Click here for a particularly good essay from my favorite columnist, Paul Krugman of The New ork Times, entitled "From the Mouths of Babes." The reference is to stealing food from the mouths of poor children through an attack on SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps.
The link in that quote refers to an NYT article entitled "Farm Subsidy Recipient Backs Food Stamp Cuts" by Ron Nixon, which includes the following passage:
During debate on the farm bill in the House Agriculture Committee last week, Mr. Fincher was one of the biggest proponents of $20 billion in cuts to food stamps in the legislation. At times he quoted passages from the Bible in defending the cuts.
“We have to remember there is not a big printing press in Washington that continually prints money over and over,” Mr. Fincher said during the debate. “This is other people’s money that Washington is appropriating and spending.”
Scott Faber, vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, said that Mr. Fincher was being hypocritical. “Not only is he advocating deep cuts to other people’s money while he is getting subsidies, he also voted to increase the subsidies that he benefits from,” Mr. Faber said.
In the light of President Obama's recent speech on the prospect of ending the permanent war in which the U.S. finds itself engaged, kudos to Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-California), the lone member of Congress who voted against the AUMF (Authorization to Use Military Force) on September 14, 2001.
The AUMF reads, in part, “the President is authorized to use all
necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or
persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the
terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such
organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of
international terrorism against the United States by such nations,
organizations or persons.”
Only one member of Congress voted against that 2001 bill. Barbara
Lee, D-Calif., said from the floor of the House of Representatives: “I
am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of
international terrorism against the United States. ... Some of us must
urge the use of restraint ... and think through the implications of our
actions today, so this does not spiral out of control.”
I think the Nuremberg condemnation of aggressive war is well known. Here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry on it:
The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg,
which followed World War II, called the waging of aggressive war
"essentially an evil thing...to initiate a war of aggression...is not
only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime,
differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself
the accumulated evil of the whole."
But here's an opinion I hadn't known, from a well-known Tea Party favorite:
Thomas Paine wrote in the March 21, 1778, edition of his pamphlet The Crisis, “If there is a sin superior to every other, it is that of willful and offensive war ... he who is the author of a war, lets loose the whole contagion of hell, and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.”
The war in Afghanistan began as a defensive action in retaliation for the attacks of September 11, 2001; it had the support of the U.S.'s NATO allies and the United Nations. The war in Iraq, however, was an aggressive war which will remain forever as a blot on the honor of the United States and on the presidency of George W. Bush.
Click here for another great article by Bob Rankin, entitld DOWNLOAD ALERT - Foistware Warning.
Foistware is a term used for software that's "foisted" on you, typically without your knowledge or explicit consent. Foistware isn't technically malware, but it can range from marginally useful, to annoying, to malicious. Most often, foistware takes the form of browser toolbars, but it can also take over your browser homepage and preferred search engines. Some foistware pops up when you visit online shopping sites, and tries to steer you to certain vendors or offers.
Foistware almost always tags along when you download a program that you do want. Through various deceptive practices, the download process may try to add extra, unwanted software to your installation package. Usually it takes the form of a checkbox that's already selected, and if you just click NEXT or CONTINUE without reading carefully, you'll end up with this extra software clutter.
The foistware problem is not limited to downloading and installing dodgy programs you probably shouldn't be messing with in the first place. Rather, some of the Internet's most trusted and widely used applications are among the offenders:
You might think this problem would show up mostly in the dark corners of the Web. But the most egregious offenders are some of the most trusted and popular names in Internet software. If you try to download or update your Adobe Reader or Flash Player, Skype, or the Foxit Reader, you'll see examples of what I mean. Adobe pushes the McAfee Security Scan, which you probably don't need because you've already installed one of the options in my list of Free Anti-Virus Programs, right? Foxit Reader, which I use and recommend, is also guilty of pushing the useless Ask.com toolbar.
Toward the end of the article, Bob says: "I've saved the best (or worst, depending on your point of view) for last." And that best (or worst) is downloads from the venerable and previously respected CNET. He describes his "six-part horror story" performing a CNET download. The upshot? DO NOT DOWNLOAD FROM CNET. They are sneaky and deceptive. I still trust and use CNET for their product reviews, but I will not use them for software downloads.
In passing, Bob recommends a little gem of a progam called "Ninite." If you download and run ninite.exe, you get to choose from a wide variety of well-known applications you wish to monitor. It will install those apps for you if they're not already there, and any that you already have loaded will be checked for the latest updates. Ninite guarantees no toolbars or foistware. In other words, those application installations have been checked by Ninite and careful choices have been made to exclude the junk. Ninite is particularly helpful for those of you who help others set up new computers. Check the applications you wish to install, and let Ninite do the work -- no need to monitor each installation to click Next, Next, Next, while accepting EULA agreements and dodging foistware attacks.
