The 0.22 caliber solution, not great but best.

The horrendous shooting in Tucson has some lessons, one perhaps counterintuitive. After shooting 19 people, the gunman was incapacitated by three heroes. A 61-year old woman grabbed his empty magazine and also the full one he was trying to reload. Another bystander tackled the gunman, joined by a third person who heard the commotion and ran over to help (toward the sound of gunfire rather than the perhaps more circumspect direction away). The last hero was armed ( covered carry being legal in Arizona ) and said that he would have shot the gunman had it been necessary but was happy that it wasn't since he was able to assist in the takedown.

Of course, there are the reflexive calls from the kneejerk Left for banning guns. There are several responses to this: 1) the gunman was known in some quarters to be mentally unstable and should have been prevented from purchasing a handgun, let alone the extended magazine, under PRESENT Federal law. 2) No law is going to suffice to keep guns away from criminals. Gun laws only suffice to keep guns away from ordinary citizens, usually the victims. 3) While Arizona has liberal gun laws ( and Congresswoman Giffords was a proponent of the Second Amendment ), no-one in the immediate crowd was armed.

Rather than limit gun ownership, it should be encouraged in the following way. Every citizen volunteer who can pass a legitimate and rigorous background check (possibly involving some quasi-deputization )should be encouraged to carry a small 0.22 caliber weapon after appropriate training. It's hard for a single person to do multiple lethal damage with such a weapon. A hail of bullets from several such weapons, however, should be enough to bring down an illegitimate gunman once he has identified himself as such. While this suggestion is not a panacea and wouldn't in all likelihood have prevented the "first-strike" shooting of Cong. Giffords, it likely would have prevented, or at least ameliorated, the shooting of 18 other people.Knowledge of the likely certainty of such a result might even provide an extra deterrent for even a first striker.

Mass public killings are fortunately rare but in many such cases, the extent of the killings would dramatically have been palliated by this policy. In the Virginia Tech shootings, also done by known loon who should never have been allowed to purchase a gun under PRESENT law, one of the bystanders had a weapon in his car but couldn't reach it in time since the school policy was to ban weapons from the campus, a stricture obviously not likely to be followed by either a crazy person or a criminal.In the V-Tech case, the shooter wasn't even stopped at the crime scene and had to be apprehended later. Without distance weapons, it takes extraordinary heroism to stop such a shooter before armed security people can arrive.

Tawfik Hamid on The Real Reasons Behind the Arab-Israeli Conflict

http://tinyurl.com/34ujpsz
The Real Reasons Behind the Arab-Israeli Conflict By Tawfik Hamid
...Despite peace treaties such as the Oslo Accords, hatred toward Jews and Israel has risen to unprecedented levels in the Palestinian areas and continues to rise in much of the Muslim world...Israel proved its dedication to peace when it withdrew from Sinai, Lebanon, and Gaza in hope of peace with its neighbors...What perpetuates the stalemate? One ..Palestinians do not accept the existence of Israel...their participation in negotiations is fake, hypocritical, and doomed to fail. It is impossible to negotiate with a partner about borders if this partner does not accept your existence to begin with..second..is the selfish mentality of the Palestinian leadership....True leaders must be ready to make concessions to ensure a better life for their people....third..is the international community's naive belief that less radical Palestinians are “moderates.” Fatah is not much different from Hamas in its refusal to accept that Israel is an established country ...Fatah is also virtually identical to Hamas with regard to its promotion of extreme anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propagandist incitement....fourth...is that the Palestinian leadership prefers to live — and to make their population live — in delusions rather than in reality. Just recently, an official Palestinian report claimed that a key Jewish holy site — Jerusalem's Western Wall — has no religious significance to Jews... impossible to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict if the Palestinian leaders insist on living in such delusions ...fifth factor...is that the Palestinians of Gaza who elected Hamas have not had to pay the price for their choice....Allowing Palestinians to see that Hamas is unable to fulfill its promises would weaken radical Islam in the area. European and American economic support for Gaza...masks the realities of the radical group's poor governance and enables them to survive.
With Hamas still strong,...their version of Islamic doctrine forbids any accommodation with the Jewish state.
What about Israel's role in the stalemate? What mistake does Israel continue to make?
...inhibiting progress has been insufficient use by Israel of negative consequences, perhaps in part because their American and European "allies" would balk at such tactics....until Fatah and Hamas accept the minimal principles necessary for Israel to participate in any further negotiations. These principles would include:
1. Declaration of the right of the Jewish state of Israel to exist;
2. Cessation of both verbal incitement and physical violence against Israeli civilians and;
3. Implementation of all previous agreements between Palestinians and Israelis.
Lastly, what of America's role? Blaming Israel for Palestinian hostility is counterproductive....Concrete evidence shows that unilateral concessions from the Israeli side without significant concessions from the Palestinian side are counterproductive.
Unfortunately, given the mentality of the Palestinian leadership, a strategy by Israel and its allies of negative consequences is probably the only strategy with potential to, at last, give peace a chance.

