New York Army Vet Facing 7 Years In Prison Over Empty Ammo Magazines

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Photo Credit: WGRZ-TV An Army veteran in New York is facing up to seven years in prison for possessing five empty 30-round ammunition magazines.

Nate Haddad told WGRZ-TV he was parked on a road last month waiting to meet someone interested in buying them off him when police approached. According to the station, the magazines were for an AR-15 rifle, the same type of weapon Haddad once carried in combat. Magazines over 10 rounds have been illegal in New York since 1994, unless they were manufactured before the law went into effect. Haddad says he thought his were legal, until he found out otherwise.

“I certainly did not think I was committing a felony crime by having these,” Haddad told WGRZ. “My understanding of what I had in my possession was that it was manufactured before 1994, but the arresting officers told me otherwise after I showed them the magazines that I had in my possession.”

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Scary Ted Cruz Labeled the New McCarthy in Leftist Freakout

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Photo Credit: New YorkerLast week, Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s prosecutorial style of questioning Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee for Defense Secretary, came so close to innuendo that it raised eyebrows in Congress, even among his Republican colleagues. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, called Cruz’s inquiry into Hagel’s past associations “out of bounds, quite frankly.” The Times reported that Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, rebuked Cruz for insinuating, without evidence, that Hagel may have collected speaking fees from North Korea. Some Democrats went so far as to liken Cruz, who is a newcomer to the Senate, to a darkly divisive predecessor, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, whose anti-Communist crusades devolved into infamous witch hunts. Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, stopped short of invoking McCarthy’s name, but there was no mistaking her allusion when she talked about being reminded of “a different time and place, when you said, ‘I have here in my pocket a speech you made on such-and-such a date,’ and of course there was nothing in the pocket.”

Boxer’s analogy may have been more apt than she realized. Two and a half years ago, Cruz gave a stem-winder of a speech at a Fourth of July weekend political rally in Austin, Texas, in which he accused the Harvard Law School of harboring a dozen Communists on its faculty when he studied there. Cruz attended Harvard Law School from 1992 until 1995. His spokeswoman didn’t respond to a request to discuss the speech.

Cruz made the accusation while speaking to a rapt ballroom audience during a luncheon at a conference called “Defending the American Dream,” sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, a non-profit political organization founded and funded in part by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch. Cruz greeted the audience jovially, but soon launched an impassioned attack on President Obama, whom he described as “the most radical” President “ever to occupy the Oval Office.” (I was covering the conference and kept the notes.)

He then went on to assert that Obama, who attended Harvard Law School four years ahead of him, “would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School.” The reason, said Cruz, was that, “There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”

“We are puzzled by the Senator’s assertions, as we are unaware of any basis for them,” Robb London, a spokesman for Harvard Law School, told me. London noted that Cruz had contributed “warm reminiscences“ of the school by video for a reunion of Latino alumni. “We applaud the fact that he has pursued public service, as so many of our graduates have done. We are also proud of our longstanding tradition of freedom of speech and the robust range of views and debates on our campus.”

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George Will: The Manufactured Crisis of Sequester

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Photo Credit: Washington PostEven during this desultory economic recovery, one industry thrives — the manufacture of synthetic hysteria. It is, however, inaccurate to accuse the Hysteric in Chief of crying “Wolf!” about spending cuts under the sequester. He is actually crying “Hamster!”

As in: Batten down the hatches — the sequester will cut $85 billion from this year’s $3.6 trillion budget! Or: Head for the storm cellar — spending will be cut 2.3 percent! Or: Washington chain-saw massacre — we must scrape by on 97.7 percent of current spending! Or: Chaos is coming because the sequester will cut a sum $25 billion larger than was just shoveled out the door (supposedly, but not actually) for victims of Hurricane Sandy! Or: Heaven forfend, the sequester will cut 47 percent as much as was spent on the AIG bailout! Or: Famine, pestilence and locusts will come when the sequester causes federal spending over 10 years to plummet from $46 trillion all the way down to $44.8 trillion! Or: Grass will grow in the streets of America’s cities if the domestic agencies whose budgets have increased 17 percent under President Obama must endure a 5 percent cut!

