Fun with Firefox

I'm trying out a new extension for blogging. I was using Blog This!, but there isn't a version for Firefox 2.0 just yet. This was posted using Deepest Sender. Thus far, it looks like it has all of the features I like to see.

We'll see what happens when I hit the "Post" button!

...OK, that wasn't so smooth, but it's not the developer's fault. The nice people at Blogger are doing their part to fight spam blogs. No one wants spam blogs, so this is okey-dokey by me!

About last night...

I wrote this late last night (or early this morning!) on FR...

I said on several threads before Tuesday that poll numbers suggested that the Dems were screwed. Their margin in the generic polls wasn't great enough, I thought, to give them control of either house. However, I'm standing by my assessment: They're screwed.

Early polls (August/September) hinted at a bloodbath this year. That didn't happen. The Dems control Congress by the skin of their teeth. (And as I write this, the Senate is iffy.) This is actually worse for them than falling short. Their far-left, base supporters are going to be claiming responsibility for the Dems' win and they are going to expect results for their effort. This trap of high expectations is going to be their undoing.

The first, second, and third items on the Moonbat agenda are impeachment, impeachment, and impeachment. This is something that Reid and Pelosi cannot deliver and cannot afford not to deliver. They face the same dilemma with the next agenda item: halting the War on Islamofascism.

The Democrat majority in both houses is not monolithic. There are a number of Blue Dogs in both houses and there's no guarantee that they'll go along with a Moonbat temper tantrum. A drive for articles of impeachment will look to the American People like a childish outburst. The Blue Dogs know this and won't want to get caught up in the backlash that's sure to follow. It cost us in the '90s and it will cost them now.

Pelosi's problem is how to find a way to persuade her most extreme supporters that impeachment is a bad idea. They are utterly convinced that the entire country thinks and feels just like they do. Any attempt to avoid impeachment will be seen as treasonous by them. I don't think that Pelosi can dodge this one. Either she pisses off her base, and this is a deal breaker with them, or she chases the Blue Dogs into George Bush's waiting arms.

The Blue Dogs also support the war effort. One member of the Democrat caucus in particular, while he may not qualify as a Blue Dog, certainly has an azure tinge and bruising around his throat: Joe Lieberman. Joe will probably view is re-election as a referendum on the war; and rightly so since his Democrat opponent made this the centerpiece of his campaign. The Moonbats also saw Joe's defeat in the primary as a sign of their own greatness. Seeing him in the Senate will piss them off; seeing him nixing any effort to halt the war will really piss them off! But what can Reid do? The knife wounds in Joe's back haven't healed yet. If there's a one seat margin in the Senate, then Reid needs to plant some wet one's on Joe's backside; especially on this issue.

And therein lies Reid's problem: It's a real pain the arse trying to hold together a fractious coalition. This is something that we understand. (And on a side note, loosing DeWine and Chaffee will be a blessing in the long run.) Any one Senator can become a king maker when the majority leader doesn't have the votes to spare. If halting the war comes up early, and it will, and if Reid caves in to Lieberman, and he will, then Reid will spend the next two years kissing blue butts. (Welcome to our world Harry!)

The Democrats are between a rock and a hard place. They will either split their caucus and lose their razor thin majority or they will have to cross their base. The Moonbat base has spent the last six years fuming over 2000. They want revenge and they want it now. "Go along to get along" is something that simply will not make sense to them. They will explode with rage if they don't get what they see as their rightful due. Nothing short of heads on pikes will satisfy them; talk and rhetoric won't do the job. But what satiates the Moonbats will horrify the Blue Dogs. What to do, what to do...

The Dems are screwed.

...and today, it sounds like Pelosi isn't backing away from the rabid Moonbats. Will she pick Moonbats over Blue Dogs?

Poor little neglected blog...

Where have I been? Everywhere but here, it would seem. You'd think that I'd have been venting my spleen here more often. I've been off offending sensibilities over at FreeRepublic, although I damn near got banned one night. (I thought that it was a funny remark. Jim didn't.)

Resistance is futile...

I was going to post this to a FreeRepublic thread on illegal immigration and assimilation; but, it got pulled while I was composing my brilliant thoughts. Who knows... Perhaps my insights could have saved the thread from the Mod's axe...

---

Things are not as bad as some people think. I've long noticed that no matter how unassimilated some Mexican immigrants are, their children and grandchildren are being assimilated into our culture. (Insert your favorite Borg warning here!) I just had an example of that not 20 minutes ago.

