The government agrees - guns save lives

The Messiah's own executively-ordered CDC study on gun violence proves that the incidence of lawful defensive gun uses by Americans at the very least equals the incidence of gun crimes committed by criminals, and most likely exceeds it:

"Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year (Kleck, 2001a)."  (Emphasis ours)

There you go.  Scientific proof that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens for self-protection equals or betters the rate of their being used in crimes.  Where, then, is the urgent need to further restrict their availability to those who responsibly use them?

Not that the general media reported this, as they pretty much are only in favor of scientific evidence when it helps advance their agenda, which of course is not how science works.  If they had paid attention in high school they would have remembered that fact.

The Jack-Booted Thug of the Week...

... is U.S. Department of Justice attorney Rachel Hranitzky, who apparently showed up at an announced public hearing at the New Iberia, Louisiana City Hall yesterday and immediately proceeded to tell a local reporter there to cover the event that she couldn't be recorded or quoted because, you know, she's more special than the other officials scheduled to speak there:

"She said the Department of Justice has very special rules about how their attorneys can be quoted."

Umm, no they don't, Ms. Hranitzky.  You and your colleagues have to play by the same "rules" as any other person, an important lesson your boss is going to learn the hard way sometime tomorrow.

Things seemingly got worse when the reporter inquired as to exactly what exception to the Constitution allowed her to impose such conditions on a meeting that anyone could walk in and attend:

"Hranitzky grew belligerent and threatening and said if the reporter didn’t follow her directive he would be asked to leave.

'Then (the Department of Justice) can call your editors and publisher at the paper, and trust you don’t want to get on the Department of Justice’s bad side,' Hranitzky said."

Ooh, how scary.  "Play ball or I unleash the Eye of Sauron upon thee."

Take your impotent and empty threats and cram them, ma'am.

(via Jay G.)

A curious silence

Former New York Times reporter Janny Scott has written a biography of Barack Obama's mother in which Scott definitively proves that Dear Leader lied right through his teeth in the 2008 presidential campaign when he claimed that Ann Dunham had been denied health insurance reimbursement during her ultimately fatal battle with cancer.  Rather, Dunham had been fully covered and all treatment expenses were paid save for her deductibles and other uncovered costs.  The only apparent disagreement between Dunham and any insurance entity, according to Scott, was with a different company which refused to pay disability coverage for her living expenses because it considered her condition to be pre-existing. 

Those updated facts make for quite a bit different of a tale than what was presented by candidate and President Obama as the poster story of a horribly broken health-care system, which is probably why he didn't bother to mention them whilst ramming his Ponzi scheme through Congress.

Strangely enough, Ms. Scott has been declining to talk further with reporters about her work despite repeated requests for interviews.  Now, when was the last time anyone remembers a book author refusing free publicity, especially as the usual end result is more books being sold?  One naturally wonders if perhaps some of Scott's former colleagues at the Times convinced her to go back on the monolithic pro-Obama reservation before more damage could be done to their false idol.

Ugly bias from the same old sources

"I think if it's Kansas, if it's Missouri, no big deal, you know that's the dance of the low-sloping foreheads, the middle places... right?"

New York Times columnist David Carr (a Minnesota native, by the way.  No pathological self-hatred there, no sirree), talking about state education scores on Bill Maher's HBO television program and actually expecting agreement from the other panelists, who to their credit did no such thing.

Powerline nailed it when they titled their post on this incident "The Mask Slips.  Again".  Funny what slips out when liberal media figures get a little too comfortable with their surroundings and forget they are on TV and not palling around on Journolist or haunting the local newspaper watering hole with the rest of the monochromatic herd who happens to think just like them.

By way of comparison, any panel member regardless of political leaning would be deservedly run out of town on a rail had she or she callously ridiculed, say, inner-city minority schoolkids in the same manner.  Since Carr was slandering the proles in flyover country, though (which includes himself, we remind everyone), the Times apparently has no problem with or response to this arrogant, elitist pronouncement by one of its favored employees.

Typical, but not particularly surprising.

Officially second-class journalists

The New Jersey Supreme Court has ruled that they do not consider bloggers to be "mainstream journalists", and because of that designation they don't meet the requirements for that state's shield law which protects the identities of confidential sources:

"New Jersey's highest court says online message boards are little more than forums for discussion and don't fit the definition of news media as described by the law."

We will merely point out to those justices that most of the major national stories of the past decade have been broken by bloggers, with the mainstream media either playing belated catch-up (the current "Project Gunwalker" scandal involving the ATF and the Justice Department) or even actively working to prevent the information from becoming public knowledge (Newsweek originally discovering and then spiking the Monica Lewinsky story).  We ourselves have broken important stories on many occasions which made use of confidential sources and will continue to do so despite this asinine decision, which only serves to unfairly benefit large media outlets.

