Mayor Sam Jones of Mobile, Alabama, is a member of Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns, an organization that advocates much stricter gun control laws and opposes letting private citizens carry guns. On Dec. 20th, Jones returned home to find a burglar in his garage. He held the man at gunpoint until police arrived.
The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) pointed out the hypocrisy — and possible illegality — of the mayor’s actions:
… According to published reports, Jones was returning home from an errand, driving his private vehicle. “His bodyguard, who drives the mayor’s city vehicle, was not on duty,” the Press-Register newspaper reported. And now there are questions about whether the mayor has an Alabama carry permit.
“Here is a municipal mayor who has a bodyguard, and believes it is okay for him to carry a gun, but he belongs to an organization that consistently works to keep everyone else from carrying,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “If the mayor is legally licensed, why does he belong to a group that has fought to prevent law-abiding citizens from exercising their self-defense right?
“If Mayor Jones doesn’t have a permit,” he continued, “then he is a poster child for the double standards that elites like Mayor Michael Bloomberg believe separates them from the citizens they serve. Either way, Mayor Jones owes it to his constituents to show them his carry permit, and to oppose any further attempts by Mayors Against Illegal Guns to prevent private citizens from exercising their constitutionally-protected right to keep and bear arms.
“It is no surprise that average American citizens are fed up with government officials at all levels,” Gottlieb observed. “We’re glad that Mayor Jones had the means and the willingness to protect his property, but we are stunned and disappointed that he belongs to an organization whose very essence is to make it virtually impossible for average citizens to do likewise.”
Mark Steyn doesn’t think much of how the U.S. spent 2011, and he’s less than optimistic about 2012:
… The year began with a tea-powered Republican caucus taking control of the House of Representatives and pledging to rein in spendaholic government. It ended with President Obama making a pro forma request for a mere $1.2 trillion increase in the debt ceiling. This will raise government debt to $16.4 trillion — a new world record! If only until he demands the next debt-ceiling increase in three months’ time.
At the end of 2011, America, like much of the rest of the western world, has dug deeper into a cocoon of denial. Tens of millions of Americans remain unaware that this nation is broke — broker than any nation has ever been.
…
Public debt has increased by 67% over the last three years, and too many Americans refuse even to see it as a problem. For most of us, “$16.4 trillion” has no real meaning, any more than “$17.9 trillion” or “$28.3 trillion” or “$147.8 bazillion.” It doesn’t even have much meaning for the guys spending the dough.
Look into the eyes of Barack Obama or Harry Reid or Barney Frank, and you realize that, even as they’re borrowing all this money, they have no serious intention of paying any of it back. That’s to say, there is no politically plausible scenario under which the $16.4 trillion is reduced to $13.7 trillion, and then $7.9 trillion, and eventually 173 dollars and 48 cents.
At the deepest levels within our governing structures, we are committed to living beyond our means on a scale no civilization has ever done. Our most enlightened citizens think it’s rather vulgar and boorish to obsess about debt. The urbane, educated, Western progressive would rather “save the planet,” a cause which offers the grandiose narcissism that, say, reforming Medicare lacks.
Welcome to the new home of Combs Spouts Off. Blog-City is shutting down at the end of the year, so I’ve relocated to my very own domain, hosted by DreamHost. Please update your bookmarks (you do have me bookmarked, don’t you?).
My friend Jed, who knows much more about such things than I do, is helping with the move. All the Combs Spouts Off archives are here — you can browse or search them using the widgets in the left sidebar. Other sidebar items, like my (long-neglected) blogroll, will be appearing in the next few days. The comments haven’t been successfully moved yet, and I’m not sure they can be.
In my waning weeks at Blog-City, I posted nothing. I won’t bore you with a lengthy explanation of the reasons (excuses) for that, but rest assured that I’ll be spouting off again in my new home. I hope you’ll visit from time to time — and toss me a comment or two when you can. If the comments on old posts can’t be recovered, I guess I need to start accumulating some new ones. 🙂
To those who have served, and to those who serve today:
Thank you.
It Is The Soldier
It is the Soldier, not the minister
Who has given us freedom of religion.
It is the Soldier, not the reporter
Who has given us freedom of the press.
It is the Soldier, not the poet
Who has given us freedom of speech.
It is the Soldier, not the campus organizer
Who has given us freedom to protest.
