Wash. Exam. | New Tone: CT congressman: Rick Perry a ‘testosterone laden’ individual with blood on his hands |
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The Hill | Great: Obama: Climate change among top three priorities for second term |
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Fox News | Disturbing: American pastor imprisoned without notice of charges while visiting family in Iran |
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Daily Caller | Ouch: Tapper to Obama on newfound gun control advocacy: ‘Where have you been?’ |
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CNN | Bias Alert: CNN Poll: Are GOP policies too extreme? |
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Hey gang!
I’ve got some Christmas wrapping to do this evening, and I haven’t heard from Phineas today so I assume he’s swamped at his day job (either that, or the militant liberals out there on the left coast have finally discovered his hideout), so please feel free to utilize this open thread to discuss the issues of the day.
Oh, and have you finished your Christmas shopping yet?
**Posted by Phineas
Updating this item. Two guns linked to the Obama administration’s gunwalking operation were found at the site of a gun battle in Mexico that took the life of model and beauty queen Susana Flores Maria Gamez. Only one of the was purchased by a federal agent:
Mexican beauty queen Susana Flores Maria Gamez and four others died in the brutal gun battle between Sinaloa cartel members and the Mexican military in November. CBS News has learned that an FN Herstal pistol recovered near the crime scene in November was originally purchased by an Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) manager who was faulted by the Inspector General in Operation Fast and Furious: George Gillett. Gillett was the Asst. Special Agent in Charge of ATF Phoenix when Fast and Furious began.
The Herstal pistol is nicknamed a “cop-killer” because of its designation as a “weapon of choice” for Mexican drug cartels. CBS News has learned the Inspector General planned to question Gillett today after a hastily-opened inquiry to determine how this agent’s personal weapon got into the hands of suspected cartel members.
CBS News spoke to Gillett, who is still employed at ATF. Gillett acknowledged he once owned the weapon in question, but says he sold it in Phoenix sometime last year after advertising it on the Internet. He declined to provide the name of the man who bought it, but says he went “above and beyond” what was required by law to complete the firearms transaction. That included asking the purchaser to fill out a form giving personal information and stating that he was in the U.S. legally; and checking his driver’s license, which Gillett said was issued in the U.S.
According to Senator Grassley, however, the aforementioned Form 4473s contained multiple errors and falsifications, which, if true, may cost Agent Gillett up to five years in the penitentiary. And –irony alert– these are the same forms straw buyers for the cartels had to fill out and lie on.
So, in at least this case and with at least this weapon, was an ATF agent himself acting as a straw buyer? Or is he just dumber than a box of rocks? How many other transactions was Agent Gillett involved in, and how many straw purchases did he oversee as part of his work on Fast and Furious?
It seems Senator Grassley and Congressman Issa’s work isn’t done yet.
via Instapundit
RELATED: Earlier posts on Fast and Furious.
(Crossposted at Public Secrets)
If you’re surprised this appeared on the pages of the New York Times, you haven’t been paying attention (hat tip):
WHEN Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina announced on Monday that she would name Representative Tim Scott to the Senate, it seemed like another milestone for African-Americans. Mr. Scott will complete the term of Senator Jim DeMint, who is leaving to run Heritage Foundation. He will be the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction; the first black Republican senator since 1979, when Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts retired; and, indeed, only the seventh African-American ever to serve in the chamber.
But this “first black” rhetoric tends to interpret African-American political successes — including that of President Obama — as part of a morality play that dramatizes “how far we have come.” It obscures the fact that modern black Republicans have been more tokens than signs of progress.
The cheerleading over racial symbolism plays to the Republicans’ desperate need to woo (or at least appear to woo) minority voters, who favored Mr. Obama over Mitt Romney by huge margins. Mrs. Haley — a daughter of Sikh immigrants from Punjab, India — is the first female and first nonwhite governor of South Carolina, the home to white supremacists like John C. Calhoun, Preston S. Brooks, Ben Tillman and Strom Thurmond.
Mr. Scott’s background is also striking: raised by a poor single mother, he defeated, with Tea Party backing, two white men in a 2010 Republican primary: a son of Thurmond and a son of former Gov. Carroll A. Campbell Jr. But his politics, like those of the archconservative Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, are utterly at odds with the preferences of most black Americans. Mr. Scott has been staunchly anti-tax, anti-union and anti-abortion.
Even if the Republicans managed to distance themselves from the thinly veiled racism of the Tea Party adherents who have moved the party rightward, they wouldn’t do much better among black voters than they do now. I suspect that appointments like Mr. Scott’s are directed less at blacks — whom they know they aren’t going to win in any significant numbers — than at whites who are inclined to vote Republican but don’t want to have to think of themselves, or be thought of by others, as racist.
