Tag: QotD

THIS Was Caused by a Video

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…I think it’s safe to say.

Cook’s Postulate is:

The key to understanding the American system is to imagine that you have the power to make nearly any law you want. But your worst enemy will be the one to enforce it. – Rick Cook

Dinesh D’Souza, vocal critic of Barack Obama and creator of the film 2016: Obama’s America, has just been given that lesson in spades.

D’Souza has been arrested and indicted for violation of campaign finance law. Specifically:

According to an indictment made public on Thursday in federal court in Manhattan, D’Souza around August 2012 reimbursed people who he had directed to contribute $20,000 to the candidate’s campaign.

The Justice Department in the form of the U.S. Attorney for Manhattan, Preet Bharara, proclaimed:

As we have long said, this Office and the FBI take a zero tolerance approach to corruption of the electoral process.

The mind simply boggles.

Nothing was done about voter intimidation in Philadelphia.

Nobody at Justice said “boo” when the Obama campaign accepted unverified credit card donations during his re-election run.

Not a peep out of the DoJ when Al Franken “won” his Senate race through voter fraud.

The list of “corruptions of the electoral process” are long and have been getting longer each year, but NOW the DoJ is ON THE JOB!

Like when the Bush DoJ prosecuted prominent lawyer Pierce O’Donnell for illegally contributing $26,000 to John Edwards’ presidential campaign the same way D’Souza is now accused.  O’Donnell accepted a plea deal and got “60 days in prison, a year of supervised release, 500 hours of community service, plus a $20,000 fine.”

I’ve been reading Harvey Silverglate’s Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, and one thing he points out early on is the power the DoJ has to coerce people into being witnesses:

Prosecutors are able to structure plea bargains in ways that make it nearly impossible for normal, rational, self-interested calculating people to risk going to trial. The pressure on innocent defendants to plead guilty and “cooperate” by testifying against others in exchange for a reduced sentence is enormous – so enormous that such cooperating witnesses often fail to tell the truth, saying instead what prosecutors want to hear. As Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz has colorfully put it, such cooperating defendant-witnesses “are taught not only to sing, but also to compose.”

Can’t wait to see who the prosecution will be dragging out as witnesses.

A recent Gallup poll indicates that “trust in government” is at an all-time low, with 57% of those polled indicating the trust the government “not very much” or “not at all” when handling domestic problems. But when queried on their faith in the Judicial Branch, 62% of those polled said they had a “great deal” to a “fair amount” of faith.

I think that’s about to change, too.

No matter what, the DoJ has bottomless pockets, and unless some high-powered law firm agrees to represent him pro bono, D’Souza doesn’t. 

It’s called “Lawfare,” and when practiced by the government against its citizens, it is particularly vicious. I have very little doubt that this is what is going on in the prosecution of D’Souza. I don’t know if he’s guilty or not. I DO know that when the Left is profiting, not a word is said, not a soul is prosecuted. When it’s their ox being gored, SOMEONE MUST PAY! And, honestly, I do not doubt that the Obama administration through the Holder Justice Department is exercising “the Chicago Way” here. As Glenn Reynolds put it:

Is there anything this administration does that isn’t politically motivated?

In other words, I know who I trust, and it isn’t the .gov.

UPDATE:  Read this.  Had enough yet?

Quote of the Day from Erik Prince, ex-CEO of Blackwater:

“Look,” he says, grasping to end our talk on an optimistic note, “America can pull its head out at any time. That happens at the ballot box. Ballot boxes have consequences still in America.” He continues: “But the American electorate has to actually pay attention, has to turn off the Xbox long enough to pay attention. Otherwise they’re going to continue to elect the government they deserve.”

