As reported by the Free Beacon, two Colorado Companies making gun parts or accessories are moving or going to move from Colorado following the passing of draconian anti-gun legislation.
HiViz Shooting Systems, a gun-parts manufacturer in Fort Collins, Colo., will move its operations up the road to Laramie, Wyo., making good on its threat to pull up its Colorado roots after Gov. John Hickenlooper signed into law several controversial gun control measures earlier this year.
Of the businesses planning to leave the state for the same reason, HiViz is the first to announce its new home.
“The decision to relocate the company was difficult, and choosing the proper location was essential to our continued growth within the industry,” said president and CEO Phillip Howe in a press release. “We look forward to settling into our new home in the firearm friendly state of Wyoming.”
Wyoming was chosen not just for its gun-friendly atmosphere, but also its tax advantages and because Laramie is less than an hour from its current location, allowing existing employees the option of commuting.
Construction on HiViz’s new headquarters is expected to start operations this summer.
The most high profile of the companies defecting from Colorado is Magpul Industries, which makes 30-round rifle magazines in small-town Erie, Colo.
One of the bills Hickenlooper signed bans magazines that hold more than 15 rounds of ammunition. The new law goes into effect July 1.
Magpul is expected to announce the location of its new headquarters after the National Rifle Association meeting this weekend in Houston. Wherever its new home, it’s already in operation: The company wrote on its Facebook page this week that gun sights and standard 30-round magazines (called PMAGs) are now being manufactured outside Colorado for the first time.
Magpul employs about 200 people and has been courted by Texas, Wyoming, South Carolina and Utah, to name just a few states eager for its business. Texas Gov. Rick Perry even made a personal appeal to the company.
Now lets get Beretta and LWRC out of Maryland; Remington out of New York; Colt out of Connecticut; Ruger and Springfield Armory out of Illinois.
Cowboys and the Tea Party political movement have a lot on common. Both believe in individual responsibility; judging a man by his actions not words; and, both are disgusted with government intrusions into our lives and particularly our God given rights.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Monday, May 13, 2013
Obama Uses IRS to Target Political Opponents
If this ain't one of the scummiest tricks ever pulled by a President, even this one. And of course the main stream media, which are Obama supporters,.....there I go again being redundant,.....anyway, the mainstream media is much more interested in reporting the Jody Arias murder trial than the criminal acts on the Benghazi coverup or Obama's use of the IRS to target political enemies. Thanks to Business Insider for posting this.
The Internal Revenue Service admitted Friday to targeting conservative and Tea Party groups with additional scrutiny during the 2012 campaign, the Associated Press first reported.
IRS spokesperson Lois Lerner said at a conference in Washington that the agency apologized for the special emphasis and scrutiny in applications for tax-exempt status.
According to the AP, she said that organizations containing the words "Tea Party" or "patriot" were targeted for additional review, blaming that on "low-level" workers in Ohio.
Here is the full statement the IRS released later:
Between 2010 and 2012, the IRS saw the number of applications for section 501(c)(4) status double. As a result, local career employees in Cincinnati sought to centralize work and assign cases to designated employees in an effort to promote consistency and quality. This approach has worked in other areas. However, the IRS recognizes we should have done a better job of handling the influx of advocacy applications.
While centralizing cases for consistency made sense, the way we initially centralized them did not. Mistakes were made initially, but they were in no way due to any political or partisan rationale. We fixed the situation last year and have made significant progress in moving the centralized cases through our system. To date, more than half of the cases have been approved or withdrawn.
It is important to recognize that all centralized applications received the same, even-handed treatment, and the majority of cases centralized were not based on a specific name. In addition, new procedures also were implemented last year to ensure that these mistakes won’t be made in the future. The IRS also stresses that our employees - all career civil servants -- will continue to be guided by tax law and not partisan issues.
In a conference call later Friday with reporters, the IRS reiterated that it was not engaging in any political attacks by targeting groups with "Tea Party" and "patriot." But it couldn't point to other non-conservative or political-sounding words.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called for a government-wide review.
"Now more than ever we need to send a clear message to the Obama administration that the First Amendment is non-negotiable, and that apologies after an election year are not an sufficient response to what we now know took place at the IRS. This kind of political thuggery has absolutely no place in our politics," McConnell said in a statement.
At one point last year, 16 tea party groups joined together in claiming harassment by the IRS, something the agency denied at the time. The IRS said that roughly 75 groups were targeted.
One of those groups, the Tea Party Patriots, called on President Barack Obama to apologize and demanded that Congress investigate.
