Democrat Senators Signed Letter Asking IRS To Crack Down On Conservative Groups

The letter here:

http://www.independentsector.org/uploads/Policy_PDFs/LettertoIRS501c4s_021612.pdf

Dated Feb 16, 2012.

Looks interesting.

Update: Took down the question mark at the end of the title.  We can pretty well see this for what it is in light of the IRS data from the last few days.

Like the saying goes: “once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and three times is enemy action”.

Update 2: From nonprofit group Independent Sector, their context for the letter:

• Democratic Senators letters to the IRS
  • On March 12, 2012 a group of seven Democratic senators sent a letter to the IRS calling on the agency to adopt a bright line test to define a purpose “primarily” related to social welfare activities, as well as require 501(c)(4) organizations to document social welfare activity on Form 990s. The letter was a follow up to their February 16 letter to the IRS, which urged the agency to investigate abuse of the tax code by 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations.

That first part is this letter.

These two parts are the lead-up events to it, as Republicans asked about selective enforcement, and Democrats complained about the Citizens United decision in order to target conservative groups – which we’ve had verified over and over for the last few days.

• Senate Democrats convene task force to craft response to impact of Citizens United
  • A group of seven Democratic senators, led by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), announced on March 13, 2012 that they are convening a taskforce to craft a new legislative response to what they see as the harmful impact of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. The taskforce said it intends to pursue all available legislative and administrative means to disclose to the public who is influencing American elections.

• Senate Republican letter to the IRS
  • On March 14, 2012 a group of Senate Republicans sent a letter to the IRS questioning recent allegations of selective enforcement on tax-exempt organizations and requested a detailed analysis of the agency’s process for the approval and renewal of a tax-exempt designation under tax code Section 501(c)(4). The group is led by Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT), ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee and Senator Rob Portman (R-OH).

Smoke, fire, all that.

Wonder if any of these fine senators were leaning on the IRS?

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Boehner’s now wondering who should go to jail.  He’s got a whole new group of people to look at.

First Woodward, Now Bernstein

Remember a few months back, Bob Woodward criticized the White House about the sequester limiting military movements, and then was threatened?

Of course, Woodward was blasted by his fellows in the media for criticizing Obama, and it’s not like Woodward was actually going to say anything serious, since Woodward never thought there were any questions worth asking about Benghazi or Fast and Furious.  He made one comment that wasn’t wholly in lock-step with the Obama-loving media and was verbally attacked and threatened for it.

Now today, Carl Bernstein is calling out Obama for targeting Associated Press reporters.

He’s not targeting the White House’s actual activities.  He’s not calling them out for suppressing Fast and Furious and targeting whistleblowers for retaliation.  Bernstein’s only mad because reporters who need to be monitored for party loyalty are now targets.

Bernstein said “the president should long ago have put a stop to this in his administration”.  Apparently he doesn’t understand or refuses to acknowledge that the president is a Chicago street organizer who was raised by Alinskyite communist thugs and terrorists.  This president does not favor freedom, he does not favor free speech.  His political agenda is one that would criminalize unpopular speech, and would actively targets opposition speech.  This is not a surprise to Country Class Americans.

Bernstein:

“There is no reason that a presidency that is interested in a truly free press and its functioning should permit this to happen.”

Y’know what that means, Carl?  Y’know what you should be able to get from that without having Mark Felt spoon-feed it to you?  It means this presidency DOESN’T favor a free press.

From the Obama administration targeting FOX news and calling it “destructive” for having a viewpoint that opposes his to Obama specifically blaming Rush Limbaugh for all the problems in America, to calling anyone who is opposed to the socialist manifest destiny an “obstructionist” or “destructive”, this administration, from the President down through all of his true-believer lackeys, are on the same page.  If you oppose them and their autocratic mania to tell you how to live, you must be destroyed.

