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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; control</title>
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		<title>Hey, Bloomberg: Mind Your Own Crumbling City</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/michellemalkin/hey-bloomberg-mind-your-own-crumbling-city/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hey-bloomberg-mind-your-own-crumbling-city</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 14 Jul 2014 04:25:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michelle Malkin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Colorado]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[control]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gun]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Michael Bloomberg]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York City]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rolling stone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Second Amendment]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=236211</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The real reason the former NYC mayor lashed out at "rural" Colorado. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Bloomberg-angry.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-236212" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Bloomberg-angry-427x350.jpg" alt="Bloomberg-angry" width="268" height="220" /></a>Some sore losers just don&#8217;t know when to pick up their billion-dollar marbles and go away. Far, far away.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m looking at you, Michael Bloomberg.</p>
<p>The former New York City mayor mouthed off about my adopted hometown of Colorado Springs and my friends in nearby Pueblo in Rolling Stone magazine this month. He snidely bashed our neighborhoods as backwater holes &#8220;where I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s roads. It&#8217;s as far rural as you can get.&#8221;</p>
<p>Snotty Bloomberg is as clueless about geography as he is about the Second Amendment. Colorado Springs and Pueblo are the second and seventh largest cities in the state, respectively. If we&#8217;re hee-haw, everyone&#8217;s hee-haw. (And what&#8217;s wrong with hee-haw, anyway?)</p>
<p>Why such vitriol and hatred for the Rockies from the man who pompously co-founded the &#8220;No Labels&#8221; movement for &#8220;civility&#8221; in politics?</p>
<p>Simple: Bloomberg&#8217;s still smarting from the ground-breaking losses he and his gun-grabbing East Coast elite pals suffered last fall.</p>
<p>Grass-roots activists — independents, former Democrats, constitutional conservatives and Republicans — successfully recalled two top gun control zealots in our state legislature.</p>
<p>The recall organizers were outspent by a whopping 7-to-1 margin. Bloomberg poured $350,000 into the failed effort to stave off the historic recalls.</p>
<p>Listen up, Bloomie: Butt out of our state and mind your own crumbling city before you bash anyone else&#8217;s infrastructure.</p>
<p>You were mayor of New York City for 12 years. How are your roads, bridges and utilities doing, Pal?</p>
<p>According to the Center for an Urban Future&#8217;s Adam Forman, &#8220;1,000 miles of water mains, 170 school buildings and 165 bridges were constructed over a century ago.</p>
<p>The city&#8217;s public hospital buildings are 57 years old, on average, and 531 public housing towers were built prior to 1950.&#8221; The center&#8217;s report documented 403 water main breaks last year. And in 2012, &#8220;162 bridges across the city — or 11 percent of the total — were structurally deficient,&#8221; and 47 of these were deemed &#8220;fracture critical.&#8221;</p>
<p>Take a Big Gulp of these additional fun facts:</p>
<p>— &#8220;Thirty seven percent of all subway signals exceed their 50-year useful life, slowing the movement of trains.&#8221;</p>
<p>— &#8220;Approximately 4,000 miles of sewer pipe across the city are made of vitreous clay, a material susceptible to cracking and blockage.</p>
<p>— Meanwhile, 1,500 of the 2,600 public housing buildings do not comply with local standards for exterior and facade conditions.</p>
<p>— In Manhattan and Staten Island, less than 60 percent of roads were rated &#8220;good&#8221; by residents. A &#8220;staggering 65.9 percent of streets in West Harlem/Morningside Heights&#8221; were in &#8220;fair to poor condition.&#8221;</p>
<p>— Highway maintenance has deteriorated over Bloomberg&#8217;s tenure. In 2012, 51 percent of highways were rated poor to fair, compared to 38 percent in 2008. &#8220;Conditions have declined in every borough except Brooklyn.&#8221;</p>
<p>Oh, and dare I mention to you and your city slicker clique that embarrassing time you had a few Christmas seasons ago dealing with a few feet of snow. Hundreds of ambulances were left stranded. Mass transit was paralyzed. Businesses suffered. Your bungling and AWOL jet setting (Bloomberg was flying to Bermuda while New Yorkers braced for the storm) cost taxpayers the entire $40 million snow removal budget and $30 million in city overtime.</p>
<p>But we&#8217;re the bumbling yokels?</p>
<p>Go home, Nanny Bloomberg. Keep your high-and-mighty nose out of our business, your hands off our guns and your money out of our state.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Internet Control in an Anti-Free Speech World</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/internet-control-in-an-anti-free-speech-world/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=internet-control-in-an-anti-free-speech-world</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Mar 2014 04:24:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[control]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[international community]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Internet]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[relinquish]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S.]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221364</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What happens when the "international community" oversees the web? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/laptops.afp_.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-221365 alignleft" alt="laptops.afp_" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/laptops.afp_-450x320.jpg" width="315" height="224" /></a>Last Friday, U.S. officials announced plans to </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/us-to-relinquish-remaining-control-over-the-internet/2014/03/14/0c7472d0-abb5-11e3-adbc-888c8010c799_print.html">relinquish</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> control of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which manages Internet infrastructure to the so-called &#8220;global community.&#8221; Despite denials from the administration, the consequences of that move do indeed include the possibility of the Internet falling under U.N. control. That reality has been pursued for years by pro-censorship factions led by Russia and China. As such, enormous questions exist about the future of the Internet under the stewardship of international interests &#8212; questions that the Obama administration seems wholly unconcerned with. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The consequences of relinquishing control of the Internet involve more than censorship. U.S. security could be </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/03/15/ex-bush-admin-official-internet-giveaway-weakens-cybersecurity-opens-door-to-web-tax/">jeopardized</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> as well. “Under invariably incompetent U.N. control, it could mean a hostile foreign power disabling the Internet for us,” former Bush administration State Department advisor Christian Whiton warned. He also sounded the warning on the possibility that any U.N. control of the Internet could engender taxes. &#8220;While the Obama administration says it is merely removing federal oversight of a non-profit, we should assume ICANN would end up as part of the United Nations,” Whiton said. “If the U.N. gains control what amounts to the directory and traffic signals of the Internet, it can impose whatever taxes it likes. It likely would start with a tax on registering domains and expand from there.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Since the birth of the Internet, which grew out of a Defense Department program that began in the 1960s, America has always played the principal role in </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/15/us-usa-internet-domainnames-idUSBREA2D1YH20140315">maintaining</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the master database for domain names, the assignment of Internet protocol addresses and other critical Web functions. That technical system is </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/200889-us-to-relinquish-internet-control">called</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). An agency within the Commerce Department, the National Telecommunications &amp; Information Administration (NTIA), has contracted out IANA&#8217;s operations to ICANN on a biennial basis since 2000. The latest contract </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/200889-us-to-relinquish-internet-control">expires</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in September of  2015.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling denied the possibility of a U.N. or equivalent type takeover, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/internet-control-commerce-department-nsa-104686.html">insisting</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that ICANN must meet four conditions to make the transition. “We will not accept a proposal that replaces the NTIA role with a government-led or an intergovernmental solution,” Strickling said in a conference call. He has asked ICANN to begin the process for making a formal transition that must &#8220;support and enhance the multistakeholder model&#8221; and &#8220;maintain the openness of the Internet.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">ICANN itself wants to get out from under U.S. oversight, and their effort has been abetted by European officials whose promotion of a globalization campaign has intensified in the wake of fugitive Edward Snowden&#8217;s leaks about the National Security Administration&#8217;s overarching surveillance programs. An NTIA official denied the connection, insisting U.S. stewardship of the Internet was always intended to be temporary. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Regardless of which scenario is accurate, ICANN&#8217;s motive is transparent. The organization has elicited the wrath of many in the business community who believe their decision-making is aimed at accommodating the industry that sells domain names, and whose fees provide the lion&#8217;s share of ICANN&#8217;s revenue. They believe ICANN&#8217;s contract with the U.S. mitigates some of those abuses, and that international control would amount to no control at all.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">There is little question that the selling of domain names is a huge business, one with enormous potential for fraud. As a 2012 article in the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Washington Post</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/donuts-incs-major-play-for-new-web-domain-names-raises-eyebrows/2012/09/24/c8745362-f782-11e1-8398-0327ab83ab91_story.html">revealed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, several groups have been out to get control of names that would give them a huge advantage over their competitors. Examples include Amazon bidding for control over all the Web addresses that end with “.book,” </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://washpost.bloomberg.com/marketnews/stockdetail/?symbol=GOOG">Google</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> for “.buy.” and  </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://washpost.bloomberg.com/marketnews/stockdetail/?symbol=ALL">Allstate</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> for “.carinsurance.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">They further sounded the alarm about Donuts Inc., a company with close ties to a documented Internet spammer. Donuts Inc. bid $57 million for 307 new domains, including “.doctor,” “.financial” and “.school.” At the time, David E. Weslow, a D.C.-based lawyer who represents several major corporations, contended that such top-level domains would precipitate a &#8220;Wild West for fraud and abuse.”  Law enforcement officials agreed, noting that the rapid expansion of new domains would increase the likelihood of cybercrime, even as identifying the perpetrators would become more difficult. In 2012, there were 22 &#8220;top level domains.&#8221; Here is ICANN&#8217;s </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt">current</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8211;and vastly expanded&#8211;list.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">ICANN </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-03-17/the-u-dot-s-dot-ends-control-of-icann-gives-up-backing-of-the-free-speech-internet">manages</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that list via an international structure of governance comprised of “stakeholders&#8221; that include governments, corporations, and civil society activists. Under its contract with the NTIA, it could theoretically be forced to render a website nameless, effectively removing it from the Internet. When that contract ends, a new form of global governance will take its place&#8211;one that has yet to be determined. There have been several efforts over the course of the last decade to transfer control of the Internet to the U.N.’s </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.itu.int/en/Pages/default.aspx">International Telecommunications Union</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> (ITU), whose website claims it is &#8220;committed to connecting the world.&#8221; Yet those efforts have been led by Russia and China, two countries whose commitment to &#8220;connecting the world&#8221; begins and ends with censoring content inimical to their interests. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unsurprisingly, both believe the only stakeholders that really matter are countries. That&#8217;s because under the current contract, nations can only suppress Internet content. They can&#8217;t prevent websites from registering domain names. If those parameters change, domain name registry could be censored under the auspices of protecting one&#8217;s national sovereignty. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">ICANN president Fadi Chehade dismisses that concern as well as others. “Nothing will be done in any way to jeopardize the security and stability of the Internet,” he promised. He called the Obama administration’s decision &#8220;historic.&#8221; </span></p>
<p>Republicans weren&#8217;t buying it. “While I certainly agree our nation must stridently review our procedures regarding surveillance in light of the NSA controversy, to put ourselves in a situation where censorship-laden governments like China or Russia could take a firm hold on the Internet itself is truly a scary thought,” said Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC). “I look forward to working with my colleagues on the Senate Commerce Committee and with the Commerce Department on this, because&#8211;to be blunt&#8211;the ‘global Internet community’ this would empower has no First Amendment.”</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Former Rep. Mary Bono (R-CA), who sponsored a unanimously-passed 2012 resolution to keep the Internet free from governmental control, concurred. “We’re at a critical time where [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is proving he is capable of outmaneuvering the administration. … As they digest it, I think people are going to be very upset,&#8221; she contended. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As if on cue, Amnesty International revealed that Russia </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/for-media/press-releases/russia-media-black-out-ahead-disputed-crimea-referendum-2014-03-14">instituted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> a media blackout that included blocking a number of Internet sites in the Russian Federation prior to secession vote in Crimea. That censorship was enabled by an amendment to the Law on Internet Information signed by Putin on Feb. 1, giving the Prosecutor General’s office the authority to block websites that publish any calls for activities considered to be unlawful.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">An </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.ideaslaboratory.com/2014/03/14/is-the-u-s-government-about-to-give-away-the-internet/">op-ed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by Daniel Castro, a senior analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), reveals what&#8217;s at stake. He notes that two years ago, on the 25th anniversary of the registration of the first .com domain name, his company released a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.itif.org/files/2010-25-years.pdf">report</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> revealing that &#8220;the annual global economic benefit of the commercial Internet equaled $1.5 trillion, more than the global sales of medicine, investment in renewable energy, and government investment in R&amp;D, combined.&#8221; He believes all of it would be at risk if the Obama administration doesn&#8217;t resist giving up control of the Internet. He contends such a move would bring about a &#8220;splintered Internet that would stifle innovation, commerce, and the free flow and diversity of ideas that are bedrock tenets of the world’s biggest economic engine.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Nonetheless, the effort has its defenders. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WVA) called the move “consistent with other efforts the U.S. and our allies are making to promote a free and open Internet, and to preserve and advance the current multi-stakeholder model of global Internet governance.” Gene Kimmelman, president of Public Knowledge, a hard-left group </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2011/04/27/Leftists-Don---t-Form----Public-Interest----Groups---They-Form-Government-Interest-Groups">promoting</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> itself as a public interest vehicle, concurred. “This is a step in the right direction to resolve important international disputes about how the Internet is governed,&#8221; he said.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This so-called step in the right direction is anything but. It is useful to remember that along with Russian and China, the EU </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/eu-unveils-planned-crackdown-on-free-speech/">criminalizes</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> free speech, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference is </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/12/oic-blames-free-speech-for-islamophobia-in-the-west">determined</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to silence those who resist terror and jihad. And despite Chehade&#8217;s contention that the Obama administration&#8217;s decision &#8220;marks a point of maturity in the ICANN community and the global Internet community,&#8221; he revealed that governments would be welcome as &#8220;equal parties&#8221; with others in the coming discussions for laying out the appropriate transitional process. Those discussions are scheduled to begin at an ICANN meeting in Singapore next week.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">ITIF’s Daniel Castro sounds the ultimate alarm, one that should concern every American. &#8220;Yes, Internet architecture is technical and, frankly, quite boring to outsiders,&#8221; he acknowledges. &#8220;But it is an issue with huge consequences that demands attention from policymakers. It is too important to get wrong. And if the Obama Administration gives away its oversight of the Internet, it will be gone forever.&#8221; </span></p>
