Thoughts From A Conservative Mom

Archive for the ‘Self Defense’ Category

Self-defense is the ultimate “feminine protection.” Of course, gun-control nuts try to argue that the morally superior position is cowering in the corner, sans wallet, trying to dial 911 before you get shot.

The Oregonian reports:

Authorities arrested a would-be robber after he was turned away by a woman with a gun at a Vancouver Izzy’s Pizza restaurant Friday.

Wilbur Haisley, of Seattle, entered the restaurant on Northeast 78th Street shortly before 8 p.m. Friday, according to the Clark County Sheriff’s Office. A caller told authorities he had run up to a woman and demanded money.

But when the victim pulled a 9mm handgun from her waist, Haisley ran the other way. Sheriff’s deputies located him a short time later and arrested him for attempted robbery. Haisley was taken to the Clark County Law Enforcement Center, where he remained Saturday morning.

The victim had a legal concealed handgun license and will not face charges, according to the sheriff’s office.

She wasn’t a “victim”, precisely because she was able to defend herself!  Here’s what REAL victims look like:

Teacher shot and killed at Washington school

The Original Tea Party

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The Civil War and Gilded Age

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Progressivism

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FDR’s State And LBJ’s Society

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Big Gov’t and Tea Parties

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The Constitution and Freedom

Woodrow Wilson and the roots of Progressivism

Barack Obama and “The Second Bill of Rights”

America’s Ruling Class – And the Perils of Revolution

We the Serfs

WHO has changed how the constitution is interpreted?

The Obama administration’s lawsuit against Arizona, officially unveiled on Tuesday, is an affront to all law-abiding Americans. It is a threatening salvo aimed at all local, county or state governments that dare to take control of the immigration chaos in their own backyards. And it is being driven by open-borders extremists who have dedicated their political careers to subverting homeland security policies in the name of compassion and diversity.

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, headed by Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez, took the lead in prepping the legal brief against Arizona. The son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Perez is a far-left lawyer and activist who worked for the late mass illegal alien amnesty champion Ted Kennedy and served in the Clinton administration DOJ. While holding down a key government position there in which he was entrusted to abide by the rule of law, Perez volunteered for CASA de Maryland — a notorious illegal alien advocacy group funded through a combination of taxpayer-subsidized grants and radical liberal philanthropy, including billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Institute (not to mention more than $1 million showered on the group by Venezuelan thug Hugo Chavez’s regime-owned oil company, CITGO).

As a former Maryland resident, I got to see Perez’s militant friends and colleagues in action. I watched CASA de Maryland President Gustavo Torres (who met with President Obama last week) complain that motor vehicle administration officials have “absolutely no right to ask for people’s Social Security number or immigration status to get a driver’s license.” I stood among CASA de Maryland grievance-mongers who shouted, “No license, no justice! No justice, no peace!” while playing the race card against naturalized Americans and legal immigrants who opposed the illegal alien welfare state.

Perez, Attorney General Eric Holder and the rest of the open-borders DOJ team have invoked a “preemption” doctrine based on the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause to attack Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration measure and oppose local and state enforcement of federal immigration laws. Never mind that the Arizona law was drafted scrupulously to comply with all federal statutes and the Constitution.

Read more at Townhall.com

Republican Rep. Darrell Issa observes:

Arizona Police Can Enforce Federal Immigration Law: Read The Case Law

Elena Kagan is one of the most radical, unqualified individuals to ever be nominated to the bench.   The Family Research Council noted that she has “no judicial experience, never having litigated a case to verdict or trial.”

Discover the Networks, a reference guide on Leftist Radicalism, exposed that in her senior thesis at Princeton University, Kagan:

“…lamented that “a coherent socialist movement is nowhere to be found in the United States”; that “Americans are more likely to speak of … capitalism’s glories than of socialism’s greatness”; that “the desire to conserve has overwhelmed the urge to alter”; that “in a society by no means perfect,” no “radical party” had yet “attained the status of a major political force”; that “the socialist movement [had] never become an alternative to the nation’s established parties”; and that the Socialist Party had “exhausted itself forever and further reduced labor radicalism in New York to the position of marginality and insignificance.” Kagan called these developments “sad” and “chastening” for “those who, more than half a century after socialism’s decline, still wish to change America.”

