So this Iran-Saudi Arabia thing could get interesting if not outright dangerous. This tribal battle has two deadly Muslim components; Arab/Persian and Sunni/Shia, and both countries have the power to either devastate and/or rearrange the entire Middle East. While Saudi Arabia is not the most ideal ally, they are still an ally and they believe we have completely abandoned them. Iran has already broken the “unsigned” agreement, which Obama is so proud of and apparently unwilling to enforce. Obama drew a red line in Syria that he was unwilling to enforce. Obama allowed Putin to take Crimea and invade Ukraine. And Obama is allowing the Chinese to choke off trade routes. Saudi Arabia is not the only ally to think that we have abandoned them, and they have good reason. A.B. Stoddard said it well when she stated that all the world powers know that this is Obama’s last year and they consider it to be open season. I think she’s right and that’s frightening. I think we could see some bad players making a lot of bad moves over the next year. Question is; does that bolster Trump even more? And how does Hillary handle it? More gun control? Your thoughts.
19 thoughts on “Clash of the Titans”
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Blogs For Victory 
This will be the year of living dangerously – especially if the recent economic activity developes into a genuine recession.
Buy stock in Remington or other firearms/ammo makers, then buy more of their products, for a hedge against recession, something that has only increased in value and will provide a little peace of mind in these dangerous times. And if the 2nd amendment is all we are left with, we had better make sure whoever is in power supports that Constitutional right. Happy New Year. Peace and prosperity to all, though it seems distant.
Freeing the slaves. Enacting more gun controls. Same thing.
http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/curtis-houck/2016/01/05/alter-compares-obamas-executive-actions-gun-control-emancipation
OK, now on a very serious note. In Norway:
In 2015, there were 50 rape reports filed in Gronland where, like all of Oslo, 100% of rapes of native Norwegian women by strangers are committed by Muslims. Across Norway, as with all of Europe, women dare not go out at night alone the risk of rape is so incredibly high……We are witnessing the wholesale collapse of Europe due to self-destructive decisions and a lack of any will to defend the homeland – a defense that wouldn’t be necessary if they hadn’t let the barbarians in. But they let them it. And they just can’t stop.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/01/police_in_oslo_norway_proclaim_oslo_is_lost.html
Meanwhile, in Germany:
The mass attack on women that happened “in the middle of the city” around Cologne Central Station on New Year’s Eve was “an intolerable situation,” Chief of Police Wolfgang Albers told reporters. (snip) The crowd of around 1,000 men attacked people in the city center in what Albers described as a “crime of a whole new dimension.”
And Democrats want us to be more like Europe.It says a lot about that party.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/01/muslim_mass_sexual_assaults_in_germany_on_new_years_eve.html
Barack Obama’s legacy — BEST GUN SALESMAN IN THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION.
The NRA should make him their Man of the Year…
My late husband loved guns, and I inherited a fascinating gun collection when he died. Many—most—are more collector items than weapons one might expect to use for any purpose today. Most reflect his love of history, so I have a couple of old Sharps rifles and several weapons from the two world wars.
I have thought of this treasure trove as something I keep as part of my memories of him and our life together, but also as a hedge against financial crisis. As the value of the collector items goes up, I figured I would be able to sell guns if necessary to augment my retirement income.
According to the newest edict from King Obama, there is enough prosecutorial discretion built in to allow Big Brother to indict and try me for illegal arms dealing if I were to sell even one of these guns, without first getting a federal firearms license.
I also have to wonder about what would happen to my brothers if these guns are transferred to them upon my death. Because there is now no official record of the existence of these guns, there is no way to track transfers, as long as there is no excuse to execute searches of our homes, but under the increasing power of the Central Authority under the assumed powers of its Executive Branch, we are seeing that anything is possible.
The real threat in the new edict from the throne room once known as the Oval Office is the restrictions implied but never spelled out—because they must remain flexible enough to be applied at will when desired—-interfering with the transfer of weapons from one person to another.
Imagine a law which says I can’t sell my car without first having an auto dealer license. One that says I can’t sell farm eggs and produce at a local farmers market, or to neighbors, without an FDA permit. One that prohibits me from buying a side of beef from a rancher because he is not in the legal system covering the sale of meat.
I am sure the trolls are snickering at this, calling it hysteria because after all the king is merely trying to protect us all from “gun violence” by making sure guns don’t fall into the hands of criminals and NRA members, who are after all equally dangerous. But there are two ways to look at the extra-Constitutional lawmaking from the throne room—-and no, “extra-Constitutional” does not mean extremely Constitutional, it means outside the boundaries of the Constitution—and while one of them is strictly related to transferring gun ownership another is the precedent of a single branch of government stating that it has the right to impose licensing restrictions on any level of transaction.
