Court: The Right to Bear Arms Doesn’t Stop at the Front Door

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Photo Credit: APLast week, in a 2-1 decision, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a restriction on carrying concealed handguns. The court held that carrying a handgun “outside the home for the lawful purpose of self-defense, though subject to traditional restrictions, constitutes ‘bear[ing] Arms’ within the meaning of the Second Amendment.”

The question of whether the Second Amendment right to bear arms extends to the public is contentious. The 7th Circuit agrees with the 9th Circuit that carrying a gun outside the home is protected by the Constitution, but other courts (the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Circuits) are unsettled on the issue.

This issue should be a no-brainer.

Few people, if any, would dare suggest that any of the other Bill of Rights be limited to the privacy of one’s home.

Does free speech end in the home? No. Do Fourth Amendment privacy rights end in the home? No. So why should the right to bear arms end in the home?

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Why American Foreign Policy is Headed for Disaster

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Photo Credit: Free Beacon …Watching the strange mix of clumsiness and insouciance with which Barack Obama and John Kerry approach the world, the abstract and aloof manner in which they comment and posture on foreign affairs, it is hard not to recall Hardy’s metaphor of growing dangers distant from the center of civilization. The recent news of a possible terrorist plot against airliners flying to the United States, and of a threat against the U.S. embassy in Uganda, remind us of the durability of the ideology and menace of Islamic terrorism. The ability of non-monarchical Arab governments to control their populations has collapsed, creating an arc of stateless space that begins in Libya and Egypt, is briefly interrupted by the tiny, embattled, belittled, and bullied Jewish State, and extends through Lebanon into Syria and western Iraq.

This is our iceberg. Within its confines murderers and barbarians roam, butchering each other and anyone else who is caught in the crossfire. Within its confines followers of al Qaeda gather and plot. They will not remain within its confines for long, though. Anyone who pays the least attention to the articles inside the New York Times will have noticed leaks by officers of our intelligence agencies, leaks desperately warning that the jihadists have turned their eyes to Europe and to the United States. It is no secret. At the end of last month the Director of National Intelligence told Congress that al Qaeda is no less of a threat than it was when it attacked in 2001.

Our response? The United States has no influence in Egypt, it has left the Syrian dictator more secure, it has left him with his stash of WMD, and it has no pull over Lebanon, no pull over Iraq. The United States is gutting its military, it is pursuing negotiations with Iran whose only point is, in the words of one former Obama official, to “buy time.” It is withdrawing from Afghanistan and leaving it in the hands of the former hosts of al Qaeda, and it is lifting asylum restrictions to make it easier for Syrians with “loose ties” to terrorism to migrate here.

The United States is about to lose strategically important drone bases in Afghanistan, it has found itself out-maneuvered by Vladimir Putin at every turn, its policies toward hotspots in Venezuela and Ukraine seem nonexistent. The policy is to talk above all, to keep talking in Geneva with the Syrians, to keep talking in Vienna with the Iranians, to keep talking in Jerusalem with the Israelis and the Palestinians, no matter that the talk accomplishes nothing, no matter that it drains resources, energy, and personnel that could be put to more constructive use elsewhere. His policy in Syria in tatters, his negotiations with Iran a charade, the secretary of State flew to Indonesia last week to rally the world against the amorphous force of climate change. Why do something about 130,000 dead Syrians, about proliferating weapons of mass destruction, when you can poke fun of those who dissent from the scientific consensus?

The territory over which al Qaeda claims sovereignty is growing, our influence in the Middle East is shrinking, and serious contenders for the American presidency want to make it more difficult for the government to survey the enemy. Our president and his administration interpret these developments, if they interpret them at all, in isolation, as discrete situations, as the inevitable consequences of the post-American world they are so diligently helping to bring into being. “Alien they seemed to be,” Hardy writes. “No mortal eye could see / The intimate welding of their later history.”

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Hypocrisy, Thy Name is John Kerry

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Photo Credit: APFleeing his failed diplomatic Middle East efforts, noted nonscientist Secretary of State John Kerry flitted off to Indonesia where he exuded hot air bloviating about (hu)man caused climate change as a weapon of mass destruction as noted here earlier.

However, by Kerry’s reasoning, the ongoing slaughter in Syria is nothing compared to Kerry’s own contribution to manmade climate change/worse than any weapon of mass destruction, blah, blah, blah. How so? John Kerry is not a flappy bird moving from place to place under his own power. So how does he get around? Why, by planes. Big ones. As Jim Geraghty of National Review Online helpfully pointed out, Kerry’s whirlwind travels from continent to continent to continent plus intracontinental short hops accelerate the very climate change he decries.

