Cowardice As A Crutch

John Wood survived the Virginia Tech Massacre, but his girlfriend and 31 other Virginia Tech students did not survive the bloody rampage of Seung-Hui Cho.

Now a graduate student at the University of Texas, Woods seeks to make sure students in other universities remain unarmed targets, like his dead girlfriend:

There were times when Woods thought that maybe he should get a gun.

"Then I learned pretty fast that wouldn't solve anything," said Woods, who is now a graduate student at UT. "The idea that somebody could stop a school shooting with a gun is impossible. It's reactive, not preventative."

Today, Woods is among the leaders in a fight against bills in the Texas Legislature that would allow licensed concealed gun carriers to take their weapons to school.

Impossible?

Woods is both a coward and a liar.

On October 1, 1997, Luke Woodham slit his mother's throat with a knife, and then took a lever-action .30/30 rifle to school. He killed two students and wounded seven others at Pearl River High School in Pearl River, Mississippi.

Woodham then attempted to leave the high school's campus to resume his attack at a middle school nearby, when PRHS Assistant Principal Joel Myrick stopped Woodham with a pistol he retrieved from his truck.

Woodham had sufficient ammunition to continue his rampage against unarmed school children and their teachers at the next school he had targeted.

He was armed with a rifle of sufficient range and power that he would have had a distinct advantage over responding law enforcement officers armed with shorter-ranged pistols and shotguns.

Woodham could have killed or wounded police officers in addition to the child victims he intended at the second school, but he never got the chance, because Joel Myrick, a responsible adult with a gun on Pearl River High School's campus, stopped Woodham, thus saving countless lives.

Less than year later, Kip Kinkel murdered his parents after being suspended from school for being in possession of a loaded pistol.

The next day, on May 20, 1998, Kinkel walked back into Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon armed with a .22 caliber rifle, a .22-caliber pistol, a Glock 19 pistol, and 1,127 rounds of ammunition. It was an arsenal more potentially deadly that that of Seung-Hui Cho's at Virginia Tech, which consisted of a Glock 19, a .22-caliber pistol, and a little less than 400 rounds.

Why do few remember the Thurston high shooting, while Virginia Tech's massacre is deeply imprinted on the nation's consciousness?

After firing 51 shots which killed two Thurston students and wounded 22 others, school shooter Kinkel was tackled by Jacob Ryker, a student shot by Kinkel seconds before.

Ryker recognized from his own experience with firearms that Kinkel was out of ammunition and was attempting to reload. Realizing that attacking the gunman was their best chance for survival, six other students joined the scramble, during which Kinkel was able to draw and fire his Glock 9mm into Ryker, striking him a second time and another student before finally being disarmed.

Five of those seven students that brought Kinkel's rampage to an end were Boy Scouts. Character, it seems, matters in the most trying instances.

There is no guarantee that allowing licensed college students the same right to carry on campus that they have off campus will stop shootings on school grounds.

There are many possible scenarios in which having legally armed students, faculty, or staff on campus will not necessarily prevent or even minimize casualties when a gunman goes on the rampage. And there are several scenarios that can be gamed out in which having armed citizens on campus could potentially result in a concealed carry permit holder shooting someone other than the school shooter.

That said, it can be said with a strong degree of certainty that if another scenario like Virginia Tech did occur, students barricaded inside a classroom with a concealed carry permit holder among them would stand a better chance against a murderous assassin than they would having nothing with which to defend themselves. Likewise, it can be said with statistical certainty that other students on campus caught in such a horrific scenario face less of a chance of being erroneously shot by a concealed carry permit holder than they would a responding police officer.

Permit holding students in a classroom being attacked have no doubt who the assailant is. Responding police, amped up on adrenaline and unsure who the bad guy is when the respond to a call, can and do shoot misidentified innocent civilians in cities across America with disturbing frequency.

John Woods, like many other school shooting victims through the years, lacked the courage of Jacob Ryker to attack the man who would be his executioner. He instead played dead while his friends were being gunned down around him.

In his shame, Woods would like to pretend that there was nothing he could have done to prevent the death of his girlfriend or the other students and faculty members who died at Virginia Tech. He froze and failed to act, and so—projecting so clearly that any armchair psychologist must make the obvious diagnosis—he now finds it convenient to declare any other outcome "impossible" because that denial helps him to cope with his inaction.

Guns, and the knowledge of guns combined with bravery, has saved lives during campus shootings. The students and teachers that Joel Myrick saved by ending Luke Woodham's rampage would agree, as would the police officers Woodham would have targeted when they arrived.

When Jacob Ryker and six other students attacked Kip Kinkel while he tried to reload it was indeed "reactive," and their reaction kept Kinkel from firing any more of the more than 1,100 rounds of ammunition that he had in his possession.

Prevention, as Woods should be painfully aware, is never foolproof, and people in a free society must have the option be armed, both mentally and preferably physically, to defend their lives.

