Operation Choke Point: Yet another Obama era attack on normal Americans

Recently, several banks including Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citibank, and J.P. Morgan  have taken actions to deny firearms related business banking services from their institutions.  According to Tony Oliva at Bullets First these banks are also the most complained about. Indeed, the list of things pulled on their customers makes one think they should be charged under the RICO statute.

Yet, not only do these four banks rate as the most complained about financial institutions in the country but they also all have policies in place to punish, deny and/or harrass American’s who DARE to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights. I don’t mean that these banks simply hide under the naive cloak of gun free zones in their establishments. No, these banks have systematically and aggressively attempted to undermine the business of firearms in this country.

Bank of America has twice attacked gun manufacturers with monetary terrorism in recent years. McMillan Firearms Manufacturing were forced to close their accounts last year and transfer their business infrastructure elsewhere simply because they manufactured firearms...

...snip...

During the Christmas season of 2012, when guns are often purchased as Christmas and other Holiday Gifts, the sales from American Spirit Arms went up. In response to this Bank of America FROZE Spirit Arms accounts for THREE WEEKS starting on December 18th. For nearly a month American Spirit Arms could not access that money and the financial impact nearly sent them under at a time when they should have been the most profitable.

When Joseph Sirochman, owner of American Spirit Arms, contacted BoA he was told by a manager at the bank that the accounts and deposits would be held under “further review” and that, as a policy “we believe you should not be selling gun and parts on the internet.”

I don’t know about you but I don’t think that Bank of America should be allowed to use the word America in their name as their actions are about as un-American as they come.

As always, please go read Mr. Oliva's post.

Now, these banks did not start this directly because of the Obama Administration "Operation Choke Point," but they were certainly emboldened by it.  And now, we have Proof of authoritarianism in the form of:

A lawsuit against federal banking regulators filed last Friday in Washington D.C. may appear at first blush to be a simple case of due process violation but, according to at least one legislator and a former ambassador, documents released in the case actually prove an Obama-era program, long thought to prevent some businesses disfavored by that administration from operating, was doing exactly that.

You can read the article, written by Sarah Lee at Townhall.com under the title Proof of authoritarianism: Operation Choke Point Revisited. In the modern world, the extending of credit to businesses is a requirement. A business will hire people to produce a product, and others to sell that product. There is typically a lag between when the product is produced, and when the business receives funds for the sale of its products. The middle man here is the bank, which extends credit to keep the employees paid, the lights on, and the businesses creditors paid until the business receives the funds from the sale of its product and pays the bank back the money it has borrowed, with of course, interest. They may also seek funds as capitol for expanding the business, building new facilities, or buying new tooling. Such is true of all businesses. Thus, banking services may be seen as a utility. Utilities may not deny services to any legal business, which are businesses producing legal products.

 In the case of American Spirit Arms, B of A essentially withheld the funds American Spirit had earned, and with which it would have paid off its loans, thus forcing American Spirit out of business based solely on a philosophy.  Of course, our A rated by the NRA Congress should have done something to stop this, but I am glad at least one victim of these arrogant banks are taking them to court.  Perhaps with a more Constitutionally minded Supreme Court we will finally get some relief.

To B of A and the rest, please note: the money deposited in your banks by us is not your money.  It is ours.  We have a fiduciary relationship with you, but you may not tell us how to spend our funds, no matter that you disagree. 

Fed Up? #MeToo!

I don't write much about feminists, screaming harpies, or whatever bad behavior passes into the public realm.  Like a lot of men, I don't like it, but the fact is that the only reason it is allowed at all is because we men tolerate it.  We wouldn't have to, you know.  If we were to adopt Islam-like practices, we could keep women, as they like to say, barefoot and pregnant.  And yet, the fact that women are allowed to say these things, to scream at their husbands, cause them public shame, to make outlandish claims, and otherwise make asses of themselves belies the claims themselves.  For have you ever heard that Muslim men are pigs, and treat their wives badly from the wives themselves?  No?  It is because in the Muslim world, they do not tolerate it.   In the West, we do.

