(CNN)A video aired Wednesday by Iranian state television shows an American sailor apologizing for entering Iranian waters, an embarrassing development for a U.S. administration trying to paint the service members’ quick release as a diplomatic victory.
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It is not clear from the video — which shows the lone female sailor wearing a head covering in accordance with Islamic tradition — that the sailor was speaking voluntarily, and U.S. officials have not yet said under what circumstances the apology was delivered. A spokesman for Secretary of State John Kerry has made it clear he has not apologized to Iran.
My column for the West Bend Daily News is online. Here you go:
Previous presidents were rightly relegated to lame duck status in their final year of office as members of Congress begin to look ahead to the next president’s priorities. Fresh off his annual vacation in Hawaii, President Barack Obama has found a way to overcome his lame duck status by simply usurping Congress and unilaterally taking action on his priorities.
After months of study on how to undermine federal law and centuries of constitutional protections, the president is planning to roll out a series of executive actions designed to undermine Americans’ Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. While Obama has not revealed the specifics yet, anti-Second Amendment zealots close to the administration are saying that he will take executive action to enact regulations on the private sales of firearms and dump more money into enforcement agencies.
Obama is justifying his executive overreach by complaining that Congress has failed to act on gun control in the wake of highly publicized murders committed with firearms over the past few years. There are two things wrong with Obama’s justification. First, Congress did act. In the wake of the killings in Newtown, several gun control bills were offered and, after consideration and debate, Congress said no. What Obama is frustrated by is not that Congress failed to act, but that they did not do what Obama wanted.
The second problem with Obama’s justification for action is that it is no justification at all. Nowhere in our Constitution does it allow the executive branch to make law because the Legislative branch decided not to. In fact, our Constitution intentionally set up a process that requires both houses of the legislative branch and the executive branch to all act to pass a law. That system of checks and balances was designed by our founders to protect the liberties of Americans from the ravages of tyrannical rule. In this case, Obama’s agenda was checked. He did not like it, so he is planning to act unilaterally. Such are the actions of a tyrant.
The main action Obama plans to take is to manipulate rules and legal definitions to require background checks on the private sale of firearms. Obama will spin this action by saying he is “closing the gun-show loophole.” The so-called gun-show loophole is an invention of the anti-Second Amendment zealots to stir up opposition.
There are only three types of firearms sales. The first are sales by licensed firearms dealers. These sales are already heavily regulated and the sellers are required to conduct a background check before releasing the firearm to the buyer. Incidentally, the vast majority of sellers at gun shows are licensed dealers that already conduct background checks — as are online sellers.
The second kind of firearm sales are the illegal ones. Even in private sales, it is illegal for felons and crooks to purchase a firearm for the purpose of committing a crime, but it happens all the time. The vast majority of the crimes committed with guns are committed by a relatively small minority of repeat criminal offenders using firearms that are obtained illegally, possessed illegally, or both. The executive action Obama is planning to make will have absolutely no impact on these kinds of sales.
The third kind of firearm sales are private sales. These sales are anything from the investor who sells the occasional firearm out of her collection to the guy who trades his old shotgun for his neighbor’s snow blower. The law does not require a background check in these sales, but the anti-Second Amendment activists want to change that. The executive actions Obama is planning to make are targeting these kinds of sales with more regulations and cost, even though guns used in crimes are rarely obtained in these kinds of sales.
The reason that anti-Second Amendment folks target private firearm sales for regulation is because it would create a de facto national gun registry. Americans have rightly opposed efforts to create a national gun registry in the past because it is a precursor to all kinds of onerous restrictions, including outright gun confiscation. It is vastly more difficult for the government to confiscate what it does not know people have.
Lest we forget, the founders did not write the Second Amendment into our Constitution to preserve our right to hunt or protect ourselves. The reason for the Second Amendment is written right into the Declaration of Independence: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” The Second Amendment is one of those new guards.
In a nutshell, the actions Obama wants to take will not actually do anything to combat the problem of crimes committed with firearms that he cites as the reason for acting. And we have a president who is acting to unilaterally and unconstitutionally restrict the people’s constitutional right that was specifically put in place to protect the people from presidents acting unilaterally and unconstitutionally.
Obama may only have a year left in office, but he can do immeasurable damage to our nation and our liberties in that time that will take years to undo — if ever.
“While we don’t yet know the details of the plan, the president is at minimum subverting the legislative branch, and potentially overturning its will. His proposals to restrict gun rights were debated by the United States Senate, and they were rejected. No president should be able to reverse legislative failure by executive fiat, not even incrementally. The American people deserve a president who will respect their constitutional rights – all of them. This is a dangerous level of executive overreach, and the country will not stand for it.”
Let me be clear… to use one of Obama’s favorite schoolmarm quips… the fact that Congress has chosen not to do something the president wants is not a justification for the executive to act alone.
