SHAME ON VIRGINIA
Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Time for Some (Competent) Leadership

Posted

President Barack Obama (D), addressing the need for members of Congress to compromise on raising the federal debt limit, says we need to “pull off the Band-Aid” and “eat our peas” . . . whatever that means. Tortured metaphors notwithstanding, what I’d really like from the president is some competent leadership on our economic policy. Even if we can’t have that, I’d at least like some consistency. Obama’s economic doctrine so far can be best-described as schizophrenic.

Let us review.

When campaigning for the Presidency in 2008, Obama continually painted President George W. Bush (R) and the Republicans as reckless deficit spenders . . . and that epitaph was well-deserved. There is no question that the Republican president and Republican Congress in the first decade of the 2000’s ran up record-breaking deficits and failed to control the growth of government. Fiscal conservatives like myself criticized them for this at the time, and only continued voting for them because we felt they were nominally better than the available alternatives. We were right on that, at least. Obama’s annual deficits—which make Bush’s astronomical deficits look positively tiny—prove that he is not the Clintonesque balanced-budget Democrat he made himself out to be. He campaigned on one thing, and we clearly got another.

In 2006, then Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) made a principled stand against raising the federal debt limit. Congress imposes a statutory debt limit on our government in an effort to keep our federal debt under control, a system that has been in-place since 1939. When Bush wanted the already-astronomical limit increased, Obama described the situation perfectly:

Read more . . .

BREAKING: Carmen Sandiego to Be Released Tuesday

Posted

Off on a Tangent has learned that Carmen Sandiego, ringleader of the infamous Villains’ International League of Evil (VILE) crime syndicate, is scheduled for release from federal prison in Waseca, Minnesota, on Tuesday. Sandiego was convicted of felony tax evasion in 1999 and is serving a fifteen-year sentence. According to sources at the U.S. Marshals Service speaking on condition of anonymity, she is being released early due to good behavior during her incarceration.

Sandiego’s crime spree began in 1985 with a series of high-profile robberies. As a former detective for the renowned ACME Detective Agency in San Francisco, California, her knowledge of law-enforcement and detecting techniques allowed her to elude capture for well over a decade. She spent eight years on the FBI most-wanted list, and was finally apprehended by a Central Intelligence Agency operation at a Finnish villa in November 1998. Her apprehension sparked a major diplomatic row between the United States and Finland.

Sandiego was charged with over twenty crimes, including six counts of robbery, four counts of conspiracy, and three counts of obstruction of justice, but was only convicted on two charges of felony tax evasion in 1999. Many Sandiego associates, including Ihor Ihorovich and Dazzle Annie, remain at large, despite being the subject of numerous ongoing manhunts.

As a condition of her release, it is expected that Sandiego will be required to wear a GPS-enabled tracking anklet for the remainder of her sentence.

Another Letter to Cigna Healthcare

Posted

You may recall a letter I wrote to Cigna Healthcare last May regarding an idiotic ‘preexisting condition questionnaire’ they sent to Melissa. It was idiotic because Melissa had been a Cigna customer for years without interruption. Insurance companies can only hold preexisting conditions against you if you have had a break in medical insurance coverage; because Melissa had been with Cigna forever, they knew there had been no such break. I happily said so, and asked them to look at their own records next time before bothering me.

And let me reiterate one more time what I said at the end of my post where I shared that letter with you, my loyal readers: “[J]ust because I opposed the particular health care reform plan passed by Congress doesn’t mean I think the system doesn’t need fixing. . . .”

Anyway, Cigna is at it again. This time, they are dragging their feet on paying out one of our dental claims because they want to know how much my ‘other insurance carrier’ has already paid. The problem is that we have no ‘other insurance carrier.’ We told them that already the last time they sent us an inquiry about it, and then they promptly turned around and sent us another inquiry asking the same stupid question. So I’ve answered it again, telling them again that we have had only Cigna dental insurance since my employer switched to them at the beginning of the year.