The process is the punishment – just adding layers and layers of legal expense to owning, buying or selling firearms will make it ever less likely in the future that people will own guns. At least, that is the bizarre hope of the left. When you pass on, whomever gets possession of those weapons will be at risk as long as the Obama rules exist…
According to the newest edict from King Obama, there is enough prosecutorial discretion built in to allow Big Brother to indict and try me for illegal arms dealing if I were to sell even one of these guns, without first getting a federal firearms license.
A couple comments. First, if this were ever allowed to become reality, FFL regulations allow BATF to make surprise inspections of any FFL dealer. If, as a private citizen you occasionally sell a gun, from say, a private collection, and your place of business is your home, they have the authority to search your home without a warrant to check your records and verify your inventory. Second, I think this is one of those incremental movements of the anti-gun Left. After much wrangling back and forth, they will agree to a compromise of “just requiring” anyone who wants to make a private sale to use an FFL dealer as the intermediary in any such sale. Of course, when it’s determined that people are either ignoring the new “law”, or that is isn’t having any statistical effect on gun crime, there will be new “common sense” laws proposed to correct that. Anyone who doesn’t understand, at this point, that the Left’s goal is to disarm the American people just has their head up their A$$.
They are persistent – they don’t care if it takes 20 years. We’ve got to get more like that – stop demanding immediate perfection. If we could, say, cut the budget by $1 next year, that would be a victory. Trouble is, if in that budget $1 less than the year before there was, say, something that some anti-immigration fanatic considers to be “amnesty”, then that would effectively kill the whole deal. We’ve got to stop being like that.
The figure the Left loves to claim is that 40% of gun sales are done without a background check, and that closing the “gun show loophole” would solve that, or at least go a long way toward solving it. There are a couple things wrong with that line of thinking besides the fact that the main premise is false or at least not provable. Most available information seems to indicate that between 5 and 10% of vendors who sell guns at gun shows are not FFL dealers, and the ones who aren’t are either in a different business (ie. knives, medical supplies, survival gear, firearm accessories, etc.) and just happen to have a couple guns in their booth, or they’re someone selling guns from a private collection — often like Amazona, antiques, commemoratives, and other unique firearms that wouldn’t be sought by someone wanting the gun for nefarious purposes. I can say from personal experience from the half dozen or so gun shows I’ve been to in the last couples years that what I’ve seen supports that description. The number of guns sold at gun shows that are actually used in crimes is statistically insignificant. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that there is a huge black market out there for guns. How many of the people involved in those back alley or parking lot sales are going to apply to become an FFL dealer, or take their sale to an FFL dealer to do the paperwork?
None – but the purpose is to make it difficult for the law-abiding, not for the law-breakers. Liberals over the world are ok with “an acceptable level of violence” because 99% of it never affects them (and 99.99999% never affects liberal leaders). This is not about stopping crime, it is about erecting a host of difficulties upon average Americans to discourage private fire arms ownership.
The Daily Signal has a couple of interesting articles on the Iran-Saudi conflict and the role of the U.S in it.
“The Saudis, long frustrated by what they see as the Obama administration’s bungling in the Middle East, now are concerned about the lack of timely and effective American responses to Iranian provocations. The decision to execute al-Nimr and 46 other Saudis is another expression of Saudi Arabia’s increasingly hardline policies against Iran and its allies in Syria and Yemen under Saudi King Salman, who ascended to the throne less than a year ago.
One Saudi insider told Reuters, “Every time the Iranians do something, the U.S. backs off. In the meantime, Saudi (Arabia) is actually doing something about it in Syria, in Iran and in Yemen,” the source added. “The Saudis really don’t care if they anger the White House.””
http://dailysignal.com/2016/01/05/obamas-passive-acceptance-of-iranian-provocations-helps-fuel-rising-iranian-saudi-tensions
“While the U.S. has said Iran is living up to its commitments related to the nuclear deal so far, Tehran has also launched ballistic missile tests in violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions and continued to support its unpopular proxies in the region.
According to news reports, the Treasury Department told congressional lawmakers last week that it intended to sanction people and entities it considered responsible for the ballistic missile program, but the U.S. later decided to delay any action.”
http://dailysignal.com/2016/01/05/how-the-latest-middle-east-crisis-complicates-iran-nuclear-deal-syrian-war
The fact that the United States eagerly entered into an agreement with Iran that pumps hundreds of billions of dollars back into that country, with only token efforts to restrict its nuclear ambitions, and is ignoring its launching of ballistic missiles near U.S. Navy ships, sends a pretty clear message about our White House position on its chosen alliances.