Just as white Southern Democrats once used cynical manipulations — poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests — to get around the 15th Amendment, so modern-day Republicans have deployed blacks to undermine black interests, as when President Ronald Reagan named Samuel R. Pierce Jr. to weaken the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Clarence M. Pendleton to enfeeble the Commission on Civil Rights and Clarence Thomas to enervate the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Disturbingly enough, the writer of this piece, Adolph L. Reed Jr., is a poli-sci prof at the University of Pennsylvania. I shudder to think what he teaches his students. For one thing, black Americans are probably more anti-abortion than white-Americans. And they’re also more pro-traditional marriage than white Americans, too. This guy and the facts clearly aren’t acquainted very well.
But why let such things like the facts get in the way of a good old fashioned untruthful race-baiting rant?
Interestingly enough, his own column is at odds with itself when you look at the actual facts. He says the GOP has made “no real progress” on race, yet Scott was elected and re-elected to the US Congress in a majority WHITE Congressional district in SC (same same for Allen West two years ago), and Gov. Haley, a woman of Indian descent, was elected in a state where whites (and men) are still the majority. This in spite of the fact that she had to deal with disgusting racial politics by old-guard extremists in her own party during the primary. These were not APPOINTMENTS – they were ELECTIONS. Did those ‘racist’ majorities elect “minorities” like Scott and Haley to soothe their racial consciences or did they vote based on ability? I mean, if we’re supposed to believe Reed, if you’re a white person voting for a black Democrat, you’re not a racist voting out of a strong sense of white guilt, so doesn’t it stand to reason if you’re a white person and you vote for a black Republican, you’re not a racist voting out of a sense of white guilt, either – or is Reed showing a double standard here when it comes to voting for black people? (rhetorical questions, of course)
What I find most sickening about Reed’s column is his assumption that white Republicans use black Republicans to “undermine black interests” – as if 1) black Republicans can’t think and act for themselves, and 2) as if “black interests” are carved in stone with no variation. Well, they might be to narrow-minded racial bigots like Reed, but there are actually a lot of black people out there who DO think outside of the box and have concluded that liberal policies have been bad for America – not just bad for black people, but bad for all Americans. Then again, black people who don’t toe the liberal line do what great leaders like MLK encouraged them to do and that is think for themselves and to judge people based on the content of their character not their race. How dare they!?
Let’s also use Reed’s same “logic” regarding black people supposedly needing to vote based on “black interests” and apply it to white people, say, in the 1800s. Back then, would he have advocated whites needing to vote based on “white interests” which, at the time, were wrapped around being able to own and keep slaves on their plantations so they could make money and live comfortable, fancy lifestyles? Probably not, because in that case, voting based on “white interests” disenfranchised a whole race of people, and did a severe disservice to this nation’s guiding principle that all men were created equal.
With that in mind, you’d think a professor like Reed would understand why black conservatives have chosen a different path and have decided that group-think is not just dangerous for the black community but for their other fellow citizens as well. But Reed, like so many other elite liberal professors, has it ingrained in his brain that there’s simply no way in hell that a black American would want to be anything other than a liberal Democrat because Democrats “help” black people. Those who defy that mold are instantly cast in the Uncle Tom role by closed-minded “intellectuals” like Reed and others who are disgraces to their profession by implying that having a mind of your own rather than marching to the same old tired “victim” drum is a bad thing.
I weep for the future of America, if this willfully ignorant “educator” and others like him continue to get by with spewing this garbage.
An idea other states should consider. Via WCNC:
COLUMBIA, S.C. — A new bill introduced Tuesday in the South Carolina House of Representatives aims to arm public school employees on campuses throughout the state.
Republican Rep. Phillip D. Lowe (District 60) wants to amend the code by adding a section “to provide a public school employee who has a concealed weapons permit may possess a firearm on the premises of his employer.”
An amendment on Section 1, Article 5, Chapter 1, Title 59 of the 1976 Code was referred to the Committee on Judiciary on Tuesday.
Lowe, a father of three, represents Darlington and Florence counties and is a member of the NRA. He has been in the SC House since 2007.
I don’t want to speak with certainty here since I’m not 100% sure, but I believe Texas already gives local school districts the option to do this. Can anyone confirm/clarify this for me please?
I think this is an idea whose time has long since come, and I’m honestly shocked that more states don’t allow this. Well, sorta shocked – considering how some people absolutely (and somewhat understandably) freak out at the thought of a “loaded gun” being in schools, even if it is owned and in the possession of a CCW holder and hidden away effectively by the teacher (or principal or whatever public school employee).