Quote of the Day – Sultan Knish Edition

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Daniel Greenfield, who blogs at Sultan Knish, is also a contributor at FrontPage Mag.  His most recent column No Country for Liberal Republicans is chock-full of QotD material.  Here’s my selection for today’s serving:

In the last two elections, the bloodthirsty neo-confederate party of hate served up a liberal Republican, currently championing Obama’s illegal alien amnesty, and a liberal Republican, currently being blamed  by Obama supporters for inspiring ObamaCare. Its fantasy candidate for the upcoming election had spent the last election hugging Obama, and then signed off on tuition for illegal aliens and banned gay conversion therapy, and was, until a few weeks ago, being praised as the ultimate good Republican; only to be subjected to the same ritual media humiliations as McCain and Romney.

The same media that insisted that the murder of four Americans in Benghazi was not a scandal and that the murder of Brian Terry in Operation Fast and Furious was not a scandal is bleating that a little traffic is a scandal.  Not a little traffic in assault rifles, as in Fast and Furious, but in the distance between cars.

By all means, do read the whole thing.

Quote of the Day

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I’m still playing over at Quora.com.  I’ve recently had an interesting exchange on the question “What can gun owners learn from non-gun owners?” with REDACTED who advertises himself as a Theoretical Biologist at MIT. I won’t reproduce the whole thread, but I will pick out two excerpts from his comments:

(A)s soon as I learn that someone owns a gun, and is pro-gun ownership without heavy regulations, I totally judge them to be uneducated and conservative. Responsible or not, having a gun comes with a mentality of thinking it is ok to buy a killing device. I am happy to do that, because I have yet to meet an intelligent, well educated person who is pro-guns in real life.

But that’s not QotD. This is:

I was never against having guns for shooting ranges, I am against them as means of self-defense (or freedom).

So rare to find one willing to state that in public.

UPDATE:  With respect to the comments here, do you see why I like playing over there?  Talk about a target-rich environment! ;D

UPDATE 2:  Now that I’ve made him aware that I quoted him here, he’s apparently deleted the comment that started the thread these were taken from, thus eliminating the entire thread.  Interestingly enough, I can still access them, just not from the post in question.  Reasoned Discourse™ strikes again!  The guy IS the archetype!

For archival purposes, here’s the last part of that thread-in-question:

Kevin Baker
With respect to your admitted bias, I received a very interesting email this evening and got permission to pass it on. To wit:

“I work in downtown Boston…right across the river from REDACTED. If you can get him to commit to a definition of intelligent and well-educated that isn’t equal to ‘agrees with me,’ I would be happy to produce myself at a Boston Starbucks/Dunkin Donuts so he can, in real life, see a ‘well educated’ pro-2A person, who is also not a conservative.

“Although there’s a reason I normally stay quiet and listen while people like yourself are talking, I should be able to meet any bar for reasonably intelligent that he’s likely to pick. Credentials =/= intelligent or educated, but I wouldn’t trust his personal assessment, so credentials as a proxy would seem to be the way to go. In that vein – I have a Ph.D. from Harvard in Genetics, a Mensa membership card, and am a former Goldwater scholar.

“I self-identify as mostly libertarian – while he’s likely to see some of my views as conservative, I also have plenty that fit well with the liberal stereotype (e.g. I am an atheist that has no problem with gay marriage and would very much like the government to refrain from any involvement in reproductive health/decisions).

“My gunnie creds are pretty solid. In my own right, I am a NRA instructor, former SAS instructor/coordinator, former Hunter Ed instructor, former Board Member for a state 2A-rights organization, etc.

“I am happy to be Exhibit A in this instance.”

So if you’d like to broaden your experience with an educated non-conservative, there’s a volunteer willing to meet you right there in Boston! Let me know. I think this get-together would be FASCINATING.

REDACTED
The fact that he brings up mensa, after harvard, is quite puzzling.

The fact that Harvard is a rather conservative school, is well-established to me.

The fact that he contacts you, not me, for this, is also not clear.

The fact that he thinks he is exhibit A, is not too impressive either.

He is a very typical libertarian.

His gun certifications make me doubtful of whether I feel comfortable meeting him in person, I rather stay online, but I am willing to meet him if he promises not to bring any guns.

If we meet and I am proven false, I will happily change my statements and judgement about gun enthusiasts. He may define intelligence and education as he wishes.

