Quote of the Indeterminate Time Interval – Maguro

In Althouse’s thread on the news that the Obama administration will ignore* the subpoena for Solyndra documents, he said;

Most transparent, ethical administration evah!

I concur. Between this and running guns to Mexican drug gangs to build up support for domestic gun control**, they’re doing a bang up job.

*Since when can you just flat out ignore subpoenas? I thought that was the whole damn point?

**BTW CNN (and WSJ, for that matter), it wasn’t a “botched probe.” Repeating it doesn’t make it true***.

***Unless by botched they mean it was actually found out. If it was supposed to be under the radar, and now it’s manifestly not, then that’s pretty damn botched.****

****I don’t actually have a fourth note; consider this a botched footnote.

That’s some interesting logic…

Fast and Furious was a failure right from the beginning:

Five months into the surveillance effort — dubbed Operation Fast and Furious — no indictments had been announced and no charges were immediately expected. Worse, the weapons had turned up at crime scenes in Mexico and the ATF official was worried that someone in the United States could be hurt next.

The LA Times goes on to give a bit of background information on Fast and Furious:

Fast and Furious was a highly secret undercover program begun with great ambition. The border was out of control, and the new Obama administration wanted to stop U.S. guns from crossing into Mexico and arming drug cartels.

We had to arm the cartels in order to disarm the cartels, I guess.

I’m not sure if the article is an indictment of the operation or a cry for more funding for the ATF, especially with their claim that the only reason the ATF failed to track each weapon was because it didn’t have enough resources.

The piece does a pretty good job of highlighting the complete incompetence of the ATF at every step of Fast and Furious, from its conception to its implementation to the inevitable conclusion.

How do you respond to ridiculous arguments?

With ridicule, of course.

NRA executive VP Wayne LaPierre brings ridicule in spades in his response to yesterday’s USA Today unsigned editorial on gun control (H/T Say Uncle).

The multiple long gun form is unlawful.

Even if it were lawful, it would probably be just as ineffective as the multiple hand gun purchase form was; the USA Today editorial begins with the story of a man who illegally purchased dozens of guns in AZ for resale in CA for two years before the he was finally caught.

As LaPierre points out:

The cartels run a $40 billion enterprise. They flood our neighborhoods with drugs. They rape and torture and murder. They feed their enemies to lions.

The cartels get their machine guns, grenades, missile launchers and tanks from Russia, China and South America. State Department cables, released byWikiLeaks, prove it. But the administration wants the public to believe that it’s going to disarm cartels with a form? Who is the president kidding?

Read the whole thing.

Proof that the government can always outperform even the most cynical of projections…

At the beginning of July, I said:

I look forward to the day when we learn that all organized crime is actually perpetrated by various undercover agents infiltrating each others’ organizations to get to the bottom of organized crime.

And now it turns out that I was right?*

Via Say Uncle:

U.S. federal agents allegedly allowed the Sinaloa drug cartel to traffic several tons of cocaine into the United States in exchange for information about rival cartels, according to court documents filed in a U.S. federal court.

This is insane. Why do we pay these idiots?

*I mean, of course I was right! I’m always right!

Why is the solution ALWAYS more laws? Why? (blue language alert)

In this case, a law recently went into effect to combat the scourge of meth; this time by making the purchase of Sudafed even more onerous than it was before.

Instead of just requiring people to sign a logbook when they buy OTC drugs like Sudafed (which was ridiculous enough), now pharmacists can refuse to sell to people who aren’t in “pressing need” of the drug. God forbid you choose to stock up on cold medicines so that you don’t have to go to the damn store while you’re sick; that’s not allowed anymore.

I don’t know how I missed this back when it was actually happening; I blame not getting sick that often. And it could be worse:

In June 2010, the state board of pharmacy unanimously voted to support a legislative initiative that would convert pseudoephedrine to a Schedule III controlled-substance prescription item. Solid oral dosage forms of the drug were already Schedule V nonprescription products.

You want your sudafed? GO GET A PRESCRIPTION, YOU FUCKING METH COOKER!

Fuck you, Arkansas State Board of Pharmacy.

The bill we ended up with is bad enough:

Jan K. Hastings, clinical coordinator for community pharmacy experiential education at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, said the decision-making process under the law rests on the pharmacist–patient relationship.

“There has to be a pharmacist–patient relationship before you make the recommendation, just like there would be for any other medication that you would recommend for a patient,” she said.

