Sun Times Bullshit

 

What a pile of crap that rag has become:

• The safe observation for us to make now — you will hear it from others all week — is that the angry and irresponsible talk that might lead an unhinged person to pick up a gun is common across the political landscape, from right to left.
  But that simply is not true.
  Overwhelmingly today, the fear-mongering and demonizing flow from the right, aided and abetted by cable TV and talk-radio hosts. They may represent only the irresponsible fringe of conservatism in America, but they are drowning out the thoughtful voices of the vast majority of conservatives.

Gee, and all those protesters saying "We support our troops when they kill their leaders"? The near endless "Bushitler" posters? The stamps showing George Bush with a gun to his head being passed off as "art"? Or the supposed studies about how Conservatives are less intelligent and somehow subhuman for holding their own beliefs?

Well, that's just free speech you know.

If you're a Conservative or a Republican, you just better lie back, shut up and take all the filth the left and the media is piling on you. You're opinions are misguided tripe and your beliefs mean nothing. You must listen to your betters and understand it's all for the children and your own good and you better stop clinging to your god and your guns.

The Sun Times can't go under soon enough to suit us

What happens next? History repeats itself..

• 
  Last year, voters in Oregon voted to raise taxes on the highest income earners in the state, giving Oregon the highest tax rates of any state in the nation. It hasn't worked out too well for Oregonians, according to the Wall Street Journal:

• In 2009 the state legislature raised the tax rate to 10.8% on joint-filer income of between $250,000 and $500,000, and to 11% on income above $500,000. Only New York City’s rate is higher. Oregon’s liberal voters ratified the tax increase on individuals and another on businesses in January of this year, no doubt feeling good about their “shared sacrifice.”
  Congratulations. Instead of $180 million collected last year from the new tax, the state received $130 million. The Eugene Register-Guard newspaper reports that after the tax was raised “income tax and other revenue collections began plunging so steeply that any gains from the two measures seemed trivial.”

  One reason revenues are so low is that about one-quarter of the rich tax filers seem to have gone missing. The state expected 38,000 Oregonians to pay the higher tax, but only 28,000 did.

Those with the means to do so will leave Illinois. Those companies able to will move out. Illinois has committed itself to an economic death spiral and the only questions are at what point will it crash and how bad will it be?

Praising Arizona

Praising Arizona by Stephen Kruiser

For the past nine months, the great state of Arizona has been the subject of withering media attacks by an insulated chattering class whose lack of perspective may one day be studied in graduate psychology programs (because journalism school will be indistinguishable from clown school by then). The horrific attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords by a lone, obviously deeply disturbed gunman has opened the state and my hometown of Tucson up to more irresponsible derision from the echo-chamber MSM.

Note to HuffPo and the New York Times: one psycho does not a culture make.
I won’t even bother linking to the various hit pieces in the above-mentioned publications, they’re so prevalent right now one doesn’t have to search hard to find them.
Let us begin, rather, with the notion of a “culture” in Arizona, which implies some sort of static population that’s developed its ideals over time. The state had 1,775,399 residents in 1970. The most recent census puts that figure at around 6.4 million. That kind of growth is a bit too rapid to attribute to the friskiness and fertility of the natives. The fact is that Arizona is a melting pot within a melting pot, quickly adding people from all over the United States for the past forty years. People have been flocking there for the weather and the jobs, by the way, not to join a militia. If anyone wants to attribute certain attitudes to “the people of Arizona” those same attitudes should be applied nationally, as most of the state’s population has streamed in from elsewhere.
My next point is purely anecdotal but important for context. A lot is being said about the availability of guns in Arizona. My grandfather owned a gun store. I got my first real rifle when I was six (a Savage bolt-action .22). I grew up around a lot of guns, as did almost all my friends. To this day, we all remain remarkably free of homicides and accidental shootings.
I mention that because I get the sense when reading anti-gun articles that those writing them assume gun owners default to grabbing a weapon for conflict resolution. Most probably wouldn’t admit that but the implication is there.
The simple truth is that Arizona has always been home to people who own guns legally and don’t go on shooting sprees. The tendency by anti-gun people to assume that possibility is always lurking is not only irresponsible, but also unsupported by facts.

The same media that wants you to think Arizona is ready for OK Corral v. 2.0 were only too eager to point out during the SB1070 debate that violent crime rates have been dropping there.
So, remember, when the Left is talking about illegal immigration, Arizona is a safe place. As for the rest of the time, all hell is breaking loose. (Particularly ridiculous in this HuffPo piece is this contention: : “Arizona may not be uniquely conservative, but it has become far more so in recent years.” Both Gabrielle Giffords and Raul Grijalva survived close elections in a year that didn’t exactly favor incumbent House Democrats.)
The debate over SB1070 is far too complex to revisit here but it was responsible for kicking off the nationwide Arizona bashing. The range of idiocy from a group of people who either had never been to the state or spent very little time there was also too wide to deal with fully at the moment. The majority of the knee-jerk criticism sought to portray the legal citizens of Arizona as racist and anti-immigrant.
In truth, Arizonans, particularly in the two largest population centers, are tired of the decades-long fallout from the very real drug traffic that emanates from Mexico.