Bernstein is a dinosaur.  He’s in the tank for the Democrats, but he still thinks they’re the same silly Democrats of yesteryear.  He’s still got some smidgen of journalistic integrity left, too, and he’s wondering why the Democrats are trying to crush and control journalists now.  He doesn’t understand what he’s dealing with, and he doesn’t understand that the ruling Democrats are tyrants.

He sounds mad because he can’t figure out why Obama’s doing these horrible things.  He’s like a battered wife who still thinks her abusive husband who just molested their children is a good guy, and she doesn’t understand all these horrible things that surely can’t be the truth.  The facts stare him in the face, but he refuses to understand.

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As just one more example, Sharyl Attkisson has been yelled at for being a journalist and actually reporting on a big story – gunrunning by the US DOJ/ATF, and the subsequent coverup by the Obama administration.  The media has already hushed up a few hundred murders in Fast and Furious, and hushed up Benghazi as much as they can, and they’re going to spin the IRS story as either justified because conservative=evil or as an accident.  They’ve been accomplices to tyranny for so long, are they just so blind that they’re now surprised when they’re the targets?

Somewhere, Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov are sharing a joke at the US media’s expense.

NAACP Chairman a Strong Proponent of Government Cracking Down on Groups He Doesn’t Like

From both Jawa Report and HotAir:

William Bond, chairman emeritus of NAACP, asked about the NAACP being investigated vs the Tea Party being harassed by the IRS:

No I don’t think there’s a double standard at all.  I think it’s entirely legitimate to look at the Tea Party.  I mean here are a group of people who are admittedly racist, who are overtly political, who tried as best they can to harm President Obama in every way they can.  I don’t think there are correct parallels between these two incidents.

They are the Taliban wing of American politics and we all ought to be a little worried about them.

Allahpundit referred to Bond’s expressed feelings as the “political id”.  Rather apt.  Stable Hand called him an assmaggot.  Also apt.

But there’s something both more and less to this guy.

He’s a hard-core leftist, a harsh, power-hungry race hustler whose power would evacuate if there were no more crises to exploit.  He’s one of those who has to create boogeymen in order to justify his own crusade.

“One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.”

- Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

If there’s no villainous oppressor for him to go after, he’ll just have to make one.  And Mia Love and Sonja Schmidt and Katrina Pierson apparently are the “American Taliban”.

And if Bond becomes the villainous oppressor?  If his ideology leads to what the destructive, suppressive acts of the IRS?  Well, that’s impossible to him, since any actions he takes are fine because he’s doing it for the “greater good”.

To him, there can be no double standard – all actions by him and those leftists like him are justified because the Tea Party is the embodiment of evil in his warped worldview.

He just happens to be outwardly expressing it in the clip.  The IRS was acting on his worldview.  Of course he agrees with it.

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As one more wacky juxtaposition, he calls the Tea Party “admittedly racist” (see the three women listed above as Tea Party representatives), and would doubtless put them in the category of “islamaphobic”… yet he compares the Tea Party to the Taliban.  Because small government, reduced-taxation types who actually are all-inclusive are just the same as those who want a violent all-powerful Islamic theocracy.

California Looking to Have Aliens Convict US Citizens

More stuff that stacked up in my notes pile…  California’s looking to have non-citizens serve on juries.

Jury duty long has been held up as a privilege of U.S. citizenship, along with voting and a few other civic actions.

But in move that is drawing controversy, California is considering extending the right to serve on a jury to legal immigrants who are not naturalized citizens. The California Assembly passed a bill on Thursday that would  allow non-citizens who are in the country legally to serve on jury duty.

Not a jury of your peers.

Assemblyman Bob Wieckowski, a Democrat, sponsored the bill, arguing that the state needs to broaden the pool of eligible jurors, and that fulfilling jury duty would help integrate immigrants.

United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, the branch that deals with naturalization, said that only U.S. citizens may serve on federal juries, but that some local jurisdictions in the nation allow non-citizens to be jurors. The same is true of voting, which at the federal level requires citizenship.

