from Brietbart

Last year, President Obama's re-election campaign reworked its operations renaming it Organizing for Action in an effort to leverage the President's monumental email address list to urge supporters to back the President's policies. But OFA made a tiny mistake: it didn't register all the various website addresses for its new effort. Worse, when others jumped to register the names, Obama's political group filed a complaint to get the web addresses back. Now Obama has lost that battle.

In February, Breitbart reported that team Obama didn't perform its due diligence and register all the website iterations as is normal business practice in today’s Internet centric world. As Obama's OFA made its debut, no one in his purportedly Internet-savvy campaign had obtained the corresponding .com, .net, .org or .us sites, nor did OFA register other names that are close to its official one, as is the sensible practice.

In one case, Breitbart reported that Derek Bovard registered the website address www.organizingforaction.net and set it so that visitors would be re-directed automatically to the homepage of the National Rifle Association.

...

Obama's group filed the complaints with the authority that governs website domain addresses, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The complaints were filed under Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) rules. Obama's case number is 1483257 and was filed on Feb 6. UDRP cases are usually decided within one to two months after first filing.

...

"The President of the United States and his self proclaimed 'tech savvy' group using BarackObama.com was unable to hijack our website OrganizingForAction.net. Our message of political opposition to the Presidents political agenda is our Constitutional right and this was upheld today. Today is a victory for the United States Constitution," Strong said.

"This is a victory for the Constitution. It also proves Obamas group is not 'the greatest minds in politics' as folks like Rachel Maddow claim."

"the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." (emphasis mine)

The left has been making this a major issue over the last several months.  These are "safe" months.  We're a year and a half away from the next "National" election.  The Elphs want to retake the Senate and have a shot at doing so.  The Donks want to take back the House and have a longer shot at doing that.

"We" need to nationalize the argument over the 2nd Amendment.  Think '94 Revolution. Make the Donks defend it wall to wall.  Make those Donks in purple states come out in support for amending the Constitution.  It could be surprising.  The left is usually allowed to choose the terrain ... the right needs to prepare the battlespace.  IMHO this is a HUGELY winnable arguement.  Economics obviously isn't.

My class knows a phrase I use frequently.  "Argue from the base of the V."  Get to the base of the argument rather than pick at nits "down the way."  Arguements over registration, definition of "assault weapon", etc.,  while interesting, are boring and unnecissary.  Go to the base.  Donks need to amend the Constitution to achieve their goal.  Make 'em.  And pepper the argument with a lot of "what's next?" questions. 

"shall not be infringed."  Maybe after that we can work on "Congress shall make no law."

Make 'em argue against the Constitution. And as soon as they agree to that ... and they'll HAVE to ... push 'em in the "what's next" hole.

There's long been a dull murmur calling for an update to the Browns uniforms.  IMHO that's be a mistake.  The classic look is darned near the ONLY thing the Browns have going for them.  But I recently saw a look I really liked and that even I might be able to get behind, over at Uniwatch

Couldn't sleep last night so I finished this one.  It's a very quick, simple read but by no means is it a simple book.  If I was teaching a HS civics course this would be on my required reading list.  I'd been spoonfed excerpts and quotes from this for the last decade or so.  Reading the whole thing was a slap in the face.  I wept.  No ... seriously.

If you care at all.... read this .... and get someone else under the age of 18 to read it ... and get them to get a friend to read it under the same requirement.  This book CAN make a difference.

and another reason not to move to Jersey

money graphs:

The problem is one of intellectual laziness. Democrats don’t ask questions; they accept. They don’t investigate; they believe. Curiosity has been replaced by political correctness.

This is why Democrats insist global warming is real despite being unable to tell you how much the average earth temperature rose in the 20^th century (just ask one – the most ferocious advocate of the claim among them never has handy the very fact that should underpin their claim).

This is why, when Democrats ask me if I accept Darwinian Evolution and I in turn ask them, “Which part?” their faces grow frowned, as those in the room realize the Democrat has no more read Darwin’s work than any other book of science.

Democrat McBride is the exemplar. She heard something. She asked no questions. She did no research. She was not curious. She accepted statistics and “science” for no better reason than the words were uttered. Political correctness and faux empathy replaced her curiosity. She went into knee-jerk activist mode when no action was necessary, ready to spend public finances fishing for red herring. Or blue waffles.

At least the first chapter.  It's avaialbe for download in the public domain.  The first chapter is 7 pages long.  It contains EVERYTHING Paul Krugeman needs to know to actually become a good economist.  And you'll WANT to read the rest.

Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. 

SPOILER ALERT

The "One Lesson" is stated in Part One of the book:

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Part Two consists of twenty-four chapters, each demonstrating the lesson by tracing the effects of one common economic belief, and showing that common economic belief to be a fallacy.

READ IT!

nobody seemed to notice or really care much.

