Snippets _ Nabbing The Net _ May 2011

How about a few interesting leads from around the net?

Wal-Mart Changes Mind On Guns For Guys

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703367004576289230488920802.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

To read the entire article in full at the Wall Street Journal, one will need to log-in or subscribe.  However, the blurb itself is the story, which can be surmised by awake readers easily.

Quoting: “Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is quietly bringing back rifles, shotguns and ammunition to hundreds of U.S. stores as the hurting retail giant seeks to reinvigorate its one-stop shopping appeal and attract more male customers. The world’s largest retailer stopped selling hunting rifles and bullets at all but a third of its U.S. stores five years ago, citing diminishing sales. It is now restoring them to hundreds of locations, bringing the total to nearly half of its more than 3,600 U.S. namesake stores, as part of a larger push to restore “heritage categories” of merchandise…”

Apparently Wal-Mart’s bean counters advised this reversal, and the marketplace itself has required that Wal-Mart listen to the demands of its customer base. In this case, the will of the American public is that Wal-Mart get off its politically-correct control-freak anti-gun stance and get back to selling Americans the guns they want.  Perhaps Americans can indeed, after all, “vote with their dollars”, at least in the retail market place.

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The following article touches upon a very sensitive subject, but it is part of our military’s reality today so I’m thinking we should acknowledge that this is going on within our military. Oath Keepers has not taken a stance on this policy, as it’s devisive, but I’ve heard from plenty of our members and am aware that we have membership on each side of this debate.

Marines get trained on accepting gay recruits

By ELLIOT SPAGAT, Associated Press Elliot Spagat, Associated Press – Thu Apr 28, 8:55 pm ET

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. – Marine instructor Maj. Daryl Desimone stood before an auditorium filled with fatigue-clad troops, carrying an unequivocal message: It’s OK to disagree with letting gays serve openly in the military. It’s not OK to disobey orders.

He explained that the impending repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” is an order, one heard by generals and rank-and-file alike as the military tries to change the culture of a traditionally conservative institution.

Read the whole article here:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_gays_in_military

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One of our favorite writers is retired Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, PhD, who worked at the Pentagon’s Office of Special Planning prior to her retirement. A ranking insider and an avid libertarian philosopher, Dr. Kwiatkowski’s quick eye is always on the cutting edge of scrutiny in U.S. foreign policy. Her voice is always startlingly fresh, informed, and carries an “in-your-face” declarative authority which makes for great reading. In this Lew Rockwell dot com article, Dr. Kwiatkowski looks into the new Intelligence line-up President Obama has engineered.

A Crack Team in Washington

by Karen Kwiatkowski

http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski266.html

Quoting: “Panetta offers nothing new. He represents and embraces the chronic spending addiction, the chronic stupidity, and the chronic misunderstanding of the Constitution that characterizes both his predecessor at the Pentagon, and his successor at CIA… Panetta is hugely on board with the latest Pentagon bureaucratic cancer called USCYBERCOM, co-located with the National Security Agency Headquarters in Fort Meade, MD. The NSA is a massive sector of the U.S. intelligence community, reporting operationally to the DoD rather than directly to the CIA. Traditionally, NSA has been prohibited from collecting information and intelligence on US citizens when they are within US territory. But the co-location of Cybercom (with its domestic defense mission) with “born fighting for any new mission” NSA is a sign of things to come.

“The selection of Petraeus for CIA chief is not unprecedented. For 50 years now, we’ve known how important it is for a President to have reliable yes-men running the CIA. This talent was certainly the key to the great career success of George Tenet, and Petraeus brings not only three bags full to the Executive suite, but provides a kind of military “reliability” to “managing” the massive CIA bureaucracy and keeping a lid on its potential to cause transparency malfunctions that could publicly embarrass the president or the power elite.

“… For the moment, there is no hope for a rational and rapid contraction of the metastasizing U.S. empire. There is no hope for a serious reduction in debt accumulation, pointless and costly military spending, or any kind of fiscal sanity in Washington. Eighteen months from another big presidential election, in which Obama has declared himself a candidate and shifted smoothly into electoral mode, we are witnessing the final days of the empire – but all signs indicate it will not go gracefully. Instead of wisdom, rationality and grace in Washington in this time of substantial governmental and constitutional crisis, these two appointments tell us exactly what we the people should expect from the political elite over the next few years.”

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Chuck On Chuck _ Strictly Personal

This is Dr. Chuck Baldwin’s take on things as he contemplates his move from Florida to Montana and the event of his 59^th birthday. A ways into this article you’ll find a litany of Natural Law positions which constitute Chuck’s philosophical and political views. Well worth the reading.

http://chuckbaldwinlive.com/home/?p=3457

Selected quotes from this article:

I believe the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, and Bill of Rights to be the greatest civil documents ever devised by man. I believe America’s Founding Fathers to be the greatest generation of Christian philosophers and patriots to ever live. I believe in the right of the people to keep and bear arms.

