XDA

The Army Times reports that at last we're ditching the puny intermediate round in 5.56 x 45mm and beefing up to .260 Remington or .264 USA or 6.5 Creedmore or something like those that reaches out and knocks the enemy down. Finally!

Also getting rid of the current version of the M-16 (the M-4). Never liked that gun, at all.

I think it's a very good thing to give our troops better weapons than the ones they are going up against.

Still a half decade away, more's the pity.

Labels: Ditching The Puny 5.56 and M-4; Best News This Year

Yesterday the ever shrinking NYT had this "dictated by the DNC" unsigned editorial called Trump's Fraudulent Voter-Fraud Commission.

Here's the background. The states each have rolls of voters but no access to the federal rolls of non-naturalized resident aliens. The Obama administration wanted illegal voting (which usually is for Democrats) so the administration never compared the state and federal lists to see if any aliens were voting in the states. The responsible states wanted to see the non-citizen resident alien list but the Obama administration would never show it to any of the interested office-holders the states.

The whole purpose of the  proposed commission is to go through the 50 state lists of voters and compare them at last to the federal lists of non-naturalized foreign born individuals living her to see how many, if any, voted. That would necessarily be an illegal vote. Only then will we know if it's a big problem or not. But the NYT already knows and uses that special knowledge to disparage our president in the smug, really annoying way the NYT and other Democrat-dictation-takers have. Behold.

To state the obvious, this isn't a commission. It's a self-driving vehicle programmed to arrive at only one destination: that strange fact-free land in which, according to Trump and many conservatives, hordes of foreigners and people without valid photo identification flood the polls, threatening the nations's election integrity.

The NYT says we know this is a non-existent problem (four links are given and discussed below) but the truth is we don't know. We've never cross-referenced the lists to see how many people are on both lists.

Rational people welcome more information. People who are afraid what the information will be don't want to know.

The first link, from 2014, is from a law professor at Loyola in Los Angeles. He didn't have the federal list of non-citizen resident aliens. He didn't find many illegal votes by non-citizens. No kidding.

The second link from 2007 is from writers at the NYT. They didn't have the lists either. They found it was a crime not often prosecuted. I believe that. It's hard to catch people when your not trying.

The next link, from 2014, is by two writers in the Election Law Journal (I think -- the link was broken). They also didn't have the lists, weren't looking for people who couldn't legally vote voting, only for people who pretended to be someone else when voting.

The last link, from this year, is a report of a survey by three authors from the Brennan Center for Justice. They didn't have the federal list either and drew the conclusion that because hardly any non-citizens were caught voting, it doesn't exist.

That's a strange conclusion. Maybe there are lots of them but they rarely get caught. I found each of these links wholly unpersuasive. I'd still like to see the number of people who are both on the federal list of non-citizen residents (and that list only has the know aliens living here--there are plenty the federal government doesn't know about) and are on a state list of registered voters.

It might not be a problem, but we don't know yet.

Labels: New York Times: On Voter Fraud; Refusing to Use the Federal List of Non-Citizen Residents to See If Any Are Also Registered Voters

OK, there's not a lot to say about this piece in The Week, by Ryan Cooper, whoever that is, titled: How the Democrats Can Roar Back (although according to Cooper it's how they will roar back in 2018). I just wanted to mention it and link to it so I can laugh at him on November 7, 2018 (I hope).

Money quote:

The 2018 election is still 543 days away. But already, it seems clear that Democrats are poised to sweep Republicans out of power in the House. And if President Trump keeps up his tripartite trainwreck of monstrous policy, abuse of power, and addle-brained babbling, any sentient being with a D after their name should be able to stomp Trump in 2020.

(links omitted).



Although there is the puerile fake news name-calling too. He describes the Democrats' mistakes, which put them in their worst political position since the 1920s, as follows:

Democrats disastrously misread the state of the political terrain, and none more so than Barack Obama. Instead of seeing the obvious truth — that Republicans were increasingly nutty fanatics who hated his guts, and who win elections by basically cheating — he bent over backwards again and again to try to get Republican votes, and only narrowly avoided disaster.

Pure projection. At least the part not totally fiction is. But please, Democrats, take his advice of moving ever further to the left. None of this piddling centrist policy. Bold action is what's called for and "sweeping solutions." And remember, when ever and where ever you can, call the Republicans evil and stupid and clueless and cheaters and haters. That'll reverse your political losses, for sure.

If brains were dynamite, this guy couldn't blow his nose. But I do so enjoy being called evil and stupid by Democrats who are this century's biggest political losers and look to continue in their losing ways for a long time to come. (Although my party is not immune from making stupid moves). If we're so stupid and inept, how have we kicked Democrat ass so thoroughly for three of the past four election cycles? (Oh sorry, I forgot; we cheated, obviously).

Time will indeed tell, but I strongly suspect that it will tell us that Cooper couldn't predict the sun rise accurately.

Labels: Fanatics; Ryan Cooper 2018 Election Prediction, Monstrous, Nutty, Vote For Us You Cheating

I'm always interested in apologists for the fascists violently shutting down speakers they don't like, so I read Eric Zorn's piece today in the Chicago Tribune titled: Trump and GOP, not campus radicals, pose real threats to freedom. It's pretty stupid. His start, after the smug "Oh, please", is:

The ignorant, insular snowflakes on college campuses who want to banish conservative speakers are a piddly threat to American liberty.