UPDATE: I just reviewed a previous Bob Rankin article I had flagged for consideration and then forgotten about. It's a plug for -- Ninite! Entitled "Finally: The End of Next, Next, Next...," it goes into Ninite at some length. Well worth exploring: Click here.
Click here for an article in the New York Times entitled "Kill Bill" by Thomas B. Edsall. It tells how corporations can win huge breaks from Congress for relatively small expenditures on lobbyists.
According to statistics ..., the prescription drug industry spent $116 million lobbying for legislation to prevent Medicare from bargaining down drug prices — legislation that enabled drug companies to make an additional $90 billion annually. That amounts to an extraordinary 77,500 percent return on investment. Oil companies, in turn, had a return on investment of 5,900 percent, and multinational companies, 22,000 percent.
Money spent on lobbying offers corporate America an eyepopping ROI (Return On Investment):
According to Drutman [Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation and an adjunct professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University], with whom I exchanged a number of e-mails, a study in The Journal of Law and Politics, “Measuring Rates of Return for Lobbying Expenditures,” estimated that “companies that lobbied on the [jobs] bill got a return of 22,000 percent on their investment, $220 in benefits for every $1 spent on lobbying.”
....
Lobbying, Drutman says, is simply
an investment strategy. What matters is not your win rate, but rather your net gain. So you could lose nine small battles, but win the one battle where most is at stake, and come out more than ahead.
While lobbyists can win huge benefits for their clients by getting favorable new initiatives passed into legislation, it's much easier and therefore more effective to simply block and impede any Congressional attempts to change the status quo:
The main function of agribusiness lobbyists, for example, is to preserve the status quo throughout the process of reauthorizing the Farm Bill, which covers five years. Their most important task is to preserve the network of subsidies and import restrictions that protect domestic commodities, from sugar to milk to peanuts, from foreign competition.
Similarly, the National Rifle Association’s major victory this year was not enacting a favored bill but killing legislation that would require expanded background checks for gun purchasers.
Nathaniel Persily, a law professor and political scientist at Columbia, summed up the situation in an e-mail to The Times: “The greatest impact of lobbying is the most difficult to calculate: namely, preventing legislation from ever getting to the floor.”
Despite the reforms that have been aimed at them over the past few decades, lobbyists have become a semi-permanent class with ever-expanding reach – they write legislation, they kill legislation. They have usurped many of the political functions that once belonged to elected officials, in part by adapting to new political ecologies faster than those who seek to counter their influence.
Insofar as they are protecting the status quo, lobbyists insulate calcified interest groups from challenge. They put up roadblocks that become ever-higher barriers to innovation. At a time when sectors of the economy ranging from health care to education to manufacturing are under more or less permanent siege, the tentacles of the lobbying community are choking off open exchange between officeholders and the voters they represent. They have created and now maintain a stifling stasis. It is hard to see how this ends well.
Another article from Spiegel International Online. Click here for an article entitled "Bangladesh Seamstress: 'I Had No Choice but to Go to Work'" describing the plight of a Bangladesh textile worker:
Mushamat Sokina Begum, 27, was at her sewing machine in a fifth-floor factory when the Rana Plaza building where she worked in Savar near the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka collapsed on the morning of April 24 , killing over 1,000 people. Begum was pulled from the rubble three hours later with an injured leg. She spoke to SPIEGEL ONLINE editor Hasnain Kazim about her hopes for her future and those of her two children.
Click here for an article entitled "Living by the Numbers: Big Data Knows What Your Future Holds" by Martin U. Müller, Marcel Rosenbach and Thomas Schulz in Spiegel International Online. It's a long article about how the spectre "Big Brother" is being replaced by "Big Data."
An excerpt:
TomTom, a Dutch manufacturer of GPS navigation equipment, had sold its data to the Dutch government. It then passed on the data to the police, which used the information to set up speed traps in places where they were most likely to generate revenue -- that is, locations where especially large numbers of TomTom users were speeding.
Pre-programmed Conflicts
TomTom's CEO issued a public apology, saying that the company had believed that the government wanted the data to improve traffic safety and reduce road congestion. TomTom had not anticipated the use of the data for speed traps, he said.
Similar conflicts are practically pre-programmed into the technology, especially as a central conflict is inherent in its development. Big Data applications are especially valuable when they are personalized, as in the case of credit checks and individual medicine.
Click here for an article entitled "Why Obama Is Not Nixon" by Elizabeth Drew at The New York Review of Books. She discusses the current "scandals" -- Benghazi, the IRS, and the AP -- and then presents a fascinating summary of the events we know as "Watergate":
Compared to Watergate, on the basis of everything we know about what are the current “scandals” amount to a piffle. Watergate was a Constitutional crisis. It was about a pattern of behavior on the part of the president of the United States abusing power to carry out his personal vendettas. It was about whether the president was accountable to the other branches of the government; it was about whether the Congress could summon the courage to hold accountable a president who held himself above the law. It was about a president and his aides who were out of control in their efforts to punish the president’s “enemies.”
