With Democrats having routed Republicans since the general election, they're in a strong position to further progressive regulations. That means more rules for you and me--not necessarily them. Since I don't have the time to catalog each example of liberal hypocrisy in a separate article, I'll briefly summarize some rather amazing recent examples.

·         Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, on a one-man crusade for gun control since the Sandy Hook massacre, is just fine being surrounded by men with guns. He's just not OK with you having any. Conservative activist Jason Mattera confronted Bloomberg and his security detail  and asked, "In the spirit of gun control, will you disarm your entire security team?" Bloomberg said he'll get back to him. Means no. Apparently it's fine for he and his family to be protected with guns, but not the little people.

·         The Daily Caller reported that liberal hatchet website Media Matters apparently purchased "multiple firearms used to protect the Media Matters founder." That man, David Brock, reportedly gave his blessing to the purchase, and one of his staff "committed numerous felonies in the District of Columbia and around the country by carrying a firearm ." The Daily Caller obtained an internal email exchange that revealed "the gun was purchased with cash in Maryland, likely to diminish the chances such a purchase would appear on the tax-exempt group's books." Brock, who has a history of mental issues, said he feared "right-wing assassins" and rooftop snipers,

·         Speaking of mental health and gun control, in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre Michael Moore tweeted, "The way to honor these dead children is to demand strict gun control, free mental health care, and an end to violence as public policy." Like Bloomberg, Moore, who directed the anti-gun Bowling for Columbine, just doesn't think gun control should hamper HIS lifestyle. His bodyguard was arrested for carrying an unlicensed weapon in New York.

·         Liberal author Stephen King wrote that he wished NRA leaders "would be required to put on booties and rubber gloves and help clean up the blood, the brains, and the chunks of the intestine still containing the poor wads of half-digested food that were some innocent bystander's last meal." King has made millions through the sale of violent books. One book that didn't sell well had a character that brought a gun to school and shoot his Algebra teacher.

·         David Gregory, host of NBC's Meet the Press, displayed an illegal high-capacity magazine on the show while advocating for stricter gun control. The Metropolitan Police Department even warned the network beforehand that displaying it would violate D.C. law. However, prosecutors declined to pursue charges against Gregory. To summarize, Gregory wants even more gun laws, blatantly violated one that existed, and skated. Liberals don't like it when their draconian laws apply to them.

·         In "an estate-planning move worth of a Jedi Master," liberal filmmaker George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to Disney for $4.05 billion--six weeks before higher taxes took effect that would have cost him hundreds of millions.

·         Al Gore, the face of global warming hysteria, made $100 million in petro-dollars from the sale of his CurrentTV network to Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera is closely associated with the government of Qatar, which makes money almost exclusively from the sale of oil. Gore reportedly tried to sell the network before taxes increased at the beginning of 2013.

·         Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, who got his start in politics as a "corruption-fighting mayor" in New Jersey, is being investigated for allegedly flying on a donor's plan to the Dominican Republic and having sex with underage prostitutes there.

That's enough for now. Hypocrisy isn't limited to just Democrats. Republicans do it too, but generally they are not the ones asking for more laws to be created (at least not the real Republicans, anyway) only to try to get around them.

Common sense is the first casualty in the new battle over guns

Since the most recent iteration of the gun control debate stems from the massacre of two dozen schoolchildren at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, it's an understandably emotional issue. Like all Americans, I was horrified at what happened--maybe more than some as I am the father of two young children. However, it is our responsibility as adults to check our emotions when discussing important issues so that we might hand off a better country to the next generation and resist the cynical attempts by politicians to use the children's deaths to jump start an ideological agenda.

Since the murders were committed with a gun, the knee-jerk reaction of those who take the intellectual path of least resistance is to "do something" like "ban guns" or "increase gun regulations."  Certainly, it's harder for those individuals to connect school shootings to abstract concepts like the breakdown of the family unit.

