The Right Lane update 3.19.13

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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The Victim Mentality-how to understand some of the 46%

There are many that stand in wonder why there are so many people that are dependent upon a nanny state government.  We have all read the stories, examples and expose's of this phenomenon.  Some of us (as I have) have had personal experience.  I would like to proffer there is a simple and direct cause.  Of course this is not the only one, but one that is most insidious and hard to cut out like a cancer in our society.  Further, I will go ahead and make the caveat that some people are truly down and out and need a hand up.  However, this is quiet different than what I want to discuss here. Read on....

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“One Thing a Violent Rapist Deserves is a Good Woman With a Gun”

“The one thing a violent rapist deserves is a good woman with a gun”  

“The Vice President of the United States actually told women facing an attack to empty their shotguns into the air? Have they lost their minds over at the White House? You keep your advice, we’ll keep our guns.”

Part of the efforts this conference was to try was to narrow the gender gap between men and women on the issue of gun control. Recent polls have shown that women favor bans on semi-automatic guns over men by a margin of over 20 points. Women also have a 15 point margin favoring bans on high-capacity magazines.

Natalie Foster, is the founder of Girls Guide to Guns.

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The best news yet By MARTIN WALKER, UPI Editor Emeritus

It isn't often that one gets to report undiluted good news but we now know that the world has achieved the main target of the Millennium Development Goals. Along with other targets for educating children, particularly girls, in the developing world, those goals, established by the United Nations and endorsed by the Group of Eight developed countries, called for the share of people living on less than $1.25 a day to be cut by half from 1990 to 2015. The U.N. Development Program has announced that the goal has been reached ahead of time. With living standards rising in much of the developing world, the proportion of our fellow human beings living in extreme income poverty worldwide has almost halved. It fell from 43 percent in 1990 (almost 3 billion people) to 22 percent in 2008 (about 1.6 billion people). One-third of these, more than 500 million people, were lifted out of abject poverty in China alone. But the Chinese weren't the only beneficiaries of this wave of widening prosperity in what the UNDP likes to call "the South," to stress contrast with the broadly more developed North. More than 40 developing countries have made dramatic gains, including some of the very poorest and those most hit by wars. The UNDP scores this progress with a Human Development Index, which measures different areas like education, health, nutrition, life expectancy and infant mortality as well as incomes. So, tell me why the UN continues to push redistribution of wealth from other industrialized countries?  What is their real agenda?

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US Military Voting: Silencing and Denying the Military Vote By: Gen Jerry Curry (Ret.)

Many of our military personnel stationed overseas do not successfully vote in presidential elections; or when they do vote their ballots don’t count. It is criminal that the President and the Pentagon can arrange for our troops to die in the service of their country, but can’t arrange for those same troops to vote. The Department of Defense could have ballots printed and flown to our troops at all our bases all over the world, have them filled out by the troops, sort the ballots out, fly them back to the U.S., and then have them deposited at voting drop off sites with plenty of time to spare. If legislation is needed to make this procedure legal and lawful, then let the President so inform the Congress and it will be done. “So, why aren’t soldiers voting? In many cases they simply can’t, and they have their commander in chief, President Obama, to blame,” asserts American Majority Action CEO Ned Ryan writing in the Washington Times. Since most military service men and women are by nature conservative, they tend to vote Republican. The President and the Secretary of Defense are Democrats and they may not be as keen as they could be to see that our troops exercise the right to vote. But Obama and the Secretary of Defense are only a small part of the problem. The Generals and Admirals running the Pentagon could easily arrange for every overseas military soldier, sailor and airman on active duty worldwide to vote. Of course this assumes that exercising the soldier’s right to vote is a high priority within the Pentagon bureaucracy. If there isn’t a high level of interest, a simple nod of the head by the Secretary could fix the problem. Currently the Obama Administration counters our troops failure to vote by pointing out that fiscal problems, including the Sequestration and a shortage of funds, makes it impossible to properly implement the military voting program as well as the President would like. The problem is really not just a shortage of funds; it is also a shortage of will power and little concern for our troops being able to exercise their constitutional right to vote. We know that many in the Obama Administration may not be too eager to encourage military troops to vote. So, some of the bureaucrats in the Pentagon will not protest overly much if somehow the overseas voting program doesn’t catch fire and if the troops are “accidentally” shut out of exercising their constitutional voting rights.