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		<title>Does Washington Know Best?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/does-washington-know-best/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=does-washington-know-best</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/does-washington-know-best/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 15 Nov 2013 04:20:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Congress]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[control]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=210733</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Would you trust Congress to oversee every stop light in the nation? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ap_capitol_nt_110928_wblog.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-210737" alt="ap_capitol_nt_110928_wblog" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ap_capitol_nt_110928_wblog.jpg" width="246" height="188" /></a>According to some estimates, there are more than 100 million traffic signals in the U.S., but whatever the number, how many of us would like Washington, in the name of public health and safety, to be in sole charge of their operation? Congress or a committee it authorizes would determine the position of traffic signals at intersections, the length of time the lights stay red, yellow and green, and what hours of the day they can be flashing red.</p>
<p>While you ponder that, how many Americans would like Washington to be in charge of managing the delivery of food and other items to the nation&#8217;s supermarkets? Today&#8217;s average well-stocked U.S. supermarket stocks 60,000 to 65,000 different items from all over the U.S. and the world. Congress or some congressionally created committee could organize the choice of products and their prices. Maybe there&#8217;d be some cost savings. After all, what says that we should have so many items from which to choose? Why wouldn&#8217;t 10,000 do?</p>
<p>You say, &#8220;Williams, those are ludicrous ideas whose implementation would spell disaster!&#8221; You&#8217;re right. Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek, one of the greatest economists of the 20th century, said it is a fatal conceit for anyone to think that a single mind or group of minds, no matter how intelligent and well-meaning, could manage to do things better than the spontaneous, unstructured, complex and creative forces of the market. The biggest challenges in any system, whether it&#8217;s an economic, biological or ecological system, are information, communication and control. Congressmen&#8217;s taking over control of the nation&#8217;s traffic signals would require a massive amount of information that they are incapable of possessing, such as traffic flows at intersections, accident experiences, terrain patterns and peak and off-peak traffic flows.</p>
<p>The same information problem exists at supermarkets. Consider the challenge in organizing inputs in order to get 65,000 different items to a supermarket. Also, consider how uncompromising supermarket customers are.</p>
<p>We don&#8217;t tell the supermarket manager in advance when we&#8217;re going to shop or what we&#8217;re going to buy and in what quantity, but if the store doesn&#8217;t have what we want when we want it, we&#8217;ll fire the manager by taking our business elsewhere. The supermarket manager does a fairly good job doing what&#8217;s necessary to meet that challenge.</p>
<p>You say, &#8220;C&#8217;mon, Williams, nobody&#8217;s proposing that Congress take over the nation&#8217;s traffic signals and supermarkets!&#8221; You&#8217;re right, at least for now, but Congress and the president are taking over an area of our lives infinitely more challenging and complex than the management of traffic signals and supermarkets, namely our health care system. Oblivious to the huge information problem in the allocation of resources, the people in Washington have great confidence that they can run our health care system better than we, our physicians and hospitals. Charles Darwin wisely noted more than a century and a half ago that &#8220;ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.&#8221; Congress exudes confidence.</p>
<p>Suggesting that Congress and the president are ignorant of the fact that knowledge is highly dispersed and decisions made locally produce the best outcomes might be overly generous. It could be that they know they really don&#8217;t know what they&#8217;re doing but just don&#8217;t give a hoot because it&#8217;s in their political interest to centralize health care decision-making. Just as one example, how can Congress know whether buying a $4,000 annual health insurance policy would be the best use of healthy 25-year-old Joe Sanders&#8217; earnings? Would he be better off purchasing a cheaper catastrophic health insurance policy and saving the rest of the money to put toward a business investment? Politicians really don&#8217;t care about what Joe thinks is best, because they arrogantly think they know what&#8217;s best and have the power to coerce.</p>
<p>Hayek said, &#8220;The curious task of economics is to illustrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.&#8221; We economists have failed miserably in that task.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Obamacare: The Unimaginable Suffering That Awaits Us</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/john-perazzo/obamacare-the-unimaginable-suffering-that-awaits-us/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamacare-the-unimaginable-suffering-that-awaits-us</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/john-perazzo/obamacare-the-unimaginable-suffering-that-awaits-us/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 05 Nov 2013 04:43:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Perazzo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=209618</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The horrifying direction Obama and company are leading us to. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/article-0-002ADAD300000258-120_468x286.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209619" alt="Abortion clinic - picture posed  by model" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/article-0-002ADAD300000258-120_468x286.jpg" width="257" height="199" /></a>There is a vital reason for all Americans to take a close look at how, specifically, the various government-run, single-payer healthcare systems around the world have already affected the lives of the people living under them. This is vital because Barack Obama and the Democrats actually have their sights set on creating precisely such a system here in the United States. For them, Obamacare is, and always has been, nothing more than a stepping stone toward their ultimate goal of a single-payer leviathan administered entirely by the federal government. Indeed, they&#8217;ve been quite clear about their intentions:</p>
<p>• In early August, Senator Harry Reid was asked whether his goal was to eventually use Obamacare as a springboard to a single-payer system. “Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes,” he <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/08/10/sen-harry-reid-obamacare-absolutely-a-step-toward-a-single-payer-system/">replied</a>. “What we’ve done with Obamacare is have a step in the right direction, but we’re far from having something that’s going to work forever.”</p>
<p>• In late October, Rep. John Conyers <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2013/10/21/Conyers-Obamacare-Very-Small-and-Modest-Bill-Compared-To-The-Universal-Healthcare-Thats-Coming">stated</a> that Obamacare was just “a very small and modest bill,” and that Congressional Democrats were already contemplating ways to pass “universal healthcare for everybody, single payer.” “That&#8217;s what the new direction is,” Conyers affirmed, even as the supposedly “small and modest” Obamacare project was proving to be nothing more than a colossal lie administered with inexpressible incompetence.</p>
<p>• Nancy Pelosi, too, is on record <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/archive/item/88476:final-health-care-bill-vote-due-as-early-as-next-week">stating</a>: “I have supported single payer for longer than many of you have been—since you&#8217;ve been born, than you&#8217;ve lived on the face of the earth. So I think, I have always thought, that was the way to go.”</p>
<p>• Kathleen Sebelius, the chief architect of Obamacare&#8217;s pathetic rollout last month, has candidly <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/08/12/flashback-sebelius-called-for-a-single-payer-system-eventually/">declared</a> herself to be “all for a single-payer [healthcare] system eventually.” On October 7, she <a href="http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/10/08/stewart-to-sebelius-on-health-care-law-am-i-a-stupid-man/">told</a> interviewer <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1939">Jon Stewart</a> that “if we could have perhaps figured out a pathway [to single-payer], that may have been a reasonable solution.”<br />
And of course President Obama himself has been unambiguous about his own views on this matter:</p>
<p>• At an AFL-CIO conference in 2003, Obama <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/10/29/Flashback-Obama-s-Campaign-to-Transition-to-Single-Payer-Health-Care-VIDEO">said</a>: “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health care plan&#8230;. &#8216;Everybody in. Nobody out.&#8217; &#8230; That&#8217;s what I&#8217;d like to see, but as all of you know, we may not get there immediately.”</p>
<p>• At an <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6535">SEIU</a> Health Care Forum on March 24, 2007, <a href="http://sroblog.com/2009/08/04/shock-uncovered-obama-in-his-own-words-saying-his-health-care-plan-will-eliminate-private-insurance/">Obama declared</a>: “My commitment is to make sure that we&#8217;ve got universal healthcare for all Americans by the end of my first term as President&#8230;. But I don&#8217;t think we&#8217;re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There&#8217;s going to be, potentially, some transition process. I can envision a decade out, or 15 years out, or 20 years out &#8230;”</p>
<p>• On August 4, 2007, Obama <a href="http://freedomeden.blogspot.com/2010/03/obama-and-single-payer-system.html">announced</a> that he planned to pass healthcare reform legislation and then “build off that system to … make it more rational.” “By the way,” he added, “Canada did not start off immediately with a single payer system. They had a similar transition step.”</p>
<p>• In the summer of 2008, Obama <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/08/19/obama-touts-single-payer-system">said</a>: “If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system.”</p>
<p>• And in June 2009, Obama <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35272">told</a> an American Medical Association audience that “there are countries where a single-payer system works pretty well.”<br />
So, now that we know definitively what Obama and the Democrats ultimately want, let us look at the track record of single-payer systems around the world, so that we can see exactly what is in store for us if we follow the counsel of these masterminds. A monumentally important 2008 <a href="http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa-613.pdf">Cato Institute study</a> offers keen insights into those systems:<sup> </sup></p>
<p><b>Great Britain</b></p>
<p>Under Britain&#8217;s highly centralized National Health Service (NHS), some 750,000 ailing and desperate people are currently on waiting lists for admission to a hospital. More than half of all British patients must wait more than 18 weeks to receive care of any kind. For most specialties, only 30 to 50 percent of patients are treated within that time frame. For trauma and orthopedics patients, the figure is just 20 percent. Cancer patients must sometimes wait as long as eight months for treatment, and roughly 40 percent of them never even get to see an oncologist. Many who were considered treatable when first diagnosed are incurable by the time their treatment is finally made available. Indeed, this is the sad fate of nearly one-in-five Britons with colon cancer. In addition, many life-saving procedures such as kidney dialysis and open-heart surgery are subject to explicit rationing, and treatment is often denied altogether to patients who are judged too ill or too old for the procedures to be worth the costs.</p>
<p><b>Canada</b></p>
<p>Physicians and modern medical equipment (such as MRI units and CT scanners) are in short supply nationwide, and at any given time as many as 800,000 Canadians are awaiting necessary medical treatment. Across all specialties and all procedures (emergency, non-urgent, and elective), it takes an average of 17.7 weeks for a patient to go through the process of seeing his or her general practitioner (GP), getting a referral to consult with a specialist, and receiving final treatment. And that figure does not even include the time a patient must wait to see a GP in the first place. Canada&#8217;s longest waiting periods are for procedures such as hip or knee replacements and cataract surgery, which could arguably be classified as elective. According to the journal <i>Health Affairs</i>, a 65-year-old Canadian man requiring a routine hip replacement must wait more than <a href="http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2004/09/01/canadas-medical-nightmare">six months</a> for this surgery. In August 2006, then-Canadian Medical Association president Brian Day <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/international/americas/26canada.html?_r=0">lamented</a> that “this is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week, and in which humans can wait two to three years.”</p>
<p>There are likewise protracted waiting periods for more urgent procedures such as neurosurgery and vascular surgery, where delays can dramatically affect a patient&#8217;s chances of survival. A study published in the <i>Canadian Medical Association Journal</i> noted that 50 patients in Ontario alone had recently died while they were on the waiting list for cardiac catheterization. In an address to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, University of Ottawa Heart Institute cardiologist <a href="http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2004/09/01/canadas-medical-nightmare">Richard F. Davies</a> noted that in a single year, 71 Ontario patients had died before being able to undergo coronary artery bypass graft surgery, while another 121 had been “removed from the [waiting] list permanently because they had become medically unfit for surgery,” and 44 others had left the province to have their surgery performed elsewhere—usually in the United States.</p>
<p><b>Italy</b></p>
<p>Because cutting-edge instruments such as MRI units and CT scanners in Italy are in short supply as compared to the United States, Italian patients must wait, on average, 70 days for a mammogram, 74 days for an endoscopy, and 23 days for a sonogram. Moreover, the nation&#8217;s public hospitals are largely considered substandard, unsanitary, and overcrowded.</p>
<p><b>Spain</b></p>
<p>Because Spain has a severe shortage of primary care physicians and nurses, patients are not free to select their own healthcare providers. Rather, they are assigned a primary care doctor from a list of physicians in their local community, and if they need more specialized care, they must obtain a referral from that doctor. On average, Spaniards must wait approximately 65 days to get an appointment with a specialist—including, for instance, 81 days to see a gynecologist and 71 days to see a neurologist. Similarly, they must wait an average of 62 days for a prostectomy and 123 days for hip-replacement surgery. And a number of vital health services that U.S. citizens take for granted—such as rehabilitation, convalescence, and care for those with terminal illness—are virtually unavailable in Spain, where public nursing homes, retirement homes, hospices, and convalescence facilities are in limited supply.</p>
<p><b>Portugal</b></p>
<p>Portugal has only one general practitioner per 1,500 people in its population, and only about one-seventh as many MRI units per capita as the United States. Thus, despite guarantees of “universal coverage,” waiting lists are so long and so prevalent that the European Observatory on Health Systems says that they resemble “de facto rationing.” More than 150,000 Portuguese are currently on waiting lists for surgery, out of a population of just 10.6 million. Further, there is little freedom to choose one&#8217;s own doctor anywhere in the country; patients may change their GP only by applying in writing to the NHS and explaining their reasons.</p>
<p><b>Norway</b></p>
<p>Long and growing waiting lists are a serious problem in Norway, where citizens must consult a government list in order to choose a general practitioner who subsequently acts as a gatekeeper for whatever specialty services and providers they may need. On any given day, some 280,000 Norwegians (out of a population of just 4.6 million) are waiting for care. The average wait for hip-replacement surgery is more than four months; for a prostectomy, nearly three months; and for a hysterectomy, more than two months. Approximately 23 percent of all patients referred for hospital admission must wait longer than 90 days before they can be admitted.</p>
<p><b>Greece</b></p>
<p>Greece has fewer than one-eighth the number of general practitioners that would be required to meet the overall population&#8217;s demand. Patients routinely wait as long as six months for surgery, five months for an outpatient appointment with specialists in fields like hypertension or neurology, and 30 days for just a simple blood test. The country&#8217;s public hospitals are widely considered substandard; most suffer from severe staffing shortages caused, in large part, by low pay.</p>
<p><b>Cuba</b></p>
<p>Leftists revere Communist Cuba for numerous reasons, not the least of which is the government-run, universal healthcare system that was put in place by Fidel Castro. Many of these admirers—among the most notable of whom is the filmmaker Michael Moore—form their impressions of the Cuban healthcare system from its tourist hospitals, which are, by any standards, clean, well staffed, and of excellent quality. Indeed Cuba, in an effort to attract wealthy foreigners who are willing to spend their money on healthcare services, has pioneered the practice of so-called “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_tourism">health tourism</a>” through agencies such as <a href="http://www.haciendapublishing.com/articles/socialized-medicine-cuba-2002-part-ii-other-hidden-faces-cuban-medicine">SERVIMED</a>, which markets Cuban medical services abroad. Calling Cuba “the ideal destination for your health,” SERVIMED frankly admits to being “a tourist subsystem.”</p>
<p>But after providing for the needs of affluent foreigners (and of the country&#8217;s top government officials), the Cuban healthcare system has little left for the general public. Hospitals for ordinary Cubans are typically <a href="http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/cuba/socialized-medicine.htm">unsanitary</a>. Syringes are frequently used to inject multiple patients without any sterilization, and “disposable” gloves are likewise used and reused. Consequently, infectious diseases such an impetigo and hepatitis—and infestations such as scabies, lice and fungal diseases—are commonplace in the Cuban hospital population.<br />
Moreover, Cuban hospitals have serious <a href="http://capitalismmagazine.com/2003/04/bad-cuban-medicine/">shortages</a> of antibiotics, insulin, heart drugs, blood-pressure meters, disinfectants, and even clean water and soap.</p>