In case you’re wondering, flying first class from Washington to Seoul to Beijing to Jakarta to Abu Dhabi and then back to Washington runs up roughly 12.16 metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to CarbonFootprint.com, which uses data from the EPA and Department of Energy.

The average American generates about 19 tons of carbon dioxide in a year.

So in one week, just from flying from meeting to meeting, Kerry generated about two-thirds the carbon output of the average American in one year.

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Barone: Liberalism’s Snobbery Towards Most Americans

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Susan WalshThe roots of American liberalism are not compassion but snobbery. That’s the thesis of Fred Siegel’s revealing new book, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class.

The standard account from liberal historians over the years, and more recently in bestsellers by Glenn Beck, is a linear story: Government expansion starts with the Progressives of a hundred years ago, accelerates through the New Deal and the Great Society, and is followed up by the Obama stimulus and Obamacare.

Siegel says it’s more complicated than that. And he argues that literary figures contributed as much to the liberal mindset — maybe more — than public policy wonks.

The Progressives he depicts as Protestant reformers, determined to professionalize institutions and tame the immigrant and industrial masses. Progressive projects included women’s suffrage and prohibition of alcohol.

But the many pro-German Progressives were appalled when Woodrow Wilson led America into World War I and by Wilson’s brutal suppression of civil liberties.

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Texas Congressman: Obama Just Doesn’t Understand the Constitution

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Photo Credit: teaparty.orgObama doesn’t understand the Constitution says one Texas congressman.

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) believes that is why Barack Obama is arbitrarily making changes to the Affordable Health Care Act, otherwise known as the Obamacare law. Brady said maybe that’s why Obama himself has insisted that as president he can do whatever he wants and that he intends to pursue his agenda with – or without – Congress. Brady’s take: Obama just does not understand the Constitution.

According to a report by The Hill, as reported by WND, Brady believes that Obama does not understand how the executive, legislative and judicial branches of our government work.

Brady’s comments were in relation to U.S. House plans for legislation that would allow the president to be sued by the House for violating the Constitution.

The Hill report stated that “When asked by Ransom Notes Radio whether people will finally get tired of Obama’s use of executive authority, Brady said: ‘I certainly hope so because enough’s enough. He just doesn’t understand the branches of government or the Constitution.’”

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The United States of Decline

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Photo Credit: National Review America is unraveling at a stunning speed and to a staggering degree. This decline is breathtaking, and the prognosis is dim.

For starters, Obama now rules by decree. Reportedly for the 27th time, he has changed the rules of Obamacare singlehandedly, with neither congressional approval nor even ceremonial resolutions to limit his actions. Obama needs no such frivolities.

“That’s the good thing about being president,” Obama joked on February 10. “I can do whatever I want.” In an especially bitter irony, Obama uttered these despicable words while guiding French president François Hollande through Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson — a key architect of America’s foundation of limited government.

That very day, Obama decreed that the Obamacare mandate for employers with 50 to 99 workers would be postponed until 2016 (beyond an earlier extension to 2015), well past the November 2014 midterm elections. This eases the pressure on Democrats, whose campaigns would suffer if voters saw their company health plans canceled due to Obamacare’s unnecessary, expensive, mandatory benefits — e.g. maternity coverage for men.

So, by fiat, Obama has postponed the employer mandate. When Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) effectively tried to do this through legislation last fall, Democrats virtually lassoed and branded him.

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WSJ: What Would Lincoln Do?

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Photo Credit: Richard Strauss/SmithsonianAbraham Lincoln, whose birthday we mark this holiday weekend, had less leadership experience than almost any earlier president. George Washington and Andrew Jackson had been generals, several other presidents had been governors, and all the Southerners had owned plantations. They had run organizations and managed men. President Lincoln, by contrast, was a former state legislator, a one-term congressman and the senior partner of a two-man law firm; he kept his most important papers filed away in his hat.

And yet Lincoln filled the office of president so effectively that he regularly tops historians’ rankings of great presidents.

It helped, of course, that he was one of the greatest writers in the American canon—certainly the greatest ever to reach the White House (Jefferson at his best could be equally good, but his range was narrower). Leaving aside such extraordinary talents, which of Lincoln’s principles of action can guide his successors?

Cite precedent. Lincoln the lawyer was ever mindful of precedents, while Lincoln the unhappy son who never bonded with his hard-driving, un-bookish father was always looking for paternal surrogates. He found both precedents and men he could look up to in America’s founding fathers.

