2nd Amendment Watch: Appellate Court Uphold Chicago's Gun Ban

Wednesday, June 03, 2009

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2nd Amendment Watch: Appellate Court Uphold Chicago's Gun Ban

A U.S. Court of Appeals panel voted today to upheld Chicago's gun laws in a ruling today against an NRA court challenge.

Chicago's law is one of the strictest in the country, banning handguns, concealed weapons and automatic and semi-automatic weapons in the hands of private citizens.

The unanimous three-judge panel ruled today that a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year, which recognized an individual right to bear arms under the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, didn’t apply to states and municipalities. 

“The Supreme Court has rebuffed requests to apply the second amendment to the states,” U.S. Circuit Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote, upholding lower court decisions last year to throw out suits against Chicago and its suburb of Oak Park, Illinois.

The Fairfax, Virginia-based NRA sued the municipalities in June 2008, one day after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller struck down a hand-gun ban in the U.S. capital district encompassing Washington. 

“We clearly disagree with the court’s conclusion,” NRA attorney William N. Howard, a partner in Chicago’s Freeborn & Peters LLP, said in a telephone interview. “The next step will be an appeal to the Supreme Court.” 

In Heller, the high court struck down Washington’s 32-year- old gun law, which barred most residents of the city from owning handguns and required that all legal firearms be kept unloaded and either disassembled or under trigger lock. Six residents had challenged the law, saying they wanted firearms available in their homes for self-defense. 

“Heller dealt with a law enacted under the authority of the national government,” Easterbrook wrote, “while Chicago and Oak Park are subordinate bodies of a state.” 

This seems to be specious legal reasoning to me. The Constitution specifically states that any matters not covered by it were to be left to the states. That obviously does not include the Second Amendment. If the Constitution is indeed the law of the land, it would seem to me that it would supersede state and municipal laws. Based on the judge's way of thinking, Los Angeles or Detroit could legalize slavery or coin their own money without running afoul of the feds. 

We'll see what develops...stay tuned.

Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Oooh, Oooh, Looky! We Found Us A Rightwing Nutcase!

It took some time,but the Obama Administration and the Angry Left finally have their Rightwing nutcase poster boy to flesh out that ridiculousDepartment of Homeland security report by Janet Napolitano.

He's Scott Roeder, who murdered famed abortionist Dr. George Tiller over the weekend. Judging by the responses from the Obama Administration and their lackeys in the dinosaur media, you'd think that Roeder was Osama bin-Laden personified and that Dr. Tiller was Albert Schweitzer.

Attorney General Holder immediately announced that he was sending federal marshalls to protect abortion clinics throughout the country, as though Roeder was part of an ongoing , organized jihad instead of an isolated nut case. Much has been made of Roeder's connection's to the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue. After all, he posted on their message board...and he actually had the publicly available office phone number of Cheryl Sullenger, the senior policy adviser for Operation Rescue who was *! gasp!* convicted of conspiring to bomb an abortion clinic over twenty years ago.

I guess conspiring to bomb something is less acceptable than actually doing it if you have a wealthy family to get you off and are a good pal of the current occupant of the White House.

I use that word jihad advisedly, by the way. On the same day the story about Tiller being murdered broke, there was another story about a home grown jihadi, a convert to Islam being arrested after firing on a recruiting station, killing one soldier and seriously wounding another. The White House has yet to issue a statement on that one, and I don't see US marshalls fanning out to protect the nation's recruiting centers. 

Can you imagine how that one would play out in Berkeley?

As for the media, they're ignoring the recruiting center sniper story for the most part, just as they've always mostly ignored numerous other violence and attempted terrorism by home grown jihadis.

But Dr. George Tiller? To hear the press talk, the late Dr. Tiller was a saintly, heroic character rather than an unapologetic, brutal man who bragged about specializing in late term abortions. He made millions penetrating healthy, near full term babies' heads with a surgical knife, vacuuming their brains out, collapsing their skulls and pulling them out of the womb.

And while the dinosaur media would never infer that shooting a couple of soldiers, sniping at infidels in DC or plotting to attack Fort Dix, Brooklyn synagogues or a Jewish community center has anything to do with radical Islam here at home, Scott Roeder is, of course, a direct symbol of all the right wing crazies out there that need to be suppressed.

Am I excusing what Scott Roeder did? Nah. It was murder, plain and simple, and he deserves to swing for it if he's found guilty.

But I can't help noticing the discrepancy here. By his own admission, the late Dr. Tiller was responsible for killing almost 30,000 babies. And while that carnage wasn't illegal , the idea that the perpetrator was somehow a heroic and decent man makes my flesh crawl.

