It’s Monday, February 11th, 2013….but before we begin, a brief Sign of the Times:

Support Growing For Former L.A. Officer Accused Of Killing Spree

 

And all from the Left.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, Bill Kristol and Peter Wehner offer their thoughts on….

The Absentee Commander in Chief

The Defense secretary told the president that Americans in Benghazi were under attack. Then: nothing.

 

We’ve both had the honor to work in the White House. We’ve seen presidents, vice presidents, chiefs of staff and national security advisers during moments of international crisis. We know that in these moments human beings make mistakes. There are failures of communication and errors of judgment. Perfection certainly isn’t the standard to which policy makers should be held.

But there are standards. If Americans are under attack, presidential attention must be paid. Due diligence must be demonstrated. A president must take care that his administration does everything it can do. On Sept. 11, 2012, as Americans were under attack in Benghazi, Libya, President Obama failed in his basic responsibility as president and commander in chief. In a crisis, the president went AWOL.

Thanks to the congressional testimony of outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey late last week, we know they met with President Obama on Sept. 11 at 5 p.m. in a pre-scheduled meeting, when they informed the president about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. The meeting lasted about a half-hour. Mr. Panetta said they spent roughly 20 minutes of the session briefing the president on the chaos at the American Embassy in Cairo and the attack in Benghazi, which eventually cost the lives of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, security personnel Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, and information officer Sean Smith.

Secretary Panetta said the president left operational details, including determination of what resources were available to help the Americans under siege, “up to us.” We also learned that President Obama did not communicate in any way with Mr. Panetta or Gen. Dempsey the rest of that evening or that night. Indeed, Mr. Panetta and Gen. Dempsey testified they had no further contact at all with anyone in the White House that evening—or, for that matter, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

That’s not all we discovered. We now know that despite Gen. Dempsey having been informed of Ambassador Stevens’s repeated warnings about the rise of terrorist elements in Benghazi, no forces were put in place or made ready nearby to respond to possible trouble. It also seems that during the actual attacks in Benghazi, which the administration followed in real time and which lasted for some eight hours, not a single major military asset was deployed to help rescue Americans under assault.

And we learned one other thing: Messrs. Panetta and Dempsey both knew on the night of the assault that it was a terrorist attack. This didn’t prevent President Obama, Secretary Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice from peddling a false version of events in the days and even weeks that followed, as the administration called the incident spontaneous, said there was no evidence of a coordinated terrorist attack and blamed the violence on an anti-Muslim video. So the White House, having failed to ensure that anything was done during the attack, went on to mislead the nation afterward. (Knowingly mislead, which by Webster’s defintion, constitutes “lying”.)

Why the deception? Presumably for two reasons. (“Presumably”?!?  Come on, guys; let’s call a spade a spade!) The first is that the true account of events undercut the president’s claim during the campaign that al Qaeda was severely weakened in the aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden. The second is that a true account of what happened in Benghazi that night would have revealed that the president and his top national-security advisers did not treat a lethal attack by Islamic terrorists on Americans as a crisis. The commander in chief not only didn’t convene a meeting in the Situation Room; he didn’t even bother to call his Defense secretary or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Not a single presidential finger was lifted to help Americans under attack.

This is an embarrassment and a disgrace. Is it too much to hope that President Obama is privately ashamed of his inattention and passivity that night? And that he has resolved, and instructed his senior staff, to take care that he not be derelict in his duty as commander in chief ever again?

Hey, hope springs eternal; but the odds of The Obamao ever feeling shame or remorse over the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi are about the same as him ever apologizing to the family of Brian Terry:

In other words, about a snowflake’s chance….in Hell!

Speaking of a snowflake’s chance, those are the odds David Rivkin and Andrew Grossman, courtesy of the WSJ, give for the success of a firearms ban, as they observe in their commentary on….

Gun Control and the Constitution

The courts would no more allow government to undermine the Second Amendment than the First.

 

The 2nd Amendment, like the rest of the Constitution PROTECTS, not GRANTS, an inherent right!

Could there be a better illustration of the cultural divide over firearms than the White House photograph of our skeet-shooting president? Clay pigeons are launched into the air, but the president’s smoking shotgun is level with the ground. This is not a man who is comfortable around guns. And that goes a long way toward explaining his gun-control agenda. (That….and the rest of his unconstitutional policies!)

