Venezuela Bans Private Gun Ownership

Venezuela has announced a new law that makes owning a gun illegal if you are a private citizen.

Under the new law only the military, police, and licensed security will be allowed to have firearms.

An amnesty period, of unknown length, is in currently in place for all citizens to turn in any firearms that they might own.

Once the period is up, anyone found possessing a gun will be jailed for the offense.

Legislators say that they voted for the law in order to cut down on the murder rate in Venezuela. Over 18,000 murders were committed during 2011.

But President Hugo Chavez's government is completely honest about what their goal is, stating that eventually they will disarm all civilians.

Opponents state that it is further attempt by Chavez to continue his dictatorship. They also point out that violence has continuously grown worse under his reign.

IDF Service for All Israelis

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will face a struggle as he seeks to expand who is called to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. Members of the IDF have led calls for reforms that they be joined by all Israelis in defending the country.

Officially all able bodied men and women age 17-49 must serve three (men) or two (women) years of active service, and then up to a month each year in the reserves. However in reality two groups have been given exemptions.

Haredi Jews are very orthodox, and do not take part in the military service. Their argument is that their full time study of sacred Jewish texts adds to Israel's defense.

They likely will be the greater challenge, as some of their number have already pledged to protest, and go to jail rather than serve. Their promised mass demonstrations will hurt the Prime Minister abroad.

The larger group makes up more than twenty percent of Israel's population, Israeli Arabs. They were given the exemption by former Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, who stated it was unfair morally for Arabs to be forced to fight against their fellow Arabs. Many, especially Beduins, though do volunteer already. With their addition, come security concerns, mostly due to the large numbers of previously unknown individuals that they will add.

Due to the Arabs lack of automatic service, many have come to view them as second class citizens. However, international ideas that all Arab Israelis would rather be part of Palestine have been repeatedly shown as false. Time and time again Arab Israelis have fought not just for Israel, but against the idea of their being separated from their beloved country.

In the long term Israel can only grow more unified by the inclusion of all into the IDF. Already viewed as having the best trained military in the world, the increased diversity and greater numbers will only make it stronger.

International Cooperation in The Drug War

Since the beginning of 2012 US drug enforcement agencies have been partnering with their counterparts throughout most of the Americas to stifle drug trafficking.

Already the affects have been seen, as any all flights by drug traffickers have been targeted, and arrests have been made as soon as planes have landed.

Thanks to the fading out of the US in Middle East conflicts, money has been able to flow in other directions, and so the drug war has seen a vast increase in US active involvement.

In one raid, the US worked with Guatemalan and Honduran forces in the seizure of a large amount of cocaine.

The US is continuing to press other governments to further their involvement, pooing intelligence so that the crackdown can become even more effective.

Governments that help have gained extra funding, specifically for schools and police training, from the US.

However, some members of Latin American governments are expressing their displeasure with the arrangements. They disapprove of what they see as growing US control of their own resources.

Concerns also have been raised, about an increase in violence in countries that are fighting the drug trade. But most recognize this as a stepping stone in a war.

Countries that have been fighting the trade for years are seeing declines in the violence as drug runners consider those places just too dangerous to try. Some see this as a sign that the war is truly being won.

Hewlett Fire Could Affect Ft. Collins Water Supply

A survey completed by The Forest Service's Burn Area Emergency Response, or BAER, Team has determined that the Hewlett Fire will affect the Poudre River.

The fire, which burned more than 7,000 acres to the north west of Fort Collins, Colorado.

According to the survey, increased erosion on the burned areas will add sediment to the river, that could add a smoky taste.

Extra purification procedures should be able to handle the lower quality of the water. The city also has the option of adding water from the Horsetooth Reservoir.

It will take around five years for enough growth to take place for the area to be stabilized from erosion.

The Forest Service is also looking into removing expected weeds and burnt trees from the area, especially along hiking trails. Aerial seeding and mulching are also options being considered to speed the recovery of the forest.

Google Applies for Domain Names

Google announced that they have applied for various domain names.

In 2008, ICANN announced a program to expand the number of generic TLDs (think .com, .org, .edu), developed through its bottom-up, multi-stakeholder process, in which we participate. Given this expansion process, we decided to submit applications for new TLDs, which generally fall into four categories:

• Our trademarks, like .google
• Domains related to our core business, like .docs
• Domains that will improve user experience, such as .youtube, which can increase the ease with which YouTube channels and genres can be identified
• Domains we think have interesting and creative potential, such as .lol

Domain names are run by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, an independent agency which controls and runs them. They stopped taking applications for new domain names, after Google's announcement.

