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Please join in celebrating our Constitution’s latest victory at the Independent Policy Forum, The Supreme Court and the Battle for Second Amendment Rights, tonight at 7PM Pacific time.

The Supreme Court has now given us two historic decisions, the 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller case and the 2010 McDonald v. Chicago case, wherein the “right to bear arms” has been clearly established as an individual right, and a right which cannot be infringed by the states. Join Stephen P. Halbrook (Research Fellow, The Independent Institute), whose work has been cited repeatedly be the Supreme Court, and Donald E.J. Kilmer, Jr., Professor of Constitutional Law at Lincoln Law School of San Jose and attorney at law, as they discuss the Second and Fourteenth Amendments and what it means to take the Bill of Rights seriously.

And kudos to The Independent Institute for creating this sharing opportunity.

UPDATE: 10:04pm eastern IndependentInst-1: Everyone’s moving into the their chairs, please forgive the delay, we should begin broadcasting in a few minutes.

10:08pm They’re on air, but you have to click the play button.

The Lockerbie bomber may have been freed to buy oil drilling rights in Libya for British Petroleum. Abdelbeset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, who bombed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, was freed last year ostensibly because he was dying of cancer. Today he appears to be in good health and is “living in the lap of luxury” in Libya.

Yesterday reports surfaced that British Petroleum influenced the British government so that they could drill for oil in Libya. Apparently no crime is too heinous to be forgiven when oil is at stake. CNN reports:

A group of U.S. lawmakers have called for an investigation into whether BP may have played a role in lobbying for the release of the man convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland….

“Reports have surfaced indicating that a 2007 oil agreement may have influenced the U.K. and Scottish governments’ positions concerning Mr. Megrahi’s release in 2009,” wrote Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey in a letter to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on Monday.

Britain and Libya sparred over whether Megrahi should be included in a prisoner transfer agreement the two nations were negotiating. British officials and BP said that the oil giant’s interests — the company was seeking a huge deal to drill for oil in Libya — were a consideration in those negotiations….

…Gadhafi’s son Saif al-Islam Gadhafi told CNN that that Libya pressured the British government to include the convicted terrorist in the prisoner release agreement. Initially, he said, Britain refused to heed Libya’s demands that Megrahi be included in the prisoner release agreement.

“There was no mention of Mr. Megrahi until the British said ‘we are ready to sign but there should be a clause mentioning that Mr. Megrahi is excluded.’ And then we said no,” Gadhafi said. “We were very very angry. It’s not acceptable.”

The London Telegraph casts this as a political attack:

Democratic senators in the US have called for an investigation into BP’s interests in Libya, as they tried to connect the oil group with a deal to free a convicted terrorist….

Frank Lautenberg, a Democratic senator from New Jersey, called for an investigation into whether BP helped to secure the early release of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber freed by Scottish authorities last year.

“It is shocking to even contemplate that BP is profiting from the release of a terrorist with the blood of 189 Americans on his hands,” Mr Lautenberg wrote in a letter to the Senate foreign relations committee….

The oil company has faced a series of attacks from US politicians but last night’s was among the most political.

However, it is disingenuous for the London Telegraph to make that characterization, when only a year ago the London Times suggested exactly that reason for freeing the terrorist:

The release of the Lockerbie bomber from prison would liberate Britain’s largest industrial company from a string of problems hampering its $900 million (£546 million) Libyan gas projects, industry sources claimed last night.

BP, the oil giant, signed a deal with Libya in 2007 to explore for gas in the west of the country and offshore. But since then it has faced a string of bureaucratic obstacles, including delays securing official permits and approvals to import equipment through Libyan customs, the sources said….

The close ties between politics and the oil industry in Libya, where 95 per cent of export revenues are from oil and gas, are irrefutable….

Al-Megrahi’s release also comes amid a highly delicate battle for influence over Tripoli between Russia and the West. It is a struggle tied to billions of dollars worth of oil and arms deals, which could shape Europe’s energy security for years to come.

So there you have it, what we have always known — the balance of money and power on the world stage determines what is morally acceptable.

Democrats used voter intimidation and voter fraud during the 2008 and 2009 elections. Former Justice Department lawyer J. Christian Adams blew the lid off this scandal by exposing Eric Holder’s racial bias in dropping voter intimidation charges against two billy club wielding Black Panthers. In Congressional testimony last week, he noted that this was not an isolated incident — the pattern is pervasive:

….Adams revealed that not only were similar claims “pervasive”, but Obama activists committed the “same” crimes during the 2008 Democratic primary to help then Sen. Obama defeat Democratic heir apparent Hillary Clinton.

Obama gamed the system in 2008 by not only allowing an army of young men station themselves outside polling locations in African American communities to prevent elderly women and others from voting for their chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton, but he also trained thousands of willing accomplices … spread throughout the Democratic caucuses to commit voter fraud on a massive scale….