Do liberals even understand what patriotism IS?

"Cosmopolitan critics, men who are the friends of every country save their own."
-Benjamin Disraeli
Oikophobia Why the liberal elite finds Americans revolting.
http://tinyurl.com/36rr33h

NYC sanitation workers strike during 20"snowfall

A mere 20" of snow brought New York to its knees because 10% of sanitation workers didn't show up for work (undisputed fact) and (reportedly) the New York Post said that the union advised workers to slow down, skip streets, etc and that supervisors would not "write them up." The union unhappiness is over budget cuts resulting in less over-time and fewer promotions to supervisor.

If there is a dispute between two parties (e.g. Bloomberg and the union ) and someone willfully targets innocent bystanders not directly part of the dispute, it is clearly an act of terrorism. The fact that deaths resulted merely reinforces the point.

Napolitano and Holder should take note ( if they cared about terrorism, that is.)

It was Calvin Coolidge who first insisted that "there is no strike against the public good." Where is old Cal when he is needed? Public service employees can NOT be allowed to strike.

US foreign policy is in shambles. Obama's not just bad on domestic issues.

http://tinyurl.com/2g9c86q
Why Latin American turned By Caroline B. Glick
There is no doubt that the Venezuelan-Iranian alliance and its growing force in Latin America goes a long way towards explaining South America's sudden urge to recognize "Palestine." But there is more to the story...
Those trends are the rise of Hugo Chavez, the influence of the Venezuela-Iran alliance, and the cravenness of US foreign policy towards Latin America and the Middle East...Largely out of hatred for America, Chavez has turned toIran...Chavez's choice of Iran as a strategic ally was not a fluke.
Iran's footprint in Latin America has grown gradually. Beginning in the 1980s, Iran has used Latin America as a forward base of operations against the US and the West. It deployed Hizbullah and Revolutionary Guards operatives and other intelligence and terror assets along the largely ungoverned tri-border area between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. That staging ground in turn enabled Iran to bomb Israeli and Jewish targets in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s....With Chavez's assistance, Teheran is expanding its web of alliances throughout Latin America at the expense of the US and Israel...."there is information from international agencies that indicate that uranium from Bolivia and Venezuela is being shipped to Iran."...the WikiLeaks sabotage campaign against the US gave us a first person account of the magnitude of Ahmadinejad's electoral fraud....reported a conversation with an Iranian source regarding the true election results. The Iranian source referred to results as a "coup d'etat." The regime declared Ahmadinejad the winner with 63% of the vote. According to the Iranian source, he received less than a tenth of that amount. ...****And what did Obama/Clinton do/say about this fraud and the uprising? They supported the regime in Iran!***the impact of US foreign policy - in South America and the Middle East alike - has had on the positions of nations like Brazil and Argentina towards Israel. During the Bush administration, US Latin America policy was an incoherent bundle of contradictions....Under the Obama administration, the US Latin American policy has become more straightforward. The US has turned its back on Colombia and Honduras. US President Barack Obama is interested in appeasing the Chavez crowd...April 2009 Obama sat through a 50-minute anti-American rant by Ortega at the Summit of the Americas. He then sought out Chavez for a photo-op. In his own address Obama distanced himself from US history saying, "We have at times been disengaged, and at times we sought to dictate our terms. But I pledge to you that we seek an equal partnership. There is no senior partner and junior partner in our relations." ...Obama's attempted appeasement hasn't done any good. Nicaragua invaded neighboring Costa Rica last month along the San Juan River. Ortega's forces are dredging the river as part of a plan with Iran to build a canal along the Isthmus of Nicaragua that will compete with the Panama Canal.Indeed, even Obama's ambassador in Managua admitted in a recent cable that Ortega remains deeply hostile to the US. In a cable from February illicitly published by WikiLeaks Ambassador Robert Callahan argued that Ortega's charm offensive towards the US was "unlikely to portend a new, friendly Ortega with whom we can work in the long-term."