NRA Turns Justice Department Memo Back On Obama

From the Arizona Daily Star:

The National Rifle Association is using a Justice Department memo it obtained to argue in ads that the Obama administration believes its gun control plans won’t work unless the government seizes firearms and requires national gun registration _ ideas the White House has not proposed and does not support.

The NRA’s assertion and its obtaining of the memo in the first place underscore the no-holds-barred battle under way as Washington’s fight over gun restrictions heats up.

The memo, under the name of one of the Justice Department’s leading crime researchers, critiques the effectiveness of gun control proposals, including some of President Barack Obama’s. A Justice Department official called the memo an unfinished review of gun violence research and said it does not represent administration policy.

Hmm.

The nine-page document says the success of universal background checks would depend in part on “requiring gun registration,” and says gun buybacks would not be effective “unless massive and coupled with a ban.”

It basically notes that a partial ban, or buybacks, won’t work to reduce crime.  Everything has to be eliminated; and even so, long gun murders are a tiny fraction of murders to begin with, so it still won’t have an effect.

Biden Says “Buy A Shotgun”

From the Weekly Standard:

Joe Biden doesn’t have the brains that God gave squash.

Every part of what he says is stupid, and anyone who teaches self defense, or law related to self defense, will concur.

–

I didn’t catch this the first time… but he talks about living in a secluded, wooded area where he can walk out on the balcony.  For those 99.9999% of us that don’t live on wooded exclusive country estates with balconies, this sounds even more insane and stupid.

Obama Administration Opposes Criminal Background Checks

Not on law-abiding citizens who want to buy guns, of course.  But they oppose and will sue employers who don’t want to hire thieves, rapists, and murderers:

Should it be a federal crime for businesses to refuse to hire ex-convicts? Yes, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which recently released 20,000 convoluted words of regulatory “guidance” to direct businesses to hire more felons and other ex-offenders.

–

Most businesses perform criminal background checks on job applicants, but the EEOC guidance frowns on such checks and creates new legal tripwires that could spark federal lawsuits. One EEOC commissioner who opposed the new policy, Constance Barker, warned in April that “the only real impact the new Guidance will have will be to scare business owners from ever conducting criminal background checks. . . . The Guidance tells them that they are taking a tremendous risk if they do.”

If a background check discloses a criminal offense, the EEOC expects a company to do an intricate “individualized assessment” that will somehow prove that it has a “business necessity” not to hire the ex-offender (or that his offense disqualifies him for a specific job). Former EEOC General Counsel Donald Livingston, in testimony in December to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, warned that employers could be considered guilty of “race discrimination if they choose law abiding applicants over applicants with criminal convictions” unless they conduct a comprehensive analysis of the ex-offender’s recent life history.

It is difficult to overstate the EEOC’s zealotry on this issue. The agency is demanding that one of Mr. Livingston’s clients—the Freeman Companies, a convention and corporate events planner—pay compensation to rejected job applicants who lied about their criminal records.

The biggest bombshell in the new guidelines is that businesses complying with state or local laws that require employee background checks can still be targeted for EEOC lawsuits.

The article goes on to note that a security company that guards nuclear facilities was sued by the Obama EEOC in 2010 for refusing to hire a twice-convicted thief – even though state laws said the security company isn’t allowed to hire criminals.

Background checks for criminals going into a job where they’d be armed guards?  Bad.  Background checks, registration, permits and confiscation against joe citizen when he wants to exercise his rights?  Good.

This leftist-progressive modern liberal agenda does invariably elevate the failed, evil and wrong at the expense of the good and successful (just as Evan Sayet said).

Electric Cars and Government Mandates

There’s been a bit of discussion, though not really very much, about Obama’s new CAFE standards that mandate average fleet fuel economy at 54.5 mpg by 2025.  That’s not that far away.  And as noted, the leftist watermelon environmentalists are very fond of making up mandates that simply cannot be met – such as requiring fuel companies to use a fuel that doesn’t exist.  The objective it to get rid of cars they don’t like by making their production nearly impossible or illegal, citizen demand be damned.  But the most interesting car issue has been about a newer car idea from government.