I work in a mostly Latino neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley and get my hair cut at a local shop. The owner is originally from Mexico. The girl who cuts my hair is Latina, but she was born and raised here. The shop usually has the TV on one of the Spanish language stations. This should set the scene for you.

A customer walked in with her little boy. She asked a question in Spanish of the girl cutting my hair, who answered in Spanish. Her little boy noticed something on the wall and asked his mother about it, in English. She responded to her son in English. A few minutes later, as I was paying my bill, the little boy walked up to me and asked ¿Como estás?. (I have dark hair and an olive complexion, so I assume that he mistook me for a Latino.) How is this a good sign, you ask? The little boy, while fluent in Spanish, obviously speaks English at home. English is his primary language.

Culture is something one learns and it's determined by language, not ethnicity. The culture that child is learning is ours; not Mexico's. His mother may be trying to cling to the culture of the "Old Country", but he is turning into an American. Resistance Is Futile.

All we are saying....

...is give Peeps a chance.

Shotgungate

Re: The hunting accident involving Dick Cheney

WHO CARES?!?

It was a minor hunting accident. To hear these inside-the-beltway, metrosexual bedwetters in the media carry on, you'd think that Cheney was hunting GOP donors rather than quail.

The next time I get peppered with shot during the dove season, should I alert the DC media? Or should I piss 'em off by letting someone call the local broadsheet?

Improved Google News

The Google News page has improved. Users now have the ability to easily customize their page to add their own search terms. Cool.

Zogby finally flips out

Pollster John Zogby still insists that he had the election right as his company performs "damage control" in the wake of his ridiculous predictions. Zogby predicted a Kerry win with 311 EC votes. So what went wrong? How is Zogby International explaining the error? Simple: It wasn't an error; it was rightwing fraud.

According to Zogby International, "We have received thousands of letters and phone calls regarding irregularities - many of which center on early exit polling results that were uncharacteristically inaccurate in several battleground states; questionable practices at polling stations that may have resulted in votes not being counted accurately; and in Ohio, as with other swing states, the automated Diebold machines were particularly disturbing because they offered no voting receipts".

In other words: IT'S BUSH'S FAULT!!

John, lighten up on the Kool-aid!

It's not PEST, but...

...it's something close!

I've been dragging since the election. I haven't posted a bloody thing here and I've done precious little over at our NRA-MC blog. I haven't done much more than crack jokes on FreeRepublic. I feel like I'm overloaded with tryptophan after a huge, Thanksgiving meal.

Maybe I had one too many servings of Democrat angst!

I've been content to sit back and watch the Dems implode. Comment hasn't been necessary; nor have they required any pushing to go off the deep end. Nothing to do but crash with a bowl of popcorn and watch the fur fly.

A milestone

Wow... I've had 2000 hits to this blog.

In the "nice to know" column...

It's nice to know that someone out there is using the Blogger nom de plume pajamapundit.

Drugs from Canada, eh

Are you confused about this talk of "allowing re-importation" of drugs from Canada? So am I. Good thing for all of us that someone slightly less lazy and slightly more interested than me decided to look into the Canadian drug thing. (Actually, Jeff at ShapeOfDays.com was only energetic and interested enough to ask others to "spoon feed" the answers to him; more than I can say for myself!)

A long story made short:If you suspected that it's a stOOpid idea, your suspicions prove correct. It is a stOOpid idea. While this risky scheme, to borrow a phrase from Algore, might, might, lower costs of name brand drugs by 1% over the next decade, H.R. 2427 could also increase the cost of non-imported drugs by $1 billion in the first year alone. StOOpid!!

(Did I over use "stOOpid" in this post? Perhaps.)

Mo' Haileygate

Staci D. Kramer at Wired.com news reports that Prof. Hailey is being pursued by mob of bloggers. Curiously, there's no mention of the Photoshop files the Prof. left on the school server.

AP: Iran Converts Uranium Into Gas

AP: Iran Converts Uranium Into [Uranium Hexafluoride] Gas

Not good.

bortaS bIr jablu'DI' reH QaQqu' nay'

Michelle Malkin is annoyed at the AP's description of Dick Cheney's performance at the debate as having a "cold efficiency". One must remember, however, that "Revenge is a dish that is best served cold".

The most memorable post-debate line

The award goes to Dennis Miller who said that Edwards' handlers "wisely chose to number his body parts so they could put him back together after Cheney finished slicing and dicing him".

The Bushies and the Swifties

Jim Lindgren at The Volokh Conspiracy wonders about connections between the Bush campaign and the Swift Boat veterans For Truth ads. He cites this exchange between George Bush and Bill O'Reilly...

