It’s Friday, January 18th, 2013….but before we begin, a quick video clip forwarded by Bill Meisen which begs a couple of simple questions the Empire State’s crack team of investigative journalists never thought to ask:

As Mr. Meisen noted, if cops facing a crazed gunman need more than 7 shots, shouldn’t law-abiding citizens facing a similar threat be allowed the same capability?  And why, assuming for a moment active duty law enforcement deserves an edge unavailable to the rest of New Yorkers, should RETIRED policeman be afforded a right denied the rest of the general public?  Inquiring minds want to know….even if the MSM isn’t interested.

And be certain to catch John Lott’s latest injection of sanity into the gun debate in today’s Cover Story, available at our home page.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of Daniel “Any a you homos ever call me Francis, I’ll kill ya” Feeney, Thomas Sowell details the truth behind the struggle no one on the Left will ever admit even exists:

Liberalism Versus Blacks

 

There is no question that liberals do an impressive job of expressing concern for blacks. But do the intentions expressed in their words match the actual consequences of their deeds?

San Francisco is a classic example of a city unexcelled in its liberalism. But the black population of San Francisco today is less than half of what it was back in 1970, even though the city’s total population has grown. Severe restrictions on building housing in San Francisco have driven rents and home prices so high that blacks and other people with low or moderate incomes have been driven out of the city. The same thing has happened in a number of other California communities dominated by liberals.

Liberals try to show their concern for the poor by raising the level of minimum wage laws. Yet they show no interest in hard evidence that minimum wage laws create disastrous levels of unemployment among young blacks in this country, as such laws created high unemployment rates among young people in general in European countries.

The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state. Most black children grew up in homes with two parents during all that time but most grow up with only one parent today.

Liberals have pushed affirmative action, supposedly for the benefit of blacks and other minorities. But two recent factual studies show that affirmative action in college admissions has led to black students with every qualification for success being artificially turned into failures by being mismatched with colleges for the sake of racial body count.

The two most recent books that show this with hard facts are “Mismatch” by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., and “Wounds That Will Not Heal” by Russell K. Nieli. My own book “Affirmative Action Around the World” shows the same thing with different evidence.

In all these cases, and many others, liberals take positions that make them look good and feel good — and show very little interest in the actual consequences for others, even when liberal policies are leaving havoc in their wake.

The current liberal crusade for more so-called “gun control” laws is more of the same. Factual studies over the years, both in the United States and in other countries, repeatedly show that “gun control” laws do not in fact reduce crimes committed with guns. Cities with some of the tightest gun control laws in the nation have murder rates far above the national average. In the middle of the 20th century, New York had far more restrictive gun control laws than London, but London had far less gun crime. Yet gun crimes in London skyrocketed after severe gun control laws were imposed over the next several decades.

Although gun control is not usually considered a racial issue, a wholly disproportionate number of Americans killed by guns are black. But here, as elsewhere, liberals’ devotion to their ideology greatly exceeds their concern about what actually happens to flesh and blood human beings as a result of their ideology.

One of the most polarizing and counterproductive liberal crusades of the 20th century has been the decades-long busing crusade to send black children to predominantly white schools. The idea behind this goes back to the pronouncement by Chief Justice Earl Warren that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Yet within walking distance of the Supreme Court where this pronouncement was made was an all-black high school that had scored higher than two-thirds of the city’s white high schools taking the same test — way back in 1899! But who cares about facts, when you are on a liberal crusade that makes you feel morally superior?

To challenge government-imposed racial segregation and discrimination is one thing. But to claim that blacks get a better education if they sit next to whites in school is something very different. And it is something that goes counter to the facts.

Many liberal ideas about race sound plausible, and it is understandable that these ideas might have been attractive 50 years ago. What is not understandable is how so many liberals can blindly ignore 50 years of evidence to the contrary since then.

As the not-so-great/pretty-much-psychotic D.B. loved to say, there are none so blind as those who WILL not see.  And here’s Exhibit “A”, courtesy of Tim Carney and The Washington Examiner:

In gun control push, Obama abandons logic and facts

 

Whenever a politician proposes a policy surrounded by children, skepticism is in order. But skepticism, logic and sound argumentation are the enemies of President Obama in his gun control push, which kicked off Wednesday on a White House stage filled with kids.

After December’s Sandy Hook massacre, Obama has reached deeper than usual into his bag of debater’s tricks and rhetorical ploys. He assigns evil motives to those who disagree with him on policy. He tries to pre-empt cost-benefit analysis with facile assertions that any policy is mandatory if it will save “only one life.” (Any, that is, except unrestricted abortion!) And the most contentious policy he seeks — a ban on so-called assault weapons — has near zero correlation to the problem he claims to be addressing.

