Choosing The Right Lane To Follow

In pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, free markets and individual liberty

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington

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Why Obama Sent No Rescue: Benghazi Lasted ‘8 Hours’ But Was ‘Over in ... 30 Minutes’ By Terence P. Jeffrey

The chairman and the vice chairman of the State Department Accountability Review Board (ARB) that investigated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, made dramatically different statements on Wednesday about the duration of those attacks that resulted in the deaths of four Americans. The relevant duration of the event shrunk from "almost eight hours" to "only about 20 or 30 minutes" when a reporter asked this "accountability" team why the U.S. military had not been sent to Benghazi to help that night. During his opening statement at a State Department briefing, Ambassador Thomas Pickering, who chaired the ARB, said the terrorist attacks occurred over a span of almost eight hours. “What happened on September 11th and 12th in Benghazi was a series of attacks in multiple locations by unknown assailants that ebbed and flowed over a period of almost eight hours,” Pickering volunteered. About 20 minutes later in the same briefing, as Ambassador Pickering nodded his head in agreement, retired Admiral Michael Mullen, the vice chairman of the ARB, put the Benghazi terror event in a very different timeframe. He said it lasted only about 20 or 30 minutes. Mullen, who formerly served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was responding to a reporter who had asked why the U.S. military never became involved. “Why such a passing reference to military involvement?” the reporter asked. “Can you explain why they couldn’t have done more?”

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Disgusting: Benghazi Penalties are Bogus - More lies from the Administration!

The four officials supposedly out of jobs because of their blunders in the run-up to the deadly Benghazi terror attack remain on the State Department payroll — and will all be back to work soon, The Post has learned. The highest-ranking official caught up in the scandal, Assistant Secretary of State Eric Boswell, has not “resigned” from government service, as officials said last week. He is just switching desks. And the other three are simply on administrative leave and are expected back. The four were made out to be sacrificial lambs in the wake of a scathing report issued last week that found that the US compound in Benghazi, Libya, was left vulnerable to attack because of “grossly inadequate” security. State Department leaders “didn’t come clean about Benghazi and now they’re not coming clean about these staff changes,” a source close to the situation told The Post., adding, the “public would be outraged over this.” US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed in the Sept. 11 attack, originally blamed on a spontaneous demonstration against a US-made anti-Islam video that got out of hand.  That version was dismissed by an Accountability Review Board headed by retired Ambassador Thomas Pickering.

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Glenn Beck: Obama Destined for Prison?

As many news sites and pundits break down the biggest stories of 2012, one story too big to miss has been resurrected by the website TeaParty.org, a story at least one national pundit believes could send Barack Obama to prison. The tea-party site posted a Glenn Beck video from October in which the TV and radio host insisted a case for treason could be built against President Obama for his role in the attack of Sept. 11, 2012, in which armed Libyans captured and killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others at an American diplomatic mission in Benghazi. “This president is lying to you about Benghazi in such spectacular fashion that I believe people will go to prison,” Beck said on the Blaze TV broadcast of his radio show. “This is impeachable; the president might go to prison for this one.” Beck cited evidence that Ambassador Stevens had been helping arm Arab Spring rebels in Libya and Syria, rebel forces that included al-Qaida operatives and a heavy Muslim Brotherhood influence.

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Obama Sees a ‘Political Victory’ in Going Over the Cliff

Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said Sunday he thinks President Obama wants to dive over the so-called “fiscal cliff.” “I believe the president is eager to go over the cliff for political purposes,” Barrasso told Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.” ”He senses a political victory at the bottom of the cliff.” The senator also said he believes the nation will go over the cliff, with the deadline just nine days away. Barrasso said he thinks Obama is eager to blame Republicans if Congress cannot reach a deal by the end of the year. Polls have indicated that Americans would blame Republicans more than Democrats if talks fail. Barrasso also pointed to a report in the Wall Street Journal late last week that said during negotiations, Obama threatened Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) that he would use the presidential bully pulpit to heap blame on the GOP during his “State of the Union” speech next year.

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Obama Mentions Himself 63 Times – At Daniel Inouye’s Funeral

President Barack Obama used the funeral for Hawaii senator Daniel Inouye to talk about himself. The most narcissistic person on earth!  In the short 1,600 word speech, Obama used the word “my” 21 times, “me” 12 times, and “I” 30 times.