“The IRS has demonstrated the most disturbing, illegal and outrageous abuse of government power,” said Jenny Beth Martin, the group's national coordinator.
“This deliberate targeting and harassment of tea party groups reaches a new low in illegal government activity and overreach. It is suspicious that the activity of these ‘low-level workers’ was unknown to IRS leadership at the time it occurred. ... We reject a simple apology that does nothing to alleviate the danger of this happening again. Only immediate and public actions on the part of the IRS and the president will suffice.
Certain tax-exempt charitable groups can conduct political activities, but it cannot be their primary activity.
The Internal Revenue Service admitted Friday to targeting conservative and Tea Party groups with additional scrutiny during the 2012 campaign, the Associated Press first reported.
IRS spokesperson Lois Lerner said at a conference in Washington that the agency apologized for the special emphasis and scrutiny in applications for tax-exempt status.
According to the AP, she said that organizations containing the words "Tea Party" or "patriot" were targeted for additional review, blaming that on "low-level" workers in Ohio.
Here is the full statement the IRS released later:
Between 2010 and 2012, the IRS saw the number of applications for section 501(c)(4) status double. As a result, local career employees in Cincinnati sought to centralize work and assign cases to designated employees in an effort to promote consistency and quality. This approach has worked in other areas. However, the IRS recognizes we should have done a better job of handling the influx of advocacy applications.
While centralizing cases for consistency made sense, the way we initially centralized them did not. Mistakes were made initially, but they were in no way due to any political or partisan rationale. We fixed the situation last year and have made significant progress in moving the centralized cases through our system. To date, more than half of the cases have been approved or withdrawn.
It is important to recognize that all centralized applications received the same, even-handed treatment, and the majority of cases centralized were not based on a specific name. In addition, new procedures also were implemented last year to ensure that these mistakes won’t be made in the future. The IRS also stresses that our employees - all career civil servants -- will continue to be guided by tax law and not partisan issues.
In a conference call later Friday with reporters, the IRS reiterated that it was not engaging in any political attacks by targeting groups with "Tea Party" and "patriot." But it couldn't point to other non-conservative or political-sounding words.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called for a government-wide review.
"Now more than ever we need to send a clear message to the Obama administration that the First Amendment is non-negotiable, and that apologies after an election year are not an sufficient response to what we now know took place at the IRS. This kind of political thuggery has absolutely no place in our politics," McConnell said in a statement.
At one point last year, 16 tea party groups joined together in claiming harassment by the IRS, something the agency denied at the time. The IRS said that roughly 75 groups were targeted.
One of those groups, the Tea Party Patriots, called on President Barack Obama to apologize and demanded that Congress investigate.
“The IRS has demonstrated the most disturbing, illegal and outrageous abuse of government power,” said Jenny Beth Martin, the group's national coordinator.
“This deliberate targeting and harassment of tea party groups reaches a new low in illegal government activity and overreach. It is suspicious that the activity of these ‘low-level workers’ was unknown to IRS leadership at the time it occurred. ... We reject a simple apology that does nothing to alleviate the danger of this happening again. Only immediate and public actions on the part of the IRS and the president will suffice.
Certain tax-exempt charitable groups can conduct political activities, but it cannot be their primary activity.
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Property of the State
Here is an article at the American Thinker, published on 1 May 2013 by Timothy Birdnow that that examines the relationship between the citizen and the State. It does so from looking at the individual as Property - either of yourself or as property of the State.
Mr. Birdnow correctly separates the base views of the liberals versus the conservatives. This is an excellent article.
May 1, 2013
The Individual as Property
By Timothy Birdnow
In 2011 a woman named Sharrie Gavan beat a man with a baseball bat. Now, this is not all that unusual, as domestic disputes, home invasions, and overheated arguments sometimes end with an act of assault, but this particular case is different. In this instance the woman took a baseball bat to the drug pusher who was gleefully destroying her 20-year-old son with heroin. Mrs. Gavan was recently convicted of the assault and faces up to a year in prison.
This story seems destined to die a dull death, although there are locals in the St. Louis area who have cheered the actions of this woman. But when looked at in a larger context this story speaks volumes about the fundamental changes that have occurred in our culture and in our thinking.
What is the nature of the relationship between the citizen and the State? America was founded on principles found in the Bible and in the writings of 17th century philosophers such as John Locke.
John Locke pointed out in his First Treatise on Government:
Though the Earth... be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself.
So, all men have first and foremost the right to own themselves.
