Hi folks!
You may have seen Ken Vogel's Politico articledescribing Obama's involvement with the Joyce Foundation where he was on the board from 1994 to 2002. This came up on a lucid MyDD Diary discussion tonight (no, just kidding, it was a Finger-gate Rantfest), and I wrote the following commentary that I felt needed to be posted here.
Partly because I did some actual research and math that folks might find useful, but mostly because it is just yet another farcicle issue that's fun to lampoon, the Lampoon Tent opens below...
OH NO! A Dem on the Board of a Fund that supports other groups that support talking about ways to control handguns!!!!!!!
Next thing I'll hear is that there's a Republican who supports groups that support discussing limiting Abortion!
Oh the Horror of it!
Mission Statement
The Joyce Foundation supports efforts to protect the natural environment of the Great Lakes, to reduce poverty and violence in the region, and to ensure that its people have access to good schools, decent jobs, and a diverse and thriving culture. We are especially interested in improving public policies, because public systems such as education and welfare directly affect the lives of so many people, and because public policies help shape private sector decisions about jobs, the environment, and the health of our communities. To ensure that public policies truly reflect public rather than private interests, we support efforts to reform the system of financing election campaigns.
Yep, crazy foundation for a Dem to be on the board of!
Improving Firearms Policy
The Foundation believes that better public policies can help reduce gun violence. It supports the efforts of law enforcement officials, legislators, municipal leaders, the medical and public health communities, advocacy groups, and others in pushing for measures to stop gun trafficking, keep guns out of the hands of criminals, prevent children from getting access to firearms, and other measures that offer promise of combating gun violence.
Sounds radical!
Alberding said Sugarmann's group is "the only organization that we fund that explicitly has that goal" of a national handgun ban. The foundation's cash can't be used to lobby, she pointed out. And she stressed that when Obama was on the board, the focus of the foundation's gun violence program was almost exclusively on studying the issue from a public health perspective.
Not only that, but 1.23% of the grants allocated went to folks advocating - among other things - the discussion of banning HANDGUNS! The sheer unmitigated madness!
Of that overwhelming number, 0.038% of the funds went to "a symposium on the theory that the Second Amendment does not protect an individual's right to bear arms, but rather only a state's right to arm its militia." A symposium! They were TALKING at that thing! What was he thinking?!?
Seems like the most of the 1.23% of the funding went to a group ominously called the "Violence Policy Center"
...primarily for efforts to study the public health effects of gun violence.
That appears to be the purpose of a majority of the 83 gun-violence grants...
And of the wildly unDemocratic VPC's 105 listed publications, 0.009% of the funding supported the publication of one book putting forth the argument for banning handguns (whose author "disagree[s] with Obama's interpretation of the Second Amendment" - but you know that's a smokescreen), and 0.0045% of the funding went "to support a student grass-roots gun violence prevention campaign." - but, get this, the student group advocates a handgun ban!
And, Obama at one time supported a limit of buying only "one handgun a month" - which barely satisfies my personal needs, I can tell you that.
And you just know that the 81% of funding that went to groups studying the environment, education, employment, money and politics and culture is just another false front erected by the Obama campaign!
But, what's this? A crack in Obama's un-Democratic anti-handgun stance?
"Obama supported a 2002 amendment to bar the use of federal homeland security funds to seize firearms during states of emergency", while Senator Clinton opposed barring the use of DHS funds to seize guns.
Whew! At least one candidate is sticking to the Democratic Party's support of guns!
He may as well quit the race, this guy is a goner! No Democrat will ever vote for him (I, myself am now voting for my cat, who just told me he's Ben Franklin's ghost)!
-thanks!
-chris
PS, did I mention that he is a black crypto-muslim antiamerican secret society communist manchurian candidate funded by the Illuminati, and actually a thousand year old tibetan monk presevered in formaldehyde and operated with strings?