Lack of informed presidential leadership aside, there is a gulf between those Americans who view guns as invaluable tools for self-defense, both against private wrongdoers and a potentially tyrannical government, and those who regard that concept as hopelessly archaic and even subversive. For them, hunting is the only possible legitimate use of firearms, and gun ownership should be restricted to weapons suited to that purpose.

But while the level of the policy discourse leaves much to be desired, its constitutional dimensions are even more dimly recognized, much less seriously engaged. Yet the debate over guns, as is the case with many other contentious issues in American history, cannot be intelligently pursued without recognizing its constitutional dimensions. The Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in Heller v. District of Columbia confirmed that the Second Amendment means what it says: “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

After Heller and its follow-on case, McDonald v. Chicago, which applied the Second Amendment rights to the states, what government cannot do is deny the individual interest in self-defense. As a legal matter, that debate is settled.

The president and his allies seem to have missed the message, as demonstrated by his continued insistence that most of the American people, including many hunters, support his proposed gun-control measures. Even if that claim were true , constitutionally protected rights are guarded with particular vigor precisely when public opinion turns against them. Meanwhile, the president’s continued appeals to emotion, capitalizing on a series of tragic mass shootings, also ill-fit what ought to be a serious and dispassionate discussion. (As is the case with every emotional appeal he makes on any given issue.)

While the courts are still sorting out Heller‘s implications, politicians should not assume that they have a free hand to restrict private gun ownership. Decades of case law interpreting and applying the other provisions of the Bill of Rights show that there are hard-and-fast limits on gun control.

The general framework is straightforward and certainly well-known to those who have studied (let alone taught) constitutional law. The government cannot abridge constitutionally protected rights simply to make a symbolic point or because it feels that something must be done. Any measure must be justified by a legitimate government interest that is compelling or at least important. At the same time, any regulation must be “narrowly tailored” to achieve that interest.

On that basis, in a recent case the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on depictions of animal cruelty, rejecting the government’s argument that it had any legitimate interest in banning pictures and videos associated with crimes, and finding—even assuming the government’s interest—that the statute swept up too much protected speech. In this way, judicial balancing requires a careful weighing of the government’s interests against the individual’s, with a thumb on the scale in favor of the individual.

But you wouldn’t know that from the current gun-control debate. Several states, for example, are considering gun-insurance mandates modeled after those for automobile insurance. There is no conceivable public-safety benefit: Insurance policies cover accidents, not intentional crimes, and criminals with illegal guns will just evade the requirement. The real purpose is to make guns less affordable for law-abiding citizens and thereby reduce private gun ownership. Identical constitutionally suspect logic explains proposals to tax the sale of bullets at excessive rates.

The courts, however, are no more likely to allow government to undermine the Second Amendment than to undermine the First. (Not based on what we saw out of Roberts on Obamascare.) A state cannot circumvent the right to a free press by requiring that an unfriendly newspaper carry millions in libel insurance or pay a thousand-dollar tax on barrels of ink—the real motive, in either case, would be transparent and the regulation struck down. How could the result be any different for the right to keep and bear arms?

The same constitutional infirmity plagues the president’s plan. Consider his proposal for a new “assault weapons” ban, targeting a class of weapons distinguished by their cosmetic features, such as a pistol grip or threaded barrel. These guns may look sinister, but they don’t differ from other common weapons in any relevant respect—firing mechanism, ammunition, magazine size—and so present no greater threat to public safety. Needless to say, the government has no legitimate interest in banning guns that gun-controllers simply do not like and would not, themselves, care to own.

Also constitutionally suspect are restrictions on magazine size. There is no question that a limit of 10 rounds (as the president has proposed) or seven (as enacted by New York state last month) would impair the right to self-defense. A magazine with 10 rounds may provide adequate protection against a single nighttime intruder. But it may not: What if there are two intruders?

Further compounding the constitutional problem is the fact that the benefit of such limits is questionable. For a practiced and calm shooter, swapping magazines takes no more than a couple of seconds. And a swap may not even be necessary if the shooter has multiple guns, as in several mass shootings in recent years.

