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“The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.” – President Obama, Inauguration (2009

Politically lazy or political cowardness?

“House Speaker Paul D. Ryan backed away Wednesday from legislative action to ban ‘bump stocks,’ the device a mass shooter used in Las Vegas earlier this month to create machine-gun-like rapid fire from his legal semi automatic rifle, killing 58,” washingtonpost.com reports. “Instead, Ryan and many of his fellow House Republicans hope the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) will act administratively to outlaw the devices, which the agency ruled legal in 2010.” Translation . . .

“Administratively“? Congress is supposed to legislate and the Executive Branch is supposed to, well, execute those laws. Period.  If one is to be true to the Constitution there should be no discussion.  This is a really damning statement from a Republican whose Platform says that the GOP believes in a limited Government and that Ryan has said the same thing on multiple occasions. The GOP and Ryan has made much of the Constitution and that the government’s governance is governed by it. Yet, go back and read that bolded part again and ask yourself “cognitive dissonance, or trying really hard to not stand up, trying not to lead, trying to avoid a hard situation, wanting to punt it elsewhere, and not wanting  (eventually) to take a vote”?

THIS is one reason why he got elected both as a US Rep and as Speaker – to do all those things that now seem to be giving him the shakes.  He wants the ATF to make the decision?

As Glenn Reynolds keeps saying we are blessed in having the worst political class ever!

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“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.”

“For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”

–Marcus Tullius Cicero

I posit that in our time and in our nation, it is the scourge of

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Some letter-writers who criticize my defense of so-called “price gouging” mistakenly assume that I oppose charitable actions to help victims of natural disasters (Letters, Oct. 11).  In fact, I applaud any and all outpourings of such generosity.  To the extent that big-hearted people make available, at zero or very low prices, additional supplies of goods such as water and propane, the prices of these goods are kept from rising as high as they would rise without such generous giving.  This result is entirely commendable.

Yet the very fact that, with every natural disaster, prices of such goods nevertheless rise to levels higher than they were pre-disaster proves that the amounts of goods supplied charitably are insufficient to meet all of the victims’ needs at pre-disaster prices.  The resulting rise in prices, therefore, continues to serve the useful function of enticing those people with ordinary-sized hearts to work harder to bring much-needed supplies to the victims and to persuade the victims themselves not to use available supplies frivolously.

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A list of 70 odd requirements was issued by the White House on Sunday in response to the Democrats demanding and whining that the Obama Executive Order be “honored” by Trump (and actually want to extend that amnesty to their illegal alien parents that brought these then “kids” into our country illegally AND want to bring other family members in) and legislatively formalize this.  The overriding question is “why didn’t you do this when you had supermajorities in the House and Senate AND held the Oval Office?

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Some didn’t even let the bodies cool – it is Progressive partisanship at its worst.  No time for actual reflection, no time for grief, and no “safe space” for the victims’ families.  Instead, even as the bodies were still on the ground, they went full political.  AWR Hawkins has the list:

The Democrats cannot stop themselves when it comes to gun control, and proof of it lies in the fact that various Democrats—and/or Democrat surrogates—have voiced support for nine different gun controls since Sunday.

• Ban on Bump Stocks – Sen. Dianne Feinstein is pushing this with her Automatic Fire Prevention Act. She admits that bump stocks are an accessory—that they do not convert semiautomatics into automatics—but she wants to ban them anyway. Her bill explicitly bans any accessory that allows an increase in rate of fire in short bursts but does “not convert the semiautomatic rifle into a machine gun.”
• Ban on Trigger Cranks – Sen. Feinstein’s bill bans trigger cranks too. Like the bump stock, trigger cranks are another novelty that gun owners can use to achieve short, rapid bursts of fire. Such cranks allow a gun owner to mimic automatic fire yet do not convert a semiautomatic gun into an automatic one.
• Ban on Semiautomatic firearms – Sen. Feinstein voiced support for this ban during her appearance on Face the Nation, and the Washington Post pushed for such a ban two days later.

