Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review applaud a Maryland doctor for slamming political correctness and the progressive tax system at the National Prayer Breakfast. They’re also stunned as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta reveals that President Obama and Hillary Clinton were not in contact with them at all during the terrorist attack in Benghazi. And they note how the California murderer’s manifesto should be a lesson to the mainstream media after the killer lauds Obama, Piers Morgan and other liberal figures.
Archives for February 2013
Nugent Fires Back
Rock music legend Ted Nugent is one of the strongest voices in defense of the Second Amendment and as the latest debate over proposed gun control legislation plays out, Nugent is making his voice heard loud and clear.
Earlier in the week, Nugent engaged in a feisty debate with CNN host and gun control advocate Piers Morgan. Despite the push for more restrictions on gun rights in Washington and in states around the country, Nugent fired back with a vigorous defense of what he says is the overwhelming majority of gun owners.
“99.99 percent of the gun owners of America are wonderful people that you are hanging around with here today, perfectly safe, perfectly harmless, wonderful, loving, giving, generous caring people. Would you leave us the hell alone?” demanded Nugent. “Go after the nutjobs. Go after the murderers, because I don’t know any.”
Nugent, who is also a National Rifle Association board member and now a WND.com columnist, was typically straight-talking with us as he assessed his confrontation with Morgan.
“I am convinced that Piers Morgan was sent by God to represent everything that doesn’t agree with Ted Nugent, because you’ve got to be the devil’s advocate or the devil to argue with me,” said Nugent. “I’m a simple man. I’m 64 years clean and sober. I never went to college because I was too busy learning stuff. The stuff I learned, I had to bend Piers over the other night and deposit it posthaste.
“In fact, I’m saving money on dog food this week because I’m just letting my three Labradors lick the shrapnel from Piers’s skull out of my boot cleats,” he said.
Nugent then explained why he believes history and practice prove that taking away guns never mean greater safety for the people.
“If you try to argue that the Chicago, Mexico, Washington, D.C., Rwanda gun-free zone is somehow desirable, then you are either as equally evil as the murderers that slaughter innocent people in those gun-free zones or you are opening the door and rolling out the red carpet, that is red because it’s saturated with the blood of innocent victims that are piled higher in gun-free zones than anywhere in the world,” said Nugent.
“Anybody that dares debate me about what the Second Amendment means and whether free Americans have the right to keep and bear arms as a gift from God, a right from God as guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution, I will do to you what I did to Piers. I will embarrass you and I will make you look like some subservient sheep from England,” said Nugent.
The very first thing Nugent does in his new column is attack the premise that some firearms can be restricted because no one supposedly needs them.
“Common sense people know it’s not the Bill of Needs. Common sense people know you don’t need two homes and you don’t need more than one TV. Common sense people know that quality of life and freedom has absolutely nothing to do with needs,” said Nugent. “Then when you scrutinize the self-evident truth of God-given individual rights, the Founding Fathers wrote it down, not because they got together and had a good idea. They knew that the king denied these self-evident truths and these God-given individual rights. So we wrote down the self-evident, truth-based God-given rights that we the people in this new land, free of kings, free of emperors, free of tyrants, free of slave drivers, that we will exercise our God-given, instinctual, self-evident, truth-based right to self-defense from any evil force that threatens our gift of life from God and especially power-abusing monsters in government.”
Nugent says he also doesn’t buy President Obama’s claim that he’s proposing “common sense” gun restrictions or Obama’s claim that he is a great respecter of the Second Amendment.
“I say sure you are, Mr. President and I’m a gay pirate,” mused Nugent. “One just has to study Barack Obama’s voting record. The Commander-in-Chief will go to the Vietnam Memorial Wall and will put on his community organizer, ACORN, Van Jones, gangland, Chicago, gangster-politic scam best and pretend to show respect for 58,000 heroic American military warriors who gave the ultimate sacrifice fighting Communism. And then President Obama will go back and appoint members of the Communist Party as his czars.
