Truth About Guns tells us how California’s AG Harris Effectively Bans All New Semiautomatic Handguns in California:

“California’s Kamala Harris, the best-looking attorney general in the nation, has signed a letter mandating micro stamping technology for all new semiautomatic handguns being sold in the Golden State. [Read the letter here.] Any new model handgun must have a microstamped serial number somewhere on the gun’s frame and a firing pin that stamps a unique number onto the cartridge before (or as) it ignites the primer.”

Nobody does this. If they did, it would make all such firearms too expensive for anybody, including the government.

As Maryland moves to institute restrictive gun laws, Beretta is looking for friendlier pastures. Beretta Announces Plans to Move After Maryland Gov. Signs Bill:

Maryland’s new law will restrict the number of rounds allowed in magazines to 10. While this won’t impact Nano, or Pico production or distribution, the magazine limit will make import, warehouseit difficult to work with the 92, 96, PX4, and the ARX 100. Standard capacity M9 magazines couldn’t be brought into or warehoused in the state. The magazine restriction wouldn’t shut Beretta down, but it would make distribution of the full sized pistols (including the M9) much more complicated.

And the “assault weapon” restrictions will hit the ARX line hard. The ARX 100 would be illegal in Maryland. While that may not hinder production of the 5.56 tactical rifle, Maryland residents (some of whom make the ARX 100) couldn’t own the gun. This doesn’t sit well with Beretta.

If that weren’t enough, the new restrictions on Maryland FFL holders will also apply to Beretta, who holds FFLs in the state. Beretta’s ability to service guns at their Maryland facility (where the also teach armorer classes) would be curtailed.

Come to Tennessee. We’ll welcome you with open arms.

Suit the First: The Georgia town of Nelson, about 50 miles north of Atlanta, recently passed a law requiring citizens to own a gun ownership that it said is mostly symbolic. The law requires every head of household in the town of 1,300 to have a gun and ammunitions. Anyone who opposes gun ownership or has certain disabilities are exempt.

Hoplophobes are, of course, somewhat upset even though people of their ilk would naturally be unaffected by the law:

The Washington-based Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence filed a federal lawsuit against the  claiming the law is unconstitutional. The suit contends the Second Amendment doesn’t require anyone to have a gun, and government cannot require citizens to arm themselves.

Suit the Second: In the wake of shootings in Colorado last year a series of laws were passed that limit the size of ammunition magazines and expand background checks. The laws go into effect 1 July but sheriffs from 54 of Colorado’s 64 counties are filing suit, claiming the regulations are unconstitutional.

The sheriffs say the new state laws violate Second Amendment protections that guarantee the right to keep and bear arms. Opponents are criticizing the lawsuit as political maneuvering.

Weld County Sheriff John Cooke said he and his colleagues were “not the ones playing politics with this.”

“We believe that the Legislature were the ones who were playing politics,” he said.

Gun control opponents say the language in the regulations is unclear and doesn’t provide safeguards to prevent people from inadvertently breaking the laws.

Ammunition magazines, for example, are easily converted to larger sizes, which the bill bans. Gun rights advocates also say the law expanding background checks doesn’t provide enough exemptions for temporary transfers and that people conducting private transactions will have a difficult time getting appropriate checks.

As usual, police chiefs are opposed to the suit, claiming the new laws are “common sense”. As the article states, police chiefs are not elected. The natural conclusion is that the sheriffs represent their constituency. Reminder: the sheriffs are from 54 of Colorado’s 64 counties (84%).