The sequester has forced liberals to clarify their conviction that whatever the government’s size is at any moment, it is the bare minimum necessary to forestall intolerable suffering. At his unintentionally hilarious hysteria session Tuesday, Obama said: The sequester’s “meat-cleaver approach” of “severe,” “arbitrary” and “brutal” cuts will “eviscerate” education, energy and medical research spending. “And already, the threat of these cuts has forced the Navy to delay an aircraft carrier that was supposed to deploy to the Persian Gulf.”

“Forced”? The Navy did indeed cite the sequester when delaying deployment of the USS Truman. In the high-stakes pressure campaign against Iran’s nuclear weapons program, U.S. policy has been to have two carriers in nearby waters. Yet the Navy is saying it cannot find cuts to programs or deployments less essential than the Truman deployment. The Navy’s participation in the political campaign to pressure Congress into unraveling the sequester is crude, obvious and shameful, and it should earn the Navy’s budget especially skeptical scrutiny by Congress.

The Defense Department’s civilian employment has grown 17 percent since 2002. In 2012, defense spending on civilian personnel was 21 percent higher than in 2002. And the Truman must stay in Norfolk? This is, strictly speaking, unbelievable.

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Florida Doesn’t Have Enough Doctors For Medicaid Expansion, Lobby Group Says

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Photo Credit: Mike StockerBrace yourself for longer lines at the doctor’s office. Whether you’re employed and insured, elderly and on Medicare, or poor and covered by Medicaid, the Florida Medical Association says there’s a growing shortage of doctors — especially specialists — available to provide you with medical care.

And if the Florida Legislature goes along with Gov. Rick Scott’s recommendation to offer Medicaid coverage to an additional 1 million Floridians — part of the Affordable Care Act that takes effect next January — the FMA says that shortage will only get worse. “Florida needs more doctors and it needs more nurses, and it needs them working together in teams,” said Rebecca O’Hara, a lobbyist for the FMA.

About 15 million Floridians have health insurance today, and Obamacare, which requires most adults to have coverage by January, could add as many as 2.5 million more. One million would come through a potential expansion of the federal-state Medicaid program that Scott announced this week he was backing. The others would be the result of new mandates requiring employers and individuals to have insurance or be fined.

Currently, the state has 44,804 doctors, but about 5,600 of them are expected to retire in the next five years. And even though Florida has opened three new medical schools in the past dozen years, the state isn’t producing as many doctors as it needs. Scott’s budget this year has $80 million to fund programs to train 700 new residents a year, in hopes they’ll remain in the state.

Of all patients, people covered by Medicaid may have the hardest time finding a doctor; only 59 percent of the state’s physicians are taking new Medicaid patients, according to a Kaiser Health News study.

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Have You Read Evan Todd’s Letter To Obama Yet?

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Photo Credit: RLEVANSEvan Todd is a Columbine survivor. And he wasn’t just AT Columbine on the fateful day where students lost their lives. He was shot and was wounded himself. And he’s got something to say to Obama. BEHOLD:

Mr. President, As a student who was shot and wounded during the Columbine massacre, I have a few thoughts on the current gun debate. In regards to your gun control initiatives:

Universal Background Checks

First, a universal background check will have many devastating effects. It will arguably have the opposite impact of what you propose. If adopted, criminals will know that they can not pass a background check legally, so they will resort to other avenues. With the conditions being set by this initiative, it will create a large black market for weapons and will support more criminal activity and funnel additional money into the hands of thugs, criminals, and people who will do harm to American citizens.

Second, universal background checks will create a huge bureaucracy that will cost an enormous amount of tax payers dollars and will straddle us with more debt. We cannot afford it now, let alone create another function of government that will have a huge monthly bill attached to it.

Third, is a universal background check system possible without universal gun registration? If so, please define it for us. Universal registration can easily be used for universal confiscation. I am not at all implying that you, sir, would try such a measure, but we do need to think about our actions through the lens of time.

