Helpful Hoplophobe'sTravel Guide

Guns in Parks: The Hoplophobes’ Travel Guide to the United States | The New Ledger

Huge public service done here to help those that are phobic of the horror of a concealed permit person carrying a gun might gun them down. Who says gun folks aren't sensitive!!

Helpful hints on areas that are especially safe are provided (based on the difficulty of getting carry permits). NYC is incredibly safe  (from being shot with a legal concealed gun) -- impossible that anyone will be carrying a legal gun. Same for Newark NJ and Washington DC.

South side of Chicago is incredibly secure from legal gun owners -- great spot for those hoplophobes to visit, along with South Central LA. Good spot to be REALLY relaxed about the potential for seeing a legally carried concealed gun!!

Good foreign travel insights as well. North Korea is notoriously free of any guns for citizens at all, so that ought to be a SUPER safe destination. 

Great job, and no doubt an immense help to those concerned about the terror of someone with a legally concealed gun being in their vicinity!!

Is Life Worth Death?

Schumpeter's Moment - WSJ.com

Great little column, it has nothing to do with my title other than that is what it made me think of. Capitalism is the only thing that creates growth and individual freedom, BUT, it also creates differential wealth (rich and poor) and it isn't perfect -- crashes come with it, no matter how much we want to avoid them. It relates to our "ultimate dilemma" as humans -- one we don't really get to play in except as parents for children, and in the case of a decision to take our own life -- which certainly doesn't "work" in that death is hastened rather than avoided.

Where that becomes troublesome, however, is the moment when
government comes to be seen as the sole source of security. What we,
the public, need to understand is that the best guarantor of security
is not government. It's economic growth. While we want to believe
otherwise, the cold fact is that government can't guarantee economic
permanency. Nobody, and nothing, can.

Pragmatically speaking, we must figure out how to increase people's
sense of security without making government itself bigger or more
powerful

The bottom line is that we have to find ways to ENCOURAGE risk -- in going to school, investing money, starting a business, inventing something or a host of other "risky behaviors". Cases where effort or capital or both is put to some use where "the outcome is uncertain". In the real world, that is true in **ALL** cases. BO and the MSM will tell you "Social Security is certain" -- but if North Korea puts an ICBM into DC at the wrong time, or some nasty strain of influenza hits -- or more likely, they just muck up the economy enough, it ISN'T "certain". Humans don't deal in positive certainty -- only negative. See death.

So what about the ultimate Schumpeterian challenge: Can capitalism be
saved? France's President Nicolas Sarkozy in October 2008 proposed a
brilliant formulation. He said: "The financial crisis is not the crisis
of capitalism. It is the crisis of a system that has distanced itself
from the most fundamental values of capitalism, which betrayed the
spirit of capitalism."

Well put, and BO is taking us away from the spirit of capitalism at warp speed!

Costs Of Supporting Republicans

Dealergate: Stats demonstrate that Chrysler Dealers likely shuttered on a partisan basis

What happens when there is extreme one party rule with no media oversight? They run amok. They ALWAYS run amok. "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely".

If one needs to close some dealerships, I'm sure a politician can't think of a much better method than to correlate the dealership owners list with Republican donors, and "shazaam!". Now a businessman might use some stupid correlation like cars sold, money taken in, profitability, customer satisfaction, etc, but that is where the businessman is stupid.

Hey baby, this is ALL about BO style politics! Corruption? What the hell is corruption? He hasn't even thrown any Christians to the lions yet -- he is being a pretty long suffering guy. If folks "get it" without a lot of violence, he may let a lot of really bad Republicans live with just a minium of retraining and relocation. Talk about a wonderful guy!

Heil BO!

Warming Your Heart

Momma Voted for Obama

We all know the horrors of the right wing family. Two parents, usually in a home, nearly always attending church, working, saving, teaching morality -- the kind of depravity that often creates Republican voters. Such things have often been despised as "indoctrination" in the media.

Nice little site showing how the Democrat side of the fence is all open-minded and trying to keep nasty things like politics out of the little donkey's young life!

How about, "All Democrat children are special, over half of them never get by the abortion clinic!"

