Why does anybody need a 30-round magazine?

By William A. Levinson
http://www.americanthinker.com
January 3, 2012

Senator Dianne Feinstein's latest divide-and-conquer attack on the Second Amendment has made even Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) a sucker for the argument that private citizens do not need high-capacity magazines. These include not only 30-round rifle magazines, but 17-round magazines for handguns like the Glock.
Why does anybody need a high capacity magazine? If Senator Manchin were to educate himself by, for example, attending Front Sight's four-day defensive handgun class, he would learn the two primary answers:

(1) Failure to stop the aggressor, and

(2) Multiple aggressors

Failure to Stop
The classic .38 caliber revolver, with a capacity of six rounds, was the standard sidearm of the United States Army during the Moro insurrection in the Philippines. The Army found at least one dead Army officer with an empty sidearm, and his head split open by a machete or similar weapon. They also found the soldier's killer, who had finally bled to death. Six rounds of .38 were therefore not enough to convince even one determined attacker.
Police instructor Masaad Ayoob's The Truth About Self Protection adds an incident in which a female police officer saw a crazed gunman murder a woman, who then shot her as well before she could do anything. "She lay helpless as she watched a neighbor empty a .22 rifle into the killer; the neighbor then had to club the madman down with the empty rifle, again and again, before he succumbed."
Ayoob does not report the size of the .22's magazine, but the Moro insurrection exemplifies why even a 30-round rifle clip might not be enough to stop a crazed and determined attacker, such as one hopped up on a drug like PCP. "He had 32 Krag balls through him and was only stopped by the 33rd bullet -- a Colt .45 slug through both ears." The Krag-Jorgensen's 30-caliber cartridge was far more powerful than the .22 in Ayoob's example, but not sufficiently powerful to civilize this particular attacker even when fired in mass.
Colonel Jeff Cooper's To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth adds the case of a man who was prosecuted for shooting his attacker eight times with a .380 automatic pistol. The prosecutor admitted that the dead man had been the aggressor, but argued that the shooter had taken the law into his own hands by continuing to shoot an adversary who had "obviously" been disabled. Cooper, whom the defense called as an expert witness, cited a suicide in which "the deceased shot himself amidships four times with a .380 Webley. Presumably the first three hits did not convince him."
The .45-caliber Automatic Colt Pistol was the Army's specific solution to the "failure to stop" problem in the Philippines. A single hit from a .45 caliber bullet will (per Cooper) stop the aggressor 95 percent of the time. This does not mean, however, that 7 or 8 rounds are enough for all conceivable defensive scenarios. Front Sight teaches students to change magazines in (ideally) less than two seconds. The other issue that Senator Manchin fails to recognize is that of multiple attackers.
Gang Bangers and the Knockout Game
Front Sight's 4-day defensive handgun class included scenarios with multiple aggressors, including four gang bangers on a street and five or more in a house (along with innocent bystanders). Front Sight's standard doctrine is to fire a controlled pair into an aggressor's thoracic cavity and, in the event of failure to stop, another into his cranio-ocular cavity to take out his central nervous system.
In the street gang situation, though, one shot is fired into each gang member due to the need to economize on both time and ammunition; only those that don't go down (or flee) then get "seconds." You might conceivably stop four gang members with seven or eight rounds of .45 ACP; that is what the cartridge was designed to do. A small man or woman who can handle only a 9 mm comfortably might not be able to end the incident even with 15 or 17 rounds, unless he or she can make the far more difficult head shots. It is particularly telling that most police officers carry either .45s or high-capacity 9 mm sidearms.
Then there is the knockout game, in which a street gang selects a victim at random, knocks him or her down, and then maybe beats him or her to a pulp. Here is an example that involved six individuals; only one struck a blow, but the others seemed to approve. Although the Web page and the book it promotes focuses on black racial violence, there is similar Caucasian-on-black crime, such as that perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan. In any event, if there are six (or more) bad guys, you are obviously going to need far more than six bullets.
The anti-Second Amendment camp may argue that the teacher who was assaulted in this video would not have had time to defend himself with a firearm or anything else, because his attacker hit him by surprise. (While use of a firearm in response to a fist might normally be considered excessive force, multiple aggressors, even unarmed ones, create a disparity of force situation that might indeed justify a lethal response. The same applies if a single unarmed aggressor is much younger, bigger, and/or stronger than the victim, e.g. a teenage punk against a senior citizen or woman.) This is where the five conditions of mental awareness, as taught by Front Sight, come into play.
States of Mental Awareness
The knockout game victim was in what Front Sight calls Condition White, which means he was not paying attention to his surroundings. Front Sight recommends living in Condition Yellow. This does not mean a state of paranoia but it includes, for example, not getting too close to alleys or other positions from which you can be ambushed. It also means looking around you when you are handling your car keys in a parking lot. Violent criminals often avoid people who are clearly alert; they, like all predators in the animal kingdom, don't want to take a chance with anybody or anything that might hurt them.
Condition Orange means you have identified a potential threat. Had the teacher been in Condition Yellow, he would have seen the six young males in time to recognize them as such. Condition Orange can prevent a confrontation before it even becomes a confrontation. You don't get hurt, and you don't have to explain to the police why you hurt somebody else.
Condition Red means a known threat is in front of you. In the case of an imminent "knockout game," you have laid out in your mind how you are going to put the gang bangers down if they escalate to Condition Black by initiating hostilities.
Senator Feinstein's latest attack on the Second Amendment relies entirely on public ignorance of firearms and their legitimate uses, and this ignorance extends even to many people who support the principles of the Second Amendment. Education is the cure for ignorance and Front Sight, along withGunsite (founded by Colonel Cooper) offers some of the best.
William A. Levinson, P.E. is the author of several books on business management including content on organizational psychology, as well as manufacturing productivity and quality.

