Lots of stories built up in the tabs this week that don’t quite warrant their own posts, but are interesting, nonetheless:
The Crimes of Gun Grabbing Mayors from Emily Miller. We have Google Alerts looking for criminal mayors, and let me tell you, this is not a group of people who should be lecturing any gun owner about gun ownership leading to crime. What we don’t publish is all the non-MAIG mayors who end up in trouble with the law, and as you can imagine,it’s far more numerous. Guns don’t cause crime, but mayors sure seem to.
Learning from the Election. I agree with much of Victor Davis Hanson’s take on this election. I’m challenged my his section on the Latino Vote. Much of what I’ve seen in regards to the Hispanic vote suggests it wasn’t immigration that drove them, it was the fact that they support Obamacare and the Stimulus in large numbers. Hanson’s prescription is “the Italian strategy” — to close the border and allow upward mobility to work its magic. I generally favor liberal immigration policies, but if the people you’re letting in believe in big government and social democracy rather than limited government and American republicanism, to what degree are you just committing national suicide?
The GOP ignores low-information voters at their peril. Bitter once talked to the daughter of a Democratic strategist when she lived in DC, who shared a disdain of this voting group. Partisans on both sides generally are much more informed than the average voter. But the person she talked to admitted Democrats encourage this voting group because they tend to break for Democratic candidates. This article suggests Democrats are doing a much better job marketing to this group than the GOP.
Sending in the health teams. Apparently the New York City Department of health is busy making sure restaurant standards are busy being kept up in relief tents. The response to this storm in New York has been at least as bad, if not worse, than Katrina, but you don’t hear the same wailing and gnashing of teeth in the media. Instapundit‘s characterization of this as “Katrina on the Hudson” is apt.
Billionaire’s Gun License is Suspended Amid Inquiry. It’s funny how millionaires and billionaires always seem to have “good cause” to get a license in New York. This, the 2nd Circuit has ruled, is a completely objective, and constitutional standard. That panel of judges is a disgrace to the Constitution, and we’re only going to see more of it now that Obama has been re-elected and Harry Reid is preparing the nuclear option. This is what happens when you elect people who care more about their own power than the document which limits it.
Could not have said it better on your last point about judges. They are absolutely (liberal judges) the greatest threat to our rights. Obama will nominate anti-second amendment judges, and republicans will vote for them just like they did sotomayor and kagan.
The issue with Republicans voting for them is very real … but if Reid gets too obnoxious, e.g. eliminates too much of the filibuster, that might change, especially if the Senate changes hands in 2015.
The Democrats aren’t looking very hard at what’s on the table in 2014. I wouldn’t mess with the filibuster rule if I were them.
Personally, I agree with Reid that if you want the filibuster, you should be required to hold the floor for the duration. But that could come back and bite them in the ass in two year if they are in the minority.
I have a number of friends who worked emergency communications after both Katrina and Sandy. From their reports, other than the Salvation Army and the utility workers there is essentially no emergency response after Sandy. And both of those groups have been hamstrung by local officials.
From personal experience, after Katrina some were disappointed that FEMA did not “send in the black helicoppers to take people off of roofs and did not send in the laser trucks to clear the roads.” But of course FEMA had no helicopters and no laser trucks. What FEMA did have was lots and lots of water, ice, MRE’s, and people determined to help anyone who needed help. For those of us whose homes were not destroyed, life was approaching normal in a couple of weeks.
Between the two, I consider the official response to Sandy a serious criminal offense.
Stranger
Errr, the National Guard is there is some numbers … and not initially in any law-enforcement role in NYC.
But as for Katrina, “after Katrina some were disappointed that FEMA did not ‘send in the black helicoppers to take people off of roofs….’“; no, that was done immediately by the National Guard and the Coast Guard. About the media malpractice, you need to know no more than that they ignored choppers constantly landing on a … parking garage I think it was next to the Superdome, a block or three away from Nagin pity party. I’m told it’s pretty hard to miss the sound of an up to 23 ton CH-47 Chinook….
There were also a lot of boats involved. Reason, I think, had a great article on all this, although I can’t find it right now.
“. . .if the people you’re letting in believe in big government and social democracy rather than limited government and American republicanism, to what degree are you just committing national suicide?”
That is a somewhat discomforting thought, because it comes remarkably close to some things the Know Nothings were saying about my Irish g-grandparents 160 years ago. “They could never be real Americans.”
But more discomforting yet, the Know Nothings were perhaps right, though their logic was a bit premature. Possibly to a greater extent than most other ethnicities, Irish maintained communication and cultural interchange with the old country, and when populist socialism came into its ascendancy in Ireland in the beginning of the 20th Century, it appears the sympathies of a lot of American Irish followed. There is a historical reason, I believe, why urban enclaves of American Irish vote as they do, and why in many ways their partisan sympathies here have mirrored their sympathies for Sinn Fein back in Ireland.
It may also be noted that their early experiences with “American Republicanism” mirrored more the British authoritarianism they had known and hated — codified exploitation of workers — more than it did what they considered to be and called “republicanism.”
I state the above objectively, and not critically. But a good question is, where in the world today can you find a nation that doesn’t promote government as big as can be (mis)managed, and that doesn’t at least give lip-service to “social democracy?” So, are you implicitly advocating sealing the borders against everyone — especially now that we out-socialize many of the nations of the world, and have for at least the last fifty years?
I can’t think about the above without thinking of my g-grandparents; would America be a better place if the congress of 1852 had succeeded in keeping them out? (They only succeeded in making them sail to Canada, after which they walked across the border into New York.)
I can’t think about the above without thinking of my g-grandparents; would America be a better place if the congress of 1852 had succeeded in keeping them out?
Well … I can confidently state that America would today be minutely but measurably less cynical if they and the line of descendants leading to you had been kept out ^_^.
It is left as an exercise to the reader if this would be good or bad.
(Me, I vote bad, because you occasionally make me think, and that’s not common; weasel word “occasionally” because often enough we more or less agree to begin with.)
“America would today be minutely but measurably less cynical if they and the line of descendants leading to you had been kept out. . .”
Hey, the first time I read Orwell’s “Nineteen-Eighty-Four” I said that as authors go, he was way too much the optimist for my tastes!
:-)
Well, to be honest I’m not sure sealing the border is really even possible. I don’t know what the solution is. It’s quite possible that we can’t maintain freedom to any great degree because no one, save a few, really wants it.
Well, we have two mutually exclusive choices we can pick from: open borders or a welfare state.
Or the bonus choice: national bankruptcy. Which might get … uncomfortable for illegal or even legal unassimilated aliens/recent aliens.