Local jurisdictions allowing aliens to vote on how you live in your country is absurd.  It surrenders sovereign franchise to aliens, whether they be illegal (which is the real point in Cali), or legal.  Legal permanent residents aren’t citizens.  They’re just living here, they aren’t Americans.  They haven’t so much as sworn any allegiance to the US, they’re just here on papers.

If they want to be Americans, then once they get citizenship they can enjoy the right to vote, and they can enjoy the right to serve on juries and convict or acquit their fellow citizens (though some may find that a dubious honor, given the time commitments).

Democratic lawmakers who voted for the bill said there is no correlation between being a citizen and a juror, and they noted that there is no citizenship requirement to be an attorney or a judge.

Yeah, actually there is.  A jury of one’s peers means having citizens of the country you reside in be your jurors.  That anyone can hire any attorney they want is no big deal, but that a judge, as a state official, could bear allegiance not to the US, but to a foreign nation, is frankly absurd.

The Democrat argument for it basically comes down to “we need them to serve on juries US citizens are too lazy to serve on”.

Noting that women were once kept off juries, Assembly Speaker John Perez, D-Los Angeles, said the judicial system should be changed to allow a person to be judged by their peers.

He then went on to talk about apples and oranges.

Paula Hannaford, an expert at the Center for Jury Studies, confirmed that California would be the only place — state or locality — in the country to allow non-citizens to serve jury duty.

Because non-citizens on jury duty is patently absurd.

Why not just have Incitatus on the jury?  There’s nothing that says horses can’t serve on juries.

Media Hushes Up Benghazi Whistleblower Hicks’ Political Background

Via Drudge, from Breitbart:

NBC News “spiked” the story this week, prior to Hicks’ dramatic testimony before Congress.  

Toensing appeared on WMAL-FM in Washington DC Saturday with host Steve Malzberg.

“He voted for Hillary in the primary and Obama twice. NBC spiked the story where I told it before the hearings…

…It’s just amazing what the press is still trying to do to cover this up. So they try to make this partisan because of the lawyer. Well I’m not the messenger, he’s the messenger! The modus operandi is to find anything they can do to just attack.”

Thing is, if Hicks were reported as a Democrat supporter who votes Democrat all the time, it goes to show that there is actual bipartisanship – that people as Americans are saying something’s wrong, that this was a criminal coverup.  There are actual Democrats who recognize that what happened at Benghazi is wrong, and there are actual Democrats who are critical of the Obama administration.

That would go against the narrative that this is just a right-wing fiction, a right-wing kooky conspiracy theory that’s all about editing a document that gets edited anyway and nobody died and nothing happened and it was all a protest against a reich-wingnut who made a video on youtube to offend the arab world because he’s out to offend them so much.

It’s only natural that people take RPGs and mortars to protests, because right-wingers make people that mad, and they deserve it.  So it’s the right’s fault… according to the left.

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That part really is key, in case someone isn’t getting how the White House story of a spontaneous protest doesn’t fit with reality.  In the leftist worldview, it’s somehow “normal” that people take fire support to protest, and a “protest” with mortar support is a perfectly acceptable explanation for an attack on a 9/11 anniversary.

Yes on proposition 19!

Defense Distributed’s Plastic Liberator

A friend of the blog sent this news story a few days back – from the UK Register:

Plans for fully 3D-printed gun go online next week
The Liberator pistol causes political panic

Defense Distributed, the pending non-profit that plans to make 3D-printed weaponry available for anyone with such a printer, will release the blueprints for a fully-working plastic firearm next week.

The UK Register is pretty open about their bias in the story, which they at least try to make funny, but it’s on the level of McNugget jokes.  But they do point out that Democrats have never seen anything they don’t wish to control.