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Mohammed Morsi Slams Israel as ‘Pigs’ and ‘Bloodsuckers,’ Promises ‘War’

By Bryan Preston
PJ Media
http://pjmedia.com
January 3, 2012

The Muslim Brotherhood man who now leads Egypt has been lauded for brokering a kind of peace between Israel and Hamas in 2012. Two years prior to that, before he held the Egyptian presidency and led the faction re-writing that country’s constitution, Morsi spoke about the Israelis.

The words he used and the tone he took are both inflammatory.

In a video taken September 23, 2010, Morsi said “These futile [Israeli-Palestinian] negotiations are a waste of time and opportunities. The Zionists buy time and gain more opportunities, as the Palestinians, the Arabs, and the Muslims lose time and opportunities, and they get nothing out of it. We can see how this dream has dissipated. This dream has always been an illusion. Yet some Palestinians, who erroneously believe that their enemies might give them something… This [Palestinian] Authority was created by the Zionist and American enemies for the sole purpose of opposing the will of the Palestinian people and its interests.”

Morsi went further: “No reasonable person can expect any progress on this track. Either [you accept] the Zionists and everything they want, or else it is war. This is what these occupiers of the land of Palestine know – these blood-suckers, who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.”

Morsi also promoted “all forms of resistance” against Israel, calling for military resistance against the “criminal Zionists” along with supporting “resistance fighters,” i.e. terrorists who attack Israeli civilians. He called on Muslims and Arabs all over the world to “support” such fighters, but did not specify what such support entails. He called on “Zionists” to be “driven out of our countries.” He stated that he does not recognize the “Green Line.” Morsi also called for boycotts against Israel and all countries that support it, including the United States. The United States is currently consideringsending Morsi’s Egypt a gift of 20 F-15 fighters and 200 Abrams tanks.

The language Morsi deployed bears striking similarities to the accusations and insults that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad routinely deploys against the country. Ahmadinejad has called for the “fake regime” to be “wiped from the map.”

Just this week an aide to Morsi predicted that Israel would cease to exist within a decade.

Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood is the ideological forerunner to terrorist groups Hamas, Hizballah, al Qaeda and others.

Bryan Preston has been a leading conservative blogger and opinionator since founding his first blog in 2001. Bryan is a military veteran, worked for NASA, was a founding blogger and producer at Hot Air, was producer of the Laura Ingraham Show and, most recently before joining PJM, was Communications Director of the Republican Party of Texas.

Al Gore's Current TV bought by Al Jazeera

Leftist/Jihadist Alliance: Al Jazeera acquires Current TV

By Robert Spencer

http://www.jihadwatch.org

January 2, 2013

As I noted earlier today, Al-Jazeera has been dubbed "the most powerful voice of the Muslim Brotherhood." And Pamela Geller has noted that "Al Jazeera is the leading terrorist propaganda organization in the world. Jihad murder mastermind Anwar al-Awlaki has praised Al Jazeera, and several years ago one of its most prominent reporters was arrested on terror charges. Al Jazeera also has for years been the recipient of numerous Al Qaeda videos featuring bin Laden, Zawahiri, and American traitor Adam Gadahn. Yet they never seem to be able to trace where these videos are coming from. They have repeatedly been set up at the point of attack right before a bomb went off, so that they could take the picture of the slaughtered, dismembered bodies."

The Left and the jihadis have been cooperating for years. This makes their alliance official.

"Al Jazeera Acquires Current TV," by Brian Stelter for the New York Times, January 2 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

6:48 p.m. | Updated Al Jazeera on Wednesday completed a deal to take over Current TV, the low-rated cable channel that was founded by Al Gore and his business partners seven years ago.

Current will provide the pan-Arab news giant with something it has sought for years: a pathway into American living rooms. Current is available in about 60 million of the 100 million homes in the United States with cable or satellite service.

Rather than simply use Current to distribute its English-language channel, called Al Jazeera English and based in Doha, Qatar, Al Jazeera will create a new channel, called Al Jazeera America, based in New York. Roughly 60 percent of the programming will be produced in the United States, while the remaining 40 percent will come from Al Jazeera English.

Al Jazeera may absorb some Current TV staff members, according to people with knowledge of the deal who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. But Current’s schedule of shows will most likely be dissolved in the spring.

“Al Jazeera is planning to invest significantly in building ‘Al Jazeera America,’ a network focused on international news for the American audience,” the Current chief executive Joel Hyatt said in an e-mail to staffers on Wednesday evening. Referring to Mr. Gore, he said, “Al and I will both serve on the advisory board of Al Jazeera America, and we look forward to helping build an important news network.”

The plan will bring Al Jazeera, which is financed by the government of Qatar, into closer competition with CNN and other news channels in the United States.

For Al Jazeera, the acquisition is a coming-of-age moment. A decade ago, the Arabic-language channel was reviled by American politicians for showing video tapes and messages from al Qaeda members and sympathizers. Now it is acquiring an American channel.

“They really want to be able to compete for American viewers, and they have to find some way to get on,” said Philip Seib, the director of the center on public diplomacy at the University of Southern California and the author of “The Al Jazeera Effect.”

Mr. Seib said access to Americans is important both for economic reasons, for the channel’s advertisers, and for “the journalistic legitimacy of their venture.”

To date, the country’s cable and satellite distributors have been reluctant to carry Al Jazeera English. It is available in just a handful of cities, including New York and Washington. To change that, Al Jazeera has lobbied distributors, called for a letter-writing campaign by supporters and promoted its widely praised coverage of the Arab Spring.

Acquiring Current TV, and thus its distribution deals across the country, solves this dilemma for Al Jazeera, at least partially.

Current is hard to find on many cable lineups, and some analysts say it’s at risk of being dropped by some companies because of low ratings, but it would give Al Jazeera a foothold on the country’s cable and satellite service lineups. Then Al Jazeera could revamp the channel and promote it as a new American-based news source.

Representatives for Current TV and Al Jazeera did not immediately respond to requests for comment. There was no immediate word about the sale price.