The Essensce of Unconstrained

The 'Empathy' Nominee - WSJ.com

The heart of the unconstrained vision is that current thinking, feeling, practices and opinion are superior to any strictures of the past, including a written constitution. Thus we have:

In a speech published in the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal in 2002, Judge Sotomayor offered her own interpretation of this jurisprudence. "Justice [Sandra Day] O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases," she declared. "I am . . . not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, . . . there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

I'd argue that is very much a racist statement. The criteria I like to use is what the attitude would be if the statement was reversed. Second, I would hope that a wise white man with
the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a
better conclusion than a minority woman who hasn't lived that life.

My wordview is that if the second formulation is seen as racist, then the first must be as well, else the term "racism" has no meaning.

Naturally, the idea of ideas and words "having no meaning" is what her first formulation means. There can NEVER be a universal definition of wise. Translation, all points of view are relative, and it is perfectly reasonable for mine (or BO's) to be the one taken as correct -- and NOBODY (least of all, say "God") can EVER declare that there is some "universal truth" ... of which a better understanding would be "wise".

So, BO has appointed a relativist, racist that no doubt will see fit to re-write whatever law she sees fit as often as possible to the court and there is nothing that can be done to stop it.

New Deal or Raw Deal

I finished this book today by Burton Folsum Jr out on the deck enjoying the great weather and the day off from work. I'd say that our current American predicament is based off couple key myths that tend to work together to keep us heading toward a continued loss of freedom and economic decline:

1. "Liberal" = "left". Left is ALWAYS larger government, more centralized government control, less individual freedom and the risk of dictatorship. Communist, socialist, fascist, monarchist ... ALL are on the left! The idea that Fascism is "right" is lunacy -- for one thing, "Nazis" were "National Socialsts", and fascism isn't exactly "libertarian". The "right" is about "LIBERTY" ... meaning "libertarian", LESS government, more indiviual freedom -- going too far to the right means one is an ANARCHIST, not a fascist!
2. "The New Deal was a great success. It certainly wasn't an economic success -- it was a POLITICAL success for the forces of the left which the elite and MSM in this nation find to be a wonderful thing. This book covers #2 very well.
   

The following quote from Henry Morgenthau Jr, one of FDRs closest associates and his Secretary of the Treasury at the time he made this statement before his fellow Democrats in Congress in May of 1939:

We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong...somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises...I say after 8 years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started...And an enormous debt to boot.

Sound familiar? Here is a good quote from Henry Hazlitt on the subject of government spending:

The government spenders have the better of the argument with all those who cannot see beyond the immediate range of their physical eyes. They can see the bridge. But if they had taught themselves to look for indirect as well as direct consequences they can once more see in the eye of imagination the possibilities that have never been allowed to come into existence. They can see the unbuilt homes, the unmade cars and washing machines, the unmade dresses and coats, perhaps the unmade or unsold foodstuffs. These homes, cars and washing machines were unbuilt of course, because taxpayers sent their money to Washington for the WPA rather than buying their families a new car or a new coat. We can think of these nonexistent objects once perhaps, but we cannot keep them in our minds as we can the bridge that we pass every working day.

The problem is of course greater than that, because both the MSM and the Democrats are going to brag up the benefits of their spending, while not saying anything about the costs.

The book goes through a good amount of detail of the corruption of the patronage created by the New Deal. The spending for the WPA was increased in swing states in election years, and the WPA workers were used as extensions of the Democrat party. Naturally as today, the unions, farmers, and other groups were provided kick-backs that all but made them wards of the one-party Democrat state.

The end of the book provides a lot of great detail on how going into the depression, the US was leading the world -- by the end of the 30's, we had no recovery and had slipped to being one of the worst of the industrialized economies. The New Deal successfully elected a lot of Democrats, created a lot of government dependency, and set the nation firmly on a path to ruin with the advent of the Social Security entitlement that sold the obviously false claim that "we can all get out more than we put in".

The New Deal was an economic disaster that started us on a path to future disasteres, one of which we are experiencing now. Politically, it laid the foundation for dictatorship or worse, LBJ framed it up, and now BO seems to be doing the roof and paint on the fascist edifice.

Raw deal indeed!

Totalitarian Means One Party

Op-Ed Columnist - State of Paralysis - NYTimes.com

Paul Krugman is an unabashed statist. Our founding fathers created a nation where "left" meant more gigantic government of every stripe -- socialist, communist, fascist, monarchy, ... it didn't matter. "Right" was little to no government -- libertarian, anarchist. Even "stranger", "right" was LIBERAL -- as in you did what you wanted, "libertarian". "Conservative" was more to the LEFT -- controlled, following tradition ... the Federalists, like Washington, Adams and Hamiliton wanted something "more like a monarchy" -- thus, the Senate, which was intended to be our "House of Lords".

