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In This Issue:
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 Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of NRA, writing in America’s 1st Freedom, tells readers that documents obtained from the U.S Department of Homeland Security show that as of April 2014 the Obama administration had released this group, including many convicted of violent crimes such as homicide, sexual assault and kidnapping.
The Constitution’s Second Amendment is our defense against this type of criminal, and the Second Amendment is at risk given just a single vote change at the Supreme Court.
Mr. LaPierre explains:
For nearly seven years now, Obama has undermined the country’s very foundation, its culture and the values that have made America the greatest nation in the world.
An especially egregious example of his trampling on the Constitution to take away the rights of law-abiding gun owners is Obama’s implementation of the United Nations’ gun-ban treaty without obtaining mandated Senate ratification-constitutionally directed approval that he knows he cannot obtain.
Add to the list “Operation Chokepoint,” a scheme to drive federally licensed gun dealers out of business through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) by coercing banks into shutting down financial services for those targeted business. Under the government thumb, local banks notified gun dealers: “Ultimately your company’s line of business is not commensurate with the industries we work with.”
This malfeasance must come to an end. But if Hillary Clinton gets into office [RCY: See more about Hillary here], she will pick up where Obama left off, and the damage she would inflict on our country would be catastrophic.
One thing all Second Amendment supporters can do is to join the NRA today. I am a life member. A second is to join with your whole family in taking the NRA’s excellent handgun safety course, as Debbie and I have done. And you can benefit in taking a look at the mini series I have recently posted The Armed American Family (Part I, II, III, IV, V).
Here you will see a truly disturbing video on the danger of the Supreme Court to America’s Second Amendment rights.
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You’ll get one of the best explanations I’ve read on what shotgun chokes do here.
Chokes today range from the most open, called “Cylinder,” to varying degrees of ultra-tight Extra-Full. Let’s take a look at the most common you’ll encounter for the most popular shotgun gauge, the 12-gauge.
A shotgun barrel with Cylinder choke actually has no constriction at all. Its diameter is the same as the barrel’s internal dimension. This choke throws the widest pattern, so it is considered the most open choke. Cylinder is good for close shots on clay targets and game birds, and is also the most popular choice for those who keep a shotgun for self-defense and use buckshot.
The Improved Cylinder choke is the first level of constriction up from Cylinder. It is 0.010-inch narrower in diameter than the barrel diameter. This provides just a little constriction to the shot column as it exits the barrel, enabling that group of shot to maintain a nice, wide pattern for fast flushing game birds at distances to about 30 yards. It is also a popular choice for skeet targets and sporting clays targets thrown at those same distances.
A Modified choke, the next tightest, will provide a bore reduction of 0.020-inch. It makes a good choice for an all-around shotgun choke. It works well on clays from 30 to 45 yards or so and can handle most of the flushing game birds. I’ve used a Modified choke for waterfowl, pheasants, and even turkeys. In fact, for years it was the only choke I owned, until I was educated about the shotguns with interchangeable chokes.
The Full choke was, for decades, the waterfowl hunter’s best friend. With a bore reduction of just about 0.035-inch, this tight choke allowed a shotgunner to hit geese and ducks at the 40-yard mark and beyond. The tradeoff with a choke this tight is that it’s usually too tight for close-in targets, those closer than 25 yards. You’ll either miss because the pattern hasn’t widened enough to hit a moving target, or you’ll absolutely annihilate a target with an almost literal fistful of lead. Such a hit is fine on a clay target, but if you’re a hunter looking for a pheasant dinner, you could be picking shot out of a pile of shredded meat.
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The Supreme Court, writes Andrew C. McCarthy in NRO, is a reflection of the political class, of which it is very much a part. As the president rules unilaterally, the courts are there to give the administration the aura of legal rigor. King v. Burwell was not a constitutional case. Rather it was a simple, direct matter of statutory interpretation.
What made it ostensibly straightforward was the law: a statute that says, “an Exchange established by the State,” cannot possibly mean “an Exchange not established by the State.” If we were a nation of laws, such a case would never make it to the highest court in the land.
As McCarthy points out, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor did not author one opinion in the plethora of opinions on same-sex marriage, on refashioning Congress’s Fair Housing Act, and, of, of course on Obamacare. And there was zero speculation on how the four Progressive justices would vote. “There was no need. They are the Left’s voting bloc.”
“Once it has become a given that a critical mass of the Supreme Court is no longer expected, much less obliged, to do law, then the Court is no longer a legal institution. It is a political institution,” writes Andrew McCarthy. Read more here.
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 Ted Cruz is proposing a Constitutional amendment that will hold Supreme Court justices accountable to the voters. Those justices deemed unfit “will be removed from office.”
