…and more Americans started packing heat:

Last fall, I wrote about a surprising trend: gun sales have skyrocketed since Barack Obama became president. During that time, the stock of gunmaker Sturm Ruger (RGR) has outperformed gold. Analysts aren’t quite sure what’s causing the trend…

Probably just an outbreak of clingy bitterness.
Read Joshua Green’s “Barack Obama, ‘Greatest Gun Salesman in America'” here.

“Now, let me tell you a bit about your shitty new country…”
February 13 was the official launch of “People’s Citizenship Guide: a response to conservative canada.” Written by a group of progressive scholars with the intention of providing a “more honest alternative” to the official citizenship Guide, the People’s Citizenship Guide encourage new immigrants to join the ranks of the leftist grievance-mongers:

“The Canadian economy forms part of an unequal global economic system, a system which, shape by the legacies of colonialism, continues to privilege industrialized nations over those of the global south.”

Sun TV host Brian Lilley and guest John Robson spotlighted several other notable passages from The People’s Citizenship Guide on yesterday’s edition of The Byline:

“Canada has a long history of repression, exclusion, and exploitation.”

The unjust “exclusion” continues to this day:

“You must apply to become a Canadian “citizen” to vote in any election in Canada. This means waiting several years after arriving in Canada to become eligible, paying a significant application fee per person, passing a written exam in French or English, and swearing allegiance – perhaps in front of a military official – to the British Queen, who leads a Christian church. For many people, this process is a barrier to exercising their democratic rights.”

(emph. mine)

During the Occupy Toronto movement, I met with a lot of young adults, who did not meet the typical stereotype of the left-leaning protester. Many told stories of having always followed the best advice of people they trusted — parents, teachers, guidance counsellors — only to find themselves overeducated, underexperienced, with no job prospects and mounting bills. They felt betrayed, and that was driving their anger.

Pity …

… “progressives” don’t have to travel abroad to feel smug:

She did not look at, nor speak to the other boys and the game went on for at least half an hour. She’d chat with her girl friends … then head to her brother’s table … after she left, he’d chat to his friends about what she had just said. It appeared as if she were taking verbal messages back and forth between the two groups …

Fred L. Smith on the anti-business policy agenda of the left:

Ignored (in the storm about the Heartland documents), however, (is) a larger and even more serious issue – the growing effort to drive the market (and market-friendly voices) from the marketplace of ideas. The left has found that their statist alliances – trial lawyers and environmentalists, unionists and consumer groups – have been powerful in advancing their agenda. They’re not eager to see economic liberals do the same.
Note their systematic ideological-cleansing program: no one with any business links serving on a government policy advisory group; no one with a business background to serving in government; pejorative labeling in academic journals of any business-funded research; banning academics funding by business; passing stockholder resolutions against companies assisting pro-market policy allies..
If these efforts succeed, then the only legitimate voices in the policy debates will be crony capitalists and statist intellectuals. A serious threat and one that the Heartland incident should alert us to.

h/t

In a column at Time Magazine’s website, college administrator and early childhood educator Erika Christakis argues that Christians who oppose the Obama administration’s decision to force them to pay for abortifacients are imposing their will on everybody else:

“Let’s see what our society would look like if we all had the luxury of imposing our unfettered will.”

This vaguely dystopian inversion of the truth – that it is progressive, secular champions of central-planning such as herself, and not Christians, who are imposing their “unfettered will” – informs her entire column. Her will, she will have you understand, isn’t unfettered or selfish, but an expression of rights: those who don’t want to pay for other people’s abortifacients, she says, are “unwilling to concede that the exercise of their deeply held convictions might infringe on the rights of millions of people who are burdened by unplanned pregnancy.”
You read that right: being disinclined to pay for the nominal – and presumably infrequent – expense of your neighbour’s abortifacients is an infringement upon your neighbour’s rights.
As for those recalcitrant Christians who are just too thick to understand that the beliefs of the proponents of big-state, enforced-secular leftism trump their own deeply-held spiritual belief that abortion is murder,

“At a minimum, the Catholic bishops and employers resisting contraceptive coverage should be willing to pay for the care of all those unwanted children. Or perhaps they’d be willing to spend some time in jail in protest. At my taxpaying expense, of course…”

“Luxury of imposing their unfettered will” indeed.