John McCain is a stubborn man and it is a character trait that has held him in good stead. As a prisoner in Vietnam his stubbornness in not giving up and giving in to the five year long ordeal of his imprisonment certainly played a large part in keeping him alive. And stubbornness can be a good quality in a politician, too. God knows Ronald Reagan was stubborn, often proudly saying that one of his political strategies was to get most of what he wanted from the Democrats in one battle, letting them save face with a partial win…and then going back and getting the rest of what he wanted later.
But stubbornness can be a character flaw, too. It can make you blind to the arguments of others. This can be especially problematic when you’re wrong and they’re right. It can make you arrogant and can alienate people who should be your allies. Which brings us to McCain and conservatives, his base without whom he can’t win this election. You see, the problem is McCain really doesn’t like us. To a large degree he’s bought into the moonbat caricature of conservatives, thinking we’re bigots and yahoos who lack hearts. But he’s figured out a way to deal with us. He’s going to throw us some red meat during the campaign; he’ll give us some lip service when he has to and once he placates us enough that we vote him into office, he’s stubbornly going to go right back to what he wants to do. You can do that sort of thing and keep a clear conscience when you’re doing it to people you don’t respect, I guess. Read the rest of this entry »
Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.
I could see the gun control lobby clinging to this line of “dangerous and unusual weapons” and bringing various appeals up to the SCOTUS based upon it.
Which then depends on the makeup of the court five years from now. Obama becomes President we know how it will look and then we could look forward to a 6-3 decision in favor of weakening our second amendment rights.
That is how important this election is. For those thinking of staying at home, or throwing their vote away on a Keyes or a Barr, because of their disagreements with McCain in the past….think about that.
The tyranny of the liberals was almost complete. One more vote and they would be confiscating our guns. After that, they could have done whatever they wanted and an unarmed population of sheep could have done nothing about it.
Five Justices, in the starkest display yet of the importance of presidential elections, saved a Constitutional right from extinction at the hands of liberals. One more Obama liberal on that Court, and the 2nd Amendment would be gone, erased from the Constitution, after more than 200 years. They are dangerous and they are dismantling our republic.
Every flippin day we get more evidence that Obama is the worst flip-flopper to have come along in some time. He anticipated the SCOTUS ruling today in opposition to gun bans and put this out:
ABC News’ Teddy Davis and Alexa Ainsworth Report: With the Supreme Court poised to rule on Washington, D.C.’s, gun ban, the Obama campaign is disavowing what it calls an “inartful” statement to the Chicago Tribune last year in which an unnamed aide characterized Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., as believing that the DC ban was constitutional.
“That statement was obviously an inartful attempt to explain the Senator’s consistent position,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton tells ABC News. Read the rest of this entry »
Thomas Joscelyn wrote an excellent article yesterday in the Weekly Standard that points to the first casualty of the Boumediene decision with the ruling that Huzaifa Parhat is NOT a enemy combatant. This now forces the US to either release him, transfer him to another country, or give him another tribunal.
The left and the MSM insist in believing Parhats story that he just got “caught up” in a big net after 9/11 inside Afghanistan but as Thomas points out, there is ample evidence to show us that he is not the innocent little lamb the NYT’s wishes us to believe he is:
According to the DOD, 22 citizens of China have been detained at Gitmo. Five of them have been released, but 17 of them remain at Gitmo. Like Parhat, all of these men are Uighurs, that is, natives of China’s Xinjiang region, or East Turkestan, as Uighurs call it. The Uighurs, who have been oppressed by various Chinese policies, have been fighting for their independence for decades. And given the deplorable human rights record of the Chinese regime, they have won at least some international support for their efforts.
Not all Uighur separatists are created equal though. A minority of them in the early 1980s formed the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a separatist group rooted in radical Islamic ideology and dedicated to jihad. And by the early 1990s, the ETIM had become a significant fighting force with a presence throughout Central and South Asia. It was only a matter of time before the ETIM’s members would cross paths with their Arab and Afghan ilk. Read the rest of this entry »
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the District of Columbia cannot ban a citizen from keeping a handgun at home, throwing out one of the nation’s strictest gun control laws.