...Brazil's President...and Argentina's President...are also responding the US's signals towards Iran and Israel. Obama's policy ...has no chance of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and just like the Arabs and the Europeans, the South Americans know it....From (their) perspective, there is no reason...to participate in the US charade of preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power.(They)might as well be on the winning side. And since Obama doesn't mind Iran winning, Iran will win....Like the Europeans, the Arabs, the Asians and everyone else, the Latin Americans have clearly noted that Obama's only consistent foreign policy goal is his aim of forcing Israel to accept a hostile Palestinian state and surrender all the land it took control over in 1967 to the likes of PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas and Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. They note that Obama has refused to rule out the possibility of recognizing a Palestinian state even if that state is declared without a peace treaty with Israel. That is, Obama is unwilling to commit himself to not recognizing a Palestinian state that will be in a de facto state of war with Israel.
The impression that Obama is completely committed to the Palestinian cause was reinforced this week rather than weakened with the cancellation of the Netanyahu-Clinton deal regarding the banning of Jewish construction in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. The deal which was to see Israel banning Jewish construction for an additional 90 days in exchange for a US pledge not to ask for any further bans, to support Israel at the UN Security Council for a limited time against a Palestinian push to declare independence without peace, and to sell Israel an additional 20 F-35 fighter jets sometime in the future. It came apart because Obama was unwilling to put Clinton's commitments - meager as they are - in writing. ...signals to the likes of Brazil and Argentina and Uruguay that they might as well go with Chavez and Iran and turn their backs on Israel. No one will thank them if they lag behind the US in their pro-Iran, anti-Israel policies. And by moving ahead of the US, they get the credit due to those who stick their fingers in Washington's eye...

Left-handed honesty

BEST OF THE WEB TODAY DECEMBER 27, 2010
Happy Easter!
The Obama administration has hidden surprises in store for you.By JAMES TARANTO
We'll be on Sean Hannity's "Great American Panel" tonight, assuming we can get to the studio through the 20 inches of global warming that fell on New York overnight"My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government," the newly inaugurated President Obama declared in a memo to department and agency heads in January 2009. "Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing."
How's that working in practice? The New York Times reports on how an Obama ally in Congress, Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, responded after the administration made a regulatory decision he had urged:
After learning of the administration's decision, Mr. Blumenauer's office celebrated "a quiet victory," but urged supporters not to crow about it.
"While we are very happy with the result, we won't be shouting it from the rooftops because we aren't out of the woods yet," Mr. Blumenauer's office said in an e-mail in early November to people working with him on the issue. "This regulation could be modified or reversed, especially if Republican leaders try to use this small provision to perpetuate the 'death panel' myth."
Moreover, the e-mail said: "We would ask that you not broadcast this accomplishment out to any of your lists, even if they are 'supporters'--e-mails can too easily be forwarded."
The e-mail continued: "Thus far, it seems that no press or blogs have discovered it, but we will be keeping a close watch and may be calling on you if we need a rapid, targeted response. The longer this goes unnoticed, the better our chances of keeping it."
Even though Blumenauer sent the warning not to send emails about the regulation by email, both the regulation and the effort to keep it a secret remained secret until yesterday when the Times reported them.
The regulation imposed a prospective ObamaCare provision that, amid public outcry, had been cut from the law Congress enacted. "Under the new policy," the Times explains, "the government will pay doctors who advise patients on options for end-of-life care, which may include advance directives to forgo aggressive life-sustaining treatment." Although this provision was part of the "death panel" controversy, even Wesley Smith of the Discovery Institute, a leading opponent of medical homicide, acknowledges that "the new regulation is not alarming in and of itself."

