Gun rights in Ohio, Kasich and the democrats

Michelle Malkin has an interesting story on the efforts of democrats to acquire the names of people who have concealed carry permits. Apparently there is a naked appeal to NRA members, since the NRA turned turncoat and endorsed Strickland. Kasich needs to get out there. We've heard almost nothing from him. Lots of stuff floating around, including an idea to cut the income tax in Ohio, which most people view, at this time, as devastating to our staggering economy and schools. Right now, Strickland has the upper hand:

On the contrary, the Democraps want to troll for votes among CHL holders because the NRA has endorsed Ted Strickland in the governor’s race. They’re trying to play right to the gun community in that race and hoping to make those same voters forget that their Senate candidate, Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher, is a rabid anti-gun zealot. They also hope to keep control of the Ohio House by any means they can find, since they want to control the Ohio Apportionment Board that will draw the new congressional and legislative districts once the census data is released to the states.

John Kasich, the GOP candidate for governor, has an uphill battle to win the gun rights vote this year because the voted for Clinton’s Assault Weapons Ban and many will never forgive him for that vote. The Democraps are trying to use the gun issue to their advantage since their candidate for governor already has the NRA endorsement and their candidate for attorney general, Richard Cordray, will surely get the NRA’s backing. They’re using the Rahm Emanuel playbook from 2006 to try to make their candidates look okay on gun issues. So far they appear to be succeeding.

Ugh. This mess makes you sick. 

The document is certainly in my handwriting

Kagan, on being asked if she wrote a memo helping defend passing partial birth abortion, says in response, "The document is certainly in my handwriting," rather than "Yes." Read about it at Powerline:

So Kagan set about solving the problem. Her notes, produced by the White House to the Senate Judiciary Committee, show that she herself drafted the critical language hedging ACOG's position. On a document [PDF] captioned "Suggested Options" -- which she apparently faxed to the legislative director at ACOG -- Kagan proposed that ACOG include the following language: "An intact D&X [the medical term for the procedure], however, may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman."

Kagan's language was copied verbatim by the ACOG executive board into its final statement, where it then became one of the greatest evidentiary hurdles faced by Justice Department lawyers (of whom I was one) in defending the federal ban. (Kagan's role was never disclosed to the courts.)

Looks like she's following Sotomayor's footsteps. Lie. 

