The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
CeaseFire PA is bragging that Sen. Pat Toomey called them with promises of pushing more gun control as he goes into his final year of this term.
As you may recall, the gun control legislation that Pat Toomey actually authored is not at all what Pat Toomey tells voters he’s backing. Toomey’s numbers were already anemic at best. I don’t see how telling American gun owners that they need to give up their gun rights in light of a terrorist shooting is good politics.
As if Bloomberg’s 700 large weren’t enough, Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly’s group are poised to spend $600,000 of other rich people’s money in Virginia races this year. They’ve been going after big donors as well, and it’s paying off. That’s 1.3 million dollars of anti-gun money being spent in a single state. That’s way more than NRA can afford to spend in a single state.
It was depressing to read this article, “How to Build a Digital Elephant, The GOP’s Biggest Obstacle in 2016,” this morning just after waking up. It’s essentially a story of how Silicon Valley oligarchs have built an impressive machine that the Republican Party is ill prepared to match, and it seems like a lot of candidates are making the same mistakes Mitt Romney made, in not getting his ORCA system off the ground until the election, where it spectacularly failed for lack of ever having been tested. What we’re seeing, essentially, is a bunch of rich billionaires buying Our Republic by creating an impressive analytical machine that helps Democrats reach low-information voters in large numbers with messaging compelling enough to them to get them to turn out, both at the polls and on the ground.
This isn’t the first time this has happened in our country’s history. William Randolph Hearst‘s yellow journalism machine managed to buy him enough influence to start a war. FDR coasted into office, and was re-elected three times largely because he understood how to use radio, when other candidates didn’t. It’s widely believed that Kennedy managed to defeat Richard Nixon in the 1960 election because he looked better on Television, and knew how to use Television. Obama almost definitely won the Presidency and re-election, because the people backing him understood how to use social media better than anyone else. Can the GOP learn in time?
Tying this back to gun rights, I don’t think the NRA is at all using these kinds of sophisticated analytics to understand its membership and other people NRA interacts with to understand more about them and how to motivate and message to them. Bloomberg has a ton of money to buy solutions to these problems, and if he figures this out before NRA does, we’re finished.
I like Glenn Reynold’s suggestion, “Meanwhile, if the GOP were smarter it would be pushing Google-unfriendly changes in tax and IP law, and couching them in Democratic buzzwords to make it hard for Obama to veto them. That would encourage Google to back off of the partisanship.” Not just tax and IP law, send a bill to Obama ending the H1-B program. That will really kick Google in the nuts. The GOP needs to learn to be ruthless to their enemies. Their unfortunate problem is they think their enemies are conservatives.
Mass confiscation now seems to be the official policy of the Democratic front runner. When asked about the Australian and British models, Hillary responded:
Australia is a good example, Canada is a good example, the U.K. is a good example. Why? Each of them have had mass killings. Australia had a huge mass killing about 20-25 years ago, Canada did as well, so did the U.K. In reaction, they passed much stricter gun laws.
In the Australian example, as I recall, that was a buyback program. The Australian government, as part of trying to clamp down on the availability of automatic weapons, offered a good price for buying hundreds of thousands of guns.
No, Mrs. Clinton, Australia offered $200 per firearm, often for guns worth thousands, and you either took the money and turned over your gun, or you went to prison. Australia forcibly confiscated every semi-automatic rifle in the country, and then offered a pittance in return, as a “so sorry.” Great Britain forcibly confiscated every handgun in the country, upon penalty of going to prison. And they were successful. Why? Because both countries had registration, so the police knew exactly who had them. Universal Background Checks are really universal registration. That’s not an exaggeration, it’s the truth, and it is the primary reason the gun control folks want them. How do we know this? Because every time we’ve offered a UBC system that doesn’t involve the registration component, they’ve rejected it. Registration is what they want, and look to where it lead in Britain and Australia. Now you have both the Democratic President, and Democratic front-runner endorsing the British and Australian model.
Folks, we are in real serious trouble if she wins in 2016. Real serious.
A big part of what drags down Toomey’s overall approval numbers is that he’s not very popular even with Republican voters- only 42% approve of him to 27% who disapprove. But most of those people will still vote for him in a general election even if they don’t approve of him, which is why he still leads the Democratic field.
That’s probably true, and likely will continue to be true as long as Democrats are howling at the moon mad. But what could it be that turned Republican voters off to Toomey? Gee, I wonder. How many gun voters are just going to not vote in that race? I volunteered for the guy in 2010. I will not be going forward, unless he makes it up to me and renounces the Manchin-Toomey fiasco, and votes for some things I want.
