort against her. Surely there are other professional-grade DAs out there, too, who also would qualify to fill out the remainder Kane’s term.
Let’s get that recall effort started and Pennsylvania’s law enforcement back on track.
UPDATE: How on earth could I forget? Kane is having some difficulty investigating the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board, where cash gifts and other toxic ethics violations have occurred recently. Now….why would Kane have such a tough time bringing to bear her full weight on such obviously corrupt violations of Pennsylvania laws? Why, it would not perhaps happen to be the presence of KANE TRUCKING contracts with the PLCB, right? The KANE TRUCKING contracts with the PLCB are worth millions of dollars to Kathleen Kane, personally. Got it. Fox guarding the henhouse here. Good old fashioned corruption, at least on the face of it. Time to end this sick experiment, and send Mrs. Moneybags Kane home.
America’s tradition of gun ownership runs deep
Visiting the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, over the weekend, it was tough not to wonder how anti-gun activists get their ideas.
Displays at the museum about the 1750s French and Indian War, and the 1775-1783 American War of Independence, have an awful lot of individually owned, military-grade firearms on display.
On April 19, 1775, after the American militia faced off against the professional British soldiers in Lexington, Massachusetts, and after they fired on the long British retreat back to Boston, a British commander wrote “Whoever looks upon them [the American militia] as an irregular mob will find himself much mistaken, as they have men amongst them who know very well what they are about.”
Meaning, the American militia men were darned good shots, brave, and thoughtful about tactics. Those privately owned rifles created the personal freedoms and liberty that American citizens now take for granted and which are the goal of would-be immigrants the world over.
Today, the American tradition of personally owning firearms that the government has neither approved nor knows about lives on among about 100 million citizens. It is the ultimate liberty, and we will not give it up. Nor will we allow government bureaucrats to watch us, monitor us, and decide for us if we should or should not own guns. The Second Amendment means what it says: “Shall not be infringed.”
Which is why I wonder why one political party has made gun control such a singular goal. It is an increasingly loser political issue, with little to no return on investment. If that one political party would give up on this one issue, they would be a lot more successful. I should know, because the spirit of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill lives on among so many Americans. How others are missing that spirit makes you wonder if they really understand what America is all about.
Is our intraparty war “Mars vs. Earth”?
Scott Wagner’s crushing defeat of PA State Rep. Ron Miller (a very nice man, for those who do not know him) last week is just one more political race in a string of races over the past few years that have seen the Republican grass roots increasingly stand up to or defeat Republican establishment insiders armed with faux endorsements and tons of party cash (that should be used to defeat liberalism, not defeat conservative Republican candidates).
Here is an article from this week, in which Josh First is quoted about this sad phenomenon:
(Although I am conservative, I don’t know how I became a “hardline conservative,” but in the context of the grass roots vs. the GOP establishment, I’ll take it, as I am passionate about politics being an open, accountable, and transparent process)
This present situation (hopefully to be ended soon) reminds me of this scene from the movie Mars Attacks!, where Jack Nicholson is the grass roots activist and the Martians are the GOP establishment insiders…