“Security checkpoints, background checks, and gun regulations will do little good if criminals can print plastic firearms at home and bring those firearms through metal detectors with no one the wiser,” said Congressman Steve Israel (D-NY) in a statement.

“When I started talking about the issue of plastic firearms months ago,” Israel said, “I was told the idea of a plastic gun is science-fiction. Now that this technology appears to be upon us, we need to act now to extend the ban on plastic firearms.”

HotAir today has a story citing that ol’ Chuck Schumer, who’s never met a ban he didn’t like, and demands total control over you groveling peasants who need to kneel before his Ruling Class dictatorial power – because it’s what’s good for you – also wants to ban it.

Bloomberg’s own pet news agency even criticizes Schumer and thinks they need to forget about plastic guns and ban the rest first.

Should we light our hair on fire about plastic guns made with 3D printers?

Too late for Senator Charles Schumer. The combustible New York Democrat is encouraging hysteria over the prospect of criminals using 3D printers to manufacture firearms, possibly to assassinate the president. “We’re facing a situation where anyone—a felon, a terrorist—can open a gun factory in their garage ,and the weapons they make will be undetectable,” Schumer said. “It’s stomach-churning.”

Bloomberg’s own people don’t care about actual criminals, though:

…If you’ve got the skills, you can already make a gun in your basement, and there are less complicated ways to do it than using a $10,000 3D printer and computer set-up. Why would bad guys bother making comic book firearms when they can go online and order anything from a Glock 9 mm pistol to a Bushmaster military-style semiautomatic rifle with 30-round ammunition magazines?

Perhaps the evil doer wouldn’t want to leave a credit-card trail. Then he pays cash at a Main Street gun shop, a weekend gun show, or to the criminal down the block who sells black market firepower from the trunk of his car. Or the crook steals or borrows his gun.

Point being, ban real guns first.  Get the “dangerous ones”, then ban all the rest.

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The plastic Liberator pistol is a very interesting thing, and not just in its mechanics.

Perhaps the most interesting is what’s in the name.  A Russian professor of mine that taught Chekhov explained that Chekhov’s names always were indicative of the character; and names are often very, very important.  Going a very long way back in history, true names were a method to power over someone – either due to knowing someone and being able to identify them in a time before pictures, or out of a very early belief in names as a form of magic.  Here, too, in a very fascinating way, the name was chosen for a reason, and is very indicative of what this pistol really represents.

Here with the plastic Liberator, we have all that liberty and liberation connotates, that this will free the information and free the people to have the tools to arm themselves against tyranny.  We also have its historical antecedent, the FP-45 Liberator pistol:

It was made on the cheap, and made to be distributed to resistance fighters.

It had abysmal accuracy, but the purpose of the pistol was very specific.

It was made to shoot occupying forces up close and personal.  It was made to shoot Nazi dictator thugs at extreme close range.

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Some computer geeks at The Verge yammer on about the convergence between “crypto-anarchists” and guns, but for them, history doesn’t exist before the Palo Alto labs, apparently.

Cyberculture icon Stewart Brand’s famous notion that “information wants to be free” has been an almost ubiquitous refrain ever since utopian-minded hackers began populating computer networks in the 1980s. Today, 3D printing has given the phrase a whole new meaning, allowing raw data to become real world weapons with the click of a button. Cody R. Wilson, the antagonistic founder of Defense Distributed, is taking that idea to its logical — and hugely controversial — extreme.

Except it’s not an extreme at all…

(DefCad’s) his reasoning, he claims, isn’t really about the Second Amendment at all — it’s about technological progress rendering the very concept of gun control meaningless.

“It’s more radical for us,” he told Motherboard in “Click Print Gun,” a recent mini-doc about the dark side of the 3D printing revolution. “There are people all over the world downloading our files and we say ‘good.’ We say you should have access to this. You simply should.”