It is the Soldier, not the lawyer
Who has given us the right to a fair trial.
It is the Soldier, not the politician
Who has given us the right to vote.
It is the Soldier who salutes the flag,
Who serves beneath the flag,
And whose coffin is draped by the flag,
Who allows the protester to burn the flag.
Thanks, Papa, for your many years of service. I love you and miss you.
On this Veterans Day, please make a contribution to an organization (or two or three!) that supports veterans or active-duty military personnel. Such as Project Valour-IT to help severely wounded soldiers.
The Signaleer has a nice history of Remembrance Day, which begat Armistice Day, which begat Veterans Day, and he includes the classic World War I poem, In Flanders Fields. Worth a visit.
At a fundraiser in San Francisco Tuesday evening, President Obama delivered his version of Jimmy Carter’s infamous malaise speech, blaming the American people for the mess he’s created:
We’ve lost our ambition, our — our imagination, and — and — our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam and unleashed all the potential in this country.
Joe Newby has a roundup of critical reaction from Rush Limbaugh and others. Steven Birn noted that “Limbaugh and others are missing the biggest point” — that this speech reveals Obama as the socialist he is:
… It’s fascinating to watch the socialist mind in action. When he declares that Americans have lost their ambition, in his mind ambition means building bi[g] government funded projects. …
Obama has America all wrong. In his mind America is great because of large, overpriced infrastructure projects. In his mind America’s jobs and prosperity come from the government. The reality is that American prosperity comes not from government but from private individuals. It isn’t the Golden Gate bridge that was a great innovation, it was the automobile and the assembly line that were great. It isn’t the Hoover Dam that made America prosperous, it was the telegraph and telephone.
Obama’s default is government. If government isn’t spending big money on infrastructure we’ve somehow lost our ambition and our imagination. Notice those two things require the collective to act. He doesn’t praise individual innovation, only collective action. The truth is the opposite. We’re prosperous not because the government runs things but precisely the opposite. Cars, airplanes, telephones, refrigerators, freezers and most recently computers are all things that were innovated for use not by the government but by private individuals with a profit motive. Steve Jobs and Apple Computers had an IPO in the late 70′s or early 80′s where Wall Street invested $120 million in their business. Jobs died worth $7 billion. That’s innovation, that’s ambition, that’s imagination. It’s the opposite of a government funded bridge.
The Carter comparison is certainly apt, as are Birn’s comments. But I was struck by something else regarding that speech: the Obama administration is allegedly chock-full of the best and the brightest, right? So how could they be so tone-deaf and stupid? Wasn’t there even one person on the White House staff who read that speech and said, “Mr. President, you don’t want to say that — it will draw unflattering comparisons with President Carter”?
It’s obvious to anyone who looks at how the 2009 stimulus bill spent $800 billion and how this year’s so-called jobs bill would spend another $450 billion that the jobs the Obama administration wants to “create or save” are government jobs and government contractors’ jobs. The only thing surprising about today’s outrageous statement by Sen. Harry Reid is that he’d admit this — and offer an absurd justification (emphasis added):
The Senate Majority Leader dropped this stunner in the context of explaining why Congress must drop everything and spend more money we don’t have to prop up public sector jobs. Because, Reid apparently believes, government workers are the real victims of the great recession. Ladies and gentlemen, the Democrat Party mentality, distilled:
“It’s very clear that private sector jobs have been doing just fine. It’s public sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers.”
The private sector’s official unemployment rate has been stuck above 9%, and the real rate (accounting for all the people who’ve given up and left the labor force or are involuntarily working part-time) is at least 16% and maybe over 20%. Sen. Reid thinks that’s “just fine.”
Meanwhile, the government worker unemployment rate is 4.7%. And that’s where Reid and the Obama administration want to “create or save” more jobs, by spending another few hundred billion dollars we have to borrow from the Chinese — or take away from people whose spending and investments might otherwise create private sector jobs.
I’ve tried in the past to remember Hanlon’s (or Heinlein’s) Razor (“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity”). But the Socialist Democrats have demonstrated through both their words and their actions that their purpose is to create more jobs in government, where unemployment is at 4.7% (effectively full employment), and that they don’t give a rat’s ass about the 9-16% (or higher) unemployment in the private sector.
In fact, their massive new regulatory schemes can only make private sector unemployment worse.