Funny thing...whenever violent jihad rears its head in our society, we're constantly assured by the very same sort of folks who are lionizing George Tiller today that while the terrorism is to be condemned, we have to look at the underlying causes. After all, these people have grievances, and you have to understand their rage. 

But you could say exactly the same thing back at them about Scott Roeder.

As for me,I'm not a fan of murder - no matter who commits it.

Race Carding Sotomayor

Is Sonia Sotomayor a racist?

To listen to Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and a huge chunk of the conservative punditry, you would have to assume that Barack Obama's first Supreme Court nominee fits that description.The chief evidence that Judge Sotomayor might have some interesting ideas in this regard are a speech she made at Berkeley in 2002 in which stated that a wise Latina woman would come up with better decisions than a white male and her presumptuous ruling on Ricci vs DeStefano, an egregious reverse discrimination case now before the Supreme Court where her decision will likely be reversed.

It’s worth noting that Judge Sotomayor's remarks at Berkeley were not an offhand comment or a response to a question but part of a prepared speech, and thus something she obviously thought about beforehand. It's also worth noting that it is the Obama Administration that has defended the judge's remarks as 'poorly phrased' and attempted to spin them, not Judge Sotomayor herself.

One can only imagine how long a white male Supreme Court nominee would last if he had a statement on the record that as a white male, he had better judgment and reasoning than some idiot Latina female 'because she hasn't lived that life.'

What Judge Sotomayor is doing merely mirrors her background. She's a creature of academia, like our president.

In the academic world, identity politics, quotas and groupthink in the name of diversity are acceptable as mainstream thought to the point where this kind of thinking is hardly even questioned anymore, and Judge Sotomayor is likely bewildered at what all the fuss is about.

There’s absolutely no question these ideas will color her judgments, with her ruling on Ricci Vs. DeStefano being a good example.

Does her acceptance of identity politics and group grievance make her a racist? Probably, even if an unconscious one. But it's pointless to attack her on the grounds that she is actually is one . Assaults based on attacking this sort of covert racism are sheer emotion and ultimately a failure. We have no means to monitor what’s in someone’s heart nor is it likely to play in the media if presented from the right side of the spectrum. That’s the sort of assault the Left is better able to get away with, and we saw examples of it in the confirmation hearings of Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork.

Instead, it makes much more sense to actually explore her judicial philosophy with the right questions. How does she view the Second Amendment? How about First Amendment freedoms, or precedence of international law over US courts? What is her inherent view of the judicial branch of government and its role? Can she explain her statements about the inherent differences between groups, and what advantages her superior wisdom as a Latina grant her over a white male judge, and how that affects her judicial philosophy? What role does she feel that 'empathy' has in judicial proceedings, in view of the fact that the oath Sotomayor will swear if she becomes a Supreme Court justice says: "I do solemnly swear that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich . . . . So help me God”?

Barring a major scandal, Sonia Sotomayor is going to be confirmed. But it is vital that her ideology be exposed, so that if the Democrats vote to confirm her, the nation at large understands that the Democrats and the Obama Administration now own that ideology and are endorsing it.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

This is a rare moment for conservatives to publicly take the warped mirror of identity politics and judicial activism and hold it up plainly for the American people to see in all its inherent ugliness. Let them decide for themselves if that bigoted view really feels right for our beloved Republic.

We have here an opportunity that shouldn’t be squandered. As I seem to recall somebody saying, you never want to waste a good crisis.

(This fell through the cracks over at American Thinker, but I'd like to thank Larrey Anderson for his considerable help with it. He improved whatever merits it has immensely.)

Monday, June 01, 2009

Bye Bye GM

General Motors, an American Institution went bust today,filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this morning.

As with Chrysler, the UAW made out like a bandit while the bondholders, including a number of retirees, took a total hosing.The entire bankruptcy and the GM restructuring plan are the product of a secretive, unaccountable Obama Administration task force.

The government now owns 60% of GM in exchange for an additional $30 billion in addition to the $20 billion GM was already given, essentially to keep the UAW afloat. The Canadian government kicked in for an additional 12.5% while the UAW will walk away with 17.5%. The remaining 10% will be owned by existing bondholders.

This is not going to be painless. Just closing of hundreds of GM and Chrysler dealerships (run by GOP donors, no doubt) is expected to cost more than 100,000 jobs.

The biggest hosing, of course, will be taken by the American tax payer and consumer. We'll be footing the bill in more ways than one.