If this all sounds very similar to the good gospel spread by Brand and advanced by progressives and activists like the late Aaron Swartz, you’re hearing it right. But even without the context of Wilson’s operation, firearms and freedom of information share a strangely similar history, an oft-overlooked ideological confluence between hackers and gun advocates that seems to be gaining momentum.

Except it’s not extreme at all, as guns existed well before computers…

If you go back before 1934, there were no restrictions on guns except if you were black or another wrong color/status.  There were restrictions on people, and that’s what was understood.  Guns aren’t dangerous, criminals are dangerous because they don’t restrict themselves to any laws or social mores.  Guns weren’t dangerous to the people in power, freed black former slaves with guns were dangerous, because guns are tools of power.  Today, as then, it’s not the guns that are dangerous – Schumer and his ilk are surrounded by security with guns and send their kids to schools with guns and will come after you with guns – it’s you being armed that’s dangerous to his power.  Guns are just a tool, as they always have been.

Guns used to be made by smiths, but anyone with access to some basic tools and a bit of skill can make them.  Zip guns have been made out of virtually nothing for decades.  Submachineguns are relatively easy to make, and some famous SMGs were even made in facilities as simple as bicycle shops.

The next leftist dictator-tyrant argument is then to control ammo and powder, which has a few major flaws.  Namely, their enforcers use them, and their enforcers provide criminals with guns and ammo, so the criminal argument goes right out the window.  Of course it isn’t about criminals, it’s about making you into a criminal so they can tell you how to live and make you live the right way.  It’s never about the guns, it’s about the control.  Components to make ammunition aren’t impossible to come by, and conventional ammunition is only needed once – until an armed instrument of the state has his tools liberated.

The entire concept of homemade guns isn’t extreme.  Going back a few decades, not only could you buy a machinegun by mail, no matter who you were, but you could build whatever you liked.  There was a great heyday of gun manufacturing in the early 20th century before regulations started becoming overwhelming.  John Moses Browning was designing his greatest works in the early 20th Century – from pistols to machineguns, many of which are still in use today.  Consider that the M2 heavy machine gun is something that’s been in service for nearly 100 years.  It’s not that there aren’t more designers for weapons with better ideas, it’s that government regulations have limited the marketplace and made it more difficult to experiment.  Government has stalled technological development – developments that used to be made in mechanic shops when designers and engineers and skilled craftsmen got together and designed new tools.

There were virtually no regulations or restrictions on firearms for a hundred years or more, with the exception of those laws meant to target blacks, American Indians, and other specific groups that the majority wanted to oppress; and a few local laws.

Defense Distributed to some degree is just bringing things back to how they were for generations.  Before, the government trusted citizens and so it didn’t restrict citizens, soon, the government simply won’t be able to restrict citizens; and if they do restrict enough, there will be tools of liberation available.

Colorado Loses Another Business

For those who totally missed it, Colorado’s leftist Democrat rulers recently passed several anti-gun bills that were opposed 10-1, rejected by the people, and passed by legislators who didn’t even bother to answer questions about their bills because they planned to and did ram it through.  They also threatened and shut up law enforcement that opposed it.

In addition to driving Magpul out of Colorado, and driving the Outdoor Channel out of Colorado, and driving the Alfred Manufacturing Company out of Colorado, now they can add HiViz to the list of companies leaving Colorado:

HiViz Shooting Systems intends to leave Colorado in the wake of new state gun control legislation signed into law last month, according to the Northern Colorado Business Report.

The Fort Collins company, which makes sights, recoil pads and other accessories, started in 1996. But like Magpul Industries Inc. of Boulder County, HiViz said it’s not happy with the gun control measures approved by the Colorado Legislature and signed into law by Gov. John Hickenlooper. Magpul Industries announced last month it will be leaving Colorado.

Pass anti-gun bills, expect gun companies to leave.  Leftists are happy with this, but that’s because there’s still someone making guns for their enforcers, and other than that, they want to destroy all gun companies.  They will find that their enforcers will be denied a lot of tools now, though.