Kevin Baker
Full disclosure: I’m a blogger, and I used a couple of excerpts from your comments there in a post this morning:

The Smallest Minority (This post – Ed.)

This respondent is not a member of Quora, has not read the thread(s), and sent me an email rather than leaving a comment on my blog – thus did not see your opinion of Mensa prior. And Harvard is conservative? Compared to UC Berkeley, but …

I will forward your response and see where it goes from there.

REDACTED
I am not sure if you were allowed to do that.

You put me at considerable safety hazard, by reproducing my full name and location. And by choosing specific parts of my writing you selected out of context, without my consent, in your own personal domain.

Even if this is legal ( not sure) , it is certainly unethical, which just makes me more worried that you own a gun.

You advocate individual rights, while you take the matter of my privacy completely in your own hands.

Kevin Baker
I beg your pardon? You’re posting on a public forum. Your information is available with a quick and simple Google search (as is mine). You have a Facebook page! And you’re worried about me “outing” you? And GUN OWNERS are paranoid?

If gun owners were 1/10,000th as dangerous as you make us out to be, there WOULDN’T BE ANY ANTI-GUNNERS LEFT.

There’s another related question on Quora – “What can non-owners learn from gun-owners” or words to that effect. How about this? That we’re normal, everyday people who aren’t hair-trigger (pun intended) killers just waiting to snap and blow away everyone in the closest Starbucks?

Good grief man, get ahold of yourself.

Yes, I selected excerpts from your comments. They were the most telling, so that’s what got excerpted. Welcome to internet infamy! Perhaps thousands of people will see your words!

Why else did you post them in the first place?

REDACTED
Hmmm, the safety hazard is not your judgement to make. If over then next 20 years half a million people read your blog (gross overestimate), there is a good chance there is more than a crazy person among them.

My uncle ( a successful surgeon) was shot paralyzed for life by a gun owner, a healthy but racist one, who profiled my uncle as an enemy foreigner in D.C. in 1980. Please give me some room to be paranoid.

What about the ethical perspective? do you think I get the right to stand by and discuss what I say when you present them out of context? No, you didn’t even inform me. That’s very very cowardly. Honestly, I thought you were radical but fair, that’s why I took a shot ( pun intended) to have a conversation. now I don’t even think that.

Why did I post them? because I was having a conversation with you, under your posting.

Thanks to this, I will never discuss these things with people like you. You get to say your stuff and applaud yourself, read some ethics, with an open mind, works on both fronts.

Also, in Quora’s terms of agreement:
(f) contains other people’s private or personally identifiable information without their express authorization and permission, and/or

Kevin Baker
We have already determined that what we were doing was NOT “having a conversation,” we were staking out our positions in a public forum. My condolences to your uncle, but there are crazies in every nation, and not all of them use guns (yes, I include homicidal bigotry as a form of insanity). And D.C. in 1980? Wasn’t that a gun-free zone then?

On the “out of context” argument, please go back and read the entire thread. They ARE the context. I did inform you, admittedly after the fact, but you’re more than welcome to respond in the comments. You needn’t leave an email address – anonymous comments are accepted.

I’m not radical, I’m fanatical – defined as “won’t change my mind, won’t change the subject and won’t shut up.” But I suspect you are the same.

It has been my experience that anti-gun people are of one of two types – those who have suffered direct or indirect loss from violence involving a firearm, or the merely philosophically involved. You are obviously one of the former, and for that reason your position is somewhat more understandable.

My posting of your comments was not unethical. What moral principle did I violate? Certainly not your privacy. I’m sorry you were offended/frightened, but that’s your perception, not my fault. Perhaps ten million people may eventually read THIS thread, and they can Google you just as I did.

Welcome to the internet.

My correspondent has replied:

“As I work in Boston and am not a MA resident, I will of necessity be sans firearms when I meet him. He can rest easy on that count.”

Contact information: [REDACTED]

Assuming, of course, that you’re not too frightened to carry through now.