Obama on Wednesday told voters to ask their congressman “what’s more important, doing whatever it takes to get an A grade from the gun lobby that funds their campaigns, or giving parents some peace of mind when they drop their child off for first grade?” Obama’s direct and unmistakable implication: The only reason to oppose an “assault weapons ban” is for campaign contributions. In his press conference, he credited “an economic element” to “those who oppose any common-sense gun control or gun safety measures.”

Obama rules out the possibility that some people deeply value the constitutionally enshrined right to bear arms. Concerns about unintended consequences? Obama doesn’t acknowledge those. Anyone studying the 1994 “assault weapons ban” can see it did little to curb violence. But in Obama’s mind, that argument is just another cover story for “I Want More NRA Contributions!”

Obama engaged in this same sort of argumentation during the health care debate. While he had the full backing of the drug lobby, the President described Obamacare opponents as those who “would maintain a system that works for the insurance and the drug companies.”

Obama’s most facile argument Wednesday was this plea for gun control: “[I]f there’s even one life that can be saved, then we’ve got an obligation to try.” Vice President Biden said a week earlier that “if your actions result in only saving one life, they’re worth taking.” The flaw in this reasoning is pretty obvious. Thousands of Americans will drown this year in swimming pools. You could save many of those lives by banning swimming pools. That doesn’t mean we have “an obligation to try” banning swimming pools.

We don’t outlaw pools because — however heartless this sounds — we weigh other goods against the good of preventing deaths. In the case of a pool, we weigh the costs to health, fun and liberty against the lifesaving benefits of banning pools. When talking about gun control, we could weigh lives saved by outlawing guns against the costs to recreation, liberty and self-defense. But the Obama-Biden “just one child” rule precludes any two-sided analysis. (Because they know any fact-based analysis proves the futility of their position.)

Finally, Obama’s policy prescriptions are grounded in what’s politically popular rather than what would effectively address the problem of gun violence. Obama repeatedly called for a ban on “military-style assault weapons.” This is not actual class of weapons — this is a rhetorical device to make some rifles sound scary.

Scariness is what “assault weapons” talk is all about. The 1994 “assault weapons ban” didn’t have a real definition of assault weapon. The law listed a bunch of guns that would be illegal and then laid out some criteria for what could make a gun be an “assault weapon.” The qualifications were mostly cosmetic: A rifle could become illegal if you added a flash suppressor; it could become legal if you removed a bayonet.

And restricting rifle ownership has very little bearing on curbing murders. According to FBI data, rifles are responsible for less than 3 percent of all U.S. murders for which the murder is weapon is known. You are five times more likely to be killed by a knife or a blade than by a rifle. Handguns, the data show, are used in a vast majority of gun murders. But handguns don’t look as scary as the AR-15.

Many on today’s left flatter themselves as being more “reality-based” than the right. Liberals care more about science, data and the empirically proven, you’ll hear from MSNBC or the New Republic. But Obama’s arguments for gun control aren’t based on data or logic. They are based on aspersions, emotion and popular fears. (Not to mention utter ignorance.) In other words, it’s politics as usual.

Which is just another way of saying the effect of facts on Liberals is like….

In a related item, as Ann Coulter so eloquently observes….

Guns Don’t Kill People, the Mentally Ill Do

 

Seung-Hui Cho, who committed the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, had been diagnosed with severe anxiety disorder as a child and placed under treatment. But Virginia Tech was prohibited from being told about Cho’s mental health problems because of federal privacy laws.

At college, Cho engaged in behavior even more bizarre than the average college student. He stalked three women and, at one point, went totally silent, refusing to speak even to his roommates. He was involuntarily committed to a mental institution for one night and then unaccountably unleashed on the public, whereupon he proceeded to engage in the deadliest mass shooting by an individual in U.S. history.

The 2011 Tucson, Ariz., shopping mall shooter, Jared Loughner, was so obviously disturbed that if he’d stayed in Pima Community College long enough to make the yearbook, he would have been named “Most Likely to Commit Mass Murder.” After Loughner got a tattoo, the artist, Carl Grace, remarked: “That’s a weird dude. That’s a Columbine candidate.”

One of Loughner’s teachers, Ben McGahee, filed numerous complaints against him, hoping to have him removed from class. “When I turned my back to write on the board,” McGahee said, “I would always turn back quickly — to see if he had a gun.”

