Gun Free Zone

From the Washington Examiner:

Joe Biden on the Second Amendment: No amendment is ‘absolute’

Joe Biden is calling for a cultural shift around how the country thinks about gun ownership.

“The Second Amendment — no amendment is in fact absolute,” Biden told the Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund’s Presidential Gun Sense Forum Saturday in Des Moines, Iowa.

“You cannot stand up in this hall and yell fire. That’s not freedom of speech because they know the consequence of yelling fire: There’ll be a stampede, and someone will get hurt,” the former vice president said.

No, you can’t yell “fire” if there is no fire.  If there is a fire, you can.  There is more to it than that, but I hate that people get this wrong all the time by oversimplifying it.  Biden said “fire” from the podium, but he’s not getting arrested because the context of his statement makes it unlikely that people will panic.

“Folks, don’t apologize at all about the Second Amendment,” Biden advised, explaining how the amendment allows for limitations on who can own a weapon and what type. “These guys will tell you, the tree of liberty is watered with the blood of patriots. Give me a break.”

“Can you go out and buy a flamethrower? Can you go out and buy an F-15?” he added. “If you want to protect yourself against the federal government, you’re going to need at least an F-15.”

Actually, yes, you can buy a flame thrower.  Some states, like California, restrict how far a device can throw flame, such as a limit of 10 feet.

But they have to be specific, because what is a flame thrower?  If you want to do down the line of banning an object that propels burning fuel, you just banned the butane lighter.  Not to mention a lot of tools like torches for soldering and brazing, burners for melting asphalt, cutting torches, and industrial lighters.  So this is a ridiculously stupid argument.

If you tie the two statements he made together, you get the idea that he thinks that the Second Amendment is a bulwark against tyranny (“These guys will tell you, the tree of liberty is watered with the blood of patriots”) is wrong because you can’t buy an F-15.

Again, Biden is wrong.  Yes, he’s right about the not being able to buy an F-15 part, but that’s irrelevant to the Second Amendment being a bulwark against tyranny.

The F-35 requires 50 man-hours of maintenance per flight hour.  I don’t have official figures but I’ve seen anecdotes saying that other fighters are a low as 6 man-hours per flight hour.  Plus pilots can only stay awake for so long.

Given the limited armament of fighter aircraft, that means that these planes are going to spend a lot more time on the ground than in the sky.

The M1 Abrams Main Battle Tank also requires a ridiculous amount of maintenance to keep in fighting condition.

I used to not believe this, but I’m getting more and more sure that half the military is made up of people like Spenser Rapone, Mike Prysner, and Bradley “Chelsea” Manning.  Only because there are so many far-Left Democrat politicians, like Ted Lieu, Pam Keith, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy McGrath who are decorated veterans and then in politics are viciously anti-gun, advocate for open borders, extreme economic redistributionism, and show abject contempt for Conservatives and Trump supporters.

It honestly surprises me that someone could swear an oath to defend this country, accept a commission from the Congress of the United States, go overseas on deployment, then think it’s perfectly acceptable for middle and working-class men and women to go broke paying taxes into a system that gives away goodies such as healthcare to every person who sneaks into our country while saying they want mandatory buy-back of guns from law-abiding citizens.

Like, this legitimately boggles my mind.

Would Amy McGrath really fly a sortie in an F-18 against a bunch of gun owners hiding out in a cabin in the woods with their hoard of AR-15’s they refused to sell to the government?  Can somebody in Kentucky ask her this?

So let’s say for a moment that half our military is still willing to fight in a war against the American people.

Does the military still have enough maintenance technicians to repair, refuel, and rearm our aircraft and vehicles, while providing security for said vehicles while they are on runways and in maintenance hangars being worked on?

He’s right that I may not be able to shoot down an F-15 with my AR-15.

I just don’t think he, or any of the people that think like him, have an idea of what a guy with an AR-15 can do to an F-15 while it is parked on the ground.

Are you getting the feeling that maybe school boards are not telling us the whole truth?

