Year: 2009

So much for that talking point!

I guess President Bambi Teleprompter will have to change his script again:

There’s no dispute that thousands of handguns, military style rifles and other firearms are purchased in the U.S. and end up in the hands of Mexican criminals each year. It’s relatively easy to buy such guns legally in Texas and other border states and to smuggle them across.

But is it true as President Obama said, that “More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States?” No, it’s not.

The figure represents only the percentage of crime guns that have been submitted by Mexican officials and traced by U.S. officials. We can find no hard data on the total number of guns actually “recovered in Mexico,” but U.S. and Mexican officials both say that Mexico recovers more guns than it submits for tracing. Therefore, the percentage of guns “recovered” and traced to U.S. sources necessarily is less than 90 percent.

Furthermore, the 90 percent figure is based on a badly biased sample of all Mexican crime guns. Law enforcement officials say Mexico asks the U.S. to trace only those guns with serial numbers or other markings that indicate they are likely to have come though the U.S.

Fox News has put the percentage at only 17 percent, but we find that to be based on a mistaken assumption that throws its figure way off. We can’t offer a precise calculation because we know of no hard information on the total number of guns Mexican officials have recovered. But if a rough figure given by Mexico’s attorney general is accurate, then the actual percentage of all Mexican crime guns traced to U.S. sources is probably less than half what the president claims, and more than double what Fox news has reported.

via FactCheck.org: Counting Mexico’s Guns.

Leave it to a group of people, who actually have held position, say longer than a year; unlike our feckless President, to poke a huge hole in the Liberal MeMe that all the guns in Mexico and are coming from America. Interestingly enough, Fox News got disproved as well. Considering who owns them, I am not surprised at all. The truth of the matter is, and no one will say this; but I will. Most of those guns are coming Russia’s black market, and then are being shipped down through Mexico’s open borders.

So, it looks like the Liberal Democrats are going to have to find someone else to blame for Mexico’s gun problem and not us “Right Wing Extremists”, that the DHS just loves talking about. 😀

Quote of the Day

Will it be Texas governor Rick Perry? Perry is using rhetoric about seceding from the union. That is EXACTLY the kind of thing we need. I believe, given the other states with similar resolutions in their legislatures, that it would begin a domino effect. It would give people a chance to actually have a clear reason to fight: their state’s rights of sovereignty and they would know that they have the state’s resources behind them. Unfortunately, even though it’s clear what a boost Texas seceding would be in uniting us, I have no doubt that Perry is not up to the task and is using the issue as nothing more than a rallying point for reelection.

Where have all the heroes gone? Where are all the pioneers? Where are the visionaries? Where are the true statesmen? Where are the defenders of freedom? What has happened to the American Spirit of life and liberty? I guess they’re all at the mall or Starbucks and are too fat to get up out of their chair and fight. Or they’re looking forward to retirement and the “good life” after spending their life being a good soldier and playing by the rules and saving for the “golden years” while their real golden years of youth were passing them by. Certainly they can’t be asked to risk all that for something as silly as their children’s futures. How selfish of me.

Or maybe we don’t want to risk our children’s well-being now, so we defer it until they’re adults and let them deal with the fact that they can’t afford college or health care or a home without going into enormous debt and we never teach them the importance of things like: character, honor, integrity, truth and freedom but rather teach them how to live in fear and how important it is to get a “good job” and play by the rules and to go along to get along and that will be safe.

We’re pathetic.

You are known by the company you keep

I think this says it all right here folks, this one via Fox News:

President Obama shook hands with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez on Friday at the opening of the Summit of the Americas being held this weekend in Trinidad and Tobago.

Photos released by the Venezuelan government show Obama clasping Chavez’s hand and smiling broadly, and Venezuela

Hope and Change?!?!
Hope and Change?!?!

quoted Chavez as saying, “I’d like to be your friend,” while noting that he shook President Bush’s hand eight years ago with the same hand. Obama reportedly expressed thanks.

A senior White House official said the encounter came before the summit’s opening ceremonies during a meeting with the heads of state. Obama talked to many of the 25 or so leaders who were there at the time. At one point, he walked across the room and introduced himself to Chavez.

The official wouldn’t directly confirm Venezuela’s version of the encounter but didn’t dispute it. Chavez spoke in English, the official said.

Earlier Friday, Dan Restrepo, the president’s top Western Hemisphere adviser on the National Security Council, had told FOX News Obama might cross paths with Chavez.

“A chance encounter if it occurs,” Restrepo said, in describing such a meeting. “Let’s put the animosities behind us. Let’s not have old arguments.