No matter, today Krugman's Democrats are in charge across the board, so why in the world do we still have problems, and in fact they seem to be getting WORSE??

Easy, "it's the Republicans stupid" ... they just seem unwilling to give everyone, states and federal the last shreds of taxing authority! That's the prolem! These idiots STILL have 40 Senators, and that is WAY too many! California had the audacity to elect a RINO Governor that has been unable to do anything relative to holding the line on spending, but no matter, "What's the Matter with California"??? REPUBLICANS!!! Even though they have had nothing for political power there in well over a decade, and a less strident idealogue than Krugman might just have a moments pause over what the results have been. Not Paul though -- get rid of ALL the Republicans, and no doubt shortly after any Democrat that is so foolish to be "moderate", and THEN we will have success -- tax rates approaching 100% and completely unbridled spending (whatever THAT might be -- if this isn't it, I'm not certain that I can even imagine it!).

To be blunt: recent events suggest that the Republican Party has been driven mad by lack of power. The few remaining moderates have been defeated, have fled, or are being driven out. What’s left is a party whose national committee has just passed a resolution solemnly declaring that Democrats are “dedicated to restructuring American society along socialist ideals,” and released a video comparing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Pussy Galore. And that party still has 40 senators.

There you go. I have to agree though, the Republicans are at least imprecise about "socialist ideals" -- it is "national socialism" Nazi/fascist when you maintain the veneer of private ownership while strong arming the businesses to do your bidding lest you purge the leaders and cut off their funding. So he is right, they are at least "mad" enough to not speak the truth. What I wonder is what Paul would call buying up banks and auto companies with public debt, bypassing Sr bondholders for union cronies, and funneling huge amounts of public money into thinly disguised Democrat organizations like ACORN? Probably "good government".

I suppose that when one believes they have all the answers, one party rule seems like such a good idea, it is just shameful to try to name it anything at all. As one wag said -- "when fascism comes to America it will be called Americanism". I think it is here, and it is called "Obamanomics".

BO, First US Nuke Detonation President?

Obama: North Korean nuclear test 'a grave threat' - CNN.com

BO and guys like Jerimiah Wright have often pointed out that the US is the "only nation to have used nukes against another" -- and always without the caveat that many hundreds of thousands of lives, if not millions (many of those US) were saved by that decision. They don't like it, it somehow damages their vision of a "perfectly moral nation" (by their standards).

So now we have North Korea flexing it's muscles with BOTH ICBMs that could reach the US and nukes, Iran openly preparing to destroy Israel, and chaos in the Swat Valley in Pakistan, a nuclear nation with weapons spread out and not under central authority.

BO seems to not like it -- one would have thought that he could wave his hand and such threats would simply cease, but one gets the distinct impression that global threats are rapidly building, even as our economic  ship founders ever more.

Will BO be that "historic President" that presides over that "spread the nukes around" strategy that allows one or more American cities to be reduced to rubble with "the chicken's coming home to roost"? Guys like BO have always been very uncomfortable with "American exceptionalism" and love to ask supposedly rhetorical questions that essentially come down to "why do we think we are so special"??

Sadly, what used to make us special was individual freedom AND RESPONSIBILITY, a belief that we WERE a "special nation blessed by God", and a sense of a special past and future destiny that was worth effort and sacrifice. We have elected our first pagan president whose most important life experience (still?) was his return to his "tribal roots" in Africa as a "Luo". He is "a citizen of the world" -- first? Where does citizen of the US lie on his list of "blessings" (or I guess in his case, "pieces of random luck")?

I'd fully expected that the Bush security work would give us something better than a year before we suffered a major attack against the US, but it is starting to look like that could be too optimistic!

How many nukes would it take to make us "nothing special" ... the kind of nation that BO could approve of? SF, NYC and DC? Is that enough, or does one need to take out Chicago and LA ... ?? as well. I would have formerly thought that 3 would change things in a way that would "never be forgotten", but 9-11 makes me wonder. The power of the left and the MSM to expand on any grievance or supposed grievance by America (Abu Grab, Gitmo, Katrina, pollution ...) and to utterly bury her woundings (eg. 9-11) is amazing. Would whatever was left 10 years after losing NY, SF, and DC only remember the incident with the now already quite hazy and even conflicted view that Americans have of 9-11? I really wonder.