I get Toomey is trying to position himself as a moderate, but in a state with high levels of gun ownership, a strong hunting tradition, and about 1 out of every 7 adults citizens having a License to Carry Firearms, ours was not the issue to choose to go soft on.
Off topic:
If you look at that poll it shows Hillary losing to the GOP front runners in Pennsylvania. The prospect of losing The Keystone State should be putting Dems into a panic. If we go red, Ohio certainly will, and so will Florida. Where’s Hill’s path to the White House without those states?
Jim Webb is the only Democrat in the race who isn’t after your guns. So how about it, Liberal Gun Club? Sanders has always been a mixed bag on the issue, and he’s been distancing himself from the parts of his records that are actually good. Every Democrat except Jim Webb basically declared open war on us in that debate. If Democratic gun owners can’t give Webb a bit of a bump, to be honest, what good are you to the cause? If you only start clubs of like minded people who will gladly vote your gun rights away to Clinton, Sanders or O’Malley, really, what good are you? I’m not issuing this challenge because I hate you guys. I’d be thrilled if the Democrats supported gun rights, or were at least not openly hostile toward it. I’d be thrilled to see an insurgency in the Democratic Party that favored gun rights. This is your chance. He might not be the best candidate in the world, but the contrast on guns is stark here.
I in no way expect Webb to be the nominee. He doesn’t have the chops to win. But giving Webb a bump would help tremendously. The election in 2016 is sure to be very close, and if in 2016 the nominee does eventually lose the general election, the party might start to wonder if maybe those Jim Webb Democrats could have been useful. What’s made gun rights successful are single issue and near single issue voters who are capable of swinging close elections. Increasingly, the Dems are believing those numbers are already baked into the GOP voting figures, and the NRA can’t come up with new voters that are going to help Republicans and hurt Democrats. What keeps me up at night is I’m not sure they are wrong.
I think Jim Geraghty has summed it up best, “America Now Has An Openly Socialist Party”, but he notes about Hillary:
With that in mind, Hillary Clinton is the class of the field on that stage, and the only real obstacle to the nomination that remains is a Joe Biden bid. Compared with everyone else, she’s polished and knows what she’s doing. Even when she’s being robotic and inauthentic, she’s remembering her talking points, pivoting to her preferred issues. The software upgrades to her personality may look awkward when she’s alone, but she’s still a much, much better candidate than anybody else on that stage.
Geraghty is absolutely right about his assessment of where the Democratic Party has ended up, as the party of Democratic Socialism. But Bernie Sanders struck me as a formidable candidate given the populist zeitgeist among both the right and left base in this race. Back to Geraghty:
In one of the few surprises of the night, Bernie Sanders did his best to try to save her on her troubles with her personal e-mail server. He’s an old fool if he thinks Hillary will return the favor when he needs it.
That struck me as an unwise move on the part of Sanders. What better way to sink her as an establishment candidate than to ride that hobby horse? But I don’t agree with the rest of Geraghty’s assessment of Sanders. There is a tendency to want to dismiss populism — I speak as someone who has that tendency. There is no denying it anymore. Nothing I saw in the Dem primary convinces me that this is anything other than a race between Bernie Sander’s left-populism and Hillary Clinton’s left-establishmentarianism, and I think Bernie’s populism is going to be more appealing to the Democratic base.
I do have to agree with Geraghty about Jim Webb, in that “Webb has a good chance of winning the Democratic nomination in 1948.” But I don’t think anything I saw tonight will help Hillary stop feeling the Bern, and for anyone else to put serious pressure on either candidate.
God help us. The stakes are very high, and I don’t honestly think anyone who’s a real contender, on either side, is really anything other than a cartoon.
I’m always ambivalent about whether Hillary Clinton saying something anti-gun is really news. Is there anyone who thinks Hillary favors gun rights? Perhaps they might remember Hillary trying badly to run to the right of Obama on guns in 2008. There may be some remote tribesmen in New Guinea who are unaware that Hillary Clinton is anti-gun. But for the rest of us, I think this comes as no surprise:
Hillary Clinton slammed the Supreme Court as “wrong on the Second Amendment†and called for reinstating the assault weapons ban during a small private fundraiser in New York last week, according to audio of her remarks obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
This is my shocked face. I had no idea Hillary Clinton was an enemy of Second Amendment rights. No idea she supported assault weapons bans! I figured it wouldn’t be too long before Hil was out on a hunt with Sarah Palin sporting an AR in .308. Good thing we have the media around to keep us informed.