Trouble is that the Saudi side is, essentially, the ISIS side – hard to choose between the rat-bastards. In a better world where Iran wasn’t governed by Islamist fanatics, I’d like us to be allied with Iran against Saudi Arabia…but right now Iran’s side in the battle is Hezbollah…which simply hasn’t got around to being as murderous as ISIS.
Our descendants will ponder how their ancestors abandoned American supremacy, ingenuity, and civility due to ignorance, idealism, and an irrational obsession with politically correct progressivism that led to the transformation -– and decline — of this once great nation.
Good article:
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/01/obama_and_the_insanity_of_the_liberal_mind.html#ixzz3wTrFuamj
That is a great article. I particularly liked the quote at the beginning: “Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.”
It’s as if Paine had a crystal ball and could see Obama in our future. But his point is even more important—it is a lesson that ANY “Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent…”
There is a slightly similar article in Mother Jones, of all places, by a self-avowed Liberal, on why Donald Trump resonates with so many people. He actually makes some good points, and sounds less loony than most of the Libs we encounter. One thing I found interesting, though, is his belief that there is a difference between Liberal and Left. From the article: the author had put some of his text in bold so I will do so as well.
“Today, however, we have a new, more virulent political correctness that terrorizes both liberals and conservatives, old-line Democrats and Republicans, alike…The extremist adherents of this new political correctness have essentially taken a flamethrower to the public space and annihilated its center…Any incorrect position, any expression of the Constitutional right to a different opinion, or even just a slip of the tongue can lead to public ostracism and the loss of a job.
…Gay marriage is a good example. Liberals wanted gay marriage to win in the Supreme Court, and it did. Leftists wanted more: to silence their opponents even after those opponents completely lost on the issue…I could reel off many other examples. When the New York Times tells the rubes that it’s time to hand in their guns, when The Washington Post suggests that Jesus is ashamed of them for not welcoming Syrian refugees the week after a terrorist attack, people react not because they love guns or hate Syrians, but because their natural urge to being told by coastal liberals that they’re awful people and that they should just obey and shut up is to issue a certain Anglo-Saxon verb and pronoun combination with all the vigor they can muster. And if they can’t say it themselves, they’ll find someone who will, even if it’s a crude jerk from Queens who can’t make a point without raising his pinky like a Mafia goon explaining the vig to you after you’ve had a bad day at the track.”
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/01/are-liberals-responsible-rise-donald-trump
He makes the point that many people will drift away from Trump if they can only have faith that one (or more) of the other potential candidates will also stand up to the PC crowd and defend the same areas Trump has staked out, just in a less offensive way.
Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio I think both fit that bill. I know this is said a lot, but this is a very important election. If Hillary, Jeb, Kasich, or even Christie win, we are in deep kimchee. Neither of them will do anything to change the status quo. In my opinion, Trump or Cruz are the best two choices to clean house in Washington, with Rubio the next best choice and of course I still like Marco, but it has to be one of those three.
When I step outside my disdain for Trump as a person and try to objectively analyze the pros and cons of having him as president, while I find the possibility cringe-inducing I keep reminding myself that we have survived seven years of Obama and we can probably survive four years of Trump. It’s not the term of office that alarms me so much as the backlash and effect on the next election after this one.
Let’s face it, the international reputation of the United States is so badly damaged now not even a clownish Trump can do more to sink it any farther than Obama has. I keep thinking that he must come across differently on a one-to-one basis, as so many people he has done business with seem to think he’s OK. He would probably get some good things accomplished, he would probably put good people in important positions, his overweening arrogance might be helpful in dealing with issues that are bound to create lots of hostile reactions, and I suppose a flurry of old photos of the new First Lady nude or nearly so won’t be harder to live with than Michelle. At least Melania is used to the good life and won’t overreact like Michelle has in a nouveau riche orgy of conspicuous overconsumption. She can probably pay for her own vacations, too.
But any effort to find Trump less a disaster as president is based solely on the fact that anyone on the Right is going to be better than what we have now. I could quite honestly vote for literally any of the Republican hopefuls, including Kasich or Christie, believing that the worst of our lot is still better than the best of theirs.
We’re on the same page. I am also close to the point that I don’t care how Trump will be perceived, by anyone. He has successful experience running multi billion dollar companies so he has done some things right and worked with a lot of difficult people along the way. I am sure he can handle Washington.