Time For a Yard Sale? Selling Excess Property Could Net Government Billions (+video)

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When families face a budget crunch, they have but a few options — spend less, make more or starting selling stuff.

So why doesn’t the federal government do the same?

Given the current state of the country’s finances, many are wondering if it is time for the federal government to sell what it doesn’t need — basically, hold a yard sale.

The federal government is sitting on billions in assets that are either sluggish or just dead weight. That includes federal land, buildings and other structures. Two years ago, President Obama’s deficit commission identified 64,000 buildings and structures that it deemed excessive, underutilized or vacant and recommended should be sold.

“So instead of raising taxes, which takes money out of the economy and lowers economic activity, we ought to be looking at selling federal assets,” said Myron Ebell, with the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Read more from this story HERE.

Russia’s Pravda: ‘Americans, Never Give Up Your Guns!’

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photo credit: gre.ceres

These days, there are few few things to admire about the socialist, bankrupt and culturally degenerating USA, but at least so far, one thing remains: the right to bare arms and use deadly force to defend one’s self and possessions.

This will probably come as a total shock to most of my Western readers, but at one point, Russia was one of the most heavily armed societies on earth. This was, of course, when we were free under the Tsar. Weapons, from swords and spears to pistols, rifles and shotguns were everywhere, common items. People carried them concealed, they carried them holstered. Fighting knives were a prominent part of many traditional attires and those little tubes criss crossing on the costumes of Cossacks and various Caucasian peoples? Well those are bullet holders for rifles.

Various armies, such as the Poles, during the Смута (Times of Troubles), or Napoleon, or the Germans even as the Tsarist state collapsed under the weight of WW1 and Wall Street monies, found that holding Russian lands was much much harder than taking them and taking was no easy walk in the park but a blood bath all its own. In holding, one faced an extremely well armed and aggressive population Hell bent on exterminating or driving out the aggressor.

This well armed population was what allowed the various White factions to rise up, no matter how disorganized politically and militarily they were in 1918 and wage a savage civil war against the Reds. It should be noted that many of these armies were armed peasants, villagers, farmers and merchants, protecting their own. If it had not been for Washington’s clandestine support of and for the Reds, history would have gone quite differently.

Moscow fell, for example, not from a lack of weapons to defend it, but from the lieing guile of the Reds. Ten thousand Reds took Moscow and were opposed only by some few hundreds of officer cadets and their instructors. Even then the battle was fierce and losses high. However, in the city alone, at that time, lived over 30,000 military officers (both active and retired), all with their own issued weapons and ammunition, plus tens of thousands of other citizens who were armed. The Soviets promised to leave them all alone if they did not intervene. They did not and for that were asked afterwards to come register themselves and their weapons: where they were promptly shot.

Read more from this story HERE.

Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Plans to Put Armed Posse at Schools (+video)

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An Arizona sheriff has proposed placing an armed volunteer posse at many Phoenix-area schools, in response to the deadly school shooting in Connecticut.

Earlier in the week, Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne proposed firearms training for one educator in every school in the state. Following that lead, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said Thursday he wants to start dispatching volunteer patrols to schools within a week, according to MyFoxPhoenix.com.

The report emphasized that the plan calls for armed posse members around the perimeters of schools, not inside them. It will focus on about 50 schools within Maricopa County.

Read more from this story HERE.

Feinstein Drops Gun Bill Before Police Give Report on Newtown Shooting

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The Connecticut State Police report regarding the deadly mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School will not be released for “several months,” spokesman Lt. J. Paul Vance said over one week ago.“There is no further information to be released by the Connecticut State Police at this time.”

Despite the lack of information about the Newtown gunman, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, or how he managed to get the weapons from his mother Nancy Lanza, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) introduced an updated version of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban bill to Congress on December 17.

Feinstein’s office did not respond to an inquiry as to why she did not wait for a police report to be released with so many facts yet unknown. For example, numerous claims have been made that Mrs. Lanza even attempted to secure her weapons before her son used them to commit mass murder. Newtown Police told Breitbart News that the department could “neither confirm nor deny” that Mrs. Lanza did not at least attempt to secure the guns her son was reported to have used.

Breitbart News’ AWR Hawkins points that the Feinstein Assault Weapon Bill is actually a handgun ban.

“[T]he details of the ban betray a gun grab that includes semi-automatic pistols that use ‘a detachable magazine’ and have ‘one military characteristic.'”

Read more from this story HERE.

Senator Rand Paul Takes On Alaska Delegation Over Earmarks in Hurricane Sandy Relief Bill (+video)

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photo credit: gage skidmore

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul took on Alaska’s Senators yesterday over earmarks for Alaska fisheries placed in the appropriation bill designated for Hurricane Sandy relief, suggesting that if the spending was necessary it should be pushed through the Senate in a stand-alone bill.

The comments came on the Senate floor in the middle of a speech in which Senator Paul took on wasteful spending, of which the Alaskan earmarks were just one example of the problem.

Paul has suggested he would agree to further infrastructure spending if it were taken from appropriations that have already been designated as wasteful, or funds from the foreign aid budget designated for countries who have demonstrated hostility to America.