“I make this announcement with mixed emotions,” Phillip Howe, president and CEO of HiViz, said in a statement. “Colorado is a beautiful state with great people, but we cannot in clear conscience support with our taxes a state that has proven through recent legislation a willingness to infringe upon the constitutional rights of our customer base.”

HiViz gets it.  And they’ll be keeping their customer base by supporting them.

Harry Reid Introduces S. 792 – Gunpowder Restriction Bill

Via GunsSaveLives, from The Hill:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday introduced a bill that would require background checks to be run on anyone buying explosive powder, a reaction to last week’s Boston Marathon bombing.

Reid introduced the bill, S. 792, for Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who has been out sick for much of the year. But in a press statement, Lautenberg said the Boston bombing shows that background checks are needed for explosive materials.

“It defies common sense that anyone, even a terrorist, can walk into a store in America and buy explosive powders without a background check or any questions asked,” Lautenberg said Tuesday.  “Requiring a background check for an explosives permit is a small price to pay to ensure the safety of our communities.

Note the clever wordplay.  What they want to ban is blackpowder, gunpowder, reloading supplies, and everything else associated with ammunition and firearms ownership.  Frank Lautenberg is famous for being as anti-gun as they get.  The shoddy attempt at avoiding saying “we want to ban gunpowder and disarm the citizenry” and instead saying “explosive powders” makes it sound like we’re getting attacked by Persian sorcerors.

If one were to look at it logically, they’d find that the Boston terrorists didn’t use gunpowder for ammunition, or black powder, or anything else related to guns.  I’ve mentioned it before, but terrorists and US gun culture are mutually opposed.  People in US gun culture are the type who either fancy themselves as someone who would stop terrorists… or are people who have stopped terrorists.

The Boston terrorists used fireworks.

A New Hampshire fireworks store has told the FBI that it sold four-hundred dollars worth of fireworks in February to accused Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

The gunpowder in fireworks is often used in bombs.

“He just wanted the biggest, loudest stuff we had in the store,” said Megan Kearns, the assistant manager of Phantom Fireworks, in an interview with ABC News affiliate WMUR.

So the proposed bill, which regulates only gun owners, and is only targeted at gun owners, would do absolutely nothing when it comes to what terrorists have done.  Lautenberg’s bill exists only to harass gun owners and reloaders and destroy American gun culture.  Firework gunpowder and ammunition gunpowder have been very different things for a long, long time now.

From the Hill:

Under current law, people can buy up to 50 pounds of explosive “black powder” with no background check, and can buy unlimited amounts of other explosive powders, such as “black powder substitute” and “smokeless powder.”

Lautenberg’s bill would require a background check for the purchase of any of these powders.

It would also let the attorney general stop the sale of explosives if a background check shows the applicant is a known or suspected terrorist, and if there is a belief the explosives will be used for terrorism.

He is going after gunpowder, not after what the bombers used.  They bought fireworks and disassembled them.  Lautenberg wants to destroy US gun culture one piece at a time.

It would also require a permit to make homemade explosives, and direct the government to study how to better trace the use of explosive powders.

So is Lautenberg that stupid or does he just think you are?  Terrorists would try to get permits to make homemade explosives?  Really?

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Also, as I noted when Lautenberg first proposed this Second Amendment-stomping dictate, you can still drive to your corner gas station and buy gallons and gallons of highly flammable, destructive gasoline.

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There also seems to be a cultural component to this.  I’m sure once he’s banned guns, next Lautenberg will be the type to want to ban fireworks, and leave all fireworks displays to specific fireworks-trained government-appointed authorities on fireworks who will handle that dangerous work and keep fireworks out of the hands of dangerous terrorists like you, so peons like you can celebrate International Workers Day and see the glorious fireworks of the state.  Were he on a smaller scale, he’d be the type to ban fireworks for “the children” because some North Park kid got his hand blown off, leaving you with snakes and snap-pops.