So why the coverup? It's partly a matter of form: It looks bad for the administration to impose by executive fiat a provision that the people's representatives had expressly rejected, though of course the inevitable discovery of the effort to keep the secret only compounds that problem.

But there is also a substantive reason why the administration and its allies wanted to keep this quiet: It reminds people that ObamaCare's promise to deliver "universal health care" while saving money can be kept only if the government assumes the power to deny medical treatment in the name of controlling costs. Death panels are intrinsic to the ObamaCare scheme, as Shikha Dalmia of the Daily Beast explains:

The administration is defining Medicare fraud down to include "unnecessary" and "ineffective" care. And to root this out, it plans to make expanded use of private mercenaries--officially called Recovery Audit Contracts--who will be authorized to go to doctors' offices and rummage through patients' records, matching them with billing claims to uncover illicit charges. What's more, Obamacare increases the fine for billing errors from $11,000 per item to $50,000 without the government even having to prove intent to defraud.

It's reminiscent of the Climategate emails, which detailed an effort to deceive the public so as to justify expanded government control of the economy. And the Obama administration is acting in defiance of the citizenry on the global-warming front too, as the Associated Press reports:

Stymied in Congress, the Obama administration is moving unilaterally to clamp down on greenhouse emissions, announcing plans for new power plants and oil refinery emission standards over the next year.

In an announcement posted on the agency's website late Thursday, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson said the aim was to better cope with pollution contributing to climate change.

They timed this to coincide with--forgive the expression--Christmas, when no one would be paying attention. The timing is embarrassing in another way, since yesterday saw a blizzard so severe that it led to the postponement of a professional football game.

The New York Times, however, was prepared lest the global-warmist faithful be tempted to stray. Theologian Judah Cohen appeared on the Times op-ed page Sunday to explain that "the overall warming of the atmosphere is actually creating cold-weather extremes":

As global temperatures have warmed and as Arctic sea ice has melted over the past two and a half decades, more moisture has become available to fall as snow over the continents. So the snow cover across Siberia in the fall has steadily increased.

The sun's energy reflects off the bright white snow and escapes back out to space. As a result, the temperature cools.

But wait. Greenhouse gases are supposed to prevent the sun's energy from escaping back into space, aren't they? A careful reader noted with delight that Cohen has denied a central doctrine of global warmism. Even skeptics find an easter egg from time to time.
****Funny as this inadvertent denial is, the idea that one can modify one's theory ex post facto to use contradictory evidence as affirmative, bespeaks of either a complete misunderstanding of scientific method, of logic, of basic reasoning OR a disingenuous attempt to say anything that might work for a general public for whom the Anthropic Global Warming clerics have contempt. One of the AGW clerics was asked what, if any, disconfirming evidence there could POSSIBLY be since warming proves AGW and cooling proves AGW. The answer was even worse: disconfirming evidence would be only if NO CHANGE in the weather occurs! *****
Stop Global Warming Before the Snow Storm Bears Go Extinct!
"Snow Storm Bears Down on Mid-Atlantic, Northeast"--headline, Associated Press, Dec. 26

The danger of liberals and substituting Gov for God

C.S.Lewis - "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims my be the most oppressive.Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience..."

W.D. by James Kavanaugh
One thing God should never do
Is answer anyone's prayers.
If He answered but a single prayer
He wouldn't be God anymore.
But King of the Welfare Doles.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
God is not a cosmic bellhop.