DemocRats change tactics, goals remain the same.

I've been wondering when the Obama administration was going to finally move on the whole gun thing, because clearly they can't get their agenda enforced against an armed populace. (And if you think I'm fracking crazy for saying that, review what's been happening in Arizona this last few months.)

Well, here we go.  Having finally finally exhausted themselves beating the dead horse which is gun control, and having had no less than the semi-packed Supreme Court of the United States of America come right out and admit that the US Constitution and the 2nd Amendment thereto really means what it says, the O-bots have opened a new front in the war on America: they are going to have a go at banning bullets.

At issue: lead, the most widely used material for making bullets, shot, and sinkers. The Center for Biological Diversity says in a 100-page petition that lead used by outdoorsmen and women can be blamed for causing deaths in some 130 species of birds like eagles. "Lead-based bullets fragment on impact, distributing toxic lead particles widely throughout carcasses, and making it impossible for scavenging animals or humans to avoid ingesting lead along with meat," says the center, joined on petition by the American Bird Conservancy, the Association of Avian Veterinarians, and two other groups.

The NRA counters that claims lead is causing a horrific toll on wildlife is bogus. The proof, they say, is the population explosion of American Eagles around the nation, including some inside Washington's beltway.

But more importantly, says the NRA, the EPA is barred from regulating ammo or fishing sinkers under the Toxic Substances Control Act. But the ammo foes think that they have found a way around that by asking the EPA to regulate elements of ammo and the element they want banned is the lead.

Yes friends, the same Greenies who were utterly silent during the biggest oil spill in US history are trying to get lead banned for use in fishing and hunting.  Even the most cursory examination of their "evidence" reveals it to be total, 100% pure refined bullshit, but that's completely beside the point.  The EPA ran with it, because that's what they've been told to do.  Its all arranged, the outcome is certain.

But OOPS!, it seems there's a problem!  Here's a news update:

EPA Surrenders to NRA on Gun Control Issue

EPA rejects attempt to regulate lead in bullets after NRA protests

D'oh!  That pesky internet blew their cover, and that Drudge guy posted it and now the jig is up.

In a swift and unexpected decision, the Environmental Protection Agency

today rejected a petition from environmental groups to ban the use of lead in bullets and shotgun shells, claiming it doesn't have jurisdiction to weigh on the controversial Second Amendment issue. The decision came just hours after the Drudge Report posted stories from Washington Whispers and the Weekly Standard about how gun groups were fighting the lead bullet ban.

The EPA had planned to solicit public responses to the petition for two months, but this afternoon issued a statement rejecting a 100-page request from the Center for Biological Diversity, the American Bird Conservancy, and three other groups for a ban on lead bullets, shot, and fishing sinkers. The agency is still considering what to do about sinkers.

You know what just happened there? Some poobah in Washington DC was reading Drudge Report yesterday,  looked out the window and saw 1 million non-violent, orderly, peaceful and seriously pissed off Tea Party demonstrators listening to Glen "The Racist" Beck and Sarah "Caribou Barbie" Palin.  He then freaked out and made a phone call.

Awesome.

Update, now Big Brother doesn't need a warrant to track you. Really.

This is a new one on Drudge, the Ninth Circuit Court in California has been up to tricks again.

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway - and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements.

That is the bizarre - and scary - rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants - with no need for a search warrant.

Note that this isn't NewsMax or some right wing nutblog like The Phantom Soapbox, this is Time  Magazine.  Obama's on the cover every week.  Liberal Central Time Magazine is concerned that this time the Ninth Circus may have gone a little too far.  Welcome to the party boys, about time you showed up.

Here's a fun bit toward the end of the article, a <gasp!> CONSERVATIVE judge is the only one who came out hard against this farce.

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month's decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people's. The court's ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.

Judge Kozinski is a leading conservative, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, but in his dissent he came across as a raging liberal. "There's been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there's one kind of diversity that doesn't exist," he wrote. "No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter." The judges in the majority, he charged, were guilty of "cultural elitism."

The author, Adam Cohen,  thinks that limited government and respect for private property are liberal values.

Cohen, a lawyer, is a former TIME writer and a former member of the New York Times editorial board.