This is of critical importance because it is this most fundamental principle that the modern Left and Right part company over. Liberals do not believe this basic assertion, preferring to believe that we as a collective own each other. This distinction is absolutely critical, because it informs our beliefs in terms of actions.
The English Philosophers Hobbes and Hume argued that property was a creation of the State, and were not held in high regard by the Founders of the United States. If property is a creation of the State, then one can argue that the State has sovereignty over the individual.
And of course later philosophers came to dismiss the view of self-ownership as illusory. Rousseau believed individuals enter voluntarily into a social contract which creates a "sovereign", a sort of group entity, a collective. Rousseau was extraordinarily influential on later leftist thinking, as was Karl Marx who disdained the concept of personal sovereignty, as did Benito Mussolini. As in communism and fascism, the entire undercurrent of modern liberalism is anti-individualism. Even the Anarchists, though they may seem to be radical individualists, ultimately seek the ollectivization of property as a means to grant themselves the individualism they seem to believe in -- making them as statist as any other leftist branch. Without property rights one cannot have individual rights.
It is no surprise that the general degradation of property rights should coincide with the rise of statism and the devaluing of the individual. Either we own property -- including ourselves - or we do not.
From such a belief system comes abortion; the right to life is subject to the granting of permission by the collective.
Gun control is another example; the Left hates guns because they empower the individual over the collective. A man with a gun does not need the protection of the State but can deal with violations of his rights by himself. The man with a gun can, if need be, do without the collective. This chafes at liberal sensibilities, as they are absolute in their determination to make us all not just our brother's keeper but his master. There can be no right to self-defense in a world where one does not own even himself. The State is master and it is a usurpation, an act of rebellion, to defend yourself. It is even more an act of treason to defend yourself against the State. This is why there is such anger in the Progressive community against "bitter clingers" holding onto their guns; what right does any individual have to take the power of the State?
It affects religion, too. The Judeo-Christian religions believe in the duty of the individual to govern himself first and foremost. The Progressive thinking is that nobody has a right to govern himself, so Christianity and Judaism are rebels, antithetical to the cause of community and the idea that "it takes a village". Islam, on the other hand, is both a handy tool to use against them and is a system where there is no division between the State and the Faith, and the individual must submit to the larger collective.
Almost any position held by the Progressive Left can be understood if one thinks about it in terms of property rights.
The liberal view has largely emerged triumphant in our modern era. The case of Mrs. Gavan is illustrative of that.
Not sixty years ago Mrs. Gavan would not have been arrested, nor tried, nor convicted. She had gone to the police like any good citizen and was told there was nothing that could be done, so, in desperation, she took very modest steps to protect her family. Please note the pusher was not seriously harmed -- merely warned away with a couple of bruises. The Founders would have shrugged at that.
But not the modern python state; laws have become nooses around the necks of the citizenry while leaving the predators (who follow no law but their own) free rein. Society will not allow a person to defend himself. Now if a crime victim shoots an attacker he is the person in trouble (ask George Zimmerman). Now any action outside of official channels is punished because it is considered an act of rebellion. It is the reason why the Obama administration keeps pushing this "right-wing domestic terrorist" shibboleth; they are frightened of anybody outside of their control, outside of the Borg Collective.
And so a decent woman protecting her family may go to prison for the sake of upholding the right of the State over the individual. This is not just an elitist-Progressive thing, either; ordinary citizens and minor officials in Jefferson County, Missouri pursued, charged, tried, and convicted this woman. This mindset is now a part of the American psyche.
And it won't change, not without enormous social, educational, and informational changes in this country. We have to remember who we once were, and that means the schools need to teach, the arts need to remember, movies and television need to change, an entire culture has to be revamped. The prognosis for a restoration is grim.
But not impossible. As long as there is a spark of liberty in the individual there remains hope. We have to teach our children. We have to remember who we once were.
Timothy Birdnow is a St. Louis-based writer. Read more from Tim and friends. www.tbirdnow.mee.nu
Mr. Birdnow correctly separates the base views of the liberals versus the conservatives. This is an excellent article.
May 1, 2013
The Individual as Property
By Timothy Birdnow
In 2011 a woman named Sharrie Gavan beat a man with a baseball bat. Now, this is not all that unusual, as domestic disputes, home invasions, and overheated arguments sometimes end with an act of assault, but this particular case is different. In this instance the woman took a baseball bat to the drug pusher who was gleefully destroying her 20-year-old son with heroin. Mrs. Gavan was recently convicted of the assault and faces up to a year in prison.
