What happened? The NRA-ILA happened. Ted Cruz happened.Actual voters happened. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid evidently didn’t have the clout to put the squeeze on members over gun control the way Nancy Pelosi did on Obamacare and taxpayer-funded abortions. That, or the fact there’s no way in hell the Republican House would pass a ban, Reid decided the political cost would be too high (including, very possibly, the loss of the Senate) for no legislative gain.
This is one of the times that the Senate’s glacial pace helped prevent knee-jerk liberal opportunism from making it’s way into law.
There’s still a lot of other bad gun control ideas floating around Washington, DC (not to mention out in the states), but at least we managed to kill this one.
Maybe in a few months I can buy an AR at a decent price…
Supposedly the votes aren’t there to ratify the money grab. Which may mean that Angela Merkel and the EU will just keep twisting until the “proper” decision is arrived at.
“A one-time, ad hoc seizure of money isn’t a tax. It is confiscation. Or we can use a plainer word for it: theft.”
The EU creditor states have at a single stroke violated the principle that insured EU bank deposits of up $100,000 will be guaranteed come what may, and in doing so they have more or less thrown Portugal under a bus.
They have demonstrated that the rhetoric of EMU solidarity is just hot air, that they will not force their own taxpayers to share a single cent of clean-up costs for the great joint venture of monetary union – in which northern banks, insurers, pension funds, and indeed governments, were complicit.
Their refusal to pay is entirely understandable in one sense – and if I were a German taxpayer, I would not care to swallow these losses either – but then the leaders of these creditor countries can hardly expect the world to believe that they will in fact do whatever it takes to hold EMU together. Quite obviously, they will not.
The sooner this is made clear, the better. The sooner they take the proper course of withdrawing from EMU and organise the break-up the euro in the least disruptive way, the sooner Europe can recover.
When Cyprus’s banks reopen on Tuesday morning, every depositor will have some of his or her money seized. Accounts under 100,000 euros will have 6.75% of the funds seized. Accounts over 100,000 euros will have 9.9% seized. And then the Eurozone’s emergency lending facility and the International Monetary Fund will inject 10 billion euros into the banks to allow them to keep operating.
It’s hard to express in words just how bad an idea this is. Europe has truly crossed the Rubicon.
“The establishment of the principle that a government can, and at times of economic strain must, help itself to your savings, and that this is a legitimate tool of statecraft, ought to provoke riots.”
I’ll go further: riots are not enough.
If I were one of the people having my wealth confiscated, the proper response to such actions would be join an angry mob hanging the still-twitching bodies of the people who proposed and passed such a measure over the nearest lightpost.
Think it can’t happen here? Remember, liberals have already floated the idea of seizing your 401K.
The Eurocrats in Brussels have already decided that they would prefer to seize people savings rather than let the Euro fail, or admit that the European cradle-to-grave welfare state is unsustainable. “The dream of political union matters more to Europe’s governing caste than the well-being of the people they represent.”
I didn’t post anything yesterday because I was trying to figure out how much money I should put into gold and silver to get ahead of the European bank runs I half anticipated. Indeed, in this case such bank runs would etirely rational But they haven’t started outside Cyprus itself.
I’m pretty sure David Dewhurst would never have gotten under Dianne Feinstein’s skin, which is all the more reason we in Texas are happy we elected Cruz…
Dwight of Whipped Cream Difficulties and I are contemplating a conservative/gunner blogger meetup Saturday, March 23, at 6 PM, venue TBD (but not too close to the SXSW madness downtown). Drop me a line at lawrenceperson at gmail dot com if you’re interested in attending.
Thomas Friedman hates the Keystone pipeline because the oil is dirty, but loves China, where industry is a thousand time dirtier than here in the U.S. And where will that oil go if the pipeline isn’t built? China. Maybe Friedman just wants all the jobs to be in China. That, or actual checks from the Chinese government or their business subsidiaries, would explain an awful lot of Friedman’s writing over the last few years…
The degrees of broke-ness varies: from completely and utterly broke, like Greece or Italy; to wobbly, like the U.K., France, the U.S., or Japan; to getting poorer like Germany. But all of them are going to have to raise the percentage of gross domestic product they collect in tax — and many of them very significantly.
The U.S. deficit is more than 7% of GDP. The U.K.’s deficit is just as high. There is very little sign that spending cuts to close gaps of that magnitude are on the cards, nor is there any sign that growth will be sufficiently strong to make up the difference — certainly not in countries like the U.K. or Japan.
Huge sums of additional revenue will have to be raised.
Willie Sutton once famously remarked that he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.”
In the same way, governments will look to raise more tax from companies because that’s where the money is.
Or they could, you know, actually cut spending…
I’ve not been following the Prenda Law case closely. Fortunately, Ken over at Popehat has. Exceptionally brief background: Scumbag copyright troll lawyers operate shakedown operation, filing dubious (at best) copyright infringement lawsuits. Then they compounded the problem by suing bloggers and lawyers in an attempt to silence them. As you might expect, that strategy isn’t working out very well for them… (Hat tip: Dwight)
After putting up this look at Max Baucus, I haven’t had a chance to look at other top “pro-gun” Democrats.
Fortunately, S. E. Cupp has already done that for me with this look at New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. When she represented an upstate House district, she earned an “A” rating from the NRA. And after she moved to the Senate?
She was appointed to Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat in 2009, following a messy selection process by then-Gov. David Paterson. On the day of her appointment, Mayor Bloomberg publicly criticized her for her staunch opposition to gun control.
Suddenly, the moderate Gillibrand of 2006, who had earned the affection of the ultimate moderate Democrat in Bill Clinton, needed a makeover, and quick, if she was going to make it as a senator, not just an upstate representative.
So a new and improved Gillibrand, one who was more politically palatable to downstate liberal elites, was born, practically overnight.
Within two years, she had impressively turned that “A” rating from the NRA into an “F.” NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam remarked at the time that he couldn’t recall a similar instance in recent history of a politician’s score changing so drastically, so quickly.
When it comes to Democrats at the national level, there are two types: Those who have betrayed gun owner rights already, and those who are going to betray them when enough pressure is applied.
When push comes to shove, there’s no such thing as a pro-gun Democrat.
“George Prescott Bush filed the official paperwork Tuesday to run for Texas land commissioner next year.”
That would be Jeb Bush’s son, Bush43’s nephew, and Bush41’s grandson, one of the “little brown ones.” The Bush name alone is probably enough to win him the office, but add to that the fact that the Bush family has one of the most powerful money machines in all politics and you have a prohibitive favorite. Jerry Patterson was probably right to think he’d have an easier time defeating a post-Senate-race-meltdown David Dewhurst for Lt. Governor.
Deeper analysis of a continuing Bush dynasty, and of how Democrats and the press react to facing a Bush scion who happens to be Hispanic, will have to wait until (at least) tomorrow.
