Shocking: Obama goes after limits on Constitutional rights as a drippy feel-good measure

Obama calls for assault weapons ban, background checks (from USA Today):

From the article: "While not citing the NRA by name, Obama did denounce groups that gin up "fear" about a fictitious plot to take away people's guns."

Yeah, because none of those other things that Obama specifically voewed would never happen ever happened. There is no increase in any taxes on the middle class. The SS tax increase that is in everyone's paychecks now was categorized under "fees," was it? Was a return to a preexisting condition? How's that not a lie? Don't trust this far-left tool -- sorry, I meant tool of the far left.

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I want to believe that Obama isn't a... compassionate Marxist (the far left's variation of George Bush the compassionate conservative), but every issue over the last fours years has resulted in some sweeping and stupid message from the far left's big book of infringements on society. The easy example is Obamacare: health care reform took center stage when we kinda needed to focus -- like REALLY FOCUS -- on the economy.

In case you forgot or didn't really realize it, back in 2009 and 2010, for months the country was caught up in arguing about health care reform (which is needed, it's a matter of how, and WHEN to prioritize it) and a giant, unread bill. Unread, the bill was passed by a fully Democrat-controlled Congress. This done, rather than focusing like a laser beam on creation of private sector jobs and economic stability and growth to create jobs jobs jobs jobs jobs. (Who needs jobs when you have devoted voters who don't work, anyways, was that the logic? Eeeew.)

Obama's rhetoric is always a concern because he -- at best -- treats being a leader like a spacey, feelings-driven camp counselor in many matters. (At worst, he's a charlatan who pretends he isn't fully entrenched in the ideology of hippies and big government, one-party leftists.)

His rhetoric in proposing these gun ban ideas is further proof: it's not about the mentally unstable, the severely mentally ill people. They are not the problem, it's the "gun culture" and "gun violence." It isn't, in his version of things, "crazed violence" or "violent madmen" who commit such acts that are root of the problem, it's an inanimate object that is deadly -- threatening to bad people in the right hands, tragic in the hands of others. He does not stress that this is a problem of sick people who take a lawless and insane attitude, grab deadly guns and proceed to kill people. No, because people are not responsible for themselves: government, it seems, is the ultimate responsible party. So, as the head of the national government, he is making his move. To hell with Americanism, Federalism and the Second Amendment, let's get this gun control thing rolling, slowly but surely.

I hope this is just part of a negotiation, his initial proposals. Because I missed the part where we blame criminals for their heinous acts, whether insane, just plain criminal, or otherwise. His message tell us that it is not a problem with people that killed children in Sandy Hook, but with objects. If we tell everyone they have to curb their attitudes according to his will, then we've accomplished something. Except all we've accomplished is rattling a saber.

His simple message wins the morons, a perfect example of why Democrats are now more than I've ever understood it to be the party of mob rule. If the majority of nitwits are with you, you may not be effective or even sensible, but you are getting your way.

Read the article:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/01/16/obama-gun-violence-pla... -jR

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Fiscal cliff fix? Our 'leaders' seem to have abandoned fiscal sense, Democrats in the lead

Maya MacGuineas, a budget hawk who has led a group of corporate chieftains in a group called "Fix the Debt," was also unenthusiastic about the bill.

"This is one of the lowest common denominator deals," MacGuineas said. "I wish I had something nice to say, but not so much."

http://news.yahoo.com/analysis-fiscal-cliff-deal-called-dud-deficit-front-000...

Deeeeeeeeee-sgusting.

-jR

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Guns vs. severe mental problems: Ideologies don't make people right, and guns don't make them killers

From "Gun Ban Won't Stop Another Sandy Hook Massacre: Let's Have the Hard Conversation":

Does anybody really think the guns Nancy Lanza kept in their Newtown, Conn., house all on their own attracted her son to launch a murderous rampage that claimed the lives of 20 small children and seven adults? Such simplistic nonsense.
What if the answers aren't that simple?
Consider that last year in Norway, a nation with a tight gun-control and licensing program, Anders Breivik methodically gunned down 69 people, mostly teenagers, on the island of Utoya. Again, this didn't happen in the United States of America, where 311 million people own an estimated 200 million guns. It happened in orderly, gun-sparse Norway, where living by the rules is the modern-day path to Valhalla.
What if gun control is the wrong conversation for us to be having?
What if we dealt instead with the harder-to-comprehend realities that affected Adam Lanza's life -- the fact that he lived virtually locked up in a basement room playing violent video games over and over, hypnotized by war. Or that he kept to himself, couldn't look others in the eye, reacted without emotion. Or that he had cut his father out of his life, refused to see him after his parents divorced, when his father began dating another woman. Or that he was consumed with anger because his mother was going to have him committed for treatment.
Instead of more gun control, shouldn't we be talking about where to set the bar when it comes to forcing an individual into treatment –- and whether those caring for people with mental-health issues have enough resources available to head off potential crises? The state of Connecticut didn't do much to help Nancy Lanza. It's a state that makes involuntary treatment difficult because it leans strongly toward supporting the civil liberties of individuals. Let's talk a little more about that.
In his address in Newtown [the Sunday after,] President Obama promised a grieving community "meaningful action ... regardless of the politics."But if enacting more restrictive gun laws is the action he has in mind, it leaves a mountain to climb in light of the Second Amendment and its principle. And more important than that, more gun laws aren't going to prevent another Sandy Hook massacre.