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$2.7M Federal Study: Why Do Lesbians Have Higher 'Risk for Hazardous Drinking'? By Elizabeth Harrington

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded $2.7 million to study why lesbians are at a higher “risk for hazardous drinking.” The University of Illinois has received grants since 2009 for its project, "Cumulative Stress and Hazardous Drinking in a Community of Adult Lesbians," which aims to develop “culturally sensitive” strategies to prevent lesbians from being drunks.. “However, very little is known about the factors that increase lesbians' risk for hazardous drinking.” “We propose to build on and extend our study of sexual identity and drinking… to model effects of cumulative stress on hazardous drinking among lesbians.” The researchers theorize that lesbians report higher rates of traumatic events, making them more likely to engage in hazardous drinking, which has been defined by NIH’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism as “more than 7 drinks per week or more than 3 drinks per occasion for women.” Furthermore, the problem may be worse for “lesbians of color,” the researchers say. The grant states that there are “chronic stressors unique to sexual minorities, creating cumulative stress that may be compounded in lesbians of color.” The study is being led by Tonda Hughes, professor at the Department of Health Systems Science at the University of Illinois, an “internationally recognized expert in the area of alcohol use among lesbians,” “Findings will have important scientific and public health implications for identifying groups at greatest risk for hazardous drinking and for developing culturally sensitive prevention and intervention strategies,” the grant states. In 2009, Hughes began leading this follow-up study, focusing on alcohol abuse and lesbians in particular. Since then the project has received a total of $2,675,202, averaging $668,800 in grants per year. The University of Illinois is not alone in receiving federal funds to study “sexual minorities” and their propensity to drink. The University of Washington has been awarded $1,154,445 since 2010 for its project “High Risk Drinking in Emerging Adult at-Risk Women,” which seeks to find out why young lesbians and bisexuals face an “elevated” chance for hazardous drinking. Old Dominion University in 2012 received $446,056 for its study titled “Minority Stress, Alcohol Use, and Intimate Partner Violence Among Lesbians.” As previously reported, the NIH also is funding a study to examine why “three-quarters” of lesbians are obese, spending a total of $1.5 million on that research. Requests for comment from the NIAAA and Dr. Hughes were not returned by publication of this story.

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US Spends $3.8 M to ‘Decrease Human-Elephant Conflict’

The Department of the Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service has awarded $3.8 million in 2011 and 2012 for a “African Elephant Conservation” grant that, in part, aims to “decrease human-elephant conflict.”

The grant award for 2013 is estimated at $1.5 million to continue efforts to protect African elephants and their habitat, according to federalgrantswire.com. The funds will go to “any African government agency responsible for African elephant conservation and protection and any other organization or individual with demonstrated experience in African elephant conservation.” Wow! and we cannot even give school children tours of the People's House or provide adequate numbers of Air Controllers!

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Obama Says Gov’t. Must Subsidize Green Energy That’s ‘Too Risky’ for Private Sector By Fred Lucas

President Barack Obama called for shifting American vehicles “entirely” off oil and said the government must finance green energy projects because they are “too risky” for the private sector.

“We recognize there are some things we do together as a country because individually we can’t do it -- and by the way, the private sector on its own will not invest in this research because it’s too expensive, it’s too risky,” Obama said. “They can’t afford it in terms of their bottom lines. So we’ve got to support it, and we’ll all benefit from it and our kids will benefit from it and our grandkids will benefit from it. That’s who we are. That’s been the American story.” [Who is we?  You and me!] Obama’s remarks, delivered Friday in his adopted home state of Illinois, come after years of government spending on green energy projects that went bankrupt or out of business – such as Solyndra, Beacon Power and Ener1. The plan to wean the U.S. off fossil fuel also comes as the administration has stalled efforts to approve the Keystone Pipeline from Canada that proponents say could create tens of thousands of jobs. “The only way to really break this cycle of spiking gas prices, the only way to break that cycle for good is to shift our cars entirely, our cars and trucks, off oil,” Obama said at the Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill. [Even his own department of energy has reported alternative fuels will at best reach %19 in the next 40 years] Obama called for establishing an Energy Security Trust that would be funded from revenue [taxes that you and I will eventually pay] from oil and gas leases on federal lands to subsidize green energy projects to shift America off oil and gas. Obama said this would not add to the deficit because it’s from a separate fund.