Shrinking the private sector while growing government: The sum total of the evidence strongly suggests that this isn’t stupidity or happenstance — it’s their intent.
Time for another weekend trip down musical memory lane. The second-best southern rock band ever (right behind the original Allman Brothers Band) was the 70s-era Marshall Tucker Band, with brothers Toy and Tommy Caldwell. Their unique blend of rock, country, jazz, and blues changed rock 'n roll forever, and it saddens me that they're largely forgotten and under-appreciated. That they haven't been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is unforgivable.
I hope you enjoy the following songs as much as I do. If so, you may want to pay a visit to Original Marshall Tucker Band.
The first song on the first Marshall Tucker Band album (self-titled, 1973), "Take the Highway," showcased what made MTB special: the marvelous song writing and guitar playing of Toy Caldwell and the signature flute riffs (by Jerry Eubanks), unique and unexpected from a southern rock band, and yet so perfectly fitting.
"Can't You See" is the second song from that album. Here's a live performance featuring a young Toy Caldwell. He was one of the finest thumb-picking guitar players ever.
"This Ol' Cowboy" may be my favorite MTB song. It's from their third album, Where We All Belong (1975), and it has a great foot-tapping Western swing flavor to it that always puts a smile on my face. Toy Caldwell sings lead (and wrote it, of course) and does some great guitar work. I especially like the way the guitar and flute follow each other note for note. Charlie Daniels contributed some fine fiddling, and I think that's Paul Hornsby on the piano.
The other strong contender for my favorite MTB song is "Fire on the Mountain" from their fourth album, Searchin' for a Rainbow (1975). It was written by rhythm guitarist George McCorkle — one of the few songs they recorded that wasn't by Toy Caldwell. Dickey Betts provided the guitar solo on this one.
I'll end with a hard-rocking live version (from the Carolina Dreams Tour '77 DVD) of another great MTB song, "24 Hours at a Time." I generally prefer the somewhat slower-tempo studio version, but this one's a must-see. Don't let the slightly muddy sound and photo montage at the beginning turn you off. The first two minutes of the original recording were damaged and had to be reconstructed for the DVD, but the remaining 12 minutes of this extended jam are live footage, and excellent quality considering the age. Starting at around 3:00, it features about five minutes of simply amazing guitar work by Toy Caldwell, with his brother Tommy on bass next to him, matching him lick for lick (watch their thumbs fly!). I'm worn out just from watching!
Apparently, President Obama is not too popular in Virginia. His only announced Virginia appearance during next week's bus tour is in a state senate district where the Democratic candidate has no Republican challenger in next month's election. Four previously reported stops in districts where the Democrat faces a challenger have apparently been dropped.
The Republican Party of Virginia says it's hard to find a Democratic candidate eager to be associated with the President. So they're having a contest, the "Proud to Stand with Obama" Direct Mail Scavenger Hunt (emphasis in original):
Find any general election direct mail piece from a Virginia Democrat running for the state Senate – or one from a Democrat committee – that uses a picture of President Obama in a positive light, i.e. "Supported/Endorsed by Barack Obama" or "Supports Obama's policies." (Note: Democratic primary mail pieces do not count!)
Then scan it and email it to contest@RPV.org or fax it to us at: (804) 343-1060. The first qualifying mail piece in the door wins the prize, an autographed copy of Karl Rove's "Courage and Consequences," and a "Not Again!" bumper sticker.
If no qualifying entry is submitted by Oct. 28, they'll award the prize to the first person to submit a direct mail piece from any of 10 Democratic state senate candidates "that proudly identifies them as the Democratic candidate."
The original contest idea, which involved the state's popular Republican governor, had to be scrapped:
The initial idea for this contest was to see how many different pieces of direct mail we could find in which Democrats running for the state Senate used the phase "worked with Governor McDonnell," or included a picture of themselves with Governor McDonnell… but we've seen several of those piece already, so that wouldn't have made for a very challenging scavenger hunt.
Congressional investigators are apparently about to subpoena Attorney General Eric Holder to find out who knew what when regarding Operation Fast and Furious, which led to the deaths of at least 200 people, including Border Patrol Agent Bryan Terry.