Besides, we have never been informed as to the correct government office to supplicate ourselves in order to apply for our shiny "Authorized Journalist" badge so that we can be all official-like "news media" and get such privileges.  Whoever gave the government the power to decide who is or isn't a journalist, anyway?  Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin were one-man pamphleteers; under this arbitrary ruling they would no doubt be considered merely pests and ordered to immediately give up their anti-Crown sources on pain of imprisonment.

Well said

Liberal author and radio-show host David Sirota explains in Salon magazine the importance of not allowing the police to bully, intimidate, threaten with arrest or otherwise prevent people from recording officers going about their public duties (from a respectful and non-interfering distance, of course).

"That's what the practice of cellphone recording is supposed to do -- not mimic the national security state's Big Brother culture, but prevent that security state from trampling our freedoms.

Law enforcement officials, of course, don't like the cellphone cameras because they don't want any check on police power. So they've resorted to fear-mongering allegations about lost lives. But the only police officers who are threatened by cellphone cameras are those who want to break civil liberties laws with impunity. The rest have nothing to worry about and everything to gain from a practice that simply asks them to remember the all-too-forgotten part of their "protect and serve" motto -- the part about protecting the public's civil rights."

We vehemently disagree with Mr. Sirota on just about every political issue, but on this particular topic he's spot-on.

The Jack-Booted Thug(s) of the Week...

... are unfortunately too numerous this time around to name just one winner.

1.  A person was arrested at Denver International Airport on Saturday morning after "authorities" noticed he was videotaping the security lines. He was taken into custody "on suspicion of interfering with a transportation facility" along with three people in the security line.

We're not sure how openly photographing a security checkpoint counts as "interfering", especially when the TSA itself admits that doing so is perfectly legal and acceptable behavior.  Those cops had better have another, much better reason for arresting this person or they could find themselves in serious legal trouble.

Apparently the folks in line the person was filming didn't possess IDs or boarding passes.  That's certainly anomalous (but also not illegal) behavior but again, the cops wouldn't have found this out unless they wrongly detained the photographer in the first place, which will probably result in the suppression of any evidence of wrongdoing gained from their arrest (of which there have been no reports to date).

We certainly don't wish to be the victims of terrorist acts, but government officials have to follow the rules they themselves put into place or else we're no better than any other tin-pot Third World dictatorship. 


2.  17-year-old high-school student and anti-police corruption activist Robert Wanek was unlawfully arrested last Friday by "Officer" Dustin Hill of the Wahpeton, North Dakota Police Department for daring to film the cop on a public street as part of Wanek's independent investigation into alleged unwarranted raids taking place in the town.  Hill is ironically one of the officers accused of abusing his police powers, and in this incident he pretty much proves Wanek's allegations for him:



According to Wanek he was held in handcuffs and questioned by another officer for approximately one hour without being read his rights or his parents being notified (he is a minor after all), and upon his release was informed that he had been unlawfully detained solely because he "had pissed Dustin Hill off".  Apparently that's some sort of crime in that podunk burg. 

Wanek is asking all concerned individuals to call the Wahpeton Police Chief at 701-642-7722 to politely inquire whether an investigation into "Officer" Hill's clearly unlawful and bullying behavior has been opened, and if not why not.

(via CopBlock)   


3.  Chattanooga (Tennessee) Times Free Press reporter Kate Harrison last Thursday was interviewing volunteers cleaning up the damage from massive flooding in the area while also taking pictures when she was ordered by Hamilton County Sheriff Jim Hammond, Chattanooga Police Chief Bobby Dodd and Hamilton County Director of Emergency Services Don Allen (way too many chiefs there, it seems) to stop taking photographs, a clear violation of her Constitutional rights as both a private citizen and a working journalist covering a legitimate news story in public.

"Harrison also was commanded by emergency services spokeswoman Amy Maxwell not to publish any of the photographs she had taken, and later was threatened with arrest. (We published one of Harrison’s photos.)"

This wasn't the only run-in the paper's reporters had with overreaching officials that day, by the way:

"In a similar incident on the same day, another member of our news staff — photographer Allison Carter — was threatened with arrest by a Catoosa County deputy sheriff if she did not cease photographing tornado damage at a Food Lion shopping center, and if she did not delete the pictures she had taken from her camera."

These incidents are completely unacceptable behavior on the part of those public "servants", and we hope the paper pursues all legal remedies available to it to have those bullies severely punished for their attempt at official intimidation.

(Jack Lail via Unc)

The lapdogs in the mainstream press reveal themselves

"At one point Wolf Blitzer and the gang admonished other news services for 'wildly speculating' about the nature of the announcement [Bin Laden's demise], saying that White House officials were pleased they had not said anything."

How nice of CNN to place keeping their masters in the White House happy far above aggressively investigating and reporting arguably the biggest legitimate news story of the decade.  We doubt they'd have been so compliant had a Republican administration made the same demand.

We haven't watched that amateurish channel in years and don't miss it one bit.