Time for another roundup of this and that:
Posts Tagged ‘Guns’
LinkSwarm For February 15, 2012
Wednesday, February 15th, 2012LinkSwarm for February 3, 2012
Friday, February 3rd, 2012Texas Senate Race Update for January 31, 2012
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012Glenn Beck: “There’s no way you’re ever going to get elected. You make too much sense.”
The Case for Rick Perry
Monday, January 2nd, 2012Ace of Spades makes his case for Rick Perry here.
Since that piece came out December 19, it’s hardly cutting edge news. But I’ve been ruminating on it for a while to try and figure out if I have anything more to add. I think I do. And with the Iowa Caucuses looming, I probably should.
I haven’t covered much of the 2012 Presidential race, mainly because I’ve been focusing on the Texas Senate Race and everyone and their dog was blogging every twist in the POTUSA race.
OMG! Ron Paul is up 3 points!
Plus I don’t have cable, so I wouldn’t be able to watch the interminable numerous debates.
Finally, a baseball team the Astros can beat
Which is why I didn’t see Perry commit his brain freezes, of which there were many. (My theory is that he was still hopped up on goofballs from his back operation.)
Percocet makes me see tiny little Jim Hightowers, and I have to grab and crush each and every one of them
Having lived in Texas for the entirety of Rick Perry’s tenure as governor, I can attest that he is not a perfect candidate. There have been times (Gardasil, the Trans-Texas Corridor) when he’s strayed from conservative principles. And he’s not as polished as Mitt Romney or as articulate as Newt Gingrich.
But Perry isn’t running against the second coming of Ronald Reagan, or even Sarah Palin. Every other major Republican contender is not only at least as flawed, they’re considerably more so.
By process of elimination, that leaves Perry. As I said before, Perry isn’t perfect, but he has a record on holding the line on government spending and enabling job creation that puts Romney to shame. One again, let’s go to the charts that the indispensable Will Franklin of Willisms has provided on Texas job creation:
And the case for Perry over Romney (again thanks to WILLisms) is even more stark:
More on the Texas job success story here.
While I have criticized Perry’s campaign budget proposals for being too timid, Perry insisted on balancing the Texas budget without tax hikes. I assure you that California would love to have Texas’ budget. Indeed, adjusted for inflation, population growth, and federally-mandated spending, the Texas state budget has actually gone down under Perry. His guiding principle has been “don’t spend all the money,” and it’s one that Washington desperately needs.
One final, very big reason to support Perry: He can win. Perry’s never lost a race, because he’s a tough and tenacious campaigner who’s not afraid to hit his opponents hard. Everyone thought Kay Bailey Hutchison was going to cream Perry in the 2010 governor’s race, and he beat her like a rented mule.
Or maybe a rented donkey.
In the general election against Bill White, he ran an ad featuring a police widow talking about how her husband had been killed by a multi-arrested illegal alien while White was touting Houston as a “sanctuary city.”
Even professional MSM Perry hater Paul Burka says that Perry is a hard man. “He is the kind of politician who would rather be feared than loved.” Perry will have absolutely no fear of taking the fight to Obama and going negative early and often, and he won’t let political correctness cow him into treating Obama with kid gloves.
Will the media savage Rick Perry for his flubs? Of course they will. But, as Ace noted, they’ll always find a way to crucify any Republican candidate to make Obama look better. They’ll use the same “he’s an idiot” line of attack they used on Reagan and Bush43…and you saw how far that got them.
If you’re still undecided on Perry, this video should at least give you a more rounded picture of him:
For those who think Perry is already out of the race, remember that at this point in 2004, the consensus was that Howard Dean was going to be the nominee. There’s a reason Americans actually get to vote, and they frequently prove the pundits wrong.
One final reason to vote for Perry: he’s a pretty good shot.
Brief Candidate Profile: Jason A. Gibson, Pistol Packing…Democrat?
Monday, December 19th, 2011I just got off the phone with newly-filed Texas Democratic senate candidate Jason A. Gibson. (I called when his law firm’s email bounced for some reason.) He says his website, www.jasongibson2012.com, will be up live in a day or two.
I asked him why he was running. He said he was “tired of Washington being dysfunctional” and “tired of being on the sidelines.” He also said “I get things done.”
He says his family has a long history in the Democratic Party, and that his grandfather a union organizer. However, when I noted that my blog was on the conservative side of the spectrum, he mentioned support for two policies not often voiced among modern Democratic candidates: lower taxes and the right to bear arms. Indeed, he said he was a Texas CHL holder, which must surely be an uncommon thing among Democrats these days.
There was a time, of course, when the Texas Democratic Party had numerous conservative politicians among their ranks. But by the 1980s, the party that had once been home to Allan Shivers and John Connally found itself to be captive to the ideological likes of Jim Hightower and Lloyd Doggett, causing the exodus of conservative Democrats like Phil Gramm, Kent Hance and Rick Perry to the Republican Party, which goes a long way toward explaining why it’s been over a decade since the Democrats held a single statewide office in Texas. The majority of Democratic partisans at both the state and national level have nothing but contempt for “Blue Dog Democrats,” and I doubt Gibson can buck the trend.