It was also about, though this has still gone largely unrecognized, an attempt by a sitting president to determine the nomination of the opposition party’s presidential candidate. Potentially strong challengers were spied upon, their offices broken into and files disappeared, their campaign events disrupted by what were diminished by their categorization as laughable “dirty tricks.” It was about black bag jobs and paying criminals to carry out ideas that sprang from the fevered brain of a president who saw opponents, political and otherwise, as enemies, and then trying to hush the whole thing up. The attempt, not unsuccessful though not exclusively their doing, to try to get the opposition party to nominate its weakest candidate was a step along the road to fascism. It was a putsch by a head of state.
Nixon’s extraordinary abuse of his new power started almost as soon as he had put away his Inaugural finery. In February 1969 he told his staff that he wanted private funds raised to establish an intelligence unit within the White House to carry out around-the-clock surveillance of political opponents. This led to the hiring of a group of fanatics, bums, fools, and losers—most of them paid for with private funds but run by White House aides and right out of the Executive Office Building, next door to the White House. Some were of Cuban origin and had participated in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba; to motivate them Nixon instructed that they be told that their mission was to root out Communists in the Democratic Party. (He even ordered that they be required to read the chapter of his memoir Six Crisis that recounts his exposure of Alger Hiss as a spy for the Soviet Union. But Nixon was always telling people, even Mao, to read Six Crises. The shrewd Mao had beat him to it.).
The following year Nixon signed off on a plan (the “Huston plan”) that included not just wiretaps also but break-ins and intercepting mail; the plan was so extreme that even the powerful FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, no civil libertarian, objected; though Nixon said that the plan had been rescinded parts of it were implemented. The list of “enemies” he ordered John Dean to draw up, was considered by many who were on it funny and even a point of pride, but it was a chilling exercise of power: the president used the levers of government, including the IRS, to audit and harass his opponents, a wide swath of people in public and private lives. Nixon was often heard on the tapes telling his aides he wanted them to “get the goods” on this or that perceived enemy. Edward Kennedy, presumably Nixon’s most powerful opponent for reelection, was put under twenty-four hour surveillance for a time by one of the clowns hired by the White House to carry out Nixon’s plan.
Nixon’s most serious problems arose out of his obsession about the leak of the Pentagon Papers, in 1971. This led—shortly after the Papers were first published in The New York Times—to the establishing, four days later, the White House “plumbers” office in the EOB. A sign saying PLUMBERS was on the door. But even before the plumbers office was fully set up Nixon’s aides implemented “Special Operation No. 1”: in a first step toward punishing the leaker, Daniel Ellsberg, the White House sanctioned the gravest offense—a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in order to get the files of this particular patient. A raid of the office of the psychiatrist of a private citizen on the orders of the president of the United States. This clear flouting of the Fourth Amendment protection of private property from searches and seizures was the most disturbing act during this extraordinary period and it shook even conservative senators; Nixon knew that its discovery was the single greatest danger to him, and this was what he was so frantically trying to cover up. As it happened, even though one of the plumbers had cased the place, the psychiatrist’s office contained no files at all.
The obsession over the leak of the Pentagon Papers also led to the mad suggestion by the president of the United States that the offices of the Brookings Institution be firebombed in order to get to the safes in the offices of former Kissinger aides, Leslie Gelb and Morton Halperin, who were suspected of keeping the drafts of some unpublished chapters of the Pentagon Papers. The president could be heard on the tapes instructing his aides: “Godammit. Get in there and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.” You see, Kissinger had ordered up the study. Ellsberg had been assigned by Kissinger to do a super-secret study on the papers and had been given access to them, which were stored at Rand. Though one of the burglars had searched Brookings and reported that the files existed, there were none. In any event, some White House aides thwarted that plan before it was fully carried out.
In this context the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office building on June 17, 1972 was almost routine. This one, when the burglars were caught, which started the unraveling of Nixon’s secret plots against his enemies, was actually the burglars’ fourth attempt: in the first attempt they faked a banquet to get into the building but ended up locked in a closet; the second time they couldn’t break the lock on the DNC office door; the third time, on Memorial Day, they got into the DNC office but put a bug on the wrong phone, so on they went back to fix it. Perhaps because breaking in had become so habitual they got sloppy and left the immortal piece of tape on a door. That the plumbers were stumblebums doesn’t negate the sinister nature of what they were told to do.