Everything's falling apart

  Everything's falling apart. 
  Oh, Obama finally let more ships travel to the Gulf to help clean up the oil spill but we're pretty sure he'll find a way to mess that up, considering it took him 70 days to let them in. (Update: While writing this, it was announced that the Coast Guard won't clear the A Whale, the biggest skimmer in the world, 10 stories high,  to come into the water because the EPA is worried the water which it will clean may still contain some traces of oil. Health care, anyone? The Coast Guard's joint information center says the 6 vessels who have applied to help are awaiting PENDING Jones Act waivers.... WAITING, after 70 days, WAITING) Does that mean unions are no longer important, Mr. president? 
  Dear Leader was shunned at the G20, where people flew in from all over the world not to miss an opportunity to behave like animals and break other people's property. 
  Dear Leader tried earnestly to persuade other leaders around the world to spend more money (read: PRINT more money) to solve their deficit problems but even the Chinese didn't buy that, although they've bought plenty of our debt before. Concern mounts as to who will buy our debt in the future, given the fact that everyone except Dear Leader seems to understand at last that we're all broke.
  One bright spot: Al Gore's scandal just got uglier, what with the proof of a witness and a hotel videotape, not even including the, um, stained pants she kept. 
  Job creation is really, really bad but our "leaders" use newspeak to call this the "summer of recovery." 
  The democrats are adding billions to save union jobs to bills that have nothing to do with the bill itself, like the military spending bill. Since the job situation is so desperate, our esteemed leaders are raising taxes on everyone (even though they're broke) (just like they did in the olden days), in addition to the ones they already instituted, like the tanning tax that starts tomorrow. (Those tanning salon owners are really rich so they deserve what they get.) 
  Our president and his union toadies are busy working on wrecking the oil business, after the auto business, banks, the fishing industry, home babysitting. Hm. Let's see. Where to focus the laser beam next. (Oh, the coal industry! Of course!)
  We have a VICE president, president and congresspeople who swear at taxpayers when they ask logical questions and accuse them of being, let's see, killers (talking to YOU, Pete Starkcrazy), bigots, stupid, uneducated, violent...more invective is surely coming, depending on what the democrats are trying to pass.
  The VICE president has given up on jobs, saying those 8000 aren't coming back. They aren't even trying, because they know that they're just gone. No sunny Reagan optimism there. In addition, half the stimulus money hasn't even been spent yet, since they're saving it for The One's reelection year, regardless of the misery people are in now. That stimulus was meant for reelection, not people's jobs, after all!
  Meanwhile Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac spent $1 billion on landscaping. This year.
  The Gulf beaches are inundated with oil which could have been prevented if our esteemed Dear Leader had only been on the job working and ORGANIZING rather than partying, golfing, posing for photo ops. 
  The MSM doesn't seem interested in covering the neglect of the Obama administration, except when it came to the media being denied entry into the Gulf to do their so-called jobs, but nobody really listens to them anymore anyway since everyone knows now they meet in clandestine groups online to decide what news items have importance and what don't, depending on their particular news slant, which everyone knows is liberal. 
  A new supreme court judge is being grilled but everyone knows she's just lying to get her seat and then she'll decide everything based on what she didn't tell the grillers initially, just like the previous one lied to pass the grilling to be confirmed, only to directly contradict what she said during the vetting process. ( Talking to YOU, Sotomayor: I can find nothing in the Second Amendment’s text, history, or underlying rationale … to protect the keeping and bearing arms for private self-defense purposes.)
  Our Attorney General drops cases in which black people intimidate white people, and it has been revealed that our department of JUSTICE is only a department of JUSTICE for black people, as white people had JUSTICE for a long time and, now, deserve INJUSTICE for a while.
  Yes, everything's falling apart.
  YET.
  Those of us out here plugging away for justice, real justice, are not discouraged because we know NOVEMBER'S coming. And we know that we are not faint of heart. And we know that we are MANY. 
  And even after November we will NOT GIVE UP.
  We've learned that the truth will out, even if Daily Kos just made up their claims that the tea partiers are insane. 
  We have great candidates running against the ruling elite. 
  We've won in many races, even though the press tried to make it sound like even one loss means we're all going down. We're NOT.
  We have the spirit of the Founding Fathers running in our veins.
  We are a majority in this country, not a minority. 
  And we in Northwest Ohio have raised, again, more money for another billboard, penny by penny, dollar by dollar, against the ruling elite.
  WE ARE THE RESISTANCE! 
  We wear our Gadsden flags wrapped around our hearts. 
  We're just waiting for the moment, pals, to tear open our shirts, we're just waiting for the moment!

Hanson: Where did the tea party anger come from?

Victor David Hanson sums up perfectly, as usual, in his most erudite voice, the reasons the tea parties exist. Read it all and rejoice that someone has defined it:

You were had

After 18 months, the people feel they have been had—in the way that a blow-dried mansion living, philandering John Edwards is hardly an advocate for the “other America”, or green-scheming, instant multi-millionaire Al Gore is hardly a disinterested advocate for welcoming reasonable debate about a sustainable planet. Prophets fall harder, especially when “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” prove to be a reflective of the Chicago way, the snooty ineptness of the Harvard lounge, and the shrill leftism of SEIU.

Rangel, Dodd, Geithner, the Blago mess, the lobbyists, the earmarks, and the political bribes to pass health care together have convinced half the electorate in just a few months that Obama is not merely not a reformer, but perhaps the most ethically compromised president since Bill Clinton or Richard Nixon.