John Woods failed at the worse possible moment. A broken and bitter man, he would see others fail as he did.

He was neither mentally nor physically prepared to deal with the possibility of violence, an eventuality that concealed carry permit holders, including the faculty, staff, and students of elementary schools through colleges around the country are at least minimally prepared for by their training.

Concealed carry is not the best answer to an outbreak of school violence. The best option is to prevent an attack from ever happening at all. But that is a given, and unless we wall our campuses like prisons and meticulously search every person entering them every day, the possibility of an armed gunman attempting mass murder will exist. It will happen again and it ignore that reality, to act as if prevention is the only option available to slow or stop an attack, is madness.

Since it will happen again as a near certainty, the next best option is to allow trained faculty, staff and students that have concealed carry permits to carry their firearms off campus bring them on campus to class with them as well.

Just because some lack the courage to defend their own lives shouldn't mean that other should have to die as a result of it.

N.C. Democratic Senator: Obama's Budget "Completely Unsustainable and Unacceptable."

North Carolina 's junior senator Kay Hagan defeated incumbent Elizabeth Dole in November, riding a Democratic wave that saw Barack Obama win in a normally "red" state.

That hasn't kept Hagan, who now holds Jesse Helms' old seat, from lashing out at the big government bloat of one of the most incompetent Administrations in American history.*

From WRAL:

"e;I agree with a number of ideas in President Obama's budget, but I was particularly concerned about the deficit spending in his proposal," Hagan said in a speech at the North Carolina Associated Press Broadcast annual meeting at Elon University. "It's completely unsustainable and unacceptable."

Her decision to renounce some of the popular president's ideas comes as a striking contrast to her campaign last year, when she cozied to his mantra of change as North Carolina voters swept both into office. It underscores her eagerness to depart from the big-government plans of her party even as she tries to influence legislation as a backbencher in Washington's upper chamber.

The Democratic lawmaker who took office on Capitol Hill just three months ago said she has been working with colleagues to cut the growth in non-defense spending from 12 percent in Obama's budget to 6 percent. The former state Senate budget writer said politicians right now need to discourage spending that does not create jobs or improve the economy.

Remember, folks—this is from a Democrat who used Obama's surging popularity to get into office; she's now distancing herself from him as much as she can within the party, and just after a little more than two months into Obama's Presidency.

* William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia on his 32nd day in office. That's worse, I guess, though it might be interesting to see what Harrison accomplished in 32 days versus Obama.

Harrison was replaced by John Tyler, the Joe Biden of his generation, who is generally referred to one of the worst Presidents in American history and was deemed "His Accidency" by his many critics.

Complicity in Idiocy

Fox News posted the following highly-misleading graphic on the front page of foxnews.com tonight, as the click-through image for a story entitled Clinton: U.S. Shares Blame in Mexico Drug Wars.

The obvious implication of the image, echoing recent rhetoric by the Obama Administration and the Mexican government that the firearms industry in the United States is responsible for supplying drug cartels with massive amounts of firepower, including military weapons.

But what does the picture actually show?

A close look at the picture shows at the top a short-barreled AR-15 carbine where the flash hider begins immediately in front of the front sight.

Such weapons are highly-regulated under the National Firearms Act of 1934, and buyers must have approval from the ATF and pay a $200 transfer tax. Such weapons are most commonly seen in use by law enforcement agencies on both sides of the border in urban tactical dynamic entry or SWAT teams. It is possible, and perhaps probable, that this firearm was acquired by cartels from Mexican law enforcement, and not from civilian firearms dealers.

The next firearm down, a civilian-legal AR-15 carbine, has a noticeably longer 16-inch legal minimum barrel, as does the Mini-14 carbine. The AR-15-style rifle below that has a 20-inch barrel.

Dominating the photo, however, is a collection of military weaponry that is simply unavailable for purchase by American civilians at any price. There are either rockets or mortar shells (probably the former, but I'm not sure) and a M-72 LAW, a disposable anti-tank rocket.

Our President and Attorney General and have been more than willing to mislead the American people by including military weaponry in displays of arms confiscated from cartels, in hopes of pushing for what the President likes to call "common sense" gun control measures, as if anti-tank rockets, hand grenades, IEDs and police and military-issued machine guns can be had under existing gun laws.

We except such deception from Barack Obama, a man who was once part of the anti-gun Joyce Foundation and who was part of an attempt to con the Supreme Court. We also expect the media to be largely ignorant and heavily biased in stories involving firearms.

We should, however, expect at least the most basic level of intellectual curiosity from our media, such as wondering why government officials are implying military anti-tank weaponry is available for purchase by civilians in U.S. gun shops.

Journalists are abdicating their responsibility to ask these questions.

This failure to follow the basic tenets of journalism is a large part of why the public holds the media in such low regard, and why their news organizations continue to collapse around them.