We have recently witnessed the #metoo movement suck up a bunch of piggish men who used power in a particular field to obtain sex.  I say to obtain sex because the word "seduce" implies more naivete on the part of the women than is believable.  The women in each case wanted something the man had, and the man wanted something the women had.  It seems to me that in the Harvey Weinstein case, and others like it, that what we are actually talking about is prostitution.  The women wanted stardom, and were willing to give up sex to get it. Not exactly the story the #metoo movement wants to tell.

Now, women are sometimes mistreated.  Women who are genuinely raped, or beaten by domestic partners, do indeed need the protection of the law.  Protection orders are all fine and good, but they are only worth whatever the government can afford, which isn't much.  So, a woman in this position should obtain a gun, and learn how to use it.  The "men" who do these things need to be punished, and the women need to be treated with respect, but we should in no way relax the legal standards of evidence, or of giving the defendant the right to confront his accuser.  But of course this is not what the #metoo movement is about.  In saying to believe all women, it wants to destroy the legal underpinnings of our society. They want one half the population to be able to simply say what they want and have it obeyed, on pain of a false claim.

Sorry, "ladies."  We men will tolerate much, and much more than we perhaps should, but but you and your pajama boy toys don't get to do that to us.  Now run along a play, and allow us men, and the REAL women out there, to get back to work.

Cowering Before the Party of Evil

Ben Shapiro at the Daily Wire tells us that Political Correctness and its enforcers are not really all that popular.

Huh!

Shapiro writes that:

On Wednesday, Yascha Mounk, lecturer on government at Harvard University, wrote a fascinating piece for The Atlantic regarding a new study from Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Miriam Juan-Torres and Tim Dixon, titled Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape. There’s a lot of fascinating material in the report, but Mounk picks out the biggest gem: Americans hate political correctness. Or at least nearly all Americans do, the only exceptions being far-Left progressives.

And who are these far-Left progressives? They’re disproportionately white and upper class.

Yep, their the young people who, rather than feeling grateful as they should, feel guilty that they have so much. But instead of doing what they should if they feel this way (hint: give it away to the poor and make your own way in the world) think the rest of us should give up what our fathers and mothers have bequeathed us. My mother and father worked hard to get out of poverty and give us a better life than they had. Sorry if you rich kids feel guilty about it, but I ain't givin' it up. Go peddle your crap somewhere else.

And please, gentle readers, go to the link and read the whole article. Then go out an enjoy breaking some so called "rules" of PC. It's fun to piss off a liberal snowflake on occasion.

And while your at it, go look at a scene from one of my favorite anti PC movies here.

Meanwhile, Michael Reagan, son of the great President Ronald Reagan writes a piece at Townhall.com entitled The Party of Evil. Now, you may be wondering what ties these two pieces together. And here it is: the enforcers of PC often feel guilty for having more than others, but the Democrat politicians do not. Instead, they manipulate these poor misguided people for their own ends. It is like someone taking advantage of a mentally disabled individual to take his lunch money.  Go read also the Party of Evil. 

God does not give us the power to destroy the earth!

So, it is that time of year again when the climate alarmist brigade begins to ramp up its claims of impending doom, before going into a big, well funded meeting with all the usual suspects.  These meetings of the UN Framework Conventions on Climate Change are big events that have a carbon footprint that dwarfs those of small countries.  They eat the finest cheeses, drink the best wines, and generally live very high on the hog.  No doubt celebrities will fly in on their private jets to rub shoulders with the leftist delegates to the Convention while staying in five star luxury at the hotels.  All very chic.

This year, however, the IPCC report is being credibly challenged by a group of scientists who will be releasing their report, "Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels" in Katowice, Poland the week of December 4, 2018. But you should read all about it from John Dale Dunn and Joseph Bast at the American Thinker entitled The IPCC is still wrong on climate change. Scientists prove it. Go read the whole thing.