This story seems destined to die a dull death, although there are locals in the St. Louis area who have cheered the actions of this woman. But when looked at in a larger context this story speaks volumes about the fundamental changes that have occurred in our culture and in our thinking.
What is the nature of the relationship between the citizen and the State? America was founded on principles found in the Bible and in the writings of 17th century philosophers such as John Locke.
John Locke pointed out in his First Treatise on Government:
Though the Earth... be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself.
So, all men have first and foremost the right to own themselves.
This is of critical importance because it is this most fundamental principle that the modern Left and Right part company over. Liberals do not believe this basic assertion, preferring to believe that we as a collective own each other. This distinction is absolutely critical, because it informs our beliefs in terms of actions.
The English Philosophers Hobbes and Hume argued that property was a creation of the State, and were not held in high regard by the Founders of the United States. If property is a creation of the State, then one can argue that the State has sovereignty over the individual.
And of course later philosophers came to dismiss the view of self-ownership as illusory. Rousseau believed individuals enter voluntarily into a social contract which creates a "sovereign", a sort of group entity, a collective. Rousseau was extraordinarily influential on later leftist thinking, as was Karl Marx who disdained the concept of personal sovereignty, as did Benito Mussolini. As in communism and fascism, the entire undercurrent of modern liberalism is anti-individualism. Even the Anarchists, though they may seem to be radical individualists, ultimately seek the ollectivization of property as a means to grant themselves the individualism they seem to believe in -- making them as statist as any other leftist branch. Without property rights one cannot have individual rights.
It is no surprise that the general degradation of property rights should coincide with the rise of statism and the devaluing of the individual. Either we own property -- including ourselves - or we do not.
From such a belief system comes abortion; the right to life is subject to the granting of permission by the collective.
Gun control is another example; the Left hates guns because they empower the individual over the collective. A man with a gun does not need the protection of the State but can deal with violations of his rights by himself. The man with a gun can, if need be, do without the collective. This chafes at liberal sensibilities, as they are absolute in their determination to make us all not just our brother's keeper but his master. There can be no right to self-defense in a world where one does not own even himself. The State is master and it is a usurpation, an act of rebellion, to defend yourself. It is even more an act of treason to defend yourself against the State. This is why there is such anger in the Progressive community against "bitter clingers" holding onto their guns; what right does any individual have to take the power of the State?
It affects religion, too. The Judeo-Christian religions believe in the duty of the individual to govern himself first and foremost. The Progressive thinking is that nobody has a right to govern himself, so Christianity and Judaism are rebels, antithetical to the cause of community and the idea that "it takes a village". Islam, on the other hand, is both a handy tool to use against them and is a system where there is no division between the State and the Faith, and the individual must submit to the larger collective.
Almost any position held by the Progressive Left can be understood if one thinks about it in terms of property rights.
The liberal view has largely emerged triumphant in our modern era. The case of Mrs. Gavan is illustrative of that.
Not sixty years ago Mrs. Gavan would not have been arrested, nor tried, nor convicted. She had gone to the police like any good citizen and was told there was nothing that could be done, so, in desperation, she took very modest steps to protect her family. Please note the pusher was not seriously harmed -- merely warned away with a couple of bruises. The Founders would have shrugged at that.
But not the modern python state; laws have become nooses around the necks of the citizenry while leaving the predators (who follow no law but their own) free rein. Society will not allow a person to defend himself. Now if a crime victim shoots an attacker he is the person in trouble (ask George Zimmerman). Now any action outside of official channels is punished because it is considered an act of rebellion. It is the reason why the Obama administration keeps pushing this "right-wing domestic terrorist" shibboleth; they are frightened of anybody outside of their control, outside of the Borg Collective.
And so a decent woman protecting her family may go to prison for the sake of upholding the right of the State over the individual. This is not just an elitist-Progressive thing, either; ordinary citizens and minor officials in Jefferson County, Missouri pursued, charged, tried, and convicted this woman. This mindset is now a part of the American psyche.
And it won't change, not without enormous social, educational, and informational changes in this country. We have to remember who we once were, and that means the schools need to teach, the arts need to remember, movies and television need to change, an entire culture has to be revamped. The prognosis for a restoration is grim.
But not impossible. As long as there is a spark of liberty in the individual there remains hope. We have to teach our children. We have to remember who we once were.
Timothy Birdnow is a St. Louis-based writer. Read more from Tim and friends. www.tbirdnow.mee.nu
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