Current was conceived in 2005 after Mr. Gore and another co-founder, Joel Hyatt, bought the small cable news channel Newsworld International. Current’s owners, along with Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt, include several venture capital firms and two major distributors, Comcast and DirecTV.

After several years in obscurity showing viewer-submitted videos and documentaries, Current tacked to the left in 2011 with the hiring of MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. A year later, Mr. Olbermann was fired, but a liberal minded channel made in his image remained. The channel now simulcasts liberal radio shows in the morning and features news-talk shows in the evening by Joy Behar, Eliot Spitzer, Jennifer Granholm and others.

None of the shows have drawn significant audiences. On a typical night in 2012, about 42,000 people were watching the channel, according to Nielsen. Mr. Spitzer quipped to a reporter from Mediabistro last month, “Nobody’s watching, but I’m having a great time.”

At the end of October, Current confirmed that it was considering selling itself. Mr. Hyatt said in a statement at the time, “Current has been approached many times by media companies interested in acquiring our company. This year alone, we have had three inquiries. As a consequence, we thought it might be useful to engage expertise to help us evaluate our strategic options.”

The New York Times Company mulled a bid for the channel, but decided not to do so....

Current’s programming will continue for about three months. Then an international feed of Al Jazeera English will be simulcast on the channel. Sometime later in 2013, the rebranded Al Jazeera news channel, with 60 percent American programming, will start.

Al Jazeera intends to open new bureaus across the United States to support the American programming. The news operation currently has bureaus in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Miami, and Chicago.

Posted by Robert on January 2, 2013 6:08 PM | 15 Comments 

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Wind Farms vs Wildlife

The shocking environmental cost of renewable energy

6 CommentsClive Hambler 5 January 2013

http://www.spectator.co.uk

Wind turbines only last for ‘half as long as previously thought’, according to a new study. But even in their short lifespans, those turbines can do a lot of damage. Wind farms are devastating populations of rare birds and bats across the world, driving some to the point of extinction. Most environmentalists just don’t want to know. Because they’re so desperate to believe in renewable energy, they’re in a state of denial. But the evidence suggests that, this century at least, renewables pose a far greater threat to wildlife than climate change.

I’m a lecturer in biological and human sciences at Oxford university. I trained as a zoologist, I’ve worked as an environmental consultant — conducting impact assessments on projects like the Folkestone-to-London rail link — and I now teach ecology and conservation. Though I started out neutral on renewable energy, I’ve since seen the havoc wreaked on wildlife by wind power, hydro power, biofuels and tidal barrages. The environmentalists who support such projects do so for ideological reasons. What few of them have in their heads, though, is the consolation of science.

My speciality is species extinction. When I was a child, my father used to tell me about all the animals he’d seen growing up in Kent — the grass snakes, the lime hawk moths — and what shocked me when we went looking for them was how few there were left. Species extinction is a serious issue: around the world we’re losing up to 40 a day. Yet environmentalists are urging us to adopt technologies that are hastening this process. Among the most destructive of these is wind power.

Every year in Spain alone — according to research by the conservation group SEO/Birdlife — between 6 and 18 million birds and bats are killed by wind farms. They kill roughly twice as many bats as birds. This breaks down as approximately 110–330 birds per turbine per year and 200–670 bats per year. And these figures may be conservative if you compare them to statistics published in December 2002 by the California Energy Commission: ‘In a summary of avian impacts at wind turbines by Benner et al (1993) bird deaths per turbine per year were as high as 309 in Germany and 895 in Sweden.’

Because wind farms tend to be built on uplands, where there are good thermals, they kill a disproportionate number of raptors. In Australia, the Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle is threatened with global extinction by wind farms. In north America, wind farms are killing tens of thousands of raptors including golden eagles and America’s national bird, the bald eagle. In Spain, the Egyptian vulture is threatened, as too is the Griffon vulture — 400 of which were killed in one year at Navarra alone. Norwegian wind farms kill over ten white-tailed eagles per year and the population of Smøla has been severely impacted by turbines built against the opposition of ornithologists.

Nor are many other avian species safe. In North America, for example, proposed wind farms on the Great Lakes would kill large numbers of migratory songbirds. In the Atlantic, seabirds such as the Manx Shearwater are threatened. Offshore wind farms are just as bad as onshore ones, posing a growing threat to seabirds and migratory birds, and reducing habitat availability for marine birds (such as common scoter and eider ducks).

‘Uh-oh.’

I’ve heard it suggested that birds will soon adapt to avoid turbine blades. But your ability to learn something when you’ve been whacked on the head by an object travelling at 200 mph is limited. And besides, this comes from a complete misconception of how long it takes species to evolve. Birds have been flying, unimpeded, through the skies for millions of years. They’re hardly going to alter their habits in a few months. You hear similar nonsense from environmentalists about so-called habitat ‘mitigation’. There has been talk, for example, during proposals to build a Severn barrage, that all the waders displaced by the destruction of the mud flats can have their inter-tidal habitat replaced elsewhere. It may be what developers and governments want to hear, but recreating such habitats would take centuries not years — even if space were available. The birds wouldn’t move on somewhere else. They’d just starve to death.

Loss of habitat is the single biggest cause of species extinction. Wind farms not only reduce habitat size but create ‘population sinks’ — zones which attract animals and then kill them. My colleague Mark Duchamp suggests birds are lured in because they see the turbines as perching sites and also because wind towers (because of the grass variations underneath) seem to attract more prey. The turbines also attract bats, whose wholesale destruction poses an ever more serious conservation concern.

Bats are what is known as K-selected species: they reproduce very slowly, live a long time and are easy to wipe out. Having evolved with few predators — flying at night helps — bats did very well with this strategy until the modern world. This is why they are so heavily protected by so many conventions and regulations: the biggest threats to their survival are made by us.

And the worst threat of all right now is wind turbines. A recent study in Germany by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research showed that bats killed by German turbines may have come from places 1,000 or more miles away. This would suggest that German turbines — which an earlier study claims kill more than 200,000 bats a year — may be depressing populations across the entire northeastern portion of Europe. Some studies in the US have put the death toll as high as 70 bats per installed megawatt per year: with 40,000 MW of turbines currently installed in the US and Canada. This would give an annual death toll of up to three -million.