“He will continue to associate communists, publicly admitted communists after visiting the Vietnam Memorial Wall. It doesn’t get any more arrogant. It doesn’t get any more dishonest, and it doesn’t get any more anti-American than this president,” he said.
Nugent says he welcomes the large debate on gun rights because he believes logic, history and “a tsunami of facts” are on his side of the debate. But given the recent election returns and current polling on these gun issues, is he confident that will be enough to win the debate?
“That’s the scary issue right now. It really is a nation divided and it’s never been more divided. The racism that President Obama and Eric ‘Gun-Running’ Holder promote is just heartbreaking and it’s tragic. Those of us that know better have got to constantly expose their ruse and their scam,” said Nugent.
Describing himself as an eternal optimist, Nugent says he believes his side will win what he sees as a fight to preserve our freedoms.
“If it weren’t for my knees and the government my life would be perfect, so I’m going to replace both,” said Nugent. “I use my bully pulpit and every resource that this ‘We the People’ guy has.
“I see a positive reaction. I see people waking up out of the embarrassing doldrums of apathy and I see people re-emerging and participating in this sacred experiment in self-government and becoming engaged. I think that increased engagement is going to cleanse our soul. It’s going to upgrade the quality of life in America,” said Nugent, who wants to see more political leaders like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
“I see great, great leadership out there but we’ve got to make sure they make policy and not acquiesce to the gangsters in the White House,” he said.
Three Martini Lunch 2/7/13
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review like that more information is coming to light on the investigation surrounding Sen. Bob Menendez and that liberal media are now bringing the story to light. They also observe how the mainstream media suddenly love Marco Rubio now that he is on board with immigration reform. And they discuss revelations that Jesse Jackson, Jr. is looking at significant prison time and a new probe is centered on Jackson’s wife.
The Long Road to Less Government
President Obama’s policy of targeting enemies, including Americans, for death through drone strikes is the latest and most alarming example of the endless expansion of government power, according to Judge Andrew Napolitano.
Napolitano is the senior judicial analyst for the Fox News Channel and is the author most recently of “Theodore and Woodrow” and “The Freedom Answer Book”. He says the growth in government power is nothing new and the erosion of individual freedoms is always pitched in pleasant ways.
“Monster government almost always comes with a smiling face. After it’s here, the face loses its smile and it saps our liberties and our prosperity,” said Napolitano.
Napolitano says there is no implosion of rights as troubling as what we’re seeing this week as the Obama administration defends the targeting and killing of enemies, including American citizens without giving them the right to due process.
“I’ve often commented that my job here at Fox is to monitor the government as it steals your liberty and steals your property, but I never thought I’d be monitoring the government stealing your life. Essentially, that’s what this is,” said Napolitano.
The administration’s legal justification for the drone program was laid out in a Department of Justice “white paper” that made its way to NBC News on Sunday night. The paper, which is a the distillation of countless other reports, clearly lays out what the Obama administration considers justification for the program of targeted kills.
“It basically says that the President of the United States can authorize an ‘informed, high-level official of the U.S. government’ to strip the constitutional protections of an American in a foreign country if the informed official is satisfied that the American is an imminent danger to American national security and his capture or arrest would be impractical,” said Napolitano. “That is basically the power claimed by kings and tyrants. I can suspend the law to get you if you are a danger.”
There are defenders of the Obama drone policy on both sides of the aisle, but Napolitano says their arguments fly in the face of the principles on which America was founded.
“Would we live in a safer society if the government could cut down every law and abrogate every freedom and break down every door and arrest everybody it wanted?,” asked Napolitano. “We’d be safe from the bad guys but we wouldn’t be safe from the government. Who would want to live in such a society?”
The judge says it’s very easy to read the administration’s legal defense for the drone program and see how it could be used to target any American.
“The language in this 16-page document could easily apply to Americans in America,” said Napolitano. “So the president could decide that Bill O’Reilly or Glen Beck or Judge Napolitano are just too troublesome, too meddlesome, too much of an obstacle to the accomplishment of his purposes and it’s time to take them out.