The Star is to be commended for opening a discussion on causes of violence instead of simply focusing on tools used to commit violence. Unfortunately, even though the original work cites some pretty good arguments from two local gun dealers, three of the best arguments against further gun regulations are missing, which are:

1. It's in the Constitution

The best argument for guns is the least persuasive to progressives and the low-information voter. The 2^nd Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms, and the Supreme Court affirmed it as an individual right. The purpose of the guarantee is not to hunt or for sport, but to give the citizen a last line of defense against a tyrannical government. Our Founding Fathers had just thrown off an oppressor, and they feared the government they created would grow to oppress future generations. By arming the public, they tipped the scales of power into the individual's hands. Every attempt to erode it since has put each of us at the mercy of an all-powerful government. A cursory knowledge of history reveals what happens when citizens are disarmed, knowledge the low-information does not possess. To the progressive ideologue, the Constitution is not something to be consulted, it's something to be sidestepped. And so, the best argument for guns will go unheeded.

2. Gun laws only serve to disarm those who obey the law

Here's where common sense plays a role in the gun debate. As common sense isn't common, Criminals do not obey laws, by definition. By definition, law abiding people do. Therefore, laws regulating guns will disarm those that obey laws and put them at the mercy of those who do not. In other words, power shifts away from good people and ends up in the hands of bad people. Ironically, people that decry strict drug laws as advocate for strict gun laws, despite the failure of both.

Perhaps if the manufacture of all guns is prohibited, not even criminals can find guns. Two seconds of thought reveal that laws passed in the United States only affect the United States, so any other country could fill the criminal demand for guns on the black market--just as they do for drugs, which are available just about everywhere.

Finally, there are already laws against many types of guns used in crimes. It is against the law to murder, against the law to steal guns, against the law for certain people on probation to handle guns, and so forth. Yet violence occurs every day.  If laws against murder are ignored, why would any clear-thinking person think the solution lies with more laws?

3. Guns provide for self-defense

As good as our local police departments are, they are primarily a reactive force. Their job is to show up after a crime has occurred to draw chalk outlines around the victims. No response time is good enough to protect a family whose house is broken into in a home-invasion robbery. Citizens must be afforded a right to use deadly force to protect themselves. That means rifles, handguns, and shotguns. Even limitations on magazine capacities can put people's lives in danger. Criminals seem to have no problem getting banana clips for their AK's , but I can't have more than 10 shots in my gun? What if 3 or 4 people break into my house and I miss a couples times? I'm dead.

Conclusion

Progressives and low-information voters seem to both believe that power is best left in the hands of experts, the elite, and authorities. Low information-voters want to defer the hard choices to someone else, and progressive ideologues want to be that someone.

An underpinning of both their belief systems is that centralized power can be used not just to minimize violence--but to prevent it.  In that futile pursuit to change what cannot be changed--human nature--half the country is willing to cede power to an increasingly scary government. 

While reading coverage of the drama surrounding the so-called Fiscal Cliff, I kept coming across references to the Tax Policy Center as an impartial expert--further obscuring the real purpose of the center, which is to advance left-wing economic policies, while enhancing its credibility.

·         Bloomberg: "The budget deal passed by the U.S. Senate today would raise taxes on 77.1 percent of U.S. households, mostly because of the expiration of a payroll tax cut, according to preliminary estimates from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington."

·         Washington Post: The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has just completed a new analysis of John Boehner's "plan B" fiscal proposal, which would raise taxes only on income over $1 million. The analysis makes it pretty clear just how ludicrous it is for House Republicans to be expecting Obama to agree to it."

·         FactCheck.org:  "The scheduled tax increases, if allowed to take effect, would net an additional $536 billion in fiscal year 2013, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, raising more than $5 trillion in 10 years."

It's pretty funny that a fact check group that is itself biased uses as an official source that is also biased. It gets even better when the liberal mainstream media quotes the liberal fact-check group that cites the liberal think tank, while each group fiercely claims to be nonpartisan. It's liberal lying on an Inception scale.

Lying is too strong of a word, though. Technically, the Tax Policy Center is nonpartisan--but only in the sense that they support an ideology instead of party. They are progressives and not necessarily Democrats. All their "research" supports left-wing economics, even when they criticize today's elimination of the payroll tax cut. They oppose that only because it's a regressive tax.

Without going through all of their publications independently, I'll just stop at this. If a conservative think tank like the Heritage Foundation subdivided into the "Tax Policy Group", you can bet the media wouldn't label it "nonpartisan." So when the liberal Brookings Institute and the liberal Urban Institute form the Tax Policy Center, I'd expect the same treatment, if I didn't know any better.