<p>It is noteworthy that in the pre-Castro years of the 1950s, the Cuban population as a whole had access to <a href="http://capitalismmagazine.com/2003/04/bad-cuban-medicine/">outstanding</a> medical care through association clinics (<i>clinicas mutualistas</i>) which predated the American concept of health maintenance organizations by decades, as well as through private clinics. At that time the Cuban medical system ranked among the best in the world, as evidenced by the fact that it had Latin America&#8217;s lowest infant-mortality rate—comparable to Canada&#8217;s and better than those of France, Japan, and Italy.</p>
<p>So the evidence is crystal clear. As the Cato Institute <a href="http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa-613.pdf">puts it</a>, “In countries weighted heavily toward government control, people are most likely to face waiting lists, rationing, restrictions on physician choice, and other obstacles to care.” By contrast, “<a href="http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa-613.pdf">those countries</a> with national health care systems that work better, such as France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, are successful to the degree that they incorporate market mechanisms such as competition, cost-consciousness, market prices, and consumer choice, and eschew centralized government control. In other words, socialized medicine works—as long as it isn’t socialized medicine.”</p>
<p>Yet socialized medicine is <i>precisely</i> the direction in which Obama and Democrats wish, beyond any shadow of a doubt, to steer the United States of America. What, then, does this tell us about the judgment and the motivations of these men and women?</p>
<p>Some questions simply answer themselves.</p>
<p><strong>Don&#8217;t miss this week&#8217;s <em>Glazov Gang</em>, which explores <em><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/to-lie-for-obamacare-on-the-glazov-gang/ ">To Lie for ObamaCare</a></em>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Selling Out on Guns</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/selling-out-on-guns/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=selling-out-on-guns</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/selling-out-on-guns/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Apr 2013 04:55:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Former NRA-endorsed senators broker a bargain to keep debate alive on the Democrats’ anti-gun legislation.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/selling-out-on-guns/0120-gun-rights-rallies-jpg_full_600/" rel="attachment wp-att-185299"><img class=" wp-image-185299 alignleft" title="0120-GUN-RIGHTS-RALLIES.jpg_full_600" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/0120-GUN-RIGHTS-RALLIES.jpg_full_600-450x300.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="180" /></a>Two senators have brokered a Faustian bargain on gun purchaser background checks that they hope will allow the Democrats&#8217; anti-gun legislation to pass the Senate.</p>
<p>Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Pat Toomey (R-PA), both of whom have &#8220;A&#8221; ratings with the National Rifle Association, have assigned the creepy Orwellian name, the &#8220;Public Safety and Second Amendment Rights Protection Act,&#8221; to their legislation.</p>
<p>The measure, which the sponsors plan to offer as an amendment today to the main anti-gun bill pending in the Senate (Senate bill S.649), would expand background checks for gun purchasers, which critics say would clear the way for a national gun registry in the future. Honest commentators admit collecting more information from more and more gun buyers will have no effect on crime because criminals won&#8217;t bother submitting to such checks. Even worse, the data that would constitute a de facto gun registry could be used to confiscate firearms from law-abiding citizens.</p>
<p>Toomey acknowledged he faces resistance in his own party. For this reason he asked that a key Democratic co-sponsor of the amendment, leftist Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York, skip a Capitol Hill press conference yesterday.</p>
<p>Although it has been said that the most dangerous place in Washington is between Schumer and a television camera, the New Yorker agreed to stay away, the <em>New York Times</em> reported.</p>
<p>Toomey rationalized his support by stating: “I’ve got to tell you, candidly, I don’t consider criminal background checks gun control.” He failed to detail some of the scarier, authoritarian provisions of the main anti-gun bill pending in the Senate that he now implicitly supports.</p>
<p>Gun law expert Dave Kopel <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/344763/turning-gun-owners-felons-dave-kopel">warns</a> the legislation &#8220;would turn almost every gun owner into a felon.&#8221; For example, it would regulate innocent activities such as letting your spouse borrow your weapon for a few days. It would also forbid you from sharing a gun at a shooting range on public lands or on your own property.</p>
<p>&#8220;This is not &#8216;gun control&#8217; in the constitutionally legitimate sense: reasonable laws that protect public safety without interfering with the responsible ownership and use of firearms,&#8221; Kopel says.</p>
<p>Toomey, an otherwise principled Tea Party conservative, appears to have caved in to pressure from New York mayor Michael Bloomberg&#8217;s 501c4 advocacy group, Mayors Against Illegals Guns Action Fund. The group had been running ads in Pennsylvania critical of Toomey, but after the senator switched sides it <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/04/10/bloomberg-anti-gun-coalition-drops-ad-attacking-toomey-launches-ad-praising-toomey/">replaced</a> those messages with new ads praising him for supposedly seeing the light.</p>
<p>In a state like Pennsylvania, ads &#8212; even slashing negative ones &#8212; highlighting Toomey&#8217;s principled support for the Second Amendment would probably only help the freshman senator&#8217;s 2016 reelection bid. Gun control is a proven loser of an issue in Pennsylvania, as it is in all but a select few states. The Keystone State reportedly issued close to a million hunting licenses in 2011 and has 400,000 NRA members.</p>
<p>Toomey&#8217;s calculation is difficult to gauge, as it makes little political sense. Constituent calls into his offices are reportedly running 200 to 1 against the deal. Even if anti-gun legislation somehow clears the Senate, it seems unlikely to survive the House of Representatives where lawmakers relish ideological combat much more than in the clubby Senate. So far Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) seems to be holding firm in his defense of the Second Amendment.</p>
<p>Media cheer-leading to the contrary, Obama has been losing this legislative battle almost from the beginning.</p>
<p>After the ringleaders of the Left ghoulishly stood atop the bodies of the school children murdered by a madman in Newtown, Connecticut in December, public support for new gun restrictions ticked up slightly for a little over two months. That spike in support has since evaporated.</p>
<p>Last month Obama was forced to <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/obama-withdraws-radical-judicial-activist-nominee/">withdraw</a> the nomination of Second Amendment enemy Caitlin J. Halligan to the critical District of Columbia Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals. Halligan was successfully filibustered twice by Republican senators largely because of her vehement opposition to gun ownership rights.</p>
<p>An effort to resurrect the useless assault weapons ban sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is dead after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) dropped it from pending legislation. Feinstein authored the previous assault weapons ban, which was in effect from 1994 to 2004. The feel-good provision had no discernible effect on crime rates.</p>
<p>It is unclear if Toomey&#8217;s about-face will have an effect on the filibuster being waged against the Harry Reid-backed gun control legislation pending in the Senate.</p>
<p>Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and others have vowed to block the bill, arguing that such a drastic change to current law requires the support of 60 senators.</p>
<p>But the Left, including former Rudy Giuliani speechwriter and phony centrist John Avlon, say the filibuster is hurting Republicans.</p>
<p>There is, of course, no evidence of this.</p>
<p>If anything, a failure to take a dramatic stand to defend Americans&#8217; Second Amendment rights is much more likely to drive Republicans away from the Grand Old Party.</p>
<p>Which makes Toomey&#8217;s &#8220;compromise&#8221; all the more puzzling.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Jim Carrey: Gun Owners Don&#8217;t Deserve to Live</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ben-shapiro/jim-carrey-gun-owners-dont-deserve-to-live-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jim-carrey-gun-owners-dont-deserve-to-live-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 27 Mar 2013 04:15:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=183200</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The hypocrisy of the Hollywood elite.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ben-shapiro/jim-carrey-gun-owners-dont-deserve-to-live-2/picture-4-41/" rel="attachment wp-att-183240"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-183240" title="Picture 4" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Picture-41.png" alt="" width="247" height="199" /></a>Over the weekend, once-superstar comedian Jim Carrey announced he’d be releasing a new song, titled “Cold Dead Hand.” He also announced the gist of the song via Twitter: “‘Cold Dead Hand’ is abt u heartless motherf%ckers unwilling 2 bend 4 the safety of our kids.” Just in case you didn’t catch his point – that gunowners are morally deficient human beings – he stated in early February, anyone “who would run out to buy an assault rifle after the Newtown massacre has very little left in their body or soul worth protecting.”</p>
<p>So, what was Carrey’s new musical masterpiece? It was a rip on dead former movie star and NRA president Charlton Heston. Carrey played Heston as a moron, a crazy person. Then, posting as a character on <em>Hee Haw</em>, Carrey sang, “His immortal soul may lay forever in the sand, the angels wouldn’t take him up to heaven as he planned, cuz they couldn’t pry his gun from his cold, dead hand.” He then proceeded to make the oft-cited liberal idiot claim that gunowners want to own firearms because they have inferiority complexes about their penis sizes: “You’re a big big man with a little bitty gland, so you need something bigger with a hairpin trigger.”</p>
<p>But that wasn’t the end of the video. The chorus was straight from the minds of Barack Obama and Piers Morgan: “It takes a cold dead hand to decide to pull the trigger. It takes a cold dead heart and as near as I can figure, with your cold dead aim, you’re trying to prove your dick is bigger, but we know that your chariot may not be swinging low.”</p>
<p>And more: “Imagine if the Lord were here and he knew what you’d be thinking, would his sacred heart be sinking into the canyon of despair. And on the ones who sell the guns, he’d sic the vultures and coyotes, only the devil’s true devotees could profiteer from pain and fear.” Carrey then portrayed Heston trying to work a rifle in a simulation of masturbation.</p>
<p>Forget the bad taste. This sort of comedy is Carrey’s stock in trade; nobody could mix him up with Johnny Carson. The bigger problem here is the moral one: according to Carrey and his ilk on the left, failing to agree with the leftist view on guns makes you an inhuman monster.</p>
<p>That’s the perspective the left loves to push on virtually every issue. On sequestration, conservatives want to cut government in order to hurt children (or as Obama puts it, first responders, teachers, cops, firefighters, and the other members of the Village People). When it comes to voter ID, conservatives want to ensure against voter fraud because they want to disfranchise minorities.</p>
<p>But on guns, the left’s moral compass spins most wildly. Carrey, who hasn’t had to live in fear because he has the cash to pay for security, wouldn’t know the first thing about defending himself. That doesn’t stop him from deriding those who do worry about self-defense as losers suffering from sexual inferiority (even though it is Carrey, not his opponents, who is obsessing on penis size.) And Carrey certainly doesn’t believe in the possibility of government tyranny that undergirds the Second Amendment – as an ardent leftist, he’s a fan of bigger, broader government .</p>
<p>Carrey doesn’t mind using guns when it suits him. He’s borne firearms in movies like <em>Bruce Almighty</em> and <em>The Mask</em>, and he’ll do it again in <em>Kick-Ass 2</em>. The role of a lifetime that awaits him is that of a hypocrite.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Shadow of the Gun</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/shadow-of-the-gun/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=shadow-of-the-gun</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 14 Mar 2013 04:50:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=181248</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the Left's promotion of fire arms fear instills learned helplessness in our children.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/shadow-of-the-gun/f_0_gun-shadow_g_320/" rel="attachment wp-att-181302"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-181302" title="F_0_gun-shadow_g_320" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/F_0_gun-shadow_g_320.jpg" alt="" width="296" height="223" /></a>Every day another one of the stories comes in. A teacher panicked by a plastic gun, an army man on a cupcake, a t-shirt, a pop tart chewed into the shape of a gun or a finger gun, hits the panic button. Suspensions and lectures quickly follow as the latest threat to the gun-free zone, usually in the form of a little boy, is tackled to the ground and lectured to within an inch of his life.</p>
<p>Tellingly these incidents rarely take place in the inner city schools where teenage gang members walk through metal detectors at the start of the day. The safety officers in those schools, big weary men with eyes that look everywhere at once, don’t waste their time on toys. Not unless those toys are full-size, painted black and filed down to look like real guns.</p>
<p>It’s usually the schools where a shooting is wholly unlikely; where gun violence is not a daily reality, but an unlikely convergence of horror, that institutional vigilance hits an irrational peak as every school imagines that it could be the next Columbine or the next Sandy Hook.</p>
<p>The NRA’s initial proposal of armed school guards was met with an irrational chorus of protests. More guns aren’t the answer, was the cry. And the leading crier was the White House’s expert skeet shooter. In a country where law enforcement is heavily armed and gunmen are stopped by gunmen in uniforms, a strange Swedenization had set in. The problem was not the man, it was the gun. Get rid of the guns and you stop the killing.</p>
<p>Schools across the country are banning not the gun, but the idea of the gun.  Gun-free zones mean places where guns cannot be mentioned, depicted or even symbolized as if the refusal to concede the existence of a firearm will eliminate the threat of it being used on the premises.</p>
<p>This isn’t a precautionary attitude, but a pacifist one. Gun horror is not a productive emotion, but learned helplessness disguised as moral superiority. Rather than teaching children to hate killers, schools are instead teaching them to hate guns. And reducing murders to instruments rather than morals, children are left with no sense of right and wrong, only an instinctive horror of violence.</p>
<p>Pacifists have always demonized armies rather than invaders. During WWI they obsessed over gas. During WW2, it was the bomber and the tank. During the Cold War they demonized nuclear weapons. By dealing with the object rather than the subject, they were able to avoid the question of moral responsibility. Rather than hold the Nazis or the Communists accountable for their actions, they extended a blanket condemnation over the weapons-wielders.</p>
<p>The American GI was just as bad as the SS man or the Kamikaze pilot or the Political Commissar. The only difference was in who had the bigger guns. And the one with the bigger guns was also the one to blame.</p>
<p>That same attitude can be seen today when Israel is blamed for every battle with Islamic terrorists because it has the bigger guns. Rather than evaluating the nature of a conflict and the values of both sides, the pacifists score every war based on firepower.</p>
<p>To believe that there is no such thing as constructive violence is to reject free will. Without accepting the necessity of constructive violence, there is no good and evil, only armed men and unarmed men. Without constructive violence, two boys playing cops and robbers in the schoolyard are not acting out a childish morality play, they are becoming desensitized to murder, and without it a child with a pop tart chewed into the shape of a gun is on the way to being a school shooter.</p>
<p>If there is no such thing as constructive violence, then the police officer is not the solution to crime, he is part of the cycle of violence. And if that cycle of violence does not begin with a man choosing to use a gun for good or evil, then it must begin with the gun. The man becomes the object and the gun becomes the subject. American ICBMs become just as bad as Russian ballistic missiles. An Israeli soldier killing a suicide bomber is just as bad as the terrorist. There are no good guys with guns. To have a gun is to be the bad guy.</p>
<p>For decades the gun-control lobby has brandished assault rifles at press conferences and spent more time describing their killing power than their manufacturers have. The rifle has been upgraded to the assault rifle and now, in the latest Orwellian vernacular used by the White House and the entire media pyramid beneath it, weapons of war.</p>
<p>The dreaded assault rifle or weapon of war or killing machine of mass death actually kills rather few Americans. The average shooter doesn’t bring an AR-15 to a Chicago gangland dispute. Despite the number of these weapons in private hands, most of the killing takes place with handguns in the same parts of the country where large amounts of illegal drugs are sold, women trafficked and stores robbed.</p>
<p>Shootings in America are not caused by guns, they are caused by crime. Guns really do not walk off store shelves and go on killing sprees. That’s what criminals are for.</p>
<p>But the trouble with that discussion is that it takes us into moral territory. Talking about guns is easy, talking about souls is not. If guns don’t kill people, then we have to ask the difficult question of what does kill people.</p>
<p>It’s a bigger question than just Adam Lanza pulling the trigger in a classroom full of children. It is a big question that encompasses the Nazi gas chambers and the Soviet gulags, the Rape of Nanking and September 11. It is a question as big as all of human history.</p>
<p>The left has tried to reduce people to economics, to class and then race, gender and sexual orientation. It has done its best to reduce people to the sum of their parts and then to tinker with those parts and it has failed badly. The best testimony of its profound spiritual failure is that the worst pockets of gun violence are in urban areas that have been under the influence of their sociologists, urban planners, psychologists, social justice activists, community organizers and political rope-pullers for generations. And what have those areas brought forth except malaise, despair, blight and murder?</p>
<p>Banning guns will do as much for those areas as banning drugs did. It is not the shadow of the gun that has fallen over Chicago, but an occlusion of the spirit. Social services have had generations to save the city and they have failed because the technocracy can reach the body, but it cannot reach the soul.</p>
<p>The gun-control activists drew the wrong lesson from Newtown as they drew the wrong lessons from WW2 and September 11. The lesson is not that weapons are bad; the lesson is that people in the grip of evil ideas are capable of unimaginable horrors regardless of the tools at their disposal. A single man can kill a classroom full of children with a gun and a few men can kill thousands with a few box cutters. It isn’t the tool that matters. It’s the man.</p>