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“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

-Ronald Reagan (actor, speaker, author, Governor, President of the United States)

In a poll by FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), the results should be disheartening.  Short changed by their high school educations and then further indoctrinated by the overwhelming Leftist (many outright Marxists) professors, these kids have no idea what their actual birthrights are for being American citizens. Emphasis mine

In the most comprehensive survey on students’ attitudes about free speech to date, FIRE measured student responses to questions about self expression, reactions to expression of other students, guest speakers, and hate speech. Some key findings include:

• 46 percent of students recognize that hate speech is protected by the First Amendment, and 48 percent of students think the First Amendment should not protect hate speech.
• Most students (56 percent) support disinviting some guest speakers. Democratic students are 19 percentage points more likely than their Republican peers to agree that there are times a speaker should be disinvited.
• 58 percent of college students think it’s important to be part of a campus community where they are not exposed to intolerant or offensive ideas. 

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I’m on most of the major Democrat email lists – sometimes as my usual email address and sometimes under others.  Most of the stuff is absolute emotion – their titles and content SCREAM emotion: “Women will DIE!”, “They want to put you back in chains!”, “This. Cannot. Happen.”, “LAST CHANCE!” and a recent one, “Poachers will win if this bill passes.” And yes, we are called EVIL.

Those are the calmer ones. 

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If you don’t know, George Soros is the multibillionaire that, when a child, helped the Nazi in their Holocaust death camps.  He is known for making money by currency manipulation of sovereign countries.  He is an open faucet of money, via a whole gaggle of Progressive “charities” and when followed, it almost looks like money laundering.  He’s one of the Left’s biggest donors over the decades.  Also, he is no friend of Freedom and actively is working for a single world government and open borders.

In this piece from DC Whispers, he’s at it again.  The Democrats talk about Trump in collusion with the Russians?  Republicans ought to be yelling about Soros more often as he’s really trying to crush our sovereignty.  Here’s one of those times where I do quote quite a bit of that post (reformatted, emphasis mine):

AMERICAN COUP: Big Money Donors Trying To Overthrow Trump Revealed. Here’s The List…

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We don’t need you. We have your children – Herrman Goebbels

That second question in the title is from a post I did back in 2009 – and the question has only become more and more important over the last eight years so I suggest that you read it because here is another example of what Progressives in education believe about “truth”:

Two Canadian professors have developed an approach they call “Trojan horse pedagogy” to peddle social justice to otherwise unassuming students. Sal Renshaw and Renee Valiquette, both of whom teach at Nipissing University in Ontario, detailed their extensive “ruse” in a recently published book, boasting that their “Introduction to Interdisciplinary Analysis” class is actually a “social justice” course in disguise… “Our goal in this class is to move both hearts and minds, in part by ‘forcing’ an encounter with at least some knowledges that students have already decided they are not interested in,” Renshaw and Valiquette explain, adding that the classes are “rooted in… post-structural feminist theory.”

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I’m going to watch it again, but it was class Rice-Crispies operandi – dripping with condescension and her favorite tactic of hijacking the conversation while someone else is talking (in this case, Susan Olsen representing the Women’s Defense League).  I have to give Susan kudos for the attempt, but it was clear that Zandra Rice-Hawkins was as haughty as ever (as she treats me every time we meet up).  We’ve blogged about this outlook of Progressives before – that we believe they are misguided, but they believe we are EVIL.  That came out quite clear yesterday (and she is a pro-abortion extremist as well, so the image above fits).

Thus this post from The Federalist caught my eye and well sums up why there is no common ground.

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Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

We have seen a number of militant gay couples go to Christian small businesses like flower shops, wedding photographers, wedding chapel owners, and t-shirt makers and demand to be served.  At almost every turn, anti-discrimination ordinances or that any business was a “public accommodation”, along with biased bureaucrats and judges,  either put these businesses out of business or have put them into years long court battles that may well bankrupt them even if they win on First Amendment grounds.

Now, what happens when the shoe is on the other foot?  Is a gay person allowed to “discriminate” against Christian customers?

A gay Seattle coffee shop owner kicked a group of Christians out of his coffee shop Sunday, after declaring he would [Rule #1 prevents me from pasting this in -Skip]. The owner heatedly tells the Christians to leave his shop immediately in a video posted to Facebook by Abolish Human Abortion, a Christian group seeking to end the practice of abortion.

“I’m gay, you have to leave,” the owner tells the group. “This is offensive to me. I own the place. I have the right to be offended.” The group tried to explain that they hadn’t placed any in the shop, but the owner repeatedly told them to”shut up.”

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