Why is the public not more aware of this carnage? First, because the wind industry (with the shameful complicity of some ornithological organisations) has gone to great trouble to cover it up — to the extent of burying the corpses of victims. Second, because the ongoing obsession with climate change means that many environmentalists are turning a blind eye to the ecological costs of renewable energy. What they clearly don’t appreciate — for they know next to nothing about biology — is that most of the species they claim are threatened by ‘climate change’ have already survived 10 to 20 ice ages, and sea-level rises far more dramatic than any we have experienced in recent millennia or expect in the next few centuries. Climate change won’t drive those species to extinction; well-meaning environmentalists might.

Gun Ownership and People Power

By Daniel Greenfield
http://frontpagemag.com
January 3, 2012

At a Brady Center event, its Legal Action Project Director asked retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens whether having a right to a cell phone might be a more universal form of self-defense than gun ownership.

“Maybe you have some kind of constitutional right to have a cell phone with a pre-dialed 911 number at your bedside, and that might provide you with a little better protection than a gun, which you’re not used to using,” Justice Stevens mumbled.

Stevens, who often seemed unclear on the difference between a right and an entitlement, had a point. Why bother waiting for the laborious process of using a gun, when you can instantly dial 911 and wait twenty minutes while being murdered for the police to arrive?

There still is no constitutional right to a cell phone, but you’re already paying into a Universal Service Fund that does just that, providing cell phones to any and all, courtesy of Lebanese-Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim’s company, who, when he isn’t making high interest loans to the New York Times, shovels prepaid government cell phones into the ghetto.

Gun control advocates have been digging away at the 2nd Amendment because gun ownership is an individual right. And they don’t believe in individual rights. Their gospel is group rights. If the 2nd Amendment assigned the right to bear arms to each group by its degree of persecution, liberals would find it much more acceptable no matter what the annual death toll was. An LGBT 2nd Amendment would really float their boat.

Justice Stevens and the Legal Director of the Brady Project were pondering how to make an individual right fair by universalizing it and redistributing it to a group right. Some people have guns and others don’t. But everyone can have a government mandated right to a cell phone… except perhaps the Amish.

If you assume that rights belong to the group, rather than the individual, then pre-dialed cell phones are a better solution than guns. Just push 1 if you’re being murdered, 2 if you’re being raped, 3 if your house is being set on fire and 4 if you just realized that your health plan doesn’t provide abortion coverage on all major legal holidays.

The police may not get there in time, but they will get there to government specifications and will take action in line with municipal, state and federal policies in deference to group rights. Governments can issue a directive for how many arrests of how many people they want to see, based on type of crime and race. And that is the kind of enforcement you will get backed by federal grants to local communities and Department of Justice lawsuits. Whether or not the police officer will be there in ten minutes or twenty, whether he will even take your statement or just doodle something while you talk, depends on Washington D.C.

Group rights are the right to wait in a government line to find out whether your request will be filled or not based on your socioeconomic status, race, gender, transgender, sexual orientation and surfing abilities. And the line, in this case, happens to be the phone line to the 911 system, which will send someone to help you at a rate that depends on all the number juggling involving money, crime statistics and votes.

The 2nd Amendment is a very different creature. The controllers would like to turn it into a group right. Replace the home rifle with an IOU for a cell phone from Carlos Slim that will allow you to dial 911. And they would equally like to turn the 1st Amendment into a right to say the things that are socially beneficial, while outlawing speech that is not socially beneficial.

When rights serve the group, or the idealized arrangement of groups meant to provide the perfect statistical balance between skin colors, genders, lack of genders, and choice of partners, then the individual has no rights except as a member of Team White, Team Black, Team Gay or Team Badly Confused.
A gun is an individual thing. It’s hard for a group to own a gun. You can give Team Gay, Team Union or Team Korean Men in Wheelchairs a cell phone link to a central network of law enforcement support services, but a gun is a thing that an individual buys and learns to use. It is not a network, but an object, its power does not come from pushbutton access to a plea for government aid, but from the skill and courage of the individual. Gun power is merit based.
The left shouts “Power to the People,” but doesn’t truly mean it. It would like to replace Power to the People with Pre-dialed Cell Phones to the People and Lines at Government Offices to the People and Write to Your Local Congressman to the People.
The people aren’t supposed to have guns; they’re supposed to have government on speed dial. The people aren’t supposed to have power; they’re supposed to have a hand out to the government which will decide whether to help them or not based on its own priorities. And if the help doesn’t arrive, then they can shout “Power to the People” outside government offices and demand that the rich people give more money to the government so that it can help them faster.
The Director of the Brady Legal Project asked the retired Supreme Court Justice, “The Supreme Court held that the 2nd Amendment assures our right to have a handgun in the home for self-defense as you say. This question’s asked: ‘That protects only gun owners. What about those who don’t have guns? Surely they have a right of self-defense. Instead of relying on the 2nd Amendment and dealing with gun laws, wouldn’t it be more rational to rely directly on the right we all have to self-defense?”
Like all gun control proposals, it would be rational. Just as it was rational in the USSR to move all the farmers to collective farms in order to increase wheat production and just as it was rational to bail out the banks and then spend billions more stimulating the economy. Putting all your eggs in one centrally planned basket is rational. It’s also stupid. Rational is not the same thing as right and it’s certainly not the same thing as individual rights.
The Constitution holds to the irrational idea that power should be vested in the individual and that fairness comes from respecting individual rights, rather than relying on government to level all the playing fields and all the heads. It holds to the notion still that individual rights become universalized through individual power rather than through government power.
The Bill of Rights determines that the people shall have power, while the gun controllers determine that the people shall have a place on a government line.
The Constitution determines that the people shall be armed and the gun controllers determine that each man, woman and child shall have the right to spend the last 30 seconds of their life begging the government to save them.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

Nothing is certain except more debt and taxes

The Senate fiscal-cliff bill still means higher taxes on every working American.  So much for just going after 'the rich'.