<p>The gun, the sword, the spear and the club took countless lives and saved countless lives. Civilization has always balanced on a future made possible by little boys playing cops and robbers and playing with little green army men. They can either grow up to be the protectors of the future or the frightened men who will stand aside and do nothing when they hear the screams begin to come because they have been told that all violence is evil.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Brainwashing Kids About Guns: the Sequel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/brainwashing-kids-about-guns-the-sequel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=brainwashing-kids-about-guns-the-sequel</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 08 Mar 2013 04:38:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=180368</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Progressives go to astounding lengths to teach children that even owning a gun is insane.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/brainwashing-kids-about-guns-the-sequel/bullets-control-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-180516"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-180516" title="bullets-control" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/bullets-control1-450x300.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="180" /></a>Barely a month ago <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/brainwashing-kids-about-guns/">I wrote about</a> a spate of recent incidents in which schoolchildren as young as five were seriously punished for committing no reasonable offense whatsoever other than triggering the anti-gun hysteria of politically correct, progressive school officials. Those incidents were just the beginning.</p>
<p>In arguably the most ludicrous and outrageous example yet, a seven-year-old with ADHD <a href="http://foxbaltimore.com/news/features/raw-news/stories/7yearold-suspended-teacher-says-he-shaped-pastry-into-gun-465.shtml">has been suspended</a> from his Brooklyn Park school for two days because he accidentally shaped a breakfast pastry to resemble – according to his teacher – a gun. Apparently he was trying to shape a mountain out of it, but it turned out to be the school authorities who made a mountain out of a molehill. Playing with his food actually drove Joshua’s teacher to tears (“She was pretty mad,” <a href="http://www.foxbaltimore.com/news/features/top-stories/stories/7yearold-suspended-teacher-says-he-shaped-pastry-into-gun-18192.shtml#.UTRXA3zF36o">he said</a>), and she took away the pastry and tossed it in the trash. The father confirmed with the school that no students had been upset or hurt or scared, but the principal determined that “a threat had been made.”</p>
<p>Ponder that for a moment.</p>
<p>Joshua’s elementary school later sent students home with <a href="http://www.loweringthebar.net/2013/03/update-ii-school-offers-counseling-for-students-troubled-by-pastry-gun-incident.html">a letter</a> citing the Code of Student Conduct to parents and guardians which declared that “one of our students used food to make inappropriate gestures that disrupted the class. While no physical threats were made and no one [was] harmed, the student had to be removed from the classroom.” This is curious reasoning, considering that it was the hysterical teacher who disrupted the class, and since the incident had no adverse effect on any of the students, there was no reason to remove Joshua from the class, much less suspend his education for two days.</p>
<p>Joshua’s father said, “I would almost call it insanity. I mean with all the potential issues that could be dealt with at school, real threats, bullies, whatever the real issue is, it’s a pastry, ya know?” Apparently Joshua’s dad needs to be sent to reeducation camp until he fully grasps the seriousness of pastry-shaped threats to the security of the State.</p>
<p>Astoundingly, the letter went on to offer reassurances to anyone who might have been traumatized:</p>
<blockquote><p>If your children express that they are troubled by today’s incident, please talk with them and help them share their feelings. Our school counselor is available to meet with any students who have the need to do so next week. In general, please remind them of the importance of making good choices.</p></blockquote>
<p>The “good choice” that schools now want your children to make is to banish from view anything that might remotely resemble a gun, because the progressive goal is to brainwash impressionable young generations into considering guns themselves <em>verboten</em>, rather than understanding their centrality to American freedom and making rational distinctions about how they are used.</p>
<p>How pathetic are American adults becoming, that we actually now need school counselors to deal with students “troubled” by gun-shaped pastry? The truth of the matter is that children are not troubled by such incidents at all; it’s progressive <em>adults</em> who, in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting and the subsequent opportunism of the Obama administration, have whipped themselves into an irrational state of pacifist horror unmatched in the history of humankind. How America’s enemies must be exulting over the extent to which the most powerful nation on earth has been emasculated by cultural Marxism’s political correctness.</p>
<p>As I wrote in <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/brainwashing-kids-about-guns/">my previous piece</a> about the brainwashing of our children, the left does not want American citizens to own guns. They want to mold future generations into a helpless citizenry that entrusts its protection to the well-armed State. The radical left is hell-bent on subverting our 2<sup>nd</sup> Amendment right to bear arms, because that right stands in the way of their tyrannical ambitions.</p>
<p>Moving on to another incident: in <a href="http://townhall.com/columnists/tonykatz/2013/03/04/actor-joseph-c-phillips-teacher-threatened-my-son-questioned-his-mental-state-over-photo-of-bb-gun-n1525401">a radio interview</a> with talk show host Tony Katz, actor Joseph C. Phillips, who happens to be openly conservative, related how his fifteen-year-old son took his camera to school in Woodland Hills, California to show off a photo of himself with a BB gun. The boy’s social studies teacher, James DeLarme, saw it, “snatched” the camera out of his hand and declared that the police would have to be notified. Outrageously, he and another teacher scrolled through all the photos on the camera before returning it. Then, in front of all the students, DeLarme asked Phillips the Younger, “Do you have any animosity towards your classmates? Are you angry at anyone at school?” implying that a photo of him with a BB gun marked the teen as a loony, imminent threat.</p>
<p>The elder Phillips, who was not notified of this by the school, was rightfully outraged and wrote a letter to the principal. “Owning a BB gun is NOT an indication of mental instability!” Ah, but that’s where progressives would disagree; demonizing law-abiding gun owners as mentally and morally unstable is precisely their goal. In any case, the principal didn’t deign to respond, but a vice principal did, claiming that DeLarme had done the right thing to “secure the safety of the 3,000 students and the 250 faculty members at the school.”</p>
<p>Interestingly, as Katz points out in his Townhall article about the incident, it turns out that social studies teacher James DeLarme has strong feelings about his opposition to gun ownership. In an <a href="http://www.ecrjournalism.com/news/2013/01/10/sandy-hook-shooting-causes-minor-concern-for-school-safety/" target="_blank">interview</a> with the school paper in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting, he said, “We need to discuss the number of guns we have in this country,” and asserted that our country’s position on gun control and violence is what makes such situations as Sandy Hook probable.</p>
<p>Joseph C. Phillips complained in his radio interview that “at a certain point, people have to stand up and say ‘Enough with the hysteria! Enough is enough!’ We are not going to sacrifice the dignity of our children, our own dignity… What they [the school] did is not keeping anyone safe.”</p>
<p>Obviously he will have to join Joshua’s father in reeducation camp.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Brainwashing Kids About Guns</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/brainwashing-kids-about-guns/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=brainwashing-kids-about-guns</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 12 Feb 2013 04:35:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=177210</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the Left is undermining support for the Second Amendment in k-12 public education. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/brainwashing-kids-about-guns/toy-guns-gun-violence/" rel="attachment wp-att-177386"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-177386" title="toy-guns-gun-violence" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/toy-guns-gun-violence.jpg" alt="" width="286" height="199" /></a>A spate of recent incidents in which schoolchildren were punished for <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">unconscionable gun crimes</span> triggering the hysteria of politically correct school officials highlights the left’s increasing insanity about guns.</p>
<p>A five-year-old girl from Pennsylvania <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/01/19/5-year-old-suspended-labeled-a-terrorist-threat-for-threatening-to-shoot-friend-with-toy-bubble-gun/">was suspended</a> from school last month after telling a friend she was going to shoot her with a pink toy gun that sprays <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">hollow-point bullets</span> bubbles. Despite not even having the bubble gun with her at the time of the shockingly dire threat, the kindergartener was later interrogated by school officials without her<strong> </strong>parents present. She was ultimately – are you sitting down for this? – labeled a “terrorist threat,” suspended for ten days, and required to undergo psychiatric evaluation.</p>
<p>At about the same time, a school in Maryland <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/01/16/its-ridiculous-three-6-year-olds-suspended-for-making-gun-signs-with-hands-during-recess/">suspended</a> two six-year-olds for making a gun gesture with their hands while playing cops-and-robbers during recess. Two weeks before that, another six-year-old was suspended for the same terrorist offense. This idiocy is reminiscent of an <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/08/28/school-allegedly-asks-deaf-preschooler-to-change-his-name-because-sign-language-version-resembles-weapons/">incident</a> last year in which a deaf three-year-old was informed by school district officials that the signing he uses for his name too closely resembles him waving a gun. So now he is required to spell out his name letter by letter instead. That’ll teach him.</p>
<p>The insanity continues. Now a seven-year-old Colorado boy has been <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/02/05/second-grader-playing-rescue-the-world-at-recess-suspended-after-throwing-pretend-grenade-at-evil-forces-with-adorable-interview/">suspended</a> for throwing a pretend grenade at a pretend box full of “evil forces” while playing “rescue the world” at recess. Again, that’s a <em>pretend</em> grenade he lobbed at a <em>pretend</em> box of evil (good thing he didn’t refer to it as an “axis of evil,” or the officials might have tarred and feathered the kid and run him and his Bush-loving parents out of town). His school maintains a list of “absolutes,” no-nos designed to keep the schoolgrounds safe, which includes “no fighting, real or imaginary; no weapons, real or imaginary.” Because it isn’t enough to ban students from <em>playing</em> with real weapons; it must be <em>verboten</em> even to <em>think</em> about them, even when combating evil.</p>
<p>Alex Evans said he threw the fake grenade “so nothing can get out and destroy the world… I was trying to save people and I just can’t believe I got dispended.” Alex, that’s because you’re not far enough along in school yet to have been sufficiently indoctrinated by your schoolteachers. In a few years, once you’ve absorbed enough <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=939">Howard Zinn</a> and <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1232">Noam Chomsky</a>, you will understand that <em>we</em> are the ones destroying the world through our imperialistic war-mongering and racist theft of natural resources. However, had you thrown an imaginary grenade at an imaginary band of violent Tea Partiers, you would have gone to the head of the class.</p>
<p>In an article that contains more handwringing about how guns are poisoning our children’s minds, <em>The</em> <em>New York Times</em> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/fashion/parents-are-facing-a-loaded-question-cultural-studies.html?_r=0">reports</a> on groups of “anti-toy-gun activists” (now <em>there’s</em> a pathetic label) who encourage exchanges in which toys like Hula Hoops are given to children who turn in their toy guns – a sort of children’s version of firearm buybacks like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Australia">the one that disarmed Australians</a> back in the 90s. One of those is the California group Alliance for Survival, whose coordinator Jerry Rubin explains, “No one is saying that if you play with a toy gun, you’re going to grow up to be a violent killer.” No? Then why ban toy guns? Because “the game is still the same: pretend to kill your friends, pretend to kill your classmates.” Except that kids aren’t pretending to kill their friends and schoolmates; they’re pretending to kill <em>the bad guys</em>. Anti-toy gun activists like Rubin can’t comprehend that this might be healthy practice for when these children grow up and one day have to confront uncompromising evil in the real world.</p>
<p>This is all part of the radical left’s determination to make pariahs out of American gun owners, even if those guns dispense nothing more dangerous than bubbles or a deaf boy’s name. As the totalitarian hypocrite Eric Holder <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYyqBxD-3xw">said</a> at the Women’s National Democratic Club years ago, American youth need to be “brainwashed” into thinking negatively about guns. In fact, he urges kids to report gun owners to authorities, so be careful who knows you have a legally purchased and registered handgun, all you law-abiding moms and dads. You might find yourselves betrayed to the government by your own children, just like during China’s Cultural Revolution. “I’ve also asked the school board to make a part of every day some kind of anti-violence, anti-gun message,” Holder said, “every day, every school, at every level… We need to do this every day of the week and really brainwash people into thinking about guns in a vastly different way.”</p>
<p>This is the Attorney General who funneled guns into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, resulting in hundreds of murders. He is part of an administration that turns a blind eye to gun violence committed in this country by <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;frm=1&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;cad=rja&amp;ved=0CEAQqQIwAA&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.examiner.com%2Farticle%2Ffamily-research-council-shooter-used-splc-hate-map-media-silent&amp;ei=K84WUbfCMMn3igK224HwAQ&amp;usg=AFQjCNEQExpPHUxG8vSgfLi0zMyUNRSmMQ&amp;bvm=bv.42080656,d.cGE">leftists</a> or Islamic terrorists like the Fort Hood shooter, whose massacre was labeled “workplace violence” (as opposed to the kindergartner who <em>was</em> called a terrorist threat). The Obama administration cares about a tragedy like Sandy Hook only insofar as it is a crisis they don’t want to let go to waste. The administration says nothing about the ongoing handgun massacre of children in tightly gun-restricted Chicago, because it doesn’t fit their “ban guns to save the children” narrative, and because, quite frankly, they don’t care about saving the children anyway. What they care about is disarming the American populace. Their obsession with gun control is about big-government gun confiscation, not gun crime prevention, just as their demonization of guns in the minds of schoolchildren is also about disarming Americans and molding a generation of defenseless pacifists.</p>
<p>This hatred of guns is ragingly irrational. The left wants to indoctrinate upcoming generations into believing that, in any and all circumstances, guns – even imaginary ones; even a pointed index finger – are the apotheosis of violent evil. And yet the Obama administration has now opened the door to combat for women in the military. How are those women – and our young men  too, for that matter – supposed to deal with that disconnect, when from kindergarten onward they are relentlessly brainwashed to despise guns, and yet are now expected to go into combat and kill the enemy?</p>
<p>And then of course there is the hypocrisy of left-leaning Hollywood, which inundates young people with violent imagery and then pats itself on the back with smugly self-righteous <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;frm=1&amp;source=web&amp;cd=4&amp;cad=rja&amp;ved=0CEgQtwIwAw&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D64G5FfG2Xpg&amp;ei=StkWUZ6oNemXigKd44GgAw&amp;usg=AFQjCNEnaU23zMJu098teXGsAFRRkl8mRg&amp;bvm=bv.42080656,d.cGE">public service messages</a> calling for immediate political solutions to gun violence.</p>
<p>The left does not want American citizens to own guns – it’s that simple. And they want to shape our children into a helpless citizenry that entrusts its protection to the well-armed nanny state. They care nothing about the right of Americans to protect their homes, schools and loved ones from home invaders or burglars or rapists. They care least of all about our 2<sup>nd</sup> Amendment right to bear arms to oppose a tyrannical government, because that right stands in the way of the radical left’s tyrannical ambitions.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Can Rahm Emanuel&#8217;s Illegal Thug Tactics Be Stopped?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/volpe/can-rahm-emanuels-illegal-thug-tactics-be-stopped/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=can-rahm-emanuels-illegal-thug-tactics-be-stopped</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/volpe/can-rahm-emanuels-illegal-thug-tactics-be-stopped/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 31 Jan 2013 04:15:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michael Volpe]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bank of America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chicago]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[control]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Guns]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Manufacturers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rahm emanuel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[TD Bank]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=175618</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Chicago mayor's attacks on private business owners take an ugly turn. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/volpe/can-rahm-emanuels-illegal-thug-tactics-be-stopped/rahm-emanuel-3/" rel="attachment wp-att-175620"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-175620" title="Rahm Emanuel" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/AP081118061084.jpg" alt="" width="291" height="211" /></a>A number of pro-2nd Amendment groups have condemned a series of letters written by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel encouraging both Bank of America and TD Bank not to honor credit lines with gun manufacturers, but so far, Emanuel is not facing any legal action for his interference in a private contract.</p>