At this point there are less than two dozen domains available, .com being used by about fifty percent of web sites. Any and all new ones will be listed June 13.

Some regulators, from various governments, have requested that ICANN not allow any more domains, at all. However, internet freedom groups support the expansion, praising that it will allow for more diversity.

Walmart Caves to Far Left Pressure and Leaves ALEC

Walmart, the largest retailer in the country, has fled ALEC in the progressive left's latest victory in its war on the organization. Jessica Wohl of Daily Finance stated "In April, ALEC said it was abandoning the committee that worked on 'public safety and elections' to focus on the economy. Despite the change, Walmart decided it was no longer focused on the same issues as the council." As I've mentioned before, in a previous post, and which was reiterated by Ben Shapiro of Breitbart.com today:

Liberal groups like Media Matters for America and its close associate, the Van Jones-run Color of Change, working in coordination with friends of the Obama Administration, launched secondary boycotts against members in ALEC this year; several major ALEC sponsors have already dropped out, prompting ALEC to announce in April that it was no longer going to focus on “public safety and elections,” and would instead direct its energies toward the economy.

These groups have ALEC targeted due to its past support of model bills related to Stand Your Ground laws and Voter ID legislation. Wohl continued in her piece stating that such legislation is opposed by groups like "ColorOfChange, a liberal advocacy group for black Americans,[that] has said the voting laws put the poor and minorities at a disadvantage." This group was co-founded by Van Jones. The ex-Special Advisor for Green Jobs advisor to the Obama White House who infamously called Republicans "assholes" that led to his premature departure from the administration.

However, this whole notion that it disadvantages the poor and minorities is absurd in the extreme.  It always amazes me how liberals seem to think people, who are missing identification for voting, are incapable of going to their local DMV and acquiring a photo ID. It's only $13.50. Let's take a look at the process in my home state of Pennsylvania.

$13.50! Holy Cow

Regardless, Maggie Sans, Walmart Vice President of Public Affairs and Government Relations, wrote this statement, addressed to ALEC's national chairman and executive director:

Previously, we expressed our concerns about ALEC's decision to weigh in on issues that stray from its core mission 'to advance the Jeffersonian principles of free markets...We feel that the divide between these activities and our purpose as a business has become too wide. To that end, we are suspending our membership in ALEC. Sans, who is also giving up her role as secretary of ALEC's private enterprise board, did not specify the issues that caused the split. Walmart has benefited from ALEC campaigns involving taxes, commerce and technology. While we are disappointed in Walmart's decision, we understand the unique pressures they are under, said spokeswoman Kaitlyn Buss.

I guess we can add Walmart to the list of victims of far left badgering.

RIP

Coca-Cola

Kaplan

Procter & Gamble

Blue Cross/Blue Shield

Pepsi

Kraft

Wendy’s

Walmart

California's High Speed Folly

More news of the stimulus's failure emerged this week with CBO's report citing how it may have cost $4.1 million per job, but the story that should be on everyone's minds concerning the Obama's agenda is California's high speed rail project. Calls for a high speed rail system by the Obama administration have been enhanced given China's successful completion of their system last summer. However, if you look at the current California project, the scale of failure is epic and our tax dollars are being poured into it.

In a rare instance, CNN gave a rather insightful report on how this proposed high speed rail is actually three times more than its estimated cost. The railroad project itself seemed sound. A line from Los Angeles to San Francisco spanning two hundred miles was a palatable initiative for Californians, which is why they voted for a $10 billion dollar bond measure back in 2008. However, the original estimate was in the ball park of about $34 billion dollars. It is now projected to cost a monstrous $198 billion dollars. Additionally, Drew Griffin, CNN Investigative Correspondent, reported that not a single rail has been laid in the four years since the initiative was passed.

This marks another stinging failure of the domestic agenda of the Obama administration. First clean energy, now high speed rail networks. It fits nicely into the description George Will aptly made about American liberalism on Charlie Rose, last August, as "an amalgamation of appetites of parochial interests". The project is now revised under the new Chairman of California's Railway Authority, Dan Richard, but it's very different original high speed blueprint. Griffin stated:

It turns out, the latest plan could be for a much slower train, not actually the high- speed futuristic cartoon California voters approved four years ago. More of a hybrid that goes slower, makes a few more stops and doesn't quite deliver the L.A. to San Francisco promise of just a few hours.


And that's not the half of it. This is about to become really political. California's high-speed rail has one huge backer -- President Barack Obama -- and that is where you come in. The administration has pledged $3.5 billion in stimulus money, also known as federal tax dollars, and that's just so far. Now, California admits it will need even more, tens of billions of dollars more from federal taxpayers to finish it.