What do you think? Was this a good way for Obama to make the occasion personal and meaningful? or was he detracting from the person the funeral was for? The full speech can be viewed here

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Bill Ayers: The Left Must Utilize Its ‘Absolute Access’ to America’s Classrooms

Bill Ayers, former domestic terrorist-turned university professor, reemerged earlier this month to explain how the Left’s access to schools and neighborhoods will help them shape the future of America. Speaking at a New York University “Change the Stakes” meeting on Dec. 4, he said the Left must utilize the existing “movements on the ground.” In the video, obtained by EAGnews.org, Ayers also first blasts conservatives for portraying President Barack Obama as a “secret Muslim” and a “secret sociopath,” running around with “terrorists and Arabs.” He lamented the fact that many liberals felt like Obama was “winking” at them while he portrayed himself as a compromising moderate – but Obama ended up disappointing the far left, according to Ayers. “The same people, and I’m sure some of us in this room, are saying, ‘But the second term he’ll be free,’” he said. “Forget about it. That’s not where change comes from.” “If we want change to come, we would do well not to look at the sites of power we have no access to; the White House, the Congress, the Pentagon,” Ayers added. “We have absolute access to the community, the school, the neighborhood, the street, the classroom, the workplace, the shop, the farm.” “Why are we ignoring that and saying, ‘I hope Obama makes peace’?” he asked. “Forget about it. He’s not going to do anything if you don’t do something.” “So, our job is movement building, [Obama's] job is governance and sitting in a chair of empire.”

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Time to 'take down the teachers' unions' Private market should be allowed to flourish in education arena

Plenty of people have experience in politics, but few in politics have much experience in the business world. That’s why entrepreneur Pete Snyder is running to be Virginia’s next lieutenant governor.

Snyder has long been active in Republican politics but never sought office himself. Instead, he spent the past 13 years starting and growing New Media Strategies, the first social media marketing company. He also had no plans to join this race until he saw the election results in November, and his wife actually planted the idea in his head. “I went into a deep depression for about a week (after the election),” Snyder said. “My wife kicked me after a couple of days and said, ‘Hey honey.  What the heck are you doing? If you really firmly believe that we need more private-sector people involved in governing and more people who actually signed the front of a paycheck, you need to get in the ring.’ And that was really it.” My focus is going to be one of big ideas. While the stakes have only gotten higher in politics in Washington and in Richmond, it seems that the politics have only gotten smaller. The ideas have only gotten smaller. So we have a campaign based on big ideas.” Education reform is at the top of Snyder’s priority list. He said union power has allowed some terrible policies to remain on the books. “If you look at Virginia’s education laws, you would think they were written by the teacher unions themselves, which is preposterous because in Virginia we don’t even negotiate against teachers unions,” said Snyder. “Things like teacher tenure still exist. Last in, first out still exists. We have some of the worst grades on charter schools.” Snyder said the private market should be allowed to flourish in the education arena. He said the model should be Louisiana, where Hurricane Katrina wiped out so many schools the government couldn’t get enough open and the private sector came to the rescue. “Since then, kids are being educated, test scores are going through the roof and more kids are going to college than ever,” Snyder said. “We need more of that in Virginia. We need to take down the teachers’ unions and their influence and add many more free-market elements to reward our best and most innovative teachers and to actually have our kids be learning.”

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Utopian Fantasies of Gun Control Advocates

It took only days before California’s legislators reacted to the horrific Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy with a fusillade of bills designed to take California closer to Democratic leaders’ unstated but obvious goal: making it essentially illegal for Californians to own firearms. I write “essentially” because the strategy isn’t to ban guns outright, but to mire ownership in so many layers of regulation that owning a gun becomes even more frustrating and costly than operating a business in this state. Legislators aren’t stupid. Direct assaults on gun ownership generate pushback, but killing this constitutional right through a thousand cuts is less confrontational. California already has the toughest gun regulations of any state, yet legislators (including a Republican) have introduced a long list of new proposals at news conferences where they used the Connecticut tragedy to grandstand. “They were mowed down,” Los Angeles Democratic Sen. Kevin de Leon said. “I think that, viscerally, it will give a lot of political officials around the country the political courage to do the right thing.” It’s not clear what de Leon means by the right thing. California has passed 45 gun control laws in the past 23 years. If you think we’re safe from gun violence because of all those rules, check out the murder rates in Los Angeles, Oakland and San Bernardino.