“Let’s not have tired ideological arguments. Let’s get down to figuring out how we can advance things that are in our national interest. Things that matter to the United States that should matter to Venezuela. Putting the arguments and ideologies of the past aside and working on pragmatic solutions to real problems that face our countries today,” he said.

As far as I am concerned, he may as well been shaking hands with Karl Marx. It is the same thing. Chavez is a known Communist, and Obama is a known Socialist. You are who you hang around. Two birds flock together.  We were warned in the election that Barack Obama was nothing more than a radical left candidate and now, he’s proven it. On top of this, he is wanting to basically normalize relations with Cuba; a known Communist country as well.

What’s next, an ambassador to Al-Qaeda in Washington D.C.? I mean, you laugh or scoff at my words? But when does the slippery slope end? When do we say, enough is enough? How can someone; who has been charged with upholding and defending our Constitution, make allies with people like this? America is about to learn a cold, hard lesson, of why you do not elect people, based upon a personality.

I fear for our Nation, greatly. 🙁

Now, why am I not surprised about this?

As a Rule, I am not a big fan of Gawker.com. (Because I ended up on there once! 😮 )  But this one is too good to pass up:

CNN’s Susan Roesgen went nuts on the air Wednesday at a Chicago tea party, blaming everything (accurately) on Fox News. But maybe she was angry because Fox turned her down for a job—twice!

Roesgen got snippy with a crazy interviewee while trying to cover the tea partiers, and the crowd turned on her. “I think you get the general tenor of this,” she said. “It’s anti-government, anti-CNN since this is highly promoted by the right-wing conservative network Fox.”

Back in 2005, though, according to a Fox News source, Roesgen really wanted to work for that right-wing conservative network. She sent a tape of her on-air work to Fox’s then-programming chief Kevin Magee in January 2005, and followed up with another reel to Magee’s successor Bill Shine in September 2005. Needless to say, she didn’t get the gig.

via Gawker – Fox-Bashing CNN Reporter Applied for a Job at Fox – Tea parties.

Man, the irony here is just too good. Nothing says asshole more than slamming a network; that you tried to apply for, more than doing what this feckless bitch tried to do. This is to say nothing about her total unprofessional treatment of the people she was trying to interview. Political Bias and an axe to grind; man, can’t get much more catty that! I thought Malkin was a bit catty! Wow! Meeooow indeed!

Gawker goes on:

So next time you see CNN or MSNBC talking heads—like Fox News alum David Shuster, for instance—talking about how awful Fox is (which it is!), just remember: It’s all business, kids.

Indeed. So, that explains O’Reilly and Olbermann? Huh, and here I thought it was some sort of gay crush thing. Doggone.

Sarah Palin lives what she preaches, and that's a good thing..

You know there has been times, when I have criticized Sarah Palin, there have been times when I have voiced my disgust with this woman.

This, is not one of those times…. first the quote:

In front of an audience of nearly 3,000 anti-abortion rights advocates in Evansville, Ind., Palin described in detail how she struggled with her fifth pregnancy last year and choked up when she spoke about Trig’s birth.

“It was a time when I had to ask myself was I gonna walk the walk or I was gonna talk the talk,” Palin said.

She said she learned she was pregnant with Trig while she was out of the state at an oil and gas conference.

“There, just for a fleeting moment, I thought, I knew, nobody knows me here. Nobody would ever know. I thought, wow, it is easy. It could be easy to think maybe of trying to change the circumstances. No one would know. No one would ever know.”

Ultimately, Palin said she realized she had to stay true to what she’d been saying for years — that “life is valuable because it is ordained.”

“I had just enough faith to know that trying to change the circumstances wasn’t any answer,” Palin said.

via Sarah Palin: I Had to ‘Walk the Walk’ – ABC News.

Let me be the first to say, that I publicly applaud Sarah Palin for sticking to the morals and values that she believes in. I may have criticized her in the past.  But this is one thing that I will not say anything negative about. There is nothing; at all, wrong with sticking to one’s convictions, despite the cost. Our country was founded by men that did this, The King James Bible was written by men, that did this. The protestant movement itself was started by men who did this.

In a day and age were loyalty and principles are considered a pleasant afterthought and by some, to be quaint, old hat, and outright outmoded. I say it is extremely wonderful of this fine woman to stand for her principles and convictions. Sarah Palin is one hell of a woman for this, and she deserves all the praise and accolades for it. I have often said on this blog, that I believed that Abortion was a moral issue, now legislatively, that’s another matter; but the point is, Sarah Palin stuck to her morals, and that my friends, is a good thing.