During the hearing yesterday, Kagan asserted that the constitution was meant to be “interpreted over time”.  This is the key foundation of Progressive philosphy (introduced by Woodrow Wilson): that the constitution is a “living document” which must “evolve” over time, and judges are the ones who get to decide how. 

This is in direct contrast to how the constitution was originally designed by the founders: as the concrete law of the land, to be modified only by the people’s representatives (Congress) through the amendment process.  Judges were only to interpret the laws and the constitution as explicitly stated – not “legislate” from the bench by changing their “interpretation” to fit “modern” beliefs and attitudes. 

In a time when we need Constitutional Originalists who will honor the constitution as written - and leave it to the people and their representatives to change the laws as they see fit - Obama has appointed a judical activist who believes in an all-powerful judicial branch that can change the laws and reinterpret the constitution by judicial fiat. 

On Free Speech and Censorship:

In a brief for the United States v Stevens case, Kagan wrote,

“Whether a given category of speech enjoys First Amendment protection depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs.” 

Translation: Speech is free if the government decides it has more value than ‘societal costs’.

In September of 2009 Kagan encouraged the Court to adhere to a new philosophy on the First Amendment that would allow the government to censor posters, pamphlets, and TV and radio content–and the Internet.  She essentially argued that “it’s fine if the law bans books because the government won’t really enforce it.”

On the limits of the “Commerce Clause“:

During her confirmation hearing, she dodged a question by Senator Coburn on whether or not she believed Congress has, under the commerce clause, the right to tell citizens what they should eat.  She said such a law would be “stupid”, but refrained from declaring that it would be unconstitutional.  If she thinks government potentially has the right to tell you what to eat (which is obviously NOT the intent of the commerce clause), where would this radical draw the line?

On Abortion:

During the Clinton years, Kagan “manipulated the statement of a medical organization to protect partial-birth abortion“:

The documents…show Miss Kagan’s willingness to manipulate medical science to fit the Democratic party’s political agenda on the hot-button issue of abortion. As such, they reflect poorly on both the author and the president who nominated her to the Supreme Court.

On 2nd Amendment Rights:

Elena Kagan said as a U.S. Supreme Court law clerk in 1987 that she was “not sympathetic” toward a man who contended that his constitutional rights were violated when he was convicted for carrying an unlicensed pistol.

Kagan…made the comment to Justice Thurgood Marshall, urging him in a one-paragraph memo to vote against hearing the District of Columbia man’s appeal.

The man’s “sole contention is that the District of Columbia’s firearms statutes violate his constitutional right to ‘keep and bear arms,’” Kagan wrote. “I’m not sympathetic.”

On the Homosexual Agenda:

While serving as Dean of Harvard Law School, Kagan’s administration demanded and forced Blue-Cross, Blue-Shield to cover sex-change operations as an “equal right” paid benefit, harming gender-confused students, as confirmed in 2006 and 2008 by Harvard Crimson newspaper articles.

Kagan also offered sympathetic ear to lesbian group Lambda’s Transgender Task Force demand to force all women to share public bathrooms and locker-rooms with cross-dressing men, which is now part of Harvard’s dormitory policy, according to the report.

“This is further proof Elena Kagan cannot be trusted to impartially rule on Obamacare or bathroom bills like ENDA,” said Chaplain Klingenschmitt.

On the Military:

As the Dean of Harvard Law School, Kagan tried to bar military recruiters from college campuses.  Family Research Council observed that “at the time, even Ruth Bader Ginsberg, one of the court’s most liberal justices, couldn’t find a way to justify Kagan’s position.”

As if all this weren’t enough, Judicial Watch now reports that the White House interfered with an independent New York Times investigation by trying to deny access to Kagan’s Brother Irving, a teacher at Hunter College High School:

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has obtained documents from Hunter College High School regarding a White House effort to deny New York Times education reporter Sharon Otterman access to Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s brother Irving, who currently teaches at the New York school. Otterman requested and received permission from both the school and Irving Kagan to attend one of Mr. Kagan’s constitutional law classes before White House Deputy Press Secretary Joshua Earnest intervened.