On the internet kill switch

From Red State, before the hysteria sets in:

Because you see: the emergency powers sought by the Democrats and the White House not only amount to a huge power grab over private computers that is unprecedented online, but the purported goal still won’t be achieved. The bill is as overbearing in its means as it is impractical in its ends.

Consider the premise of the bill: we have to defend ourselves against a hypothetical attack by a foreign power on this country’s computers over the Internet. It sounds just so reasonable that we should just be able to “shut off the pipe” to country X until the threat passes, doesn’t it? The problem is, there is no one pipe. The Internet is not like the system of roads, centralized and government owned. The Internet is a tangled web of private networks, any or all of the biggest of which (”the Backbone”) might have their own connections to private networks in other countries. Take a look at this diagram of the Internet backbone made by the Opte Project:

Oceanographer: Methane gas astonishingly high

Carried by Reuters:

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And this from AOL:

The dangerous gas has played an important role throughout the disaster and response. A bubble of methane is believed to have burst up from the seafloor and ignited the rig explosion. Methane crystals also clogged a four-story containment box that engineers earlier tried to place on top of the breached well.Now it is being looked at as an environmental concern. 

Crazy Pete Stark: the borders are secure

In this video you see the absolute arrogance of the ruling elite in this country. He baits the citizens, mocks them, questions everything they ask without answering the questions. Some of his responses: The borders are quite secure... There is a low incidence of crime among illegals....anchor babies is another side of discrimination...5th worst attendance for voting...been in office 38 years... who are you going to kill today, minuteman? 
This is the state of politics today. These are the people who take our money and our treasure and spend it on themselves and their pet interests to keep themselves in office.

Our borders are secure? Watch this:

Kaptur: disappointed in Obama

Hard to believe. After dealing with several tornadoes, Northwest Ohio was particularly hard hit. It is NOT hard to believe that Obama is, once again, MIA when it comes to dealing with disasters:

A veteran Democratic lawmaker bashed President Barack Obama for being "noncommittal" in extending disaster relief to tornado-stricken northwest Ohio.

Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, said that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had been a disappointment in its decision to deny aid to areas hurt by tornadoes in early June. 

"They've disappointed us in Katrina, they've disappointed us here, they disappointed us so many places in our country," Kaptur told a local ABC affiliate in Toledo.

She jabbed Obama in particular for having seemingly brushed off her and other Ohio lawmakers' requests for FEMA's help to deal with the fallout from the tornadoes, which destroyed a number of high schools across two congressional districts, including a major high school.

Yale fellow: Obama: most radical U.S. president ever

This is the audio you may have been hearing around the talk zone today. From NewZeal:

Dr. Richard L. Rubinstein, Yale fellow, "Distinguished Professor of the Year", and Harvard Phd, states that president Obama's intention is to "correct the historical mistake of the creation of the state of Israel." Dr. Rubenstein states that president Obama due to his family heritage is extremely pro Muslim - to the point of "wanting to see the destruction of Israel."

Hoft: After 70 days, he still refuses to allow cleanup equipment into the Gulf

  This is intentional malfeasance. How does this make any sense? Won't it make more people mad about not cleaning up the Gulf as will be influenced to shift from fossil fuels to the non-existent green energy? What does he gain by doing this? 
  Gateway Pundit:

In fact there is clear evidence that the negligence by the Obama Administration caused the destruction of the Gulf coastline.

** The feds only accepted assistance from 5 of 28 countries a month after the disaster.

** It took the Obama Administration 53 days to accept help from the Dutch andBritish.

** It took them 58 days to mobilize the US military to the Gulf.

** The feds shut down crude-sucking barges due to fire extinguisher concerns.

** The Obama Administration ignored oil boom manufacturers that have miles of product stockpiled in their warehouses.

** They only have moved 31 of 2,000 oil skimmers to the disaster area off of Florida.

** Florida hired an additional 5 skimmer boats to operate off its coast due to federal inaction.

** There are no skimmer boats off the coast of Mississippi.

** The massive A-Boat skimmer won’t be allowed to join the cleanup effort until the Coast Guard and the EPA figure out whether it meets their standards.