See video below:

Steyn: Laws Are for Little People, Not David Gregory

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A week ago on NBC’s Meet the Press, David Gregory brandished on screen a high-capacity magazine. To most media experts, a “high-capacity magazine” means an ad-stuffed double issue of Vanity Fair with the triple-page perfume-scented pullouts. But apparently in America’s gun-nut gun culture of gun-crazed gun kooks, it’s something else entirely, and it was this latter kind that Mr. Gregory produced in order to taunt Wayne LaPierre of the NRA. As the poster child for America’s gun-crazed gun-kook gun culture, Mr. LaPierre would probably have been more scared by the host waving around a headily perfumed Vanity Fair. But that was merely NBC’s first miscalculation. It seems a high-capacity magazine is illegal in the District of Columbia, and the flagrant breach of D.C. gun laws is now under investigation by the police.

This is, declared NYU professor Jay Rosen, “the dumbest media story of 2012.” Why? Because, as CNN’s Howard Kurtz breezily put it, everybody knows David Gregory wasn’t “planning to commit any crimes.”

So what? Neither are the overwhelming majority of his fellow high-capacity-magazine-owning Americans. Yet they’re expected to know, as they drive around visiting friends and family over Christmas, the various and contradictory gun laws in different jurisdictions. Ignorantia juris non excusat is one of the oldest concepts in civilized society: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Back when there was a modest and proportionate number of laws, that was just about doable. But in today’s America there are laws against everything, and any one of us at any time is unknowingly in breach of dozens of them. And in this case NBC were informed by the D.C. police that it would be illegal to show the thing on TV, and they went ahead and did it anyway: You’ll never take me alive, copper! You’ll have to pry my high-capacity magazine from my cold dead fingers! When the D.C. SWAT team, the FBI, and the ATF take out NBC News and the whole building goes up in one almighty fireball, David Gregory will be the crazed loon up on the roof like Jimmy Cagney in White Heat: “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” At last, some actual must-see TV on that lousy network.

But, even if we’re denied that pleasure, the “dumbest media story of 2012” is actually rather instructive. David Gregory intended to demonstrate what he regards as the absurdity of America’s lax gun laws. Instead, he’s demonstrating the ever greater absurdity of America’s non-lax laws. His investigation, prosecution, and a sentence of 20–30 years with eligibility for parole after ten (assuming Mothers Against High-Capacity Magazines don’t object) would teach a far more useful lesson than whatever he thought he was doing by waving that clip under LaPierre’s nose.

To Howard Kurtz & Co., it’s “obvious” that Gregory didn’t intend to commit a crime. But, in a land choked with laws, “obviousness” is one of the first casualties — and “obviously” innocent citizens have their “obviously” well-intentioned actions criminalized every minute of the day. Not far away from David Gregory, across the Virginia border, eleven-year-old Skylar Capo made the mistake of rescuing a woodpecker from the jaws of a cat and nursing him back to health for a couple of days. For her pains, a federal Fish & Wildlife gauleiter accompanied by state troopers descended on her house, charged her with illegal transportation of a protected species, issued her a $535 fine, and made her cry. Why is it so “obvious” that David Gregory deserves to be treated more leniently than a sixth grader? Because he’s got a TV show and she hasn’t?

Read more from this article HERE.

Why the Founding Fathers Matter

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It has become typical in school text books, in public discussions, and in the smug wisdom of Progressives, to diminish the words and actions of those who led the founding of the United States. However, now that the nation has gone through what Al Gore called a “wrenching transformation” away from limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty (all major ingredients to making the US the freest and most prosperous nation in history) it’s time to listen again to their wisdom.

Thomas Jefferson warned us to …

Avoid Sustainable Development: “When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.”

Avoid the Welfare State: “The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.” “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”

Avoid Massive Government Debt: “It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.”

Avoid Government Over-regulation: “My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.”

Read more from this story HERE.

No Let Up In Senseless Attacks On Tim Tebow

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After years of swirling around Tim Tebow, the vultures now have something else to pick on.

It’s barely a scrap, if that, for holier-than-Tebow critics who have been foaming at the mouth to dig up a granule of dirt on the man ever since he announced he was still a virgin.

So as reports surfaced that Tebow informed New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan that he didn’t want to be a part of the wildcat offense in Sunday’s game against the San Diego Chargers, apparently angry at being passed over for the starting quarterback job in place of maligned Mark Sanchez, the vultures closed in.

He’s a “fraud,” a “loser” and, as ESPN’s Merril Hoge declared, is as “phony as a three-dollar bill.”

Never mind that reports of Tebow’s insubordination all came via secondhand, unnamed sources or that Ryan wouldn’t confirm the story. One reported moment of a frustrated quarterback is enough for some to assassinate the character of a man who has proven time and time again to be as standup a human being as there is in a world where more and more sitting down is encouraged and celebrated.

Read more from this story HERE.

Get Rid of the Republican Establishment

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Here’s a New Year’s wish I would love to see come true.

However it is defined or however many people are part of it, it is time to send the giant never-ending “GOP Establishment” made up of some professional politicians, some moneyed nouveaux riche who — by virtue of their contributions and the faux friendships it buys with politicians — consider themselves political landed gentry, and the endless scam artist consultants they support packing.

As previously stated, I thought Mitt Romney to be a better candidate than did many observers. That said, the recent revelations in news articles that claim to chronicle the Romney campaign reinforce the idea that the “silk underwear” branch of the GOP just doesn’t get it.

The emerging story of a candidate who really didn’t want to run in the first place and consultants who never listened to pleas from his own family to humanize the man so that everyday people could “feel like he understands them” just makes conservatives and the GOP faithful sick.

They once again spent their hard-earned money and endless time backing another Republican nominee who had no prayer of connecting with the average voter. Never mind that he was, at closer examination, a young man of privilege who outgrew his silver spoon to create his own hard-earned fortune, his case was never properly made.

Read more from this story HERE.