O'REILLY: You didn't know anything about the Swift Boat ads before they went on the air, did you?

BUSH: No. I didn't.

O'REILLY: Did Karl Rove know anything about it?

BUSH: I don't think so. In other words, you're asking if anybody coordinated this in our campaign?

O'REILLY: No, whether they'd give you a heads up they were going to do it.

BUSH: Not to my knowledge.

...and then describes Pres. Bush as looking "awfully sick to his stomach".

I don't see anything sinister here. So he didn't say "Absolutely not!!"; he knows better than to vouch for the actions of people he can't watch 24/7. When you don't know the answer to a question, the correct response is "I don't know". The stupid response is to speak of things you cannot know about. Bush knows better.

Ya gotta love this. (Unless you work at CBS.)

The remodeled romper room

No, your monitor isn't broken; I made some changes. I was getting bored with the old template.

More on "Haileygate"...

Wizbang reports that the Hailey report may have been done at the request of Utah State University. There are lots of interesting links on the Wizbang page. The report site is down and University authorities are investigating the situation.

The Rathergate saga won't go away

This is just too funny!

In the ongoing Ra^thergate melodrama, another defender has stepped forward to safeguard Dan's virtue. This knight in shining armor claims to have proof that the See-BS memos are, in fact, the product of a typewriter. However, Wizbang has got the goods on him!

David Hailey of Utah State had rallied the hopes of Dan's peeps at the Boston Globe with his analysis of the infamous memos. But he made a mistake or two. The first was failing to look at his published handywork at high magnification. It becomes obvious that characters were added to his "typewriter" samples with Photoshop. Why would one say that Photoshop was used? That leads us to his second mistake: Leaving his Photoshop files in a public folder on the university server. Word is that the Boston Globe has stopped returning Hailey's phone calls.

Where do you want to be taken today?

Oh joy: JPEG exploit could beat antivirus software. Thanks Bill.

No, I didn't feel it

...But I imagine that the folks at the Parkfield earthquake observatory are quite excited about today's quake. Preliminary magnitude is 5.9.

The Pajamhadeen

As a matter of fact, I am in my pajamas.

Well... Let's try to look on the bright side of this whole Ra^thergate disaster.

It's kinda neat to know that MS Word can so faithfully reproduce documents across platforms and defaults printers. I remember back when changing the default printer on a document would wreak havoc on the formatting. This made working on a document from multiple networked workstations difficult. Changing workstations might mean changing printers. The word processing program would then change the fonts to match the new default printer and scatter your formatting to the winds. Those days are long gone. Now, you can create a document on Word and know that when you send the file to someone else, they will see the formatting just as you intended.

This is pretty cool... Unless you're trying to forge a document that was supposedly written on a typewriter 30 years ago!

What's the font size, Kenneth?!?

I have been thinking for the last three days about what to write on the passing of Ronald Reagan. He was the first President I had the priviledge of voting for in 1984. (I missed being able to vote for him in 1980 by a little over 1 year.) He set into motion a chain of events in this nation that has yet to play out. The "Reagan Revolution" continues to this day.

In thinking about what Reagan did during his Presidency, I began to think about how history would have changed without him. And when I began thinking about what the world would have been like, I realized that I had already seen this movie: Red Dawn. Red Dawn is an alternative history where the plot's "what if" is "what if Ronald Reagan had never been President".

Without Reagan, Jimmy Carter is re-elected in 1980. Abroad, Carter continues his anemic response to Soviet aggression. At home, the Malaise continues; there is no economic boom in the 80s and 90s. Where Reagan aided the Afghan people in their struggle against Soviet tyranny, Carter does nothing more than his boycott of the Olympic games. Nicaragua stays under Soviet control. Grenada becomes even more firmly entrenched as a Soviet satellite. Communist rebels in El Salvador succeed. Honduras falls. Costa Rica falls. Panama falls. Communist revolutions spread through South America like a cancer. Mexico begins to bend under the pressure of refugees fleeing north.

Without Reagan, there is no SDI. Without SDI, the Soviet Union is never pushed to the breaking point. Eastern Europe stays in Soviet hands. There is no Glastnost. Without Reagan's aid to the Afghans, the Soviets hang on and defeat the Mujahadeen. They are left in a position to threaten Pakistan. If they succeed, they can threaten the West's oil supplies in a way that Saddam could only dream of.