Most Republicans and Conservatives turned a deaf ear to the outrage of the disenfranchised Democrat primary voters at the time, believing this to be a Democratic party problem only. Not so. Today FOXNews reports that Al Franken’s margin of victory for the Minnesota Senate seat came from votes cast illegally by convicted felons. Worse, the Department of Justice was made aware of the problem, but did nothing about it.

This has potentially fatal implications for the coming fall elections. The election rolls are full of registrants who have died, moved out of the district (and will be voting somewhere else) or are not legally qualified to vote. Democrat operatives will cast votes for these people, and after the fact, it will not be possible to assess the damage. This should be no surprise to the average American — after all, it has been standard operating procedure in Baltimore and Chicago for a long time. But the Obama machine has taken it nationwide, unchallenged by a complicit media.

As columnist Fred Dardick points out, “an army of Republican poll watchers will be needed this November.”

Tail wag: Jim Simpson

References:

Canada Free Press — How Obama Used an Army of Thugs to Steal the 2008 Democratic Party Nomination

Canada Free Press — Democrat Voter Fraud is Far More Widespread Than You Think

FOXNews — Feds Were Asleep at the Switch When Minnesota Felons Went to the Polls

We Will Not Be Silenced — A Documentary About Voter Fraud In the Democratic Presidential Primary 2008

American Thinker — Former Chicago Machine Player Issues Warning to Sharron Angle Campaign

Our writers here at American Daughter have been critical of Obama’s response to the oil disaster. Reader MaryAnne reasonably asks:

Could you please detail exactly what you think Obama should personally do about BP’s complete disregard for the safety of its workers and the destruction of Gulf Coast beaches? I have gone to the trouble of reading some of your past posts and have yet to see you offer one workable solution to any of the problems you address.

I haven’t done this until now, because it doesn’t make any difference what I would have done. The mission of our news magazine is to inform our readers of the capabilities and shortcomings of public figures, so they can make informed decisions about their political activism, financial support, and voting. But such a discussion may offer a useful baseline for comparison, and it certainly is something that I have given a lot of thought. Here’s what I would do if I were president:

1. If I were president, I would immediately assume personal executive responsibility for the response to one of the greatest environmental disasters to face our planet, that happened under United States jurisdiction. I would NEVER abdicate that authority to any profit-motivated corporation. I would use every legal means to force that corporation to finance the clean-up, but I would manage the clean-up myself, by delegating tasks to my government officials.
    
2. The assessment of “guilt, fault, and blame” is only useful if it prevents future mistakes based on “lessons learned.” And technological mistakes usually result from policy driven by wishful thinking rather than scientific data. In this respect, the Deepwater Horizon disaster is almost an exact reprise of the Challenger disaster, in which decision makers ignored the warnings of scientific personnel about the O-ring’s potential failure at freezing temperatures.

   If I were president, I would immediately make it perfectly clear and well understood by the public that the deepwater drilling was promoted during the Clinton administration (the Outer Continental Shelf Deepwater Royalty Relief Act of 1995) without due consideration of disaster contingencies. Our government gave British Petroleum a “categorical exclusion” for the well during the Obama administration. I would do this, not to indulge in partisan finger-pointing at Democrats, but to prevent the root administrative causes and lax safety standards of our own government agencies from being obscured by Democrat partisans throwing up smoke-screens about Dick Cheney’s relationships with the oil industry.
    

3. Within hours of the first phone call notifying the White House of the rig explosion, I would have assembled a crisis team, booked a hotel on the Gulf Coast, and taken the whole team there on location to assume personal positive control of the situation. Within the first twenty-four hours I would have convened an emergency meeting with the governors of the Gulf States. For the entire duration of the crisis, I would not have played one hour of golf, nor done anything else but be the country’s executive.

   To be president of the United States is an honor, and it is an executive position, a management position, and a good executive “rests in action.” A qualified executive does not need the personal recreation of sports or parties to “recharge his batteries.” He draws his strength and energy from his passion for the job, from the personal satisfaction of giving his hands and heart to the cause and knowing he has done his best.
    

4. Upon first being notified of the rig explosion, I would have placed an emergency call to Dr. Jane Lubchenco, Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. I would have decreed, under the executive powers, that she bypass the normal protocols for data calculation and delivery, assemble her best scientists immediately (waking them up if necessary) and get back to me within eighteen hours with her best estimate of the latitude/longitude coordinates of the point above the blown hole where the center of the oil “volcano” was most likely to first breach the ocean surface.

   I would have asked the Gulf State governors to mobilize their National Guards to protect the beaches and wetlands, and asked Congress for emergency funding for same. I would have tasked the Secretary of the Navy to identify some Naval assets in the Gulf for assisting oil containment operations. I would have instructed the Coast Guard to immediately mobilize a fleet of boats on standby, awaiting the NOAA calculations. As soon as the NOAA coordinates were received, I would have had the Coast Guard deploy five widely spaced concentric rings of oil booms around the NOAA-calculated surface point. The containment booms would have been in place within two days, tops. (Those measures would impede, but not prevent, the spread of oil. They would buy time for dredging and bioremediation.)
    

