Reminder: Another zealot waiting in ATF wings
Thanks to vigilant pressure from 2nd amendment bloggers and House GOP Oversight and Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa, the White House is set to throw acting ATF director Kenneth Melson under the bus over the Project Gunrunner/ Fast and Furious scandal (all background links below). Internal documents released this week show he was intimately involved in overseeing the program and screened undercover vid of thousands of straw purchases of AK-47s and other high-powered rifles — some of which ended up in the hands of Mexican drug cartel thugs, including those who murdered Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.
Getting rid of Melson is a start — but this one move alone ain’t gonna cure ATF’s problems. It’s going to take a bigger bus. Corruptocrat AG Eric Holder knew about the program much earlier than he testified to, Rep. Issa says, and he has been an obstruction to the Gunrunner probe since day one.
And then there’s the man waiting in the wings to replace Melson — either as acting director or as permanent director. He’s Chicago anti-gun radical Andrew Traver and he’s scheduled to meet with Holder and DOJ today.
I told you all about Traver in April when only a few were paying attention and I’m reprinting my column in full to bring you back up to speed. See also David Codrea’s FOIA on Gunrunner from April for Traver’s fingerprints.
***
Stop ATF’s anti-gun zealots
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright [April 1,] 2011
For 30 years, Chicago banned handguns. The crime rate skyrocketed. Murders soared. Gangs blossomed. Desperate city officials even considered calling the National Guard to combat the out-of-control violence that all the “community organizing” in the world couldn’t curb. The Supreme Court struck down Chicago’s individual firearms ownership prohibition last year, but the same anti-gun zealots who put Windy City citizens’ lives at risk remain in power.
And now one of them may soon be in charge of the scandal-plagued Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Meet Andrew Traver. He’s President Obama’s nominee to head ATF. The Senate Judiciary Committee refused to act on the original nomination last fall. His name was sent up again earlier this year, and a hearing has yet to be scheduled. Obama’s czar-happy habits should be a red flag on a possible recess appointment.
Traver has spent two decades in the Chicago ATF office bureaucracy. The White House touts his record as a Navy vet and crime-fighter. But it’s his anti-gun advocacy that won him Chicago crony backing in the Beltway. Liberal Republican Sen. Mark Kirk and rabid leftist Sen. Dick Durbin both support their home state bureaucrat. Grassroots Second Amendment groups across the country (not to mention rank-and-file ATF agents) have raised their voices in opposition.
Traver allied with the progressive Joyce Foundation to lobby for tighter federal restrictions of Second Amendment freedoms. He supports curtailing access to ATF databases and opposes privacy protections for gun-owners. He has also compared automatic black-market weapons to legal semi-automatic assault weapons.
As the National Rifle Association points out, Traver misled the public in a fear-mongering appearance on a Chicago NBC affiliate TV news show. In the interview, he hyped “the growing frequency of gang members and drug dealers using heavy caliber military-type weapons” and described them as if they were machine guns: “Pull the trigger and you can mow people down.” Traver and his agents “provided the reporter with a fully automatic AK-47, with which she was unable to hit the target,” the NRA reported. “He then said that stray bullets are ‘one of the main problems with having stuff like this available to the gangs.’”
Except for the fact, contradicting the implication of the NBC scare story and Traver’s rhetoric, that fully automatic firearms are not available for sale through normal retail outlets. But the truth wouldn’t have made for a story as sensationalized and swaggering as the one Traver helped concoct.
Instead of focusing on criminals, the bureaucracy-expanding ATF suits and their left-leaning, anti-gun benefactors target law-abiding gun dealers and shop owners. Far easier to shoot fish in a barrel than reptiles slithering in the dark.
Second Amendment activist Mike Vanderboegh, who helped expose the ATF’s emerging Project Gunrunner scandal (in which botched sting operations have allowed straw purchasers monitored by the feds to walk untold thousands of guns across the southern border), says Traver is known to be a “managerial bad apple in ATF circles.” He rose through the agency hierarchy, “all the while making friends of notorious Illinois anti-firearm rights politicians of both parties. He has had personal friendly contact with Barack Obama and Hizzoner, the King of Chicago Richard Daley. He has worked with the virulently anti-firearm Joyce Foundation … putting his efforts and his name to a report which calls for more firearm bans and regulations that amount to the gutting of the Second Amendment.”