Yes, Internet polls are far from reliable and the majority of Fox News readers are indeed conservative. But it is still telling when Fox News asks Is it time to overhaul the IRS? and 96% of respondents want either a major overhaul of outright abolition of the IRS:

Another poll, although this one is a bit more scientific, comes from Show of Hands, an iOS and Android app that allows anyone to enter demographic information and then vote on a wide variety of issues, most surrounding political and social issues. Nearly half of self-identified Democrats believe that the IRS’ actions in reviewing conservative groups were just mistakes rather than blatantly illegal, politically motivated misuse of power:

Roger Simon of Pajamas Media has another response to David Sirota’s idiotic article fervent desire that the Boston Bombers turn out to be white Americans:

Over the last few days I have wanted to write about an article published by David Sirota on Salon, which was commented on admirably by my colleagues Roger Kimball and Richard Fernandez. Sirota wrote to express his hope that the Boston Bombers would be white Americans, because otherwise our putative race-hatred of Muslims or people of color of any sort would be enhanced. It’s all about “white skin privilege,” doncha know?

Today Sirota seems like an imbecile (well, he did before), but I would venture to say he doesn’t know why. So I will spell it out for him:  the War on Terror (euphemism alert) is not about skin color. It is about ideology, Islamic ideology.

Be sure to click through and read Kimball’s and Fernandez’s most excellent responses as well.

CIA operators were denied request for help during Benghazi attack, sources say

Fox News has learned from sources who were on the ground in Benghazi that an urgent request from the CIA annex for military back-up during the attack on the U.S. consulate and subsequent attack several hours later on the annex itself was denied by the CIA chain of command — who also told the CIA operators twice to “stand down” rather than help the ambassador’s team when shots were heard at approximately 9:40 p.m. in Benghazi on Sept. 11

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/10/26/cia-operators-were-denied-request-for-help-during-benghazi-attack-sources-say/#ixzz2Qufe6MJE

Keep peeling the onion and impeach somebody.

UK Daily Mail:

Is Obama’s brother a wife beater? President’s sibling is accused of attacking two of his TWELVE wives and seducing a schoolgirl. Now he’s using his White House links to launch his own bid for power

• President Obama’s half-brother accused of being wife beater
• Roy Abong’o Malik Obama standing for election in Kenya
• Dismisses wife-beating allegations as being ‘a matter of interpretation’

There has been an incessant influx of emails and internet rumors concerning a new “hidden tax” to fund ObamaCare, seemingly kicked off by posts that feature receipts from Cabela’s that show a Medical Excise Tax being applied to sporting equipment:

The authors of these emails and posts often gleefully point out that the administration is levying hidden taxes on our sporting equipment in an effort to get middle America to fund his wrong-headed policies. These are a mixture of truth and fiction, the latter caused by a computer mistake and possibly a lack of due diligence in reviewing confusing IRS publications.

There is indeed an excise tax imposed by ObamaCare, aka ACA (Affordable Care Act), but meant only for a "medical device" which is intended for use by medical professionals. The tax is imposed at the point that a manufacturer (or importer) sells the medical device to the buyer, which is (of course) subsequently passed on the the consumer (or patient) in the form of higher prices.

The definition of a "taxable medical device" is laid out rather confusingly in section 48.4191-2 of an IRS publication that attempts to clarify the final regulations , but it is basically any device that is, or should have been, "listed as a device with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under section 510(j) of   the FFDCA and 21 CFR part 807, pursuant to FDA requirements."

Clear? I didn’t think so.

To try and clarify things, the publication explicitly says that eyeglasses, contact lenses and hearing aids are not subject to the tax, or indeed any device generally available to the public through retail outlets. Further, it offers up a plethora of examples which try to show how the determination of taxable vs. non-taxable is made, through which we learn that denture adhesive and oxygen concentrators are not taxable, while portable x-ray machines and nonabsorbable silk sutures are (big surprise there, huh?).

So obviously, fishing poles and the like do are not subject to the ObamaCare excise tax that is adding to the already burdensome cost of medical care in this country. But it is easy to see why the internet lit up with false rumors otherwise.

The main source are numerous posts displaying a Cabela’s receipt such as the one shown above. While these receipts are real, they were a temporary phenomena caused by a computer glitch that has since been corrected.

The other source of confusion is the fact that the ObamaCare taxes are reported on form 720, which lists all excise taxes, including fishing poles and the like. So rather than assuming malicious intent on the part of the author of said emails and posts, it may be a lack of diligent review that contributed to this internet myth.