Cruz concludes, “We must not submit our Constitutional freedoms and the promise of our nation to judicial tyranny.”
The time has come, therefore, to recognize that the problem lies not with the lawless rulings of individual lawless justices, but with the lawlessness of the Court itself. The decisions that have deformed our constitutional order and have debased our culture are but symptoms of the disease of liberal judicial activism that has infected our judiciary. A remedy is needed that will restore health to the sick man in our constitutional system.
Rendering the justices directly accountable to the people would provide such a remedy. Twenty states have now adopted some form of judicial retention elections, and the experience of these states demonstrates that giving the people the regular, periodic power to pass judgment on the judgments of their judges strikes a proper balance between judicial independence and judicial accountability. It also restores respect for the rule of law to courts that have systematically imposed their personal moral values in the guise of constitutional rulings. The courts in these states have not been politicized by this check on their power, nor have judges been removed indiscriminately or wholesale. Americans are a patient, forgiving people. We do not pass judgment rashly.
Yet we are a people who believe, in the words of our Declaration of Independence that “when a long train of abuses and usurpations . . . evinces a design to reduce [the people] under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security.” In California, the people said enough is enough in 1986, and removed from office three activist justices who had repeatedly contorted the state constitution to effectively outlaw capital punishment, no matter how savage the crime. The people of Nebraska likewise removed a justice who had twice disfigured that state’s constitution to overturn the people’s decision to subject state legislators to term limits. And in 2010, the voters of Iowa removed three justices who had, like the Supreme Court in Obergefell, invented a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Judicial retention elections have worked in states across America; they will work for America. In order to provide the people themselves with a constitutional remedy to the problem of judicial activism and the means for throwing off judicial tyrants, I am proposing an amendment to the United States Constitution that would subject the justices of the Supreme Court to periodic judicial-retention elections. Every justice, beginning with the second national election after his or her appointment, will answer to the American people and the states in a retention election every eight years. Those justices deemed unfit for retention by both a majority of the American people as a whole and by majorities of the electorates in at least half of the 50 states will be removed from office and disqualified from future service on the Court.
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 You know, it is just astounding how affordable anything can be when your tab is picked up by another American. Barack Hussein Obama and six unelected, black-robed political captives at the Supreme Court have saddled Americans with a third-world health-care system that is quite simply a dead-end street.
Thanks to Obama and the “big six,” millions of more Americans are going to be either dumped into the Medicaid chasm or simply left adrift to flounder in a Medicaid world increasingly eschewed by capable health-care professionals.
Obama brazenly trumpets “affordable care.” When a large percentage of your fellow citizens are given a free ride on your dime, most anything can be affordable. In the case of our growing third-world health-care system, the government picks up the health-care tab for a growing percentage of Americans. This quasi-Marxist scheme is blatant income redistribution.
The government does not have a bank account. In order to pay its ever-mounting obligations, the government must increase the taxes of productive citizens (half of Americans pay no federal income taxes) or borrow the money needed to redistribute. When neither option is available for whatever reason, the central government simply turns to its political cousin, the Fed, which creates all the money that is desired, literally out of thin air (prints more). The Fed is not a government institution. Rather it is a private club designed by domestic and international politicians and bankers to benefit the political elite and the Wall Street charlatans.
Americans should end the Fed, and shut it down for good. The state of Texas, by example, offers a world-class, jobs-creating economy without the need for a Fed. My home state of Florida is a great place for business and jobs without the need for a Fed. Americans have been conned into believing there is a need for an institution created to benefit a select handful of Washington/New York/European insiders.
Today, well over three-hundred million Americans have allowed six unelected lawyers to dictate the future of America’s health-care system. Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Sam Adams, and John Hancock did not intend for the Supreme Court, never mind the executive branch, to have this kind of power. Quality health care is increasingly less available to the majority of Americans thanks to Obamacare. And it is dramatically more expensive for those productive Americans who actually write a check to pay for their health-care coverage.
Obamacare is a fraud that has been perpetrated on the American people and must be repealed by Congress after the 2016 election. Only candidates who run on a “repeal Obamacare” platform in 2016 make sense for America.
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If you get a chance to shoot sporting clays with a Browning over-under shotgun, take-it.
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 The foundation of America’s freedom is the U.S. Constitution, which states that the federal government has only those powers specifically granted to it by the Constitution. All other powers belong either to the states or to the people themselves.
SCOTUS, in its decision to uphold ObamaCare, ignored the actual words of the law—the words written under the guidance of the Obama administration. As Thomas Sowell writes, regardless of whether you favor or oppose ACA, there is reason for legitimate concern. The deeper, long-lasting impact of these decisions on ObamaCare (and same sex marriage) raises the question of whether we the people are to decide what kind of society we want to live in. Do we the people need nine unelected Supreme Court justices to impose their interpretation of the law on us?