But first, you have to start. And that's where it really gets dicey. The foundational segment, the first stretch of track, will cost at least $6 billion alone and, under the new plan, will connect Fresno to Burbank. It won't go anywhere near San Francisco. And in the process, will dissect generations-old dairy farms, nut orchards and towns that don't want it. 

That's not the worst of it.  Apparently, Barack Obama, who continues to be a staunch proponent of this project:

has pledged $3.5 billion in stimulus money, also known as federal tax dollars, and that's just so far. Now, California admits it will need even more, tens of billions of dollars more from federal taxpayers to finish it.

But first, you have to start. And that's where it really gets dicey. The foundational segment, the first stretch of track, will cost at least $6 billion alone and, under the new plan, will connect Fresno to Burbank. It won't go anywhere near San Francisco. And in the process, will dissect generations-old dairy farms, nut orchards and towns that don't want it. 

However, even with the inflated costs and objections by local farmers, Dan Richard and the rest at the Railroad Authority aren't giving up. After all, as Griffin reported, "they've already got the promised $3 billion of your tax dollars in federal stimulus. California may not get another dime from President Obama, but it has no intention of giving back the $3 billion already promised or the billions more from California voters." This Rube Goldberg project is expected to take ten years to finish. Who's lining up to get their first ticket?

NYC Plans Ban on Many Drinks

New York City is planning to enact a ban on all sugary drinks that are bigger than sixteen ounces.

Specifically targeted are sodas, but anything that has been sweetened will be included in the ban.

The most common size of bottled sodas are twenty ounces.

Diet sodas, vitamin waters, unsweetened iced teas, and any drinks with less than twenty-five calories per eight ounce serving are to be given waivers from the ban.

Restaurants, delis, movie theaters, ballparks, and even sidewalk carts would be affected, and have to change their cup sizes to follow the new law.

Mayor Bloomberg says this is part of the war on obesity.

Opponents say it is an attack on personal freedom.

Virgin Galactic Given FAA Permit

The FAA has announced that it has given a launch permit to Virgin Galactic.

Virgin Galactic is currently flying SpaceShipTwo, which would be capable of carrying six passengers and two pilots.

The one year permit grants the company permission to begin rocket-powered suborbital test flights.

For now all flights will still only be done by pilots, but expectations are for passengers to start going up sometime in 2013.

Over five hundred people have already booked flights, at the price of $200,000 a ticket.

Birther Nonsense

While I'm not a fan of Stand Up! with Pete Dominick on Sirius XM, he's always good to get the center-left angle on politics. In addition, I'm a self-diagnosed politics junkie who was stuck in the wonderful Beltway traffic so I guess you can say I didn't have a choice in the matter.

Pete's guest, John Avalon, made a critical point today stating how significant Mitt Romney's nomination really is to American politics. He is the first Mormon to be nominated by a major party and the first non-protestant to be nominated by Republicans. This comes after Mitt's pervasive hammering surrounding his not so stellar conservative credentials.

The base may have been skeptical about him, but in the end, they choose him over the other clowns who vied for the Republican nomination. However, the mainstream media is not pushing that narrative. Instead, they're focused on Donald Trump's birther nonsense.
 
Now, I know we should all focus on the economy and other key issues in this upcoming election, but this birther issue does get under my skin. First of all, it's beyond absurd. Barack Obama was born in Hawaii and is a "natural born citizen" who is eligible for the presidency. Even Andrew Breitbart thought this whole charade was a losing issue.

No one cares! No one cares because the narrative these people are trying to push is not grounded in reality. It is something akin to an Alex Jones "theory", that al-Qaeda is an arm of the U.S. intelligence network, or a person who has watched Three Days of the Condor, The Manchurian Candidate, and The Parallax View one too many times. No doubt shady stuff occurs in Washington, but birthers are so ludicrous it makes me want to hug them in empathy.

My first taste in blogging was for Western Journalism, which reports heavily on the subject. I cannot bash the folks at Western Journalism too much, since some of them are very professional and cordial, but as the months progressed; I found myself unable to be associated with an organization that peddles, excuse me, this gross propaganda concerning Obama's eligibility.

It's been three years folks. If you haven't been able to convince the base, the heavyweights in the conservative media, and the American people, you probably don't have the "explosive find" which you regard as the holy grail of political malfeasance.

Furthermore, like liberals, birthers get agitated, petulant, and downright nasty when people dismiss them and their ideas. It is a temper tantrum on steroids. An excerpt from a piece on Western Journalism detailed the open letter Breitbart's Senior Staff released surrounding their legitimate vetting of Obama which, needless to say, didn't bode well with this writer.