In the last week or so, there’s been a kerfuffle in the car communit about the Tesla S sedan.  To put this out there before we even get started, Tesla is effectively a government project.  They got a loan to the tune of $465 million from you, the taxpayer.  Tesla is a government sponsored “good idea”.  Electric cars are expensive (the roadster runs about $109K), so the proletariat has to ride mass transit, and the Tesla is eco-friendly and expensive, so the limousine liberal set can pat themselves on the back for being “green”.  The poor are shoved into government control, the rich are allowed to feel enlightened.  South African billionaire Elon Musk spent almost a half-million dollars lobbying for his half-billion dollars in taxpayer handouts, all so he could design a car for those who tell you how to live to get them to and from their bureaucratic offices.

Back on Feb 8, the NYT, which has a harsh leftist bias to the point that they aid Al Qaeda by showing where US body armor is weak, and is all about fighting Manbearpig, decided to have one of their reporters test the claim that the $101,000 Tesla S sedan could be driven like a normal car.

WASHINGTON — Having established a fast-charging foothold in California for its electric cars, Tesla Motors has brought its formula east, opening two ultrafast charging stations in December that would, in theory, allow a speedy electric-car road trip between here and Boston.

But as I discovered on a recent test drive of the company’s high-performance Model S sedan, theory can be trumped by reality, especially when Northeast temperatures plunge.

It’s an interesting story of what happens when an enlightened “good idea” meets the real world:

Setting out on a sunny 30-degree day two weeks ago, my trip started well enough. A Tesla agent brought the car to me in suburban Washington with a full charge, and driving at normal highway speeds I reached the Delaware charging dock with the battery still having roughly half its energy remaining. I went off for lunch at the service plaza, checking occasionally on the car’s progress. After 49 minutes, the display read “charge complete,” and the estimated available driving distance was 242 miles.

Fat city; no attendant and no cost.

Except that $465,000,000 taken out of the taxpayer’s pocket.  And the fact that the car runs on coal.

But he went on:

As I crossed into New Jersey some 15 miles later, I noticed that the estimated range was falling faster than miles were accumulating. At 68 miles since recharging, the range had dropped by 85 miles, and a little mental math told me that reaching Milford would be a stretch.

Simply put, the cold weather, along with other factors, reduced the battery life.  He started calling Tesla and they told him to shut off the heater.  And they told him do do “regenerative braking“, which will conserve energy, but won’t actually recharge batteries.  You can’t burn energy to go forward and then stop and get all that energy back by stopping, because energy was expended in moving from one place to another.  Tesla’s engineers apparently think that the laws of thermodynamics don’t apply to them just because they’re friends with Obama and he can tell Eric Holder not to prosecute.

The NYT reporter quoted Obama’s leftist watermelon environmentalist who wants $8/gallon gas Energy Secretary Steven Chu:

At the Washington Auto Show last month, Dr. Chu, who has since announced his plan to leave office in the next few weeks, discussed the Energy Department’s goal of making electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids as cheap and convenient as comparable gasoline-powered cars.

He continued: “We can’t say this everywhere in America yet, but driving by a gasoline station and smiling is something everyone should experience.”

Chu’s decided what you should experience, what’s good for you, and he will make you drive an electric car by killing the gas car.  I could dissect the leftist tyrannical knows-what’s-best-for-you mindset of Steven Chu, but I’ll move on to a simple fact of why people won’t be smiling as they look at gas stations.  From the NYT:

I drove a state-of-the-art electric vehicle past a lot of gas stations. I wasn’t smiling.

Instead, I spent nearly an hour at the Milford service plaza as the Tesla sucked electrons from the hitching post. When I continued my drive, the display read 185 miles, well beyond the distance I intended to cover before returning to the station the next morning for a recharge and returning to Manhattan.

To get 185 miles of range in a mostly fuel-inefficient (but powerful) Ford F250 that could pull a Tesla S on a trailer, I can pull into a gas station and get those 185 miles of range in about four minutes, unless it’s a very slow pump.  Then I’ll be back on the road.  To get that 185 miles of range in a Ford Focus, you need maybe two minutes, because that’s only about 6 gallons of gas.  You also don’t need to turn off your heater when you’re driving, and don’t lose huge amounts of mileage in the cold.

And then, for the NYT reporter, things got worse.  He stopped overnight and a charge of 90 miles dropped to about 25, short of what he needed for the last leg of the two-day trip.