By DAVID MALPASS

The Wall Street Journal

http://online.wsj.com

January 1, 2013

Whatever ultimately emerges from the fiscal-cliff negotiations over the past 48 hours, the country will survive. But the damage can't be undone. Taxes are going up for all working Americans. And so is the size of government.

Businesses have been waiting to see whether a second Obama administration will encourage the economy. During the fiscal-cliff negotiations, however, the president made clear that his goal isn't to get business going again but instead to expand government and redistribute income. He offered no real spending cuts and instead used the year-end deadline to divide America into classes—to the point of campaigning on New Year's Eve against higher earners. Though the president talks about fairness, his policies penalize profit and investment. This hurts aspiring Americans more than it hurts those who have already made it.

The deal that emerged from the Senate early Tuesday morning is being sold as a tax cut for the middle class, but the expiration of the two-percentage-point payroll tax holiday means that working Americans' take-home pay will drop. The bill reduces the value of tax deductions for upper incomes and, with the new open-ended 3.8% Medicare tax that was enacted under ObamaCare, income-tax rates on families and small business owners earning over $450,000 have been pushed above 44%.

Images.com/Corbis

The Senate bill makes the tax code more complex, provides for no spending cuts and creates four deadlines—for the debt-limit increase within weeks, the March 1 automatic spending cuts known as the sequester, a second sequester on March 27 (to make up for overspending since the first sequester) and the March 30 expiration of government spending authority. These deadlines will keep Washington negotiations on the front page for months but with little likelihood that government will cut programs, sell assets or downsize the 1,300 federal agencies and commissions.

No wonder many House Republicans balked at what was presented. The New Year's Day legislation is breathtaking in its largess. The Senate bill extends 52 tax credits, mostly for one year, ensuring huge annual lobbying fees and political contributions. Section 206 provides a juicy capital-gains tax exemption for contributions of property for conservation, meaning wealthy environmentalists with extra acreage will be able to take a tax deduction for the appreciated property and have the environmental organization preserve it, adding to the value of the primary property. Section 312 provides faster tax deductions for "motorsports entertainment complexes." Section 317 allows expensing of film and television productions, meaning lower taxes for Hollywood.

The bill devotes much space to tax credits for government-approved energy schemes, providing taxpayer subsidies for energy-efficient new homes, existing homes, appliances, cellulosic biofuel and "Indian coal facilities." Underscoring the complexity of the tax code, the bill takes seven pages to index the alternative minimum tax for inflation because it takes side trips to curry favor with the owners of plug-in electric vehicles and with first-time home-buyers in the District of Columbia.

The pattern across the developed world is for politicians to negotiate with each other and, after much drama, make the brave decision to downsize jobs through taxes and mandates rather than downsizing government. This country is no different: Whatever tax and spending decisions Washington makes over the next few months, the likelihood is that government will be bigger in 2013 and the fiscal problems even more urgent.

There has emerged from the budget negotiations no process to cut government programs, limit the debt or reform the tax code. Many tax rates have now gone up and almost no spending restraint has been implemented, hurting 2013 investment and hiring. Even if the spending sequester is allowed to proceed on March 1 or substitutes are found, the cuts will be a small fraction of the spending binge in recent years that left a string of $1 trillion deficits.

The Congressional Budget Office scores the Senate bill as adding $4 trillion to the national debt by 2022. That assumes the sequester or equivalent spending cuts are fully implemented in March, which seems unlikely. Some are hoping that during the coming confrontation over the debt-limit increase fiscal conservatives will be able to recover lost ground on spending. That won't work, because the debt limit doesn't provide much leverage.

The debt-limit statute was written specifically to make it easier to increase the debt, not as a way to limit the debt. It should be repealed and replaced with a law that cuts spending when there is too much debt. While Republicans rightly want to stop the unending growth in debt, the current debt-limit statute gives most of the power to the president, allowing him to shut down parts of the government and blame holdouts until he gets enough votes for more debt.

Rather than rejecting an increase in the debt limit, fiscal conservatives should offer a lasting remedy. This would be a debt-to-GDP limit that, when exceeded, would give the president the power to underspend congressional appropriations and to propose fast-track reductions in entitlements—but would also require him to make monthly reports to the public on excess spending and prohibit raises for government employees making over $100,000.

Fighting under the current rules isn't working and leaves government inexorably bigger. The country can't afford this approach. Demographics are making it harder each year to restrain spending or win elections on the platform of limited government. The rules pit fiscal conservatives against themselves, leading to bigger government.

Regardless of how the current crisis is ultimately resolved, there is sure to be another. Republicans and fiscally conservative Democrats should use every opportunity to strengthen the framework for limited government, in order to restrain federal spending and allow the private economy to grow.

Mr. Malpass, a deputy assistant Treasury secretary and legislative manager for the 1986 Tax Reform Act in the Reagan administration, is president of Encima Global LLC.

A version of this article appeared January 2, 2013, on page A17 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Nothing Is Certain Except More Debt and Taxes.