I think Mr. Cohen just woke up and discovered he's been mugged by his own side.  He's having a "WTF?!!!" moment.  Lot of that going around lately.

Pedal to the metal in the wrong direction.

The USA (and Canada) are turning away from individual freedom and running toward the full-on police state as hard as they can go. Two bad signs today in the "news", PreCrime and mobile full-body scanners.

Have to hurry up this post, but lets just say these are two technologies I really don't want Constable Plod using on me at whim. Sensationalist journalism working in our favor for once, eh?

h/t to Drudge today on these.

The Phantom

One of these things looks just like the other...

New Iranian super weapon!

Old German super weapon!

Resemblance? Naw, couldn't be!

Oh, it is ON Nancy baby!

Nancy Pelosi, the gift that just keeps on giving.  The Energizer Bunny of stupid. wants an investigation into those opposing the Obama's favorite, the  9/11 mosque.

"There is no question there is a concerted effort to make this a political issue by some. And I join those who have called for looking into how is this opposition to the mosque being funded," she said. "How is this being ginned up that here we are talking about Treasure Island, something we've been working on for decades, something of great interest to our community as we go forward to an election about the future of our country and two of the first three questions are about a zoning issue in New York City."

Nancy must owe some pretty interesting people a whole lot of payola. Sucks to be you, Nancy.

But hey, if there's some shadowy group out there throwing money around in support of common sense, common decency and basic good taste, I'll take a couple hundred grand for being on their side.

The "Ain't Gittin' Paid" Phantom

Blazing Cat Fur: Toronto Star Linked To "Edits" Of Rob Ford Wikipedia Page

Blazing Cat Fur: Toronto Star Linked To "Edits" Of Rob Ford Wikipedia Page

Shock, "Objective Journalists" of the Toronto Red Star caught stone cold trashing the Wikipedia page of a conservative politician.

Say it ain't so, Red Star!

Power grab of the day.

As witnessed by the recent Toronto blackout, Ontario's electricity infrastructure is getting past its sell-by date.  We are not alone.

Experts on the nation's electricity system point to a frighteningly steep increase in non-disaster-related outages affecting at least 50,000 consumers.

During the past two decades, such blackouts have increased 124 percent -- up from 41 blackouts between 1991 and 1995, to 92 between 2001 and 2005, according to research at the University of Minnesota.

In the most recently analyzed data available, utilities reported 36 such outages in 2006 alone.

"It's hard to imagine how anyone could believe that -- in the United States -- we should learn to cope with blackouts," said University of Minnesota Professor Massoud Amin, a leading expert on the U.S. electricity grid.

What is the problem?  The grid was built out in the 1940's and 1960's, its too small and too old for the job its being made to do.  Like sticking a Volkswagen Beetle motor in a Mac truck, it can pull the truck up the hill, but if you load the truck up to maximum, it breaks.

What is the Liberals/DemocRats solution to this problem?  Windmills and RATIONING.

Amin supports construction of a nationwide "smart grid" that would avert blackouts and save billions of dollars in wasted electricity.

In a nutshell, a smart grid is an automated electricity system that improves the reliability, security and efficiency of electric power. It more easily connects with new energy sources, such as wind and solar, and is designed to charge electric vehicles and control home appliances via a so-called "smart" devices.

A little known property of "smart grid" systems is they allow the electric company to decide how much power your individual house gets at any given time, and how much you are going to pay for that power on a minute by minute basis.  A fully implemented smart grid would be able to control your home appliances, such at the thermostat of your air conditioner.  Really.

Carvallo jokes about the so-called "Easy Button" at Austin Energy. It's not really a big red button on the wall, but it is a mechanism that allows an operator to control tens of thousands of home thermostats.
"Austin is two to three years ahead of everybody else," said Carvallo, now chief strategy officer for the smart grid software firm Grid Net.

Rather than build additional transmission capacity to handle the increased demand, or God forbid build some redundancy into the system so it doesn't black-out New York, or Toronto, or the whole North East when something breaks, these socialists are going to take control of your house from you, and make you pay for it.  And you will pay handsomely, never doubt it.