Obama's Press Conference in a Nutshell

Capitalism is a systemic virus that we cannot hope to kill, and as distasteful as that thought is to my Administration, it is something that we can hope to control if you give us unprecedented power.

We need to institute cap-and-trade so that we move from real, but pollution-causing energy sources to environmentally-friendly solutions that presently, err, do not exist.

And sure, my budget will most likely bankrupt the United States if we're off even a little bit, but if we don't spend hundreds of billions to institute a bunch of vague, wide-ranging, and ideologically-driven policy prescriptions, then we might end up broke anyway because of impossible—hey look, a bunny!

We've going to cut the deficit in half, which is why our national debt will being to skyrocket. It's simple economics. For growth we need sustainable um, other examples of domestic products... dropping discretionary defense spending to lowest levels since the 60s. Hey, do my critics offer a better idea? Let's talk about Mexico!

We're going to look at the border with literally hundreds of more people, and we're trying to find a way to use this as an excuse to push for gun and ammunition control. We'll do everything we can... except build an actual physical border.

The VA is underfunded and we hope to make cost saving in the procurement system to make up for the money we need for veterans care. We'll scrap expensive new weapons that underperform, to keep providing our troops with existing weapons systems that are overused and obsolete to the point that they also underperform.

Invest, invest, invest.

And by that, I mean let's spend your money.

I'm going to give a long and rambling misdirection instead of answering your question about AIG, though I will admit I didn't voice my opinion because I didn't know what was going on.

The Chinese idea of doing away with the dollar is admittedly a different plan, but hey, wouldn't a "yen menu" at McDonald's be cool? Not that a new global currency is needed. Yet.

We're not going to renew the Bush tax cuts for the middle class. We're going to introduce the Obama tax cuts. See how much more I care about you than anyone since Reagan? Any by "Reagan," I mean shut up, capitalist, or you might just find a busload of sedated ACORN drones outside your house in the morning.

Please don't look at how I'm in favor of penalizing charities. And lets go to the decaffinated hack from Ebony who uses a discredited report on homeless children to make a point, showing why Kevin Chappell has no more business being a reporter than Dave Chappell. Oh, and did I mention we'll start programs to help them with housing? Now hand over your wallets.

Race does not enter into the equation in my Administration, except for the searing legacy of racial discrimination I like to use when it's convenient. American's instead have looked at me based upon my incompetence, not my appearance.

Cloning, stem cells, abortion... come on. It's just meat, like that $100/lb Wagyu steak I'm going to have when I'm done with you, reporter-man.

As for the Jews and Palestinians, we need a two-state solution. I have no idea how to really do anything to help the genocidal terrorists more than giving them more credibility than cash, like the $900 million of your tax dollars I just gave them. Luckily, I didn't say that out loud. Maybe we should send them a video instead. Youtube, not DVD. What was the question?

Back to the economy.

Uh, Good night.

Update: Kaus explodes on Chappell's idiocy.

Bestest President Evah

I refuse to believe this is possible.

There is simply no way that Barack Obama, President of the United States, did not know Nicolas Sarkozny has been the President of France for the past two years.

No world leader could be that daft, his administration so glaringly incompetent, as to send a letter pledging co-operation with a man no longer in office.

Then again, it might explain Obama's shabby treatment of Gordon Brown.

He may have been expecting Margaret Thatcher.

Update: Thank God. Obama was replying to a letter from Chirac and not blindly sending out a dim-witted letter to an actual head of state that could easily be mocked.

You know. Like he did with the Russians.

Raleigh, NC Tax Day Tea Party

I guess late is better than never, so here's notice that there will be a tea party protest at the State Capitol in Raleigh, NC on Saturday, March 21.

Raleigh will also be one of the sites for a nationwide tea party on April 15.

You can find out more about both events at RaleighTeaParty.com

Cradle and All

If you thought that American media outlets are little more than extensions of JounoList and the White House Press Office... well, you might be on to something.

Unlike the eight years that ended January 20th, the sharpest critiques of our failing and flailing government are now coming from those outside of America, as foreign newspapers do the job Americans won't do:

Helicopter Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve is dropping trillions of fresh paper dollars on the world economy, the President of the United States is cracking jokes on late night comedy shows, his energy minister is threatening a trade war over carbon emissions, his treasury secretary is dithering over a banking reform program amid rising concerns over his competence and a monumentally dysfunctional U.S. Congress is launching another public jihad against corporations and bankers.

As an aghast world — from China to Chicago and Chihuahua — watches, the circus-like U.S. political system seems to be declining into near chaos. Through it all, stock and financial markets are paralyzed. The more the policy regime does, the worse the outlook gets. The multi-ringed spectacle raises a disturbing question in many minds: Is this the end of America?