While some limit on magazines may be constitutionally permissible, one that falls below the capabilities of guns in common usage for self-defense is probably not. The most popular guns for self-defense take 15 or so rounds in their default configurations. Given the uncertain benefit of restricting magazine size, not to mention the tens of millions of “high capacity” magazines in circulation, something near that number may be a constitutional minimum.

And while there is no question that procedural requirements like background checks are permissible, that does not mean that the government may place an undue burden on the right of law-abiding citizens to protect themselves. Excessive waiting periods, registration fees and the like are all subject to scrutiny, lest they infringe on constitutionally guaranteed rights.

At bottom, the Constitution requires sensible and effective regulation of guns that respects and upholds this most fundamental right. Policies motivated by nothing more than discomfort with firearms, often born of a lack of experience, fall far short.

Let alone obvious willful ignorance, or an uniformed opinion; both of which are the subject of this supporting video featuring Penn & Teller:

In a related item, courtesy of Hope n’ Change, we present a follow-up to last week’s report of recent gargantuan purchases of ammunition by the DHS:

Big Bang Theory

 

Have you heard the hilarious new riddle that’s been sweeping through the halls of the Department of Homeland Security? It goes like this:

Question: What do you have when you’ve stockpiled 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition in 10 months?
Answer: Not enough bullets! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Okay, we’re not laughing either – especially since Janet Napolitano just ordered another 21.6 million bullets to add to her “homeland” arsenal. But what in blazes is she expecting to happen within our borders which will require so much firepower?

To put the numbers into perspective, at the peak of the Iraq war our military was using 5.5 million bullets a month. By that standard, Janet Napolitano’s troops now have enough ammo to wage full scale war on someone for 30 years. Someone here at home. Or another way to look at it is 5 bullets for every man, woman, and child in America. Literally.

Gulp. It seems uncomfortably coincidental that Barack Obama and company are pushing hard for the disarmament of citizens, while simultaneously stockpiling jaw-dropping (or dissidence-stopping) amounts of domestic artillery, including hollow point bullets intended to kill rather than wound. (To be honest, all bullets have but one purpose.)

Someone with a suspicious mind might imagine that Obama and the DHS are preparing for something huge, something secret, and something which would be so disruptive to our economy that bullets might be unavailable for years or decades.

Fortunately, here at Hope n’ Change Cartoons, we don’t have suspicious minds! Or at least we’re not admitting we do until our Kevlar longjohns arrive in the mail. 

We’d surely love to; and as the star of this next video clip forwarded by Balls Cotton confirms, we’ve got just the young lady to do it:

What do The Obamao and his Fellow Travelers fear most?  An armed, informed citizenry; which is precisely why Liberals, having successfully dumbed-down the public education system, are now going after guns.

Which brings us to yet another story you won’t find featured in the MSM:

Suspect shot by homeowner during burglary attempt

 

Police are investigating a shooting case involving a homeowner and burglary suspect near 75th Avenue and Indian School Road. Authorities say the homeowner came home to find four men ransacking the property around 11 a.m. Friday. Two men ran out of the house through the carport door and two came out from the bedroom area, according to Phoenix Police.

One of the suspects came at the homeowner and the homeowner fired one round at him, from a handgun he had in a holster in his waistband, police say. The suspect was transported to an area hospital where he later died. He was identified as 16-year-old Mario Barcenas.

What young Mario Barcenas planned to do to this well-armed (legally!) homeowner….

….we can only guess.  But based on what the MSM didn’t see fit to report about what 17-year-old Trayvon Martin did to George Zimmerman?  To borrow a phrase from Harry Callahan, we’ll assume he wasn’t out collecting for the Girl Scouts.

Here’s the juice: the MSM will never hesitate to report the number of people killed by firearms in the U.S; what they won’t report are the circumstances of the deaths, i.e., differentiate between homicide or self-defense, let alone point out two-thirds of firearms deaths are by suicide.  Thus, any expectation they’d remind us back in 1994 almost 1,000,000 clearly innocent Rwandans were hacked to death with machetes in less than three months defies both hope and logic.

Yeah….it’s the guns!

Moving on to the Culture Section, we offer this Word to the Wise from Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt:

….I’m actually not sure if the problem is that our most popular cultural offerings are focused on characteristics that limit human potential. It could very well be the opposite, that the “everyone is special, everyone is great,” “be yourself,” “march to the beat of your own drummer” message persuades people that they have a lot more human potential than they actually have, or perhaps it’s that they get an unrealistic sense of what it will take to unlock their human potential.