SB 120: Naloxone in Schools

(n) Naloxone use and supply.—
1. A public school may purchase a supply of the opioid  antagonist naloxone from a wholesale distributor as defined in 499.003 or may enter into an arrangement with a wholesale distributor or manufacturer as defined in s. 499.003 for naloxone at fair-market, free, or reduced prices for use in the event a student has an opioid overdose. The naloxone must be maintained in a secure location on the public school’s premises.
The participating school district shall adopt a protocol developed by a licensed physician for the administration of the drug by school personnel who are trained to recognize an opioid overdose and to administer naloxone.

So exactly how bad is the opioid overdose issues in schools that this bill is being offered?

I think these idiots thing everything outside the US looks like an outside Parisian cafe in the fall sitting with Pierre, the French lover or a sleepy village in the mountains of Latin America where the children bring you coffee and pastries and they all know British English.

This article appeared in my Google news feed.  I read it.  It may be the worse political article ever written.

Keep calling him #MoscowMitch: McConnell is finally running scared
Are Trump and his traitorous enablers modern-day McCarthyists?

Excuse me?  Is not calling Trump and his supporters traitors the real McCarthyism?

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn’t like it when you call him #MoscowMitch. He hates it so much that he’ll accuse you of being a McCarthyist for doing so. If the accusation was untrue — that is, if McConnell, President Donald Trump and other Republicans weren’t empowering Russia at the expense of America for their personal benefit — then #MoscowMitch and talk of collusion in Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign would be unfair, even unjust. As the facts currently stand, however, it is a perfectly fair label.

So Salon’s position is that every accusation about Trump and McConnell being Russian assets is true?

They still are not McCarthyist, though, because McCarthyism wasn’t really about hating Russia — it was about hating liberals.

No, it was about hating liberals that sided with the Socialists.

A quick history lesson. Joseph McCarthy was a United States senator from Wisconsin who served between 1947 and 1957. His political heyday, however, lasted from 1950 to 1954. On February 9, 1950, he delivered an infamous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia in which he claimed without evidence that he had “a list of 205 [State Department employees] that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” Notice that he did not say “Russians” or “traitors to Russia.” This isn’t because the Soviet Union (the empire controlled by Russia during the bulk of the 20th century) wasn’t America’s primary geopolitical enemy at the time, or that there wasn’t a valid and widespread fear of that nation. Rather it is because the assumption wasn’t simply that people would betray America to Russia, but that they would do so because the Soviet Union’s authoritarian left-wing ideology was being conflated with all forms of liberalism. When McCarthy warned of “Communists,” he was using a dog whistle to vilify anyone whose beliefs were to the left of what he and his supporters deemed acceptable.

This is historical drivel.

It turns out that after 60 years of maturation, Joseph McCarthy was spot-on correct.  The threat wasn’t that we’d become a Soviet state.  It was that Liberals would adopt Socialist or Communist policies and create a Communist United States.

Which, considering the popularity and power of Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and the way Bernie gained momentum in 2016 and 2020, the risk of a Socialist United States is real.

This isn’t to say that his tactics aren’t still used, of course. They are — but by conservatives. Whenever you hear liberals described as “communists” or “socialists,” or liberal policy proposals denounced as preemptively authoritarian, it is because men and women are following McCarthyist tactics. Their goal isn’t to protect America from possible treason, but to intimidate liberals by forcing them to fend off false accusations about their ideology. It is a classic example of a straw man fallacy but made worse by the facts that (a) it can be used to scare people into silence and (b) it means that policy proposals which might help innocent people won’t be implemented.

Bernie is a Socialist.  He calls himself that.  AOC is a member of the Democratic Socialist of America.  Many Left-wing politicians have adopted policies or rhetoric straight from the DSA.  Calling them Socialist is not McCarthyism.  It’s dead-on accurate.

Where does McConnell factor into all of this?

Well, considering that the intelligence community unanimously agrees that Russia is still actively interfering in America’s elections, it stands to reason that patriots on both sides of the aisle should want to beef up our election security so that our democracy will remain intact. Yet McConnell has obstructed legislation that would do precisely this, and the only logical explanation for him doing so is that he knows Russian meddling is likely to benefit Republican candidates. When he was called out on this with the insulting but deserved epithet “Moscow Mitch,” he responded with a Senate speech in which he whined, “Keeping our republic means we can’t let modern-day McCarthyism win. So here is my commitment: No matter how much they lie, no matter how much they bully, I will not be intimidated.”