In October 1973, Nixon rattled through a series of beheadings of those who got in the way of his desperate attempts to prevent the tapes into which he had sealed his own fate—as he was oddly aware—from being turned over to the prosecutors. He first ordered the attorney general, Elliott Richardson, to fire Archibald Cox, the Independent Prosecutor who had subpoenaed the tapes and got a court order that they must be released. Richardson, a Boston Brahmin, also refused and was fired by the president; the next in line, Bill Ruckelshaus, a popular environmentalist, also refused and was fired. Finally, the next in line, Robert Bork, agreed to fire Cox. The prosecutors’ staff was barricaded in their offices trying to protect their files from the FBI, who had surrounded them and told them they could not remove their papers. As the bulletins rolled in, one after another on that dark Saturday night, it felt as if we were living in a banana republic and now there were grounds for fearing a President who was irrational and out of control. There was a run on the bookstores to buy legal scholar Raoul Berger’s Impeachment: The Constitutional Problems (1969). No one knew how to impeach a president.
When the House Judiciary Committee took up its work at the beginning of 1974, trying to impeach a sitting president who still had a fairly strong political base was a daunting prospect. Impeachment had not yet been cheapened by the zealots who conducted a trivial pursuit of President Clinton. The triumphalism came later, spurred on by the myth that Watergate was a victory of the good guys over the bad guys. It was about something far deeper: whether our constitutional system would survive. If the Committee did vote for articles of impeachment by a bipartisan and definite majority it was probable that the House would agree and vote to impeach—indict—the president. Next would come a grail in the Senate. And the president remained defiant. The committee had to get it right.
Almost forgotten is the part played by an obscure New Jersey congressman, Peter Rodino, who had been chairman of the committee for only a year. (Inevitably once the spotlight fell on him, rumors circulated, without any evidence, that he must have ties to the mob.) Rodino was not the most articulate member by far but the miracle of the Judiciary Committee’s adopting on a bipartisan basis three articles of impeachment was due to the fact that ordinary people rose to the task and did extraordinary things; Rodino’s choices made a critical difference.
Showboat attorneys or flashy advisers were turned away. As it was, Rodino had to struggle against some committee members who wanted to conduct a prosecution of the president. The two people who along with Rodino shaped not just the committee’s action but the history of the downfall of Richard Nixon were a thirty-four-year-old Francis O’Brien, who had no prior experience in such matters but was recommended to Rodino for his uncommon judgment, and John Doar, the counsel whom O’Brien had found. Doar had served in the Eisenhower Justice Department and then was a civil rights hero in Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department. He was methodical and low-key and built the case against Nixon brick by brick, slowly earning the trust of committee members, the press, and the public.
These three men had concluded that if there were to be articles of impeachment that would be accepted by a still-divided country they had to be seen as arising from a fair process, be bipartisan and come from the center of the committee members: those on the right who defended Nixon to the end and the most partisan Democrats on the committee had to be contained, and moderate Republicans and southern Democrats had to be convinced that voting for articles of impeachment was necessary and urgent. James Madison’s writings and the Federalist Papers became as familiar in the discussions as morning newspapers.
The atmosphere in Washington was unlike anything that had gone before or has happened since. We lived in fear. Knowing that the telephones of some of the presidents’ “enemies” were being tapped, we joked in our telephone conversations about our phones being bugged. (No Internet then, but just think of the Nixon people’s probable temptation to trace emails.) One Sunday morning when the newspaper delivery was late, a perfectly sane woman I knew said, “They’ve stopped the papers.” It got to the point where, near the end, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger felt compelled to send a memo to military commanders to obey no command that came from the White House to dispatch the troops to restore order.
This brings us to the strange character of Richard Nixon, probably the most peculiar person to serve as president of the United States. He was also an unlikely successful political figure. He didn’t particularly like people and few people liked him. He had very few friends, trusted almost no one. He was awkward in many ways, from his odd motions at times to his virtual inability to make small talk. Nixon’s confusion of opponents with enemies and his indulging his long nurtured grievances gave us a president who came to office filled with hatreds and was willing to use the instruments of government to “get” them. The president was a dangerous man.
But even then, we didn’t know just how dangerous were Nixon’s personality traits. Not until I was doing research for a book about him for the American Presidents series did it become clear that he was often drunk, barking out orders in after-midnight calls to his aides, his words slurred, and they would have to decide whether to carry them out. Worse still, on the advice of a wealthy backer who kept him stocked, Nixon began to take Dilantin, an anti-convulsive drug, on the grounds that it would lessen depression, though it had never been approved for that. Dilantin served to enhance the effects of too much alcohol: mental confusion, slurring of words, physical clumsiness. Often Nixon was holed up with his best and only close pal, Bebe Rebozo, outside the White House, in Key Biscayne or at Camp David. On the eve of the “incursion” into Cambodia, a disastrous spreading of the Vietnam War, the two men were at Camp David and one or the other would call Kissinger to make sure that the incursion went forward. “It’s your ass, Henry,” said one of them, their drunken voices hard to distinguish.