Well, yeah, if the fascist campus thugs are merely shutting down Conservatives, it's piddling. If the right was doing something it never does, namely, shutting down Mr. Zorn, violently, I'm pretty sure he would be a little more concerned.

The hand-wringing and pearl-clutching on the political right about the lefty activists who object to their schools providing a forum to conservative provocateurs is preposterously out of scale to the danger these activists actually pose to the First Amendment.

Oh, I don't know about that. I'm pretty sure that conspiring to deprive an individual of his or her constitutional rights (here free speech) is a federal felony. Why, yes it is. See Title 18, Sec. 241 of the US Code. So it's serious enough to warrant up to ten years in the pen. So it's probably somewhat serious. Notice too that it is the same felony to cover ones face ("go in disguise") and do the same thing, which of course is exactly how the black shirt fascists do things in Berkeley and elsewhere. This law was passed to stop the KKK (all Democrats) from depriving black Americans of their rights; so it only seems fair to apply it to the equally deplorable actions of today's Democrat extreme. But no one ever does, more's the pity.

Zorn then gives lip service that stopping someone from speaking is inexcusable but he follows it up with this:

But come out from under the covers. Put on some fresh trousers. The vast majority of liberal politicians and pundits deplore this sort of suppression, which remains geographically quite limited.

Oh, I get it. It's the right that is having the vapors over nothing. Right. We've soiled our pants. Gotcha. We're the overly sensitive snowflakes, I guess, not the campus crowd. He goes on:

Rascals and rabble rousers from all across the political spectrum still have countless venues for expression, and those who wish to enjoy the vile ramblings of, say, Milo Yiannopolous, have no shortage of opportunity online.

This is the feeble excuse of "you can talk somewhere else" which means absolutely nothing to the free speech rights we Americans enjoy. If you can be stopped from speaking at one venue, then you are not free to speak. The physical limits of our free speech zone is the geographical boundary of America. Any redlining where certain people can't speak is diminishing that freedom. He's not through with the irrelevant "but, see..." excuses.

The right dominates talk radio and cable chat, and Republicans control every branch of government at the federal level.

I don't know what cable chat is but I agree that lefties cannot produce a radio talk show worth listening to and Republicans have majorities in the legislature and Trump is in the White House. And what, specifically, does that mean to lefty thugs violently stopping Conservatives from talking? Why, nothing, this is just "you can talk somewhere else" dressed up with jealousy and longing. Yeah, and lefties dominate Education stem and root and dominate TV. Which one reaches more people? Oh, and where are the venues where Conservatives are not allowed to speak? Why, it's on college campuses, where the left dominates thought and a lot of action, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Freedom of conservative speech is very, very safe.

Unless you're Milo Yannopolous, Charles Murray, Ann Coulter, Heather McDonald, etc.; then it's not safe at all to try to speak on a college campus to which you were invited by students there.

So about this time I'm wondering where is the GOP/Trump threat? And Zorn tells us, and it's all words, and not very menacing words at that. There is a huge difference between saying things and doing things. For one thing, your right to say things is protected. For actions, your right to swing your fist, for example, stops at the tip of my nose. It's no crime to say "Milo Yiannopolous says vile, rambling things" as Mr. Zorn just did. It is a crime to stop Milo from exercising his first amendment right. It is a crime to assault him in order to silence him. Zorn must be willfully blind to this important distinction.

And what are the dangerous threats to freedom that Trump and the GOP express? Remove the "actual malice" requirement with "public figures" via NYT v. Sullivan from libel laws. That doesn't sound like the death knell of our First Amendment to me. I'm generally OK with the decision but the creation of two classes of victims of slander, ordinary people and famous people, has always struck me as very un-American. And the other dire threat is trying to get a Constitutional Amendment to bring back punishment for burning the American Flag. Let me quote Mr. Zorn, "Oh, please." That's the clear and present danger to our freedom of speech, trying to amend the Constitution? Spare me the faux outrage, Eric. And here is his big finish:

For genuine threats to the core values of our democratic republic, however, you need look no further than the relentless, state-by-state efforts of the GOP to suppress minority voting.

And in support for this, Zorn quotes two lefty judges who wrongfully struck down voter ID laws. I can quote judges too; here is Justice Stevens, formerly of the Supreme Court, on the subject in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, which upheld a voter ID statute:

There is no question about the legitimacy or importance of the State’s interest in counting only the votes of eligible voters. Moreover, the interest in orderly administration and accurate recordkeeping provides a sufficient justification for carefully identifying all voters participating in the election process.

Regarding the tired, false meme that such laws are intended to deprive people of color of their voting rights, I always say, you have to be a straight up racist to believe black Americans are less capable of obtaining a photo ID than white Americans are. Hey, Zorn, do you like apples? I just called you a racist. How you like them apples?

So, yeah, it's not the disguised black shirt fascists felons that is the threat, it's the Republicans passing constitutional laws and talking about reforming past Supreme Court decisions through legal channels. Any idiot can see that.

Labels: Eric Zorn; Fascist Thugs--Pffft, Oh Please Nothing but Republicans--Deadly Threat to Freedom