It is not impossible to think that a tyrant, to the likes of Mao, Castro, Che, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and others, could possibly rise to power in America. It could be five, ten, twenty, or one hundred years from now — but future generations have the natural right to protect themselves from tyrannical government just as much as we currently do. It is safe to assume that this liberty that our forefathers secured has been a thorn in the side of would-be tyrants ever since the Second Amendment was adopted.

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How to Win in 2014: Stop Obama’s Legislative Agenda, Promote the Farm Team

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Photo Credit: GARY LOCKENearly four months after the election, most everybody seems to agree that something is amiss with the GOP. This consensus has provoked a stream of free advice for how Republicans can get back on their feet. Some of it is constructive and helpful. For instance, commentators like Jim Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute, Peter Wehner of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Michael Gerson of the Washington Post have persuasively argued in various ways about why and how the Republican party needs to update its policy offerings. But much of the “advice” amounts to a victory lap by liberal Democrats and their friends in the media, many of whom seem to think that a successful Republican party would be one that closely resembles the Democrats.

Helpful political advice should first of all be practical, taking into account what can and cannot be done. What, for instance, can the Republican party accomplish between now and the next election? To do that, we should first take a political inventory, to see where the GOP stands. On the plus side of the ledger, we have the party’s strength in the states. Republicans control 30 governorships, including in key swing states like Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. What’s more, the GOP holds a majority of state legislative seats, roughly 52 percent nationwide. All told, Republicans have unified control of 25 states, with 53 percent of the nation’s population. Compare that with the Democrats, who control 13 states with 30 percent of the American public.

Republicans also control the House of Representatives and retain enough seats to filibuster in the Senate. Not only that, but the 234 House Republicans still constitute a larger caucus than at any point during the Republican “revolution” of the mid-1990s. While this number is down from 2010, the last two cycles have produced the strongest GOP House majority since the Great Depression.

Finally, the Republican coalition is reasonably united. Naturally, there are fissures — notably, the divide between the so-called establishment wing of the party and the Tea Party “opposition.” Nevertheless, historical perspective is appropriate here. While the media like to play up today’s divisions, the party remains generally united around a set of policy goals — tax reform and sensible deregulation to jump-start the economy, entitlement reform to solve the debt crisis, the expansion of domestic energy production, and so on. One could not say the same of the Republicans after Franklin Roosevelt’s reelection in 1936 or Lyndon Johnson’s in 1964.

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Rich Hollywood Movie Producers Love Subsidies (That Would Pay For Teachers, Firefighters, And Police Officers)

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Photo Credit: Dreamworks At the Democratic National Convention last year, actress Eva Longoria called for higher taxes on America’s rich. Her take: “The Eva Longoria who worked at Wendy’s flipping burgers—she needed a tax break. But the Eva Longoria who works on movie sets does not.”

Actually, nowadays an Eva Longoria who flipped burgers would probably qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit and get a check from the government rather than pay taxes. It’s the movie set where she works these days that may well be getting the tax break.

With campaign season over, you’re not likely to hear stars bringing up taxes at this weekend’s Academy Awards show. But the tax man ought to come out and take a bow anyway. Of the nine “Best Picture” nominees in 2012, for example, five were filmed on location in states where the production company received financial incentives, including “The Help” (in Mississippi) and “Moneyball” (in California). Virginia gave $3.5 million to this year’s Oscar-nominated “Lincoln.”

Such state incentives are widespread, and often substantial, but they don’t do much to attract jobs. About $1.5 billion in tax credits and exemptions, grants, waived fees and other financial inducements went to the film industry in 2010, according to data analyzed by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Politicians like to offer this largess because they get photo-ops with celebrities, but the economic payoff is minuscule. George Mason University’s Adam Thierer has called this “a growing cronyism fiasco” and noted that the number of states involved skyrocketed to 45 in 2009 from five in 2002.

In its 2012 study “State Film Studies: Not Much Bang For Too Many Bucks,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that film-related jobs tend to go to out-of-staters who jet in, then leave. “The revenue generated by economic activity induced by film subsidies,” the study notes, “falls far short of the subsidies’ direct costs to the state. To balance its budget, the state must therefore cut spending or raise revenues elsewhere, dampening the subsidies’ positive economic impact.”