…“Car is shutting down,” the computer informed me. I was able to coast down an exit ramp in Branford, Conn., before the car made good on its threat.

Tesla’s New York service manager, Adam Williams, found a towing service in Milford that sent a skilled and very patient driver, Rick Ibsen, to rescue me with a flatbed truck. Not so quick: the car’s electrically actuated parking brake would not release without battery power, and hooking the car’s 12-volt charging post behind the front grille to the tow truck’s portable charger would not release the brake. So he had to drag it onto the flatbed, a painstaking process that took 45 minutes. Fortunately, the cab of the tow truck was toasty.

At 2:40 p.m., we pulled into the Milford rest stop, five hours after I had left Groton on a trip that should have taken less than an hour. Mr. Ibsen carefully maneuvered the flatbed close to the charging kiosk, and 25 minutes later, with the battery sufficiently charged to release the parking brake and drive off the truck, the car was back on the ground. A Model S owner who had taken delivery the previous day watched with interest.

Tesla’s chief technology officer, J B Straubel, acknowledged that the two East Coast charging stations were at the mileage limit of the Model S’s real-world range. Making matters worse, cold weather inflicts about a 10 percent range penalty, he said, and running the heater draws yet more energy. He added that some range-related software problems still needed to be sorted out.

You can’t drive it like a normal car.  It doesn’t work.  You can’t use it for road trips, and the “super recharge” stations run on coal, and take an hour to charge.  When the batteries get cold, you lose power, when you lose power, the car shuts down.

But we spent $465,000,000 on a “good idea”.

The South African billionaire needed $465,000,000 of your money to make a car that doesn’t work and build infrastructure for an idea that as far as cars go, was cutting edge in 1884 but abandoned back in the early 20th century.  The South African billionaire then went on to rant about how the NYT was out to get him.

Of course, as Jalopnik noted, third parties shot that paranoid criticism down.  And the NYT reporter wrote not just one, but two responses of his own.

Virtually everyone says that I should have plugged in the car overnight in Connecticut, particularly given the cold temperature. But the test that Tesla offered was of the Supercharger, not of the Model S, which we already know is a much-praised car. This evaluation was intended to demonstrate its practicality as a “normal use,” no-compromise car, as Tesla markets it. Now that Tesla is striving to be a mass-market automaker, it cannot realistically expect all 20,000 buyers a year (the Model S sales goal) to be electric-car acolytes who will plug in at every Walmart stop.

Knowing then what I know now about the car, its sensitivity to cold and additional ways to maximize range, I certainly would have treated the test differently. But the conclusion might not have been any better for Tesla.

It wouldn’t have been.  The thing is, it’s not a normal use car.  It’s a niche car for people who want to out-smug Prius owners, and have $100K to do it with.

Some CNN Money reporters went on to repeat the distance of the drive from DC to Boston, but not the duration of the drive.  They made the drive successfully, but as they note:

There were some differences with my ride and the one from the New York Times. The weather for mine was about 10 degrees warmer. And I did mine in one day; the reviewer from the Times split it into two.

The NYT reporter stopped overnight and his Tesla’s battery died in the cold.  He didn’t plug it in because he wanted to drive it as a “normal use” car, which it clearly isn’t.

Some of the advice given to the NYT reporter sounds like Tesla is trying to apply Keynesian economics to cars:

It was also Tesla that told me that an hour of charging (at a lower power level) at a public utility in Norwich, Conn., would give me adequate range to reach the Supercharger 61 miles away, even though the car’s range estimator read 32 miles – because, again, I was told that moderate-speed driving would “restore” the battery power lost overnight. That also proved overly optimistic, as I ran out of power about 14 miles shy of the Milford Supercharger and about five miles from the public charging station in East Haven that I was trying to reach.

If you spend some power to run the car and “prime the pump”, the car will magically keep running!

Those people are so foolish they don’t understand that power has to come from somewhere.  It would be like calling Surefire and having them tell you that you can make your flashlight brighter by turning it on for a while, because the batteries don’t run down when used, they’re charged by being used.  You’d be wondering if the guy is an idiot, or if he’s just an asshole on his last day.

It doesn’t work that way with flashlights, or cars.  Doesn’t work that way with government spending or government cars, though some governments and their car companies think it does.  They think wrong.