“All across America, survivors of gun violence and those who lost a child, a parent, a spouse to gun violence are forced to mark such awful anniversaries every single day,” Mr. Obama said. “And yet Congress still hasn’t done anything to prevent what happened to them from happening to other families.”
And for you lefties cheering him on, consider how you will feel in about 14 months if a Republican president decides to act unilaterally on things like abortion, unions, immigration, etc. This is a tyranny that swings all ways, which is why our Founders designed our government to have the checks and balances it does. Obama doesn’t like the fact that he has been checked, but that does not justify unilateral action on his part.
(CNN)President Barack Obama is expected to announce in the coming days a new executive action with the goal of expanding background checks on gun sales, people familiar with White House planning said.
Described as “imminent,” the set of executive actions would fulfill a promise by the President to take further unilateral steps the White House says could help curb gun deaths.
Planning for the action are not yet complete, and those familiar with the process warn that unforeseen circumstances could delay an announcement. But gun control advocates are expecting the new actions to be revealed next week, ahead of Obama’s annual State of the Union address, set for January 12.
Obama appears to be focusing on two things. One is to spend more money on enforcing existing gun laws. I’m cool with that. The second would be to change the definitions of things to expand background checks for private sales or the so-called “gun show loophole.”
Here’s the issue in a nutshell… businesses that sell guns are required to conduct a background check before selling it. Private sellers are not. So if Uncle Ben wants to trade his ol’ shotgun for a snow blower with his neighbor, he is not required to do a background check on the neighbor. The gun show aspect is a farce that liberals use to drum up anti-gun sentiment by showing pictures of gun shows with their rows and rows of guns for sale. But in reality, the vast majority of sellers at a gun show are businesses and conduct background checks just like everyone else. So what the anti-gun folks are really after is requiring background checks for the private sales of guns.
Why is this a problem? There are three reasons. The first is that it creates an additional expense and hassle for people who haven’t done anything wrong. Uncle Ben is not the problem. The second reason is that while inconveniencing law-abiding folks, it will have virtually no impact on crooks. The bad guys will still sell guns illegally to each other. Many of them are already felons and not allowed to have a gun and that’s not stopping them. Why would this? So it’s a measure that imposes cost ant inconvenience on good guys while not deterring the bad guys at all. No thanks.
The third reason folks like me oppose requiring background checks for private sales is because it is a path to a gun registry, and a gun registry is an instrument used by tyrants throughout modern history to disarm the citizenry. Instead of forcing people to actually go down the court house and register their guns, background checks get there through the side door by creating a record of every time a gun is transferred. It would take a generation for almost every lawful gun in the country to be registered – just the lawful ones, because the crooks’ guns would still not be cataloged.
Remember that the 2nd Amendment is not about hunting or self-protection… it’s about an armed citizenry maintaining the capacity to violently overthrow their government if it becomes necessary. As the Declaration states:
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
That’s hard to do if the people are arming themselves with plastic garden rakes.
So in the end, what Obama and his anti-liberty cohorts are wanting to do is impose additional costs and restrictions on law-abiding people that will have no impact on actually reducing crimes committed with guns while creating a precursor for a future tyrant to disarm Americans.
by Owen | 0737, 21 Dec 1515 | Politics | 5 Comments
Once again, this president blames others for his failures. It is not that he is wrong… it’s that the American people are too stupid to appreciate his brilliant strategy and the media isn’t helping.
“We haven’t on a regular basis, I think, described all the work that we’ve been doing for more than a year now to defeat ISIL,” Obama told NPR in an interview taped before he departed for his holiday vacation in Hawaii. He called the communications blunder a “legitimate criticism of what I’ve been doing and our administration has been doing.”
But he also pinned Americans’ renewed unease about terror attacks on U.S. soil to blanket media coverage of ISIS attacks. The November ISIS terrorist massacre in Paris, which left 130 people dead, led to “a saturation of news about the horrible attack there,” Obama said in the interview.
“If you’ve been watching television for the last month, all you have been seeing, all you have been hearing about is these guys with masks or black flags who are potentially coming to get you,” he said in the NPR interview. “So I understand why people are concerned about it.”
“Look, the media is pursuing ratings,” he added later. “This is a legitimate news story. I think that, you know, it’s up to the media to make a determination about how they want to cover things.”
Staring down his final year in office, President Obama vowed Friday to give Congress one last chance to approve legislation to shut down the notorious prison for suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay before he looks at executive actions to close the facility.
Congress has acted on Guantanamo Bay. They have said that it must continue to act as a prison for foreign combatants. Obama’s job, as the leader of the executive branch of government, is to execute the will of the American people as expressed through their duly elected representatives in Congress.
Instead, Obama is threatening to ignore the American people and lawlessly act to close Guantanamo Bay. Whether you want Guantanamo Bay to remain a prison or not, this is not the way for our federal government to function.
Washington (CNN)As his administration prepares an executive order tightening access to guns, President Barack Obama met Wednesday with former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a proponent of new gun laws who has become the chief enemy of the National Rifle Association.