Obama's leadership failure

By Robert J. Samuelson, Published: December 31

The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com

The “fiscal cliff” is a massive failure of presidential leadership. The tedious and technical negotiations are but a subplot in a larger drama. Government can no longer fulfill all the promises it has made to various constituencies. Some promises will be reduced or disavowed. Which ones? Why? Only the president can pose these questions in a way that starts a national conversation over the choices to be made, but doing so requires the president to tell people things they don’t want to hear. That’s his job: to help Americans face unavoidable, if unpleasant, realities. Barack Obama has refused to play this role.
Instead, he has cast the long-term budget problem as a question of whether the richest 1 percent or 2 percent of the population should pay more in taxes. Not only that, but he has insisted that the higher taxes be paid by raising rates, as opposed to reducing various tax breaks (deductions, exemptions, preferential rates) enjoyed heavily by upscale Americans. The obsession with rates is bad policy (higher rates may threaten risk-taking, work effort and hiring) but qualifies as good politics: It signals Obama is macho; he’s tough on the rich, who are implicitly blamed for the nation’s budget and economic woes.
Whatever one thinks about raising taxes at the top (and I have no objection to it as part of comprehensive budget package), it’s not the crux of the problem. The crux of our problem — the problem being the bipartisan and untenable promises made to most Americans of both high government benefits and low taxes — arises from an aging population and high health costs, which cause rapid increases in spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Let me repeat some statistics I’ve often cited. In 2012, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid accounted for 44 percent of non-interest federal spending. As for taxes, the richest 5 percent paid almost 40 percent of federal taxes in 2009 (and within that, the richest 1 percent paid 22 percent of taxes).
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office puts it this way:
“With the population aging and health care costs per person likely to keep growing faster than the economy [gross domestic product], the United States cannot sustain the federal spending programs that are now in place with the federal taxes (as a share of GDP) that it has been accustomed to paying.”
Until Obama conspicuously and consistently acknowledges these realities in straightforward and unmistakable language — something he hasn’t done and shows no signs of doing — he cannot be said to be dealing honestly with the budget or with the American people. The main reason that we keep having these destructive and inconclusive budget confrontations is not simply that many Republicans have been intransigent on taxes. The larger cause is that Obama refuses to concede that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are driving future spending and deficits. So when Republicans make concessions on taxes (as they have), they get little in return. Naturally, this poisons the negotiating climate.
Of course, Obama would offend many Democrats if he entertained benefit cuts in Social Security and Medicare: higher eligibility ages, higher premiums for affluent elderly, structural changes in the health-care system to reduce costs. Just as many Republicans don’t want taxes raised a penny, many Democrats don’t want benefits cut a penny. Consider the highly technical proposal to shift from the standard consumer price index (CPI) to a “chained” CPI to adjust Social Security benefits. From 2013 to 2022, this change is estimated to reduce Social Security spending by $100 billion. Over that decade, total Social Security benefits are estimated at $10.588 trillion; the cut would be less than 1 percent. Yet, many Democrats reacted in horror, as if hordes of elderly would be impoverished.
Unfortunately, much of the media have accepted the Obama narrative that it’s only Republican rigidity that frustrates negotiations and leads to deadlock. This means, of course, that there’s even less incentive for Obama and congressional Democrats to engage in genuine bargaining.
The result is that we’re not getting the debate we deserve and that budget choices are being made mainly by default. Just as important, the periodic, ugly confrontations over budget policy — the paralysis and bitterness they involve — corrode confidence and weaken the economy. A weak economy creates few new jobs, and the lack of jobs is the nation’s No. 1 social problem. Obama’s abdication of responsibility may be in his political self-interest, but it is profoundly hostile to the national interest.
Read more from Opinions E.J. Dionne: It’s our system on the cliff Ruth Marcus: Making a ‘B’ line to the cliff Michael Gerson: Obama must learn to negotiate Marc Thiessen: Republicans should stand and fight

Senator Feinstein's Constitutional End-run

By Alan P. Halbert
http://www.americanthinker.com
January 2, 2013

There's more than a touch of hypocrisy in the recent exploitation of the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy by the MSM, Obama, and the Democrats. All the wanton murders due to Fast & Furious (estimated at 300 or more) do not appear equal to one life lost at Sandy Hook. The administration paid criminals to illegally arm drug cartels in Mexico, choosing to supply them with none other than "assault weapons", mostly AK-47's with some Barrett .50 caliber BMG rifles and a few hand grenades thrown in for good measure.
The result was the deaths of federal agents Brian Terry and Jaime Zapata, along with another thirteen American citizens, and several hundred Mexicans. Another disgusting milepost for 2012 is the 500th homicide in Chicago, Obama's and Mayor Rahm Emanuel's hometown. This sad statistic was achieved when Nathaniel Jackson was shot and died at the scene on December 27th at 9:00 P.M. as he stood on a street corner.
The MSM has largely been silent about these tragedies, choosing instead to concentrate on the victims at Newtown. In the process they overlook at least 466 child gunshot victims with 68 fatalities in Chicago this past year alone.
This brings us to Senator Feinstein's attempt to revive the National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1934 with her recently drafted gun control legislation. She will introduce this revamped legislation to the Senate in January in an effort to resolve our supposed epidemic of violence as revealed by Obama in his Sandy Hook speech to the nation. In effect, what this darling of the left has done is reintroduce all of the weapons that were not subject to registration initially.
This is simply a national gun-registration scheme; a synopsis of the NFA follows:

The National Firearms Act ("NFA"), 72nd Congress, Sess. 2, ch. 757, 48 Stat. 1236, enacted on June 26, 1934, currently codified as amended as 26 U.S.C. ch. 53, is an Act of Congress in the United States that, in general, imposes a statutory excise tax on the manufacture and transfer of certain firearms and mandates the registration of those firearms. (Note: bold emphasis is mine)