In addition to the $465,000,000 in taxpayer money for a car that can’t drive 200 miles over two days without spending hours of downtime being plugged into a coal mine, there’s also the fact that if you leave them parked, they might never start again:

One owner, Max Drucker, provided Wired.com with an email he sent to Telsa Motors CEO Elon Musk saying his battery was rendered “dead and unrecoverable” after he left the unplugged car in storage for six weeks.

“I had no idea I could be putting my car at risk,” Drucker told Wired.com by phone. “This was an accident. I didn’t know.”

…

Drucker, first identified by Green Car Reports, took delivery of Roadster No. 340 in May 2009, more than a year after placing a $50,000 deposit for the vehicle. He said he has driven the car 13,000 miles and followed Tesla’s service guidelines. He moved into a rental house while his home was being renovated and parked his Roadster in the garage, leaving it with a 25 percent state of charge. He didn’t touch it for six weeks and found it dead when he attempted to start it earlier this month.

“It wouldn’t do anything,” he said. “It wouldn’t even unlock. It took four guys two hours to get the car out of my garage and onto a flatbed truck. The car wouldn’t even roll.”

He sent the car to the Tesla store in Los Angeles. Three days later, Drucker said, Tesla told him the battery must be replaced at a cost of $32,000 plus tax and labor. He said Tesla told him the warranty will not cover the repair, and his car remains at the Tesla store.

Sounds like a government car.

The government spent $465,000,000 of your money giving it to a South African billionaire to develop a car that costs $100,000 that as a brand new car that runs on coal and can’t go from Boston to DC without special treatment and constantly talking to the manufacturer.

Top Gear reviewed the car and both liked it and found it horribly impractical because it takes forever to charge and it runs out of battery life.  So naturally, Tesla sued them.  And Top Gear won the suit.

“But as a device for moving you and your things around, it is about as much use as a bag of muddy spinach.”

- Jeremy Clarkson on the Tesla Roadster

The Tesla is a government-sanctioned program, forcibly funded by taxpayers (remember at April 15th that you’ve paid for these bags of muddy spinach), with that $465,000,000 given to a South African billionaire so he can have funds to sue anyone who questions the holiness of the car that will stop Manbearpig.

If it was his own car company, then it would be a simple indictment of electric cars as technological throwbacks due to their massive limitations, no matter if they do have good 0-60 times.  But as is, it’s another reminder not only of Milton Friedman’s statement that no one spends money as carefully as the person to whom it belongs; but it’s also an indicator of what government mandates amount to when they meet the real world – fanciful ideas, but nothing that works.

Gunwalker Update: ICE Agent Jaime Zapata’s Family File Wrongful Death Lawsuit

From CBS:

A second wrongful death lawsuit has been filed blaming U.S. government officials involved in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives’ “Operation Fast and Furious,” which allowed thousands of weapons to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

Tuesday, the Texas family of fallen Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jaime Zapata sued the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the former head of the ATF and others they blame in Zapata’s death.

In February 2011, Zapata and his partner Victor Avila were gunned down in Mexico by suspected drug cartel members. Avila survived but was critically injured and has joined Zapata’s family in the suit.

As CBS News reported, at least two of the murder weapons had been trafficked by suspects the ATF had under surveillance but failed to arrest. Zapata’s parents argue that if ATF agents had arrested the suspects and confiscated the weapons early on, the rifles might not have been used in their son’s murder.

Obama’s Failing Ratings and the State of the Union 2013

Via Breitbart, from Gallup:

If it weren’t for Dick Cheney agreeing with Obama on drone strikes, he’d be all in negatives.

Of course, given that even MSN is calling bullshit on Obama’s State of the Union address, maybe it shouldn’t be all that surprising:

• The president claimed that “both parties have worked together to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion.” But that’s only an estimate of deficit reduction through fiscal year 2022, and it would be lower if the White House used a different starting point.

We haven’t reduced the deficit at all, and we’re still running trillion-dollar deficits.

