It is hard to be optimistic about the future of our country when I keep reading things like this:

Bank nationalisation gains ground with Republicans

Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator for South Carolina, said that many of his colleagues, including John McCain, the defeated presidential candidate, agreed with his view that nationalisation of some banks should be “on the table”.

The US Constitution is now a dead document. The political parties in power are simply fighting over the scraps, with no significant difference between them. And without anything to constrain the power of the federal government anything can happen. And it will. The gigantic bailouts and so called stimulus bills are only the start.

America is a good country, but as the cliche goes — “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

ETA: Glenn Beck had John Lott on to talk about this.

The point is, they’re going to have — look at what we’ve done to the banks in terms of the current financial situation, where we forced them through different laws to make loans that they didn’t want to make, make loans to people who didn’t have any down payments on it. That’s going to be on steroids when you have government there as a direct owner and it’s not going to be as obvious because you won’t have regulations that you can point to. You can just have the presidents of the bank doing what they’re being told by the politicians behind the scenes to go and do.

Liberty Belle over at Redistributing knowledge has helped organize a Porkulus Bill Protest in Seattle today (President’s Day).

The protest against the porkulus is on for President’s Day!

Date: Monday, February 16th
Time: 12:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Where: Westlake Park in downtown Seattle, 401 Pine St., in the open area by the big arch.

The idea is to use what we’ve learned about dissent over the last eight years. We need loud protests with lots noise and visuals. So, what should you bring?

Bring AS MANY PEOPLE AS YOU CAN! Bring your families, your friends, neighbors, bring everyone!

Bring SIGNS!! Get those craft making juices flowing and make signs and banners and pictures and paintings. Just imagine that you are a left-wing college student with nothing else to do and that should help you get started!

Bring something to sit on and appropriate clothing.

Most importantly, JUST BRING IT!!!

H/T to Michelle Malkin for this.

Found this on Glenn Beck’s site this evening:

for gun bloggers. When I went through the broken links on gunbloggers.com last week I found that a number of them that had converted their blogs to static pages because of problems finding a decent blog hosting company. Others were just gone. It looks to me like there is a need for a stable host for like-minded gun blogs.

Among other things I am an experienced system administrator (at one time adminstering over 100 servers), I have my own webserver here in my basement and bandwidth to spare. So here is the deal — If you are a gun blogger or other conservative blogger I will host a WordPress site for you. I will maintain the blog software, managing upgrades and backing up the database. You can have this for free as long as you run my google adwords ads on your pages.

Or for $10/mo I will do the same, but you don’t need to put up my ads.
Domains can be XXXX.gunbloggers.com, or if you register your own domain you can point it here for no charge.

These accounts include ssh access to your user account, nightly SQL dumps of your blog database and optional delivery of the backups to a remote server if you wish.

See www.gunbloggers.com/hosting for more details. If you want to sign up, email me at the address on that page and I’ll get you going.

Dave Workman has a guest opinion up at The Tuscon Citizen today.

One should not be required to obtain a license or pass a government-administered test to exercise any constitutionally-protected civil right. If the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s taught us anything, it is that all civil rights are sacred, one is no less important than another, and all of them are worth defending because a threat to one puts all rights in peril.

Dave Workman is senior editor of Gun Week as well as an excellent holster maker.

The Senate confirmed Pres. Obama’s choice for Attorney General, with the help of 19 spineless Republicans. If one of these folks is your representative I suggest you give them an earful. And come next election do everything you can to defeat them.

Now, can we expect the NRA to adjust their ratings of these Senators based on this vote? I sure as hell hope so.

Alexander (R-TN)
Bennett (R-UT)
Bond (R-MO)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Collins (R-ME)
Corker (R-TN)
Graham (R-SC)
Grassley (R-IA)
Gregg (R-NH)
Hatch (R-UT)
Isakson (R-GA)
Kyl (R-AZ)
Lugar (R-IN)
McCain (R-AZ)
Murkowski (R-AK)
Sessions (R-AL)
Snowe (R-ME)
Specter (R-PA)
Voinovich (R-OH)

Thanks go to the 21 who stood up against this anti-gun bigot. You can read the full roll call here.

HT to The Freehold

Here is what the GOA had to say about Holder in a January 13, 2009 letter:

Holder, who served as Deputy Attorney General from 1997-2001, supports a 3-day waiting period for handgun purchases, one-gun-a-month rationing, licensing and registration of all gun owners, mandatory so-called smart gun technology, a lifetime gun ban for certain juvenile offenses and regulating gun shows out of existence.

As Janet Reno’s top deputy, Eric Holder was the go to guy on gun control issues. In a 1999 statement, Holder told members of Congress not to cave in to “the special interest that value the cold hard steel of guns more than the lives of children, neighbors and police officers,” and urged them to pass legislation that would have destroyed the gun show industry.

Right now in Washington State it is legal to own suppressors, as long as you comply with all the federal regulations. But you cannot shoot it.

Yep, you heard me. Because of a mistake in the law you have to go to Oregon or Idaho to shoot it.

There is now a Bill in the WA State Legislature that would correct this — HB 1604, I urge you to right to your representative and support this bill.

HT to Outrageous Malfunction for the link to the bill.

I’ve just gone through the logs for gunbloggers.com and removed a number of sites that are no longer around and fixed some feed links that were broken. Some of you have feeds that are not working, and no way to contact you. I’ve left these active for now, since they are making new posts.

I’ve just updated the LibertyNews Store to include new Molon Labe stickers and shirts using a Greek font.

From Wikipedia

The Greek phrase Molōn labe! (Μολὼν λάβε; approximate Classical Greek pronunciation [molɔ̀ːn labé], Modern Greek [moˈlon laˈve]), meaning “Come and take them!”, is a classical expression of defiance reported by Plutarch in response to the Persian Army’s demand that the Spartans surrender their weapons. It corresponds roughly to the modern equivalent English phrase “over my dead body” or “bring it on”. It is an exemplary use of a laconic phrase.

Firehand over at Irons in the Fire was lamenting the fact that he couldn’t find another white on black Molon Labe sticker. I’d had the greek version of it saved away for a while now so I whipped up a couple of images with Pixelmator and expanded the store’s offerings.

I also like the maternity shirt, it would be appropriate for a gun owner carrying twins.