eTrace = National Gun Registry

In regard to this JPFO alert comes this response:

Are you aware that the BATFE has for several years been aggressively offering eTrace to local law enforcement agencies? They have the agency sign a memorandum of agreement and then the agency can run traces on any firearm they wish. The catch is that the agency has to agree to run a trace on ALL CRIME GUNS. The MOU defines a CRIME GUN as:

“The parties agree that a ‘crime gun’ is defined as “any firearm that is illegally possessed, used in a crime, taken into police custody, or suspected by law enforcement officials of having been used in a crime.”

The key word in this definition is “taken into police custody.” I have been a law enforcement officer for over thirty years and held positions up to the rank of Detective Commander. Only a very small portion of firearms that are taken into custody could possibly be considered a “crime gun.” TV and movies aside, we run into very few “smoking gun” cases where we have a firearm left at the scene a crime, and it is a rare instance that knowing who was the first lawful purchaser of a firearm would serve any investigatory purpose. We take hundreds of firearms into custody as found property, safe-keeping, recovered-stolen or in possession of individuals who have been arrested. In all those cases, including arrests, it is of very little consequence who bought the gun from Acme Sporting Goods ten years ago.

Please follow the link and read the whole thing.

A reminder

Obama’s communist cronies Ayers and Dohrm dedicated their manifesto to Robert Kennedy’s assassin.

Significance via Zombietime, The Daily Telegraph and Billy Beck.

(One of) The Big Lie(s)

A good fisking by Robert Higgs, via The Independent Institute:

As soon as I saw the headline of an August 10 article by financial columnist Peter Cohan, I knew that something was terribly wrong. It reads: “How did the politics of small government lead to big government bailouts?” This is akin to asking, How did the extinction of the elephants lead to Barack Obama’s election as president? If you make a claim of the form “A caused B,” but A never happened, then you are wasting your time by delving into the historical details of this bogus relationship.

Yet we continue to see one example after another of what suspicious readers may be tempted to view as the Big Lie that deregulation or other obliging government measures caused the present economic mess. I won’t go so far as to characterize this claim as a Big Lie. Although some of its purveyors, acting out of partisan motives, surely know that they are blowing smoke, others may simply suffer from economic ignorance, analytical confusion, or loss of historical memory. In any event, the public is ill-served by commentators who purport to speak with authority about our current economic troubles and related government’s policies, yet peddle this worse-than-sophomoric tale.

The enemy of my enemy is not my friend

But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy watching one enemy destroy another.

Pass the popcorn.

via Two–Four

Reasoned Discourse breaks out at the 2A Blog Bash

Read about it at The War on Guns.

The evil of democracy

Columbia Conservative Examiner: Democracy = Majority Rule = Tyranny

Suppose that the entirety of our society, from top to bottom, from the federal government to local government, was run according to ‘majority rule,’ which is commonly known as ‘democracy.’

I can state unequivocally that such a move would be the single largest disaster to be perpetrated on the human race since the Holocaust.

And he is absolutely correct.  In numerous discussions with hive-minded collectivists who think we live in, or should live in, a pure democracy, there are easy points to be made that will have them shutting up fairly quickly.  But I think my favorite is this:  In a pure democracy, 51% of the people can vote to exterminate the other 49%.

My goodness

A new DHS report that puts ALL “conservatives” into the “domestic terrorist” classification seems to have caused something of an uproar.

Well, it’s nice to be able to welcome so many new people into the fold, but really, we did try to warn you.

via The Liberty Sphere

Kumar appointed Minister of Cinematic Propaganda

Worthy comments here.

Just a spoonful of sugar

Mary Poppins’ ghost appeared in a Google Street View photo.

How did it get there? Google put it there. They have done this in other places and with other fictional characters such as the Paddington Bear and Sherlock Holmes.

So what?

So this:  if they can put fictional characters where they aren’t, they can put real individuals where they aren’t.

This shouldn’t be news to anyone; the technology to do this has existed for quite some time.  But expect them to graduate from light-heartedly putting famous fictional characters into actual photos to light-heartedly putting actual individuals into actual photos.  Such falsified images will be recognized as false but used for propaganda anyway because the mindless herds will think it is so cool, and because to them, the idea is more important than the fact.

Just wait for it.  And don’t forget to use plenty of sugar.

Robert Powell has been allowed to resign

News snippet at NFL FanHouse.

That’s not good enough.  Until I hear he has been reduced to gathering aluminum cans from the side of the road because no one else will hire him, I won’t believe justice has been done.

Yes, remember

Whose Paranoid remembers Goliad:

“FELLOW SOLDIERS: In the order of Providence we are this day called upon to pay the last sad offices of respect to the remains of the noble and heroic band, who, battling for our sacred rights, have fallen beneath the ruthless hand of a tyrant.