If you’ll permit me to refer to an off-color essay in the humor site Cracked.com, they argue that The Karate Kid ruined the world. Stay with me here:

Every adult I know–or at least the ones who are depressed–continually suffers from something like sticker shock (that is, when you go shopping for something for the first time and are shocked to find it costs way, way more than you thought). Only it’s with effort. It’s Effort Shock.

We have a vague idea in our head of the “price” of certain accomplishments, how difficult it should be to get a degree, or succeed at a job, or stay in shape, or raise a kid, or build a house. And that vague idea is almost always catastrophically wrong.

Accomplishing worthwhile things isn’t just a little harder than people think; it’s 10 or 20 times harder. Like losing weight. You make yourself miserable for six months and find yourself down a whopping four pounds. Let yourself go at a single all-you-can-eat buffet and you’ve gained it all back…

America is full of frustrated, broken, baffled people because so many of us think, “If I work this hard, this many hours a week, I should have (a great job, a nice house, a nice car, etc). I don’t have that thing, therefore something has corrupted the system and kept me from getting what I deserve, and that something must be (the government, illegal immigrants, my wife, my boss, my bad luck, etc).”

I really think Effort Shock has been one of the major drivers of world events. Think about the whole economic collapse and the bad credit bubble. You can imagine millions of working types saying, “All right, I have NO free time. I work every day, all day. I come home and take care of the kids. We live in a tiny house, with two [lousy] cars. And we are still deeper in debt every single month.” So they borrow and buy on credit because they have this unspoken assumption that, [darnit], the universe will surely right itself at some point and the amount of money we should have been making all along (according to our level of effort) will come raining down. . . .

How have we gotten to adulthood and failed to realize this? Why would our expectations of the world be so off? I blame the montages. Five breezy minutes, from sucking at karate to being great at karate, from morbid obesity to trim, from geeky girl to prom queen, from terrible garage band to awesome rock band.

WE blame the false expectations purposely raised by Liberals in their pursuit of perpetual power.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch with The Gang That Still Can’t Shoot Straight, Jonah Goldberg raises….

Two cheers for rebranding

Conservatives will never beat liberals at the game of whose heart bleeds the most. They shouldn’t try.

 

Ever since Mitt Romney lost the presidential election, there’s been a lot of talk about how the Republican party needs to “rebrand” itself.

Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal wants, among other things, for the GOP to stop being “the stupid party.” Representative Paul Ryan has concluded that the watchword for the Republican party needs to be “prudence.” Senator Marco Rubio is the frontman for the most tangible aspect of the rebranding effort: getting on the right side of the immigration issue. In the process, he’s become something of the de facto point person for the party.

The latest entrant into this effort: House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. On Tuesday, Cantor gave a well-received speech at the American Enterprise Institute (where I am a fellow), titled “Making Life Work.” In it, Cantor argued for utterly reasonable conservative solutions that would improve the plight of the working poor and the middle class.

It’s all good stuff from a great field. Indeed, while calling them the “fantastic four” might seem hyperbolic — and unfair to a few other politicians left out of the mix — Rubio, Ryan, Jindal, and Cantor are a pretty good counterargument to those who think the Republican party is doomed. Excellent politicians all, three out of four are minorities: a Hispanic, an Indian-American, and a Jew — which sounds like they should be walking into a bar for a joke. The fourth, the Catholic Ryan, routinely wins a working-class district that votes Democratic in presidential elections.

I should note that lately I’ve written favorably about this rebranding stuff as well. In a nutshell, I’ve been arguing that the GOP’s problems don’t stem from a lack of principle, but from a lack of persuasiveness.

My point was not — and is not — that the GOP should abandon its commitment to core conservative principles. If you can’t get the swing voters to vote for the existing level of conservatism the GOP is offering, it seems odd to argue that the GOP needs to peddle an even more strident form of conservatism (even if that purer conservatism would yield better policies). If a potential customer says, “The Chevy Impala is too pricey,” a good salesman doesn’t immediately respond, “Okay, can I interest you in a Bentley?”

