Tag Archives: freedom

It’s Not Confirmed

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However.

Aides to Secretary of State John Kerry rejected speculation that America’s top diplomat had been cut out of the loop when the Obama administration negotiated last month’s historic policy shift on Cuba.

State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki offered this:

This was a process the Secretary was comfortable with[.]

Umm, that’s not a denial, Ma’am.

Fox News also quoted Psaki as saying that “the White House kept Kerry informed at every stage of the secret negotiations.” That’s also not a denial that Kerry was kept out of the negotiations, only an assertion that he was allowed to follow along at home.

Hmm….

Cutting Federal Spending

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Retired Federal judge and ex-US Senator (D, NY) James Buckley has an idea on this.

dismantle[] the more than 1,100 grants-in-aid programs that spend one-sixth of the federal budget on matters that are the exclusive business of state and local governments.
…
Those programs, which provide funding for Medicaid as well as everything from road and bridge construction to rural housing, job training and fighting childhood obesity—now touch virtually every activity in which state and local governments are engaged. Their direct cost has grown, according to the federal budget, to an estimated $640.8 billion in 2015 from $24.1 billion in 1970.

I’ve advocated elsewhere weaning the States off their Federal Medicaid grant addiction. The remaining 1,109 handouts to the States certainly should be eliminated, also. Those $641 billion compare to 2014’s Federal deficit of $483 billion. That surplus could be used to pay down (a little) our enormous Federal debt and to reverse its skyrocketing increase—a real bending of the curve.

That’s just the pecuniary fiscal cost of those programs and of the States’ addiction to them.

Because the grants come with detailed federal directives, they deprive state and local officials of the flexibility to meet their own responsibilities in the most effective ways, and undermine their citizens’ ability to ensure that their taxes will be used to meet their priorities rather than those of distant federal regulators.

Getting rid of these programs also would be a giant step toward restoring the Federalism that was, and can be again, the bedrock of our nation’s exceptionalism and greatness.

At Last, Shovel Ready Jobs

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And President Barack Obama only had to break the law (and the Constitution) to find them.

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency is looking to hire 1,000 new employees to process applications pertaining to President Barack Obama’s new executive action on immigration, the New York Times is reporting.

Never mind that existing immigration law makes his Executive “Action” mandating protection from deportation of illegal entrants into the US illegal. Never mind that his Constitutional mandate, and his oath of office to take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, make his Executive “Action” illegal.

Because, jobs. And best of all,

The new positions have salaries that range up to $157,000 a year.

That’s better than road building—and they’re indoors, too. Can’t beat that with a…stick.

Hostility

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In an article more centered on relations between Ukraine and Russia and Ukraine’s ending of its “nonaligned” status, Nick Shchetko and Alan Cullison had this remark in noting that Ukraine’s move

drawing a quick rebuke from Moscow, which has accused the West of bringing hostile forces to its borders.

No. Moscow is…not describing accurately…the situation. The only hostile forces on Russia’s borders are Russia’s own, looking out, and Russia’s own on the outside of Russian borders, looking further out.

If Russia doesn’t want hostile forces on its borders, all it has to do is stop behaving hostilely. Full stop.

An Excuse to Stall?

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In a city with a history of denying Americans their gun rights?

[Washington, DC] does not know how long it will take to process those requests [for concealed carry licenses].

“There’s no internal guideline for how long the process should take at this point,” DC police Lieutenant Sean Conboy told a Free Beacon reporter today.

Yeah. Because in the six years since DC v Heller and the four years since McDonald v Chicago and the two years since the Seventh Circuit’s Moore v Madigan gave a strong hint, it’s unreasonable for the DC cops to figure out how to assess and issue CCWs.

And there’s this:

There is still confusion about how people will complete the required 16 hours of classroom training and two hours of range training. Conboy said that the city is still working to officially license a trainer….

And there’s the matter of public firing ranges in DC: there aren’t any.

Hmm….

The 2nd Amendment is quite clear. In light of the erosion of it, it’s time to give it back its teeth. I don’t like Federal laws in general, but here’s one I could get behind: all police departments—every single one of them—must issue concealed carry licenses absent a compelling reason(s) (e.g., the applicant is a felon) for not. There must be a deadline on the application’s favorable ruling, too: if no necessarily derogatory information is turned up (that felony conviction, for instance) within a reasonable time frame—say 28 days, or 42 days—the department must issue the license.