Understanding BO's 100 Million

http://wimp.com/budgetcuts/

It really really is worth taking the time to go over to that site and get some help in visualizing how much 100 million is next to 3.6 Trillion. They use pennies on a table and it is VERY effective. Basically it is half a table full of pennies stacked 5 deep, and 100 Million is a 1/2 of ONE PENNEY ... but it sinks in better when you see someone slice up a penny and see it visually.

One of the sad things of the liberal press is that were BUSH to have come out and said that he was going to take "90 days and find 100 million to save", he would have been laughed about for weeks as being a 100% stupid rube without enough intelligence to do anything without his staff putting it up on a teleprompter. Since BO said it, it gets reported as "the great and powerful BO is working hard to do important things, why are the evil conservative loonies complaining".

BO and His Straw Adversaries

RealClearPolitics - President Above-It-All

Nice short little discussion on the "BO Magic" -- create a fake left and a fake right that don't exist, and then stand with whatever position you hold as "moderate".

Oh, and if you change your positions a lot? So what, the press is never going to call you on it, and you can always "Blame Bush". Sweet.

BO's Homage to Bush

RealClearPolitics - Obama's Deeds Vindicate Bush

When things go right, it is sometimes parents who eventually see their young rebels realize that delaying gratification, working hard, taking responsibility and faith in God is worth way more than feeling good today, shirking work and responsibility, and believing that "it's all about me".

I suspect that George Bush is fairly unsurprised to find BO following nearly all of his policies in the WoT already, and being quickly being forced to follow even the ones he has been most recalcitrant on (Gitmo). Sadly, my guess is that Dick Cheney is right and BO's "half measures" are very likely to earn us a nuke going off in a major city courtesy of Pakistan, N Korea, or even Iran.

 The media loved to "out" Bush policies on renditions, interrogations, Gitmo, Predator Strikes, etc because "the made Bush look bad". All the while, they apparently forgot that America had elected Bush, and when it in fact RE-elected him, the primary  target that "looked bad" was AMERICA -- not so much because of what Bush had or hadn't done, but because it was exposed as a country so divided that it could not at a signifiicant level put national interests ahead of petty politics.

Enter BO. I think Charles is right that the fact that BO adopts the same policies is positive in that it ULTIMATELY will forge national consencus on what ought to have been obvious all along:

The genius of democracy is that the rotation of power forces the
opposition to come to its senses when it takes over. When the new guys,
brought to power by popular will, then adopt the policies of the old
guys, a national consensus is forged and a new legitimacy established.

That's happening before our eyes. The Bush policies in the war on
terror won't have to await vindication by historians. Obama is doing it
day by day. His denials mean nothing. Look at his deeds.

Charles is hoping that the costs of BO's windowdressing of policy will be low to nil.  I hope he is right, but I tend to agree with Cheney -- even 90% measures leave us 10% exposed, and in the world that we live in, that is unfortunatly 10% too much!

Blame Others (BO)

Obama Blames Bush

One of the core elements of the left is "Blame Others" -- I guess I just realized how truly appropriate the current WH denizen is for them.

While insisting "we need to focus on the future," President Obama
devoted much of his speech on terrorist detainees today to denouncing
the policies of President Bush's administration. He faulted everyone in
Washington for "pointing fingers at one another," yet pointed his own
finger frequently, and critically, at the Bush administration. Obama
said America's problems won't be solved "unless we solve them
together"--in a divisive and partisan speech certain to alienate
Republicans and conservatives.

If any president has gone to such
lengths to attack his White House predecessor as Obama did today, I
don't recall it. True, presidents have blamed the prior administration
for problems they inherit, but I can't think of a president who did so
as aggressively and with such moral preening as Obama.

In Business Leadership, announcing a specific date to do something when you have no clue as to how to accomplish it is considered "incompetence". Since BO is of course a Democrat, and the MSM loves Democrats, he is brilliant, everything that goes wrong must be someone else's fault, in this case, Bush. 

Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress are demanding a plan
before they appropriate funds for closing Guantanamo. Obama said he's
still working on that, four months after he announced the prison would
be closed.