Andrew Breitbart was never a ‘Birther,’ and Breitbart News is a site that has never advocated the narrative of ‘Birtherism.’”
Reading this makes me want to ask in bemused wonder:  How old are you?  (I could, of course, ask the same question of Anderson Cooper, Bill O’Reilly, Mark Levine, Neal Boortz, or Glenn Beck – who are clearly much older to a man.)  But seriously, how immature – or insecure, at least – must one be to be so concerned with what the cultural elites think of them?  Young Ben Shapiro (twenty-eight, and reportedly the youngest nationally syndicated writer in the country) went to Harvard Law. One wonders if he had been president of the Law Review if we would have ever seen one of his publications…but I digress.  Joel Pollak…sure enough, went to both Harvard and Harvard Law – just as I had expected.
While I must congratulate the two on emerging from that milieu with any non-collectivist values, it seems that neither of them escaped with a penchant for identifying and confronting the Alinsky staple of marginalization…or, they accept the practice so fully that they simply can’t bear the thought of being on the receiving end thereof.  Well, grow up, boys!  If what Media Matters says about you is a concern (and it clearly is), then perhaps you should choose another line of work.

I think someone misplaced their pacifier. The real comical element about this whole movement is that there is no concrete legal definition of the term "natural born citizen". They have no cornerstone. I've always thought that the term applied to any citizens born on American soil. Indeed, I would stand corrected. Byron York wrote a great piece in The Washington Examiner since the rude resurrection of this issue thanks to Donald Trump, who Geogre Will aptly called a bloviated ignoramus last Sunday. York wrote:

The Constitution specifies that a president must be a "natural born citizen" of the United States, but it does not define the term. The Supreme Court has never clarified the issue, but there is a law, 8 U.S. Code 1401, that spells out in detail who is a citizen.
The law uses the phrase "citizens of the United States at birth" and lists categories of people who fit that description.
First, there are people born inside the United States. No question about that; their citizenship is established by the 14th Amendment.
Then there are the people who are born outside the United States to parents who are both American citizens, provided one of them has lived in the U.S. for any period of time. And then there are the people who are born outside the United States to one parent who is a U.S. citizen and the other who is an alien, provided the citizen parent lived in the United States or its possessions for at least five years, at least two of them after age 14.
Since they are all "citizens of the United States at birth," the question is, does that also mean they are "natural born citizens" in the constitutional sense?

Birthers believe a natural born citizen is a person born to two parents who were citizens of the United States at the time. Hence, the reason why birthers have Marco Rubio, the crown prince of the Tea Party movement, in their crosshairs if he should ever be Romney's running mate. Well, according to Theodore Olson, Bush's former solicitor general:

"My conclusion would be that if you are a citizen as a consequence of your birth, that's a natural-born citizen...[Olsen] defended John McCain in a 2008 lawsuit alleging McCain was ineligible to be president. McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936 while his father served in the U.S. Navy there. Even though the area was under American jurisdiction and both McCain's parents were U.S. citizens, some Democrats alleged McCain was ineligible to be president. McCain won the case, if not the presidency.
The law is really quite lenient, especially for those born outside the United States. If a child were born today in, say, Kenya, to a Kenyan father and an American citizen mother who had lived in the United States for at least five years, at least two of them over the age of 14 -- that child would be a "citizen of the United States by birth" and be eligible for the White House.

However, this hasn't stopped people like Joseph Farah of World Net Daily, who vociferously pushes the birther issue and has gone on record to say Rubio is ineligible for the VP slot due to his parents not being citizens at the time.

Washington lawyer Matthew McGill, who York cites in his column, states: "I am not aware of anyone who has contended that someone could be born in the United States and be a citizen by virtue of the 14th Amendment and nevertheless still not be a natural-born American citizen...if he is born in the United States, his parentage is not of consequence." No to mention that there is incontrovertible proof that Rubio was born in Miami, Florida.

In the words of John Adams, "facts are stubborn things." Barack Obama is eligible for president, he is the president, and now we must focus all of our efforts in voting him out of office come November.

We have no time to theorize absurd notions about the "origins of his birth." This is time to get serious about the fate of our republic and our economy and we have zero time for sophomoric conspiracy theories whose footnote page is no longer than a kindergartner's book report.

However, this is a free country. You have every right to keep your opinions, no matter how insane, but I intend, along with other serious conservatives, to do everything possible in order to restore honor and dignity to the White House. It's game time and birthers have come unprepared. They're still coming down from their Paxil binge.