The “estimate of deficit reduction” is like writing out a diet.  You come up with a plan that says you’re only going to eat 2000 calories a day, you’re going to run 3 miles a day, lift weights for an hour, and do another hour of cardio.  By the end of 2013, you should be ready to run in an iron man triathalon.  Of course, when the day after you write that plan, you eat 4000 calories, waddle 30 yards to the fridge and back in a day, lift only food to your mouth, and do another hour of sleeping to rest from all your eating… you won’t find yourself at the end of the year ready to run an iron man triathanlon.

• Obama touted the growth of 500,000 manufacturing jobs over the past three years, but there has been a net loss of 600,000 manufacturing jobs since he took office. The recent growth also has stalled since July 2012.

That job growth just keeps “unexpectedly” stalling, just like the rest of the economy keeps “unexpectedly” stalling.

To continue with the working out analogy, Obama’s growth of jobs is like adding a half hour of running to your daily workout in the evening… after you take out an hour of running from your daily workout in the morning.  You can say you’re running an extra half hour, because it is a different half hour, but you still have a loss.

• He claimed that “we have doubled the distance our cars will go on a gallon of gas.” Actual mileage is improving, but Obama’s “doubled” claim refers to a desired miles-per-gallon average for model year 2025.

The Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards that the government imposes are as fanciful as any other soviet pipe dream.  The party will dictate that it must be so, and when it cannot be produced, oh well – it’s the worker’s fault.  Obama declares that all cars must average 54.5 mpg by 2025.  That’s 12 years from now.  12 years ago, a 2001 Ford Taurus got 19 mpg combined.  Today, a 2013 Ford Taurus gets 23 mpg combined (and that’s ignoring that there was a massive Taurus redesign after some idiot wunderkind at Ford cancelled it).  The 2001 Toyota Camry 4-cylinder got 24 mpg combined.  The 2013 Toyota Camry 4-cylinder gets 28 mpg combined.

Ford and Toyota both make good cars.  The Taurus with a V6 over 12 years was able to be improved by 4 mpg.  The Camry with a 4-cylinder over 12 years was able to be improved by 4 mpg.  The new demands by government are that they go up to 54.5 mpg.  For the Taurus, that’s requiring an increase of 31.5 mpg – more than double.  For the Camry, that’s requiring an increase of 26.5 mpg – almost double.  And remember again, that’s average economy, so for every fun, desirable vehicle like the Ford Raptor, Toyota FJ, Jeep Wrangler, Ford Mustang, Dodge Challenger or any of the light trucks that are made that get in the teens to 20s for mpg, they’ll have to crank out some ridiculous number of vehicles that get above 55 mpg.

Keep in mind this is the Obama government that declared that we need to be running on biofuels that DO NOT EXIST.  They can make mandates, and when the mandates can’t be met, they impose fines, or seize control.  The objective is to fundamentally transform America, and it’s working.  Auto manufacturers will have to either stop making cars people want, or they’ll have to make the ones the government lets them.

And government-made cars suck.

• Obama said the Affordable Care Act “is helping to slow the growth of health care costs.” It may be helping, but the slower growth for health care spending began in 2009, before the law was enacted, and is due at least partly to the down economy.

Obamacare is a trillion-dollar tax hike.  Those taxes will be passed on to consumers.  We’ve already begun to see it, as businesses like Stryker Medical start cutting jobs; and they will be raising costs.  All those taxes have to come from somewhere.  Obamacare is also scheduled to cost every family about $20,000.

There is nothing there that will “slow the growth of health care costs” under Obama policies unless you have a very fanciful vision of the future… just like the 54.5 mpg cars, magic biofuels, increasing jobs, and recovering economy.

The Triumph of Executive Will

Reading the first few paragraphs of this Bloomberg article really begins to give a feel for what the Obama administration is:

When President Barack Obama delivers his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, the biggest question he’ll face will be how to get an ambitious second-term agenda through a divided Congress.

The answer: Go around it.

On climate change, gun control, gay rights, and even immigration, the White House has signaled a willingness to circumvent lawmakers through the use of presidential power. Already, plans are being laid to unleash new executive orders, regulations, signing statements and memorandums designed to push Obama’s programs forward and cement his legacy, according to administration aides and allies.

“The big things that we need to get done, we can’t wait on,” said White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer. “If we can take action, we will take action.”

Congress is unpopular because there’s no face to congress other than that of the whiny weakling John Boehner.  The right hates congress because they’re constantly surrendering, and the left hates congress because the right in congress isn’t surrendering enough.  The low information voter just hears complaints about congress and believes it, rather than looking at their own representative.

