The Right Lane 1.26.13

The 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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There are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades  happen  -Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Don't fall into the false sense of security of time - we may not have time!

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Registration then Confiscation then...

The "assault weapons" ban proposal not only places heavy restrictions on future purchases of weapons by law-abiding citizens, but as originally proposed, requires weapons already in private hands to be registered under the National Firearms Act. This requirement includes: Background check and registration of owner including photograph and fingerprint ($200); registration of type and serial number of the firearm; certification from local law enforcement of identity and that possession would not violate State or local law; and additional taxes to fund the ATF for registration implementation.

Step 1: Registration.

Step 2: Confiscation.

You may not be a gun owner, and may even be fearful of guns, but if you like to be safe in your home, thank a gun owning neighbor -- because violent criminals don't know which homes are occupied by somebody able to defend themselves and their families -- AND their neighbors. Violent felons prefer unarmed victims!

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Missouri Proposes Law Requiring Students’ Parents To Inform Schools About Their Guns

Generally, conservatives understand that taking people’s rights away is not protecting them. Liberals however equate complete control with safety. If they can just know everything about everyone of us, where we live, how we raise our kids, what foods we eat, etc., they’d be able to keep us and everyone else safe. A Missouri state senator has proposed a bill that would require parents to inform their children’s schools as to whether or not they own guns, and if so, where they are stored. Maria Chapelle-Nadal, a Democrat, thinks these parents should be held accountable if their firearms are not stored “properly.” What is “proper storage?” Does that mean guns have to be completely disassembled and stored in a locked safe far from where the ammo is stored? Are they going to have to hire inspectors to come and search those homes whose owners have registered their guns with the school district? If the inspector sees something suspicious like a Bible, the Constitution or an American history book, will he have to say something to a mental health professional about possible mental illness? Who knows? The bill isn’t law yet, but this is always the direction that the government goes. It wants complete control. If their goal is citizen disarmament, they’ll use anything to achieve that end. Federal legislation, police, military or now, schools.

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Politicians Need to Catch Up When It Comes to the People's Money  By Scott Rasmussen

President Obama in his inaugural address made it clear he intends to protect the nation's entitlement programs. In the world of Washington politics, this amounts to a pledge that the president will make sure that no changes will be made to programs like Social Security and Medicare. Republicans in Congress won't challenge him because just about everybody in official Washington shares the president's views that changing such programs would be political suicide.  The reality, however, is that only the foolish options offered by Washington politicians are unpopular. Cutting benefits or raising taxes are unpopular. Giving voters more control over their own lives makes sense just about everywhere except in the halls of Congress, however.  A simple example is Social Security. Two out of three voters (65 percent) support a proposal that would let them choose their own retirement age. Those who want to retire earlier would pay more in taxes. Those who plan to retire later could pay less in taxes.

Polling shows that that with such a system in place, most younger voters would push back their retirement a few years and use the extra cash flow to help raise a family and meet other needs. A sizeable number of people in their 50s also would be willing to take home a little more pay today and keep working a bit longer.

In stark contrast to the public support for this flexibility is the opposition many feel toward congressional plans to raise the retirement age or make other adjustments. Why? Because we are no longer in a one-size-fits-all world. Nobody trusts Congress to determine the right trade-offs between an individual's retirement age and how much he or she pays along the way. We'd all feel more comfortable if we could make those decisions around our kitchen table with the help of family, friends and financial advisers. Bluntly, we have more confidence in our own ability to make rational decisions about things that impact our lives. At the same time, we have little or no confidence that voting for one politician over another will make any difference. That's why any policy that shifts decision-making authority away from Washington and into our own hands is potentially popular with voters.

The steps necessary to make this simple concept a reality are outlined in my latest book, "The People's Money." A working approach would make sure people have the right to change their minds as they age and include protections to ensure that the system remains solvent. It's even possible to make the trade-offs work so that they eliminate the entire unfunded liability in the current Social Security program -- a liability currently approaching $20 trillion.  It's worth noting that the concept did not originate with me. Credit for a flexible approach belongs to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In his first message to Congress about Social Security, he envisioned a program with basic benefits but also thought that it would be so popular that voters would want to pay more for additional benefits. Social Security is only one area where voters are ahead of their politicians. "The People's Money" details many others, including support for a more focused military mission, an end to corporate welfare, and more consumer choice and competition in health care. Hopefully, the politicians will catch up sooner rather than later.

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59% Still Favor Building the Keystone XL Oil Pipeline

Most voters continue to favor construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline and still think building the oil pipeline from western Canada to Texas will be good for the U.S. economy. But voters express more uncertainty about the environmental impact of the pipeline than they did in earlier surveys. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 59% of Likely U.S. Voters favor building the pipeline, while 28% are opposed. This includes 34% who Strongly Favor the pipeline and 10% who Strongly Oppose it.