The only pharmacist-patient relationship I’m interested in, you jackbooted tyrant, is the one in which I say, “I would like to buy Sudafed/whatever, an OTC drug that DOESN’T REQUIRE A PRESCRIPTION,” and the pharmacists responds with, “Okay, that’ll be $10.”

I’m not your friend. I’m not going to the damn druggist for advice. I’m going to buy drugs, and unless those drugs require a fucking prescription, IT’S YOUR GODDAM JOB TO SELL THEM TO ME.

The plot thickens…

Apparently the White House did know about Fast and Furious. The ATF special agent in charge of the Phoenix office told the National Security Director for North America about the operation because,

“He was asking about the impact of Project Gunrunner to brief people in preparation for a trip to Mexico… what we were doing to combat firearms trafficking and other issues.”

Obviously Operation Fast and Furious only falls under that umbrella in the loosest definition of “combat firearms trafficking” you can come up with; as we’ve seen in the past couple of months, the ATF was more enabling firearms trafficking than actually combatting it. Hell, they were even letting convicted felons buy guns as part of this “program.”

And now Congress’s report has accused the ATF of arming Mexican cartels for war. When guns you allow to be sold to known straw purchasers take less than 24 hours to get from the point of sale to the scene of the crime, then your lame attempt to “combat firearms trafficking” isn’t working at all.

Heads are going to roll because of this. For many Mexicans and Americans living near the border, they already have.

How do you know the police banging on your door are actually the police?

What if they’re a bunch of criminals dressed up like the police so that home invasion robberies are easier to pull off?

This is yet another reason why no-knock warrants ought to be abolished.

If the police are never allowed to bust in, guns at the ready, then you won’t have to worry about people pretending to be the police kicking in your door. If someone does kick in your door, you know that they’re criminals.

Instead of criminals who also happen to be the police.

Look, you approve hundreds of gun sales to straw purchasers

And you don’t get to be shocked when those guns turn up at drug-related crime scenes.

They’re not just showing up in Mexico any more; some of the guns have been found at crime scenes in Arizona, as well.

This doesn’t surprise me at all. If someone’s willing to break the law to buy guns (as all straw purchasers and those on whose behalf they are purchasing the guns plainly are), they’re goign to break the law in other ways.

The real culprit here is the ATF; they’re the ones who gave the order to the gun stores in the Southwest to sell to known straw purchasers, and to keep selling. They broke the very laws they are charged with upholding, and unless they’re punished for it, they’ll do it again when it’s politically convenient.

Uncle’s got a roundup of the latest news.

The solution is always more government control

Is the government smuggling guns illegally across the Mexican border to cartels?

Well, that’s only because the laws aren’t strong enough and we need more government control!

It was only a matter of time, of course, until lawmakers joined the Washington Post and the New York Times in calling for more gun control in the wake of the ATF’s disastrous Fast and Furious gun “tracking” operation.

Obama’s answer to the Fast and Furious question at yesterday’s press conference was almost Nixonian; though he did miss the chance to go full Tricky Dick and say, “I am not a gun trafficker.”

And right on cue, the NYT is clamoring for gun control in the wake of Fast and Furious revelations

You stay classy, New York Times Editorial Board (H/T Uncle).

Calderon’s complained about the lapsed assault weapons ban before; I’m sure he’s still in favor of our reinstating the ban.

Mexico has extremely strict gun laws, but that doesn’t seem to stop the cartels. Over 40,000 killings in Mexico since their drug war started in 2006.

The NYT also repeats the false claim that most guns in Mexico are from the United States. To be fair, they’re not alone; the government is pushing this out and out lie as well.

Acting Director Melson is leaving the ATF after the Gunwalker hearings (and rightly so), and slain Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s family hopes that all those involved in the ATF’s criminal misconduct will be held accountable. I’d hope so too, but given the government’s penchant for looking out for its own, I’m not going to hold my breath.

And finally, Uncle saw this on facebook, and I thought it was an excellent analogy:

Imagine the DEA telling pharmacists to illegally sell oxycontin to known drug dealers or they would be shut down. Then imagine the DEA using the fact that more oxycontin was on the street (and hundreds of overdose deaths) as a pretext for making it harder for patients to get prescribed narcotics. This is essentially what happened with the ATF and Project Gunwalker.

Even the occasional gem sifted from the detritus of facebook isn’t enough to get me to use that vile social networking site. I can’t stand it.