5. I would have ordered dredging to begin immediately to create sand reefs connecting the barrier islands offshore from sensitive wetlands and marshes, to protect the pelican rookeries and sea turtle hatching grounds from contamination. As executive, I would have taken the responsibility for my decision and not hidden behind the requirement for an Environmental Protection Agency impact study that could take months or years.
    
6. Under the authority of the Executive Powers, I would have forbidden British Petroleum or any other agency from using the toxic chemical dispersant Corexit 9500. I would have personally taken the responsibility for ordering the bioremediation of oil-eating microbes, stored in large enough quantities in Texas warehouses.
    
7. With respect to the potential for environmentally friendly solutions, I would have immediately tasked Cornell University’s Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering to recommend plant-based bioremediation. I would have used discretionary grant money for a crash program aimed at the specifics of the Gulf situation.

   I would also have used discretionary grant money to task Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences to do a systems analysis of the oil spill response, and to quantify risk factors associated with various strategies — chemical dispersant, burn-off, booms, reefs, skimmers, bioremediation via plants or microbes. (I have no doubt that the combination of chemical dispersant and burn-off currently being implemented is the worst possible choice with respect to long-term environmental considerations. It has short-term cosmetic appeal, in that it masks the full dimensions of the disaster, but we will pay a long term price worse than that for DDT.)
    

8. Under the authority of the Executive Powers, I would have suspended the Jones Act, or Merchant Marine Act of 1920, and accepted help from the foreign governments that offered it on DAY ONE — Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Republic of Korea, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

   The fact that Obama deferred his leadership role to British Petroleum is most egregious here:

   Four weeks after the nation’s worst environmental disaster, the Obama administration saw no need to accept offers of state-of-the-art skimmers, miles of boom or technical assistance from nations around the globe with experience fighting oil spills.

   “We’ll let BP decide on what expertise they do need,” State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid told reporters on May 19….

9. Under the authority of the Executive Powers, I would have relaxed the oil-to-water ratios required for returning processed ocean water to the Gulf, thereby permitting the immediate deployment of the South Korean-built, Taiwanese-owned, Liberian-flagged ship “A Whale” for oil-skimming in the Gulf. The Obama administration allowed it to languish tied up to the docks in Norfolk, Virginia for weeks.
    
10. If I were president, I would never have limited access to the oil spill damage by the press or by photographers, except to the extent required for their safety. I would have valued our mutual stewardship of our natural resources above any concerns for my political reputation. I do not believe that the American public is a mindless herd of sheep whose perceptions need to be manipulated. I do believe that they are a resourceful and creative force that should be kept FULLY INFORMED and engaged in the solution to this truly earth-changing disaster.
     
11. If I were president, I would never have used phrases like “boot on the neck” or “kick ass.” The empty rhetoric and political grandstanding characteristic of this administration does nothing to solve the problem, and it does nothing to reassure the public that a responsible leader with a thoughtfully reasoned plan is in charge. It is the language of a guttersnipe, not a statesman.
     
12. As for the other part of MaryAnne’s question, what “Obama should personally do about BP’s complete disregard for the safety of its workers,” the remedy, if any, is the province of the Occupational Safety & Health Administration. The president can make clear to Hilda Solis, Secretary of Labor, and to David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health, his deep personal concern about this matter, and ask them for a study and special report with recommendations. But that is “locking the barn door after the horse is stolen.” It would, however, have serious value with respect to the remaining nearly 4,000 active oil and gas platforms in the Gulf.

And that’s just the first couple of days….

References:

American Daughter — The Executive Orders

LENTA — How to remove oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico? (translated from the Russian)

The NRA announced its strong opposition to the confirmation of Elena Kagan for the U.S. Supreme Court in a letter to the U.S. Senate on July 1. Today, they announced the release of a television ad:

Both her political career in the Clinton Administration and her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee make it clear that Kagan would be a serious opponent of our Second Amendment Rights.

Last year, Sonia Sotomayor deliberately misled the American people by claiming she believed it was “settled law” that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to keep and bear arms. This year, she proved she never really believed that by voting against the Second Amendment in McDonald v. City of Chicago.

Elena Kagan used the same phrases – “settled law” and “precedent” – to describe her view of the Second Amendment in the hearings. It is critical that the members of the U.S. Senate not fall for the same trick twice….

Here’s the ad that the NRA will be airing across the country. Watch, and then contact your Senators at 202-224-3121 (Senate switchboard) or look up their email and office phone numbers here — Senators of the 111th Congress. Urge them to oppose and filibuster Kagan’s confirmation. The future of our Second Amendment rights depends on it!

For more detail read — NRA Opposed To Kagan Nomination To U.S. Supreme Court.