Probably not, if only because there are good reasons for optimism. The U.S. economy has pulled out of self-destructive political spirals in the past, spurred on by its business class and corporate leaders, the profit-making and market-creating people who rose above the political turmoil to once again lift the world out of financial crisis. It’s happened many times before, except for once, when it took 20 years to rise out of the Great Depression.

Past success, however, is no guarantee of future recovery, especially now when there are daily disasters and new indicators of political breakdown. All developments are not disasters in themselves. The AIG bonus firestorm is a diversion from real issues , but it puts the ghastly political classes who make U.S. law on display for what they are: ageing self-serving demagogues who have spent decades warping the U.S. political system for their own ends. We see the system up close, law-making that is riddled with slapdash, incompetence and gamesmanship.

One test of whether we are witnessing the end of America is how many more times Americans put up with congressional show trials of individual business people and their employees, slandering and vilifying them for their actions and motives. And for how long will they tolerate a President who berates business and corporations as dens of crime and malfeasance? If the majority of Americans come to accept the caricatures of business as true, then America is closer to the end of its life as a global leader, as a champion of markets and individualism.

Our incompetent Congress and President are so lacking in situational awareness that they can't see that nearly every move they've made has compounded the problems facing our country. Every massive spending bill passed, every angry attempt at placing the blame on others, every pathetic foreign policy rookie mistake and unforced diplomatic error, every abortive attempt to impose massive new government controls over American life, is pushing us closer towards a point where we have no confidence in our nation's supposed "leadership." Closer to a failed state than we could ever imagine.

A member of our Senate last week had the audacity to proclaim that businessmen should resign or commit suicide for accepting money they were owed under contract.

Perhaps some people should eat a bullet, or swallow a handful of pills with a bourbon chaser, or at least resign as a result of the horrific decisions they've made that have threatened and wrecked not just individual lives, but entire economies.

But there is no honor among thieves, and the thieves in our Congress and White House lack the integrity to do the honorable thing. They won't admit their incompetence and resign. They sure as Hell won't voluntarily die to assuage some foreign (to them) sense of honor.

I still hold out hope that we'll find a way to pull out of our current economic collapse, but the more Congress grandstands in order to ignore real problems, and the more our President bogs himself down in constant gaffes, petty dalliances, and dreams of social engineering the America of his dreams, the less likely it seems that will happen.

What Might Have Bean

"Administration Presses Students into Farm Labor" --New York Times

"President's Sweatshop Agriculture" -- Mother Jones

"Executive Branch Breaches International Child Labor Laws" --Amnesty International

"First Lady Plans Subsistence Farming on White House Grounds To Survive Crashing Economy" Newsweek

"COUP IMMINENT: Concentration Camps Under Construction" --Raw Story

"President Avoids Getting His Hands Dirty" -- Think Progress

At least, that is how this story would have been told if Bush was still in office.

Old School

Politician buys unremarkable stock.

Unremarkable stock skyrockets in price months later.

Politician unloads his stock the very next day, walks away with a handsome profit.

I'm soure there was nothing untoward going on, at all.

The Best President Money Can Buy

My latest at Pajamas Media.

Hey Grassley: You First

Fox News reports the following idiotic outburst by Iowa Senator Charles Grassley:

Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley suggested on Monday that AIG executives should take a Japanese approach toward accepting responsibility for the collapse of the insurance giant by resigning or killing themselves.

The Republican lawmaker's harsh comments came during an interview with Cedar Rapids, Iowa, radio station WMT. They echo remarks he has made in the past about corporate executives and public apologies, but went further in suggesting suicide.

"I suggest, you know, obviously, maybe they ought to be removed," Grassley said. "But I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they'd follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I'm sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.

"And in the case of the Japanese, they usually commit suicide before they make any apology."

I've got an idea for you, Chuck.

As you took $26,250 from AIG in 2007-2008 alone, why don't you lead by example?

DoD to Scrap Valuable Once-Fired Brass at an 80% Loss During Recession So Obama Can Screw Gun Owners; Jobs Are Lost As A Direct Result

One of the most expensive components of a modern rifle or pistol cartridge is the brass casing. It is also the part of the cartridge that is the most "green," in that brass cases can be reused multiple times.

The Obama Administration, however, so despises gun owners that it has forced the Department of Defense to start chopping into scrap once-fired rifle brass that it formerly sold in bulk to to ammunition reloading companies at a premium.

Read all the details at The Shootist, which has far more.

In enacting this directive, the Obama Administration:

• wastes a tremendous amount of government money; once-fired brass can be sold for 80-percent more than bulk brass scrap
• directly caused the firing of workers at ammunition factories who cannot get the brass cases they relied upon as a key material
• by purposefully undermined the reloaded ammunition market, forces federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to buy top-of-the-line ammunition for training qualification, meaning either departments will have to get by with less training for their officers, or citizens will have to pay even more in taxes

This attempt to undermine the ammunition market is hardly surprising considering the prohibitionist mindset of a man so dishonest he was part of the Joyce Foundation attempt to pervert legal scholarship in order to undermine the Constitution.