With respect to subsection f) which you added above, please see the following under “Quora’s licenses to you”:

“Quora gives you a worldwide, royalty-free, non-assignable and non-exclusive license to re-post any of the Content on Quora anywhere on the rest of the web provided that the Content was added to the Service after April 22, 2010, and provided that the user who created the content has not explicitly marked the content as not for reproduction, and provided that you: (a) do not modify the Content; (b) attribute Quora by name in readable text and with a human and machine-followable link (an HTML anchor tag) linking back to the page displaying the original source of the content on http://quora.com on every page that contains Quora content; (c) upon request, either by Quora or a user, remove the user’s name from Content which the user has subsequently made anonymous;”

I’ll remove the link and description of you in my blog post, but it seems to me that subsection f) applies to posting HERE at Quora, not elsewhere. Also, it appears that I am remiss in not linking to this page in my blog post, per Quora’s terms, so I’ll be doing that instead.

See? Understanding of the law is a very important thing. Unless, apparently, you’re the President, and can just unilaterally decide what parts of the law you want to enforce or not.

I’ve edited just a tiny bit for readability, but that’s the end of a LONG thread exchange that he apparently doesn’t want anyone to read anymore.

I guess I can add another item to my list of things gun owners can learn from non-gun owners. I’ll leave it to you to determine what that item is.

Quote of the Day – Victor Davis Hanson Edition

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photo obamacare_pajamas_boy_as_che_12-22-13-3.jpg

The great mystery of America today is how many of us have joined Pajama Boy nation — 20%, 40%, 60%? — and how many want nothing to do with such metrosexual visions of a huge state run by a nerdocracy, incompetently doling out other people’s money. How many were on board for Obamacare, more entitlements, and lectures from the apartheid elite on inequality and fairness, versus how many turn the channel at sound of His voice.

—

Pajama Boy is the bookend to vero possumus, the faux-Greek columns, the Obama rainbow logo, cooling the planet and lowering the seas, hope and change, Forward!, “Yes, we can!”, the Nate Silver infatuation, Barbara Walters’ “messiah,” David Brooks’ crease, Chris Matthews’ tingle, and the army of Silicon techies who can mobilize for Obama but not for Obamacare. These are the elites without identities who feed on the latest fad. They are the upper-crust versions of those who once mobbed stores to buy the last Cabbage Patch Kids doll, or had to have a pet rock on their dresser. Obama, after all, was the lava lamp and Chia Pet of the young urban progressive.

— Victor Davis Hanson, Works and Days: Pajama Boy Nation

Quote of the Day – Tam Again Edition

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What can I say?  She’s the Empress of Snark™

I’m not sure whether the Canadian government gave it up for dashingly goateed Uncle Sam like a roofie’d lumberjack in a lonely logging camp or whether the NSA figured out that the master password for the OHIP was still set as “PASSWORD”, but there you go.

Whole battalions of radical Islamic terrorists might be coming across the southern border hidden inside the bales of marijuana, but we’re stopping that invasion of depressed Canadian paraplegics cold, right in its Little Rascal-ridin’ tracks.

Praising with Apocalyptic Damns

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Sorry, had to come out of hiatus for THIS Quote of the Day.  Former Enron Adviser Paul Krugman on Obamacare:

…we’re probably heading for a turning point in the health reform discussion. Conservatives are operating on the assumption that it’s an irredeemable disaster that they can ride all the way to 2016; but the facts on the ground are getting better by the day, and Obamacare will turn into a Benghazi-type affair where Republicans are screaming about a scandal nobody else cares about.

He said it, I didn’t.

Remember Benghazi? Of course you don’t.  The media has decided it’s a non-issue, which is what Krugman is counting on.  But the internet never forgets:


But if that’s Krugman’s best-case scenario for Obamacare, then it’s really, really bad.

Quote of the Day – Daniel Hannan Edition

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Daniel Hannan is a member of the EU Parliament representing South East England for the Conservative Party.  He’s authored a new book, Inventing Freedom:  How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World and has written a short piece for The Telegraph that Billy Beck pointed to on Facebook.