So contrary to the myths that have been built around it, or the use that later politicians want to make of it, Watergate wasn’t about the mistakes of a bureaucracy, it wasn’t a cops and robbers story, or about courageous journalism. It was about a pattern of acts by a president that threatened the constitution, the law, and the Bill of Rights.
Click here for an article by David Atkins at Hullabaloo entitled "The progressive, anti-imperialist case for international intervention."
It's a long article, not the easiest reading, but it's a good explanation of the liberal interventionists' philosophy.
Jon's guest, George Packer, author of "The Unwinding," America on the verge of dystopian collapse.
Barack Hussein Guevara Stalin Obama began his second term as president with high hopes.
His only hope, the media! With the attention span of a concussed goldfish -- more of a problem with goldfish than you might think. There's not just the bowl; there's the treasure chest.
In the race for 2016 (Chuck Todd: "With still 1,000 days to go in the 2016 contest ...") Comedy Central calls the Democratic primary for Hillary Clinton.
Joe Scarborough, December 20, 2006: "She will crush Barack Obama. Barack, just sit it out. It's going to be ugly. I promise you; you heard it here first."
Stewart: And the rest was alternate history.
(Segment: The Road To The Road To The Road To The White House)
Video of Chuck Todd, discussing a Biden run, reading the word on his teleprompter "literally" as "light rally." Stewart mocks him, as a "come Dian."
Larry Wilmore, Senior Black Correspondent: The blacks want to hold onto the presidency for a while before relinquishing it to other minorities.
Stewart: The white guys had a good run.
Wilmore: Yeah, 43 out of 44.
Stewart: Well, 43 1/2.
Wilmore: When John Oliver takes over this summer --
Stewart: He's just here for a few weeks.
Wilmore: The Internet's right, Jon -- you are funny.
Segment based on getting laughs from the phrase "can't punt" -- and that's not how you spell "can't."
To Disney: As parents, our job is to keep them in front of the screen; your job is to raise them right. And if you keep teaching them the wrong lessons, then we're going to have to start doing it ourselves, and that's not cool.
George Packer: Good interview. Unlike Colbert, Stewart engages his serious guests in a serious way. I'm a big fan of Packer's articles in the NY Times and the New Yorker.
"Washington is represented [in his book] by Newt Gingrich, who I think history will say did more than maybe any other person to create the pretty messed-up politics that we know today." [Soft pedal much?]
Moment of Zen: Republican bottom-feeder Louie Gohmert in verbal combat with Attorney General Eric Holder: doesn't want Holder to "cast aspersions on my asparagus." Yeah, that's what he said:
Click here for the latest wingnut fantasy from Alex Jones at Infowars:
Put simply, Bilderberg is merging with Google under the stewardship of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, a regular Bilderberg attendee.
Want proof?
Backed up by prior research, we were able to confirm in conversations with hotel managers and others that the Grove is now a central base for Google’s agenda to control the global political and technological landscape.
Well, there you go: hotel managers and others. Talk about solid sources!
Bilderberg is indeed being recast as ‘Google-Berg’ – partly because of efforts on behalf of activists to tear away the veil of Bilderberg’s much cherished secrecy, and partly as a means of re-branding authoritarian, undemocratic secret gatherings of elites as trendy, liberal, feel-good philanthropic-style forums like Google Zeitgeist and TED.
In reality, behind the scenes Google is using such forums as proving grounds on which to form the consensus that shapes the globe. We were told directly that the organizers behind the so-called “Arab Spring,” which began in Tunisia and Egypt, which as we have documented is in fact a series of contrived western-backed color revolutions masquerading as organic uprisings, were recruited by Google ...
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Google is clearly positioning itself to become a force more powerful than governments in controlling and monitoring people’s behavior across the globe through all manner of different means, from cars that drive themselves (and are constantly tracked by a centralized Google database), to Google Glass which is akin to having a Google microchip in your forehead, to Google’s deep involvement in manipulating mass movements through social media as they did in Egypt and Tunisia.
...
The direction in which this is all heading can clearly be surmised from remarks made by Eric Schmidt himself, who has repeatedly made it clear that he thinks privacy is a relic of the past and plans to turn Google into the ultimate Big Brother that makes George Orwell’s 1984 look like a children’s fairy tale.
See if you can make any sense out of this clip -- good luck! (2 minutes 23 seconds)
If you need more, here's his take on the Boston Marathon bombing: 12 guys were involved! The Saudi was the money guy! The cops know it! The FBI know it! Wait, the cops, the DHS, and the FBI knew it in advance! (1 minute 10 seconds)
This one's about what Glenn calls his "bizarre gift" of literally feeling other people's pain. (2 minutes 26 seconds)
He's the gift that keeps giving. I'll have to stop adding clips, because it seems the list may be endless. This time he claims that since he didn't support the "birther" or the "Obama is a Muslim" memes, he's not a conspiracy theorist. Then he demands that a special counsel be appointed "to explore impeachment of this president" -- but there has to be "citizen oversight" because "The big government stooges will cover for themselves. They will help each other, because the State Department is full of snakes. So is the White House, so is Congress."