Here's the executive summary of Operation Fast and Furious: In an attempt to justify more gun control laws, the Obama administration wanted evidence that Mexican drug cartels were obtaining weapons from US gun stores. So they helped Mexican drug cartels obtain weapons from US gun stores. With the government's help, straw purchasers, some of them paid government informants, bought guns at US gun stores and smuggled them to the cartels in Mexico. The feds forced reluctant gun store owners to facilitate these straw purchases. When even that wasn't enough, ATFE agents themselves bought guns and transferred them to the drug cartels. They did all this without informing the Mexican government or even US ATFE agents in Mexico.
The few mainstream media reports about the operation invariably describe it as "botched." It was not botched. Operation Fast and Furious did exactly what it was designed to do: transfer lots of US guns to Mexican drug cartels in order to prove that Mexican drug cartels got guns from the US, thus justifying more US gun control laws.
The scam failed only because of the death of Bryan Terry and the subsequent bouts of conscience that led some of the ATFE agents involved to become whistleblowers.
The National Association for Gun Rights India (NAGRI) has joined the International Association for the Protection of Civilian Arms Rights (IAPCAR), a coalition of 16 groups from 8 countries dedicated to protecting the natural human right of armed self-defense.
IAPCAR was founded by Julianne Versnel, director of operations for the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and Alan Gottlieb, Chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA). Via SAF email:
“It is heartening to see groups like NAGRI who are passionate and active for civilian arms rights joining our coalition,” said IAPCAR executive director, Philip Watson.
“In the wake of the tragic Mumbai massacre, Indians are rethinking their country’s repressive gun restrictions and see the need to empower citizens. Self-defense is a civil right; the denial of this right should not be tolerated,” Watson observed.
“NAGRI is delighted to be associated with IAPCAR. All pro-gun associations and civil rights organizations should join hands,” said Rakshit Sharma, a representative of NAGRI.
The Postal Service, facing huge deficits as people and businesses increasingly communicate via the internet and email, has launched a new TV ad campaign to win back business. The ad I saw tonight was nicely done.
A woman posts a bill on her refrigerator with a magnet. "A refrigerator has never been hacked." Another woman pins a page to her corkboard. "An online virus has never attacked a corkboard." A variety of other men and women are shown looking at bills and filing them in various ways. "Give your customers the added feeling of security a printed statement or receipt provides — with mail. It's good for your business and even better for your customers."
The commercial ends by telling viewers how to get more information about the advantages of using mail instead of the internet or email. By sending them to usps.com/mail.
Somewhere, a hacker with a sense of humor must be trying to figure out how to hack that page and have it display a banner with big red letters:
Wolf Creek Ski Area is opening Saturday, after getting three feet of snow earlier this week. They may have another eight inches or so by the time they open, with more snow falling throughout Saturday. This will be their earliest opening ever — by 19 days!
Here in Denver, it's going to drop to the low 30s tonight, along with rain mixed with snow, and the foothills west of town (down to about 6000 ft.) will get accumulating snow.
I'm sure this is another sign of global warming. Somebody call Al Gore. 🙂
Julius Henry "Groucho" Marx was born on October 2, 1890. He was, IMHO, one of the 3 or 4 funniest men of the 20th century. If you've never seen him as Rufus T. Firefly in Duck Soup, you don't know what you're missing. Check out A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, too. Here are some of my favorite Groucho quotes.
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
I have nothing but respect for you — and not much of that.
Marriage is a wonderful institution. But who wants to live in an institution?
I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.
A man is only as old as the woman he feels.
She got her good looks from her father–he's a plastic surgeon.
I'm not crazy about reality, but it's still the only place to get a decent meal.
Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it.
I intend to live forever, or die trying.
Groucho died on August 19, 1977. Three days after Elvis. So almost no one noticed.
Here's an interesting bit of Groucho trivia from IMDB:
In 1989, the Republic of Abkhazia (in the former Soviet Georgia) proclaimed independence. To show the world they were rejecting their Communist past, they issued two postage stamps of Groucho Marx and John Lennon (as opposed to Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin).
Scientists at the CERN lab in Switzerland claim that they've observed neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. What nonsense! The science has long been settled. There's a consensus. All reputable scientists are in complete agreement regarding the speed limit of the universe.
These Einstein deniers are just doing the bidding of large multinational corporations and special interests that stand to benefit from having the speed limit of the universe overturned (although I'm not sure who they might be…).
This is just as reprehensible as denying that the Holocaust took place or that anthropogenic global warming is happening. They should be denied funding and barred from publishing in reputable journals.