I have not talked much about such things, but I was born, raised and live in Texas, and such events as this mean a great deal to me.

Go thou henceforth and read the whole thing.

Innocence is irrelevant

Guilty:  Because we say so, because we have the power to say so, and that’s how we keep you in your place.

DUI BLOG : Bad Drunk Driving Laws, False Evidence and a Fading Constitution

Minneapolis, MN. Mar. 25 – That Daryl Fleck , 55, may not have intended to drive when he was found sleeping drunk in the driver’s seat of his vehicle, parked in his home lot at 11:30 p.m. “is immaterial,” Judge Terri Stoneburner argued in a Minnesota Appeals Court decision that upheld Fleck’s drunk driving conviction…

A sleeping drunk with no intent to drive or motion to constitute driving can now be charged under Minnesota’s Driving While Impaired statute. Make no mistake: This ruling holds that the potential to commit crime constitutes actual crime, and one is guilty until proven innocent. “There is no evidence his purpose for being in the vehicle was inconsistent with driving,” the opinion stated.

By the same “logic,” if you are found admiring someone else’s cool car you are guilty of car theft, and if you are caught window-shopping you are guilty of burglary.

Via Two–Four, who has a quote that you also must read.

Obama-Jugend

From the Minneapolis Conservative Examiner: The secrets behind the GIVE Act passed by Congress

Other interesting verbiage from HR 1388 which passed with a 321 to 105 vote:

expand and strengthen service-learning programs through year-round opportunities, including during the summer months, to improve the education of children and youth and to maximize the benefits of national and community service, in order to renew the ethic of civic responsibility and the spirit of community to children and youth throughout the United States

Civilian Community Corps shall be called the “National Civilian Community Corps” [and that is a very interesting and telling change of a single word --Darkman]

the Director determines appropriate “Uniforms”

From the Misc. section, #6104: (6) Whether a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed, and how such a requirement could be implemented in a manner that would strengthen the social fabric of the Nation and overcome civic challenges by bringing together people from diverse economic, ethnic, and educational backgrounds.

Uniforms, nationalism mandatory service for young people.

Let me put this very bluntly:  before you take my children, you will have to kill me.

When we have an army…

Obama volunteers hunt budget support in Birmingham, Alabama:

Those who gathered at Kelly Ingram Park in downtown Birmingham were urged to enlist others who share Obama’s vision and to stay away from trying to convert naysayers.

“We’re looking for supporters,” said DeHaven of Hoover, one of the event’s organizers. “We’re not looking for a fight. That will come later, when we have an army.”

The volunteers are part of Organizing for America, the same grassroots, national network credited in large part with Obama’s quick rise from obscurity to president. Birmingham and 11 other sites statewide were part of a national push this weekend by Organizing for America to trumpet Obama’s spending proposal.

Across the metro area, volunteers gave their opinions about why Obama’s plan is good for the country’s future. Then they asked those willing to sign a pledge of support for the budget. Supporters’ e-mail addresses and other contact information were collected, to keep people engaged and to recruit more volunteers.

Did you get that? This is the first step: building a database of like-minded allies for further “education,” and motivation to bring in still more in a governmental pyramid scheme.  When the collective gets big enough, their operations will change from persuasion to force.

via Sipsey Street Irregulars

Legalized Armed Robbery

TENAHA:

You can drive into this dusty fleck of a town near the Texas-Louisiana border if you’re African-American, but you might not be able to drive out of it — at least not with your car, your cash, your jewelry or other valuables.That’s because the police here have allegedly found a way to strip motorists, many of them black, of their property without ever charging them with a crime. Instead, they offer out-of-towners a grim choice: voluntarily sign over your belongings to the town or face felony charges of money laundering or other serious crimes.

More than 140 people reluctantly accepted that deal from June 2006 to June 2008, according to court records. Among them were a black grandmother from Akron, Ohio, who surrendered $4,000 in cash after Tenaha police pulled her over, and an interracial couple from Houston, who gave up more than $6,000 after police threatened to seize their children and put them into foster care, the court documents show. Neither the grandmother nor the couple were charged with or convicted of any crime.

If an armed gang attempted to stop your car and rob you, you would be well within your rights to respond with lethal force to protect yourself and your property.  Unfortunately, these cowards are hiding behind badges and uniforms, which the vast majority have been conditioned to accept as signs of authority.

They are still nothing but an armed gang, running amok in the absence of anyone capable of stopping them.  They should be treated as such.

New Hampshire legislature files resolution declaring state’s rights

From Pat Dollard:

The New Hampshire state legislature took an unbelievably bold step Monday by introducing a resolution to declare certain actions by the federal government to completely totally void and warning that certain future acts will be viewed as a “breach of peace” with the states themselves that risks “nullifying the Constitution.”