“The core of the argument is ‘trust us.’ That’s an argument that the Supreme Court rejected because it doesn’t trust a single individual to kill,” he said, noting the Constitution gives Congress the authority to declare war and a 12-person jury the power to sentence someone to death.
As outlined in “Theodore and Woodrow,” Napolitano says presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson are largely responsible for changing America from a nation championing limited government to one saddled with a government growing beyond anyone’s ability to control it.
“(They) shared the same view and that was this: the Constitution is not the supreme law of the land. It does not limit the government to the powers that have been delegated to it. Rather it unleashes the government to do whatever it wants except that which is expressly prohibited in the document,” said Napolitano. “Now that is not just an academic argument because that is turning the concept of limited government on its head.
“Every president from George Washington to William McKinley, Roosevelt’s predecessor, with the exception of Lincoln during the Civil War, accepted the idea that the federal government is one of limited powers and it can only do what the Constitution authorizes it to do,” he said. “When Roosevelt and Wilson switched to that (and) turned it on its head, they changed radically the size and scope of the federal government and the relationship of the federal government to individual Americans.”
So what did this big government push look like a century ago?
“In about a five-year period we suddenly got an income tax which they promised would never be more than three percent. Of course it went up to 90 percent in World War II,” said Napolitano. “We got the Federal Reserve which allows them to print worthless cash and put that into the economy. We got one of the most useless wars in American history which is World War I, basically an argument among the old, dying European monarchies about boundary lines.”
The judge says both Roosevelt and Wilson cracked down on free speech they found unhelpful to their cause and both were outspoken racists who worked to segregate the military after it had been integrated during Reconstruction.
Now that America has a full century of big government policies coming out of Washington, can this trend be reversed and how could that happen. Napolitano says it won’t happen anytime soon but will eventually happen but in a most unpleasant way.
“I’ve argued on Fox and elsewhere that we don;t have two political parties anymore. We have one political party, the big government party. It has a Republican wing that likes war and deficits and corporate welfare. It has a Democratic wing that likes war and taxes and individual welfare. Both wings have a single goal and that is staying in power.
“Honestly, it would take half the Congress and the White House with a small government, maximum individual liberty, Ron Paul-like mentality for these changes to come about,” he said.
“If they don’t come about peacefully, they’ll probably come about by other means. Sooner or later the federal government is going to run out of money, and so many people will be dependent upon the federal cash which will stop coming that they will all kinds of horrific things in order to eat and to live,” said Napolitano. ” At this point there probably will be a revolution which will end up in a small government or many small governments or a totalitarian and then the totalitarian will probably be overthrown.
“I’m not suggesting this is going to happen tomorrow. I’m not saying I want it to happen. I’m just a student and teacher of history suggesting that is the natural result of government overextending itself. It’s how Rome died. It’s how the European socialist states are dying, and we’re not far behind,” said Napolitano.
Three Martini Lunch 2/6/13
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review shudder as the Obama administration claims it can kill whoever it deems as a terrorist threat to the U.S. without any due process. They also not surprised to see the Congressional Budget Office expects seven million Americans to lose their employer-based health coverage in the next few years thanks to Obamacare. And they react to Michigan Rep. John Conyers demand that illegal immigrants not be called illegal immigrants.
Keeping the Fed Focused
The Federal Reserve should be focused on maintaining sound monetary policy and not get distracted by trying to bring down stubbornly high unemployment rates, according to Indiana Rep. Marlin Stutzman.
Stutzman is a member of the House Budget Committee and is sponsor of the FFOCUS (Focusing the Fed on the Currency of the United States) Act.
Achieving and continuing strong monetary policy has been the task of the Federal Reserve from its inception, but in the late 1970s President Carter and Congress expanded that role to include the pursuit of policies that will lead to full employment in the U.S.
Stutzman says that dual mandate is a problem because what’s best for spurring job creation is not always best for our monetary policy. The FFOCUS Act would end the Fed’s responsibilities on boosting employment and make it’s sole priority the maintenance of robust monetary policy.