Without Reagan, there is no tax cut. The top tax rate stays ridiculously high and the boom of the 80s and 90s never happens. Economies all over the world depended on the Reagan boom to get started. From Asia to Europe, economies would have stagnated. There would be no Internet and thus no "eCommerce". Without Reaganomics, the economies of the West would have been weakend and thus more vulnerable to Soviet aggression.

In short, all of the set-up from the opening minute of Red Dawn would have had a chance to come true. America's allies would have dwindled, one by one, until we would have been left standing alone. And that weakness would have invited aggression from the USSR. Reagan's policies of strength detered aggression and lead to peace.

In 1980, freedom and democracy were on the decline. Today, those ideas are spreading. America is leading that advance rather than a retreat into darkness. The world is getting better; not worse.

Thank God for Ronald Reagan.

Some of the links on this blog may lead to sites that require you to register before you can view the content. I try to avoid that; however, if the box I'm using has a cookie set for that site, I may not realize that I'm logged on to such a site. If you do not wish to register, and thus hand over a bunch of personal information, head over to BugMeNot.com. BugMeNot is a database of usernames and passwords for sites such as the LA Times, the NY Times, and the Washington Post. You can thus view the content without having to waste time telling the site that your real name is "Dona Juana Bespammed", you're a female born in 1905, and you live in the 90210 ZIP code.

I've added a blog to the San Fernando Valley NRA Members' Council web page. Click the "news" link on the sidebar menu. (Yes, I'm that site's webmaster.)

WAFFLES

This morning on Fox, raw footage of Marines in Fallujah was being shown. These Marines had taken over an abandonded house and were drawing fire while spotting targets for air support and other units. What impressed me was the utter calm these boys possessed. They were probably outnumbered by the goblins darting around outside, but you couldn't tell by looking at them. They were relaxed, even joking, as they methodically reinforced their position and hunted out targets. The SAW gunner looked like his only concern was hearing his squad leader's commands over the din coming through the open door in front of him. These "boys" are well trained and they know it. The orcs outside didn't stand a chance.

I was poking around on Google looking up the address that "Citi-online" email links to . (It points the victim to a redirect service in Moscow.) While I was looking, I found the Antiphishing.org website. Think of this as Snopes for email scams.

If you have any doubts about an email you've received, check here. You may not find the exact scam, but you'll likely see something similar. Many phishing scams are very well done, despite the poor Engrish. These Citi-bank scams send you to Citi-bank's site but, there's a pop-up window over the top that isn't from Citi-bank; the "litlle winddow". I had another a few days ago that was a very well done replica of a Paypal page (Similar to this scam.) on a Korean webserver. That one, as a finishing touch, sends the victim off to the Paypal.com 404 page after grabbing the info. In short, be suspicious of what comes to your inbox!

This has got to be the funniest scam email I've ever received...

_Dear Citi-bank Cardholder,



This Email was sentt by_the_ _Citibank serevr to verify _your_ E_MAIL adrress.

You must complete this process by clicking on_the__link beloww and entering

in the litlle winddow your Citi_Bank _Debit card_number and PIN that

_you_use on local_Atm_Machine. This_is _done_ for_your protection becaurse some of our

members members have access to their _e-mail_ adderss_ and we must verify it.



http://citi-bank-online.org/?385586164247



To verify your_ EMAIL_ addres_ and akcess _your_ _citibank

account, klick on__the_link beloww.

I've sure that it was much more convincing in the original Russian.

Talk radio is sorta like a primordial blog. Well, I did some primordial blogging this afternoon. I was a caller on the John & Ken Show at the end of the 5 o'clock hour.

The subject was President Bush whacking California's share of Federal aid for housing illegal aliens in the prison system. John was, predictably, fit to be tied at the development. I called to point out that there's really no political reason for Bush to go out of his way to spend money on the Golden State. We thumbed our noses at him "big time" in 2000. As I recall, he lost by roughly 1 million votes. He's gonna lose again this year. Spending Federal dollars on our prison system isn't going to win him any Electoral College votes out here. That money is going to go to "Red" States; not this bright Blue one!

Hey! What's this? Hmmm... It looks like a "blog".

Kinda looks familiar, now that I think about it...

...like I've seen it someplace before...

Oh... It's my blog.

Never mind.

A thought that is rarely considered by most minds in Hollywood: "Nobody wants to see that."

Why?

Personally, I find this inconceivable!

Happy New Year!

...ah c'mon. It's just a figure of speech. There's no need to get your knickers in a bunch. What do I care if you don't want to have a happy new year? It's no skin off my nose.

Hmmm... You learn something every day: The Guinness Diet.

We saw Return of The King today. (A sold-out 10:15am showing!) It's simply an outstanding movie.