But we’ll see.
Fast and Furious Update for December 8, 2011
Thursday, December 8th, 2011Some cleaning-up after yesterday’s bombshell:
Documents Shows Fast and Furious WAS About Promoting Gun Control
Wednesday, December 7th, 2011Continuing her excellent reporting on the issue, Sharyl Attkisson drops another bombshell: Just like us “paranoid” right wingers thought all along, Fast and Furious was about promoting gun control:
Documents obtained by CBS News show that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) discussed using their covert operation “Fast and Furious” to argue for controversial new rules about gun sales.
[snip]
ATF officials didn’t intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican cartels obtain the weapons, but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation called “Demand Letter 3”. That would require some U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or “long guns.” Demand Letter 3 was so named because it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information.
On July 14, 2010 after ATF headquarters in Washington D.C. received an update on Fast and Furious, ATF Field Ops Assistant Director Mark Chait emailed Bill Newell, ATF’s Phoenix Special Agent in Charge of Fast and Furious:
“Bill – can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same (licensed gun dealer) and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales. Thanks.”
On Jan. 4, 2011, as ATF prepared a press conference to announce arrests in Fast and Furious, Newell saw it as “(A)nother time to address Multiple Sale on Long Guns issue.” And a day after the press conference, Chait emailed Newell: “Bill–well done yesterday… (I)n light of our request for Demand letter 3, this case could be a strong supporting factor if we can determine how many multiple sales of long guns occurred during the course of this case.”
Read the whole thing.
The best, most favorable explanation is that Fast and Furious was instituted for some still-undisclosed purpose, and that some ATF agents saw it as a ghoulish opportunity to promote gun control.
The worst: The Obama Administration designed and implemented Fast and Furious in a premeditated fashion, breaking the law and helping kill hundreds of Mexican citizens and U.S. border patrol agent Brian Terry, all for the sole, express purpose of promoting gun control.
They had to kill people with guns in order to save them from getting killed by guns.
It shows that just because your paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.
Hat tip: Powerline, where John Hinderaker says: “If the Obama administration did arrange for the shipment of arms to Mexican drug gangs, not for any legitimate public purpose but in order to advance a left-wing political agenda, and those guns were used to murder hundreds of Mexicans and at least one American border agent–which they were–then we are looking at a scandal that dwarfs any in modern American history.”
Indeed.
Fast and Furious Update: Obama Administration Now Laundering Drug Cartel Money?
Wednesday, December 7th, 2011So says that bastion of right-wing propaganda, The New York Times:
Undercover American narcotics agents have laundered or smuggled millions of dollars in drug proceeds as part of Washington’s expanding role in Mexico’s fight against drug cartels, according to current and former federal law enforcement officials.
[snip]
The officials said that while the D.E.A. conducted such operations in other countries, it began doing so in Mexico only in the past few years. The high-risk activities raise delicate questions about the agency’s effectiveness in bringing down drug kingpins, underscore diplomatic concerns about Mexican sovereignty, and blur the line between surveillance and facilitating crime. As it launders drug money, the agency often allows cartels to continue their operations over months or even years before making seizures or arrests.
[snip]
Another former agency official, who asked not to be identified speaking publicly about delicate operations, said, “My rule was that if we are going to launder money, we better show results. Otherwise, the D.E.A. could wind up being the largest money launderer in the business, and that money results in violence and deaths.”
Those are precisely the kinds of concerns members of Congress have raised about a gun-smuggling operation known as Fast and Furious
I suppose it’s progress of a sort when even The New York Times realizes something went horribly wrong in Fast and Furious. And even if the money laundering program was working, what chance does it have now that the cover has been blown?
Does anyone actually believe the Obama Administration has an effective, coherent plan to take down the cartels?
What next? Will we find out that U.S. agents actually carried out cartel assassinations?
Also this:
The former officials said that federal law enforcement agencies had to seek Justice Department approval to launder amounts greater than $10 million in any single operation. But they said that the cap was treated more as a guideline than a rule, and that it had been waived on many occasions to attract the interest of high-value targets.
If Fast and Furious is any guide, those “hundreds of thousands of dollars” will turn out to be tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars.
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Fast and Furious Update for December 1, 2011
Thursday, December 1st, 2011I’m feeling a bit under the weather, so here are some random and no doubt woefully late updates on Fast and Furious just to prove that I’m not totally out of it:
EVERYBODY in ATF and DOJ along the border knew, and they knew it before the murder of Brian Terry, for it obviously is no surprise to the highly-placed AUSA Cook, and he doesn’t mind using this common knowledge to achieve the desired result from Phoenix.