“When you start taking into account the unemployment rate, you start trying to manipulate the monetary policies and the monetary system to try to drive unemployment rates down,” said Stutzman. “I believe they need to take that out of their responsibilities, cut it out of their formula and focus just on the economy’s need for strong, sound fiscal policy rather than trying to also appease the other side.”
“The bill that we’re filing will just simply say that the Federal Reserve Bank does not need to take into accounts unemployment rates anymore when they are setting monetary policy but focusing strictly on what the economy needs,” he said.
Stutzman says a classic example of the Fed pursuing policies that put their stated missions at odds are record-low interest rates. He says those can be seen as a good thing in the short term but are a bad thing in the long term as long as we fail to see much economic growth. He says there be far less “quantitative easing” under his legislation as well.
“Their position is that if we can inject more cash into the system then people will have the capital that they need to expand businesses, to start businesses and we’ll see economic growth,” said Stutzman. “But on the flip side, we have the Dodd-Frank legislation which is really holding and forcing banks and financial institutions to make decisions that they normally wouldn’t make.”
He says the easing policies are actually placing our fiscal standing on shakier ground.
“There may be a symptom here that they’re trying to fix, but I think in the long run it’s not dealing with real underlying problems and that is national debt . My fear is inflation because of more dollars into the system that aren’t really being supported by economic growth behind it,” said Stutzman.
The congressman is also a strong supporter of House legislation calling for a full audit of the Federal Reserve.
“With the Fed being a quasi-government agency but managing tax dollars, it’s important for every taxpayer, for members of Congress, for the president to know exactly what our money’s being used for, where it’s being invested and why,” said Stutzman.
Legitimizing Iranian Nukes
The Obama administration says it is prepared to engage in direct talks with the Iranian government over nuclear weapons but former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton says the move is naive and will only give credibility and legitimacy to the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism.
“I’m very worried with the new Secretary of State John Kerry, with a potential new Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel that these new kids on the block are going to say, ‘We can do better than everybody’s done before. We know how to deal with the Iranian leadership and we’re going to negotiate something on the nuclear weapons program,'” said Bolton.
“You can always reach agreement with an adversary by giving away your position. I’m just worried that in their desire to be able to say, ‘See, we had a success. We cut a deal,’ that in effect we’ll legitimize the Iranian nuclear weapons program and give them the capability to proceed unimpeded toward their long-sought objective of deliverable nuclear weapons,” said Bolton, who says an active nuclear program in Iran would be a direct threat to Israel, the region and the entire world if the nukes get in the hands of terrorist groups.
The concerns about Hagel’s views on Iran have been well-documented, but Bolton also dreads the type of approach Sec. Kerry will take on this as well.
“He has a record of naivete and faith in negotiations that’s almost theological, and unfortunately, not assertive and protective of American interests,” said Bolton. “I’m very worried that as bad as the first term was, the second term may be even worse.”
Bolton dealt with the Iranian nuclear ambitions during his time at the United Nations and has direct knowledge of how the regime would approach direct talks with the U.S.
“They’re very patient. They have a long-term view. They’ve clearly got some things they’d like to have. They’ed like to see some of the economic sanctions eased. They’d like assurances that their nuclear program is not going to be attacked, and they want to buy time so they can continue to work on that program,” said Bolton, who notes that the Iranians have “taken us to the cleaners” in all previous negotiations.
Bolton is also dubious of the official Obama policy against containment and dedicated only to preventing a nuclear weapons program in Iran. He has a hard time believing Obama will stick to this policy when it matters most.
“Everybody always says all options are on the table, meaning the possibility of military force by the United States but I don’t think anybody seriously believes that will happen, certainly they don’t in Israel and I fear, even more importantly, they don’t worry about it in Tehran,” said Bolton.