Earlier this week it was  noted that the Scientist in Chief continues to conflate so-called assault weapons—i.e., semi-automatic guns defined by functionally unimportant, military-style features that offend politicians—with the rifles carried by soldiers, which can fire automatically. In Denver on Wednesday, Obama described the guns he wants to ban as "weapons of war" and inaccurately identified one of the firearms used in last year's massacre at a movie theater in nearby Aurora as an "assault rifle," which is a selective-fire weapon that can fire automatically (continuously) as well as semi-automatically (once per trigger pull). Obama was at it again Thursday night, claiming in a San Francisco speech that the rifle Adam Lanza used to murder 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, last December was "a fully automatic weapon." This was no slip of the tongue; Obama initially called the rifle "a semi-automatic weapon," then immediately "corrected" himself:

I just came from Denver, where the issue of gun violence is something that has haunted families for way too long, and it is possible for us to create common-sense gun safety measures that respect the traditions of gun ownership in this country and hunters and sportsmen, but also make sure that we don’t have another 20 children in a classroom gunned down by a semiautomatic weapon—by a fully automatic weapon in that case, sadly.

Buffoon.

BigGovernment has more on his bizarre statements from Colorado. The Scientist in Chief made two odd statements about gun rights advocates’ fears of governmental gun seizures. He said that such worries would just feed “into fears about government. You hear some of these folks: ‘I need a gun to protect myself from the government. We can’t do background checks because the government’s going to come take my guns away.’ The government’s us. These officials are elected by you … I am constrained as they are constrained by the system that our founders put in place.”

There are two odd angles to this statement. The first is Obama’s overarching theme: government violation of rights is impossible because “the government is us,” and we can’t violate our own rights. Were this true, we could do away with the Constitution altogether. We would also never have to worry about democracies turning tyrannical, or electing tyrannical rulers. In this odd vision, Germany, Italy, and Spain remained liberal democracies throughout the twentieth century, World War II never happened, and Egypt, the Gaza Strip, and Turkey are all thriving centers of freedom.

 

 

The government is most assuredly not us – at least not all of us – which is why our system of government is designed to protect the rights of minorities while still allowing majorities to legislate without violating those rights. Obama’s defense to charges of incipient tyranny is that tyranny can never happen here. Which, of course, makes it more likely that tyranny will happen here.

 

 

Truth be told, even Obama does not believe that the “government is us.” If he did, he would never worry about pro-life legislation (he does, and would challenge such legislation in court), heterosexual marriage legislation (he does, and challenges such legislation in court), or anti-Obamacare legislation at the state level (he does, and will likely challenge such legislation in court). Even in Obama’s vision of rights, populism is limited, although his vision of rights is skewed.

 

 

The second odd angle is Obama’s insistence that the Constitution constrains him. The natural inference seems to be that if it were not for the Constitution, Obama would indeed pursue a federal gun seizure. Like the villain at the end of every Scooby Doo cartoon, Obama’s offhand protest suggests that if it weren’t for those darn kids, he would have gotten away with it. Except that the kids are the founders, and “it” is massive gun control.

remind them of the millions of deaths THEY have wrecked upon the African continent.  Listened to a GREAT podcast last trip reviewing the "science" behind Rachel Carson's enviro-manifesto "Silent Spring."

If Atlas Shrugged is the book that brought thousands to Libertarianism, Silent Srping was the pied piper for the tree huggers.  And the science sucked.  Want three examples?  

1.  The "cancer expert" she relied upon to show that cancer was caused by DDT?  Same guy the tobacco companies relied upon to show that cancer was NOT caused by smoking.

2.  She claims cancer rates soared from 1910 to 1960.  So did life expectancy.  And her calculation did not consider the fact that more people were living longer.  Once the numbers  are adjuested, the cancer rate is nearly flat.

3.  Same for children.  She claims children were dying from cancer at a higher rate 1925-1950 than before.  Yes, they were.  Because they WEREN'T dying of a myriad other things.  Again, no control. 

It's almost as if the Scientis in Chief was in charge.

DDT was designed as a topical repellant.  It was HIGHLY effective at REPELLING anopholese mosquitoes.  Killed them too.  And when the gubmint found out it killed them, it decided to spray OUTDOOR areas (for which it was never intended), which introduced it into the aquifer, etc.  Had "big gubmint" stayed out of it and allowed the product to be used safely it is estimated that more than 96 million people would not have died of malaria, a disease that had almost been eradicated in the 1960s.

Our Scientist in Chief, in his wisdom, is bothered that the housing rebound is leaving out people with bad credit. So his administration is pushing banks to forget the immediate past, swallow their worries, and shell out: 

Housing officials are urging the Justice Department to provide assurances to banks, which have become increasingly cautious, that they will not face legal or financial recriminations if they make loans to riskier borrowers who meet government standards but later default.

Officials are also encouraging lenders to use more subjective judgment in determining whether to offer a loan and are seeking to make it easier for people who owe more than their properties are worth to refinance at today's low interest rates, among other steps. 

Two responses from my Real Estate Law class - anger and embarrassment.