On her first day at school, student Lynda Sorensen emailed her friends about Loughner: “We do have one student in the class who was disruptive today, I’m not certain yet if he was on drugs (as one person surmised) or disturbed. He scares me a bit. The teacher tried to throw him out and he refused to go, so I talked to the teacher afterward. Hopefully he will be out of class very soon, and not come back with an automatic weapon.”

The last of several emails Sorensen sent about Loughner said: “We have a mentally unstable person in the class that scares the living cr** out of me. He is one of those whose picture you see on the news, after he has come into class with an automatic weapon. Everyone interviewed would say, Yeah, he was in my math class and he was really weird.”

That was the summer before Loughner killed six people at the Tucson shopping mall, including a federal judge and a 9 year-old girl, and critically wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, among others. Loughner also had run-ins with the law, including one charge for possessing drug paraphernalia — a lethal combination with mental illness. He was eventually asked to leave college on mental health grounds, released on the public without warning.

Perhaps if Carl Grace, Ben McGahee or Lynda Sorensen worked in the mental health field, six people wouldn’t have had to die that January morning in Tucson. But committing Loughner to a mental institution in Arizona would have required a court order stating that he was a danger to himself and others.

Innumerable studies have found a correlation between severe mental illness and violent behavior. Thirty-one to 61 percent of all homicides committed by disturbed individuals occur during their first psychotic episode — which is why mass murderers often have no criminal record. There’s no time to wait with the mentally ill.

James Holmes, the accused Aurora, Colo., shooter, was under psychiatric care at the University of Colorado long before he shot up a movie theater. According to news reports and court filings, Holmes told his psychiatrist, Dr. Lynne Fenton, that he fantasized about killing “a lot of people,” but she refused law enforcement’s offer to place Holmes under confinement for 72 hours.

However, Fenton did drop Holmes as a patient after he made threats against another school psychiatrist. And after Holmes made threats against a professor, he was asked to leave campus. But he wasn’t committed. People who knew he was deeply troubled just pushed him onto society to cause havoc elsewhere.

Little is known so far about Adam Lanza, the alleged Newtown, Conn., elementary school shooter, but anyone who could shoot a terrified child and say to himself, “That was fun — I think I’ll do it 20 more times!” is not all there.

It has been reported that Lanza’s mother, his first victim, was trying to have him involuntarily committed to a mental institution, triggering his rage. If true — and the media seem remarkably uninterested in finding out if it is true — Mrs. Lanza would have had to undergo a long and grueling process, unlikely to succeed. As The New York Times’ Joe Nocera recently wrote: “Connecticut’s laws are so restrictive in terms of the proof required to get someone committed that Adam Lanza’s mother would probably not have been able to get him help even if she had tried.”

Taking guns away from single women who live alone and other law-abiding citizens without mental illnesses will do nothing about the Chos, Loughners, Holmeses or Lanzas. Such people have to be separated from civil society, for the public’s sake as well as their own. But this is nearly impossible because the ACLU has decided that being psychotic is a civil right.

Consequently, whenever a psychopath with a million gigantic warning signs commits a shocking murder, the knee-jerk reaction is to place yet more controls on guns. By now, guns are the most heavily regulated product in America. It hasn’t worked. Even if it could work — and it can’t — there are still subway tracks, machetes, fists and bombs. The most deadly massacre at a school in U.S. history was at an elementary school in Michigan in 1927. It was committed with a bomb. By a mentally disturbed man.

How about trying something new for once?

Only if it involves innovative ways to buy votes or coerce campaign contributions.  Liberals aren’t the least bit interested in listening to facts which may dispel their feelings about guns, let alone willing to contemplate any action which would actually save lives.

Next up, Victor Davis Hanson describes what can be termed….

The War Between the Amendments

 

http://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2013/01/17/the-war-between-the-amendments-n1490541/page/full/

“….Just as semi-automatic weapons mark a technological sea change from the flintlock muskets of the Founders’ era, computer-simulated video dismemberment is a world away from the spirited political pamphleteering of the 18th century. If we talk of restricting the Second Amendment to protect us against modern technological breakthroughs, why not curtail the First Amendment as well?“

And though Andrea Mitchell certainly doesn’t seem to have a problem with the concept….

….her guest certainly points out the gaping holes in her bogus argument.