His Arrogance probably thinks that putting more Americans out of work is worthwhile if he can get what he wants, and considering his across-the-board walk-backs on combatting terrorism, it isn't all that surprising that he's willing to put already tight law enforcement training budgets in peril as well.

Barack Obama's economic incompetence is wrecking the economy, and his rabidly anti-gun ideology is threatening our security.

Why am I not surprised.

We Have Met the Enemy, and He is Us

Jane Hamsher & Friends suddenly discovered that blindly electing a bunch of corrupt big government tax-and-spend liberals who owe their allegiances to their biggest donors is a bad thing.

Who knew?

Reading the comment thread there, it doesn't seem any of those engaging in the wailing and gnashing of teeth has the self-awareness to recognize that:

• this outcome was entirely predictable result of willingly turning a blind-eye to the fact that Democratic Party owes more to corporate donors than the Republicans, and have for quite some time
• the liberal practice of trying to spend wads of other people's money doesn't just reach into the pockets of the opposition
• when you elect a President based on rhetoric instead of competence, you get predictably dismal results
• it's better not to yell "who stole our country?" when you're still wearing your mask and waving your cap gun

Hamsher now wants a Congressional inquisition to skewer several Obama administration officials (starting with Geithner and Summers), to see if they are "too closely aligned " with Wall Street.

She's too ideologically blind, of course, to see that it was the very Congress and President she championed that are at the root of the problem.

W W C N D?

My latest is up at Pajamas Media.

(link fixed)

The Circus Continues

The headline at the Washington Post says it all:

Fourth Nominee Withdraws From Treasury's Roster.

Bush was the fighter pilot, but Obama needs only one more to become an "ace."

H. Rodgin Cohen, chairman of the New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, has withdrawn his name from consideration for deputy Treasury secretary, becoming the fourth pick for a prominent Treasury Department post to pull out in recent weeks.

A prominent attorney who has advised many of the top Wall Street firms, Cohen dropped out after the White House found an issue during his vetting process, two sources familiar with the matter said. The sources declined to identify the reason. Cohen did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Though the Treasury is filling its lower-level positions, the thin ranks on the senior levels are taking a toll on the department's ability to deal with a financial crisis that continues to deepen in scope and complexity, government and industry officials say.

At this point, I think our young President's vetting team should resign and consider a career in porn.

After all, they've already seen more messy withdrawals than Jenna Jameson.

The Serial Liars of the Brady Campaign

I saw via Reason that the ever opportunistic Paul Helmke of the Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence jumped at the chance to once again use a tragedy for political gain. The Brady Campaign, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is the Westboro Baptist Church of the gun confiscation movement.

Never missing a chance to fabricate, obfuscate, or twist the truth, they begin with a whopper in their opening paragraph (my bold below):

Alabama killer Michael McLendon fired more than 200 rounds from his military-style semiautomatic assault weapons. He lived in a state that has pathetically weak guns laws: In the Brady Campaign’s recent state scorecards, Alabama earned a score of 15 out of 100. Assault weapons were banned under federal law until four years ago.

This statement is a monsterous lie.

The 1994 Assault Weapon ban that our über-intelligent Vice President liked to take the credit for authoring banned by name less than two dozen firearms, and attempted to ban others by making rifles or pistols with detachable magazines and two or more cosmetic features—pistol grips, flash hiders, bayonet lugs and other features that had no effect on accuracy or rate fire—illegal.

What effect did this law have on the legal sale or possession of these "evil" weapons the Brady Campaign and so many gullible Congressmen and Senators rushed into law?

It increased the popularity of these firearms. Yes, you read that correctly.

Legal sales of these kinds of firearms grew during the so-called ban. Manufacturers of some rifles, for example, removed flash hiders and bayonet lugs, and put these same firearms into the hands of eager customers the very day the "ban" took effect, and every day of the ten years afterward until it expired. Manufacturers of banned pistols made similar modifications, and had similar results. It might also be noted that an entire new class of concealable handguns was the direct but hilariously unintended consequence of this law, but that is a tale for another time.

There firearms were constantly and quite legally available during the time this impotent law was in effect. Manufacturers specializing in these kinds of firearms actually expanded during this time period, and competitions dedicating to shooting them greatly increased. Brady's claim that assault weapons were banned until the law expired four years ago is patently absurd.

McLendon shot complete strangers, women, children, dogs and his own mother before taking his own life. He had an SKS assault rifle, a Bushmaster assault rifle and a 38 caliber handgun.

Neither an SKS nor a Bushmaster is an assault rifle, but that has never kept Westboro Gun Banners Brady from making the claim over and over again. An assault weapon, by proper military definition, must be selective-fire, fitted with a selector that enables the shooter to fire either single shots or a burst for each trigger pull. None of the guns in the assault weapons ban was actually an assault weapon, which I guess is appropriate, as they weren't actually banned, either.