But let us return for a moment to the subject of excise taxes in general.

Excise taxes are intended to excise (i.e., control or hopefully eliminate) certain behaviors by levying punitive taxes such as drinking (UK) and prostitution (Canada). Wikipedia explains:

Excise duties or taxes often serve political as well as financial ends. Public safety and health, public morals, environmental protection, and national defense are all rationales for the imposition of an excise.

• Public safety and health –
  • deter individuals from harming their health by abusing substances such as tobacco and alcohol, thus making excise a kind of sumptuary tax, or
  • deter them from engaging in morally objectionable activities such as gambling and prostitution (see below) (including solicitation and pimping) – thus making it a type of vice tax or sin tax
• Environmental protection –
  • deter individuals or organizations from harming the general environment, including curbing activities which contribute to pollution, or which harm the natural environment.
• Defense - including taxation directly levied on other countries’ militaries and/or governments, such as the UK’s taxation on "visiting forces"
• Punitive – Many US states taxes on drugs, as well as the UK government impose excise on money laundering and on "visiting forces" (i.e., occupying military forces). These taxes are not considered revenue sources, but rather exist to allow governments greater leverage for punishments and reparations/war reparations – based mainly around tax evasion – which can be imposed in the event that the perpetrator is caught and tried.

As Samuel Johnson so eloquently put it, an excise tax is "A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid."

Smart guy, that Mr. Johnson.

So what behaviors are imposed in the US of A, land of the free? According to Chapter 24 of the IRS publication Internal Revenue Manual these are:

These are the activities in our society that the government has deemed important enough to warrant additional scrutiny, the items that Uncle Sam wants to opportunistically profit from (like telephone tax or ship passenger tax), use to subsidize public service (like taxing heavy haulers and tires to help fund highways), or punish behavior (like wagering, buying "gas guzzlers" and indoor tanning).

Thus the excise tax on sporting equipment is rationalized by setting it aside to fund bureaucratic oversight of our park system and has been in existence for quite a few years — at least back to 1983. There is, however, some evidence that a portion of this particular tax has been used effectively, at least according to one study.

But what I don’t get is why the ObamaCare excise tax on medical devices aren’t set aside for an ObamaCare fund instead of being put in general population with the rest of the tax dollars stolen from the pockets of hard working Americans. After all, that would make it easy to track and report on the efficacy of the new tax and make it obvious when ObamaCare costs far outpaced the taxes collected.

Oh wait. I see. Never mind.

Policy adviser Paul Driessen warns that not only will carbon taxes hurt job and economic growth, but will not result in raising much in the way of tax revenues.

Average planetary temperatures haven’t budged in 16 years. Hurricanes and strong tornadoes are at or near their lowest ebb in decades. Global sea ice is back to normal, Arctic ice is nearly normal, and the Antarctic icepack continues to grow. The rate of sea level rise remains what it was in 1900. …

As the liberal lobby Think Progress put it, people “overwhelmingly” prefer a carbon tax on “big polluters” versus cuts in favorite programs “like education, Social Security, Medicare and environmental protection.” …

Employing Energy Information Administration data, a recent Heritage Foundation study by economists David Kreutzer and Nicolas Loris found that a tax starting at $25-per-ton of CO2 emitted and increasing by 5% per year would cut a family of four’s income by $1,400 annually, raise their utility bills by $500 a year, and increase gasoline fill-ups by up to 50 cents per gallon. …

Hydrocarbons provide over 83% of all the energy that powers America. A carbon tax would put a hefty surcharge on everything we make, grow, ship, eat and do. It would put the federal government in control of, not just one-sixth of our economy as under Obamacare, but 100% of our economy and lives. It would make the United States increasingly less productive, less competitive globally, less able to provide opportunities for our children.

But it gets worse, because this tax on America’s energy and productivity is not being promoted in a vacuum. It would be imposed on top of countless other job and economy strangling actions.

Exactly.