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Why the Gun Control Movement Is Doomed Written by Gary North

I have watched the gun control movement become a major voice against gun ownership over the last 40 years. What has most impressed me is this: this movement has been unsuccessful in disarming Americans. The demand for guns keeps rising. I have watched Gun Owners of America grow into a major sounding board for those who want to preserve Second Amendment freedoms. There are a number of lobbying organizations that promote gun ownership, but Gun Owners of America is generally regarded as hard-core. It does not recommend making political deals with those who would control legal access to firearms. These mass murderers are almost always on prescription mood-altering drugs. The mainstream media rarely mention this. Every time that there is an incident where the latest drug-crazed shooter kills a number of people, there is a strong push by the gun control movement to get all guns banned. In contrast, every time some elderly lady shoots an intruder who had invaded her home, there is a brief story about this in the local newspaper. I have known for over 40 years that reporting in the major media is skewed in favor of the gun control movement. In the years that I have known Gun Owner's Of America's Richardson and Pratt, I have watched the gun control movement attempt to ban access to firearms, and in virtually all cases, it has failed. Guns are as plentiful today at gun shows as they were 40 years ago. We see billboards promoting gun shows in small towns across the South. I do not know if they have comparably sized shows outside of the South, but in the South, they are well attended.

Enforcement

Some laws are inherently unenforceable. We know that the laws are unenforceable among urban gang members. Gang members are among the best-armed civilians in the world. Gangs have more firepower than most local police departments. They do not use this firepower against what they would regard as the civilian population. They use the weapons against other gang members. There is no way in the United States that the federal government could gain access to the weapons of the country without threatening extremely high fines or other penalties. It is unlikely that Congress will enact legislation that would authorize some system of draconian imposition of fines or jail sentences for violators. The sheer volume of guns owned by Americans precludes the ability of the federal government to confiscate anything like 80% of the weapons. The kinds of people who own weapons are the kinds of people who resist bureaucratic intrusions into their lives. It is not like Americans in 1933, who surrendered gold coins in the darkest days of the Great Depression. They did not view gold coins as basic to their rights as citizens. They were incorrect in this regard, but there has never been the degree of commitment to the ownership of gold coins that there has been to the ownership of firearms. Who would enforce the ban? I do not think that it will be local sheriffs. It may be local police departments, but local law enforcement agencies do not like to think of themselves as being unpaid enforcers of federal regulations. Cooperation will be limited, at best.

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Gun Owners Of America’s Larry Pratt Schools CNN’s Piers Morgan Watch Here

No wonder American's are calling for Piers' deportation!

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Ron Paul breaks with NRA on armed guards in nation's schools By Jonathan Easley

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) rejected a call from the National Rifle Association to put armed guards in schools on Monday, saying in a statement on his website that “government security is just another kind of violence.” “Do we really want to live in a world of police checkpoints, surveillance cameras, metal detectors, X-ray scanners, and warrantless physical searches?” Paul wrote.  "We see this culture in our airports: witness the shabby spectacle of once proud, happy Americans shuffling through long lines while uniformed TSA agents bark orders. This is the world of government provided ‘security,’ a world far too many Americans now seem to accept or even endorse. School shootings, no matter how horrific, do not justify creating an Orwellian surveillance state in America.” Paul, who is retiring at the end of the month, is the first Republican to publicly rebuke the NRA after the group’s CEO, Wayne LaPierre, gave a controversial press conference last week in which he not only rebuffed calls for more gun restrictions, but pushed for armed guards in schools as a way to prevent future massacres. On Monday, Paul said both sides of the political spectrum were overreacting to the incident.

“Predictably, the political left responded to the tragedy with emotional calls for increased gun control,” he continued. “This is understandable but misguided. The impulse to have government ‘do something’ to protect us in the wake of national tragedies is reflexive and often well intentioned. Many Americans believe that if we simply pass the right laws, future horrors like the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting can be prevented. But this impulse ignores the self evident truth that criminals don’t obey laws.” But Paul also denounced the right for proposing increased federal involvement in the daily lives of citizens as a solution. “The political right, unfortunately, has fallen into the same trap in its calls for quick legislative solutions to gun violence. If only we put armed police or armed teachers in schools, we’re told, would-be school shooters will be dissuaded or stopped. While I certainly agree that more guns equals less crime and that private gun ownership prevents many shootings, I don’t agree that conservatives and libertarians should view government legislation, especially at the federal level, as the solution to violence.”

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When Wolves Attacked Children History of Wolves – Schoolhouse Attack in 1847

This is a true story. In 1847, a small schoolhouse in the wild west town of Stockton, California was attacked by a rabid band of wolves. Many children and the school teacher were brutally killed. The villagers were distraught with grief. Upon learning of this tragedy, the president of the United States immediately called for a ban on all guns within the nation and this small town. What is true about this story, is that no American history book ever recorded such an event… until now.  You see, murderers and the criminally insane are wolves. The only logical response to their criminal, evil deeds, is to more completely arm school teachers and villagers to defend innocent school children and themselves from these wild animals.

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10 Facts for Liberals: Why Gun Control Can’t Stop Another Massacre by Doug Giles

1) The school was already a “gun free zone;” so obviously that wasn’t effective.