“The Obama White House has no business interfering with independent press investigations of Ms. Kagan,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “These documents show that the Obama White House could care less about transparency on the Kagan nomination and is no friend of an independent media.”

How are the major networks covering this story?  With hogwash like this: “Elena Kagan shows off sense of humor in confirmation hearings”

She’d rule to restrict your 1st Amendment rights, your 2nd Amendment rights, and your 4th Amendment rights. But darn it, she makes us laugh, and that’s what’s most important in a Supreme Court nominee, right? Right? Apparently all the evening news broadcasts think so, because THIS is what they focused on. We have such a sorry, irresponsible journalism culture!

The Washington Times refers to the charade that now passes for confirmation hearings as “Kabuki theater”:

The hearings process for high court nominees has become ritualized to the point that it is almost useless. Nominees are extensively coached to avoid voicing a real opinion. There is no intellectual give and take. Spontaneity is largely absent. Anyone who can reasonably keep his cool and regurgitate platitudes for a few hours can enjoy a lifetime appointment to the most important judicial body in the land.

We know the intellectual milieu from which she has emerged. We know that her heart and mind are devoted to leftist causes and that she can be counted on to find rationales to further those aims in whatever cases come before the court.

When the president can nominate mediocre candidates for the high bench and expect the nominee to get through, it is proof that the confirmation process is broken. Ms. Kagan is a perfect example. She has no experience as a judge, a weak publication record, no evidence of being a leading legal scholar, and no reputation as a prominent intellectual. She does not deserve, and has not earned, such a high position of trust and authority. She certainly does not deserve the opportunity to have her offbeat opinions read into the law of the land.

WHO has changed how the constitution is interpreted?

Woodrow Wilson and the roots of Progressivism

The Case against Case Law

The Second Amendment is not that hard to understand — not if the person reading it has a lick of sense. I’ll prove it.

What does this sentence mean?

My over-exuberant neighbors having a wild party next door, my wife called the cops.

Not terrific English grammar but the meaning is clear enough. Cause: The noise made by the neighbors.  Effect: A telephone call to the authorities.

What does the Second Amendment really mean?

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,

(We are a new, free country. It is necessary to have a trained, weapon equipped, standing army to help keep us free. And because we will have a standing army),

the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

(if the army gets guns, so do the people, in case the army ever gets out of line.)

Cause: The government-controlled army has guns. Effect: The people, via constitutional amendment, demand, and are guaranteed, the right to weapons as well.

In short, the Second Amendment means what it says and it says what it means.

Read more at American Thinker

The Supreme Court’s rejection of Chicago’s handgun ban in McDonald v. City of Chicago is more than a recognition that the Second Amendment applies to the states as well as the federal government. The McDonald decision is a harbinger for the end of gun prohibition as an idea. The simple, undeniable truth is that gun control does not work.

McDonald brings the law up to speed with reality, where advocates of gun control have been wrong since the issue became a national discussion.

Strict gun-control policies have failed to deliver on their essential promise: that denying law-abiding citizens access to the means of self-defense will somehow make them safer. This should come as no surprise, since gun control has always been about control, not guns.

Three times in the last month, Chicago residents have defended their homes or businesses with “illegal” guns. In the first, an 80-year-old Navy veteran killed a felon who broke into his home. In the second, a man shot and wounded a fugitive who burst into the man’s home while running from the police. In the third, the owner of a pawn shop killed one of three robbers in self-defense, sending the other two running.

Read more at the National Review

Supreme Court extends gun rights nationwide

High Court’s Big Ruling For Gun Rights

The entire Western world has suffered from a deficit of moral authority for decades now. Today we in the West are reluctant to use our full military might in war lest we seem imperialistic; we hesitate to enforce our borders lest we seem racist; we are reluctant to ask for assimilation from new immigrants lest we seem xenophobic; and we are pained to give Western Civilization primacy in our educational curricula lest we seem supremacist. Today the West lives on the defensive, the very legitimacy of our modern societies requiring constant dissociation from the sins of the Western past—racism, economic exploitation, imperialism and so on.