The Supreme Court has overturned Washington, D.C.’s strict gun ban.The 5-4 decision marks first time the court has ever definitively addressed the issue, which had been one of the great unresolved constitutional questions as experts debated whether the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and carry a gun, or only a state’s right to arm a militia.
While statistics show that overall violent crime numbers are down in most big cities around the country, there has been an increase in crime in Washington DC, Cleveland and Baltimore. In the nation’s capital there were 181 murders in 2007.
Another case of liberals who cannot get want they want via the legislative process trying to get judges to write it for them from the bench.
The Supreme Court on Monday turned down a plea by environmental groups to rein in the Bush administration’s power to waive laws and regulations to speed construction of a fence along the U.S.-Mexican border.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has used authority given to him by Congress in 2005 to ignore environmental and other laws and regulations to move forward with hundreds of miles of fencing in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. Read the rest of this entry »
Big Fred doing the Big Job. Love it. From Human Events.
In a McCain administration, former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson would play a dominant role in selecting Supreme Court nominees and other judicial appointments, sources close to the McCain campaign and to Thompson tell us.
And why is Fred suddenly everywhere? These sources say that the agreement between McCain and Thompson is behind Thompson’s resurgence in the national media in recent weeks. In a McCain campaign conference call with reporters yesterday on last week’s Supreme Court decision on terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Thompson — without claiming such status — played the role of a prominent McCain adviser.
McCain will lock down a lot of conservatives with this one, yours truly included. Fred knows exactly what he is doing in this area and, as long as McCain follows his advice, there will be no Harriet Miers, David Souters, or Anthony Kennedys coming out of a McCain administration.
Henry Mark Holzer’s thought provoking article at FrontPage Mag today - Obama’s Supreme Court -gives us a preview of Obama’s judicial appointees’ litmus tests. (Holzer is a libertarian Constitutional lawyer and Professor Emeritus at Brooklyn Law School)
There are some serious concerns if the fate of the federal judiciary, let alone the Supreme Court, falls into Obama’s hands (especially with a compliant Senate). Let’s take a look at the words of Obama himself:
On July 17, 2007, Obama made a speech in Washington, D.C. to the country’s leading abortion-meisters, “Planned Parenthood.” In the words of NBC reporter Carrie Dean, Obama not only “leveled harsh words at conservative Supreme Court justices,” but “he offered his own intention to appoint justices with ‘empathy’.”
There are two camps of SCOTUS critics… those that consider themselves originalists, and others who subscribe to what always seems a catch phrase, a “Living Constitution”. Holzer (and most conservatives) fall into the former. Obama, without doubt, falls into the latter category.
“We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.”
It’s an eerie feeling reading this… the pit of the belly says this just may be a reverse de ja vu. Here’s the story in a nutshell, as told by Duncan Gardham and Gordon Rayner from London’s The Telegraph:
Justice Mitting signs a bail release for Abu Qatadabecause he had no prior criminal record in the British courts, and could not be deported for his Jordan retrial for possible breach of law under the European Convention on Human Rights.
While he’s sitting at home, wearing his fashionable electronic tag, he’ll be collecting £12,000 per year in benefits for he and his family, plus cost the state annually tens of thousands of pounds for protection.
Oh yes, among the visitors he is NOT allowed to entertain personally, or via phone contact, are Osama bin Laden, his Deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Hamza. [CORRECTION: Article doesn't mention phone or email correspondence] RTFA to see the rest of the “strict” house rules…. plus more on their due process getting in the way of old fashioned common sense.