 Like Mr. Dunn, I am not a scientist myself. I am a civil engineer, who like Mr. Dunn took chemistry, physics, geology and a bit of biology in the course of getting my degree. In the course of my work since, I have developed an excellent internal "B.S." meter.  My BS meter pegged out the first time I heard about what was then called "Global Warming" and the fact that man was causing it.  I knew from my geology days that the earth had been though hot spells as well as deeply cold periods.  The deeply cold periods were known as "ice ages."  For civilizational survival, an impending ice age scares me more that the idea that it might get a little bit warmer.

Frankly, I grow weary of debunking the theory that there is anything man can do to either make it warmer or colder.  Believing this nonsense is akin to the  superstition that by dancing around a "powerful shaman" can make it rain.  But as we read in Matthew 5:45, the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.  It may seem unfair until one realizes that we have all fallen short of God's expectation, so why should he favor on over another?

I realize that many no longer believe in God, and that many have been taught to believe that the earth is a fragile thing that man can easily upset.  Indeed, I saw a movie recently in which the premise was that we had run out of the resources to grow food and therefore had to leave the earth.  Yet the truth is that all the resources that ever existed here are still here.  They may be in landfills but they are still here and can still be used. God does not give us the power to destroy the earth.  Believe it or not, that is a scientific fact.

Judge Kavanaugh Confirmed

According to Townhall.com Judge Kavanaugh has been confirmed to be the next Justice of the Supreme Court.

While I am conservative, strangely enough I did not want Brett Kavanaugh on the court because he is "conservative," but because I expect he will decide cases based on an originalist interpretation of the Constitution.  Had leftists not created the idea of a "living Constitution" that changed meanings every time a leftist fad popped up, we would not have needed to have this fight.

Interestingly, the Constitution has been amended 27 times.  It is not impossible, merely difficult.  The amendment process was designed to be difficult to ensure that it was not amended lightly, or because a mob has temporarily overwhelmed the majority before it has had time to make up its mind.  An originalist believes that if we want to change the Constitution, it should be amended rather than have some Justice peer between the lines at the emanations of the penumbras, perhaps had consulted the entrails of goats, and come up with a amendment by interpretation.

It will be interesting to see how Kavanagh changes the Court. 

Speaking of needing consequences...

This from David Codrea over at the War on Guns blog:


US Guns to Mexico Report Feels Like 'Deja vu All Over Again' 

When will the "authorities" take action on this?

Consequences

I have on occasion noted that if there are no consequences for breaking laws, there really is no reason for having them.  In the case of gun laws, for example, it is illegal for a felon to have in his possession, a gun.  But relatively few people are prosecuted for it (though Sessions notes that Federal prosecutions are up.) Attorney General Sessions "gets it" that crimes must be punished, if the law is to have its intended effect of regulating behavior.

Interestingly, according to an article by Wayne LaPierre in the September 2018 issue of the American Rifleman, the New York Times apparently had an article lamenting Sessions' efforts because these might be too successful, thus eliminating the argument for more gun laws (!).  The NYT publishes behind a pay wall, and in any case, I don't intend to send anyone their way.  You are on your own with this one.

Today at Townhall.com we learn that Allies of Christine Blasey Ford put the screws to long time friend to change her statement. This is witness tampering, a crime. It should be punished. Similarly, Senator Dianne Feinstein should be investigated and if found to have leaked Ford's letter, should be punished as well by whatever means the Senate has to punish members. No one is above the law, or should be.

For further reading, go to the American Thinker for an article entitled How To Prevent Another Kavanaugh Circus by Ted Noel.  Ted lays out a number of steps Republicans can take to rein in the Democrats.  Since most of the activity of Dems is illegal, it only requires a prosecutor with a spine to carry it out.  Oh, and perhaps the prosecutor may need body guards.  After all, prosecuting these people will not be unlike prosecuting the mafia.