This act by New Hampshire is a clear warning to the federal government that they could face being stripped of their power by the States (presumably through civil war!

The remarkable document outlines with perfect clarity, some basics long forgotten. For instance, it reminds Congress “That the Constitution of the United States, having delegated to Congress a power to punish treason, counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States, piracies, and felonies committed on the high seas, and offences against the law of nations, slavery, and no other crimes whatsoever;. . . . . therefore all acts of Congress which assume to create, define, or punish crimes, other than those so enumerated in the Constitution are altogether void, and of no force;”

Federal gun crime laws? Void. Federal drug crime laws? Void. The gazzillion other federal criminal laws that deal with anything other than the specific enumerated crimes? ALL VOID.

One would think that if any lawyer anywhere in the entire country was worth his salt, all federal criminal trials would have ended years ago. This seems to prove that most lawyers are dullards.

New Hampshire deals a complete death blow to the pending federal hate crimes legislation by pointing out “That, therefore, all acts of Congress of the United States which do abridge the freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, are not law, but are altogether void, and of no force; . . . . .”

Later in the Resolution, New Hampshire makes clear what the feds are now risking if they proceed further: The removal of all powers from the federal government by the States!

Full text of resolution at the link.

via Whose Paranoid

Is this what passes for stirring rhetoric these days?

Via Sipsey Street, we have this masterfully obsequious declaration:

As a member, I expect the National Rifle Association to fight gun control in the 111th Congress. If they have to get down on their hands and knees and kiss Harry Reid’s rosey red ass as part of a deal to stop a gun control bill, I’ll buy them the lip balm.

Where to begin?  I don’t want to get dragged into this mess, because I believe it to be a stupid, pointless waste of time and energy, but this is just too much.  Some may continue to call it “pragmatism,” but it is not.  It is simply denial.

Here is the truth as I see it:  You aren’t going to get a chance to kiss anyone’s ass.  It just isn’t going to happen that way this time.  There isn’t even going to be an old-style “compromise,” which was a compromise only in the socialistic newspeak meaning of the term:  that is, we lose a little instead of a lot and they grant us nothing.  This time, they will take everything.  Or, they will try.

I have said it before:  they have tasted blood this time.  They like it, and they want more.  They will be going into a feeding frenzy, mutilating us into oblivion with a million little laws.  There will be no way to remain both “law-abiding” and free.  It’s one or the other.  They aren’t going to let you have both anymore.

There won’t be any deal.  They are going to tell you how it goes down, and if you try to strike a deal they will laugh in your face and bring the boot down on the back of your neck.

Doesn’t anyone get it?  They are rabid dogs who have taken control, and they will do exactly what they want.  No legal sleight-of-hand is going to even slow them down this time.  The situation is beyond that.

I pray that I will be proven wrong.  But my faith is weak, and every day I see further evidence that I won’t be.

I guess it depends on the definition of “intact”

American Chronicle | How the President Undermined Civil Liberties:

Just look at how the president has destroyed our civil rights. A few examples, below, should suffice to make you understand we no longer live in a free and democratic country.

Examples follow, well worth reading, but then in spite of the introductory paragraph, a seemingly contradictory conclusion:

Despite these abuses, we muddled through their administrations with our liberties intact. Despite the hand-wring in the press for the last eight years, it appears we have survived George Bush as well. Let us hope we can say the same after four years of President Obama.

Have we, now?  You list these abuses that the government has gotten away with, and you still say that “we muddled through…with our liberties intact.”

I ask again:  Have we?  Have we, really?

Lessons in Ecofascism

I would like to draw your attention to a set of essays that I think are very important, if not required reading.  I have read only the first one so far.  I hope to digest the second and post some quotes from it tomorrow.  I am referring to Ecofascism:  Lessons from the German Experience.  These quotes are from the first essay, Fascist Ideology: The Green Wing of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents by Peter Staudenmaier.

Quote 1:

The chief vehicle for carrying this ideological constellation to prominence was the youth movement, an amorphous phenomenon which played a decisive but highly ambivalent role in shaping German popular culture during the first three tumultuous decades of this century. Also known as the Wandervögel (which translates roughly as ‘wandering free spirits’), the youth movement was a hodge-podge of countercultural elements, blending neo-Romanticism, Eastern philosophies, nature mysticism, hostility to reason, and a strong communal impulse in a confused but no less ardent search for authentic, non-alienated social relations. Their back-to-the-land emphasis spurred a passionate sensitivity to the natural world and the damage it suffered. They have been aptly characterized as ‘right-wing hippies,’ for although some sectors of the movement gravitated toward various forms of emancipatory politics (though usually shedding their environmentalist trappings in the process), most of the Wandervöge were eventually absorbed by the Nazis. This shift from nature worship to Führer worship is worth examining.