<p>Last week, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel sent a letter from his office to two banks, Bank of America and TD Bank, asking each to suspend doing business with gun manufacturers in the hope that this will pressure these companies into helping gun legislation pass. Emanuel&#8217;s letter to TD Bank read in part:</p>
<blockquote><p>TD Bank currently aids the gun manufacturing industry through a $60 million revolving line of credit with Smith and Wesson, a gun manufacturer that manufactures the AR-15-an assault weapon that was used by James Holmes to kill 12 people and wound 58 in a crowded movie theater in Aurora. I ask you to use your influence to push this company to find common ground with the majority of Americans who support a military weapons and ammunition ban and comprehensive background checks. Companies like Smith and Wesson should be part of the solution, as they were when we greatly expanded the use of safety locks.</p></blockquote>
<p>In response, Chris Cleveland, Chairman of the Chicago Republican Party issued a scathing response calling Mayor Emanuel’s letter a threat.</p>
<blockquote><p>On Friday, the Mayor sent a threatening letter to two local banks asking them to stop doing business with gun manufacturers.</p>
<p>The Mayor is a thug who threatens local businesses. Last year, he supported the denial of a license to Chick Fil A because he disagreed with its stance on gay marriage. He later threatened to withhold a government grant to the Cubs when the owners were considering a contribution to a conservative group. And now he&#8217;s threatening banks who disagree with him on guns. In each case, he has used government money or licensing to crush dissent.</p>
<p>In all cases, businesses that get threatened back down if they know what&#8217;s good for them.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s time for this behavior to stop.</p></blockquote>
<p>The Chicago Republican Party filed suit in federal court last year after Mayor Emanuel suggested that Chick Fil A would have a hard time getting approved for a license in the City of Chicago because of CEO Dan Cathy’s stance that he believes that marriage should continue to only be between one man and one woman.</p>
<p>The Chicago Republican Party has not filed a suit yet in this case.</p>
<p>Speaking on Fox News with Megyn Kelly on Monday, Jay Sekulow, head of the American Center for Law and Justice, said that in his opinion Mayor Emanuel was acting unlawfully by interfering with a private contract.</p>
<blockquote><p>To interfere with the contractual relationship between Bank of America, or any other bank for that matter, and a manufacturer of an item-here guns, that are protected by the second amendment…To interfere with their contractual relationship, here their funding, is tortious interference.</p></blockquote>
<p>According to the legal website <a href="http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/wrongful-or-tortious-interference-with-contracts.html">Legal Match</a>, tortious interference is defined as follows:</p>
<blockquote><p>Wrongful or Tortious Interference with Contracts occurs where a person causes a party to commit a <a href="http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/breach-of-contract.html">breach of contract</a>, or where the person has disrupted the ability of a party to perform their obligations under a contract. It is also known as &#8220;tortious interference with contract rights&#8221; or &#8220;intentional interference with contractual relations.&#8221; The person causing the interference (the &#8220;tortfeasor&#8221;) is usually a third party who is not included in the contract.</p></blockquote>
<p>Speaking with Megyn Kelly on Tuesday, former judge Andrew Napolitano concurred with Sekulow.</p>
<blockquote><p>It’s not legal, Megyn. There are a couple of clauses in the Constitution, some well-known and some not so well known that would prohibit this. One of the clauses is the contract’s clause, and it basically says that state governments or city or municipal governments that are formed in the states cannot interfere with contracts that are lawfully made.</p></blockquote>
<p>In this case, Emanuel implied that two credit lines, one for $25 million and another for $60 million, be closed as a means of pressuring the banks and the two gun manufacturers into getting on board with new gun control laws.</p>
<p>Rebecca Acevedo, from the media relations department at TD Bank, declined to comment to Front Page Magazine in response to Mayor Emanuel’s letter. An email to the media relations department at Bank of America by Front Page Magazine was left unreturned.</p>
<p>Last year, <a href="http://saf.org/viewpr-new.asp?id=415">the Second Amendment Foundation</a> won a landmark ruling against the City of Chicago, and its long-standing ban on all handguns. That group has not yet made a statement or legal filing in response to Mayor Emanuel’s recent letter.</p>
<p>Bank of America is no stranger to controversy involving the second amendment. Last year, <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2012/04/20/anti-gun-bank-of-america-tells-gun-company-to-find-another-bank/">in a story from The Daily Caller</a>, a gun manufacturer named the McMillan Group International said that Bank of America asked the gun manufacturer to close out its accounts with B of A. In the Daily Caller story, B of A cited the company’s manufacture of guns as the reason they wanted the relationship to end.</p>
<p>Just three weeks ago, another gun manufacturer, American Spirit Arms, <a href="http://cnsnews.com/blog/gregory-gwyn-williams-jr/bank-america-freezes-gun-manufacturers-account-company-owner-claims">had their accounts frozen by Bank of America as well</a>.</p>
<p>Last year, there were over five hundred murders committed with handguns in the City of Chicago. In fact, more people died by gun in the City of Chicago in 2012, than did American soldiers in Afghanistan. This happened even though the City of Chicago has some of toughest anti-gun laws in Chicago. Even as Mayor Emanuel grandstands for tougher gun laws, his term has failed to address the problem of gun violence in the City of Chicago in any way.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Agenda: Shrink Second Amendment Freedoms</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/tom-blumer/obamas-agenda-shrink-second-amendment-freedoms/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-agenda-shrink-second-amendment-freedoms</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 16 Jan 2013 04:36:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Tom Blumer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[assault weapons]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[control]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Guns]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Second Amendment]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=173610</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A president unleashed. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/tom-blumer/obamas-agenda-shrink-second-amendment-freedoms/president-obama-addresses-the-nation-on-the-connecticut-school-shooting/" rel="attachment wp-att-173613"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-173613" title="President Obama Addresses The Nation On The Connecticut School Shooting" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/9794349961935b19b8b79ca7c2ea605a.jpg" alt="" width="267" height="202" /></a>President Barack Obama, who <a href="http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Oath_Office.htm">swore he would</a> &#8220;support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic&#8221; when he joined the U.S. Senate in 2005, and <a href="http://www.presidentsusa.net/oathofoffice.html">that he would</a> &#8220;to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States&#8221; when he entered the White House in 2009, <a href="http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/15/details-of-biden-gun-package-emerge/">now stands ready</a>, according to his vice president, to consider &#8220;19 steps &#8230; (he) can take himself using executive action.&#8221;</p>
<p>The administration&#8217;s intent could not be more clear. It wants to bureaucratically create a de facto repeal of as much of <a href="http://constitution.org/billofr_.htm">the Second Amendment&#8217;s</a> clearly stated and <a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/07-290.ZO.html">correctly interpreted</a> individual &#8220;<a href="http://constitution.org/billofr_.htm">right of the people to keep and bear Arms</a>&#8221; as possible by January 20, 2017 &#8212; and if that requires shredding what&#8217;s left of the Constitution&#8217;s separation of powers, so be it.</p>
<p>The clear-eyed among us warned that this day might come <a href="http://www.bizzyblog.com/2008/10/29/hope-on-callout-campaign-john-boccieri-does-not-support-the-individual-right-to-keep-and-bear-arms/">in 2008</a> if Obama won the presidency that year. During that campaign, Obama tried to quiet a group of skeptics at a Pennsylvania campaign stop, <a href="http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2008/09/06/wsj-obama-wont-ban-guns-i-dont-have-votes-congress">first by claiming</a>: &#8220;If you’ve got a gun in your house, I’m not taking it.&#8221; That wasn&#8217;t particularly persuasive, nor was his next line, which predictably did not get the press attention it should have: &#8220;Even if I want to take them away, I don’t have the votes in Congress.&#8221; It&#8217;s now clear that he mostly doesn&#8217;t care about how many &#8220;votes in Congress&#8221; he has.</p>
<p>In 2012, we further warned that reelecting the most visceral opponent of the fundamental human right of self-defense ever to occupy the White House to a second term would exponentially increase the danger to our free exercise of that basic right. Now Obama has won his last election (or so we hope), while bragging that &#8220;the American people have spoken.&#8221; Hardly. 50.61 percent of voters pulled the lever for Obama despite his being opposed by the worst Republican candidate in my lifetime; <a href="http://www.bizzyblog.com/wp-images/VotersAndTurnoutPrez2012.png">fewer than 27 percent</a> of all voting-age adults voted for him, a decline from four years earlier. Nonetheless, it remains the case that Obama has four more years to figure out how to gut the Second Amendment &#8212; something which has been one of his overarching goals for at least the better part of two decades.</p>
<p>It is reasonable to believe &#8212; in fact, there&#8217;s really no other rational alternative explanation &#8212; that Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, who in 1995 told a sympathetic audience that the nation&#8217;s leaders should &#8220;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNE5vuI9TNo">really brainwash people</a> into thinking about guns in a vastly different way,&#8221; believed that Operation Fast and Furious would be that brainwashing vehicle. As Ben Shapiro &#8212; yes, the same guy who ran circles around CNN&#8217;s gun-grabbing Piers Morgan <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJdhAm_oUUs">last week </a>&#8211; wrote <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/03/18/Holder-Fast-Furious-Guns">at Breitbart.com</a> in March of last year:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8230; (In) the Fast and Furious scandal &#8230; the Attorney General apparently gave the go-ahead to an operation that funneled guns to the drug cartels – guns later used in the murder of U.S. citizens. &#8230; [I]t surely was not a simple sting operation – and critics have long suspected that the program was designed to stir up anger at gun distribution inside the U.S. in order to provide support for gun control.</p></blockquote>
<p>Fast and Furious was &#8220;not a simple sting operation,&#8221; simply because the detailed movements of most and possibly all of the &#8220;funneled guns&#8221; <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000702304665904576385993445351016.html?mod=googlenews_wsj">weren&#8217;t tracked</a>. Instead, as <a href="http://www.bizzyblog.com/2012/10/02/asleep-at-the-wires-no-coverage-as-univision-exposes-wider-scope-sickening-carnage-of-fast-and-furious/">Univision reported in October</a>, the law enforcement &#8220;logic&#8221; was as follows: &#8220;If the weapons were used to kill in Mexico, then (police), in the crime scenes, could establish who acquired them.&#8221; In other words, it was an operation in which what ended being a body count of <a href="http://pjmedia.com/blog/ten-2011-examples-of-major-media-malfeasance/?singlepage=true">at least 300 Mexicans</a>, including a group of innocent teenagers at a birthday party, was sloughed off as collateral damage.</p>
<p>On the U.S. side of the border, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry&#8217;s murderer used a Fast and Furious gun, and the Justice Department <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/17/nation/la-na-atf-guns-20110817">has admitted</a> that it was &#8220;aware of 11 (other) instances&#8221; where a Fast and Furious firearm &#8220;was recovered in connection with a crime of violence in the United States.&#8221; Completing the conspiratorial circle, Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31727_162-57338546-10391695/documents-atf-used-fast-and-furious-to-make-the-case-for-gun-regulations/">revealed in December 2011</a> that &#8220;the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) discussed using their covert operation &#8216;Fast and Furious&#8217; to argue for controversial new rules about gun sales.&#8221;</p>
<p>At <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/01/14/news-conference-president">his Tuesday press conference</a>, Obama did not correct a reporter who wanted him to call the recent spike in gun and ammunition sales &#8220;irrational,&#8221; instead calling it the result of &#8220;a fear that&#8217;s fanned by those who are worried about the possibility of any legislation getting out there.&#8221;</p>
<p>That fear is far from irrational. Those who have called for gun confiscation or mandatory buybacks include New York Governor <a href="http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2012/12/22/page-a29-nyt-dull-headline-cuomo-says-gun-confiscation-could-be-option">Andrew Cuomo</a>, Iowa State Representative <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/01/09/iowa-lawmaker-calls-for-retroactive-gun-bans-confiscations-of-semi-automatic-weapons/">Dan Muhlbauer</a>, and the queen of confiscation, Dianne Feinstein. The California Senator <a href="http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/assault-weapons">recently proposed</a> &#8220;a program to purchase weapons from gun owners, a proposal that could be compulsory.&#8221;</p>
<p>In 1995, Feinstein <a href="http://www.infowars.com/video-dianne-feinstein-says-prepare-to-turn-in-your-guns/">bemoaned her failure</a> to take everyone&#8217;s guns, saying:</p>
<blockquote><p>If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States, for an outright ban, picking up every of them &#8212; Mr. and Mrs. America, turn ‘em all in &#8212; I would have done it. I could not do that. The votes weren&#8217;t here.</p></blockquote>
<p>There&#8217;s no reason whatsoever to believe that Feinstein feels any differently now.</p>
<p>More to the point, Barack Obama&#8217;s track record is so littered with over-the-top opposition to the right of self-defense that it would take at least another full column to enumerate all of the outrageous examples. One will suffice to demonstrate how deep-seated his hostility is.</p>
<p>Beginning in 1999, as described <a href="http://pjmedia.com/blog/obama-and-the-attempt-to-destroy-the-second-amendment/?singlepage=true">by David T. Hardy</a> in October 2008, the Joyce Foundation, with Obama serving as one of its directors, began a campaign to stack the influential <em>Chicago-Kent Law Review</em> with articles claiming that the Constitution does not confer an individual right to bear arms. It pointedly rejected offers from writers wishing to promote the opposite view.</p>
<p>This may seem a mundane matter, but Hardy pointed out that &#8220;When judges cannot rely upon past decisions, they sometimes turn to law review articles.&#8221; He also noted that the Foundation almost got its wish:</p>
<blockquote><p>The Joyce directorate’s plan almost succeeded. The individual rights view won out in the <em>Heller</em> Supreme Court appeal, but only by 5-4. The four dissenters were persuaded in part by Joyce-funded writings, down to relying on an article which misled them on critical historical documents.</p>
<p>Having lost that fight, Obama now claims he always held the individual rights view of the Second Amendment &#8230;</p></blockquote>
<p>No, he doesn&#8217;t.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Gun Confiscation By Presidential Decree?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/gun-confiscation-by-presidential-decree/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=gun-confiscation-by-presidential-decree</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 10 Jan 2013 04:55:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=172983</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Is it really so far-fetched in the age of Obama? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/gun-confiscation-by-presidential-decree/260712obama/" rel="attachment wp-att-172989"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-172989" title="260712obama" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/260712obama.jpg" alt="" width="242" height="179" /></a>President Obama may soon act unilaterally to curtail Americans&#8217; right to keep and bear arms and impose a new national firearms policy without congressional approval.</p>
<p>Spurred on by the Newtown, Connecticut schoolhouse massacre last month that took 26 lives, Obama could restrict, perhaps even abolish, private gun ownership with the stroke of his auto-pen.</p>
<p>Second Amendment backers are justifiably angry after Vice President Joe Biden spoke yesterday about ways to curb violent gun-related crime. He suggested that the president may take swift, decisive action without congressional approval.</p>
<p>“The president is going to act,&#8221; said Biden who is heading up a task force that is supposed to make policy recommendations to Obama later this month. The vice president reportedly &#8220;guaranteed&#8221; Boston Mayor Thomas Menino that President Obama would push through sweeping firearms restrictions before February.</p>
<p>&#8220;There are executive orders, there’s executive action that can be taken. We haven’t decided what that is yet. But we’re compiling it all with the help of the attorney general and the rest of the cabinet members as well as legislative action that we believe is required.”</p>
<p>Biden added, “As the president said, if your actions result in only saving one life, they’re worth taking. But I’m convinced we can affect the well-being of millions of Americans and take thousands of people out of harm’s way if we act responsibly.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;I want to make it clear that we are not going to get caught up in the notion that unless we can do everything, we&#8217;re going to do nothing,&#8221; Biden said. &#8220;It&#8217;s critically important we act.&#8221;</p>
<p>In normal times the prospect of gun confiscation might be next to nil, the stuff of conspiracy theories, but in the age of Obama so many bad things seem possible. With the country in a sour mood, the economy stuck in a ditch, and a transformational Marxist in the White House, terrible outcomes that previously appeared farfetched now could become possible.</p>
<p>Consider that Obama is a devout ideologue who deep down doesn&#8217;t believe Americans should be allowed to own guns. He&#8217;s a longtime supporter of gun confiscation but when he began running for president he began claiming to be a supporter of the Second Amendment in order not to scare away moderate voters.</p>