** The feds shut down sand berm dredging off the Louisiana coast.

** The president continues to hit the golf course, ball games, hold BBQ’s andparty while the crude oil washes up on shore.

Lesson: Just lie to get a Supreme Court seat

Remember Sonia Sotomayor's response to the question about gun rights? Why, she fully supports the 2nd amendment! One year ago it was not up to the courts to decide gun rights.
And:

SOTOMAYOR: Like you, I understand that how important the right to bear arms is to many, many Americans. In fact, one of my godchildren is a member of the NRA. And I have friends who hunt. I understand the individual right fully that the Supreme Court recognized in Heller."

Today? One year later? She RULES against gun rights for all Americans:

Justice Breyer wrote another dissent, which Justice Ginsburg and Justice Sotomayor joined in full.What’s interesting about that is it contradicts what Sonia Sotomayor said during her confirmation hearings just last year. In response to the question of whether it is settled that the Second Amendment secures an individual rights, Sotomayor told Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy, “Yes, sir.” 

Really? How does that square with the dissent? The one that said, “I can find nothing in the Second Amendment’s text, history, or underlying rationale … to protect the keeping and bearing arms for private self-defense purposes.” Although that statement only concerned whether the right to own a gun is fundamental, the dissent also said that the Court should consider overruling Heller altogether. 

Those statements are consistent with the decisions Sonia Sotomayor joined when she was an appeals judge on the Second Circuit. Those were the decisions that led defenders of the Second Amendment to oppose her confirmation to the Supreme Court. 

  If the people of America cannot trust the rule of law, the president of the United States or the words of a Supreme Court justice, what is left?
  This is why the grilling of Kagan is important. These people lie to get on the Supreme Court and then issue rulings that directly contradict their words during the vetting process.

And still, why insufficient help in the Gulf? Health care, anyone?

  Bloggers all over this country including this one are posting blog entry after entry, wondering why the federal government isn't doing more to waive rules and push as much help down to the Gulf as possible as we watch, for months now,  this pristine and beautiful part of our country defiled by oil, killing the animals and destroying the marshlands and coastline. 

  Still we wait and little happens. When the technology is available, why hasn't our government responded with all means necessary? You may have heard of the A Whale which could, except for an arcane EPA regulation, skim much of the oil from the surface.

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Haley Barbour is hopeful circumstances will change. Here we are over two months in:

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What about the Nanuq? From NOLA, there's too much red tape to be efficient:

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Take a look at this Google search dated June 28 and see how many areas of the country are begging for government help. 
An excellent portrayal of current conditions and government inaction is over at Director Blue, who also has a link to a video of the damage. Apparently that pilot was able to get in to videotape the damage.

The "Obama administration knew about Deepwater Horizon['s] 35,000-foot well bore, green-lighted [it] and fast-tracked the project"...
• Disregarded and underestimated the impact of the tragic explosion and spill for over a month...
• As of last week, had deployed only 20 of 2,000 skimmer (clean-up) vessels...
• Fought Louisiana's use of sand berms to prevent damage to the Gulf coast tidal region...
• Forced Louisiana to stop using 16 barges that were sucking up thousands of gallons of oil daily out of the Gulf..
• Refused to waive the Jones Act, which prevented foreign vessels and crews from cleaning up the Gulf, even though "American shippers who generally support the ban said they wouldn’t object to lifting it to fight the spill"...
Put simply, BP was betting big on "crony capitalism", donating heavily ($1 million-plus) to Barack Obama and significantly more to Democrats in general. 

Given these truths about this catastrophe, why would ANYONE trust the government with their health care, a government that already has not met deadlines they set for themselves?