Is this going to turn out to be a hoax? Or is it an actual fundraising appeal from Kentucky Senator Rand Paul? Well, it's from a post by the extremely credible Ezra Klein on his blog, Wonkblog, so it's the real deal:
Dear fellow Patriot,
Gun-grabbers around the globe believe they have it made.
You see, only hours after re-election, Barack Obama immediately made a move for gun control…
On November 7th, his administration gleefully voted at the UN for a renewed effort to pass the “Small Arms Treaty.”
But after the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut — and anti-gun hysteria in the national media reaching a fever pitch — there’s no doubt President Obama and his anti-gun pals believe the timing has never been better to ram through the U.N.’s global gun control crown jewel.
I don’t know about you, but watching anti-American globalists plot against our Constitution makes me sick.
This Spring, the United Nations went back into session to finalize their radical so-called “Small Arms Treaty.”
With the treaty finalized, a full U.S. Senate ratification showdown could come any time President Obama chooses and there will be very little time to fight back.
If we’re to succeed, we must fight back now.
That’s why I’m helping lead the fight to defeat the UN “Small Arms Treaty” in the United States Senate.
And it’s why I need your help today.
Will you join me by taking a public stand against the UN “Small Arms Treaty” and sign the Official Firearms Sovereignty Survey right away?
Ultimately, UN bureaucrats will stop at nothing to register, ban and CONFISCATE firearms owned by private citizens like YOU.
So far, the gun-grabbers have successfully kept many of their schemes under wraps.
But looking at previous attempts by the UN to pass global gun control, you and I can get a good idea of what’s likely in the works.
You can bet the UN is working to FORCE the U.S. to implement every single one of these anti-gun policies:
*** Enact tougher licensing requirements, making law-abiding Americans cut through even more bureaucratic red tape just to own a firearm legally;
*** CONFISCATE and DESTROY ALL “unauthorized” civilian firearms (all firearms owned by the government are excluded, of course);
*** BAN the trade, sale and private ownership of ALL semi-automatic weapons;
*** Create an INTERNATIONAL gun registry, setting the stage for full-scale gun CONFISCATION.
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this is NOT a fight we can afford to lose.
Ever since its founding 65 years ago, the United Nations has been hell-bent on bringing the United States to its knees.
To the petty dictators and one-world socialists who control the UN, the United States of America isn’t a “shining city on a hill” — it’s an affront to their grand designs for the globe.
These anti-gun globalists know that as long as Americans remain free to make our own decisions without being bossed around by big government bureaucrats, they’ll NEVER be able to seize the worldwide power they crave.
And the UN’s apologists also know the most effective way to finally strip you and me of ALL our freedoms would be to DESTROY our gun rights.
That’s why I was so excited to see the National Association for Gun Rights leading the fight to stop the UN “Small Arms Treaty!”
Will you join them by going on record AGAINST global gun control and sign the Official Firearms Sovereignty Survey today?
The truth is there’s no time to waste.
You and I have to be prepared for this fight to move FAST.
The fact is the last thing the gun-grabbers at the UN and in Washington, D.C. want is for you and me to have time to mobilize gun owners to defeat this radical agenda.
They’ve made that mistake before, and we’ve made them pay, defeating EVERY attempt to ram the UN Small Arms Treaty into law since the mid-1990s.
But now time may not be on our side.
And worse… the UN Small Arms Treaty is no longer the only UN scheme threatening our gun rights.
More and more of the UN’s radical agenda is slipping through covertly, under the cover of domestic legislation.
Not long ago, Obama told Sarah Brady from the anti-gun Brady Campaign, “I just want you to know that we are working on [gun control]. We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.”
In fact, Hillary Clinton’s State Department recently bragged that Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious are implementations of the UN’s anti-gun agenda!
And I’d place a wager that Obama’s M1 Rifle Re-importation Ban was also the UN’s agenda dutifully executed by his administration.
Anti-gun UN policy that NEVER received a single vote in the United States Congress!
The UN met recently to pass a final version of the “Small Arms Treaty” to be sent for ratification by the Senate.
So if you and I are going to defeat them, we have to turn the heat up on Washington now before it’s too late!
1. Do you believe the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Second Amendment are the supreme law of the land?
2. Do you believe any attempt by the United Nations to subvert or supersede your Constitutional rights must be opposed?
If you said “Yes!” to these questions, please sign the survey the National Association for Gun Rights has prepared for you.
