Advancing liberty one post at a time
They should stop shouting at the president and take their case to Congress as the Declare War Clause instructs. The best test of the truth of their claims will be their ability to persuade Congress to declare war against Syria and Afghanistan.
Your turn, folks.
The New York Times published an article on Monday suggesting that credit card companies surveil cardholders who purchase firearms.
The NYT piece, authored by Andrew Ross Sorkin, noted that a number of mass shooters purchased their weapons and ammo using credit cards. Banks are required to alert federal authorities to purchases exceeding $10,000, but there are rules preventing them from seeing precisely what goods users are purchasing.
Nonetheless, NYT’s Sorkin suggests that banks track purchases at sporting goods stores and gun shops and prevent cardholders from purchasing multiple firearms “in a short period of time” and report unusual spending patterns.
Visa, Mastercard respond:
“We do not believe Visa should be in the position of setting restrictions on the sale of lawful goods or services,” Amanda Pires, a Visa spokeswoman, told NYT. “Our role in commerce is to efficiently process, protect and settle all legal payments. Asking Visa or other payment networks to arbitrate what legal goods can be purchased sets a dangerous precedent.”
MasterCard similarly touted the “privacy of [cardholders’] purchasing decisions.”
Progressives know no bounds to their greed. Greed for power, for coercion, for curtailing of civil liberties, for pressuring others to do their bidding, for tyranny.
In a series of retrospectives on 1968, NPR reports on a sort of jury nullification that took place in Long Island and created a pre-Stonewall victory for gay rights and sexual freedom. In the summers, gay men would come out from New York City and elsewhere for sunbathing, house parties, and in some cases anonymous sex in a wooded area between the towns of Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines.
As I wrote elsewhere, we need to protect all of our rights, negative rights, that is. Our rights are not items on a menu from which you choose. You get all of them. The trick is to define an actual negative right. You don’t have a right to healthcare, for example. That’s a positive right. Don’t get hung up “negative” being a bad thing and “positive” being a good thing.
They are for every citizen, applicable in the given situation, not to privileged classes.
This morning, Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker signed the Trump Administration’s new regulation banning bump stocks.
. . .
The Administration’s main contention continues to be that language of the National Firearms Act and Gun Control Act—which has not needed clarification in some 80 years—is ambiguous in regards to bump firing, a contention we dispatched back in June. Yet the government is attempting to use this supposed ambiguity to shoehorn bump stocks into a statute that regulates possession of machine guns.
. . .
Regardless of what public opinion is at this moment, the law means what it says. The executive branch has the power to interpret existing law, not write new ones. The administration argues, essentially, that because the statute did not provide a separate definition of the terms “automatically” and “function,” that it gets to insert their own meaning. That simply isn’t the case. Administrative interpretations are supposed to do just that—interpret existing law—not give new meaning to an old one.
. . .
If the government really wants to regulate bump stocks, it needs to do so by passing a new law, not by assigning new meaning to an old one.
The administration’s ruling may satisfy gun-control advocates but political expediency is not the way to do it.
This “news” article in Politico demonstrates how bias by journalists infect their work which then influences public opinion.
House Democrats are planning to move several high-profile bills to combat gun violence soon after they take power in January, underscoring their belief that the political landscape has shifted dramatically on an issue that’s plagued American society for decades.
My bolded text.
Throw in a Republican to give it the veneer of bipartisanship.
Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), who has co-authored background checks bills with Thompson in the past, has already told reporters that he will back this latest effort as well.
Then the writers quote a Democrat who conveniently offered a statement that ties Republicans to the NRA:
“Republicans can’t win the House back if their position on guns doesn’t change,” he added. “This is now a top two or three issue for swing voters in suburban districts and until Republicans break from the NRA, they’re not going to win back the seats that they lost in 2018.“
Shameful. We need to protect all of our rights and the constitutional structure to protect ourselves from the greedy and power-hungry to control our lives.
45 years after War Powers Act, a first successful challenge.
In a vote on Thursday, the Senate passed S.J. Resolution 54, in a vote of 56-41. The resolution is a War Powers Act challenge to the unauthorized US involvement in the War in Yemen, and would require the US to cease its involvement, if a complementary bill passes in the House. 45 years to the day after the War Powers Act was passed, this is the first successful challenge.
Support for the War Powers Act has been bipartisan but this challenge is also bipartisan.
Judge Reed O’Connor, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, sided with Texas and the other states, saying the law cannot stand without the so-called individual mandate to get coverage, which Republicans effectively ended as part of a 2017 tax overhaul . Texas and its partner states argued that the requirement was not severable from the rest of the law and sought an injunction beginning in 2019.
I’m ignoring the political rhetoric and hysteria. This decision is sure to be appealed, and it occurred too late in the year so there are no changes to plans for 2019.
Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) is at it again:
“This is going to be the New Deal, the Great Society, the moon shot, the civil rights movement of our generation,” . . . “We can use the transition to 100 percent renewable energy as the vehicle to establish economic, racial and social justice in America.”
Where does she get this nonsense from? Maybe she’s channeling the vision of Data for Progress. Ronald Bailey:
By their lights, the feds should aim for 100 percent renewable electricity by 2035 by shuttering all natural gas and coal-fired generation plants. All fossil fuel emissions should be ended by 2050. All new passenger automobiles for sale in 2030 should be zero emissions vehicles; all rail, vehicles, and aviation should be totally fossil-fuel free by 2050. Other parts of the Green New Deal include reforesting 40 million acres of public and private land by 2035, greatly expanding mass transit systems, upgrading local water supply and management infrastructure, expanding federal regulation of the waters of the U.S., and requiring that all materials be recyclable by 2040.
The financial cost is only one part of this stupidity. This will not be a peaceful transition; more like the equivalent of an-all out shooting war in its destruction. Imagine all the destruction, destitute, hollowing-out of towns, cities, suburbs, and entire swaths of the U.S. All the shuttered power plants, and discarded trains, subways, automobiles, jets, bridges. Imagine, millions of government bureaucrats invading your neighborhood, ordering the bulldozing of everything in sight. Think you’ll be safe in your home? Fagetaboutit. Midnight raids on your home if you resist. “This must be done!” Quartering of workers and soldiers in your house. Attempts to violate your rights will be commonplace, all to impose this “vision”, but really a nightmare.
All to finally, ultimately, and for good, “achieve economic, racial and social justice in America”. How quaint, how. . . just.
Working for Liberty 