When the Israeli commandos boarded that last boat in the flotilla and, after being attacked with metal rods, killed nine of their attackers, they were acting in a world without the moral authority to give them the benefit of the doubt. By appearances they were shock troopers from a largely white First World nation willing to slaughter even “peace activists” in order to enforce a blockade against the impoverished brown people of Gaza. Thus the irony: In the eyes of a morally compromised Western world, the Israelis looked like the Gestapo.

This, of course, is not the reality of modern Israel. Israel does not seek to oppress or occupy—and certainly not to annihilate—the Palestinians in the pursuit of some atavistic Jewish supremacy. But the merest echo of the shameful Western past is enough to chill support for Israel in the West.

The West also lacks the self-assurance to see the Palestinians accurately. Here again it is safer in the white West to see the Palestinians as they advertise themselves—as an “occupied” people denied sovereignty and simple human dignity by a white Western colonizer. The West is simply too vulnerable to the racist stigma to object to this “neo-colonial” characterization.

Our problem in the West is understandable. We don’t want to lose more moral authority than we already have. So we choose not to see certain things that are right in front of us. For example, we ignore that the Palestinians—and for that matter much of the Middle East—are driven to militancy and war not by legitimate complaints against Israel or the West but by an internalized sense of inferiority. If the Palestinians got everything they want—a sovereign nation and even, let’s say, a nuclear weapon—they would wake the next morning still hounded by a sense of inferiority. For better or for worse, modernity is now the measure of man.

And the quickest cover for inferiority is hatred. The problem is not me; it is them. And in my victimization I enjoy a moral and human grandiosity—no matter how smart and modern my enemy is, I have the innocence that defines victims. I may be poor but my hands are clean. Even my backwardness and poverty only reflect a moral superiority, while my enemy’s wealth proves his inhumanity.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

The Rush to Judge Israel

Helen Thomas revealed liberal media’s anti-semitism, ignorance of history

Felipe Calderon received liberal plaudits for falsely claiming Arizona’s new immigration law uses racial profiling, but that wasn’t the only baloney the Mexican president peddled during his state visit. Over four minutes of his Thursday address to Congress was spent lecturing Americans to renew the federal Assault Weapons Ban that sunset in September 2004. His justifications for the ban were all garbage.

Mr. Calderon’s claim that 80 percent of guns used in Mexican crimes come from the United States is completely false. Most weapons seized in Mexico have traceable serial numbers that show they come from countries other than the United States. The 80 percent number reflects how many guns sent to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for tracing end up being from America. Most weapons seized in Mexico aren’t transferred to U.S. authorities, so that figure is meaningless for calculating overall totals.

It is offensive for Mr. Calderon to come here as our guest and make up facts to blame America for Mexico’s many problems. But it was more frightening to witness Democratic House and Senate members jump up and give a standing ovation when the foreigner called for renewing the Assault Weapons Ban. That’s a warning all American gun owners should heed.

Read more at the Washington Times

Obama has apparently taken a step to disarm America, according to a document that has been leaked. The step is strategic and very cunning: begin with the military.

Access the document here.

The document reveals a proposal to force all military personnel to register all firearms—even privately owned firearms that are kept in their private residences. It would force a regular inventory of all such firearms concurrent with the regular inventories of military weapons.

Soldiers maintaining privately owned firearms in their private residences, off base, would be required to keep their weapons in locked containers or with trigger locks, unloaded, and have the ammunition secured separately from the weapon in a locked container.

The proposal calls for a complete prohibition of concealed carry of any weapon—even folding knives with blades 3 inches and larger—while on base. This prohibition will override state and county permits for concealed carry.

Personnel will be required to request in writing for permission to keep privately owned weapons off-base. Privately owned weapons and ammunition kept on-base must be kept in a monitored room and can be accessed only with approval of a commander.

