MISSING THE POINT (pun intended): Knives are tools; they can be used for defense as well as offense.

ABORTION, KERMIT GOSNELL and the silence of the lambs.

GOOD: House hits brakes on Internet tax passed by Senate. We need fewer taxes, not more.

The excuse for taxing the internet is that "online tax is necessary to level the playing field between online and 'brick and mortar' retailers who must charge a tax." I've never quite understood the 'level playing field' excuse; I usually have to pay 'shipping & handling' charges which at, say, 8 bucks, easily offsets any sales tax advantage I get by purchasing online.

No, the 'Market Fairness Act' isn't about fairness, it's a tax grab, pure and simple.

GREAT FOR TRAFFIC JAMS: Terrafugia's next flying car envisioned as tilt-rotor.



The car would lift off nearly vertically using propellers on its stubby wings. The props would then rotate from a vertical to a horizontal position for regular flight, the same kind of technology that is found in the Marines' V-22 Osprey.

PUSHING BACK: "Democrats are traditionally the party of racial bigotry." It's not just me saying so.

We're very tolerant -- as long as you know your place.

THE EMPEROR OBAMA: all hat; no cattle.

"THE OVERRIDING CONCERN of the left is not whether a program does good. It is whether it feels good."

BOLIDES: visualizing meteor strikes. More on the animation here.

YOUR GOVERNMENT: spending more to do less.

THIS SHOULD put a crimp in immigration reform.

THEY DO.



The pity is ... you won't.

ANN COULTER: America's most feared economist. By the Left.

PAULA BOLYARD: Evolving on guns.

John 8:32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

NEW WORRIES for Democrats on ObamaCare Law. But they needn't worry -- the White House has PowerPoint briefings.

BROWSING THE WEB FROM MARS: Creating an interplanetary internet.

ARE POLITICIANS smarter than a pre-schooler? No. Next question.

WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY JAY CARNEY: Benghazi happened a long time ago. In my part of the galaxy, WWII was 'a long time ago'; Benghazi was yesterday.

THIS IS WHAT intolerance smells like ... and it stinks. I had the honor of serving with our military in Iraq twice (in 2006 and again in 2008) and this crap is so far out in left field that reality is over the horizon.

Much more here and here.

HOW CAPITALISM is destroying my neighborhood ... and replacing it with something better.

"THE OVERRIDING CONCERN of the left is not whether a program does good. It is whether it feels good."

BLACKS, GUNS AND CRIME:

Juan Williams, a black commentator, wrote an interesting article recently entitled “Race and the Gun Debate.” Among the statistics he cites are that 54% of all murders involve black victims, virtually all of whom were killed by black murderers, and yet blacks comprise only 13% of the population.

These are familiar numbers, but, as Williams points out, although more than half the “gun problem” can be laid at the feet of blacks, the gun debate never seems to mention this. If it were mentioned, the obvious thought that might occur is maybe it’s blacks that need to be regulated and not guns.

Three years ago I wrote the following in the prologue to my book They Came For Our Guns, They came For Our Freedom:

The single most important factor that has caused the political left to demand an end to private firearms ownership is that the underclass has, over the last fifty years, expanded exponentially, bringing with it an exponential increase in crime. Many of these criminals come from the single-parent families encouraged by the welfare system, a dysfunctional government give-away favored by the far left. The absence of fathers has led large numbers of children to seek gangs as a substitute for parenting not available at home. Not content with having created an entire class of welfare-bred criminals, the political left now seeks to protect this underclass by rendering ordinary citizens defenseless against crime perpetrated by these criminals.

In sum, both blacks and whites are part of this criminal underclass, but, as Juan Williams points out, blacks, a 13% minority, are doing 54% of the killing and dying. That needs to be said.

Why is this happening? According to Juan Williams, the out of wedlock birth rate for blacks is now 72%. This leads to more than 70% of black mothers being on welfare raising more than 70% of black children without fathers.

That’s part of the problem. Another part, Williams says, is “a dysfunctional gangster-rap culture that glorifies promiscuity, drug dealers and the power of the gun.”

So now we have black culture of violence financed by the welfare system producing what are – by any measure – distorted values. One might think this needs to be addressed.

Not so. The President of the United States recently invited the gangster rapper Jay-Z to his inauguration. Jay-Z is the black poster boy for the value system that Juan Williams says is destroying the black community. Inviting him to the presidential inauguration is, by implication, an endorsement of the mindlessness characteristic of Jay-Z and his supporters.

But Obama is not a moralist. He is a politician who panders himself to the black vote and avoids criticizing the criminal culture that has enslaved his people. Obama made no move toward gun control until a white madman killed young children at Sandy Hook . In Obama’s mind, that single act instantly transformed the “gun problem” into a white (not black) problem. It is about white misconduct, not about blacks, black culture or black behavior.

Guess what. It’s still about blacks. They are victims and killers in disproportionate numbers. An occasional white maniac does not erase that. People who want to reduce homicide by gun need to focus on curbing a black culture that has caused the problem in the first place.

Banning guns to cure black murderousness, crime and cultural deficiencies is like banning popsicles to deal with an outbreak of the Ebola virus.

It's not blacks, and it's not black culture. It's culture, not color. Period.

From my email.