The morning after, now what?

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[Ratickle]

One week ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama said there currently is no "specific and credible" intelligence indicating a terrorist plot on the United States, as he sought to reassure anxious Americans for the Thanksgiving holiday.

"While the threat of terrorism is a troubling reality of our age, we are both equipped to prevent attacks and we are resilient in the face of those who would try to do us harm," Obama said. "And that's something we can all be thankful for."

Today


"Two followers of Islamic State attacked a center in San Bernadino in California," the group's daily online radio broadcast al-Bayan said on Saturday.

The broadcast came a day after Facebook confirmed that comments praising Islamic State were posted around the time of the mass shooting to an account on the social media website established by Malik under an alias.

SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. _ San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook had contact with people from at least two terrorist organizations overseas, including the al-Qaida-affiliated Nusra Front in Syria, a federal law enforcement official said Friday.

His wife and fellow shooter, Tashfeen Malik, also pledged allegiance to an Islamic State leader in a Facebook posting, two federal law enforcement officials said.

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So how many think this is real, and has the accurate translation?

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Accurate.

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U.S. stocks had their worst annual performance since 2008, closing out a rocky year that tempered investors’ expectations for gains in 2016.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, a basket of 30 stocks, lost 2.2% in 2015, while the broader S&P 500 fell 0.7%.

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The latest ex order from the Great Eroder of Freedom seems to make every gun owner who ever might sell it a dealer under the law. Means you have to background check them and I guess get a 4473 on them. I wonder how that impacts collectors who bought for investment purposes, or Curio and Relic collectors, who are very specifically defined by the federal government as absolutely NOT dealers. They can sell, but only C and R.

Does everybody need an FFL now? We seem to be subject to the rules of an FFL now. Maybe every citizen should get an FFL and then we can just ship directly to one another.

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Gun sales went crazy in Florida after it's speech.

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The man is an idiot

31: Percentage of American households that reported having a firearm in 2014, the lowest level of reported gun ownership in the last 40 years.

23 million: Number of background checks the FBI conducted in 2015, nearly three times the 8.5 million completed in 2000.

11 million: Number of guns made in the U.S. in 2013, the year after the Sandy Hook massacre. That’s more than twice as many as the 5.4 million firearms produced in 2010.

48: Percentage of Americans who cite protection as the main reason to own a gun, while 32 percent said hunting. In 1999, 49 percent of Americans said hunting was the main reason to own a gun, while just 26 percent said protection.

39: Percentage by which gun-related homicides dropped between 1993 and 2011.

The shooters in San Bernardino, at Umpqua Community College, in Roanoke, Virginia, Charleston, South Carolina and Lafayette Louisiana -- the most recent “mass” killings -- all obtained their weapons from federally licensed gun dealers. All had passed the requisite background checks.

Some of the shooters should have been barred from purchasing guns. Dylann Roof, who murdered nine African Americans people in a church, should have been turned down since he had admitted to possessing drugs, but the FBI failed to follow through on the investigation. John Houser, who shot up a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana, had a history of mental illness and domestic abuse. He should not have been allowed to purchase a firearm, and indeed had been denied a concealed weapon permit in his home state. But in neighboring Alabama, he got one anyway.

These examples are not the exceptions – they are the rule.

Thousands continue to die from guns in cities like Chicago, where 442 were shot to death in 2015, Baltimore (301) and in New York, where more than 300 were murdered. The White House has discouraged law enforcement officials in those cities from aggressive policing tactics, such as “stop & frisk,” which in 2011 allowed cops in New York City to confiscate more than 800 guns.

Last year in New York, fewer than 400 guns were recovered. What does more to reduce gun violence? Taking away weapons from criminals, or adjusting background checks for gun buyers?

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This is kind of cool.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politi...IFz?li=BBnb7Kz

Texas governor calls for constitutional convention

The nine proposed amendments are:

· Prohibit Congress from regulating activity that occurs wholly within one State.

· Require Congress to balance its budget.

· Prohibit administrative agencies—and the unelected bureaucrats that staff them—from creating federal law.

· Prohibit administrative agencies—and the unelected bureaucrats that staff them—from preempting state law.

· Allow a two-thirds majority of the States to override a U.S. Supreme Court decision.

· Require a seven-justice super-majority vote for U.S. Supreme Court decisions that invalidate a democratically enacted law.

· Restore the balance of power between the federal and state governments by limiting the former to the powers expressly delegated to it in the Constitution.