Building a national smart grid "won't be cheap and it wont be easy," acknowledged Amin. Much of it could be completed as soon as 2030 at a cost of up to $1.5 trillion, according to the Department of Energy. It's unclear who would foot the entire bill, but the Obama administration has committed about $4 billion in investment grants.

Remember friends, YOU ARE STUPID.  You must be CONTROLLED. Electricity is not a commodity that you buy, it is the property of the government, a precious service which they will dole out to you in carefully measured amounts, in case you stupid, stupid people might <gasp!> waste some of it.

By the way, anyone who thinks a system as complex and messy as the US national electric grid can be safely automated down to the level of every thermostat in the country is a maniac.  CNN didn't mention that part.  That Smart Meter on your house is a little PC that runs Linux and phones home by WiFi.  A kid could hack it, and in fact lots of kids have already.  Feel safer?

My advice, two things.  Buy a generator to protect the food in your fridge (add up what's in there, you can pay for a generator with one saved freezer load most likely) and start raising all kinds of hell with your Conservative representatives and party.  Don't even bother with liberals, they are in love with this thing.  Control every light switch in the nation? Oh yeah, liberals have a major woody for that idea.  We're talking mahogany, baby.

The Phantom

Gee, what would the appropriate response be here?

Headline: OPP on remote reserve chased out by rock-throwing mob.

The entire Ontario Provincial Police detachment at the remote Pikangikum First Nation was marched off the reserve five weeks ago by a rock-throwing mob of elected councillors and residents.

The stunning forced departure of 11 OPP members from the isolated community, reached in summer only by air or water, went publicly unacknowledged by the force until now.

It was also almost entirely unreported, with only a couple of small stories, none with any detail, appearing locally about a week after the June 30 incident.

<extensive snippage>

Unbelievably, this isn't the first time the Pikangikum band has sent the entire detachment into exile, but rather the second time in little more than a year.

In the spring of 2009, after a band councillor threatened to bulldoze the detachment, the OPP contingent left, with a crew from the Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service in Thunder Bay replacing them at a moment's notice.

That time, the catalyst was that a teacher had fallen in love with the OPP secretary, who had recently broken up with the son of one of the councillors. Council subsequently passed a resolution firing the teacher, which it demanded the OPP enforce. On legal advice, the OPP refused, and the council then passed a resolution ordering the OPP to leave.

This time, the revolution was sparked by the arrest in late June of a deaf and mute man who was, the OPP allege, trying to pull an officer's firearm from the holster.

I wonder if just not sending any more OPP guys to that community would be an option?  I mean, they obviously don't want anything to do with The White Man's Justice.

Hey, these are resourceful First Nations people, they can live as their ancestors did, right?   Right?

Or is that racist?

I get so confused these days.

Democrats make instant tea.

In a move that will surprise no one, the DemocRat Party has started minting instant "Tea Party" candidates, and entire Tea Party organizations.

As the midterm election nears, allegations are surfacing across the country that Democrats are exploiting conservatives' faith in the Tea Party name by putting up bogus candidates in November -- the claim is that those "Tea Party" candidates will split the GOP vote and clear the way for Democratic victories. 

The theories may prove to be more than just conspiracy talk. Some of the allegations are coming directly from local Tea Party activists who are trying to flag the media and election officials as soon as they smell something fishy on the ballot. And they say they've got proof.

And they do have proof.  Affidavits, election documents, signatures, lawsuits, the usual list of crap we have come to expect from DemocRats working the system from the inside for their own benefit.  Dirty tricks, the last refuge of desperate socialists.  OMG, they are such disgusting weasels.

From this I deduce two things.  First and most obvious, the DemocRats are a lot more afraid of the Tea Party than they are of the Republicans.  They are in fact TERRIFIED of the Tea Party and the media comments to the contrary are pure propaganda.
Second, these lying scum are likely to stage racist provocations at legit Tea Party events, and/or hold fake events with lots of racist signs.  I would make book on it.  I also think that as November gets closer and the mid-level scum start getting more frantic, there's going to be violence.  Some of these county-level and state-level races are going to get severely ugly, and union interests will probably arrange some "situations", if you get my drift.

Govern yourselves accordingly, my friends.

The Phantom.