It appears the Brits… none of them… are bully over this quandary of their own making. Imagine that? Read the rest of this entry »
Possibly one of the best, and most honest overviews of the Iraq SOFA negotiations comes from Omar Fadhil in his article today at the Long War Journal. Unlike most news outlets that state their content with such conviction, Fadhil points out that understanding each of the factions beefs is especially difficult since little about the negotiation specifics are known at this time to *any* one.
Or, as he puts it, the details “are rarely shared beyond the closed circle of the executive branches in Washington and Baghdad, leaving lawmakers in both countries in the dark for now. Personally, I think this is wise because too many voices prior to hammering out a starting point draft is anything but productive.
Despite the lack of details, there are varying levels of acceptance and rejection for what basics they do know. And knowing these objections is valuable for even the first SOFA draft. Oddly enough, there are only two groups with an absolute no-compomise/reject attitude. That would be the Association of Muslim scholars, and Sadr’s clan.
The Muslim scholars are Sunni clerics, formed in April 2003 after the fall of Saddam to unite the Sunni ulema, the highest Iraq sunni authorities. Their historic sympathies lie with Saddam’s old regime and AQ. However the AMSI has found their support by Sunnis significantly diminishing since “the awakening” of tribal leaders, and perhaps had their biggest setback last November when Sheikh Ahmed Abdul Ghafour al Samarrai, the leader of the Sunni Religious Endowments (more clerics…) ordered the closure of the AMSI headquarters in the Umm al Quraa mosque.
The lefties won. No other way to put it when discussing the recent SCOTUS decision. They have torn the Constitution to threads to give rights to illegal alien enemy combatants. As Andy McCarthy points out in his article today, we don’t trust the judiciary to make habeas corpus decisions on their own. Thats why there are reams and reams of legislative guidance on the matter from Congress. Nothing exists for these enemy combatants and now hundreds of cases will be thrown at the feet of federal judges with no guidance from our elected officials.
The left in the country have succeeded in turning back the clock to September 10th, 2001. They’ve hindered our ability to successfully interrogate the worst of the worst of our enemy. They’ve hindered our ability to gather intelligence via electronic and telephonic means. They’ve hindered our ability to gather intelligence via the enemies financial transactions (SWIFT) and now the liberals on the Supreme Court have told us that we are not in a war. It’s all a criminal matter to be left up to the court system.
Eight years after 9/11 and we have come full circle with the possibility of the most liberal politician in our country being elected President of the United States.
We didn’t have to wait long to see what’s coming. Defense attorney’s are gearing up for fresh battles, and prosecutors assume they are going ahead with military commissions as planned. Without clear due process and legal guidance, it’s as if the process were a severed earthworm, with both halves crawling off in opposite directions.
Tho it was made abundantly clear the concurring justices viewed the Military Commissions Act as un Constitutional, the opinion does not address the fate of the CSRTs/military commissions that were created with Detainees Treatment Act. Are they necessary anymore? Are they legal proceedings in the court’s eyes?
“It is an open question whether the military commissions, as they currently exist, satisfy the requirements of the Constitution,” said Michael Dorf, a law professor at Columbia University.
The military lawyers said they would use the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling to argue that if detainees have the right to habeas corpus, they are also entitled to other constitutional protections.(emphasis added by MH)They say the Constitution would bar the planned trials, asserting that legal procedures at Guantánamo violate basic legal protections.
The lawyers cited commission rules that permit hearsay and evidence derived by coercion as examples of commission procedures that they argued would not be permitted by the Constitution.
“It no longer makes sense for the government to pursue these cases through military commissions,” said Lieutenant Commander Brian Mizer, adding that he would quickly press a federal court challenge on behalf of his client, Salim Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden. Hamdan is scheduled to be the first detainee to face a commission, now set for July 21.
We’ve now moved beyond “basic” Constitutional rights to upcoming demands for full Constitutional rights by defense lawyers. Read the rest of this entry »
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Jarhead68 And the left starts bemoaning the fact in 3…2…1… The Kos Kids must be in mourning.
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