· Give state officials the power to sue in federal court when federal officials overstep their bounds.

· Allow a two-thirds majority of the States to override a federal law or regulation.

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I wonder if he even reads his speeches before he reads them off of the tele-prompter? He thinks his policy in Syria is working?

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President Barack Obama promised his final State of the Union address would be short. Dana Bash of CNN called it “low-energy.” One thing it was not was accurate–or honest. Here are Obama’s top ten lies, in chronological order.

1. “[W]e’ve done all this while cutting our deficits by almost three-quarters.” This is pure fiction. Obama has doubled the national debt, and it’s not because he cut the deficit. Rather, he spent staggering amounts of money in his first months in office–which he assigns, dishonestly, to the previous fiscal year, under George W. Bush. He “cut” (i.e. spent more gradually) from that spending, but only under protest, after Republicans took the House in 2010.

(Update: It is true that Obama’s 2015 budget deficit was about 25% of his 2010 deficit. But he referred to “deficits,” plural. Until last year, all of Obama’s deficits were worse than all of Bush’s deficits except for the last two.)

2. “Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction.” With that line, Obama took a shot at his would-be Democratic successors, as well as his Republican critics. But the truth is that despite the slow recovery–the slowest since World War II–labor force participation is the lowest it has been in decades. Wages are stagnant, household incomes still have not recovered from the recession, and young people see a bleak future.

3. “That’s what the Affordable Care Act is all about. It’s about filling the gaps in employer-based care so that when we lose a job, or go back to school, or start that new business, we’ll still have coverage.”That is a cruel joke, given that Obamacare canceled insurance coverage for millions of Americans who did not change jobs. It also raised deductibles and premiums so high that many insurance companies are leaving the Obama exchanges totally.

4. “Food Stamp recipients didn’t cause the financial crisis; recklessness on Wall Street did.” Actually, food stamp recipients, metaphorically speaking, were indirectly responsible–as well as Wall Street sharks. Obama leaves out the government’s role, under the Community Reinvestment Act, in pushing mortgages on people who could not afford them, and in backing the derivatives based on those mortgages that ultimately burst the whole bubble.

5. “We’ve protected an open internet…”. Obama’s policy of Net Neutrality has turned Internet service providers into public utilities under an ancient regulatory regime. The result has been a sharp decline in broadband investment and a much less free and open system. In addition, the Obama administration is rushing to shift control of ICANN to the international community, which will ensure that the Internet is less free, and subject to overseas censorship.

6. “Seven years ago, we made the single biggest investment in clean energy in our history. Here are the results.” It is laughable that Obama would claim his failed clean energy spending–think Solyndra–led to the fracking-fed energy boom we have enjoyed for the past several years, especially when the administration did all it could to stop oil and gas development. He also nixed the Keystone pipeline and started a plan to kill coal plants.

7. “No nation dares to attack us or our allies because they know that’s the path to ruin.” Of all the lies in Obama’s speech, this was undoubtedly the worst, coming hours after Iran seized two U.S. Navy boats and ten sailors. Obama did not even mention those Americans in captivity at any point in his speech, declining the chance to reassure the nation that they would come home safely. It is an omission that will define this address in history.

8. “As someone who begins every day with an intelligence briefing, I know this is a dangerous time.” Obama does not attend most of his daily intelligence briefings, preferring instead to read intelligence reports–so he claims–on his iPad, a stark contrast to the attentive approach of his predecessor. Late last year, even as Obama claimed that there was little risk from attack, radical Islamic terrorists carried out brutal attacks in Paris and in San Bernardino.

9. “We are training, arming, and supporting forces who are steadily reclaiming territory in Iraq and Syria [from Islamic State].” The Obama administration’s attempt to train and arm Syrian rebels has been a disaster. Belatedly, the administration has helped Kurdish peshmerga forces, and the Iraqi military has made gains lately, but Obama has not made a serious effort to defeat the Islamic State, and is even giving up on regime change in Syria.

10. “Fifty years of isolating Cuba had failed to promote democracy, setting us back in Latin America.” And a year of appeasement has not promoted democracy, either. The Castros remain firmly in power, and we are not helping the opposition. Worse, the Cuban regime continues to arrest thousands of political dissidents, to cozy up to enemies like Iran and North Korea, and to carry out provocative acts–such as stealing a U.S. Hellfire missile.

Towards the end of his speech, Obama told one important truth: “There’s no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide…”.

An unusual, but overdue, admission of guilt.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...he-union-2016/