NRA’s Chris Cox summed up the nomination bluntly: “You might as well put an arsonist in charge of the fire department.”
Traver’s pending nomination hearing comes as Republican watchdogs Sen. Charles Grassley and Rep. Darrell Issa turn up the heat on the Obama administration’s stonewallers over Project Gunrunner. The State Department, Justice Department and ATF have failed to produce documents in a timely manner on a bloody initiative that has been tied to the deaths of at least two American law enforcement officials. Traver would be another go-along, get-along Chicago cog in the machine. Americans need someone who’ll strip the whitewash, not second-coat it.
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Previous:
June 15 Document drop: More Project Gunrunner fit hits the shan
March 30 Project Gunrunner: Obama’s Stimulus-Funded Border Nightmare
April 1 Stop ATF’s anti-gun zealots
April 1 Project Gunrunner update: Issa subpoenas the stonewallers
April 19 Project Gunrunner update: ATF ignored warnings, DOJ ignores document requests
April 20 Project Gunrunner document drop: Issa blasts DOJ stonewalling, threatens contempt proceedings
May 4 Project Gunrunner update: The fit hits the shan
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spaceycakes said:
I wish I’d seen that! I recall a lot of these celeb/wannabes pulling the old “there’s a fly in my soup” routine. Just claim there’s ‘mold’ in your NY apt. Everyone’s doing it!
They don’t feel they should have to pay for anything and Newt has been chummy w/ that crowd for way too long.
In the past I would’ve said Coach, but they’re all made in China. I will not pay $500 for a bag made in China. I have an old Coach bag, but it is all leather and old enough to be made in the USA. It will probably last me forever. Hermes is waaaaay overrated.
For big, sturdy and stylish, I’d say Tod’s, Bottega Veneta and Furla. Furla is the cheapest at about $300 and up, and Bottega Veneta at the other end at about $1400 or so. It all boils down to taste. I love Tod’s handbags.
and now that I’ve answered (completely without guile), I’ll bet you’re laughing your arse off
Practice your reloading and make them take it from you.
Special Prosecutor? Hopefully but I am hoping for Citizens Firing Squads. They murder our people and Mexicans with reckless abandon with nary a thought to the consequences.When you have the Director of the FBI and Attorney General testify before Congress that the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team can’t tell the difference between a women holding a baby and a man with a gun you have all the proof you need that they hold us in utter contempt and are willing to kill ANYONE anytime it suits them.
===
The Right to Keep and Bear Arms–>Constitutional Carry
It is a RIGHT-not a license from “our betters”.
My ultra liberal cousin says she thinks Huntsman is great. What does that tell you??
R I N O
Okay, spacey. I own several Coach bags but no longer buy anything made in China. I bought an Adrienne Vitadini bag once for $250 and almost had a stroke. I’m sticking with my Van Eli ($150) heels ‘cuz I’m gonna let my .9mm do all the impressing. In order to take your suggestions, I’m gonna need another 2 jobs – heh! Ms. Happyscrapper – you got any good deals on skillets?
We all have our crossed-eye bears don’t we
One niece WAS rather pleased with herself in voting for O’Bambi, she was quite superior to we narrow minded folk. Now that the local utility is closing the coal fired plant her husband will lose his job and the housing prices in that town really bottomed out. She is whining in the typical of liberal hypocrisy-as Ole Blue Lips w/ears done said “Obama Says He Will “Bankrupt” Coal-Fired Plants“. Now the poor girl has to move back to hate filled narrow minded Arizona; her hate filled narrow minded sister is the only one willing to put up with her. (ain’t it wonderful?)
Our utility rates will rise 9% to pay for “cheap, efficient, renewable and clean Green energy”. How we will miss King Coal. Yes indeed we all have our crossed-eye bears.
Hearing you, Arizona @106….same problem where I am, too! And the libs who voted for Obama whine on the one hand about having to pay higher (much higher) utility costs while supporting him on the other side of their tiny brains. Grrrrr
PROGRESSIVE IDIOTS!!!