Originally, pistols and revolvers were to be regulated the same as machine-guns, though they were exempted as the legislation moved its way through Congress. Feinstein's expansion of the NFA will include all of the weapons they had the intelligence to exclude previously.
It is interesting to note that the NFA became law right after the repeal of Prohibition. Congressmen of the day were intimately familiar with how unintended consequences play out from their legislative intent. Prohibition released a murderous rampage of gang-related violence on this nation dwarfing anything we have seen since, leading to the expansion of the Mafia and other organized crime syndicates that are still with us today, another testament to a benevolent Congress.
Owning an NFA weapon subjects the owner to loss of certain constitutional rights, chief amongst them the surrender of our Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights to due process. The possession of an NFA weapon allows the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) to demand inspection of these weapons any time they appear at your door, usually unannounced, all without a search warrant of course.
These weapons are individually registered to the owner. You are not allowed to transfer them without the express permission of the government. Transporting the weapon across state lines for any purpose without government approval beforehand is illegal. This is also applicable to each weapon you currently own. Senator Feinstein's draft does not discuss the waiver of the $200.00 dollar fee to register "grandfathered" weapons in the NFA database.
To legally posses an NFA weapon requires that the chief law enforcement officer (CLEO) in your area of residence sign a BATF form that expressly allows the citizen to possess such weapons. You will also need to submit photographs of yourself, a fingerprint card, and of course, pay the $200.00 fee and possibly a registered Class III Transfer Agent, with his fee as well.
Imagine a harried rural or county sheriff overwhelmed by the sheer volume of requests made to his office. This will probably place many weapons in limbo while the documents are in process. No doubt they will enact some method of holding these weapons while this plays out; probably leading to many lost, stolen, or outright confiscated weapons by attrition.
Not to mention how many LEOs will be required to perform the background checks on individuals for weapons that are already legally owned, taking them away from legitimate law enforcement duties. This will probably lead many local law enforcement agencies to throw up their hands and refuse to comply with these new requirements; again leaving law-abiding citizens in limbo with lawful weapons in their possession subjecting them to arrest and prosecution, leaving many weapons surrendered by default.
I have to wonder how many leftist CLEOs will choose this route? Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, and Chicago to name just a few cities play host to such officials. Of course, they will excuse themselves with "legitimate budget" busting cover story(s)... if only we had the funds....
You get the idea.
These tactics are nothing short of a backdoor scheme to render legal weapons illegal by redesignating them through the NFA as equivalent to automatic weapons. The result will be a national gun registration database for conventional arms. At the same time, these very same legislators (along with Obama) have encouraged untold carnage and mayhem through policies of looking the other way as regards the inner cities of this nation, Mexico, South America, and the Middle East as our government willingly supplies criminals, jihadists, and cartels with weapons.
Now in their ultimate wisdom, they wish to make pariahs and criminals out of law-abiding citizens by means of an act of Congress that will force us to reapply for our lawful and legally owned weapons for a false premise of security from ourselves.
Discussing the real reason for the Sandy Hook tragedy is beyond the gun control mentality of the leftists currently ensconced into the media, educational institutions and seats of power in this nation. It is simply about power and control... not guns. The action of our president in Fast & Furious and the arming of Al Qaeda in Libya, Syria and the pipeline of illegal weapons funneled by the Mexican drug cartels back into our nationrenders this clear enough.
We are in far more danger from these actions of our own government than from another Sandy Hook atrocity by a crazed killer.
The Second Amendment's purpose is to provide for the citizens' defense from all who would deny their natural God- given right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" against a criminal, a foreign or domestic enemy, or our own government. We will witness the end of the Republic if this proposed legislation is passed, since all of our rights flow from the citizen's ability to defend them.
As for this citizen, I will never disarm or surrender my Second Amendment rights, much less willingly comply with such a traitorous act of Congress if enacted... it is actions like these that light revolutionary fervor in a nation and its citizens. It did so in 1776 and it will do so again. 

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Death and Taxes

By Daniel Greenfield
http://frontpagemag.com
January 2, 2012

On November 13, 1789, Benjamin Franklin sat down to write a letter to a French scholar and physicist by the name of Jean-Baptiste Leroy, famous for his experiments with electricity. The French Revolution was gathering steam, Versailles and the Bastille had been stormed and Parisians were becoming used to Madame Mob marching through her streets. Franklin had been corresponding with Leroy for a long time and had grown worried about his French colleague after not having heard from him for an entire year.
“Are you still living? Or have the mob of Paris mistaken the head of a monopolizer of knowledge, for a monopolizer of corn, and paraded it about the streets upon a pole?” Franklin enquired, before going on to a brief mention of affairs on the other side of the Atlantic. “Our new Constitution is now established, everything seems to promise it will be durable; but, in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.”
Death and taxes happen to be the current favorite topics of the mob of Washington, D.C. and the head of the mob who is juggling his demagoguery of those two issues. The situation is not yet so dire that, like Lenin or Chavez, the mob is calling for the heads of the monopolizers of corn. Instead our Foulons are the mythical 1 percent who are hoarding all the wealth that Washington has not yet spent.
In movie theaters, Les Misérables, a tawdry movie based on the tawdry musical based on the tawdry novel, is playing side by side with Django, a black revenge fantasy, and The Hobbit, a bit of conservative escapism from a British author born not long after the death of Victor Hugo bidding farewell to the pleasant way of life of the British countryside.
Cinematically a refried exploitation of the aftermath of the French Revolution is brushing shoulders with a refried exploitation of ’70s black liberation clichés, both of which have been shouldered out of the way by the majority’s longing for the village green and the humble power of the common man who makes no noise at all, but proves surprisingly courageous when the first Nazi bombers begin passing overhead.
In real life, the silent majority of hobbits is often stomped underfoot by revolutionaries and gangbangers. And these days it’s the Django and Les Misérables agenda that is moving forward.
Taxes will of course go up. Unlike the French peasant, the modern beneficiary of these ruinous taxes has never worked a day in his life and would be considered a wealthy man or woman in 95 percent of the world. But revolutions aren’t made for peasants, even if they are allowed to have the occasional bit of fun killing a Foulon or two and then walking around with his head on a pole. Revolutions, like the bad movies filmed about them, are made for the profit of revolutionaries.
The other item on the agenda is death. The death of children always makes for powerful propaganda, and modern propaganda isn’t a matter of a passing out some dirty handbills, but full-blown hysteria broadcast on every channel, printed in every newspaper and shouted from the covers of every magazine. And the purpose of propaganda is the seizure of power.
To impose taxes it helps, as Congressman Nadler said, to act as if the “State ought to have a monopoly on legitimate violence.”  And once there is a state monopoly on legitimate violence, then the state, like all monopolies, loses its last remaining incentive for making any fine distinctions between the legitimate and illegitimate uses of its power.
The next stage of every revolution, once the prisons are stormed and the heads are paraded around on poles, is the monopolization of revolutionary violence by the revolutionary state, protecting its ability to impose taxes through its power to impose death; legitimate death through legitimate violence.
“The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny,” Robespierre said, and his example has since been followed by countless tyrants of liberty and despots of freedom, who are distinguished from their predecessors only by their relentless cruelty and the ideological principles that they use to justify their tyranny.
The new monopolizers of corn, who killed the old monopolizers of corn, must also have a monopoly on violence. The monopolizers of all things, from knowledge to corn to power, begin with a cause, with the bodies of dead children, with the image of assailed women, and then on they go, murdering women and children beyond count in the name of the despotism of liberty and the liberty of despotism.
Some months before Franklin had penned his letter, Madame Mob had stormed the Bastille, leading to the death of several women and children, and freeing a handful of oppressed prisoners who were paraded through the streets. One of those oppressed prisoners was the Comte de Solages, locked up at the request of his family for “monstrous acts” that involved incest, and the Marquis de Sade, a rapist and pedophile, who helped touch off the storming of the Bastille by shouting through a window that the prisoners were being murdered, who became a delegate to the National Convention, and went on being a rapist and a pedophile. And all of it was done for the murdered children at the Bastille.
Our own revolutionary leaders are quite adept at manufacturing and exploiting martyrdom, even if on close inspection the beneficiaries turn out to be our own Marquis de Sades; monsters like Bill Ayers.  The Bastille is stormed over and over again, but there is nothing inside, only more distractions, more empty memorial services full of political rhetoric and promises that if we grant the government a total monopoly on violence then Aurora and Newtown will never happen again.
Franklin understood that death and taxes are constant things, for no matter what happens and whatever principles are articulated, there will be someone coming by to collect the taxes and deal out death if the taxes aren’t paid.
Death and taxes are the secret heart of government. They are the secret heart of all power, from the playground bully offering a choice between your lunch money or a knuckle sandwich, to the government bully offering a sophisticated legalistic version of the same.
In Washington, the talk is of death and taxes again. Given a monopoly on death, the government will keep us from dying with its rationed health care and its even more strictly rationed gun control. And given our taxes, the government will be able to pay for it all. But death is even more inevitable than taxes, the death of men and the death of their ambitions. All systems and ideologies perish. It is the people who live on, generation after generation, outliving the monopolists and tax collectors, the tinpot revolutionaries and the mob leaders who eventually fall victim to their own vices of terror.
The American way of life was not made for kings or revolutionaries, for grand systems and tremendous tyrannies. It was made for the people, for the silent majority that seeks only to keep what it has, rather than steal from others, and when the mobs have moved on, it is the people who will restore America.
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A Conversation with Chris Knight