Here’s today’s QotD from that piece:

We are still experiencing the after-effects of an astonishing event. The inhabitants of a damp island at the western tip of the Eurasian landmass stumbled upon the idea that the government ought to be subject to the law, not the other way around. The rule of law created security of property and contract, which in turn led to industrialisation and modern capitalism. For the first time in the history of the species, a system grew up that, on the whole, rewarded production better than predation.

Savor that last line:  

“For the first time in the history of the species, a system grew up that, on the whole, rewarded production better than predation.”

And now, after centuries of this, we’re descending back to predation through crony capitalism and “too big to fail” businesses.

Quote of the Day – “Junk-on-the-Bunk” Edition

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Some time back, the Empress of Snark™ quipped:

It’s good to have goals. Mine is that, when they finally come after me for felony jaywalking or confuse my address with the crack house two blocks down, and in the aftermath spread all my stuff on bedsheets in the front yard, I want the kids on the intarw3bz gun boards to look at that junk-on-the-bunk display and say “Wow, that is an arsenal.”

But that’s not the QotD.

The latest news in the world is that George Zimmerman, the man who actually had to use a firearm in self-defense, and was found not guilty of murder by a jury of his peers after a modern-day media witch-hunt, is now in trouble on a domestic violence charge. The judge in the case demanded that Mr. Zimmerman surrender his firearms during the course of the legal proceedings.

Mediaite reports:

Following George Zimmerman’s recent arrest for alleged domestic abuse against girlfriend Samantha Scheibe, police conducted a search of the house where the couple had been staying that uncovered a large cache of weapons and ammunition.

What constitutes a “large cache” in the eyes of the Mediaite reporter?

Three handguns
One 12-gauge shotgun
One AR-15 rifle
106 rounds of ammunition, including two AR-15 magazines

Now, Mr. Zimmerman is only 30 years old, so he hasn’t had a lot of time to acquire much of a junk-on-the-bunk collection, but honestly – that’s pretty pathetic. I know there’s been a recent drought, but only two AR-15 magazines? Really?

I told you that so I could tell you this: Today’s Quote of the Day – the first comment to Popehat’s post on it is:

Jesus! That’s enough ammunition for the NYPD to shoot two people! — Ken White

Where would you like your internets delivered, Mr. White?

(h/t to SayUncle for the Popehat link.)

GeekWithA.45 on Health Care “Reform”

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He left this as a comment to yesterday’s QotD, but it’s too important just to leave there:

I’ve said it before. The pre-Obamacare healthcare market was already distorted by perverse, unnatural market forces, and that this sort of problem whose root cause was complexity was not going to be solved by adding additional complexity to it.

The only thing additional complexity would do would be to shake things up, find a new set of winners and losers, and generally cost everyone.

Coming off my yearly engagement with the think tanks, I’ve heard, for the first time, a series of data points coming from hospital CEOs that add up to one thing: the admission that exercising a hospital’s primary function is no longer a source of value and revenue, it is viewed as entirely cost, risk, and liability. Consequently, they are no longer building any capacity, and are in fact looking for ways to reduce their capacity and eliminate hospital beds.

The aging boomers are gonna love that when it comes home to roost.

Again, I think it bears repeating: the healthcare industry now views exercising its particular expertise and primary function as primarily a source of cost, risk, and liability.

That, as they say, isn’t sustainable.

In desperation, they’re looking to preventative care across their collective “healthcare community” (defined by what?) to save them, but at the end of the day, preventative medicine comes down to 3 things: “Don’t smoke, don’t be obese, and get a checkup once a year, do what doc says if they find something”. That will get them something, but not a whole lot. Humans being what they are, horsehair shirts never work.

The dark portent dripped across the whole thing is, of course, the premise that any lifestyle choice that potentially affects health becomes a matter of public policy, because it’s now a matter of public expense.

Welcome to the endarkenment, a peculiar state of nature.

I’m going to close this post with a quote from the Starship Nostromo’s AI “Mother”:

“The option to override detonation procedure has now expired.”

American healthcare is all over but the screaming.