House Democrats just
refused to pay for President Barack Obama's plan to relocate prisoners
from the Guantanamo detention facility where enemy combatants are being
held.
Obama has signed an executive order to close the facility
at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by early next year, but the Pentagon has yet to
come up with a plan on where to put the 240 or so prisoners. Between
50-100 are likely to be sent to the United States.
No lawmaker
wants the accused terrorists in their backyard.
Obama's CIFTA Lie
CIFTA is the proposed
Organization of American States treaty on firearms trafficking,
known by its Spanish initials as
CIFTA.
Obama is
working to get the CIFTA treaty through the Senate. This
push is a result of his recent trip to Mexico and and his claimed
attempt to halt to flow of guns into Mexico.
The problem is that Obama is using
faulty statistics to push this treaty and infringe upon the right of the
American People to keep and bear arms.
Obama says that 90% of
the guns recovered in Mexico from drug cartels come from the United
States. This isn't true. The fact is, nobody really
knows. Yes, lots of guns seized in Mexico come from the United
States. No question. But that's indicative of a whole
other sort of problem. The fact that drug runners can get guns
doesn't mean that America should end-run the Second Amendment.
That's just poor logic.
Another point is Obama's faulty logic -- that 33
nations in the Western Hemisphere have signed on to this treaty, so
it must be good. This is an incorrect conclusion -- those
nations do not have a Second Amendment to the Constitution.
Beyond that, since when did the United States of America follow
the examples of Venezuela, Chile, Nicaragua, and yes, Mexico?
It is the United States that should be setting the example here --
not the other way around. This is just an encore performance
from Obama's "Hate America Tour, 2009."
Obama has no clue how to help Mexico but sees an
opportunity to help his agenda. It is obvious that Obama's teams
at the Justice Department and the State Department are exploiting the
violence in Mexico to justify more restrictions on gun ownership by
Americans. Obama's hostility
to the Second Amendment has been clear for years. This may be yet another example of Rahm
Emanuel's maxim: "Never let a good crisis go to waste."
In an
article written by Rep. Tom Tancredo on April 30th, Tancredo asks the
question, "Why the Lies About Guns Going to Mexico? "
The Mexican Ambassador to the United
States, Auturo Sarukhan, appeared on a CBS news program recently and
repeated a lie we have heard for many months about the violence in
Mexico. The ambassador says Americans are to blame for the
violence wrecked on his country by the Mexican drug cartels because
"most of the guns confiscated by Mexican police can be traced back to
the United States. That is not true, but the way that claim has
been accepted by American politicians and the mainstream media raises
suspicions about a hidden agenda.
ATFE's Fake Number:
We can almost forgive the Mexican
ambassador for being confused when the United States agency responsible
for enforcing our gun laws, the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives (ATFE), has made so many contradictory
statements on the matter. ATFE Assistant Director William Hoover
told Congress last year that 90% of the weapons seized in Mexico crime
scenes can be traced to gun sales in the US.
The problem is that 90% number isn't
true. Yet, that hasn't kept it from being picked up and used by
members of Congress, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and, of course,
Mexican officials like Ambassador Sarukhan who are eager to blame the US
for Mexico's problems.
Real Weapons Source:
The 90% number reported by Hoover came
from a small group of weapons turned over to the U.S. for tracing, but
they were by no means all of the weapons seized by Mexican authorities.
A spokesman for the ATFE, Matt Allen, has now "clarified" the number and
admitted that only 17% of the weapons found at crime scenes in Mexico
have been traced to the U.S. Ironically, while Mexican officials
have freely used the 90% number from the ATFE, they have not themselves
made such a charge based on their own numbers. The truth is, they
know better.
We can easily understand Mexico's reasons for preferring
the 90% number to the more accurate 17%. Mexico does not want to
openly discuss the many other sources of advanced weapons being used by
the drug cartels. Thousands of advanced weapons and tons of
military equipment are stolen from its own military and state police.
Weapons are smuggled across its southern borders from Guatemala and by
boats landing on its 8,000 miles of coastline, weapons that often
originate in Venezuela, Colombia, and Nicaragua, or from purchases in
Eastern Europe. But it is easier for a Mexican politician to blame
the U.S. than to explain his own government's failure to police its
borders, its ports of entry and its military installations.
Did the Mexican
ambassador mention that over 100,000 soldiers have deserted the Mexican
army in the past seven years and that many of them took their weapons
with them and joined the cartels?
Update: Ron Polarik,
PhD,
observes that whether it's drug cartels, the Army, or the local
Politsia, Mexico gets the vast majority of its guns from countries
other than the United States.
Care to bet which country supplies the most arms to
Latin America? (HINT: Not the US. Not
even close)
Percentage of Supplier Deliveries
Value by Region, 2000-2007 -- Source:
U. S. Government
Supplier
Asia
Asia
Near East
Near East
Latin America
Latin America
Africa
Africa
2000-2003
2004-2007
2000-2003
2004-2007
2000-2003
2004-2007
2000-2003
2004-2007
United
States
33.44%
32.83%
63.46%
62.67%
2.75%
4.00%
0.35%
0.49%
Russia
85.16%
69.19%
10.97%
16.76%
0.65%
10.81%
3.23%
3.24%
France
10.53%
19.51%
85.96%
74.39%
1.75%
4.88%
1.75%
1.22%
United
Kingdom
4.00%
6.32%
96.00%
84.21%
0.00%
2.11%
0.00%
7.37%
China
55.17%
56.10%
31.03%
21.95%
0.00%
2.44%
13.79%
19.51%
Germany
64.71%
39.13%
23.53%
13.04%
0.00%
0.00%
11.76%
47.83%
Italy
20.00%
20.00%
20.00%
0.00%
40.00%
20.00%
20.00%
60.00%
All Other
European
18.92%
28.26%
58.11%
34.78%
9.46%
26.09%
13.51%
10.87%
All Others
73.03%
61.22%
14.61%
18.37%
4.49%
14.29%
7.87%
6.12%
I received the following information via
email and awaiting a source/link:
Since the Constitution says
that US treaties are ABOVE the Constitution, Obama can use CIFTA and
other treaties to get a bare majority of the Senators to repeal the
2nd Amendment, without going through the arduous process of getting
the agreement of 2/3rds of each house of Congress and 3/4ths of the
sates; if CIFTA is passed by 51% of the Senate, is the de facto law
of the land and presto, our gun rights are GONE.