There is no congressional media office out trying to paint a picture of congress as a benevolent deliberative body in the same way that Obama has his numerous official and unofficial propaganda wings.  Half the country that supports Obama’s agenda (until they find themselves targeted) represents a great amount of support.  Half the country that supports their half of congress doesn’t support the other half of congress, so popularity remains low.

And in this void, with the elected representatives of the people both hated and demonized, comes that powerful figure to simply work around them.  Checks and balances exist for a reason, and working around those checks and balances – imposed by free people who vote for their representatives to represent them – is someone who will simply make things happen.  There is a certain allure to a “man of action” who will make decisions while others deliberate – it’s those exciting, dynamic “men of action” who seize power that make for compelling stories.  A president who merely presides and works to uphold the rule of law and execute the orders issued by the citizens through congress isn’t as fascinating as a heroic figure who goes it alone and tells off the yammering talkers.

But in governmental context, that’s a dictator.

Atlanta School Shooting, Metal Detectors, And Guards

Drudge has these three stories stacked together to tell a larger story this morning.

Armed Guard Disarmed Teen In Atlanta School Shooting

Atlanta • A student opened fire at his middle school Thursday afternoon, wounding a 14-year-old in the neck before an armed officer working at the school was able to get the gun away, police said.

Wayne LaPierre’s simple statement proves true again, and those who reject defense seem that much more foolish.

Georgia School Had Metal Detectors

ATLANTA (AP) — A middle school where a 14-year-old boy was shot and wounded in the neck by a fellow student had metal detectors, and school officials were investigating how the shooter made it past them.

At airports, we have metal detectors.  The objective is to control points of entry to airports, and guarantee that most weapons are prevented from getting on the plane.  The TSA’s intrusive measures and the treatment of everyone like a criminal (they even molest pilots who could fly the plane into the ground if they so chose) are somewhat akin to gun control – they focus on tools and not on people with ill intentions.  But for the moment, let’s look at how they use metal detectors to deter weapons with metal parts from being brought onto airplanes.  This is airport security:

See those big silver, gray, and black things?  Those are metal detectors.  See those other things that are varied colors up top, mostly blue in the middle, and black on the bottom, with a shiny spot on their top right corner?  Those are guards.  Some may be armed, some may not be armed.  Some just act as screeners, some act as responders.  The metal detector is just a tool.  The person doing the guarding is what makes the difference.

So how could he get past the metal detectors?  By walking.  How did he get past the guards is what people should be asking.

An off-duty armed resource officer who was at the school was able to grab the gun away from the suspect, who was taken into custody. Charges against the shooter were pending, Campos said.

Or they should be asking why the guard who was there was off-duty and why they’re relying on his dedication to be there on his own time – or just luck that he was there, and why they don’t have full-time guards.

And the third story: Newtown Calls For Armed School Officers

The Newtown Board of Education wants more armed police officers in the towns four elementary schools after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary last month.

Last night, they decided to ask the town to approve the request to include one additional full-time Newtown police at each of the elementary schools in next year’s budget.

Today, members of the board will be meeting with state and federal officials about obtaining additional funding for security.

“Our parents are demanding of us that things are made safe and secure and certain measures are put in place,” Chairwoman Debbie Leidlein said. “So we’re being very thoughtful.”

Remember, that federal school security funding was stuff that Obama cut off.

 

Gunwalker Update: Dealings On Holder Contempt Charges

From HotAir:

The Obama administration’s intransigence on recess appointments gave the judiciary an opportunity to finally rule on the practice — and the White House lost a huge legal battle that would effectively handcuff Barack Obama to the Senate for the next four years on appointments. I’m not too surprised to see that they may not want to take chances again, this time on the reach of Congressional contempt charges:

A deal may be near in the Operation-Fast-and-Furious-related dispute that led the House of Representatives to cite Attorney General Eric Holder for contempt last year.

U.S. District Court Judge Amy Jackson was set to hold a key hearing next week in the lawsuit the House filed seeking to enforce its subpoena for records of how the Justice Department responded to Congressional inquiries about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives gunrunning investigation that may have resulted in as many as 2000 weapons flowing to Mexican drug cartels.