<p>He has Freudian-slipped from time to time. In his first presidential campaign he mocked small-town Americans as &#8220;bitter&#8221; people who &#8220;cling to guns or religion,&#8221; paraphrasing Saul Alinsky&#8217;s attacks on ordinary Americans.</p>
<p>Consider also that Obama is a narcissistic president with a messiah complex who began his political career in the living room of unrepentant bomb-detonating terrorists.</p>
<p>Since winning the 2008 election Obama has: refused to enforce laws he dislikes including laws cracking down on the voter fraud Democrats often need to win elections; routinely assaulted the Bill of Rights; decreed a partial immigration amnesty after it was rejected by Congress; ignored court orders; recess-appointed high government officials when Congress wasn&#8217;t actually in recess; attempted to intimidate Supreme Court justices; kept a Nixon-style enemies&#8217; list and labeled his detractors in the Tea Party movement as terrorists; waged class warfare and encouraged racial animosity; presided over the &#8220;Fast and Furious&#8221; gun-walking scandal that provided weapons to Mexican drug cartels; nationalized large swaths of private industry; ignored politically-inspired violence carried out by his allies; unilaterally moved to impose economy-killing carbon emission controls; openly disdained entrepreneurs; waged war without congressional approval; accepted illegal foreign campaign contributions; tried to get a governor to appoint his crony (Valerie Jarrett) to fill the Senate seat he vacated; said police &#8220;acted stupidly&#8221; when they dared to arrest his personal friend; turned a blind eye to rampant corruption in his administration; and forced health care providers to violate their religious beliefs.</p>
<p>Now Obama is apparently considering minting a $1 trillion platinum coin in order to evade the congressionally imposed national debt limit.</p>
<p>This is the behavior of a Third World banana republic <em>caudillo</em>, not the supposed leader of the free world.</p>
<p>Congressman Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) said the president&#8217;s proposal to go it alone sounded like &#8220;dictatorship&#8221; to him. &#8220;The Founding Fathers never envisioned Executive Orders being used to restrict our Constitutional rights,&#8221; he said in a press release. &#8220;We live in a republic, not a dictatorship.&#8221;</p>
<p>Two unusually insightful posts on the micro-blogging website Twitter summed up the public&#8217;s anxiety at Obama&#8217;s overreach and imperial approach to policymaking.</p>
<p>&#8220;Executive Orders on 2nd Amendment Rights could cascade into revolt,&#8221; tweeted @daxtonbrown. &#8220;I don&#8217;t think Obama realizes how seriously people take gun rights.&#8221;</p>
<p>A user with the handle @siftyboones tweeted, &#8220;My family will not be reduced to docile livestock at the whim of the government. The End.&#8221;</p>
<p>Any executive order taking Americans&#8217; guns away would be a brutal assault on the rule of law. It could also lead to violent civil unrest in a nation founded upon a healthy distrust of governmental power.</p>
<p>Yesterday NRA president David Keene reaffirmed that the purpose of the Second Amendment to the Constitution was to prevent tyranny and deter foreign invaders.</p>
<p>“The Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunters. Hunters use firearms. Hunters have every right to use firearms, as do target shooters, as do gun collectors, as do others,” said Keene.</p>
<p>“The fact of the matter is that the Second Amendment has to do with personal and national defense. It was put into the Constitution by the Founders who considered it as important indeed as the First Amendment.”</p>
<p>As Charles Krauthammer waxed eloquent on Fox News Channel last night:</p>
<blockquote><p>We have a 200-year history and culture of gun ownership. And we have a Second Amendment and we have a system that believes that the rights, the Second Amendment, in other words, predate the republic and the point of having a government, as in the Declaration [of Independence], is to secure the rights. In Britain you have no such right, the government will control gun ownership so unless you&#8217;re willing to confiscate, which would be unconstitutional and that would cause an insurrection in the country &#8211;Australia did&#8211; these things are not going to have an effect, except at the margins and that&#8217;s the tragedy here.</p></blockquote>
<p>Although many law enforcement personnel would probably refuse to enforce something as profoundly un-American as a gun-confiscation diktat, it is not at all clear where Obama would get the legal authority to unilaterally impose new gun control measures. Even liberal constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe concedes that &#8211;at a minimum&#8211; the Second Amendment safeguards the individual right of Americans to &#8220;possess and use firearms in the defense of themselves and their homes.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Supreme Court has blown away gun grabbers in recent years. In the landmark case of <em>District of Columbia v. Heller</em> (2008),<em> </em>the high court struck down the draconian ban on gun ownership that had long been in effect in the nation&#8217;s capital. The court found for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, affirming what serious constitutional scholars had known for years.</p>
<p>The court followed up in the case of <em>McDonald v. Chicago</em>, making it clear that the individual right to keep and bear arms acknowledged in the <em>Heller</em> ruling applies to the states as well. That 2010 decision quashed a Chicago city ordinance banning the possession of handguns.</p>
<p>Complicating matters further for Obama, it turns out then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was correct when she said to lawmakers in 2010, &#8220;we have to pass the [health care] bill so that you can find out what&#8217;s in it.&#8221;</p>
<p>A new report from Breitbart.com indicates that a provision is buried in the Obamacare legislation that protects Second Amendment rights. The clause states that the government is not allowed to collect &#8220;any information relating to the lawful ownership or possession of a firearm or ammunition.&#8221;</p>
<p>Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) confirmed that he added the legislative language in order to keep the National Rifle Association out of the legislative battle over Obamacare. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.</p>
<p>Will any of these legal concerns matter to President Obama who regards the Constitution at best as a living document and at worst as an inconvenience?</p>
<p>As gun and ammunition sales skyrocket nationwide, it is clear the public isn&#8217;t taking the chance that Obama will feel restrained by the laws of the land.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Doing the Research the NY Times Won&#8217;t Do</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ann-coulter/doing-the-research-the-ny-times-wont-do/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=doing-the-research-the-ny-times-wont-do</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 10 Jan 2013 04:30:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=172930</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When it comes to the truth about guns and violence prevention, bad journalism can be deadly. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ann-coulter/doing-the-research-the-ny-times-wont-do/new-york-times-5/" rel="attachment wp-att-172936"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-172936" title="new-york-times" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/new-york-times1-450x327.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="196" /></a>In Sunday&#8217;s New York Times, Elisabeth Rosenthal claimed, as the title of her article put it, &#8220;More Guns = More Killing.&#8221; She based this on evidence that would never be permitted in any other context at the Times: (1) anecdotal observations; and (2) bald assertions of an activist, blandly repeated with absolutely no independent fact-checking by the Times.</p>
<p>There is an academic, peer-reviewed, long-term study of the effect of various public policies on public, multiple shootings in all 50 states over a 20-year period performed by renowned economists at the University of Chicago and Yale, William Landes and John Lott. It concluded that the only policy to reduce the incidence of, and casualties from, mass shootings are concealed-carry laws. The Times will never mention this study.</p>
<p>Instead, Rosenthal&#8217;s column proclaimed that armed guards do not reduce crime because: &#8220;I recently visited some Latin American countries &#8230; where guards with guns grace every office lobby, storefront, ATM, restaurant and gas station. It has not made those countries safer or saner.&#8221;</p>
<p>So there you have it: The cock crowed, then the sun came up. Therefore, the cock&#8217;s crowing caused the sun to come up. Rosenthal went to Harvard Medical School.</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s a tip: High-crime areas are often bristling with bulletproof glass, heavy-duty locks, gated windows and armed guards. The bulletproof glass doesn&#8217;t cause the crime; it&#8217;s a response to crime. On Rosenthal&#8217;s logic, hospitals kill people because more people die in hospitals than outside of them.</p>
<p>(In any event, the Lott-Landes study didn&#8217;t recommend armed guards, but armed citizens.)</p>
<p>Rosenthal also produces a demonstrably false statistic about Australia&#8217;s gun laws, as if it&#8217;s a fact that has been carefully vetted by the Newspaper of Record, throwing in the true source only at the tail-end of the paragraph:</p>
<p>&#8220;After a gruesome mass murder in 1996 provoked public outrage, Australia enacted stricter gun laws, including a 28-day waiting period before purchase and a ban on semiautomatic weapons. &#8230; Since, rates of both homicide and suicide have dropped 50 percent &#8230;,&#8221; <strong><em>said Ms. Peters, who lobbied for the legislation.&#8221;</em></strong></p>
<p>&#8220;Ms. Peters&#8221; is Rebecca Peters, a George Soros-funded, Australian anti-gun activist so extreme that she had to resign from the International Action Network on Small Arms so as not to discredit the U.N.-recognized organization &#8212; which isn&#8217;t easy to further discredit.</p>
<p>Could the Times&#8217; public editor weigh in on whether unsubstantiated quotes from radical activists are now considered full and complete evidence at the Times?</p>
<p>It would be as if the Times headlined an article, &#8220;Abortion Increases Risk of Breast Cancer&#8221; with the sole support being a quote from Operation Rescue&#8217;s Randall Terry. (Except Terry would have evidence.)</p>
<p>Whether or not the homicide rate went up or down in Australia as a result of strict gun control laws imposed in 1997 is a fact that could have been checked by Times researchers. But they didn&#8217;t, because facts wouldn&#8217;t have given them the answer they wanted.</p>
<p>Needless to say, the effect of Australia&#8217;s gun ban has been extensively researched by Australian academics. As numerous studies have shown: After the gun ban, gun homicides in Australia did not decline any more than they were expected to without a gun ban.</p>
<p>Thus, for example, according to the Australian Institute of Criminology, the homicide rate has been in steady decline from 1969 to the present, with only one marked uptick in 1998-99 &#8212; right after the gun ban was enacted.</p>
<p>The showstopper for anti-gun activists like Ms. Rosenthal and Ms. Peters is the fact that suicides by firearm seemed to decrease more than expected after the 1997 gun ban.</p>
<p>But so did suicides by other means. Something other than the gun ban must have caused people to stop guzzling poison and jumping off bridges. (Some speculate that it&#8217;s the availability of anti-depressants like Prozac.)</p>
<p>Curiously &#8212; and not mentioned by Rosenthal &#8212; the number of accidental firearms deaths skyrocketed after Australia&#8217;s 1997 gun ban, although the law included stringent gun training requirements.</p>
<p>It turns out, until the coroner has certified a death as a &#8220;suicide,&#8221; it&#8217;s classified as &#8220;unintentional.&#8221; So either mandatory gun training has led to more accidents, or a lot of suicides are ending up in the &#8220;accident&#8221; column.</p>
<p>Most pinheadedly, especially for a graduate of the Harvard Medical School, Rosenthal says: &#8220;Before (the gun ban), Australia had averaged one mass shooting a year. (Since then,) there have been no mass killings.&#8221;</p>
<p>Mass murder is a rare enough crime that any statistician will tell you discerning trends is impossible. In this country, the FBI doesn&#8217;t even track mass murder as a specific crime category.</p>
<p>After Truman Capote&#8217;s &#8220;In Cold Blood&#8221; killers slaughtered the entire Clutter family in Holcomb, Kan., the murder rate in that quiet farming town went up 400 percent in a single year! Was it Holcomb&#8217;s big showing at the 4-H club competition that year?</p>
<p>Totally unbeknownst to Elisabeth Rosenthal, Australian academics have already examined the mass murder rate by firearm by comparing Australia to a control country: New Zealand. (Do they teach &#8220;control groups&#8221; at Harvard?)</p>
<p>New Zealand is strikingly similar to Australia. Both are isolated island nations, demographically and socioeconomically similar. Their mass murder rate before Australia&#8217;s gun ban was nearly identical: From 1980 to 1996, Australia&#8217;s mass murder rate was 0.0042 incidents per 100,000 people and New Zealand&#8217;s was 0.0050 incidents per 100,000 people.</p>
<p>The principal difference is that, post-1997, New Zealand remained armed to the teeth &#8212; including with guns that were suddenly banned in Australia.</p>
<p>While it&#8217;s true that Australia has had no more mass shootings since its gun ban, neither has New Zealand, despite continuing to be massively armed.</p>
<p>The only thing Australia&#8217;s strict gun control laws has clearly accomplished is increasing the amount of violent crime committed with guns immediately after the ban took effect. Of course, Times reporters don&#8217;t have to worry about violent muggings, rapes and robberies because they live in doorman buildings.</p>
<p>For those who can&#8217;t afford fancy doorman buildings, bad journalism kills.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Off With a Bang: Assault on Second Amendment Begins</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/off-with-a-bang-assault-on-second-amendment-begins/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=off-with-a-bang-assault-on-second-amendment-begins</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Jan 2013 04:40:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[New Congress and an emboldened President Obama are after much more than an "assault weapons" ban. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/off-with-a-bang-assault-on-second-amendment-begins/bidenobama-12-12/" rel="attachment wp-att-172527"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-172527" title="bidenobama.12.12" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/bidenobama.12.12-438x350.jpg" alt="" width="263" height="210" /></a>President Obama is planning an aggressive, in-your-face, blitzkrieg-style campaign against Americans&#8217; fundamental Second Amendment right to self-defense.</p>
<p>After a madman murdered 26 people including 20 young schoolchildren last month at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Obama initially urged a reinstatement of the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban. The demonstrably useless law lapsed in 2004 and had no detectable impact on crime. It was designed to cater to big-city liberals and their irrational fear of firearms.</p>
<p>But the Obama administration&#8217;s plans to assault the Bill of Rights grew more ambitious over the Christmas holidays. The administration has now had an opportunity to brainstorm more extensively with the left-wing gun-grabbing lobby, which is heavily financed by radical financier George Soros.</p>
<p>The president is hoping to use the bloody Newtown massacre to impose sweeping new restrictions on firearms and to create a massive new database to track and spy on law-abiding gun owners. Americans are wise to be wary of such proposals. Governments the world over have used such databases time and time again to crack down on internal dissent, lay the groundwork for gun confiscation, and clear the way for genocidal slaughter.</p>
<p>Citing multiple sources &#8220;involved in the administration’s discussions,&#8221; the Washington Post <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-weighs-broad-gun-control-agenda-in-wake-of-newtown-shootings/2013/01/05/d281efe0-5682-11e2-bf3e-76c0a789346f_print.html">reports</a> that the Obama White House is now &#8220;weighing a far broader and more comprehensive approach to curbing the nation’s gun violence than simply reinstating an expired ban on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition.&#8221;</p>
<p>According to the newspaper:</p>
<blockquote><p>A working group led by Vice President [Joe] Biden is seriously considering measures backed by key law enforcement leaders that would require universal background checks for firearm buyers, track the movement and sale of weapons through a national database, strengthen mental health checks, and stiffen penalties for carrying guns near schools or giving them to minors&#8230;</p></blockquote>
<p>Vice President Biden &#8220;guaranteed&#8221; Boston Mayor Thomas Menino that President Obama would push through sweeping firearms restrictions before February.</p>
<p>“He said, ‘Tommy, I guarantee you, we’ll get it done by the end of January,’” Menino said, according to the Boston Herald. “They’re going to get it done.&#8221;</p>
<p>Obama may intend to bribe and blackmail businesses in order to win their support for his assault on law-abiding gun owners, the Post article suggests.</p>
<p>&#8220;[T]he White House is developing strategies to work around the National Rifle Association that one source said could include rallying support from Wal-Mart and other gun retailers for measures that would benefit their businesses,&#8221; the article stated.</p>
<p>The Obama White House is coordinating its strategy with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an outspoken enemy of the Second Amendment. Bloomberg co-founded Mayors Against Illegal Guns with Boston&#8217;s Menino.</p>
<p>Biden&#8217;s working group is reportedly gearing up to present a package of recommendations to the president soon. After that the Community Organizer-in-Chief intends to head up a public-relations campaign to further inflame the public before the passions generated by the Newtown murders cool.</p>
<p>“They are very clearly committed to looking at this issue comprehensively,” said Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which is participating in Biden&#8217;s group.</p>
<p>Despite ceaseless cheerleading by their allies in the mainstream media, leftists probably won&#8217;t be able to shoot holes in the Second Amendment easily.</p>
<p>Lawmakers from both parties are opposed to further crackdowns on the ownership of guns, which author David B. Kopel notes are already &#8220;the most severely regulated consumer product in the United States — the only product for which FBI permission is required for every single sale.&#8221;</p>
<p>Newly sworn-in Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said gun control proposals now being discussed –including a plan by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to create a national gun registry– are unconstitutional. The federal government doesn&#8217;t have &#8220;any business having a list of law-abiding citizens&#8221; who choose to exercise their right to keep and bear arms, he said.</p>
<p>After Newtown &#8220;within minutes, we saw politicians run out and try to exploit this tragedy, try to push their political agenda of gun control,&#8221; Cruz told &#8220;Fox News Sunday.&#8221;</p>