Who here among us hasn’t laughed their ass off over the sheer stupidity of the idea that Billion Dollar Criminal Drug Cartels are reduced to buying guns from American gun stores????
Billion Dollar Criminal Drug Cartels can go anywhere in the world, buy anything they want to on the weapons black market for pity’s sake. South and Central America are awash in weapons of every stripe and kind. The Cartels are getting product from the Taliban and have access to every continent on earth and with Mexico’s 6,000 miles of virtually unpatrolled coastline, a customs inspection process as full of holes as a colander and Customs Officials as easy to buy as Democratic lobbyists (or, NBC editors) … I’m surprised the cartels don’t have Russian tanks and Chinese Silkworms ,,, and who’s to say they don’t???
Good God these Progressive dipsticks must live in a Hollywood Fantasy Land of myth and meme to not know how unbelievably stupid and OBVIOUS this idiotic gamble was!
God, save us from these monkeys with hand grenades called policymakers.
I have posted it before, and many of you agree with me:
THEY ARE COMING FOR OUR GUNS. AN UNARMED COUNTRY IS EASIER TO CONTROL.
It doesn’t matter what the Constitution says.
It doesn’t matter what Congress says.
it doesn’t matter what the Supreme court says.
It SPECIALLY doesn’t matter what WE THE PEOPLE say.
Obamao and his band of zealots will not stop until we’re under their thumbs. No matter what, it must happen. Pray that this bunch doesn’t get reelected in 2012, because we’ll be in a world of hurt.
No foreign handbags! Coach, Cole Hann, Brighton, etc. loaded and studded preferably. But Firstskirt, as much as I love my Van Eli’s too, face it, it’s just an attractive line of comfort shoes. Not suitable for battles of this sort.
If there actually is an election 2012 and they don’t win, they will be screaming GOP “voter fraud” with help from their fellow travellers in media (a few are already hinting at that possibility)and ACLU lawyers and union thugs sweeping down on election sites nationwide forcing the counting and recounting ballots until they do win.
Giving arms to insurrectionists in a neighboring country is an act of war.
Giving arms to those who will wage war against our own citizens is also an act of war, as well as treason as you pointed out.
Zero is the only US President to wage war against us. Your suggested penalty is appropriate for him as well.
BTW: If Mexico doesn’t start accusing us of an act of war real soon and real loud, then they were in on it too.
Actually, the Federalists didn’t think the Constitution needed enumerated rights in it, as the central government could only do what it said they could, and ALL other rights were reserved to the people and the States. It was the Anti-Federalists that insisted on a Bill of Rights, and they were promised one, but it didn’t happen until about ten years after the Constitution was ratified. George Mason was key in agitating until it was done.
It was never meant to represent all rights, but it was the modest safeguard the Anti-Federalists demanded due to their fears of an all-powerful central government. Where would we be now if they hadn’t foreseen the grasping boy-kings to come?
Suck-ups suck!
Most liberals aren’t evil, but the liberal-ism that infects them and harms all of us, is evil.
Don’t forget the assault skillets. You know, those with special grips and can fire 30 pancakes a minute.
Along with your guidelines, we would be lucky to end up with light teflon coated pewter skillets or tinfoil.
Heavier caliber skillets are just too scary for them to be in public hands.
Uh, I thought I read yesterday where Mexico was filing lawsuits against gun stores over the F&F fiasco.
Well there you go! They were planning to respond to the “discovery” as a fault of the gun stores, further legitimizing Zero’s Hitlerian gun-snatching plans. This breaking story should have them screaming to the UN and such, but they aren’t outraged ‘cuz they knew what their part in this charade was supposed to be.
Coordination like that goes way beyond Holder, I’m thinking State Department and this criminal Administration.
Nixon was a schoolboy next to these Commie B*st*rds.
Recovery Act money allowed for 2 agents to be placed in 2 consulates down in Mexico.
From the ATF website:
It would be interesting to know what discussions these agents had with their Mexican counterparts.
When does the CONgresional investigation actually lead up to HOLDER?
OOPPPS, That would require BALLS!!