He’s surely that kind of nanny-state asshole as well as dictator wannabe.

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Link to the bill at govtrack (no text posted yet).

NRA President David Keene on Senate Gun Control Stall

From Washington Examiner:

The head of the National Rifle Association mocked President Obama’s Rose Garden “tantrum” after losing the gun control fight in the Senate, charging Thursday that Obama suffered the worst defeat of his presidency because “he bit off more than he could chew.”

David Keene told Secrets that the president and his team misplayed their hand because they don’t have a sense of the public’s attitude toward gun control. “They just can’t gauge the public reaction to what they do because they don’t have any sense that the public has feelings different than they do,” said Keene.

“He thought and his folks thought that Newtown changed everything. Newtown was a tragedy but that doesn’t change people’s basic values and feelings,” added the NRA president.

Fact is, people are opposed to it.  The culture of the nation is opposed to having the government chip, chip, chip away at our rights.  This is the Country Class telling the Ruling Class “no”.

The loss devastated the president, who ranted about the NRA’s power during his Rose Garden address after Wednesday’s vote.

Keene, however, saw it differently. “It was the biggest legislative defeat he suffered but that does not justify the unseemly picture of a president of the United States throwing a public tantrum.”

Keene is spot-on here.  Obama was mad and ranting, calling the NRA and the pro-rights lobby “liars”.  Mind you, this is the same president who had the ATF send guns to Mexican narcoterrorist cartels and then claim executive privilege to hush it up.

Keene said that many lawmakers who voted against the background check expansion felt that if it passed, gun control advocates would simply return to the issue to chip away more at the Second Amendment, so they decided to “just stop it now.”

All you have to do is listen to what the Democrat anti-rights activists say:

They do not stop.  They will not be happy until everyone is disarmed and doing exactly as they say.

Keene had a good way of handling the leftists who want to “compromise” by sticking in just the tip, baby:

In a way, Keene signaled that to the sponsors of the Senate compromise, Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey and West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin. Keene recalled that he took a day off last week to fish for trout on the Missouri River in Montana. “Unfortunately, I took my cellphone with me and my cellphone rings in the midst of my float and it’s Joe Manchin, who’s talking about how reasonable his idea is. And finally I said, ‘Look, I’m in the middle of the Missouri River, I’ve got a trout on the line. I don’t agree, you will have to make your own decisions, and I hung up. You have to keep your priorities straight.”

There is no compromise, and there’s no use in talking to someone who just wants to stick in the tip a little bit, baby.  No means no.

May as well go fishing.

New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg Proposes Blackpowder Regulations

An anti-gun leftist Ruling class tyrant from the northeast?  Naw…

On April 17, New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg issued a statement to the public that he intends to propose a bill or amendment to regulate black powder, and other forms of explosive components, in the wake of the Boston Marathon Massacre. The bill would demand full Federal background checks of anyone seeking to purchase the minor explosive, similar to recent attempts by Congress to require full background checks on the sale of firearms.

In the wake of the deadly bombing attacks in Boston, U.S. Senator Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ) today announced that he will reintroduce legislation he has proposed in a prior Congress to require that sales of explosive powder be subject to a background check. He will also file the legislation as an amendment to the gun violence prevention bill currently on the Senate floor

From Lautenberg’s own site:

“It is outrageous that anyone, even a known terrorist, can walk into a store in America and buy explosives without any questions asked,” said Senator Lautenberg. “If we are serious about public safety, we must put these common-sense safeguards in place.  While the police have not revealed what specific explosive materials were used in Boston, what we do know is that explosive powder is too easy to anonymously purchase across the country.”

Consider how nanny-statish New Jersey is.  In New Jersey, for example, you can’t pump your own gas.  It’s both a jobs scam and a “safety” scam that 48 other states’ citizens show is complete bull.