The Phoenix metropolitan area is a regional- and national-level transportation and distribution center for methamphetamine and marijuana and a regional distribution center for other illicit drugs, primarily cocaine and Mexican black tar heroin. The area’s transportation infrastructure facilitates the shipment of illicit drugs from Mexico to Phoenix for local distribution and transshipment to drug markets throughout the country,

The same DOJ publication noted a couple points long known by Tucson residents but completely ignored by critics intent on portraying them as a bunch of crazed rednecks who were manufacturing a problem out of whole cloth.

Drug production within Tucson is generally limited; most drugs are smuggled into the area from Mexico.

And …

In fact, GIITEM and the Arizona Counter Narcotics Alliance report an increased level of violence, particularly homicides, in Tucson that is attributed to increased drug trafficking activities and the rising number of gang members who operate in the area.

Per the Dept. of Justice, it would seem that there is a correlation between increased drug traffic and violent crime. And where is that traffic coming from? You got it.
This same piece notes that the porous border is indeed the problem. And that’s what residents of Southern Arizona have been saying all along, this really is about the dangerous people who have been availing themselves of an almost previously unmanned border, not a hatred for the people who have come across to work on farms.
While the violent crime rate may have gone down recently, it was doing so off the spikes mentioned in this 2007 report. Again … context.
This problem isn’t something that just sprung up out of the blue in the past few years. I lived a dozen or so blocks from the border in Douglas, AZ for a very brief time when I was a kid. I awoke one morning to find out some drug traffickers had been taken down in our front yard in the middle of the night.
SB1070 was simply a reaction by people who had grown too frustrated with a decades-long abandonment of responsibility by the federal government. Nothing more. No hidden bigotry. No crazy cowboys looking to go off on “brown skinned” people (can’t remember how many times I read that last summer).
Arizona faces the same economic problems that most other states have been facing in recent years. It also faces problems that are unique to it, such as how to accommodate the rapid population growth and deal with a drug traffic problem from Mexico that is far worse than in the other border states.
A problem it does not face, however, is the specter of a seething, hostile populace that’s going to have the streets flowing with blood any day now.
The people of Arizona are by and large good and deserve better than what they’ve gotten from the press, the president, the attorney general and others in the past nine months. The vile human being who killed all those people last Saturday is not representative of anything but his own wretched mental health circumstances.
The unhinged, uninformed demonization by the MSM out one side of its collective mouth while it’s calling for civility out the other is especially galling.
But, sadly, not terribly surprising.

Anti-Second Amendment Extremists Exploit Tucson Shootings

Posted by Van Helsing at 9:05 AM | Comments (0)

Sadly, anti-Second Amendment crusaders didn't wait for the bodies to cool before cashing in on the tragedy in Tucson.

One of the fiercest gun-control advocates in Congress, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.), pounced on the shooting massacre in Tucson Sunday, promising to introduce legislation as soon as Monday targeting the high-capacity ammunition the gunman used. …

Many said that people with a history of mental instability, like the alleged shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, should not be able to buy a gun — and no one should be able to buy stockpiles of ammunition used by the 22-year-old assailant.

This is called passing from the acceptable to the dubious. Keeping guns away from violent lunatics is a great idea, so long as it can be done without trampling on the rights of the rest of us. Preventing normal Americans from storing ammunition is pure and simple tyranny. Only with the public whipped up in a highly emotional state would extremists stand the slightest chance of pushing through such an outrage, which is why McCarthy is acting so fast.
Regrettably she isn't the only opportunist:

Another vocal supporter for gun control, Illinois Rep. Mike Quigley, told POLITICO that he hopes "something good" can come from the Arizona tragedy — perhaps discussion on a new assault weapon ban, sales at gun shows and tracing measures.

As always, the New York Times is providing propaganda support for statist authoritarians. An excruciatingly moronic editorial by Gail Collins begins like this:

In 2009, Gabrielle Giffords was holding a "Congress on Your Corner" meeting at a Safeway supermarket in her district when a protester, who was waving a sign that said "Don't Tread on Me," waved a little too strenuously. The pistol he was carrying under his armpit fell out of his holster.

"It bounced. That concerned me," Rudy Ruiz, the father of one of Giffords's college interns at the time, told me then. He had been at the event and had gotten a larger vision than he had anticipated of what a career in politics entailed. "I just thought, 'What would happen if it had gone off? Could my daughter have gotten hurt?' "

This is like fretting that a truck might accidently start driving by itself and run someone over. You can drop a Glock all day; it won't go off until you pull the trigger. But all a NY Slimes columnist knows about firearms is that lawful citizens shouldn't have them. The unsubtle attempt to associate Loughner with the Tea Party despite any evidence or likelihood of a connection is contemptible, but to be expected from the erstwhile "Paper of Record."
Collins goes on to accuse the NRA of being motivated by capitalism. What more can you expect of this sad Marxist remnant of a newspaper?

The 10 Most Underreported Stories for 2010

The 10 Most Underreported Stories for 2010