I believe there is a conspiracy by elitists within government, Big Business, and academia to surrender America’s independence and national sovereignty to a globalist New World Order. I believe the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, and Bilderbergers are especially culpable in this regard.

I further believe that the current effort to merge the United States into a North American Community and the push to provide amnesty (not to mention billions in federal tax dollars) to millions of illegal aliens comprise a grave threat to America. I am also convinced that there is a bold and blatant attempt underfoot to turn the United States into a police-state-style surveillance society, in which personal freedoms are being quickly and egregiously sacrificed.

I opposed the preemptive invasion of Iraq and the bombings of Libya. It should be obvious to everyone that the Obama administration is doing nothing–and will do nothing–to change the perpetual war/preemptive war doctrine introduced by George W. Bush.

As to Afghanistan, I strongly supported Ron Paul’s Marque and Reprisal Act of 2001, which was (and still is) the constitutional way to resist the efforts of violent terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda.

I opposed the bailouts for Wall Street. I regard the Federal Reserve as a corrupt cabal of international banksters, whose actions are nothing short of criminal. I wholeheartedly support the abolition of the Federal Reserve and a return to sound money.

I believe the American people have more to fear from Washington, D.C., than they do from any foreign entity. I believe the United Nations is a sinister organization from which the United States should withdraw. I believe the federal government taxes too much, spends too much, lies too much, and snoops too much into the personal lives of the American people.

I believe the federal “war on terror” and “war on drugs” are mostly a cover for power-hungry, Big Government zealots to trample constitutional government and squash freedoms and liberties, which are supposed to be protected by the Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence.

I fully support the current State sovereignty movements that are sweeping the country. I am personally convinced that the best (and perhaps the only) mechanism freedomists have to counter the incessant encroachment upon liberty by the criminals in DC is to focus our attention on electing and supporting governors, legislators, sheriffs, etc., who have the personal courage and constitutional understanding to resist these would-be tyrants in the central government.

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Navy Authorizes Chaplains to Perform Same-Sex ‘Marriages’ in Naval Chapels

Monday, May 09, 2011

By Pete Winn

Read whole article here -

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/navy-authorizes-chaplains-perform-same-s

(CNSNews.com) – Anticipating the elimination of the military ban on homosexuality, the Office of the Chief of Navy Chaplains has decided that same-sex couples in the Navy will be able to get married in Navy chapels, and that Navy chaplains will be allowed to perform the ceremonies — if homosexual marriage is legal in the state where the unions are to be performed.

The advisory came in the form of an April 13 memo issued to all chaplains, in which the Chief of Navy Chaplains, Admiral Michael Tidd, said the Chaplain Corps was revising its Tier I training manuals, which had previously indicated that same-sex marriages are not authorized on federal property.

Instead, Tidd called for chaplains to comply with service-wide efforts underway to be more accepting of homosexuality and same-sex marriage as the end of the military policy on homosexuality nears.

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Ron Paul At The Daily Bell: The Elimination of Osama Bin Laden

Read it at the Daily Bell’s website –

http://www.thedailybell.com/2249/Ron-Paul-On-the-Elimination-of-Osama-bin-Laden.html

Last week marked an important milestone in the war on terrorism for our country. Osama bin Laden applauded the 9/11 attacks. Such deliberate killing of innocent lives deserved retaliation. It is good that bin Laden is dead and justice is served. The way in which he was finally captured and killed shows that targeted retribution is far superior to wars of aggression and nation-building. In 2001 I supported giving the president the authority to pursue those responsible for the vicious 9/11 attacks. However, misusing that authority to pursue nation-building and remaking the Middle East was cynical and dangerous, as the past ten years have proven.

It is tragic that it took ten years, trillions of dollars, tens of thousands of American casualties and many thousands of innocent lives to achieve our mission of killing one evil person. A narrow, targeted mission under these circumstances was far superior to initiating wars against countries not involved in the 9/11 attacks, and that is all we should have done. This was the reason I emphasized at the time the principle of Marque and Reprisal, permitted to us by the US Constitution for difficult missions such as we faced. I am convinced that this approach would have achieved our goal much sooner and much cheaper.

The elimination of Osama bin Laden should now prompt us to declare victory and bring our troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq. Al Qaeda was never in Iraq and we were supposedly in Afghanistan to get Osama bin Laden. With bin Laden gone, there is no reason for our presence in the region – unless indeed it was all about oil, nation-building, and remaking the Middle East and Central Asia.