  Why don't you cut the red tape? Why? What are you doing that is so much more important than this? And Michelle Obama, if you're so worried about fat kids' health, why aren't you pushing your husband to worry about the health of the people in the Gulf, as some are forced to think about evacuation just because of the stench? Don't you care?
  This isn't about the kind of emotive "caring" that Clinton did. We're not asking you to cry on camera. We're not asking you to use foul language or act angry.
  We're asking you to care in the form of actually taking action, flying down there and saying, "Who's in charge? Get those skimmers in here NOW, regardless of red tape! Get those fisherman and their boats retrofitted to help clean up this mess! And pay 'em to do it!"
  No, we are asking for nothing extraordinary. We're asking you to do your job. Don't cry. Don't swear. Don't yell. Just do your job.
  We're screaming, Mr. president. We're demanding that you fulfill your responsibilities to this country, instead of golfing, eating out, partying and posing for photo ops.

Jan Brewer for president!

She faced them down again. This woman has great strength and seems fearless when confronting the most powerful corrupt entities in this country. Just after walking out of the White House meeting, she wondered aloud why we are sending more money to Mexico than to protect the borders of our country. One might also wonder why we are sending more money to Hamas terrorists than to our own borders. Where do you hear this information in the MSM?

Instead the government gives up land in Arizona to the drug cartels, telling citizens to stay away from great areas of land that are used by violent drug dealers.

Jan Brewer is heading them off.

Most galling is Mexico's so-called conservative president calling on Arizona to discard the new law which most resembles their own laws regarding immigration:

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has been ripping into Arizona's immigration law as he tours Washington -- while appearing to disregard the way his own country cracks down on immigrants along Mexico's southern border. 

Mexico repeatedly has been cited by human rights groups for abusing or turning a blind eye to the abuse of migrants from Central America. Until recently, Mexican law made illegal immigration a criminal offense -- anyone arrested for the violation could be fined, imprisoned for up to two years and deported. Mexican lawmakers changed that in 2008 to make illegal immigration a civil violation like it is in the United States, but their law still reads an awful lot like Arizona's. 

A juicy read on the Gore attack

Quite credible, says Byron York. A song about Bush? Hm. Seems like someone never got over the 2000 election. A very, um, juicy article:

At that moment, the masseuse brought up Gore's long marriage. "How do you rectify this with your wife?" she asked. That brought on another "quick shift" in Gore's mood. "I never saw anybody's moods just go like this," the masseuse told police, snapping her fingers.

The accuser said Gore maneuvered her into the bedroom. His iPod docking station was there, he told her, and he wanted her to listen to "Dear Mr. President," a lachrymose attack on George W. Bush by the singer Pink. [SNIP]

Finally she got away. Later, she talked to friends, liberals like herself, who advised against telling police. One asked her "to just suck it up; otherwise, the world's going to be destroyed from global warming."

Arguing over Byrd vacancy

Of course, if roles were reversed, the ink would be dry already. Since dems don't want this seat to go to the voters in November, hanky panky ensues. We'll see. Both the secretary of state and governor of West Virginia are dems. The LAW says that vacancy will be filled in November through election. The dems want it to be put off until 2013. Ace:

More Arguing Over Byrd's Vacancy

Update: Sec of State Tennant to Give Presser at 4:30PM; Her Own Words on Succession

ZeroSheep sends this link. 

He says this means the limitation of two years, six months applies to the length of service of the appointed replacement, and thus state law okays it if the Governor waits a week (or, presumably, a month, or two months, or a half a year, or a year).

DOJ: minority rights-yes. Whites-no. It's payback time.

Eric Holder's Department of Justice does not have a race neutral approach to protecting the civil rights of citizens of the United States. Apparently if you're black, you have a right to retribution against whites through voting. The recently resigned DOJ attorney speaks for the first time here. His name is J. Christian Adams. This article at PJM is worth reading in its entirety. It's pretty shocking, actually. He discusses the dismissal of the New Black Panthers' case in Philadelphia and the abominable Ike Brown case in Mississippi and other corrupt events in this country. The attitude is one of protection for some races, but not for others, which will lead to a general lack of confidence in the rule of law in this country.