Yours truly was involved in very intense debates this past weekend on social media over, in part, this very idea. Tragically, Sandy Hook’s principal Dawn Hochsprung (47) and school psychologist Mary Sherlach (56) were murdered as they rushed the gunman on Friday to try and stop him. Had one or both of them been armed, would we be hearing a much different story today? It’s worth discussing and debating, especially when you consider there have indeed been other instances where legally armed civilians were responsible for preventing gun massacres from taking place – with one of the civilian heroes being a school principal.
The liberals I’ve spoke with about this are (unsurprisingly) against the idea of educators being armed, because they think a kid’s going to end up with the weapon or that ppl will get hurt or die in a “crossfire.” So their solution is MORE “gun free zones” … and more money for mental health services, as though thorough reform of our mental health system is going to stop every single madman from doing exactly what Lanza did on Friday.
Now, I’m all for that kind of reform, and I’d like to think a complete overhaul of our mental health system would do just that, but I’m a realist – and unlike the left, I know there is no such place as the Utopia States of America. No matter how much mental health system reform we have, even if it ideally proved useful and helpful to the individuals as well as society, it is not going to be foolproof because some people go through life not diagnosed with anything, never show any signs of mental issues, and then go on rampages.
And those in gun free zones end up being sitting ducks, helpless victims - unable to defend themselves and those around them. That is unacceptable.
Am I calling for SWAT weaponry in the classroom? A police officer at every entrance? No. But it just plain makes sense to allow educators the option of being able to legally carry into a school. It could mean the difference between one injury or death (the shooters) or many (employees, students).
Thoughts?
**Posted by Phineas
Aside from the fact that the current representative and senator-designate from South Carolina has a good character, the right politics, and a clear-eyed view of our real problem, he worries all the right people:
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People isn’t too excited about the appointment of Rep. Tim Scott to South Carolina’s soon-to-be-vacated U.S. Senate seat.
(…)
Hilary Shelton, senior vice president for advocacy and policy at the NAACP, told The Daily Caller Monday afternoon that the group welcomed diversity in the Senate, but expects the new senator to work against the NAACP’s agenda.
“It is important that we have more integration in the U.S. Senate,” said Shelton in a phone interview. “It’s good to see that diversity.”
“Mr. Scott certainly comes from a modest background, experience, and so forth, and should be sensitive to those issues,” he said, referring to Scott’s impoverished single-parent upbringing in Charleston, SC.
“Unfortunately, his voting record in the U.S. House of Representatives raises major concerns,” Shelton said.
Shelton explained that the NAACP platform is crafted through an annual voting process which engages grassroots-level delegates who vote on the group’s national agenda. That agenda calls for an expansive role for federal government spending in black communities.
Because federal intervention has done such a bang-up job for Blacks. Just ask any beneficiary of the Great Society’s urban policies. And that War on Poverty? We fought it, and poverty won.
While Ms. Shelton does have some nice things to say about Congressman Scott, it’s clear her views are trapped within the statist, dependent, and identity-group paradigm that dominates the Democratic party. And yet Blacks are far worse off under Obama, who is pursuing those very policies the way an alcoholic chases a beer wagon. But, to be honest, the NAACP stopped being an organization seeking the best interests of African Americans at the same time they entered into a monogamous relationship with the Democratic party. (Helpful tip: if you’re an interest group and you give yourself wholly and forever to one political party — they no longer have to take you seriously, because they know they have your votes no matter what they do.)
Meanwhile, here’s hoping that Mr. Scott has a long and fruitful career in the Senate and that, rather than coming round to the NAACP line, he encourages NAACP members to realize there’s another, better way to help Black Americans prosper.
(Crossposted at Public Secrets)
What the hell?
Trying to raise campaign money off of a horrific tragedy for political gain? This is inexcusable. I’m sure they’ll classify it as an “unfortunate oversight”, though. *insert eyeroll* The screen caps, BTW, are from the mobile version of the site (the quality isn’t the best, due to sizing them down), but I saw them on the desktop version, too.
Got the link from a self-serving email sent from BO.com, listed as being “from David Axelrod”, talking about how the President “spoke from the heart” and “vowed to protect children” using “whatever power his office holds.”
Does our celebrity President EVER stop campaigning?
FYI, I have had to temporarily disable Ajax comment editor for the site because some glitch in the plug-in is causing commenters to see error messages when they try to post a comment. I wasn’t seeing it when I was logged into the blog but when I logged out of the blog I did see it.
Once I find out what the solution is – if there is one – I’ll re-enable it as it is one of the more popular plug-ins at the site. It may be that a plug-in update will have to be done by the plug-in developer before the plug-in can be used again.
Please let me know in the meantime if any of you are still having the issue with error messages popping up in your comments.
Sorry for any inconvenience.