Moving on, it’s today’s installment of our “So It  Begins” segment, brought to us today by George Lawlor and yet another adverse impact of The Dear Misleader’s hopelessly misguided policies:

Southwestern Pennsylvania hospital to stop baby deliveries

 

Pregnant women in one southwestern Pennsylvania town will soon need to look elsewhere to deliver their babies, after a local hospital announced it will end the practice in March — blaming ObamaCare in part for the decision.

The Windber Medical Center will stop delivering babies after March 31 because its obstetricians are either leaving or refocusing their practices, and because hospital officials believe they can’t afford it based on projected reimbursements under looming federal health care reforms.

Amazing; you can’t find a doctor who’ll make a house call, and this hospital still delivers babies!  Or at least they did.

Next, courtesy of The New Media Journal, one more reason House Republicans should have told Chris Christie to get his “hurricane aid” package from his NBF:

NJ Senate Excludes Non-Union Workers from Sandy Work

 

A bill that was authored by an Ironworkers’ union organizer to expand union-only Project Labor Agreements –- to include Hurricane Sandy cleanup and reconstruction — passed the New Jersey Senate on Monday along party lines 23-13. The Ironworkers’ union organizer who drafted the pro-union bill, Steven Sweeney, also happens to be the president of the New Jersey Senate and recently accused New Jersey Governor Chris Christie of “praying” for Hurricane Sandy to hit New Jersey.

As it turns out, though, unions must be counting their blessing with the New Jersey’s Senate passage of S. 2425 which adds adds to an already-existing discriminatory PLA laws in New Jersey:

New Jersey has had a project labor agreement law on the books since 2002, but highways, bridges, pumping stations and water and sewage treatment plants were exempted. With extensive rebuilding needed on those structures along the shore, this bill includes them.

Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester), who authored the legislation and fast tracked it, said the agreements are key to making sure work goes to New Jersey workers.

A Project Labor Agreement, according to the bill, “means a form of pre-hire collective bargaining agreement covering terms and conditions of a specific project.” In other words, non-union construction workers are not welcome.

According to New Jersey State Senator Tom Kean, Jr. (R), a study conducted during Democrat Governor John Corzine’s reign showed that the costs of union-only PLAs increase the costs on a project from 18-24 percent.

….The bill now heads to the New Jersey assembly and, if it passes there, it may or may not be signed into law (or amended) by Governor Chris Christie. Governor Christie, facing re-election next year has not said whether he will sign or veto the legislation if it reaches his desk.

And in the Aloha segment, two related headlines:

Manti Te’o’s Dead Girlfriend, The Most Heartbreaking And Inspirational Story Of The College Football Season, Is A Hoax

 

Obama Admits Making Up Incident with Girlfriend

 

As contributor Bill Meisen suggested, it’s probably a Hawaiian thing us haoles will never understand.

On the Lighter Side….

And in the Sports Section, we present the latest winner of the Pete Carroll Memorial “Getting Out While The Getting Is Good” award:

Kelly’s Philadelphia decision comes at wary time

 

Wary?  No.  Given the fact his program is about to undergo NCAA sanctions, including a probable ban on post-season play, we’d say, at least from Kelly’s unscrupulous perspective, it’s the perfect time.

And in another sordid story ripped from the pages of The Crime Blotter, courtesy of Bill Meisen, further proof guns ain’t the problem:

A Massachusetts man is savagely beaten outside pizza shop in Greenwich Village

A Brooklyn man has been charged with attempted murder in the beating of 24-year-old Kevin McCarron, who was stomped and pummeled with a tire iron, baseball bat and blackjack by a gang on MacDougal St. early Sunday, police and witnesses said.

 

Yeah….it’s the guns.

Finally, we’ll call it a week with what on the surface appears to be a dog-bites-man tragedy of a sort:

Man run over, killed, when dog jumps into car, pushes accelerator

FHP investigates crash at Florida home

 

A man has died after a dog jumped into a van, stepped on the accelerator and struck him as he opened a gate outside a Florida Panhandle home, according to officials. The Florida Highway Patrol says Iris Fortner, 56, and James Campbell, 68, were backing into their driveway at their home in Cantonment on Monday when Campbell got out of the passenger side of the vehicle to open the metal gates.

Troopers said Fortner opened the driver’s door to see where Campbell was standing, and that’s when Fortner’s large boxer bull dog jumped into the car and pressed the accelerator. FHP says Fortner tried to stop the van before the vehicle backed into Campbell, but he was trapped under the van.

Yeah, the dog did it….

Try this: start up your car, and keeping your foot firmly on the brake, put it in gear and press down on the accelerator.  Are we the only one thinking this had less to do an overactive dog than the bloom being off Iris’ amore?!?

Magoo