Because of thoroughly dishonest groups like Brady and unethical men like Helmke, the term "assault weapon" has evolved into a political term that can be applied to almost any semi-automatic firearm, even though using it thus is factually incorrect.

Alabama has the fifth-highest gun death rate in America, including the third-highest rate of gun homicide.

"This man needed the firepower of assault weapons to execute his plan of mass carnage. Alabama, and our nation, must take action to make it harder for dangerous people to get dangerous weapons," said Paul Helmke, President of the Brady Campaign.

The "firepower" of these weapons— or rather, the lack of it—may be directly responsible for the fact that two or more law enforcement officers who confront the gunman are alive today.

The Bushmaster rifle the murderer carried fires an intermediate caliber .223 Remington cartridge with a lightweight, high-velocity bullet generally considered to small and weak to use on deer-sized targets, and is instead typically used on much smaller game. The officers that he shot were protected in large part because the lightweight bullets fired were easily slowed, stopped, or deflected by their police cars, resulting in officers that were mildly wounded instead of being more seriously wounded or killed. If the shooter had used any one of many popular big game hunting cartridges...

The simple fact of the matter is that this deranged and vengeful man could have carried out his murderous assault with the shotgun he also had in his vehicle (the one that Brady curiously forgot to mention) and could have caused as much damage and loss of life as he did, or worse.

Freeman Goes Down

At this pace, Obama's going to be reduced to filling Administration jobs in front of Home Depot.

Exploding Whale Obamanomics

The parallel to Obamanomics?

Those in charge are completely unprepared to handle the task at hand, but desperately decide on an untested "big bang" approach to try get rid of the stench, even though even the smallest amount of foresight could have predicted the results.

They proceed anyway against all common sense, and the resulting mess coats everyone in foul-smelling crap, threatens the citizenry, crushes the automotive sector, and depresses real estate values.

Now they find themselves in a far worse situation, where the clean-up of the fallout from a hastily made decision will last far longer than it would have if more measured, common sense clean-up efforts had been taken in the first place.

Can you think of a better metaphor?

Dear World, I'm Sorry....

Actually, no I'm not. And I won't be, unless I'm forced to join you on the breadlines.

You wanted this guy to be our President, even though you were warned about the fact he was largely an unknown, selling a self-edited pipe-dream far removed from his actual radical associations and the disturbing lack of anything substantive on his résumé.

"Hey, he was a doorstop of a state legislator laughed at by his peers who fumbled his way into becoming the most radical and least experienced member of the U.S. Senate—Let's make him President!"

And inexplicably, you did.

But he isn't a leader; he's a dare gone horribly awry.

He's a radical deep in dorm-room philosophy and etherial in substance, brilliant in presentation but devoid of character and substance.

But gosh darn it, he sure looks pretty!

I hope that comforts you, considering the fact that the rest of world realizes he is now in over his head.

(h/t Hot Air)

Hustled: How Obama Deceived America About a Drawdown in Iraq and a "Surge" In Afghanistan By Playing With The Lives Of American Soldiers

This post from milblogger Greyhawk is a must-read.

It is relatively rare when we see a situation where people from both ends of the political spectrum and all points in between can unite for any reason, but using the lives of soldiers as political props is certainly one of them.

Here's the summary:

President Obama, apparently seeking to keep the anti-war left firmly under his spell, announced that he was drawing down American forces in Iraq, and was instead diverting forces who had trained specifically for an Iraqi deployment to Afghanistan.

Less than a month later, another unit's scheduled deployment to Iraq is sped up, in order to keep the same number of Stryker brigades in Iraq as there would have been if he hadn't shipped the other unit to Afghanistan.

The President ordered a unit that had trained for ten months specifically for the Iraqi mission to another part of the world that speaks a different language and has entirely different cultures. There is no easy way to determine on a Sunday night how many tens of millions of training dollars and man-hours Obama wasted by shifting this Stryker brigade, but if the Iraqi theater really didn't need them, it at least could have been understandable.

But the Iraqi theater clearly did need a Stryker brigade, and he planned on sending one all along.

We know this because just as soon as the Obama White House sold the drawdown story to the media and the anti-war left, he immediately and quietly ordered that another Stryker brigade—one that is no doubt capable, but one that didn't have the specific, intensive training of the unit diverted to Afghanistan— rushed to Iraq months ahead of schedule in order to keep the same number of Stryker brigades (two) as there has been the entire time.

There is no drawdown of Stryker brigades in Iraq.

President Obama lied to the American people.

He tried to con those who are against the Iraq war into thinking we were actually drawing down our capabilities there, when all he actually did was use a street-hustler's sleight-of-hand, having us watch one hand moving a unit out of Iraq, while using his other hand to deftly slide in another.