Now, if we could just work on that image just a little bit more, she’d be ready for 2012, maybe.

I'm not sure what to make of this…..

Honestly. I am totally at a loss. It is just that I am so conflicted about the issue, that I really don’t know what to say. On one hand, I like the idea of keeping America safe, on the other, the idea of torture makes me sick.

Here’s what I am talking about, this Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal:

The Obama administration has declassified and released opinions of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) given in 2005 and earlier that analyze the legality of interrogation techniques authorized for use by the CIA. Those techniques were applied only when expressly permitted by the director, and are described in these opinions in detail, along with their limits and the safeguards applied to them.

The release of these opinions was unnecessary as a legal matter, and is unsound as a matter of policy. Its effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on Sept. 11, 2001.

Proponents of the release have argued that the techniques have been abandoned and thus there is no point in keeping them secret any longer; that they were in any event ineffective; that their disclosure was somehow legally compelled; and that they cost us more in the coin of world opinion than they were worth. None of these claims survives scrutiny.

Soon after he was sworn in, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that suspended use of these techniques and confined not only the military but all U.S. agencies — including the CIA — to the interrogation limits set in the Army Field Manual. This suspension was accompanied by a commitment to further study the interrogation program, and government personnel were cautioned that they could no longer rely on earlier opinions of the OLC.

Although evidence shows that the Army Field Manual, which is available online, is already used by al Qaeda for training purposes, it was certainly the president’s right to suspend use of any technique. However, public disclosure of the OLC opinions, and thus of the techniques themselves, assures that terrorists are now aware of the absolute limit of what the U.S. government could do to extract information from them, and can supplement their training accordingly and thus diminish the effectiveness of these techniques as they have the ones in the Army Field Manual.

Moreover, disclosure of the details of the program pre-empts the study of the president’s task force and assures that the suspension imposed by the president’s executive order is effectively permanent. There would be little point in the president authorizing measures whose nature and precise limits have already been disclosed in detail to those whose resolve we hope to overcome. This conflicts with the sworn promise of the current director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, who testified in aid of securing Senate confirmation that if he thought he needed additional authority to conduct interrogation to get necessary information, he would seek it from the president. By allowing this disclosure, President Obama has tied not only his own hands but also the hands of any future administration faced with the prospect of attack.

Disclosure of the techniques is likely to be met by faux outrage, and is perfectly packaged for media consumption. It will also incur the utter contempt of our enemies. Somehow, it seems unlikely that the people who beheaded Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl, and have tortured and slain other American captives, are likely to be shamed into giving up violence by the news that the U.S. will no longer interrupt the sleep cycle of captured terrorists even to help elicit intelligence that could save the lives of its citizens.

Now, you all know that I was not a big fan of Bush Administration. But I cannot help but wonder, if the Obama Administration did pull a major bonehead move here.  One thing that is the source of the authority of the right to enhanced interrogation is, that these Terrorists are not subject to the Geneva Conventions. That being because they are not uniform combatants. While I might agree with that sentiment on a legal or a technical level, on a human and or diplomatic level that argument runs into bunch of problems. You see subjecting persons from countries where you are also importing oil from, to torture, does not do much for your Country diplomatically. The problem is, those who argue against the diplomatical arguement, come off sound like a bunch of Isolationists.

So, I am really not sure, did Obama screw the Country? You tell me? I’m open to opinions, as long as you don’t act like a troll.

A very thought provoking article

One more here, before I saunter off to bed.

William N. Grigg has a very interesting article of what our Republic is becoming.

Money Quote:

Transfixed by the demonic evil of Islamic terrorism, intoxicated by a sense of vindictive righteousness, the Republican Right eagerly collaborated in the effort to mow down legal protections for those designated enemies of the state. With the frustrated puzzlement of dimwitted children they now find themselves naked and shivering in the ill winds so memorably described by More.

For a long time, conservatives have extracted much undeserved pleasure from the aphorism that “A law-and-order conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged.” Now they’re given an opportunity to learn the truth of its counterpart: “A civil libertarian is a law-and-order conservative who suffered an ass-beating at the hands of the police.” Perhaps this lesson could be learned — but, given the propensity of conservatives to miss the obvious and resist admissions of error, I’m not optimistic.

Man is he ever right. It’s a sad state of affairs here in America. 🙁

Even so, Come, Lord Jesus.

(H/T to Freedom’s Phoenix)