Just to make sure I get the point across, I’ve also included this letter:

Read more . . .

“A Republic, If You Can Keep It”

Posted
Flag Gift

Melissa and I woke up this morning to find that every house in our neighborhood had a small American Flag in its yard. The flags are gifts from David Ramadan, Republican candidate for the 87th District seat in the Virginia Senate.

I don’t decide who to vote for on the basis of cute little gestures like this—so please don’t read this as an endorsement. My political endorsements will come out in September as usual, and I have not yet begun a serious review of the candidates. However, this flag is a nice little reminder from Mr. Ramadan about what makes America great: We choose our leaders, and we are the source of their power. The independence of the individual is as much what we celebrate today as our national independence from English rule.

Dr. James McHenry, one of Maryland’s delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, recorded that a woman asked Benjamin Franklin at convention’s close whether the delegates had given the American people a monarchy or a republic. McHenry recorded Franklin’s typically pithy response: “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

We can only continue to be our own political sovereigns as long as we the people keep ourselves educated and involved. We have the choice to keep our republic, founded on individual liberty and the sovereignty of the people, or to give it up—as many already have—to a committee of nominally-elected monarchs in Washington. Today is a good day to remember that the American experiment’s continued success relies not only on our independence from outside monarchs, which we gained well-over two centuries ago, but on our active efforts as individual sovereigns to prevent the emergence of a new totalitarianism in Washington.

Our government is still clothed in the garb of a republic, but more and more our representatives behave as if they are the American sovereigns and are un-bound by any limits on their authority. Many have forgotten that we are the sovereigns, we make the republic, and it is our job to keep it.

Still Waiting for the Bloodbath

Posted

One year ago this month, people with Concealed Handgun Permits (CHP) in Virginia were permitted to carry their firearms in restaurants that serve alcohol, provided the armed citizen did not himself imbibe. This had previously been illegal, although armed citizens had the option to ‘open-carry’ (and subject themselves to all the unnecessary ‘oh no, man with a gun!!’ hysteria that often results from law-abiding open-carry). This change in the law was long sought-after by CHP holders like myself for a few reasons.

First, it didn’t make any sense for us to have to leave our firearms locked in our cars, subject to being stolen, every time we visited an Applebees just because other people in the restaurant might be drinking. This made almost any sit-down restaurant in the state a prime target for criminals trying to get their hands on a gun. More fundamentally, it was damaging to public safety to make virtually all restaurants ‘gun-free’ zones. Violent crimes happen in restaurants too, and I have a right to defend myself and my loved ones there just as I do pretty-much anywhere else.

After all, we all know—or should know—from school shootings, violent crime in long-time gun ban cities like Chicago and Washington, church shootings, etc., that ‘gun-free’ zones are too-often not really gun-free. Criminals who intend to commit acts of violence scoff when a sign or ordinance tells them not to carry a firearm. They are already willing to shoot an innocent victim; what makes us think they will hesitate at taking a prohibited item into the area to do it? Meanwhile, law-abiding citizens are left completely disarmed in these places. A ‘gun-free’ zone is really a ‘sitting-duck’ zone.

So, when restaurant carry went into effect on July 1, 2010, the anti-freedom and anti-self-defense crowd went into a tizzy claiming that Virginia would become the wild west. We were breathlessly warned that drunken Ruby Tuesday patrons would be engaged in weekly firefights, that violent crime and murderous massacres would become commonplace, and that Virginia restaurants would no longer be safe for defenseless families and young children.

So where is the bloodbath? There has been none. As is always the case when self-defense rights are expanded for law-abiding citizens, our state has gotten safer, not more dangerous. Fewer guns are sitting in people’s glove boxes waiting to be stolen by violent criminals. Fewer people are disarmed against their will by an unnecessary law, and are thus more able to protect themselves and their families against the bad guys.

So will the bloviating anti-freedom folks at the Washington Post, Roanoke Times, Brady Campaign, and other outlets admit that they were wrong? Somehow I doubt it.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.