The 52-year-old Kentucky singer-songwriter chatted with us earlier this year about the gritty-yet-accessible sounds of his latest album, 'Little Victories.'

BY HUNTER HAUK

Cowboys & Indians

January 2013

PHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY DRIFTER’S CHURCH RECORDS

Cowboys & Indians: What’s going on today?
Chris Knight: I’m just pulling in my driveway at home right now, in Kentucky.
C&I: How have your shows been going lately, now that you’ve got a new record to play?
Knight: They’ve been going real good; we’re starting to play more new songs off the record. I’m pretty much touring all the time. Things don’t change a hell of a lot, especially when I have a new record out.
C&I: Do you always try to have a full band or at least a few players with you?
Knight: It depends. I did two shows last week, one acoustic and one with full band. Acoustic shows this weekend, band shows next week. It’s different all the time.
C&I: What’s the Chris Knight audience looking like these days?
Knight: It’s all age groups, different types of people. I go a lot of college towns, but don’t draw a huge college crowd. People come out of the sticks to come to the shows. They drive a long way, you know. Reminds me of the first time I played up in this little hippie town in eastern Tennessee. They kind of had a built in crowd. A lot of regulars. So they were expecting the regular turnout. But I told ‘em, “You ain’t gonna have no regulars tonight. These people come out of the hills. You wait and see.” And I got to the show later, and they had already thrown, like, 15 hillbillies out of there. Guy said to me, “Yeah, you were right.” That’s pretty much the way it is. I like it, myself.
C&I: Well, I want to compliment you on Little Victories. The album’s easy to love, and it’s even easier to connect with the lyrics. What’s your assessment of it now that it’s out?
Knight: I think it’s a good record overall. There’s always something you wish you’d have done differently or sang better. Because, you’re not playing them much on the road before you record. Then you get out night after night playing on the road. … With the exception of a few songs, I could go back and do all my records again and they’d be 10 times better than when we recorded. Because I’ve been playing some of this stuff for 14 years.
C&I:  Is it the evolution of the arrangements, or is it more your own comfort level with the songs?
Knight: Sometimes it’s just a rhythm thing, or the way that I sing something. A new guitar lick, or whatever, you know. That’s another fun thing about it, though. I can do what I want to. I had this song called “Another Dollar” on the Heart of Stone record that sounds good on record, but since I’ve been playing it live, we started screwing around with it at acoustic shows. My guitar player grabbed a mandolin, and it rocked as much as the full version. And there’s not even a mandolin on the recording.
C&I: Oh, you can always add mandolin. You recorded the new album with your touring guys, right?
Knight: Yeah, I recorded with my road band that we’d had together for close to 5 years at the time … probably more’n that. … This one, to me, was a little grittier and we were scratchin’ and clawin’, and I think you can hear it. That’s what I wanted. I wanted it to be more intense.
C&I: What was it like working with John Prine on the title track?
Knight: It was a lot of fun having him come down. We didn’t talk a whole lot. I didn’t ask him everything I wanted to ask him or say. I figured he knows all that anyway. But it was great. I’ve listened to John Prine since I was 13 years old, so to have him come play and sing on my record is a big deal.

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Find a list of Chris Knight’s upcoming tour dates here.