That is from "Gun Ban Won't Stop Another Sandy Hook Massacre: Let's Have the Hard Conversation," by Nancy Smith. See more at: http://www.sunshinestatenews.com/story/gun-ban-wont-stop-another-sandy-hook-m...? Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at (850) 727-0859. via sunshinestatenews.com

The problem is not guns, while there are some things to be addressed where guns are concerned. There are too many guns too easily available to the dangerous, it could be argued. But worse are such things as loopholes in the ability to sell and buy guns between private individuals with pretty much no oversight or checking. That is unseemly, but also quite easy to fix (does not require a gun control act, for goodness sake).
No, the problem is not one that requires further gun legislation. We can see from such despicable efforts like the government's own Fast and Furious disaster that regulations are only so good as the people we have enforcing them. And fools who are encouraging such a route as Fast and Furious gunrunning program included the President of the United States. Shameful.
It's proof that he may be the victor in a popular vote, but is far from being a man above a most unattractive, elitist deception that guns are a threat, not sick or criminal people. The last thing elitists who desire power want are an armed population. No matter how comfortable and apathetic citizens are, we should not let anyone forget that tyranny is potentially never more than a generation away.
I don't want to be a part of the generation who lays the carpet out for tyranny here in America by moving farther toward a no-guns population. Stiff gun controls work in comparably powerless and rather homogenous and passive Sweden, Finland and elsewhere. It won't work for us.
The problem is, as Nancy Smith argues, and I've felt and argued for some time: some people are very, very broken, as Adam Lanza was, as best as can be seen, and cannot be allowed around guns. The problem, too, those who are too preoccupied to face those things that afflict broken people, including the current "false prophet" of the downtrodden, the President of the United States with his anti-gun rhetoric that completely avoids the issue of severe mental illness. In my view that is crass, cynical political gamesmanship and nothing about the rights or benefits of men. Until those with the second problem can be adult enough to address the first problem, this will be a discussion that will give me deep, deep dismay at the ignorance and shallowness of the many.

- jR
(revised for clarity, Oct 6, 2013)

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Obama 'Man of the Year', another Time cover photo

He stands somewhat shorter, having won 4 million fewer votes and two fewer states than in 2008. But his 5 million-vote margin of victory out of 129 million ballots cast shocked experts in both parties.

He untied Ohio’s knotty heartland politics, picked the Republican lock on Florida Cubans and won Paul Ryan’s hometown of Janesville, Wis. (Those last two data points especially caught the President’s interest.)

He will take the oath on Jan. 20 as the first Democrat in more than 75 years to get a majority of the popular vote twice. Only five other Presidents have done that in all of U.S. history.

[There are many reasons we won, but] the biggest by far are the nation’s changing demographics and Obama’s unique ability to capitalize on them.

On the issues, Obama did not fare quite as well. While 51% of voters in exit polls in 2008 said they wanted the government to do more, only 43% said so in 2012, and Obamacare still polls badly.

But Obama doesn’t see his legacy in terms of an ideological imprint, like Ronald Reagan’s claim that “government is the problem” or Bill Clinton’s admonition that the “era of Big Government is over.” He says he just wants smarter government and a set of results that he can claim as he leaves office in early 2017: “That we had steered this ship of state so that we once again had an economy that worked for everybody, that we had laid the foundation for broad-based prosperity and that internationally we had created the framework for continued American leadership in the world throughout the 21st century.” Recent history and current headlines suggest he will fall short of achieving all those goals.

[Part of how he won was a bold inspection of voters.] For months on end, two or three nights a week, Simas and his team secretly gathered voters in rented rooms across the swing states, eight at a time, the men separated from the women. The Obamans poked at their guinea pigs’ animal spirits, asked for confessions and played word-association games.

While Romney tried to focus on Obama’s weak economic record, Obama made his race about confidence. The most important poll question in Chicago was, Which candidate is looking out for voters like you? “What we saw these undecided voters doing for literally a year,” Simas says, “looking at two very different people outside fundamental message, tactics and strategy, is, they were making a very trust-based assessment between Obama and Romney.”

This became the through line of the brutal and at times unfair Obama attacks on Romney — the cracks about car elevators, the specious mention of his potentially felonious Securities and Exchange Commission filings, the false claim that he supported an abortion ban without a rape exception, the endless harping on a Swiss bank account once held in his wife’s name. It all spoke to a central message built around trust: One man, despite his failures, had voters like you in mind. The other man, by contrast, knew how to make a lot of money for people you will never meet.

Read more: http://poy.time.com/2012/12/19/person-of-the-year-barack-obama/#ixzz2FVdnvadX

Just some notables from the article proclaiming Obama the Man of the Year. An honor he earned, whether I like him or not.

I just hope his arrogance, and his never-say-when campaign attitude doesn't fully cloud America's vision with his self-centered, messianic leftist desires. And there's a good chance it won't, because America is most divided when people such as him are crass, unreasonable and self-interested in their leadership and vote-getting tactics. Not on color, party or economic situation -- despite what his friends and allies want us to believe.

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Those changes keep... not happening. Pelosi to seek minority leader. Again.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, who has served as the highest-ranking female politician in American history, will stay on as the top Democrat in the House during the coming 113th Congress.

Read article: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57549554/pelosi-to-stay-on-as-minority-le...

Yeah, because, you know, it's do as I say, not as I do in Washington. That is exactly what the mob rule vote attained, it looks like.

- jR

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