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Elizabeth Warren: Hike Minimum Wage to $22 an Hour

Another elected idiot in Washington that does not understand economics, much less business.  Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) wondered out loud why the nation's minimum wage isn't at $22 an hour, during a Senate Committee hearing on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions last week. “If we started in 1960, and we said that, as productivity goes up — that is, as workers are producing more — then the minimum wage is going to go up the same. And, if that were the case, the minimum wage today would be about $22 an hour. So, my question, Mr. Dube, is what happened to the other $14.75?” President Obama called for an increase in the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $9 in his State of the Union address.

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Obamacare Taxes Hit All Income Levels By: Kenneth Hanner

With Obamacare set to be implemented next year, several taxes associated with the measure already have gone into effect, with new levies on Americans of all income levels. Individuals making more than $200,000 and families making $250,000 this year will have to pay an additional 0.9 percentage points in Medicare taxes, Those same levels will also be subject to additional new Medicare taxes of 3.8 percent on their investment income. The financial services company Motley Fool detailed the new taxes stemming from the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in a report, “Motley Fool ONE Tax Center.” Many high earners were just hit with higher taxes when Congress failed to pass an extension of the so-called Bush tax cuts on incomes over $400,000 for individuals and $450,000 for joint filers, the website points out.
Lower-income earners, already paying 2 percent more of their income to the government this year after the payroll-tax holiday expired, will see new limits on contributions to flexible spending accounts, with a ceiling of $2,500 on the amount that can shielded from taxes for future healthcare costs. Taxpayers who itemize their personal deductions will not be able to write off as much for medical expenses. Only healthcare costs above 10 percent of gross income can now be deducted, up from 7.5 percent before Obamacare.

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The Two Personalities Fighting In The Liberal Mind by Frank Camp

Olivia Thirlby said: “I think we all suffer from acute blindness at times. Life is a constant journey of trying to open your eyes. I’m just beginning my journey, and my eyes aren’t fully open yet.” There have been many times in my life that I have been blinded to the actions surrounding me; I have been unable to see my own wrongs, and I have been unable to admit defeat. This flaw; personal blindness, effects all of us at different times. However, it seems as though Liberals are the most deeply afflicted with this condition. Liberals provoke rabid dogs, then become surprised when they get bitten. On a recent episode of Real Time With Bill Maher, Rachel Maddow began to trash Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal: “The Ryan budget is a document that says the big problems in America right now are that rich people do not have enough money…They need relief from confiscatory tax rates.” Shockingly, Maher replied with this gem: “You know what? Rich people – I’m sure you’d agree with this – actually do pay the freight in this country…I just saw these statistics…I mean, something like 70 percent. And here in California, I just want to say liberals – you could actually lose me. It’s outrageous what we’re paying – over 50 percent. I’m willing to pay my share, but yeah, it’s ridiculous.” According to Newsbusters, the total estimated tax rate on millionaires living in California stands at approximately 60%. All of you reading this already know that the wealthiest among us pay the majority of federal income taxes, as well as state and local taxes; but for someone like Bill Maher to break the confines of his Liberal pen, and dare to say that fact out loud? Wow.   This step out of bounds will cost Maher nothing. After all, he is one of the Liberal media’s strongest mouthpieces. He is too powerful to be taken down from the inside; so nothing will be said. In addition to that, the Left does not want to call attention to the truth, no matter who said it; so the media will bury this story. What is incredible about this story is the blindness under which Liberals like Maher live their lives. Maher–a huge Obama supporter–made his statement as if it was a revelation. He seemed absolutely indignant that the wealthy in California had to pay such high taxes. Absolutely shocking, Mr. Maher! This is a classic case of Liberal blindness. Liberals are of two minds; they advocate strongly for issue after issue that ultimately harm the country; then when the harm comes to them–what with them being a part of the country–they are blown away. This is similar to Obama supporter Donna Brazile wondering about why her healthcare premiums went up after Obamacare. It’s as if Liberals actually have two separate personalities. Maybe Liberalism truly is a mental disorder.