See, in 48 other states, you can walk to a gas pump and fill your tank with gallons upon gallons of gasoline.

In 48 states, you can go and pump as much gas as you can afford into your car or an approved container.  In New Jersey and Oregon, you have to kneel before the might of lobbyists and you have an attendant pump gas for you, but you can still buy as much gas as you want.

Fortunately, highly combustible, flammable, and also explosive gasoline has never been used to kill anyone in any kind of attack, ever ever.  Well, except for killing 87 people at once.  And it’s used all the time by arsonists.

So gasoline is totally more dangerous.  It shows again that there are dangerous chemicals and things all around us, and it’s the people we have to deal with, not the tools… because a dedicated villain will always find the tools.

But Lautenberg, who lives in a state where people are considered too stupid to pump their own gas, demands that we regulate black powder.

Of the $27.8 Billion spent each year on firearms, ammunition, clothing, reloading equipment, optics, and accessories by the American public, only about 7-8% of all gun owners reload their own ammunition on a regular basis. This means that only a relatively small amount of people purchase black powder explosives each year, and in comparison to other flammable, explosive, and dangerous household products such as fertilizer and gasoline, the singling out of black powder for stricter regulation bears little statistical evidence that its use in criminal activity is widespread.

As Examiner notes, it’s not prevalent among criminals.  Actual blackpowder isn’t very prevalent (it’s been mostly replaced by Pyrodex), and modern gunpowders basically burn, they don’t quite explode.

Gunpowder is classified as a low explosive because of its relatively slow decomposition rate and consequently low brisance. Low explosives deflagrate (i.e., burn) at subsonic speeds, whereas high explosives detonate, producing a supersonic wave.

From Lautenberg’s site:

Current law allows an individual to purchase as much as 50 pounds of explosive “black powder” without a background check, and also permits an individual to purchase unlimited amounts of dangerous “smokeless powder” and “black powder substitute” without a background check.

And it will cost you shipping out the wazoo.  It’s not cheap to ship that stuff, because you have to comply with DOT regulations and hazmat to ship it already.  Smokeless powder is just a chemical that burns quickly.  When in a shell, with a primer on one end and a bullet on the other, and inside a steel chamber, it becomes useful.  Until then, it’s just a fast-burning chemical compound, and one that happens to be an intrinsic part of the Second Amendment, as ammunition is part of bearing arms.

If one were a terrorist, again, by contrast, you can buy all the gasoline you want.  So you could buy hundreds or even thousands of gallons of gasoline and do whatever you wanted with it.

Ignoring all of that for a moment, consider that Al Qaeda’s online publication, Inspire magazine, has directions on how to make very specific types of explosives.  They detailed the pressure cooker bomb, but they also detail how to use chemicals to mix much more destructive explosives.  The internet is full of destructive bomb-making recipes for those looking for them, and Lautenberg, along with the rest of his dictatorial cohorts, is apparently completely lost on the first word in the acronym IED.

Improvised explosive device.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way.  There is always a way for the motivated terrorist.

War is not a contest of force, whether conventional or unconventional, declared or undeclared.  It is a question of will.

If you ban one thing, they will find another to use.  The more you ban, the more liberties are lost, the more the terrorists have terrorized you into crushing your own citizenry and treating everyone like criminals.  They will have won, as the American people will feel defeated by the actions of their own government against the citizenry in knee-jerk response to terrorists who will never follow a law.

You have to stop the individual terrorists.  Ultimately, it is the terrorist that kills, and he is who you have to stop.

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As an aside, while we’re on the subject of background checks for everything, how about we do background checks on who comes into the country, and we stop letting in terrorists and people who will reasonably become terrorists, huh?  Then maybe us US citizens can stop getting screwed with every time we go to do anything?  And how about we do background checks on senators and congressmen and presidents, so if they show any tendencies towards grossly violating oaths to the Constitution and trying to stomp on citizens rights, we don’t let them work in government?