2) What about closing the supposed “gun show loophole?” Well, since Lanza killed his own mother and used her legally acquired guns for his rampage, making it harder for googly-eyed loners to acquire weapons wouldn’t have changed a thing.

3) Some people are calling for a ban on automatic weapons. Setting aside the fact that the regulation of fully automatic weapons is already tighter than Spandex, Adam Lanza didn’t use a fully automatic weapon.

4) Then there are calls for the “Assault Weapons Ban” to be reinstated. One problem: the semiautomatic Bushmaster .223 rifle that Lanza used wasn’t covered by the bill.

5) We could, of course, pass a newly updated “Assault Weapons Ban” that covers the semiautomatic Bushmaster .223 rifle. Then, gun manufacturers would try to create weapons that can get around the ban. They would probably be successful. When you’re a coward who’s attacking unarmed children, any gun will work.

6) We could also ban high-capacity ammunition magazines, but given the 3-5 second reload time, that would have been a minor inconvenience to Adam Lanza at worst.

So, what now? Well, let’s step into the realm of fantasy and assume that there’s no such thing as a 2nd Amendment that provides the public with a Constitutional right to “keep and bear arms.” that is every bit as important as the right to free speech and freedom of religion. Let’s also pretend that the American public would go along with the following laws and attempts to implement them wouldn’t lead to wide scale violence and unrest.

7) Congress could ban the manufacture and sale of bullets and magazines. Given the massive number of bullets and magazines already owned by the public and readily available instructions for making them. On the other hand, it would lead to a massive black market with tens of millions of previously law abiding Americans buying bullets by the bucketful from back rooms across the country.

8) Congress could also ban the manufacture and sale of guns. Again, that would lead to the creation of a massive black market, but it would also leave roughly 300 million guns in the hands of the American people. In other words, if Adam Lanza had decided to wait until AFTER that law was passed to go on his killing spree, it would have been the same sad story.

9) Then, there’s the most extreme step of all: Congress could ban the ownership of guns. One problem: In the vast majority of cases, the government has no record of who owns guns and who doesn’t. In most places, those records are kept at the gun store level and are not updated. If the gun is lost, stolen, given away or sold by the individual, there is no record of it. This is a feature, not a bug, and it’s designed to prevent exactly the sort of confiscation we’re discussing here.

10) Let’s go Steven Spielberg on this problem and assume space aliens show up and use some bizarre technology to get rid of all guns. Well, even so, fire and explosives would still exist and as Brian Palmer has noted in Slate, those can be even more effective killers than guns.

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NY Gunman Who Shot Firemen Already Barred from Owning Guns

While liberals on Twitter pointed at the shooting of four firefighters in upstate New York as evidence that more gun control is necessary, NBC News reports that the gunman, one William Spengler, was already banned from owning guns. Spengler served 17 years in prison for killing his grandmother with a hammer in 1980. He was convicted only of manslaughter, and was paroled in 1998. It seems that stronger sentencing for convicted murderers might be a more worthwhile goal of liberals seeking to prevent gun violence.  Spengler shot the firefighters just before 6 a.m. ET in Webster, New York. He’d set the fire, then waited for the firefighters to show up before shooting them. “It does appear that it was a trap that was set,” said Webster Police Chief Gerald Pickering. “People who get up in the middle of the night to fight fires, they don’t expect to get shot and killed.”

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Here’s a ‘Chilling’ Economic Report Making the Rounds Among Top Execs — And Wait Until You See What It Says About Gov’t Programs by Jonathon M. Seidl

That’s the headline greeting readers on the site Business Insider Christmas morning. The report from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) is titled, “Ending the Era of Ponzi Finance: Ten Steps Developed Economies Must Take.” “The biggest [Ponzi scheme] … is still ongoing: the Ponzi scheme of the developed economies,” the report says near the beginning. “It is not simply that the developed world has borrowed significantly from future wealth to fund today’s consumption, leading to huge burdens for the next generation. It has also reduced the potential for future economic growth, making it more difficult for the next generation to deal with this legacy.” That’s heavy. And it only gets more heavy from there. Think of it as a little dose of salt to go with your Christmas dinner (sometimes salt is good, sometimes it’s bad — and from our reading of the suggestions the report offers, there’s both cases):

1. “The West was not going to find its way to the right economic path with a little tweaking at the edges, the CEO said. What is needed is a wholesale overhaul of the economic system to tackle record levels of public and private debt.”  A summary of the report’s findings

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And the biggest lie of 2012 is… 

Information surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks against the U.S. mission in Benghazi has been so distorted by the Obama administration and so misreported by the news media that the issue was selected as WND’s “Biggest Lie of the Year.”