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Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s senior adviser who also attended the meeting with Bloomberg Wednesday, said this week that the executive orders would be reveled in “short order,” but refused to offer any more detailed timelines.
Washington (AFP) – US President Barack Obama has vowed to push ahead with plans to close the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects, despite evidence that a substantial number of former detainees have returned to the battlefield.
In an interview with Yahoo News that was published Monday, Obama said the strategic benefits of closing the notorious facility outweighed incidents of recidivism among “low-level” former inmates.
The White House itself admits that around 10 percent of those released from Guantanamo have resumed fighting for Islamic extremist organizations, but says it is more important to shutter a facility that has become a recruiting tool for militants.
What a load of bull. Does anyone seriously think that “GITMO!” is the rallying cry of the violent Islamist movement?
Here’s the video of the address, which amounted to, “Hey, everyone, back off, I got this.” No new policies, ideas, or reasons to think there won’t be more attacks as ISIS proliferates around the world.
And America largely ignores. What strikes me most about Obama’s speech last night is how little people are noticing today. Part of that is because he mostly just reiterated what he’s already said. Part of it is because America has tuned out the president and his professorial lectures about what he perceives as our “shared values.”
The only tangible thing I can see from his speech was this:
And he called on Congress to take several steps: Prohibit people on the so-called “no-fly” list meant to keep terrorists off airplanes from buying a gun; curb Americans’ access to “powerful assault weapons”
No. The no-fly list is useful, but it is a list that the government puts people on without any due process. We can not strip people of constitutional rights just because the government puts them on a list on suspicion of criminal activity. Imagine, if you will, if Obama was advocating people on the no-fly list being stripped of their 1st or 4th Amendment rights… we wouldn’t stand for it. We shouldn’t stand for stripping people’s 2nd Amendment rights on that basis either.
Apparently, Obama’s harsh tone is supposed to make our enemies think he’s serious this time.
(CNN)U.S. President Barack Obama toughened his rhetoric against ISIS at a weekend press conference in Malaysia that concluded his nine-day trip abroad.
The group responsible for the Paris terror attacks is “a bunch of killers with good social media,” he said. “They are dangerous and they’ve caused great hardship to … an overwhelming majority of people.”
The global coalition formed to destroy ISIS “will not relent,” he vowed. “We will not accept the idea that terrorist assaults on restaurants and theaters and hotels are the new normal, or that we are powerless to stop them.”
In an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopolous that was conducted Thursday and broadcast Friday — just hours before the Paris attack — President Obama proclaimed that ISIS had been contained.
“I don’t think they’re gaining strength,” he said peevishly when challenged by Stephanopolous. “From the start, our goal has been first to contain and we have contained them.”
Tunis (AFP) – US Secretary of State John Kerry on Friday warned the Islamic State jihadist group its “days are numbered”, following an American strike in Syria targeting British militant “Jihadi John”.
“The coalition forces conducted an air strike targeting…Jihadi John,” whose real name is Mohammed Emwazi, he said on a visit to Tunis.
“We are still assessing the results of this strike but the terrorists associated with Daesh need to know this: Your days are numbered and you will defeated,” said Kerry, using the Arabic acronym for IS.
“There is no future, no path forward” for IS, the secretary of state said.
While Kerry wants to spike the football after spending millions of dollars to kill one man, under Obama’s watch we have seen IS spread from a rag-tag group of malcontents to an organized force that infects two continents and has a solid base of power. We don’t have a perceptible strategy to do anything to inhibit IS’ growth. Frankly, as we all know it, IS has far more to fear from Putin than Obama. Putin has shown a willingness to follow up his words with action.
Seeing no progress on legislative reform in Congress, Obama announced last November he would take executive action to help immigrants. He has faced criticism from Republicans who say the program grants amnesty to lawbreakers.
In its ruling, the appeals court said it was denying the government’s appeal to stay the May injunction “after determining that the appeal was unlikely to succeed on its merits.”
The spirit of our democracy is very much at issue. Donald Trump says we have a corrupt system run by stupid people. Obama says we have a corrupt system run by evil people. Both of them are part of the same problem. I really don’t give a damn if they are disillusioned and fed up with democratic processes or not. If they are tired of the game, they should stop playing it, not engage in ideological commentary or entertain fantasies of personal rule.
The best way to restore faith in our democratic structures is to spend a lifetime trying to make them work, like Hubert Humphrey did, or Jack Kemp did, or Henry Jackson did, or Ronald Reagan did, or Ted Kennedy did. But it is easier, and surely satisfying in its own way, to throw a tantrum when democracy disappoints you.
So says Obama, despite evidence to the contrary. The world seems pretty comfortable standing by as Putin rebuilds the USSR.
“We cannot stand by when the sovereignty and territorial integrity of a nation is flagrantly violated,” Obama stated in his speech. “If that happens without consequence in Ukraine, it could happen to any nation gathered here today.”