To borrow a phrase: you been lied to. Bamboozled. Run amok.

By a hustler who's been playing you the entire time.

And for those of us who know people in the military, be they friends or family, you should be absolutely livid at the callous disregard with which our punk of a President used the lives of two entire brigades of soldiers and their families as pawns.

The military life is never easy. Not ever. Our troops and spouses know that, and the kids, well, they learn to cope as best they can. There is always pride, but always uncertainty, and little things can make a difference for both the morale of the soldiers and those who carry on in their absence.

Knowing that our soldiers are highly trained for a specific mission makes them feel more confident of success, and more confident they'll have a better chance to come home. Having nearly a year's training wasted—and then finding out several weeks later that all that training was wasted because of political theater orchestrated to benefit your selfish Commander-in-Chief—well, I can only assume that hurts morale. Not just the morale of the troops, mind you, but that of their families, to see how little he cares about those he commands. And that's just the 5th Stryker Brigade.

The 4th Stryker Brigade's soldiers are being rushed to Iraq to keep two Stryker Brigades there. Did they get in all the specialized training they needed? They'll no doubt rush to get it done. But are those soldiers and their families being cheated of time together because Barack Obama is using them to play a cynical political game where he tries to lie to America about the wars we're fighting?

Absolutely.

Anyone who has done any research into who Barack Obama is, instead of who he likes to claim who he is, can't be very surprised that he would so cynically manipulate others for personal political gain.

What is surprising is how brazen his abuses are, and how quickly they've come.

Update: "It looks as if the Obama administration is so self involved, the only game it’s playing is a shell game with itself and the American people."

Obama Spurs Interest in Outdoors

A friend from high school told me via Facebook and later in email that she and her family in Tennessee are going to be buying a small farm as a fallback in case of economic collapse. Neither she nor he husband have experience farming, but feel that having land and a farmhouse where they can grow and stock food is perhaps the best insurance they can have to ensure their kids have a roof over their heads and food on the table if things get really bad.

I've talked to one or two other people who are also thinking about or developing "worst-case" scenarios, both short and long term, but most people are quiet about their preparations. But preparing they are.

They are obviously not alone. This book, The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life, is #18 on Amazon's Best Seller list this morning, and Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life is #29.

And as you already well know, both firearm and ammunition sales have skyrocketed, and more popular guns and the ammunition for them cannot be had in many locations, at any price, due to scarcity and hoarding.

Individual families are preparing, but they also know many people aren't, and so they are stocking up quietly. They do not want to become targets for those who either can't afford to prepare, or who refuse to out of some variation of "it can't happen here" groupthink.

Incidentally, Atlas Shrugged, which was written by an author who saw communism take over her country and the damage it wrought, is also once again selling well on Amazon, at #37.

Obama Gunning For Presidential Record

Over at Hot Air Ed Morrissey duly notes that two more prospective would-be nominees have preemptively fled the albatross of being associated the Obama Administration.

Officially, Obama is just one flubbed Cabinet appointment away (at three, and counting) from equaling a dubious record of incompetence, a record currently held by the tenth President, John Tyler, who had four.

Serfs Up

Americans seem confused that Barack Obama is taking step after step that sends the stock market plunging ever lower and our Republic careening toward financial ruin. It confuses them, that this gifted orator would institute policies so obviously flawed. They have it in their hearts and heads that this President would want to stop the recession.

But why would he? Ever significant mentor Barack Obama has ever had, from Frank Marshall Davis to Saul Alinsky to Bill Ayers to Jeremiah Wright, has been driven by the thought of punishing America, of ripping it apart and reforging it to their liking.

Should it be any surprise at all than a man so shaped would function exactly as he was led?

The more Barack Obama can wreck the economy, the more he can turn individuals—and some states—into destitute big government dependents. As his Chief of Staff noted, they have every intention of seizing the opportunity that comes with this financial crisis.

Sadly, for all those poor souls who thought gifted teleprompter reading skills made the most radical liberal and least experienced Senator competent to be President, it is forcing them into dependency that he needs more than their goodwill. Its only going to get worse folks, and it's going to get worse by design.

Our President Is Out of His Depth

Not that most of you haven't already started coming to that conclusion yourselves.

I don't know why so many people have put their blind faith into a man who has phenomenal public-speaking skills, but who has never had a prominent real-world job.

Barack Obama has never been in charge of anything even as substantial as a Cub Scout troop den, and it shows.

Perhaps Americans are in denial, clinging to an illusion to simply avoid taking responsibility for allowing themselves to be duped into voting for a man big enough for a television screen, but woefully too small, too inconsequential in substance, for the Presidency.

The market is less forgiving.

And we're all paying the price.

Update: How petty. Not to mention a transparent sop to the netroots to keep them distracted, so they won't turn on him for his obvious and growing inadequacies.