But I hope you’ll do more than just sign your survey today.
With your help, the National Association for Gun Rights will continue to turn up the heat on targeted Senators who are working to implement the UN “Small Arms Treaty.”
Direct mail. Phones. E-mail. Blogs. Guest editorials. Press conferences. Hard-hitting internet, newspaper, radio and even TV ads if funding permits. The whole nine yards.
Of course, a program of this scale is only possible if the National Association for Gun Rights can raise the money.
But that’s not easy, and we may not have much time.
In fact, if gun owners are going to defeat the UN’s schemes, pro-gun Americans like you and me have to get involved NOW!
So please put yourself on record AGAINST the UN Gun Ban by signing NAGR’s Firearms Sovereignty Survey.
But along with your survey, please agree to make a generous contribution of $250, $100, $50 or even just $35.
And every dollar counts in this fight so even if you can only chip in $10 or $20, it will make a difference.
Thank you in advance for your time and money devoted to defending our Second Amendment rights.
Very early Sunday morning, Nicole Belle publishes Sunday Morning Bobblehead Thread at my favorite political site, Crooks & Liars, listing all the luminaries who will be appearing that day on the political talk shows.
For years I watched several of those shows, especially the flagship Meet The Press, on NBC. (I used to like the late Tim Russert, whom I thought was one of the more courageous interviewers; today's David Gregory, not so much.) I thought I was staying well-informed by watching the latest political controversies being debated by prominent, influential people.
Eventually I got so tired of seeing the same fat cats telling the same lies, without any pushback from the same compliant hosts, I couldn't stand it any more; I haven't watched a Sunday talk show for a long time.
Speaking of fat cats, several years ago I was watching an episode of Fox & Friends (I know, I know) when guest Geraldo Rivera was discussing a proposed tax bill that would only affect those with an income of more than $400,000 a year, an amount that seemed pretty damned high to me. Said Rivera to Doocy, Kilmeade and whoever that blonde is: "Let's face it, all of us make a lot more than $400,000 a year."
I nearly fell out of my chair. Like it or not, whether he deserves it or not, Geraldo Rivera has been a controversial (notorious?) media star for years, and learning that he made "a lot more than $400,000 a year" did not come as a surprise -- but those third-rate hacks on the Fox couch? Outrageous!
But I digress: back to Nicole Belle and the Bobblehead Thread. The latest stellar lineup from ABC's "This Week," NBC's "Meet The Press" and "The Chris Matthews Show," CBS's "Face The Nation," CNN's "State of the Union," "Fareed Zakaria's GPS," and "Reliable Sources," and "Fox News Sunday" show the following guests:
Senators: John McCain, R-Ariz. (appearing on a Sunday talk show for the 10th time this year and urging -- as he always does -- dropping bombs somewhere new); Jack Reed, D-R.I.; Kirsten Gillibrand,
D-N.Y.; Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.; Dick Durbin, D-Ill.; Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H.; Susan Collins, R-Maine; former Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe. (What, the unctuous, self-righteous, light-in-the-loafers Lindsey Graham was sick today?)
House Representatives: Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash.; Linda Sanchez,
D-Calif.; Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Wash; Darrell Issa, R-Calif.; Adam Kinzinger (R-IL); Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill.; Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii; Mike Rogers, R-Mich.; Adam Smith, D-Wash.; Rep.-elect Mark Sanford, R-S.C.; former Rep Dennis Kucinich (D-OH).
TV Talking Heads: ABC News’ George Will (twice); ABC Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl (twice); the BBC’s Katty Kay;
S. E. Cupp, MSNBC Host of "The Cycle"; Kelly O'Donnell, NBC News Capitol Hill Correspondent; Bloomberg View columnist Margaret Carlson; Juan Williams, Fox News Political Analyst.
Spooks and agency guys: Gen. James Cartwright (USMC, Ret.), former Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; former Defense Secretary Robert Gates; former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta; former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden; former CIA Counter-terrorism chief Robert Grenier.
The Dead Tree Bunch: Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus; New York Times columnist David Brooks; Joe Klein, TIME Magazine; The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty, Paul Farhi of the Washington Post; Jim Warren of The New York Daily News; Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Connie Schultz; The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board member Kimberley Strassel; the National Review’s Jim Geraghty; Bloody Bill Kristol, The Weekly Standard.
Former diplomat Thomas Pickering, who helped lead the State Department's
review of the attack against the U.S. in Benghazi, Libya. (Three times, because -- Benghazi!)
Web denizens: Howard Fineman, The Huffington Post; The Hill’s Bob Cusack; popular culture commentator (!) Lola Ogunnaike.
Democratic consultants: Donna Brazile and Mo Elleithee.
Republican consultants: Alex Castellanos and (sometimes apostate) Matthew Dowd.
Authors Wes Moore and Maya Angelou.