While all this is bad enough in itself, the fear is that once enacted, such regulations could be used as a precedent for civilian infringements as well. “If this arms law is good enough for the military.…” Let’s stop them before they have the precedent.

Read more at American Vision

We’ve already got the National Guard, state marshals, county sheriffs and city police.  Why on EARTH does Obama need 6000 armed “domestic security forces” in the newly passed Health Care Law?  And why do they need to report directly to the President?

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Obamacare prescription: ‘Emergency health army’

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Just shows you who’s closer to the heartbeat of America!

In official Washington, some consider the Tea Party movement a fringe element in society, but voters across the nation feel closer to the Tea Party movement than they do to Congress.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 52% of U.S. voters believe the average member of the Tea Party movement has a better understanding of the issues facing America today than the average member of Congress. Only 30% believe that those in Congress have a better understanding of the key issues facing the nation.

When it comes to those issues, 47% think that their own political views are closer to those of the average Tea Party member than to the views of the average member of Congress. On this point, 26% feel closer to Congress.

Finally, 46% of voters say that the average Tea Party member is more ethical than the average member of Congress. Twenty-seven percent (27%) say that the average member of Congress is more ethical.

Read more at Rasmussen Reports

President Obama is splintering America. The passage of Obamacare was a historic victory for liberal governance. Yet, its true cost may be that it triggers the eventual breakup of the country.

Republicans vow to repeal Obamacare. Their past record, however, leaves many conservatives rightly skeptical. Since FDR’s New Deal, Big-Government liberalism has been on the march – Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Education. The Republican Party has been unable to roll back the tide of statism. In fact, under Richard Nixon and both George Bushes, Great Society Republicans have been complicit in erecting a nanny state.

The bitter debate over Obamacare has exposed the country’s profound divisions. We are no longer one nation or one people. Rather, there are now two Americas: one conservative, the other liberal. Increasingly, we no longer just disagree but we despise each other.

Our disagreements encompass everything – politics, morality, culture and history. We no longer share a unifying essence or common values. One half of America believes abortion is an abomination; the other half considers any attempt to repeal it as oppressive and sexist. One half opposes homosexual unions because it elevates immoral and unnatural behavior to the sacred status of marriage; the other half supports it as an extension of civil rights. One half reviles Mr. Obama’s socialist agenda, viewing it as the destruction of capitalism and our constitutional government; the other half embraces it as the culmination of social justice and economic equality. One half reveres America’s heroes – Christopher Columbus, George Washington, James Madison, Davy Crockett – and its glorious history; the other half is ashamed of its past, seeing it as characterized by racism, imperialism and chauvinism.

Ultimately, a country is not simply its geographical borders with the people inside of it. It is something more – and deeper. A nation must share a common heritage, language, culture, faith and myths. Once upon a time, Americans celebrated the same heroes, sang the same patriotic songs, read the same history and literature, and gloried in its exceptional nature: a city upon a hill, with liberty and freedom for all. It was understood that, for all of our different ethnic and religious backgrounds, America is a product of English and Christian civilization. Those days are long gone.

Instead, we are going the way our Founding Fathers warned us against: increasing balkanization and sectionalism. A constitutional republic – unlike an empire – is only as strong as its national cohesion. It is based not on imperial coercion but civic consent. Mr. Obama is recklessly pulling at the strings of unity, further polarizing us.

Read more at the Washington Times

H/T Barbara Curtis

If you can’t stand the heat, manufacture a hate-crime epidemic.

After years of covering racial hoaxes on college campuses and victim sob stories in the public arena, I’ve encountered countless opportunists who live by that demented mindset. At best, the fakers are desperately seeking 15 minutes of infamy. At worst, their aim is the criminalization of political dissent.

Upon decimating the deliberative process to hand President Obama a health care “reform” victory, unpopular Beltway Democrats and their media water-carriers now claim there’s a Tea Party epidemic of racism, harassment and violence against them.

Read more at Townhall.com

Republican Whip Rep. Cantor Says Campaign Office Was Shot At, Accuses Dems of Exploiting Threats