History Repeating

While the "tea party" protests against the new administration and spending-crazed Congress are certainly getting a lot of attention in the conservative blogosphere and in isolated news stories, I suspect these small, but growing nationwide protests are masking a far deeper disenchantment with our arrogant young President and his allies in the House and Senate who seem to have one massive tax-and-spend (or more accurately, spend-and-spend until the economy completely crashes) bill after another lined up.

What am I talking about?

I wrote a blog entry in 2007 correcting a poorly researched Associated Press story by Estes Thompson. Thompson apparently decided before writing his article that he was going to blame a police ammunition shortage he had heard about on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which would fit in nicely with the years-long anti-war bias prevalent in most "professional" media.

Not surprisingly, Thompson was too lazy to go to the source, and only spoke to several police departments and their immediate suppliers, people in a position to appear to have credibility, but who were not far enough up the supply chain to have any idea what the real cause and effect were. I did the work Thompson was too lazy to do, and actually contacted the ammunition manufacturers themselves, and they explain what was really going on.

I followed up on that 2007 article yesterday in a post at Pajamas Media, explaining why the current ammunition shortage we are currently experiencing is even worse than that which hit in 2007. I'd suggest you go read it for a more detailed explanation, but the gist of it is this: demand that spiked in 2007 never abated, and the election of a President with a anti-gun record with cronies pushing aggressive firearms and ammunition laws on the local, state, and national level, combined with a global recession spiked demand even higher.

The firearms and ammunition industry are clearly recession-proof thanks to our new President's agenda.

It is next to impossible to find a gun store that stocks the kind of military-style semi-automatic rifles and pistols that our Founding Fathers would have recognized as the exact kind of weapons that are best suited for duty in the modern version of the citizen's militia, one they so strongly advocated to be built from individual citizen-soldiers as a defense against tyrants, both foreign and domestic.

I spoke with a contact of mine at a major firearms manufacturer several days ago about acquiring a new AR-15 type carbine that his company just recently brought to market for a T&E (testing and evaluation) loan as he had done for me in the past with handguns. Demand was so great, and their backorder so large, that he estimated it would be 6-8 months before I could get one. When I asked him what was causing such a massive run on his companies AR-15-type rifles, you might guess his one-word response.

Merely adding to the anecdotal evidence I've compiled from manufacturers is that which I've gathered from retail merchants, from mom-and-pop gun shops to big-box retailers.

Late last night I visited one of the local Walmart stores and swung by their ammunition counter to see if supplies at one of the largest retailers was as scarce as individuals around the country has related on various Internet forums.

"We just a got a shipment in!" the gentleman behind the counter told me. The shelves were still at least two-thirds empty, but he did indeed have several thousand rounds of 7.62x39mm and .223 Remington rifle ammunition, along with an equal amount of 9mm, 40S&W, and 45ACP pistol ammunition. He told me it would be gone by sunrise.

He claimed that since late October demand had gone up, and that since Obama won the election, it went through the roof. When he has ammunition to sell, he's pushing out 10,000-15,000 rounds per shift late at night. Two Saturday night's ago, he sold 5,600 rounds to one customer.

I've been focusing on looking at why we've been having shortages from the supply side of the equation; I haven't done as much research into why demand is so high from individual purchasers. Obviously, that is because building an accurate picture is going to require a level of in-person interviews that a single person can't easily manage. That said, I am seeing anecdotal explanations in the comments to my posts on the subject and in reading comments on firearms blogs and other internet forums.

Many people are buying significant amounts of ammunition for their personal supply, from thousands to tens of thousands of rounds each, to one person who claims to have built a stockpile over the past decade of three-quarters of a million rounds that seems to fantastic to believe.

Most claim they are building a reserve in anticipation of ammunition prices continuing to rise. Another significant component are buying ammunition as a hedge against uncertain times, both as an investment, and as security measure.

But an increasing number of people are openly expressing that the reason they are stocking up on ammunition is that they fear the actions of our federal government. These are people who have never been radicals, most could generally care less about politics, and many have never even dreamed of owning guns until now.

And while it will no doubt come as a surprise to those who would like to perpetrate the stereotype of gun owners as rural and uneducated—the kind that bitterly cling to their guns and Bibles as someone once scornfully said—anecdotal evidence suggests many new gun owners are minorities, and all social classes are purchasing firearms and ammunition.

While we seem to have a tea party movement growing nationwide as people voice their dissatisfaction with our power-mad, spending-crazed government by calling on the symbolism of the acts of Patriots in Boston Harbor more than two hundred years ago, I suspect those protests are hiding a deeper resentment and fears about the competency and goals of our federal leaders.

If our government continues to make citizens feel abused, and makes an over-aggressive miscalculation in asserting their power—certainly possible with our fumbling Attorney General who was part of the Clintonian Justice Dept management nightmare under Reno—tea parties will be the least of their worries.

They should be more concerned they are convincing many Americans to prepare for Lexington Green.