Tag Archives: freedom

Progressive-Democrats’ Continued Assault on our 2nd Amendment

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Especially cynically, President Joe Biden (D) is using the tragedy of the Sacramento, CA, shooting—other people’s blood—to press his assault on our 2nd Amendment.

Ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Repeal gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability.

Ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Where in our Constitution is the Federal government given the authority to limit the weapons us American citizens are allowed to have and to carry? Here, for Biden’s edification, is the 2nd Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

In order to have a population that is armed and that understands its arms and so can muster at need to defend our nation, every American has the right to keep and bear Arms, entirely unfettered by Government. Nowhere in that Amendment is there any authority of Government to dictate to us citizens the kind of Arms each of us can keep and carry.

Beyond that, the Supreme Court has already ruled, in District of Columbia v Heller and in McDonald v City of Chicago that the Amendment means precisely what it says: the right to have and to carry firearms is an individual right, with the addition (incorporation) that State governments also cannot (not may not) infringe on this right.

Repeal gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability? Based on what actual theory of law, gun rights, or other? Biden continues to offer no rationale other than his desired gun grab for his abuse. Gun manufacturers have no more control over the uses to which purchasers put their product than have car manufacturers, knife manufacturers, baseball bat manufacturers, hammer manufacturers, or pillows.

That last isn’t me being facetious or sarcastic. Suffocation is the third most common technique for murder.

Biden doesn’t care about any of that. He just wants our firearms; he just wants us disarmed.

Empty Words

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Russian President Vladimir Putin, through one of his representatives, is claiming to be reducing military activity in the vicinity of Kyiv and Chernihiv because “peace talks” are making progress. Chernihiv is on Russia’s secondary invasion corridor aimed at Kyiv, on the east side of the Dnieper River. Putin’s Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Formin:

Due to the fact that negotiations on the preparation of an agreement on the neutrality and non-nuclear status of Ukraine, as well as on the provision of security guarantees to Ukraine, are moving into practice, taking into account the principles discussed during today’s meeting, by the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation in order to increase mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for further negotiations and achieving the ultimate goal of agreeing on the signing of the above agreement, a decision was made to radically, at times, reduce military activity in the Kiev and Chernihiv direction.

Sure. What Putin, through Formin, is ignoring is the fact that Russian ground activity on those axes has largely stalled, and the Ukrainian military has been achieving some success at pushing the Russians back a ways and regaining control of/liberating from Russian occupation some villages along those axes. It’s also the case that Russia, already having stopped and dug in defensively, may simply be pausing to refit, refresh, and deliver combat loss replacements before renewing its assault.

[P]rovision of security guarantees to Ukraine? On what basis can Putin be trusted with any of this? Recall his invasion of Ukraine’s Donbas and Crimea and his occupation of a significant fraction of the former and all of the latter, in abrogation of his Budapest Memorandum commitment. Recall his continuation of that in the face of his Minsk Accord “commitment” and his pretended negotiation of Minsk II. Recall his claim that the Donbas actually consisted of two newly sovereign nations and are not part of Ukraine.

Nothing Putin says can be trusted. And he is ignoring the terms Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has offered through Ukrainian negotiator David Arakhamia:

…their key demands included guarantees for Ukraine’s security from the US, the UK, France, Turkey, Germany, Canada, Poland, and Israel. “This is the system we would like to build the future of Ukraine on[.]”
…
“We want an international mechanism of security guarantees where guarantor countries will act in a similar way to NATO’s article number five[.]”

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak added [as cited by The Wall Street Journal at the link just above] that the arrangement would be subject to a referendum of the Ukrainian people, as well as the approval of the guarantor countries.

Notice that. Zelenskyy wants security guarantees secured by countries not aligned, even tangentially, with Russia. And he will not accept a deal before Russia has left Ukraine.

Zelenskyy has a very good understanding of Putin’s trustworthiness and of the uselessness of anything Putin says.

Despite that recognized untrustworthiness, and in a major concession,

Mr Podolyak said that Ukraine had offered Russia a 15-year period of negotiations on the status of Crimea, which Russia annexed by force in 2014.

This shouldn’t even be a matter of discussion. Crimea is Ukrainian. Full stop.

Ketanji Brown Jackson and the Second Amendment

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Short and sweet. And wrong. At Tuesday’s morning session of the hearing to confirm/reject Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson:

Senator Chuck Grassley (R, IA): Do you believe the individual right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right?
Brown Jackson: Senator, the supreme court has established that the individual right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right.

Notice that. A court says so. Not our Constitution—the second of our Bill of Rights—says so.

This should be disqualifying.

Political Disapproval of Private Enterprise Production

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are touting the withdrawal of Sarah Bloom Raskin from the nomination to the Federal Reserve Board’s Vice Chairman position, laying that defeat off to this:

But Ms Raskin’s most significant opponent was her oft-expressed view that the Fed and other regulators should deny credit to companies that produce or heavily consume fossil fuels.

It’s good that this one failed, but it’s just an early skirmish.

The problem is broader than this. It’s dangerous to our republican democracy that anyone would be nominated to the Fed or to any Executive Branch position who would willingly abuse that position’s authority to discriminate against any government-disapproved American enterprise.

A Two-Edged Sword, and another Thought

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Russia is a, if not the, major exporter of energy to Europe, and that helps hold Germany especially, and Europe generally, back from fully supporting Ukraine against Russia’s invasion of that nation.

The two-edged sword is this.

If Russian gas to Europe stops flowing entirely, “this would do severe damage to Europe’s economy and also undermine global growth,” Mr [EurasiaGroup’s Director, Energy, Climate & Resources, Henning] Gloystein said.

That damage, were it to be inflicted by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, should prod Europe, and especially Germany, decisively away from Russian gas (and oil) altogether, as it would make clear—or should make clear—just how many weapons, including economic, the men and women of Russia’s government are willing to use in order to club Europe into submission.

The disruption from such an assault on Europe would not be felt until the next fall and winter; Europe has reserves enough to finish the present winter. That should be sufficient time for Europe to find more reliable supplies of energy. It might even convince German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to reverse ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s panicky cancelation of the nation’s nuclear plant energy production (although, maybe not—Germany has gotten used to tacit subservience to Russia).

The additional thought flows from this remark by President Joe Biden (D) in the context of that Russian invasion, quoted in the article at the link:

I will do everything in my power to limit the pain the American people are feeling at the gas pump. This is critical to me.

This is virtue-signaling dishonesty. Biden’s “everything” consists of begging OPEC and Russia(!) to pump more oil. Biden utterly refuses to open Keystone XL; to get his Cabinet and himself out of the way of exploring, drilling, and pumping lease permits on Federal land and water; to get his Executive Orders and his Cabinet rules and regulations out of the way of our oil and natural gas production and fracking for same; to get his administration out of the way of liquid natural gas production and port development so we can export LNG; to do anything at all to support and expand our domestic oil and gas production.

Biden-Harris’ determined war on our American hydrocarbon energy production industry represents a strong impediment to Europe’s ability to wean itself off Russian energy, and his war supports the Russian invasion effort by contributing heavily to the rapidly increasing price of oil (which underlies those rising “gas pump” prices), which in turn increases revenue for Putin’s Russian economy.

 

[NB: Germany has agreed a limited SWIFT sanction against “selected” Russian banks, and it has authorized shipment of some anti-tank RPGs, stinger anti-aircraft missiles, and 10 metric tons of fuel to the Ukrainian military.]