Trump’s success in the early primary season has pretty much baffled anyone who is an avid observer of politics. I’ve been reading Scott Adams series that Donald Trump is a master persuader, very skilled in the art of persuasion. I think there’s probably something to that, but the big fact that I think stands in the way of that theory is that Trump has run for President before, and never managed to get all that far. It’s possible that the environment had to be just right for his populist fire to start burning, and now he’s at the right place at the right time.
I’m not a regular reader of RedState, but this particular article caught my attention, and I think it’s a pretty good explanation for the Trump phenomena:
I don’t think the Trump support is reflective of any issue at all. I don’t think it’s even reflective of disgust with the GOP. I think it’s reflective of the disgust we have with the new unwritten rules of society …
… The reality is that people are excited to see, hey, here’s a guy who goes on TV, and if he wants to pop off at the mouth, he pops off at the mouth, and if this guy can rise to being President of the United States then maybe I don’t have to always shut my mouth and I can sometimes say what I feel and maybe I can call my annoying coworker ugly and not have to risk being sued, too.
Read the whole thing, as they say. That makes a lot of sense to me. I know I’m tired of the Troller in Chief in the White House stirring up division for political advantage, and sick of seeing people’s lives destroyed for expressing opinions that run counter to the prevailing left-wing orthodoxy. It is satisfying to watch someone giving the middle finger to the PC police and the media (but I repeat myself) and get away with it.
I was leaning towards Scott Walker out of the gate. Walker is a proven fighter and reformer,and he pulled it off while coming off as midwestern boring to the public. To me the ideal candidate is one who can maintain an air of public respectability and charm, but behind the scenes will eviscerate his enemies with a surgical precision. Walker did that very well. That is his record. Another political figure who is very good at that schtick? Barack Obama. In fact, I would argue that Obama is the master of this style, with a talent for it not likely to be seen again in our lifetimes.
Walker is out now, largely because I don’t think very many people wanted what he was offering. He probably also screwed himself by listening to the GOP consultant class rather than being himself. But I think he was ultimately done-in by the fact that a large part of the GOP base, the ones enamored with Trump, don’t want midwestern nice. They want vengeance, and Trump is playing to that.
Scott Adams is predicting Trump will go all the way, and win the Presidency in a landslide. I will admit, I’d vote for Trump over any of the three possible Democratic candidates, but I will definitely have a “Dear God, what have we done?” moment if that ends up being the choice. Right now I don’t have a horse to back, and it’ll probably stay that way until I can see whether Carly can build momentum, or whether she starts getting repetitive. I’m also keeping an eye on Rubio.
This just might lead you to believe that an election is coming up, because there were plans for a gun rights group to protest Pat Toomey’s office, but they were cancelled when apparently, “a Toomey staffer promised the senator would not reintroduce the high-profile gun control bill known as the Toomey-Manchin proposal that stalled in the Senate two years ago.” The article notes Democrats are exploiting this weakness:
A spokesman for Democratic Senate candidate Katie McGinty […] accused Toomey of telling gun-control advocates one thing and gun rights advocates another and said he is “playing politics with the issue of gun safety instead of being honest with the people of Pennsylvania.â€
The truth hurts, don’t it Pat? She’s got your number. My impression that Toomey still has a pretty good chance of winning the election. Pennsylvania likes dull, bland politicians, and he fits that role like a glove. We will almost certainly be able to get a number of pro-gun votes out of him if he stays in office that we would not from any potential Democratic challenger. Personally, I’d rather have Casey and Manchin’s seats than Toomey’s, even though I’m still angry at his concessions on this issue.
If you’re like me, you find nothing particularly new or interesting about vapid celebrities bloviating on gun control, it’s been a slow news cycle over the past week. In some ways, I hate to complain about that, because careful what you wish for. These days I’m reminded I was complaining a lot before the Sandy Hook gun control fight that things were getting pretty boring in the issue. Charles C.W. Cooke recently did an interview with Ann Coulter speaking about The Donald, including his vacillation on gun control topics over the years.
I’ve long argued that people can be educated, and that those who seek and hold political office will often gravitate towards or away from positions based solely on political expediency. That Trump once held a different opinion doesn’t bother me too much. But all things being equal, I’d rather have a candidate who’s been more solid on the issue over the years. Coulter is correct that Kasich once voted for an assault weapons ban, but has since come to Jesus. I don’t think Kasich has a prayer of winning the nomination.
These days, I’m kind of leaning toward Carly, who has been pretty consistent for at least a few years on the gun issue, and I’m impressed with how well she handles hostile media. But I’d still classify myself as undecided.