But I believe the best explanation for the corrupt dismissal of the case is the profound hostility by the Obama Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department towards a race-neutral enforcement of civil rights laws.

This hostility was — and is — on open display within the Department of Justice.

Example after example exists where this dirty little secret manifested itself within the Department and affected Department policy.

Attorney General Holder and his political appointees have traveled the country claiming that they have “reopened” the Civil Rights Division. The Civil Rights Division is “back in business,” they announce, without a sniff of media scrutiny. In time, statistics and other information will present truth to this lie, as the Bush Civil Rights Division had a more robust civil rights agenda than the Obama Civil Rights Division. During the Bush years, the Civil Rights Division brought more cases in many areas of the law, particularly voting rights.

UPDATE: He's written for the Washington Times also:

Refusing to enforce the law equally means some citizens are protected by the law while others are left to be victimized, depending on their race. Core American principles of equality before the law and freedom from racial discrimination are at risk. Hopefully, equal enforcement of the law is still a point of bipartisan, if not universal, agreement. However, after my experience with the New Black Panther dismissal and the attitudes held by officials in the Civil Rights Division, I am beginning to fear the era of agreement over these core American principles has passed. 

Robert Byrd: Ignore the past. He's a Democrat

  Powerline has the best obit, and accurate. RIP is a nice way to say goodbye but the whitewashing of Byrd is really incredible, considering George Allen's mysterious "macaca" that got him booted out of a race for governor when no one even knew what the word meant until some dimwit dug up/created a vaguely racist definition in Swahili or something. Then it was all over. But racist pasts for Democrats is nothing new:

Robert Byrd was indeed a valuable link not only to the Senate's past, but also to the Democratic Party's history as the party of slavery, segregation, and opposition to equal treatment of blacks. Stolberg obviously loved Byrd's cornpone constitutional shtick in favor of filibustering a Republican president's judicial appointees. It's a shame that Stolberg exerted no effort to put Byrd's shtick in the context it merited.

Byrd was old enough, for example, to have vowed memorably regarding the integration of the Armed Forces by President Truman that he would never fight "with a Negro by my side. Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds."

  Also interesting is that the governor of West Virginia has the right to appoint his successor until a special election in November; if Byrd had passed after Saturday, the appointment would have been good for 2 1/2 years. (Caveat: a socially conservative Democrat? I'll believe it when I see it. Somehow when it comes to politics, democrats shed their so-called conservatism the minute it costs them anything.) 
  Commentary from John Miller on NRO:

It will be interesting to see who West Virginia governor Joe Manchin selects as Byrd's successor. Manchin is a socially conservative Democrat. Shortly after his first election in 2004, I interviewed him for an article in NR:

“In West Virginia, people look to see where you stand on life, marriage, and guns,” says Joe Manchin, the newly elected governor of that state, a Democrat with conservative views on social issues. “If you’re on the wrong side of just one or two of those issues, you’ve got a problem. If you’re on the wrong side of all three, you’re mortally wounded.” 

The mystery of Robert Byrd's illness

  Ah, these are political times.
  Not to be overlooked this evening is the announcement that Robert Byrd has been in the hospital for over a week. 
  An interesting date is upon us, it seems, as research done by Doug Powers and Salon reveal. Apparently this Saturday is an important date regarding the Byrd seat, should anything happen to him. (He is 92 and in poor health.) 
  It seems Byrd has missed numerous votes since at LEAST March, indicating he has been sick for a very long time without public acknowledgement. Read over at Michelle Malkin and Salon; follow the links for the rundown on how many votes Byrd has missed:

As others have noted, the key date here is July 3 — next Saturday. Under West Virginia law, were a vacancy to be declared before then, an appointee would hold the seat through this November, when a special election would be held to fill the final two years on the term Byrd was elected to in 2006. The winner of that special election would presumably seek a full term in 2012. Were a vacancy to be declared after July 3, an appointee would hold the seat through the 2012 election, when the full six-year term would be up.

Billboards around Northwest Ohio

Are you starting to get the pictures?