<p>What happened in Newtown is &#8220;a tragedy, but it’s not a tragedy that should be answered by restricting the constitutional rights of all Americans.&#8221;</p>
<p>Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) also cautioned against taking aim at gun owners&#8217; rights.</p>
<p>“I think you need to put everything on the table, but what I hear from the administration — and if the Washington Post is to be believed — that’s way, way in extreme of what I think is necessary or even should be talked about. And it’s not going to pass,” the new freshman senator said on a Sunday TV talk show.</p>
<p>Heitkamp said mental health-related proposals have to be part of any package aimed at reducing violent crime.</p>
<p>“Let’s start addressing the problem. And to me, one of the issues that I think comes — screams out of this is the issue of mental health and the care for the mentally ill in our country, especially the dangerously mentally ill. And so we need to have a broad discussion before we start talking about gun control,” she said.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s sudden reversal on gun rights shouldn&#8217;t come as a surprise. Obama has a long anti-gun track record that he carefully distanced himself from when he began running for the presidency. In his academic days he <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-weighs-broad-gun-control-agenda-in-wake-of-newtown-shootings/2013/01/05/d281efe0-5682-11e2-bf3e-76c0a789346f_print.html">told</a> a colleague: &#8220;I don&#8217;t believe people should be able to own guns.&#8221;</p>
<p>As a candidate for state office in 1996, Obama <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-weighs-broad-gun-control-agenda-in-wake-of-newtown-shootings/2013/01/05/d281efe0-5682-11e2-bf3e-76c0a789346f_print.html">promised</a> to ban &#8220;the manufacture, sale &amp; possession of handguns.” Seeking his U.S. Senate seat in 2004, Obama advocated blocking citizens nationwide from receiving concealed-carry permits.</p>
<p>This documented antipathy toward Second Amendment rights stands in stark contrast to Obama&#8217;s statements on the presidential campaign trail in 2008 when he <a href="http://cnsnews.com/blog/gregory-gwyn-williams-jr/flashback-obama-i-will-not-take-your-guns-away">promised</a> to respect Americans&#8217; individual right to bear arms.</p>
<p>&#8220;When you all go home and you&#8217;re talking to your buddies and you say, ah &#8216;He wants to take my gun away.&#8217; You&#8217;ve heard it here, I&#8217;m on television so everybody knows it. I believe in the Second Amendment. I believe in people&#8217;s lawful right to bear arms. I will not take your shotgun away. I will not take your rifle away. I won&#8217;t take your handgun away.&#8221;</p>
<p>But that was before the Newtown opportunity came along. Obama never allows a gut-wrenching crisis to go to waste.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>America Doesn&#8217;t Have a Gun Problem, It Has a Gang Problem</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/america-doesnt-have-a-gun-problem-it-has-a-gang-problem/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=america-doesnt-have-a-gun-problem-it-has-a-gang-problem</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 31 Dec 2012 04:50:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=171576</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The country's real "gun culture" is controlled by the urban Democratic machine. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/america-doesnt-have-a-gun-problem-it-has-a-gang-problem/es_chicago_405_480x360/" rel="attachment wp-att-171581"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-171581" title="es_chicago_405_480x360" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/es_chicago_405_480x360-450x337.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="202" /></a>Chicago&#8217;s murder numbers have hit that magic 500. Baltimore&#8217;s murder toll has passed 200. In <a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/dncrime/Murder-by-Numbers-Homicide-in-2012.html">Philly, it&#8217;s up to 324</a>, the highest since 2007. In Detroit, it&#8217;s approaching 400, another record. In <a href="http://www.nola.com/crime/murders/">New Orleans</a>, it&#8217;s almost at 200. <a href="http://gothamist.com/2012/12/26/murder_rate.php">New York City is down</a> to 414 from 508. In <a href="http://projects.latimes.com/homicide/map/">Los Angeles, it&#8217;s </a>over 500. In St. Louis it&#8217;s 113 and 130 in Oakland.  It’s 121 in <a href="http://www.abc24.com/mostpopular/story/MPD-Numbers-for-2012-Show-Increase-of-Violent/r0E010eJOEOvcaXKG2uyBg.cspx">Memphis</a> and 76 in Birmingham.</p>
<p>Washington, D.C., home of the boys and girls who can solve it all, is nearing its own big 100.</p>
<p>Those 12 cities alone account for nearly 3,200 dead and nearly a quarter of all murders in the United States. And we haven&#8217;t even visited sunny Atlanta or chilly Cleveland.</p>
<p>These cities are the heartland of America’s real gun culture. It isn’t the bitter gun-and-bible clingers in McCain and Romney territory who are racking up a more horrifying annual kill rate than Al Qaeda; it’s Obama’s own voting base.</p>
<p>Chicago, where Obama delivered his victory speech, has homicide numbers that match all of Japan and are higher than Spain, Poland and pre-war Syria. If Chicago gets any worse, it will find itself passing the number of murders for the entire country of Canada.</p>
<p>Chicago’s murder rate of 15.65 per 100,000 people looks nothing like the American 4.2 rate, the Midwestern 4.5 or the Illinois’ 5.6 rates, but it does look like the murder rates in failed countries like Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe. To achieve Chicago’s murder rate, African countries usually have to experience a bloody genocidal civil war or decades of tyranny.</p>
<p>But Chicago isn’t even all that unique. Or the worst case scenario. That would be New Orleans which at an incredible 72.8 murder rate is ten times higher than the national average. If New Orleans were a country, it would have the 2<sup>nd</sup> highest murder rate in the world, beating out El Salvador.</p>
<p>Louisiana went red for Romney 58 to 40, but <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2012/11/06/louisiana-election-results/1658249/">Orleans Parish went blue for Obama</a> 80 to 17.</p>
<p>St. Louis has a murder rate just a little lower than Belize. Baltimore has a worse murder rate than South Africa and Detroit has a worse murder rate than Colombia. Obama won both St. Louis and Baltimore by comfortable margins. He won Detroit’s Wayne County 73 to 26.</p>
<p>Homicide rates like these show that something is broken, but it isn’t broken among the Romney voters rushing to stock up on assault rifles every time Obama begins threatening their right to buy them; it’s broken among Obama’s base.</p>
<p>Any serious conversation about gun violence and gun culture has to begin at home; in Chicago, in Baltimore, in New York City, in Los Angeles and in Washington, D.C.</p>
<p>Voting for Obama does not make people innately homicidal. Just look at Seattle which is agonizing over its 26 murders. That&#8217;s about the same number of murders as East St. Louis which has only 27,000 people to Seattle&#8217;s 620,000.</p>
<p>So what is happening in Chicago to drive it to the gates of hell ahead of Zimbabwe and Rwanda?</p>
<p>A breakdown of the Chicago killing fields shows that 83% of those murdered in Chicago last year had criminal records. In <a href="http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-08-31-criminal-target_N.htm">Philly, it’s</a> 75%. In Milwaukee it’s 77% percent. In <a href="http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/01/nopd_release_of_murder_victims.html">New Orleans</a>, it’s 64%. In Baltimore, it’s 91%. Many were felons who had served time. And as many <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/29/chicago-homicide-rate-new-york_n_2378073.html">as 80% of</a> the homicides were gang related.</p>
<p>Chicago’s problem isn’t guns; it’s gangs. Gun control efforts in Chicago or any other major city are doomed because gangs represent organized crime networks which stretch down to Mexico, and trying to cut off their gun supply will be as effective as trying to cut off their drug supply.</p>
<p>America’s murder rate isn’t the work of the suburban and rural homeowners who shop for guns at sporting goods stores and at gun shows, and whom news shows profile after every shooting, but by the gangs embedded in the urban areas controlled by the Democratic machine. The gangs who drive up America’s murder rate look nothing like the occasional mentally ill suburban white kid who goes off his medication and decides to shoot up a school. Lanza, like most serial killers, is a media aberration, not the norm.</p>
<p>National murder statistics show that blacks are far more likely to be killers than whites and they are also far more likely to be killed. The single largest cause of homicides is the argument. 4<sup>th</sup> on the list is juvenile gang activity with 676 murders, which combined with various flavors of gangland killings takes us nearly to the 1,000 mark. America has more gangland murders than Sierra Leone, Eritrea and Puerto Rico have murders.</p>
<p>Our national murder rate is not some incomprehensible mystery that can only be attributed to the inanimate tools, the steel, brass and wood that do the work. It is largely the work of adult males from age 18 to 39 with criminal records killing other males of that same age and criminal past.</p>
<p>If this were going on in Rwanda, El Salvador or Sierra Leone, we would have no trouble knowing what to make of it, and silly pearl-clutching nonsense about gun control would never even come up. But this is Chicago, it’s Baltimore, it’s Philly and NOLA; and so we refuse to see that our major cities are in the same boat as some of the worst trouble spots in the world.</p>
<p>Lanza and Newtown are comforting aberrations. They allow us to take refuge in the fantasy that homicides in America are the work of the occasional serial killer practicing his dark art in one of those perfect small towns that always show up in murder mysteries or Stephen King novels. They fool us into thinking that there is something American about our murder rate that can be traced to hunting season, patriotism and bad mothers.</p>
<p>But go to Chicago or Baltimore. Go where the killings really happen and the illusion comes apart.</p>
<p>There is a war going on in America between gangs of young men who bear an uncanny resemblance to their counterparts in Sierra Leone or El Salvador. They live like them, they fight for control of the streets like them and they kill like them.</p>
<p>America’s horrific murder rate is a result of the transformation of major American cities into Sierra Leone, Somalia, Rwanda and El Salvador. Our murder rate now largely consists of criminals killing criminals.</p>
<p>As David Kennedy, the head of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control, put it, &#8220;The majority of homicide victims have extensive criminal histories. This is simply the way that the world of criminal homicide works. It&#8217;s a fact.”</p>
<p>America is, on a county by county basis, not a violent country, just as it, on a county by county basis, did not vote for Obama. It is being dragged down by broken cities full of broken families whose mayors would like to trash the Bill of Rights for the entire country in the vain hope that national gun control will save their cities, even though gun control is likely to be as much help to Chicago or New Orleans as the War on Drugs.</p>
<p>Obama’s pretense that there needs to be a national conversation about rural American gun owners is a dishonest and cynical ploy that distracts attention from the real problem that he and politicians like him have sat on for generations.</p>
<p>We do not need to have a conversation about the NRA. We need to have a conversation about Chicago.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Contempt for &#8216;Bitter Clingers&#8217; Fuels Gun Control</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/contempt-of-bitter-clingers-fuels-gun-control/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=contempt-of-bitter-clingers-fuels-gun-control</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 24 Dec 2012 04:37:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=170641</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The real reason the Left has renewed its assault on the Second Amendment.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/contempt-of-bitter-clingers-fuels-gun-control/urban-league-obama-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-170705"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-170705" title="urban-league-obama" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/urban-league-obama1.jpg" alt="" width="212" height="151" /></a>The massacre of school children in Connecticut has been followed by the same irrational reactions and useless prescriptions that attend every mass shooting. The usual suspects have already been rounded up, most predictably the availability of weapons in America, especially what many misleadingly call “assault weapons.” President Obama has established a commission and promised, “This time the words need to lead to action. I will use all the powers of this office to help advance efforts aimed at preventing more tragedies like this.”</p>
<p>Of course these “efforts” will include new gun control laws that will serve liberal political ends, but will do nothing to prevent the next massacre.</p>
<p>One of the biggest culprits in this process is the media. Their incessant coverage of the crime and its aftermath, especially the suffering of the victims’ families, turns the tragedy into a sentimentalized commodity. Morbid curiosity becomes a kind of voyeurism, the same impulse that makes people slow down for car wrecks. Another effect of the media is the platform it gives to the psychotic or evil killer eager for global attention and fame. Like Hierostratus, who burned down the temple of Artemis in Ephesus just to become famous, the lunatic loner seeks power and validation through his crimes. The 24/7 coverage of killings on cable television and the Internet assures the wannabe killer that he will get the obsessive attention to his life and deeds he craves. He may have been an anonymous loser in life, but now he is a celebrity.</p>
<p>All this intense coverage does nothing, of course, for the grieving families and survivors. But these irrational feelings create emotional momentum that can be politically exploited to further extend big government’s control over our lives. Witness the calls to restrict First Amendment rights by censoring violent video games, as West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller has done, despite the absence of any demonstrable causal link between such games and mass shootings. This outsized media attention and its lurid drama also obscure the more rational context necessary for creating public policy: risk evaluation. From that perspective, hysteria over gun deaths is disproportionate. Dying at the hands of a stranger is a remote contingency for most people outside of inner city areas. Getting shot to death didn’t make the top 15 causes of death in 2011. Deaths by alcohol (26,256), car accidents (34,677), and drugs (37,485; about 15,000 from prescription painkillers) all exceeded homicides by firearms (11,101), with gun deaths at the hands of strangers representing less than a fifth of those killings.</p>
<p>But all this everyday loss of life does not create the obsessive drama of mass shootings, or a fraction of the demands for new regulations and restrictions that always follow gun deaths. Of course, the deaths of children like those in Newtown affect us more powerfully. But every year thousands of children and teens die from legal drugs and drunk drivers. Aren’t those lives as valuable and worthy of our concern as the victims of mass shootings? Why don’t we demand more intrusive regulation and restrictions on alcohol and painkillers as vehemently and persistently as we call for gun restrictions that cannot be shown to lower the risk of getting killed by a gun? Why do we accept the risk of death that attends driving, drinking alcohol, and using prescription drugs yet demand that ownership of guns be absolutely risk-free?</p>
<p>The answer can be found in the way many liberals have made a fetish out of the gun. They are the anti-gun nuts, attributing mystic powers of destruction to a tool that like cars or drugs can be misused by the careless, lunatic, or evil. Thus they demand gun-control laws that are effective only for limiting the rights of the law-abiding and sane. Take the ban on “assault” weapons. The 1994 ban, which expired in 2004, had no demonstrable effect on reducing gun-deaths, according to a University of Pennsylvania study commissioned by the Justice Department. Yet new legislation is being proposed by Senator Diane Feinstein to bring the ban back, with the same exceptions and the same focus on cosmetics of the earlier legislation.</p>
<p>Once again, the irrational and superficial drives policy: if a weapon just <em>looks</em> like a fully automatic military assault rifle because it has a bayonet mount or a folding stock, then we will restrict it, even though a few simple modifications of a legal rifle can turn it back into a banned one. And what do we do about the 200 million guns currently in circulation? Or how do we stop people from getting guns illegally? We’ve spent $1 trillion over the last 40 years on the “war on drugs,” and today any motivated teenager can get illegal drugs in a few hours. Finally, there is no historical correlation between availability of guns and homicide rates. Murders increased after the 1968 Gun Control Act, and later declined after the 1994 assault weapon ban expired––down 50% over the last 30 years. Of all the contributors to the increase in mass shootings over the last decade––greater media coverage that incites copycat killers, or the deinstitutionalizing of the mentally ill­­––the existence of semiautomatic weapons that merely resemble military assault rifles is way down on the list.</p>
<p>But media-stoked irrational hysteria about gun violence isn’t the only reason we are hearing calls for more gun control. Politics is a factor as well. According to the <em>New York Times</em>, while 60% of Republicans have a gun in the house, only 25% of Democrats do. “Whether someone owns a gun,” Nate Silver writes, “is a more powerful predictor of a person’s political party than her gender, whether she identifies as gay or lesbian, whether she is Hispanic, whether she lives in the South or a number of other demographic characteristics.” That’s why Obama used the Newtown killings to bully the Republicans into caving on his demands for higher taxes. Like class warfare, gun control is a reliable issue for Democrats to exploit for political gain no matter how ineffective the resulting policies. Just as the soak-the-rich policies dominating the Democrats’ solutions to the “fiscal cliff” will do nothing to reduce the deficit and control spending, so too more gun control will not stop tragedies like the Newtown massacre.</p>
<p>Gun control laws, then, represent yet another instance of the progressive ideology that distrusts the average person to control his own life, and so demands ever greater regulatory intrusion into private life that necessarily expands the scope and power of the government. Restrictions on guns assume that most people, especially those conservative “bitter clingers to guns and religion,” as Obama called them, are too untrustworthy or incapable or stupid to own and carry a weapon. Such laws are written by elite snobs who think they know how to run your life better than you do, just as progressive economic policy is predicated on the belief that the federal government has a right to confiscate your money because it knows how to spend it more efficiently or justly.</p>