We will see small, boxy little go-karts produced out of GM and Chrysler, stuff Americans would never normally buy but will be forced to..because there's no going to be any choice. That's what Obama's 39 MPG CAFE standards are all about.They'll do it not by making existing cars more fuel efficient but by simply eliminating SUVs and larger, more comfortable vehicles. With $5.00 per gallon gas thanks to cap and trade, no one's going to be able to afford to run a decent size vehicle anyway except the wealthy elites.

Obama will run GM based on politics, and that means the UAW and the various environmentalist groups.

GM will never be profitable again, simply because no executive is going to risk taking on the Unions and risking his job.

Once GM runs through this additional $30 billion ( and believe me, they will)they'll simply come to the taxpayers for more. And Obama and the Democrats in Congress will give it to them, because it's about votes and power, not economic recovery.

Don't like it? Sorry, folks. Those Obama Tickets you bought in November are good until at least 2010..and maybe even longer.

Two Army Recruiters Shot By Muslim In Little Rock

This morning, it was reported that two army recruiters were victims of a drive by shooting this morning:

Police in Arkansas say a military recruiter has been killed in a shooting at an Army-Navy recruiting office in Little Rock and a second recruiter has been wounded.

Little Rock police Lt. Terry Hastings said one recruiter was fatally wounded when a man inside a black SUV fired shots at the office in West Little Rock at about 10:30 a.m.

The SUV was stopped on a highway a short time later and a suspect was taken into custody.

The name of the arrestee has now been released. He's Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad — a 24-year-old Little Rock resident formerly known as Carlos Bledsoe who was charged with degree murder and 15 counts of engaging in a terrorist act. The terrorist charges were added because th eshots were fired at an occupied building.

Not much else is known, but I bet I can tell you this man's story...criminal record, converted to Islam in prison by a wahabi Imam, and associated with a radical mosque since his release.

The enemy is definitely inside the gates.It is astonishing how many times this scenario gets repeated without any attempt to end the cycle.

UPDATE: Well, whaddya know..the first part of my guess is proven correct. Now, let's wait and see if he converted in prison.

Funny, this murder isn't getting anything near the play in the dinosaur media that the murder of the abortionist Dr. Tiller is.

You'd think the press had an agenda or something...

Saudi royal: "U.S. can't be energy-independent"

So says Prince Turki al-Faisal, former ambassador to Washington and a key member of the Saudi royal family:

"You can't get rid of oil. You can't get rid of fossil fuels — gas and coal — unless you want to price yourself out of existence," Prince Turki al-Faisal, former ambassador to Washington, told editors and reporters at The Washington Times.

"I'd hope that the general public in the United States would be wiser than to be deceived into thinking that the U.S. can ever be energy independent," he said.

"The U.S. has rising energy needs despite the economic downturn," Prince Turki said. "If you are going to be paying for wind, electric and solar energy equivalents that cost five or 10 times more than it costs to use oil, you are going to price yourself out of the market. You are going to lose whatever competitiveness you have in your products."

"Politicians, when they do that,{promise energy independence} I think they are misleading their publics," he said.

During his election campaign last year, President Obama said, "I will set a clear goal as president. In 10 years, we will finally end our dependence on oil in the Middle East."

In one sense what Prince Turki is saying is the simple truth - abandoning fossil fuels, especially combined with Obama's cap and trade nonsense is a road to bankruptcy.

But it's also worth remembering that the US is the Saudi Arabia of coal, with an estimated 400-600 years worth of supply.and that we can gasify coal at about fifty bucks a barrel or less. It's a proven technology that's been around since WWII (Hitler used it to keep his war machine running) and has been vastly improved since. And that doesn't include our resources of shale oil or America's own oil sources, which we're barely utilizing at the moment.

There's also nuclear power, something the Europeans and the Japanese embraced after the Arabs turned off the spigot in the 1970's.

And we could also try building a few refineries, which is where the real bottleneck in gasoline occurs.

Add all this to ramping up our domestic production and some basic conservation measures and and the US could achieve energy independence in a remarkably short space of time..certainly within one four-year presidential term. That would buy us the time we need and then some to develop the new energy technologies for the future. Not to mention a slew of high paid US jobs, a boost for our economy, more oil to sell to other countries and strategic leverage in certain areas where we need it.

Of course, if we did that two things would happen. First, government figures would no longer have the same access to what I like to call the Arab Oil Producers Government Pension Augmentation Plan, where Presidential libraries, honorariums, consulting fees,retainers, investments in certain financial instruments and foundations get paid for by certain cash flush oil producing nations.

Second, government would take a major tax hit,because higher gas prices mean higher tax revenues. In my native state that means the county, the state and the feds garner about 80 cents plus per gallon in taxes - the higher the price, the more they make. On power, it's a whopping ten percent of the bill locally.

In case you wondered, that's why the US isn't energy self-sufficient yet.