Quote 2:

Eschewing societal transformation in favor of personal change, an ostensibly apolitical disaffection can, in times of crisis, yield barbaric results.

The attraction such perspectives exercised on idealistic youth is clear: the enormity of the crisis seemed to enjoin a total rejection of its apparent causes.

Quote 3:

The authoritarian implications of this view of humanity and nature become even clearer in the context of the Nazis’ emphasis on holism and organicism. In 1934 the director of the Reich Agency for Nature Protection, Walter Schoenichen, established the following objectives for biology curricula: “Very early, the youth must develop an understanding of the civic importance of the ‘organism’, i.e. the co-ordination of all parts and organs for the benefit of the one and superior task of life.”

Quote 4:

To make this dismaying and discomforting analysis more palatable, it is tempting to draw precisely the wrong conclusion –namely, that even the most reprehensible political undertakings sometimes produce laudable results. But the real lesson here is just the opposite: Even the most laudable of causes can be perverted and instrumentalized in the service of criminal savagery. The “green wing” of the NSDAP was not a group of innocents, confused and manipulated idealists, or reformers from within; they were conscious promoters and executors of a vile program explicitly dedicated to inhuman racist violence, massive political repression and worldwide military domination. Their ‘ecological’ involvements, far from offsetting these fundamental commitments, deepened and radicalized them. In the end, their configuration of environmental politics was directly and substantially responsible for organized mass murder.No aspect of the Nazi project can be properly understood without examining its implication in the holocaust. Here, too, ecological arguments played a crucially malevolent role. Not only did the “green wing” refurbish the sanguine antisemitism of traditional reactionary ecology; it catalyzed a whole new outburst of lurid racist fantasies of organic inviolability and political revenge. The confluence of anti-humanist dogma with a fetishization of natural ‘purity’ provided not merely a rationale but an incentive for the Third Reich’s most heinous crimes. Its insidious appeal unleashed murderous energies previously untapped. Finally, the displacement of any social analysis of environmental destruction in favor of mystical ecology served as an integral component in the preparation of the final solution:

To explain the destruction of the countryside and environmental damage, without questioning the German people’s bond to nature, could only be done by not analysing environmental damage in a societal context and by refusing to understand them as an expression of conflicting social interests. Had this been done, it would have led to criticism of National Socialism itself since that was not immune to such forces. One solution was to associate such environmental problems with the destructive influence of other races. National Socialism could then be seen to strive for the elimination of other races in order to allow the German people’s innate understanding and feeling of nature to assert itself, hence securing a harmonic life close to nature for the future.

This is the true legacy of ecofascism in power: “genocide developed into a necessity under the cloak of environment protection.”

It is a long, somewhat difficult, somewhat disquieting read. Arm yourself with your favorite beverage and/or smoke, and be warned that it wasn’t written for fifth-graders.

That’s gotta hurt

Arrested Illinois governor released after Senate seat scandal:

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was arrested today on charges he brazenly conspired to sell or trade the U.S. Senate seat left vacant by President-elect Barack Obama to the highest bidder in what a federal prosecutor called a “corruption crime spree.”

U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald told a news conference prosecutors make “no allegations” Obama was aware of any alleged scheming.

Obama said today he is saddened by allegations that Blagojevich tried to trade favors for the Senate seat and said he had no contact with the governor or his office on the matter.

Blagojevich also was charged with illegally threatening to withhold state assistance to Tribune Co., the owner of the Chicago Tribune, in the sale of Wrigley Field, according to a federal criminal complaint. In return for state assistance, Blagojevich allegedly wanted members of the paper’s editorial board who had been critical of him fired.

“We were in the middle of a corruption crime spree and we wanted to stop it,” Fitzgerald said today, calling the corruption charges against Blagojevich “a truly new low.”

Federal investigators bugged the governor’s campaign offices and placed a tap on his home phone and Chicago FBI chief Robert Grant said even seasoned investigators were “stunned” by what they heard on the tapes.

Blagojevich spokesman Lucio Guerrero said the governor’s office did not have immediate comment on the charges but issued a statement saying the “allegations do nothing to impact the services, duties or function of the state.”

A federal judge this afternoon ordered Blagojevich released on his own recognizance.

U.S. District Judge Nan Nolan said “Good afternoon, governor” in greeting Blagojevich at the bond hearing. The governor was wearing sweat pants, gym shoes and an athletic shirt.

He was released on a signature bond that specifies that he’ll forfeit $4,500 bond if he doesn’t appear in court. Blagojevich also was ordered to relinquish his passport and his firearm owner’s identification card.

Read the whole thing, and remember that this is the political machine that produced The One.