However, both the Justice Department and the House asked Jackson Tuesday to put the scheduled hearing off for more than two months as the two sides try to work out a deal that could obviate the need for the lawsuit.

This isn’t a case that should involve any compromise.  Obama and Holder’s ATF is directly responsible for arming narcoterrorist cartels.  This has been proven.  The deaths of hundreds (if not thousands by now) of our Mexican neighbors and at least two US law enforcement agents are because of Holder’s DOJ/ATF actions, and at the very least have been covered up by Obama’s executive privilege claims.

There should be no deal other than release of all documents so that Oversight & Reform can continue their investigation.  This is a mass murder case, not a procedural squabble.

Imperial Gun Control Roundup For January 15, 2013

Drudge has been on the ball on this.  That he’s on the ball isn’t really that big of a surprise, but that he’s recognized how important the right to keep and bear arms and the attempts to disarm the citizen both are is a testament to good journalism.

Joe Biden’s still talking about 19 executive actions or 19 executive orders.  Which is about the same as saying “the president will take unilateral executive action against the right to free speech and establish speech controls and speech registration for those who want to exercise the right for what we say its intended purpose was”, and every bit as chilling.

The Washington Examiner says Obama’s going to surround himself with children in order to tug at heartstrings and get people do disarm the Jews once and for all for the good of the children.  Did I say the Jews?  I meant the freedmen blacks.  Did I say the blacks?  I meant the American Indian tribes.  Did I say the Amerind tribes?  I meant the issei and nisei Japanese.  Wait, am I just listing minorities who’ve been oppressed by government?

Meanwhile, the evil Newt Gingrich, with a heart two sizes two small and filled with spiders; who hates children and all the Whos in Whoville, suggests that if gun control works, why not meet in Chicago?  He must hate children to say things like that.

And from Politico, CNN’s president supports Piers Morgan’s assault on the Constitution and the natural rights of man.  Yes, you shouldn’t be able to defend yourself because some sniveling twerp who as Daily Mirror editor fabricated a story to implicate British troops and was kicked out of his job because of it.  He’s a propagandist for terrorists, and a willing insurgent against his own nation.  He didn’t stand for any noble principle by lying about Tommy Atkins; and he’s not now.  He has been receiving more ratings by being a swaggering douchenozzle, but so what?  Jersey Shore did the same thing for several seasons, and then never engaged in any campaigns against the Constitution.

Of course, this is all about saving the children.  And there’s no better representative of that desire to save children than Joe Biden’s crack team of anti-Constitution thugs.  And no smattering of would-be tyrants is complete without tyrannical offspring – in the case of Biden’s task force advisor officer Thomas Nee, whose son spent 9 months in prison for planning a school shooting using his father’s police handgun.

President of the National Assocation of Police Officers and Boston Police Officer Thomas Nee is a member of Vice President Joe Biden’s gun control task force, which was created by President Obama in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Nee’s son, Joseph Nee, was convicted in 2008 for planning to commit mass murder of students and teachers at Marshfield High School in Massachusetts, similar to that of Columbine in 1999. After spending nine months in prison, Nee’s conviction was upheld by the Supreme Judicial Court.

But not all the news is bad, horrible, insulting death of the republic stuff.

The NRA, which represents law-abiding gun owners by virtue of the fact that they voluntarily pay for their representation, has had an influx of over 250,000 members since the murders in Connecticut prompted anti-rights politicians to dance in the blood of children.

Sentator Rand Paul is a very sharp guy, and opposes what Obama and his ilk are doing.

”I’m against having a king,” said the Senator.  ”I think having a monarch is what we fought the American Revolution over, and someone who wants to bypass the Constitution, bypass Congress, that’s someone who wants to act like a king or monarch.”

…

Bypassing Congress is an aggressive method of ruling without representation.  It’s supposed to be difficult to force sweeping national agendas upon a free people.  The modern appetite for swift, “efficient,” all-powerful centralized government is a denial of that principle.  It’s tough to find issues where Rand Paul agrees with, say, Harry Reid, isn’t it?  Good.  That difficulty defines the boundaries of what the federal government is supposed to be doing.  Battles over the extension of those boundaries should be nice and vicious.  The American people deserve no less.