The crisis in Egypt also has Bolton’s attention, as massive protests continue over the constitutional power grab from President Mohammad Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood allies. The protests have been met with brutal responses from authorities and those crackdowns have prompted even more demonstrations. In addition, the Egyptian economy remains stagnant, due in part to rapidly dwindling tourism revenues. Bolton believes this gives Morsi a very weak grip on power.
“A variety of factors have contributed to chaos in the streets and it’s not at all clear how this is going to sort out or whether the military will have to step in. In all events we can see that Morsi has not abandoned his ideology. Even as we speak, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is visiting Cairo,” said Bolton, adding that Ahmadinejad is the first Iranian leader to visit Cairo since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.
Bolton also provided additional insight into last week’s reported Israeli airstrikes against a Syrian convoy headed to the Lebanese border.
“The best information we have at this point is that it was an attack on a convoy taking advanced air defense systems into Lebanon,” said Bolton. “I think the reason those systems were moving to Lebanon really has more to do with Iran than it does to do with Syria.
“I think they were intended to go to areas controlled by the terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon because I think at some point we’re going to see another confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel as we did in the 2006 war,” said Bolton.
He believes moving weaponry into Lebanon could be designed to launch a quick counter-strike if Israel attacks the Iranian nuclear program or engage Israel so as to prevent it from attacking Iran.
Three Martini Lunch 2/5/13
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are pleased to see an assault weapons ban may not even be part of the final Senate bill thanks to Harry Reid and Patrick Leahy. They also sigh as the new Conservative Victory Fund dedicates itself to making sure candidates it deems too conservative never win the GOP nomination. And they excoriate Ron Paul for suggesting that the murder of Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle was proof that if you live by the sword you die by the sword.
Three Martini Lunch 2/4/13
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review applaud the Superbowl commercial featuring the voice of Paul Harvey and honoring the hard work of American farmers. They also groan as it becomes clear the Massachusetts GOP has no one to run for U.S. Senate. And they discuss the 34-minute blackout during the Superbowl.
States Strike Back on Guns
While President Obama and some of his allies on Capitol Hill prepare for a major push on gun control legislation, state lawmakers are preparing to resist new federal restrictions.
Texas officials and sheriffs around the nation have announced they don’t intend to enforce any new gun laws and now there is a push in Wyoming specifically designed to protect gun owners in that state against any crackdowns on semi-automatic firearms or efforts to limit magazine capacity.
Wyoming State Rep. Kendell Kroeker is leading this charge. He says there is already a law on the books in his state that protects any firearm manufactured and possessed in the state from being subject to federal gun laws. His changes to that law offer residents even more protections.
“We extended that bill this year by adding a clause that said any future ban by the federal government that would put bans on semi-automatic rifles or magazine size would not be allowed to be enforced in Wyoming. We would have misdemeanor penalties for anyone who tried to enforce it, and we expanded it to apply to any gun that is owned in Wyoming and remains exclusively in the state of Wyoming,” said Kroeker, noting his proposal would remove the requirement that the guns be manufactured in the state.
Kroeker says he’s not sure how courts would rule if the Wyoming law were to conflict with a new gun control law from Washington, but he’s very confident which side the founding fathers would choose.
“People say that but the Constitution says that the Constitution itself is the supreme law of the land and the federal government can only pass laws that are in pursuance with the Constitution,” said Kroeker. “Because this is an intrastate matter and not interstate commerce we believe that there’s no authority for the federal government to impose their restrictions on us.”
Kroeker’s bill has passed the Wyoming House of Representatives but he says he’s not sure how an unpredictable state senate will vote on it. Kroeker says the public feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with 700 emails backing his changes to the law and just 13 opposing it.
Kroeker is very concerned about the way the gun debate is unfolding in Washington.
“We’re very concerned. I truly believe that Obama and Feinstein would go as far as they feel they could get away with as far as taking guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens,” said Kroeker.
The GOP lawmaker also urged Congress to resist the urge to impose a one-size-fits-all approach to guns. He says the issue should be left up to the 50 states to decide what’s best to the people of that state.