Lincoln’s mature career—from the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854 until his death in 1865—was, among other things, a long effort to show that his positions on the issue of slavery were those of the founders. (Lincoln wanted slavery contained and ultimately extinguished; so, he said, did they.) He hammered away at this theme in his Peoria speech in 1854, the three-hour-long oration that first laid out his ideas; he returned to it repeatedly in his 1858 debates with the Illinois Democrat Stephen Douglas ; and he spent half the Cooper Union Address, his New York City command performance in 1860, showing that “our fathers, who framed the government under which we live,” agreed with him. “As those fathers marked [slavery], let it be again marked,” he said, “as an evil not to be extended.”

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Are Laws Made to Be Broken?

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Photo Credit: WNDNothing better depicted Obama’s illegal tampering with the clear words of ObamaCare — his announcement this week that he was delaying the employer mandate for medium-sized companies — than Michael Ramirez’ brilliant cartoon showing the law as a blank page in which Obama had continually changed its words and meaning.

Along similar lines, Charles Krauthammer observes:

But generally speaking you get past the next election by changing your policies, by announcing new initiatives, but not by wantonly changing the law lawlessly. This is stuff you do in a banana republic. It’s as if the law is simply a blackboard on which Obama writes any number he wants, any delay he wants, and any provision.

[snip]

Where in the Constitution is the president allowed to alter the law 27 times after it has been passed?”

[snip]

The win-at-all-cost mentality helped create a culture in which a partisan-line vote was deemed sufficient for passing transcendent legislation. It spurred advisers to develop a dishonest talking point — “If you like your health plan, you’ll be able to keep your health plan.” And political expediency led Obama to repeat the line, over and over and over again, when he knew, or should have known, it was false.

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Is Obama Accelerating the Collapse of America?

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Photo Credit: APIn my latest book, “The Ultimate Obama Survival Guide” released in Spring 2013, I called Obama a “stealth Marxist” out to destroy capitalism and make Americans dependent on government.

This wasn’t just guesswork. Obama and I were classmates at Columbia University, where we were taught how to overwhelm the system until the economy collapses with spending, debt, and entitlements. In my book, I called Obamacare the perfect “Trojan Horse” that would make it all happen.

Have you paid attention to the Obama news of the past week? It’s amazing. It’s mind-boggling. It’s unimaginable. It was a week of unimaginable destruction.

The cloak is off. Obama is no longer hiding his plans to destroy America. For anyone who isn’t blind, deaf or very dumb, it’s now all out in the open.

The news of this past week proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Obama is accelerating the destruction of America. Why the sudden rush? Obama and his Marxist cabal see the writing on the wall. Their internal polls show they are headed for a landslide defeat in November. Now that the disastrous effects of Obamacare are clear for the voters to see, they know Democrats are about to be destroyed at the polls.

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Prideful President Refuses to Admit Obamacare is a Disaster

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Photo Credit: J. Scott ApplewhiteBy Emily Miller.

President Obama is scrambling to put Band-Aids on the health care law instead of admitting that it is DOA.

He pushed Obamacare through Congress with the promise that it would help the 30 million uninsured Americans and not hurt the rest of us. Five years later, the government intrusion has disrupted the coverage of the more than 300 million Americans who were content with their insurance, and it is already dragging down the economy.

Mr. Obama is trying to to hide the problems.

That’s why the White House announced Monday it would again push back the deadline for the mandate to kick in for companies with between 50 and 100 employees to 2016, which gets the negative economic impact to hit after the election.

This is just the latest in two dozen delays to Obamacare that the president has made — without consulting Congress.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: WNDDoc Discovers ObamaCare’s Shocking, Dirty Secret

By Lee Hieb, M.D.

I am being impacted in many ways by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or, to give credit where credit is due, “Obamacare.” But the most stunning attack on my person came this month in the form of insurance rate hikes.

My older son is 24 years old, a student and in perfect health. He has never smoked, is thin, has totally normal labs, is on no meds and comes from a long line of hearty, healthy stock. It seemed appropriate to pay $47 a month for health insurance.

Then, I just received notice from Coventry Insurance that due to the new health-care law we had to make a choice from three options: 1) We could keep his insurance policy and pay nearly four times as much – $167/month; 2) We could explore a different “ACA compatible” policy; or 3) We could try our luck at the Iowa “marketplace” – i. e. Obamacare state exchange. Each option had its own phone number.

Now I’d rather sell my kid into indentured labor than put him on Obamacare, so I called the number for the new policy. I did the appropriate button pushing but ended up at the state exchange anyway. And I confess after a short conversation with a probable navigator, I hung up the phone, saying there was no way I wanted Obamacare. I also confess that I may have been a bit abrupt, thinking I would never talk to him again. So I dialed the number for option No. 1 – updating the original policy.

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