<p>In the end, the progressive point is not to solve problems that history shows big government is usually incapable of doing without extracting prohibitive costs. The point is to expand the leviathan state at the expense of individual freedom and autonomy, based on a contempt for ordinary people whom progressives at heart believe are not as worthy of freedom as they are. The emotional excesses that surround a tragedy like the Newtown massacre are merely the camouflage for advancing this assault on freedom.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Gun Culture and Gun-Control Culture</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/gun-culture-and-gun-control-culture/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=gun-culture-and-gun-control-culture</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 19 Dec 2012 04:57:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=170074</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The leftist dog whistle that promotes hatred of rural America. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/gun-culture-and-gun-control-culture/1-300x298/" rel="attachment wp-att-170092"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-170092" title="1-300x298" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/1-300x298.jpg" alt="" width="238" height="231" /></a>Hardly had the blood been scrubbed off the floors in Newtown than everyone who was anyone had begun shifting the blame from Adam Lanza to some intangible social failure.</p>
<p>Back in 2002, Michael Moore trundled his bulk over to Colorado to exploit the Columbine massacre for a general rant about gun culture, American foreign policy and how hard it was to find a shop selling bacon grease by the ton at two in the morning.</p>
<p>In his film, which won an Oscar for Best Documentary, Moore gave his audience what they wanted, lots of scenes of &#8220;hicks and hillbillies&#8221; buying, selling and giving away guns all over the place to illustrate the murderous ravages of American gun culture. Some of those scenes were staged, but it didn&#8217;t matter since Moore was catering to an audience that had nothing but contempt for working class Americans and would believe any awful thing about them.</p>
<p>What did gun culture have to do with a plot by two disgruntled dorks with tastes in pop culture far afield from the rural gun-loving dystopia that Moore was doing his best to depict? About as much as gun culture has to do with headcases like Adam Lanza or Jared Loughner.</p>
<p>Your average school shooter is unhappy and angry, irreligious, incapable of fitting into a community and filled with rage that he exercises through violent fantasies. His culture isn’t gun culture. It’s loner culture. Video games do not cause him to kill, but they are how he entertains himself until he can get a taste of the real thing.</p>
<p>Adam Lanza, Dylan Kleibold, Eric Harris, Seung-Hui Cho, James Holmes, One L. Goh and Jared Loughner had as much in common with what the Michael Moore Fan Club thinks of as &#8220;gun culture&#8221; as Michael Moore does with the working class. Whatever gun culture they had was not the American Scots-Irish culture of the hunter, the rancher and the militia member, but the urban posse of emasculated men of no worth that brandish weapons as a way to get respect.</p>
<p>The gun culture of the school shooter is the lobby scene in The Matrix, the frag or be fragged multiplayer gaming culture of Halo and Doom, and the Joker killing his way across Gotham. None of these products of mass entertainment make one a killer, but they are also far more illustrative of the type of gun culture that defines school shooters, than anything that Michael Moore and the MSNBC talking heads mean by gun culture.</p>
<p>For most Americans there is no gun culture, only the ownership of guns. To the extent that any gun culture has developed it was in response to a gun-control culture that sought to demonize the ownership of firearms. The traditional and religious culture of the American gun owner has little in common with the power fantasies of the school shooter. To the gun owner, a firearm is a necessary tool. To the school shooter, it is a way to stop feeling powerless, a way to get beyond the ersatz joys of killing bots and avatars, of watching Keanu Reeves spin through the air while filling a mob of policemen full of lead, with the joy of the real kill.</p>
<p>For all the loose talk about American gun culture, no one really seems to be able to define what it is. Defining gun culture by the entertainment industry drifts too far into Hollywood and Detroit, and away from the rural culture that is the real target of gun-control culture.</p>
<p>Instead there are a thousand articles written in children&#8217;s blood crying out, &#8220;We can&#8217;t just do nothing.&#8221; Something must be done. Now. Last week. If only we ban more weapons, we can be as safe as Norway, home of the worst shooting spree of all, or Connecticut, which already has an assault weapons ban. For the children&#8230; who had no one to protect them when a gunman came to their school and will still have no one to protect them when gun-control culture gets its way.</p>
<p>After these come a torrent of armchair psychology analyses of America&#8217;s gun culture, which are only slightly more elegant versions of Michael Moore&#8217;s thesis about rural America. And those are what gun culture is really about. After all how can you be confident of your own superiority unless you have a documentary and a hundred articles affirming it for you by the traditional method of putting down the people at the bottom of the ladder.</p>
<p>What liberals think of as gun culture is really shorthand for rural America. It&#8217;s what liberals won&#8217;t say, but it&#8217;s what they mean. Americans are still sentimental about the village, so, for now, the number of movies that portray the rural community as ideal, rather than a hive of small-minded bigots, is still rather high. But there are backdoor ways of getting at the same topic, and talking about gun culture is one of them.</p>
<p>When liberals talk about &#8220;gun culture&#8221;, they mean the same thing that Barack Obama did when he told his San Francisco fundraiser friends about the people out there who still cling to their bibles and their guns. It isn&#8217;t about the guns really, though gun-control culture is worried about having that much personal autonomy in the hands of people who don&#8217;t share their values and like their independence, it&#8217;s about rural America. And rural America, like guns, is another symbol that stands in for traditional America.</p>
<p>The left cannot talk about how much it hates this country. Gun culture is one of its dog whistles. Talking about gun culture allows the left to publicly vent its hatred for America. But the truth about gun culture is that the left has a great deal more in common with Dylan Klebold, Eric Harris, Adam Lanza and Jared Loughner. Far more than those shooters had with any phantom conservative gun culture.</p>
<p>The American left, like any high school shooter, is bitter, angry, disgruntled and filled with contempt for the rest of the country. Stuck in a country made of flyover country, the left treats Americans to their own Columbine Massacre every time it defends criminals and terrorists, every time it wrecks American manufacturing and laughs all the way to the bank as it bankrupts Americans.</p>
<p>And both the left and the shooters agree that the people should not have guns.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Americans Have Become Compliant</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/walter-williams/americans-have-become-compliant/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=americans-have-become-compliant</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/walter-williams/americans-have-become-compliant/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 16 Mar 2012 04:05:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[control]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Food Police]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=125864</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Nanny-statism is crippling the spirit and commonsense of the country. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Michelle-Obama-New-Food-Group-Icons.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-125886" title="Michelle-Obama-New-Food-Group-Icons" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Michelle-Obama-New-Food-Group-Icons.gif" alt="" width="375" height="259" /></a>Last month, at a Raeford, N.C., elementary school, a teacher confiscated the lunch of a 5-year-old girl because it didn&#8217;t meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines and therefore was deemed nonnutritious. She replaced it with school cafeteria chicken nuggets. The girl&#8217;s home-prepared lunch was nutritious; it consisted of a turkey and cheese sandwich, potato chips, a banana and apple juice. But whether her lunch was nutritious or not is not the issue. The issue is governmental usurpation of parental authority.</p>
<p>In a number of states, pregnant teenage girls may be given abortions without the notification or the permission of parents. The issue is neither abortion nor whether a pregnant teenager should have an abortion. The issue is this: What gives the government the authority to usurp parental authority?</p>
<p>Part of the problem is that people who act as instruments of government do not pay a personal price for usurping parental authority. The reason is Americans, unlike Americans of yesteryear, have become timid and, as such, come to accept all manner of intrusive governmental acts. Can you imagine what a rugged American, such as one portrayed by John Wayne, would have done to a government tyrant who confiscated his daughter&#8217;s lunch or facilitated her abortion without his permission?</p>
<p>I believe that the anti-tobacco movement partially accounts for today&#8217;s compliant American. Tobacco zealots started out with &#8220;reasonable&#8221; demands, such as the surgeon general&#8217;s warning on cigarette packs. Then they demanded nonsmoking sections on airplanes. Emboldened by that success, they demanded no smoking at all on airplanes and then airports and then restaurants and then workplaces — all in the name of health. Seeing the compliant nature of smokers, they&#8217;ve moved to ban smoking on beaches, in parks and on sidewalks in some cities. Now they&#8217;re calling for higher health insurance premiums for smokers. Had the tobacco zealots demanded their full agenda when they started out, they would not have achieved anything.</p>
<p>Using the anti-tobacco crusade as their template and finding Americans so compliant, zealots and would-be tyrants are extending their agenda.</p>
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		<title>Terror Plot Foiled</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/matt-gurney/another-terror-plot-foiled/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=another-terror-plot-foiled</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 30 Sep 2011 04:56:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matt Gurney]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=107128</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The arrest of Rezwan Ferdaus in Boston scores a major victory for U.S. counter-terrorism efforts.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Picture-31.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-107131" title="Picture-3" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Picture-31.gif" alt="" width="375" height="251" /></a></p>
<p>Boston-area man Rezwan Ferdaus, 26, has been arrested and indicted on charges of plotting a terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol Building and the Pentagon. Ferdaus, an American citizen — born in America, no less — is alleged to have intended <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-29/man-accused-of-plotting-to-bomb-capitol-pentagon-indicted-in-boston.html">to fly remote control airplanes</a>, purchased from hobby shops, into the targets. It was his apparent hope that the remote control toys — the poor man’s Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, in this case — would carry explosive devices into the targets, setting them ablaze. As the buildings were evacuated, Ferdaus allegedly hoped to fire into the crowds with assault rifles and grenades.</p>
<p>Should these charges be proven in court, it will be a major victory for U.S. counter-terrorism efforts. But those very same efforts are under attack by those who see closet <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2011/09/07/islamophobia-thought-crime-of-the-totalitarian-future/">Islamophobes </a>behind every wiretap and sting operation. The arrest of Ferdaus could prove to be not only a win for the United States in the war on terror, but for America’s peaceful Muslims.</p>
<p>From what is known so far, the detection and arrest of Ferdaus is a major achievement for U.S. law enforcement. Prior to his arrest on terrorism charges, Ferdaus’s only brush with the law had been for a high-school prank where he and friends cemented doors to their school shut. When he radicalized is not yet known. But, apparently after Ferdaus began seeking fellow jihadists online, the FBI began to monitor him.</p>
<p>Indeed, it has been reported that over the last several months, Ferdaus had dealings with FBI agents that he believed were Islamists set on attacking America. Ferdaus, a physics graduate, designed detonators that he provided the agents, and was told these had been smuggled to Iraq and used to kill U.S. soldiers, much to Ferdaus’s delight. Ferdaus then began to request weapons and supplies from his FBI “allies.” He received six AK-47s, several grenades and 25 lbs. of what he believed was C4 plastic explosive. It was then that he was arrested.</p>
<p>This is classic police work. A suspect is identified, contacted, and allowed to incriminate himself before an arrest is made and without public safety being threatened. This is how child pornographers, drug smugglers and gun runners are identified and caught. It’s how stolen goods are traced. Don’t let the modern tools fool you — cellphones, Internet cafes and social media notwithstanding, any 19<sup>th</sup>-century detective worth their salt would recognize and applaud the kind of work that the FBI put into this case.</p>
<p>Such methods are still controversial for some, but absolutely necessary. Not every terrorism case will benefit from a major break such as the one that benefited Canadian police in 2006. In that case, a home-grown cell of Canadian Islamists were planning a series of bomb and gun attacks on the financial centre of Toronto and the Parliament buildings in Ottawa. A patriotic Canadian Muslim, who became aware of the plan and was appalled, gave up the group. A police sting operation very similar to the one that captured Ferdaus was initiated after the plot came to light, and the attack was averted.</p>
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		<title>Al-Qaeda Eyes Yemen</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/frank-crimi/al-qaeda-eyes-yemen/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=al-qaeda-eyes-yemen</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/frank-crimi/al-qaeda-eyes-yemen/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 29 Sep 2011 04:35:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frank Crimi]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[al qaeda in the arabian peninsula]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ali abdullah saleh]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[aqap]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attempt]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[home]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamic militants]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president ali abdullah saleh]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[violent protests]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The collapse of Yemen’s government looks to be nearly at hand.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/al-qaeda5.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-106945" title="al-qaeda5" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/al-qaeda5.jpg" alt="" width="399" height="266" /></a></p>
<p>President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s recent return to Yemen has been met by continued massive, violent protests calling for his immediate ouster. With separatists and al-Qaeda insurgents continuing to gain ground, the total collapse of Yemen’s government looks to be nearly at hand.</p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p>Saleh had spent the past three months in Saudi Arabia recuperating from burns he received in a June rocket attack on his presidential compound, an attack which killed 16 people and wounded more than 100. While waiting for Saleh to return, his sons and relatives were charged with maintaining control over Yemen’s government, its armed forces and the capital city of Sanaa.</p>
<p>However, their heavy handed attempts to maintain order have only served to expedite Yemen’s descent into a state of near anarchy. In the past two weeks alone, savage street fighting has <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyld=140798686">claimed</a> over 150 lives as Republic of Yemen Government (ROYG) forces have rained mortars and anti-aircraft fire onto crowds of anti-government protesters.</p>
<p>In the meantime, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and other Yemeni Islamic militants, such as the Partisans of Sharia, have overtaken several towns in southern Yemen, including the Abyan province capital of Zinjibar. Moreover, senior AQAP leaders have now <a href="http://www.yoobserver.com/front-page/10021442.html">admitted</a> that fighters from Somalia’s al-Qaeda-linked al Shabab had crossed over into Yemen and were now joined in the insurgency.</p>
<p>Then, days before Saleh was to return home, anti-government tribesmen <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyld=140798686">overran</a> an army base north of Sanaa, home to the Republican Guard under the command of Saleh’s oldest son, Ahmed. That attack had been preceded a week earlier when another Republican Guard base in Sanaa had been taken over by a group of protesters and renegade ROYG soldiers.</p>
<p>Finally, serving as a backdrop to all this upheaval has been a Yemen economy, saddled with an unemployment rate of 40 percent, which has all but collapsed. So, it wasn’t too surprising that the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recently <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-09-26/saleh-return-fails-to-end-yemen-clashes-as-protesters-shun-talks.html">wrote</a> that the ROYG has “appeared to have lost effective control of parts of the country and within the major cities.”</p>
<p>So, it was into this quagmire to which Saleh returned, hoping to stave off further unrest and perhaps spare him a stint in prison or a date in front of a firing squad. To that end, Saleh, who has repeatedly rejected calls by opposition groups to vacate his 30-year presidency, offered in a televised national address to abide by a deal brokered by the Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).</p>
<p>Under that deal, Sahel would allow for parliamentary and presidential elections. In return, Saleh would cede power within a month of signing the accord in exchange for immunity from prosecution by a newly elected Yemen government.</p>
<p>Unfortunately for Saleh, the deal he offered had already been rejected three times by Yemen’s main opposition group, the Joint Meetings Parties. So, if Saleh had entertained thoughts that his televised peace offering would have a pacifying effect, ensuing events quickly disabused him of the notion.</p>
<p>Specifically, tens of thousands of protesters, quickly poured onto the streets of Sanaa demanding his immediate arrest, convinced Saleh was only stalling for time in an attempt to further consolidate his power. Perhaps their suspicions of Saleh being less than candid about voluntarily stepping aside was fueled by RYOG forces only one day after Saleh’s arrival having attacked an opposition camp in Sanaa, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/checkpoint-washington/post/secret-drone-bases-avoiding-past-mistakes/2011/09/21/gIQAPaN0kK_blog.html">killing</a> 17 people in the process.</p>
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