Last year’s Supreme Court decision declaring ObamaCare constitutional says the federal government can order individual citizens to buy the kind of insurance the government wants them to buy, regardless of what the citizens themselves prefer.
And now Chief Justice John Roberts, appointed by George W. Bush, gives the federal government the power to order us to buy whatever insurance they want us to buy. With that entering wedge, is there anything they cannot force us to do, regardless of the Constitution?
Are our “public servants” really our public masters? As Mr. Sowell writes, our freedom “is gradually and increasingly being taken away from us with smooth and slippery words.” Read more from Thomas Sowell here.
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 James D. Heiser, bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Diocese of North America, writes on, as Dr. Robert Zubrin (president, Pioneer Astronautics and Pioneer Energy) calls it, “The dangerous dogma of the man who has become Putin’s Rasputin.”
Who was Grigori Rasputin? Born in 1869, Rasputin was a Russian peasant, mystical faith healer, and a trusted friend to Tsar Nicholas II’s family. Rasputin was assassinated.
Mr. Heiser writes about Aleksander Dugin’s aggressive effort to create a Eurasian empire centered on Russia:
From Heiser’s “The American Empire Should Be Destroyed”: Alexander Dugin and the Perils of Immanentized Eschatology
Given the number of times that Dugin’s Eurasianism has been declared a fantasy from the “lunatic fringe” by various experts, one should be very circumspect when it comes to trying to guess how far Putin is prepared to go, when it comes to realizing the Eurasian Union.In a recent article for the Boston Globe, Leon Neyfakh noted that the two countries Putin has so far convinced to join Russia in the Eurasian Union—Belarus and Kazakhstan—were spooked by Putin’s decision to use military force in the situation with Ukraine.
There is a fundamental demonization of the West which haunts Dugin’s thought.
For those individuals who remember the cold war, the “geopolitical face” of Eurasianism is quite familiar because it has a strong family resemblance to the “geopolitical face” of Marxism-Leninism.
Western interpreters of Dugin have often been shocked by the occult character of his view of the world.
The incipient Eurasian Union is a far cry from the force, which was the Soviet Union, and it is no more invincible nor eternal than the denizens of the Kremlin imagined their last ideology would be.
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Pat Buchanan asks, “Are the ten commandments and Christian tradition and Natural Law as defined by Aquinas just fine for their time, but not for ours?”
Pat continues:
If what Justice Kennedy wrote Friday represents moral truth, what can be said in defense of a Christianity that has taught for 2,000 years that homosexual acts are socially destructive and morally decadent behavior?
Three decades ago, this columnist was denounced for writing that homosexuals “have declared war on human nature.
And nature is exacting an awful retribution.” Hateful speech, it was said.
Yet, when I wrote that line, AIDS victims in America numbered in the hundreds. Worldwide today they number in the millions. And there is a pandemic of STDs among America’s young who have joined the sexual revolution preached in the 1960s.
Can true “social progress” produce results like that?
And if it is an enlightened thing for a society to welcome homosexual unions and elevate them to the status of marriage, why have no previous successful societies thought of so brilliant a reform?
The late Roman Empire and Weimar Germany are the two examples of indulgent attitudes toward homosexual conduct that come to mind.
“No-fault” divorce was an early social reform championed by our elites, followed by a celebration of the sexual revolution, the distribution of condoms to the poor and the young, and abortions subsidized by Planned Parenthood when things went wrong.
How has that worked out for America?
Anyone see a connection between these milestones of social progress and the 40 percent illegitimacy rate nationwide, or the 50 percent rate among Hispanic-Americans, or the 72 percent rate among African-Americans?
Any connection between those fatherless boys and the soaring drug use and dropout rates and the near quadrupling of those in jails and prisons over the last third of a century?
One notes a headline the other day, that, among whites in America, deaths now outnumber births. This has been true for decades in Europe, where all the native-born populations are shrinking as the Third World crosses over from the Mahgreb and Middle East.
Any connection between the legalization of abortions — 55 million in the USA since Roe — and the shrinkage of a population?
“God will have the final word in this matter,” says King.
Certainly, in the world to come, He will. Yet, even in this world, it is hard to recall a civilization that rejected its God, repudiated the faith and morality by which it grew great, embraced what was previously regarded as decadence, and survived.
Our utopian president may see ours as an ever “more perfect union.”
Yet, America has never been more disunited and divided — on politics and policy, religion and morality. We no longer even agree on good and evil, right and wrong.
Are we really still “one nation under God, indivisible”?
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