All that said, I think the push to rebrand the GOP has its own pitfalls. For starters, “prudence” and “don’t be stupid,” while excellent prescriptions for how to behave, are not, in themselves, great rallying cries. If you don’t believe me, try to get a crowd of the faithful to start chanting “Pru-dence! Pru-dence!” or “We’re Not Stupid! We’re Not Stupid!”

While this may seem obvious, the fact is that one GOP’s worst tics is its habit of reading its stage directions out loud. For instance, Republicans often talk about how they’re not going to “go negative.” George H. W. Bush had such contempt for Bill Clinton’s gift for wholesale empathy, he felt the need to proclaim, “Message: I care.” (The fact he, like Mitt Romney, was photographed vacationing on a power boat at the time certainly didn’t help convey any level of sincerity!)

Obviously, Republicans should care about what is best for the country and the voters — and they should demonstrate that concern — but they will never beat liberals at the game of whose heart bleeds the most. As liberal Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne observes, Cantor’s rebranding maneuvers the GOP into a contest on Democratic turf: who cares more about workers, the poor, immigrants, etc. As Dionne notes, that’s why Democratic senator Chuck Schumer immediately praised Cantor’s remarks.

The reason that game is so perilous for conservatives is not that liberals necessarily care more than conservatives but that they are always willing and eager to prove their concern by cutting a check, even when all we have in the checking account is IOUs and cash on loan from China. Moreover, they are perfectly happy and eager to say that anyone who opposes more check kiting is greedy or selfish, even if what Democrats are doing is making the problem they seek to solve worse. All too often, liberals act as if government has a monopoly on compassion.

“There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism,” Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said, “joined with a certain superiority in its fact.” Children often think their parents are being mean when they tell their kids to do their homework. That doesn’t make the parents mean, it makes them responsible. Eventually, the lessons of life persuade children their parents were right all along.

Voters aren’t children, but too many of them have the childish notion that the best policies are those that pander to their immediate desires. The challenge for the GOP is to persuade them to put away childish things.

All too true; but we’re afeared Goldberg might as well be seeking chastity in a whorehouse.

And since we’re on the subject….

Valérie Trierweiler ‘succumbs to Marie-Antoinette syndrome of life of luxury’

 

Sorta like the First Marxette wearing $500 designer sneakers….

….to work in a food bank.

In other News of the Professionally Sensitized, we present, courtesy of Best of the Web:

Great Moments in Socialized Medicine

 

But Nobel Laureate Paul “Former Enron Advisor” Krugman KNOWS better!

“Shockingly bad care and inhumane treatment at a hospital in the Midlands led to hundreds of unnecessary deaths and stripped countless patients of their dignity and self-respect, according to a scathing report published on Wednesday,” reports the New York Times’s Sarah Lyall from London:

The report, which examined conditions at Stafford Hospital in Staffordshire over a 50-month period between 2005 and 2009, cites example after example of horrific treatment: patients left unbathed and lying in their own urine and excrement; patients left so thirsty that they drank water from vases; patients denied medication, pain relief and food by callous and overworked staff members; patients who contracted infections due to filthy conditions; and patients sent home to die after being given the wrong diagnoses.

We certainly hope the Times’s public editor sets Lyall straight. After all, as former Enron adviser Paul Krugman points out: “In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false.”

And we read it in the New York Times.

We expect Krugman’s admission of error about the same time The Obamao delivers his apology for Benghazi.

Following up on last week’s item in which we branded as bogus Iran’s claim to have developed a “stealth jet”, the New York Post reports:

Aviation experts say new Iranian stealth jet is a pathetic hoax that can’t even fly

 

To infinity and beyond!!!

Guess that makes us an expert!

On the Lighter Side….

Turning now to another titillating tale ripped from the pages of The Crime Blotter:

Jesse Jackson Jr. signs plea deal, reportedly faces ‘significant’ jail time

 

That’s one apple that didn’t fall far from the tree.

Finally, in a twisted story betwitx News of the Bizarre and The Crime Blotter, we learn of a….

Sri Lankan prisoner caught by his ring tone

 

Rumors Bawney Fwank….

Wook what I found!  Ooooh; you wascawy Swi Wankans!

….is moonlighting as a Sri Lankan prison guard remain unconfirmed.

Magoo