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Feinstein Introduces Sweeping Unconstitutional Gun Control Bill in Senate by Giacomo

As promised, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) introduced a bill that tramples our constitutional rights to own and bear arms as granted by the Second Amendment.  Many are referring to her bill as an assault weapons ban, but it goes much farther than that. Her bill defines any gun with just one look-alike cosmetic feature (pistol grip, bayonet lug, etc.), of an assault weapon to be defined as an assault weapon and thus will be banned.  This not only applies to rifles, but to handguns and shotguns as well.  Someone please tell me how many handguns there are that don’t have pistol grips. Feinstein’s bill will also place a ban on over 100 specific guns.  This includes certain semi-automatic rifles, handguns and shotguns that are equipped to take a detachable magazine and have at least one military-style characteristic.  It also includes any semi-automatic rifle or handgun with a fixed magazine capable of holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition. Supposedly, her bill would protect over 900 specifically named guns that are used for hunting and sport purposes. One of the most troubling and unconstitutional parts of her bill is the creation of a national gun registry under her National Firearms Act, with the purpose to identify every gun owned in the nation.  No matter how old the gun or how long it’s been in the family, Feinstein wants the gun registered, the owner photographed, fingerprinted and a background check run on them.  I truly fear that if this is ever passed and attempted to be enforced, that there will be bloodshed by both law abiding citizens and whoever is sent to enforce it because I know of a lot of people who won’t allow their guns to be registered as long as they are alive.

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Medicare Paid Out Millions To Claims By Illegal's

Illegal immigrants and prison inmates received more than $120 million in Medicare services from 2009-2011 despite federal law that makes them ineligible for the program, according to two new reports from the HHS inspector general. The issue, according to the reports, is timing. When Medicare is alerted that someone is incarcerated or undocumented, its contractors help prevent payments from going out the door. But often, Medicare’s databases aren’t up to date, and improper payments go out. And Medicare lacks the tools to get the money back. Nearly 3,000 illegal immigrants made thousands of claims resulting in $91.6 million in services improperly covered by Medicare during the three-year period studied in the report. Over the same period, more than 135,000 Medicare beneficiaries were incarcerated, a second report shows. The report says that 11,600 inmates submitted more than 75,000 claims and received services worth $33.6 million.

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Obama Inauguration: “Preserving Liberty Requires Collective Action”

President Obama took the Oath of Office for his final time today in a ceremonial procedure in front of a watchful nation, laying out a fiercely progressive vision for his second term in office, embracing the liberal causes of climate change, gay equality, and gun control before an audience of hundreds of thousands of Americans, politicians and government officials. President Obama threw in a head-fake to conservatives at the beginning of his speech, saying that “we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society’s ills can be cured through government alone,” before saying that the American government must lead the way on clean energy and gun control, and that freedom isn’t particularly worthwhile without collectivism. “Preserving our individual liberties,” the President said, “ultimately requires collective action.” President Obama defended big government welfare programs as enhancing American freedom, saying that things like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security “do not make us a nation of takers” but “free us to take the risks that make this country great.” In a surprising turn, the President aggressively laid out the issue he thinks might be the most important facing the country right now: global warming.  With the economy, unemployment and national debt, Obama on his own decides Climate Change it the most important issue of the day?  Have you heard of diversion?  You are witnessing it right before your eyes.  Just like we did the past four years!!

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Glock Demonstrates That Gun Ownership is Not Just a Right, But a Necessity

Watch here

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Does UN arms trade treaty figure in Obama administration’s gun control plans?

One day after President Barack Obama won re-election, his Administration agreed to a new round of international negotiations to revive a United Nations-sponsored treaty regulating the international sale of conventional arms, which critics fear could affect the Constitutionally protected right of U.S. citizens to purchase and bear firearms. Now, in the wake of the Newtown school massacre and the President’s January 16 promise to “put everything I’ve got” into a sweeping new series of gun control initiatives, the fate of that treaty, which enters a “final” round of negotiations this March, may loom as more important than ever, according to critics, some of whom argue that the U.S. should never have entered the talks in the first place. Their concerns remain, despite the fact that President Obama repeated his support for the Second Amendment and “our strong tradition of gun ownership and the rights of hunters and sportsmen” on January 16. (The subject never came up in his second inaugural address.)

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The power of making war often prevents it, and in our case would give efficacy to our desire of peace."

--Thomas Jefferson, letter to George Washington, 1788
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"Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm." --James Madison

"Monday's inaugural address included a big dollop of 'give capitalism its due.' But it was just a spoonful of sugar to help Americans swallow their collectivist medicine. ... According to this president, 'being true to our founding documents ... does not mean we all define liberty in exactly the same way.' ... This is what we are to have in mind as we swallow the 'ask not what your country' line of Obama's address: 'preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.' In other words, there is no real liberty without big government. ... Americans, Obama said, possess 'an endless capacity for risk' and 'we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society's ills can be cured through government alone. Our celebration of initiative and enterprise, our insistence on hard work and personal responsibility -- these are constants in our character.' It's all terrific lip service to the principles of economic freedom. But it was followed by the declaration that 'we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.' Translation: We can have our fiscal cake and eat it too. Forget $16.5 trillion in national debt. Forget trillion-dollar deficits. Forget government hyper-spending's toll on the private sector. ... [Margaret] Thatcher warned that socialists 'always run out of other people's money.' The president has made it clear he is nowhere near to being finished pursuing collectivism in the name of individual freedom."

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