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Who Defines “Assault” and “Crazy”???

Senate Dems Push Assault Weapons Ban… Senate Republicans Push Crazy People Ban… Who Gets to Define “Assault”.. and “Crazy”?? Do you really want the federal government, (which has proven to be a colossal failure at everything it handles) deciding which guns “look” okay for you to own and which citizens in this country have the proper mental capacity to own them?
As Senate Democrats push ahead with a proposed ban on assault weapons and other gun-control legislation, Republicans are still trying to draw attention to what they see as the bigger issue — keeping the mentally ill from owning firearms. A proposal on the issue was introduced this month by South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who on Thursday again expressed his interest in getting the measure passed.  “I believe that the best way to interrupt the shooter is to have a mental health system that actually records and enters into the database people who should not be able to buy a gun,” Graham said. He made his remark while voting against a bill passed by the committee to ban assault weapons and high-capacity gun magazines.
As a responsible gun owner, I certainly agree that I do not want guns in the hands of crazy people, however, here is my problem with Senator Graham’s proposal: Who gets to define crazy? If the government has anything to do with it, anyone who has ever been prescribed an anti-depressant could fit in the mentally ill category. The government may also determine that any Veteran who fought in a war, may have some forms of depression and therefore cannot own a firearm. The government might also decide that people who believe in God, the Constitution, and fear tyranny, are mentally ill. The government may decide that people who are preppers are mentally ill.  Seriously…. Has making drugs illegal stopped drug abuse? The argument could be made that people high on illegal drugs are mentally unstable so should the government start drug testing all Americans daily to declare those people unfit to own guns? There are over 20 thousand gun control laws on the books in America. There are already laws in place to monitor and regulate the firearms industry and gun ownership. Many of those laws are not even being enforced. Here is the bottom line: Criminals, Crazies, and the Government WILL ALWAYS HAVE ACCESS TO AND HAVE GUNS. Additional laws only affect LAW ABIDING, NON-THREATENING citizens who want to own guns simply for self defense and because they have a Constitutional Right to own them. Give the government an inch.. it takes a mile and once you hand over any rights to the government, you can expect it will take blood to recover it. Lindsey Graham and all those folks aligning with him on this issue need to go back and read what Jefferson said about people who are willing to exchange liberty for the sake of security… Those people deserve NEITHER.

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No one will ever stop the deranged and evil from committing heinous violent acts

We’re learning more about the Newtown shooter Adam Lanza. What he did was criminal. The guns he used were not his. There’s one more thing. If we’re going to play the blame-game (a favorite tactic of liberals), it might be better to direct our anger and moral judgment against video games, the media, lax security, and bad parenting, if this report from the Daily News is accurate about Adam Lanza:

“What investigators found was a chilling spreadsheet 7 feet long and 4 feet wide that required a special printer, a document that contained Lanza’s obsessive, extensive research — in nine-point font — about mass murders of the past, and even attempted murders. . . . Authorities believe Adam Lanza targeted Sandy Hook, because a school would provide little resistance, allowing him to rack up victims in a quest for notoriety.”

Something is happening in our culture. It’s not that evil people did not do evil things in the past. It’s different today. There is an underlying current of moral apathy that no number of new laws will be able to curtail. Belief in God is despised. Moral absolutes are ridiculed. Children are taught from an early age that they are evolutionary accidents meandering through the cosmos that has no ultimate purpose. Is it any wonder that some people act on these beliefs with cold efficiency? In the end, who’s to say that they did anything wrong? We can learn simple survival instincts and skills - normally referred to as self defense.

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How Democrats Need YOU to Misunderstand Deficit and Debt

Apparently the Democrats’ new dodge on the runaway national debt is to claim that the deficit is going down. This argument relies on the public not knowing the difference between the deficit and the debt. The deficit is a one-year figure– how much money we spent in the past year, after we had spent every last cent that came in through taxes, fees, fines, and other payments to the government. Last year it was $1.1 trillion; this year we’re supposed to be breaking out the party hats because it might be “only” $900 billion or so.  The debt is the total amount we owe, based on all of the annual deficits adding up, year after year. That figure is $16.7 trillion – $16,708,225,460,175.14, if you want the precise figure. Looking at the inflation-adjusted numbers for our annual deficit, year by year . . . $500 billion used to be considered a really big annual deficit. We hit that in 2004; unadjusted for inflation, it came in at $413 billion. Back in 1991, the year’s deficit came in at $453 billion. So a half a trillion was the pre-Obama all-time high.