The Supreme
Court has already ruled in a case in California (where a gasoline
additive was leaking into the groundwater) that the citizens had no
right to sue under the Constitution, because this case involved
NAFTA (I don't recall the specific facts, I think it's because the
additive was made in Canada).
Obama's Choice For SCOTUS
Leading Supreme Court candidate says courts make policy (00:34)
Courtesy of www.verumserum.com. Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor, considered a leading contender to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court
of the United States (SCOTUS), speaks on a panel at Duke University Law School in 2005. She is responding to a question on the pros and cons of different types of judicial clerkships.
I was taken by the
approving laughter from Duke's legal community that followed
Sotomayor's comment. It's like, yeah, we all know that's how it
works -- even if it isn't supposed to.
It's no wonder this
bunch was so quick to lynch the Duke Lacrosse team.
Obama's Iran Policy A Fantasy
Former US House
Speaker Newt Gingrich on Sunday
blasted Obama for setting itself on a collision course with Israel
and endangering the Jewish state.
"They are systematically
setting up the most decisive confrontation that we've ever seen,"
referring to news reports about the administration's approach to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"There's almost an eagerness to
take on the Israeli government to make a point with the Arab world,"
Gingrich said, speaking to the Jerusalem Post ahead of his speech before
the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual conference.
He called Obama's program of engagement on Iran a "fantasy," and his
Middle East policies "very dangerous for Israel." He summed up Obama's
approach as "the clearest adoption of weakness since Jimmy Carter."
Instead, he maintained, the US should be sending the message to
Israel that "we are for the survival of Israel" and that "we are not
going to tolerate Iran getting nuclear weapons."
A Free And Independent Press
White House reporters stand for Obama, but not for Bush (00:21)
Speaking About The Fourth Estate
Andrew W. Smith
writes that the Portuguese water dog and Alaskan
hillbillies "news stories" apparently leave little time for anything
remotely skeptical of Barack Obama -- and they wonder why folks aren’t
buying the papers like they used to.
So here is a small
selection of Obama news items that the press has
deemed unfit to print:
• Obama’s first two major bills
alone, the "stimulus" and "omnibus," cost nearly twice as much as was
spent on Iraq over six years -- $1.2 trillion vs. $650 billion.
•
Obama abandoned his campaign promise of "a net spending cut," his first
annual deficit -- not counting bailouts -- being three times the worst
deficit under President George W. Bush.
• Obama’s objective
in his first G20 summit -- commitments to spend our way to prosperity
with massive stimulus boondoggles across the G20 -- was rejected out of
hand.
• Obama’s objective in his first NATO summit --
commitments to combat troops for Afghanistan from "our European allies,"
which Obama and his party imagined were ready and willing to fight if
only someone "enlightened" like him were running things -- was
predictably refused, with some more European non-combat contingents
offered as a token.
• Obama’s Defense Department announced
cuts of $1.4 billion to missile defense, the day after North Korea
test-fired its long-range, multi-stage ballistic missile.
•
Obama’s economics were criticized by Warren Buffet, whose endorsement
had been candidate Obama’s highest economic credential.
•
Obama reversed the free trade Bush policy that had allowed about 100
Mexican tractor-trailers into the United States, which the Mexican
government immediately used as an excuse to levy tariffs on 90 American
goods amounting to $2.4 billion in U.S. exports.
• Obama’s
"tax cuts for 95 per cent" turned out to mean $13 a week from June to
December, to be clawed back to $8 a week in January -- as compared with
President Bush’s 2008 tax rebates of $600 to $1,200 plus $300 per child,
which were notably scoffed at during the election campaign by Michelle
Obama.
• Obama’s campaign promise of a $3,000-per-employee
tax credit for businesses that hired new workers -- repeated ad nauseam
for weeks before the election -- was discreetly retired even before
inauguration day.
• Obama abandoned his campaign promise
that "lobbyists won’t work in my White House," waiving his no-lobbyist
executive order or conveniently re-defining his appointees’ past
lobbying work to allow 30 lobbyists into his administration.
•
Obama abandoned his campaign promise to reform earmarks, signing the
omnibus bill which contained 8,816 of them.
• Obama took
more money from AIG than any other politician in 2008 -- over $100,000
--
and signed into law the provision guaranteeing the AIG bonuses which
later had him in front of the cameras "shaking with outrage" and sicking
the pitchfork crowd on law-abiding citizens who had fulfilled their end
of a contract and had their payment upheld by Obama’s own legislation.
The people need a Fourth Estate, not another adulator of
Barack Obama, not another smearer of Sarah Palin, not another patrician
editor to spike news items disagreeable to progressive sensibilities,
not another laptop-and-latte journalism-scholar to spit on everything
remotely American.
And they wonder why the news business has come on
hard times.