Nor did he say how he would overcome the objections of Congress (and
public opinion) to bringing some terrorists to the United States for
trial. And he didn't explain how he would get foreign countries to
accept some 50 Gitmo prisoners after his initial efforts to persuade
them failed.

Obama attacked the Bush administration for having set up the prison at
Guantanamo in the first place to house terrorists seized after 9/11.
But he didn't present an alternative. He didn't say what he would have
done with those prisoners had he been president at the time.

This is what is great about being a Democrat and having the MSM on your side. You can claim to be "above the fray", call previous administration anything you want while REMAINING above the fray, and have nobody in the MSM asking the question -- OK, if Bush/Cheney were wrong, what would YOU have done? Had the detainees over to the WH for tea and had your girls ask them questions? It may be great for BO, the problem for AMERICA is that other than a few marginalized Republicans or Conservative Commentators, the hard questions just don't get asked at all. Suppose Dick Cheney will get a Nobel after someone nukes and American city with a big pat on the back for being right when the BO administration was wrong like Gore did for his Globale Warming efforts? Nah, me either.

Gitmo, Classic Democrat

CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Blog Archive - Senate: don’t release Gitmo detainees into U.S. « - Blogs from CNN.com

Did you hear any doubts from the Democrats as they declared Military Tribunals and Gitmo to be "deplorable", "hurting the US", a "concentration camp". Democrats, rarely in doubt, but only because they never have a clue.

So Gitmo must be closed. The prisoners can't be released, and they can't be held in the US. But wait, sending prisoners to "other countries" was ALSO a terrible thing.

So do they shoot them?  Being a Democrat means never having to answer the hard questions -- see Nancy Pelosi!!

Joe Reveals Secret Bunker

Biden Reveals Location of Secret VP Bunker - Presidential Politics | Political News - FOXNews.com


Gotta love that Biden. If you like "open government", just have Joe around. Of course, what he says can never be assumed to have any relationship with reality, but that rarely bothers lefties!

BO's Debt

RealClearPolitics - Obama's Dangerous Debt

During Republican years, the MSM used to come unglued about deficits -- and they LOVED to look at "10 year projected costs" -- for perscription drugs, for the Iraq war, for any tax cut, etc, etc. Suddenly, one has to dig to find such an article. What is up with that?

Let's see. From 2010 to 2019, Obama projects annual deficits totaling $7.1 trillion; that's atop the $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009. By 2019, the ratio of publicly held federal debt to gross domestic product (GDP, or the economy) would reach 70 percent, up from 41 percent in 2008. That would be the highest since 1950 (80 percent). The Congressional Budget Office, using less optimistic economic forecasts, raises these estimates. The 2010-19 deficits would total $9.3 trillion; the debt-to-GDP ratio in 2019 would be 82 percent.

Remember what was going on in 1950? We had just come through another long economic winter of Democrat control. Samuelson doesn't even get into BOs rosy economic projections -- I think he will be pretty lucky to not break the old 80% record.

One reason Obama is so popular is that he has promised almost everyone lower taxes and higher spending. Beyond the undeserving who make more than $250,000, 95 percent of "working families" receive a tax cut. Obama would double federal spending for basic research in "key agencies." He wants to build high-speed rail networks that would require continuous subsidy. Obama can do all this and more by borrowing.

Boy the MSM just used to HATE the idea that Reagan would "spend and borrow" -- and then they would turn around and castegate him for not spending enough on the stuff they wanted spending on. As Samuelson points out, "Beyond the undeserving who make more than $250K" -- wanna bet that those "undeserving" will be figuring out good ways to avoid income?? They didn't get to $250K by being chumps!! The fact is that the Democrats have been set on killing the "golden goose" of the "wealthy" that have been paying all the taxes the past few years -- it is a brilliant strategy. Run huge deficits, slow down the economy so you don't have that going for you and THEN try to hammer those with the most options on how hard they want to work, where they want to work and **IF** they will be doing any investment in the US!!

He ends with the obvious. Anyone that doesn't understand that McCain trying to do this would be boiled in oil and run out of town by now is living somewhere not in this universe:

The wonder is that these issues have been so ignored. Imagine hypothetically that a President McCain had submitted a budget plan identical to Obama's. There would almost certainly have been a loud outcry: "McCain's Mortgaging Our Future." Obama should be held to no less exacting a standard.