I've left off MSNBC shows "UP with Steve Kornacki" and "Melissa Harris-Perry"; MSNBC, good lefties that they are, have a number of guests that don't fit the pattern: homeless advocates, et cetera.
In fact, Melissa Harris-Perry had on her program -- Drum Roll! Shock! Gasp! -- A Poor Person!
Imagine that! What a concept! Listen to the views and opinions of a person who is actually feeling the effects of the policies the pundits and politicians so airily discuss.
The Poor Person's name is Tianna Gaines-Turner. She and her husband, who have three children, were driven into poverty and homelessness by the chronic illness of one of their very young children.
Melissa Harris-Perry frequently speaks out as an advocate for the poor. In a post from September 2012, Nicole Belle (Crooks & Liars) tells of an Harris-Perry's outburst on hearing a wealthy conservative guest whining that the top income brackets must be rewarded for the risks they take:
“What is riskier than living poor in America? Seriously!
What in the world is riskier than being a poor person in America? I live
in a neighborhood where people are shot on my street corner. I live in a
neighborhood where people have to figure out how to get their kid into
school because maybe it will be a good school and maybe it won’t. I am
sick of the idea that being wealthy is risky. No. There is a huge safety
net that whenever you fail will catch you and catch you and catch you.
Being poor is what is risky. We have to create a safety net for poor
people. And when we won’t, because they happen to look different from
us, it is the pervasive ugliness.
“In the end it didn’t pass because we’re so politicized. There were some
on my side who did not want to be seen helping the president do
something he wanted to get done, just because the president wanted to do
it,” Toomey said.
There you have it, folks: an outright admission from a Republican senator that some of his colleagues are determined to vote against anything -- anything -- President Obama proposes. Hell, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Mike Lee vowed to filibuster the bill before it had even been presented, when they didn't know what would be in it:
"On March 22, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Utah Sen. Mike Lee, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz released an open letter
to Reid promising to 'oppose the motion to proceed to any legislation
that will serve as a vehicle for any additional gun restrictions.'”
Senator Bob Corker (R-Tennessee) retorted that he always followed the principle of reading a bill before deciding it should be filibustered.
Click here for an article by Evan Brandt at Mainline Media News from May 1, 2013, entitled "Toomey doubts second Senate gun-control vote any time soon." It tells the story of the failure on April 17 of the Manchin-Toomey amendment; click here for a PolitiFact article explaining what the amendment contains. (Manchin is a Blue Dog Democrat, Toomey a Republican.) The full bill would have required background checks on ALL gun sales; the M-T amendment would cover only sales at gun shows and over the Internet, not private sales among friends or family members (still a fairly large loophole, in my opinion).
How could such a reasonable, moderate proposal fail, when virtually every poll showed the support of more than 80% of the American population? Gun owners, NRA members, Republicans -- all these groups favored the amendment by upwards of 70%, while -- unsrprisingly -- non-gun-owners and Democrats were upwards of 90% in favor.
Yet the amendment failed, getting 46 votes opposed -- every Republican senator, plus five Democrats. And in today's ridiculous political reality, the Republicans filibuster virtually every Democratic proposal, even when they have supported or urged passage of similar bills in the past, so 60 votes are required (the U.S. Senate being the only body among all the democratic nations in the world where a 50% + 1 vote is insufficient).
Click here for a Wikipedia article describing the Senate filibuster procedure.
Since the vote, polls show declines -- some quite drastic -- in the popularity of the five Democrats who opposed the bill; Toomey's position, on the other hand, has strengthened with his constituents. Manchin is optimistic that the bill will come to the floor again and pass; Toomey is skeptical.
Fear of retribution from the NRA (National Rifle Association) is believed to be the reason for the amendment's failure. (One of the NRA's semi-official mottoes: If God didn't make men equal, Samuel Colt did.) The NRA was formed in 1871 as an organization for the promotion of gun safety, marksmanship, and hunting. It was taken over by radical right-wing Second Amendment supporters in a coup at the 1977 national convention, and has been highly politicized ever since. It has evolved from an association of gun enthusiasts to a lobby for the gun manufacturers, and their answer to everything is to put more guns in everyone's hands -- in other words, to sell more guns.
I have a question about the current gun debate: If the bill comes to the Senate floor again, even if it manages to pass -- what will be its fate in the House, with its contingent of Tea Party lunatics? There's been tremendous fuss and fury surrounding the Senate debate -- but is it irrelevant?
For decades, the NRA was an organization of gun enthusiasts, dedicated to fostering and encouraging marksmanship, hunting, and gun safety. It made the transformation to its present ghoulish existence in 1977, when extremists pulled off a coup, ousting the moderate leadership and replacing them with fanatics.
Click here for a long but interesting article on the transformation of the NRA to its present state as a lobby for the gun manufacturers.