Now look at the Obama era:

2009: $1.5 trillion

2010: $1.36 trillion

2011: $1.32 trillion

2012: $1.1 trillion

In other words, the best Obama has done is twice as bad as it’s ever been.

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Pew: MSNBC Almost Entirely Dominated By Opinion By: Bill Hoffmann

If you’re looking for straight and unbiased news reporting, you may want to avoid MSNBC. A new Pew Research Center study has found the liberal-leaning cable network is filled with opinion and commentary for 85 percent of its airtime. Only a paltry 15 percent of MSNBC’s programming stuck to “factual reporting, according to Pew. Fox News, by comparison, had a breakdown of 55 percent commentary and opinion and 45 percent "factual reporting."  CNN was the only one of the big three cable news networks to broadcast more straight news with 54 percent of its programming dedicated to factual reporting and 46 percent to opinion and commentary. Pew’s findings are based on observing a half-hour of daytime programming for the first five months of 2012 and the first five minutes of primetime "general news shows." Pew also found that in 2012, MSNBC devoted 57 percent of all its coverage to the presidential campaign, with Fox devoting 37 percent and CNN 30 percent. A separate Pew examination of programming in December 2012 found MSNBC “by far the most opinionated of the three networks, with nearly 90 percent of its primetime coverage coming in the form of opinion or commentary. “And that remains the case with many of its packaged segments. Host Rachel Maddow, for example, often begins her show with a lengthy segment combining a monologue with video clips that can last for seven minutes or longer,’’ Pew said. The findings are part of Pew's annual State of the News Media report.

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Reuters Acts As “Exclusive” Cheerleaders For New Violations Of Americans’ Privacy by Mark Horne

Boasting that they have an “exclusive” Reuters is now “reporting” that the government is about to start violating the financial privacy of Americans and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution even more than before. “The Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country, according to a Treasury Department document seen by Reuters. The proposed plan represents a major step by U.S. intelligence agencies to spot and track down terrorist networks and crime syndicates by bringing together financial databanks, criminal records and military intelligence. The plan, which legal experts say is permissible under U.S. law, is nonetheless likely to trigger intense criticism from privacy advocates.” Notice how this “story” is presented. The government’s excuse for this action is reported as if it were unquestioned fact. The only point of the plan is to “spot and track down terrorist networks and crime syndicates.” Nothing else to see here. And then there are those “privacy advocates.” Those are other people who have an opinion. Their opinions are reported as just that: only opinions.  The government’s claims, on the other hand, are the objective facts of history. Why is Reuters assuming the government’s side in this story? I’m sure there are many cynical explanations for this, but the most likely is that they wouldn’t have gotten the “exclusive” if they hadn’t promoted the government’s agenda and treated as the unquestionable truth. The entire story is simply a report on a document that they were given. The only other “reporting” they did was call a couple of sources for some quotes about privacy, and got some quotes from a “Treasury spokesman” who might have been their source for the document. Typically, these kinds of moves are made after a crisis strikes. Bush got the Patriot Act pushed through because of 9-11. We started being irradiated or groped at airports because of the underwear bomber (even though the underwear bomber would have been waved on through one of those nudie scanners). So why the sudden change? Why are we suddenly hearing that the CIA or other “spy agencies” need to be able to be able to have open access? It is amazing to me that the story actually admits that we already have our privacy violated and yet somehow it is still credible to demand more such violations. The FBI already has full access to this information, and we all know that they are all completely trustworthy and would never misuse or abuse such information… or do we? “More than 25,000 financial firms – including banks, securities dealers, casinos, and money and wire transfer agencies – routinely file “suspicious activity reports” to FinCEN. The requirements for filing are so strict that banks often over-report, so they cannot be accused of failing to disclose activity that later proves questionable. This over-reporting raises the possibility that the financial details of ordinary citizens could wind up in the hands of spy agencies.” This story assures us that the spying is legal, but you would never know the United States government had a Constitution that included the Fourth Amendment by reading it.

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