What they are talking about is HR1.  This is what HR1 will do:

• Offer online voter registration
• Establish automatic voter registration
• Allow voter registration on the day of a federal election
• Allow voters to correct their registration information at the polls
• Restore voting rights to felons after they leave prison
• Offer at least 15 days of early voting
• States must follow new rules before purging voters from registration lists.
• The bill also has several measures related to campaign finance or ethics
• Require super PACs to disclose donors who give more than $10,000
• Require major online platforms to maintain an online public record of people who buy at least $500 worth of political ads
• Use public financing to match small-dollar donations to House and presidential candidates.

WOW…  It seems like the purpose of this bill is to guarantee election fraud.  Not just that, after the whole Joaquin Castro Trump donors Tweet, making donors public is just going to be an intimidation tactic used to prevent donations to GOP campaigns.  This bill will do nothing to secure our elections from the Russians.  It will turn the US into California or Chicago will total Democrat domination through fraud and abuse.

Also, no one has ever made the argument that the Russians changed a single vote.  So this is the equivalent of the push to “close the gunshow loophole” after Parkland or Sandy Hook.  Totally irrelevant to what actually happened.

But Salon is making the argument that McConnell blocking this bill to enable Democrat voter fraud makes him agent of Moscow.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat who has actually been accused of being a traitor simply because of her politics, responded to an analogous McConnell tweet by writing on Twitter: “McCarthyism is the practice of baselessly accusing political opponents of being communists as unjust grounds for targeting & harassment. You are blocking action to protect US elections despite official DoJ pleas. That doesn’t make you a communist. It just makes you a bad leader.”

Ocasio-Cortez is absolutely correct, of course. McConnell isn’t being accused of sympathy to Moscow because his opponents lack valid grounds for criticism and are resorting to a straw man fallacy. He is being accused of this because his political actions are inscrutable except as those of a man who so badly wants his party to win that he doesn’t care if Russia needs to be empowered for that to happen.

The Russians didn’t guarantee a Trump win.  The Russian collusion argument has been the greatest act of McCarthyism since, and maybe including, McCarthy.

Salon doesn’t call bullshit on itself because it just assumes that every accusation is true.

In other words: We need a culture where people stop throwing stones at each other, but if rocks are going to be pelted regardless, anyone aligned with Trump needs to think very carefully about whether their house is made of glass.

This, like everything the Left-does is pure projection.  Russia did not turn a single vote.  That was the DOJ’s conclusion.

McConnell has very good reasons to block a vote on a bill that would turn US elections into Chicago elections.

The Democrats have adopted the policy of pushing a lie that everyone who is not a Democrat is a stooge of Russia, which is the real McCarthyism.  But as to not let that ugly label stick to themselves, they call denial of that charge McCarthyism.

This article is upside-down and wrong on everything, and calling the Senate Majority Leader Moscow Mitch is about the ugliest slur I can imagine.

From CNN:

American gold medalist kneels during national anthem at the Pan Am Games

American gold medalist fencer Race Imboden knelt as the national anthem played Friday at the Pan American Games in Lima, Peru, to protest racism, gun control, mistreatment of immigrants and President Donald Trump.

“We must call for change,” he tweeted afterward along with a photo. “This week I am honored to represent Team USA at the Pan Am Games, taking home Gold and Bronze. My pride however has been cut short by the multiple shortcomings of the country I hold so dear to my heart. Racism, Gun Control, mistreatment of immigrants, and a president who spreads hate are at the top of a long list.

By gun control, he doesn’t mean he’s protesting gun control.  He’s protesting for more gun control.

One of the images that goes along with this is just amazing.

Yep, that is him kneeling in front of the Cuba flag.

The Venezuelan’s are fielding a pretty successful team there this year, picking up 37 medals already.

Like the Soviet Block countries during the Cold War or China today, that is possible because while the people starve, the government backs these teams.

So what we have here is an American, kneeling in protest against American civil rights in front of the privileged athletes representing the failed, oppressive socialist states of Cuba and Venezuela.

Maybe if he wants more gun control, he can emigrate to one of those nations and go play for their national teams.  His privileged status as a national athlete should insulate him against having to eat out of a dumpster, being disappeared to a political prison, or run over by an armored car.