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Boy Scouts Should Not Backtrack On Values

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Photo Credit: National Library of NorwayA national uproar apparently caused the executive board of the Boy Scouts of America to postpone until May a vote on whether to allow homosexual Scouts and Scoutmasters among their ranks.

After more than 100 years as a private organization with the highest of moral standards, top scouting officials had initially floated the idea of rescinding the prohibition on homosexual members and leaders after reaffirming their policy last summer.

This reaffirmation followed just four years after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of the Scouts to set their own membership policy in regards to homosexuals in the 2008 case, Boy Scouts of America v. Dale.

Rather than resolving to uphold the Scout Law, which says that Scouts are to keep themselves “morally straight,” some members of the executive board began a covert campaign to change the policy. Two members of the executive board in particular were instrumental in pressuring their fellow board members to reconsider the ban.

Reportedly the strongest advocates for changing the common-sense policy were board members Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, and Jim Turley, CEO of Ernst & Young. Pro-family groups have called for their resignation from scouting, as well they should.

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Extreme Alaska: Snow-Kiting, Skijoring (Dog-Powered Cross-Country Skiing), And More

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Photo Credit: Tara Todras-WhitehillThe wind came from the northwest. It blew down from the glacier-studded peaks of the Alaska Range, through the icebergs of Turnagain Arm and across the frozen expanse of the Twenty Mile River. It was an unrelenting wind, the kind that fells trees, shapes mountains and drives people to their firesides. And there I was among the sculptured snow ridges and frozen grass on the banks of the Twenty Mile, attached to a giant kite, wearing a pair of skis.

When I signed up for snow-kiting in Alaska, I didn’t think about how it would feel to be bracing myself against a 25-mile-per-hour wind as I watched my kite flutter in the snow a hundred feet off, threatening to whip up into the air at any moment. All that kept it down was my hand on the rope “brake,” tight against my hip. I could barely hear Tom Fredericks, my upbeat instructor, shouting in my ear, “Now, it’s going to pull real hard when it first comes up,” before the rest of his words disappeared into the wind. Frankly, I was scared.

But then, I hadn’t come to Alaska in winter to take it easy. I let go of the brake. Seconds later, I was flying.

Colorado, Utah, Wyoming — these are the places one thinks of as winter sports paradises in the United States. But Alaska? Too dark, you might say. Too cold. Too, well, extreme. One imagines frostbite temperatures, cloud-scraping mountains and tundra too inhospitable for trees. The numbers bear out the prejudice: in the spring and summer of last year, close to 1.2 million people visited Alaska for vacation; in fall and winter, that number was just 34,000.

But as March approaches, average highs creep up to a balmy 34 degrees in Anchorage, and the daylight hours are as long as anywhere else. Conveniently for winter-sports enthusiasts, most of the 600 inches of snow the Chugach Mountains see each year remains. Still, few people go, leaving one of our country’s largest snowy playgrounds unvisited by any but locals and the few who are savvy enough to make the trip.

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Obama Threatening Veterans’ Gun Rights

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In an apparent threat to Second Amendment rights, some American military veterans have received a letter from the Veterans Administration warning that their competency to handle their own affairs is under review, and if determined by government bureaucrats to be “incompetent,” they would be barred from possessing weapons.

The issue is being raised by the United States Justice Foundation, which defends civil and religious rights.

In a statement on the organization’s website, Executive Director Michael Connelly said his organization is pursuing a Freedom of Information Act demand to the Department of Veterans Affairs to “force them to disclose the criteria they are using to place veterans on the background check list that keeps them from exercising their Second Amendment rights.”

“Then we will take whatever legal steps are necessary to protect our American warriors,” he wrote. He said he’s been approached by a significant number of veterans who have received letters from the VA.

An image of a letter dated Dec. 20, 2012, has been posted online at Red Flag News. The letter states that the Department of Veterans Affairs has “received” information about the veteran that “because of your disabilities you may need help in handling your Department of Affairs (VA) benefits.”

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