It is as true to the original story as is possible for a film to be. The original was never intended to serve as a screenplay; Tolkien himself doubted that it could be adapted. But Peter Jackson and his crew did the impossible. They took a great story and put into a filmable form without losing the charm of the original work.

Testing... Testing... 1,2,3...

OK... Whatever bug there was seems to have been stomped.

Can you tell yet that I'm looking forward to seeing Return of The King?

I was reading an account on the NY Times site of last night's early showing of the movie. The Times has an entire page dedicated to the Lord of The Rings. A review of the new movie is there as well as of the two preious movies. But I scrolled down the page and found that they have re-posted their book reviews for the novels starting with Anne T. Eaton's 1938 review of The Hobbit.

The Motley Fool has a less than kind take on the Microsoft re-org:Microsoft Circles the Wagons.

Here is another review of Return of The King by Jeffrey Overstreet. And like the "Disembodied Brain" site I mentioned the other day, this is also someone who obviously enjoys, or at least appeciates the genre. In fact, part of his review addresses other critics who obviously dislike the genre and, perhaps, have no business offering reviews...

After the press screening, I overheard several critics complaining about “the Neverending Movie” and “the Movie with Seven Endings.” (They’ll probably hate this “neverending review” as well.) There seems to be an inexplicable disconnect between some people and Tolkien’s style of tale-weaving. (One woman complained that she still couldn’t tell the difference between “Merry and Trippy.” Go figure.) I have no explanation, just sadness that their skepticism stands between them and so many rewarding metaphors and characters. Did they at some point outgrow fairy tales, deciding that they are valuable only as charming flights of fancy for the naïve?

Off on a tangent, I suppose that what makes blogs so interesting is that they generally are written about subjects that the bloggers appreciate. No blogger feels as though he or she was dragged off to a "neverending story".

Overstreet gives ROTK an A+.  He too laments the loss of such story elements as The Scouring of The Shire, but he also points out that much of the Lord of The Rings doesn't translate well to film. In addition, Overstreet notes that Tolkien had his doubts about the success of a screenplay adaptation of LOTR.

...and if they were smoking while having sex, it would be obscene!!

OK... So I was just now looking at the latest posts page on FreeRepublic. You know some spin is going on when these two threads have replies on the list back-to-back...

Bush Says He Could Support Ban On Gay Marriage
			Posted by 11th Earl of Mar to Akira On 12/16/2003 5:26:11 PM PST #10 of 10
Bush Appears to Open Door to Same - Sex Unions
			Posted by KantianBurke to goldstategop On 12/16/2003 5:26:08 PM PST #5 of 5

Is there more than one George W. Bush?

Window dressing?

Jay Wrolstad at Newsfactor.com writes that Microsoft is reorganizing key Windows groups. Specifically, various engineering groups are being united under a single VP to advance the next version of Windows, codenamed "Longhorn". Longhorn is scheduled for release in late '05 or early '06. Analyst Laura DiDio of the Yankee Group is quoted as saying "The message from Microsoft is, 'We will do what we have to do to blunt the spread of Linux' ". However, one cannot help but wonder if MSFT will actually try to engineer a solution to the Linux problem (i.e. build a better product), or if they'll simply try to engineer better FUD.

There's a reason why I wouldn't want a car with OnStar. Not that I'm paranoid or anything... But just because you're paranoid, that doesn't mean that they're not out to get you!

Some people are getting pretty testy about Rush Limbaugh.

Here's a blog worth mentioning: Disembodied Brain.

This blog by Jeff Dillon is on the San Diego Tribune's website and it cover sci-fi topics. Dillon is obviously a sci-fi fan, not just a reporter assigned to the subject. And unlike a lot of reviewers I've seen in the past, Dillon enjoys what he sees. His reviews and other blog entries aren't the usual non-stop carping one can see elsewhere. His review of Return of The King contains what look like valid criticisms, but overall avoids the kind of tone you can find from other writers. No off-topic rants about how much money the films have made, for example. There is criticism of Jackson for cutting the "Scouring of The Shire" that is quite legitimate. It's also tempered with the admission that there are parts of Tolkien's novels that don't lend themselves to a movie script.

If you're a fan of sci-fi, I recommend a visit to this blog.

Great... Just what the world needs: More flies.

Ann Coulter strikes again...

Vegan Computer Geeks for Dean

No, I haven't forgotten about this page... I've been busy.

"Self defence", UK-style

Briton Tony Martin, who was convicted in a UK court of defending himself against a criminal, has been given a new self defense tool: An air raid siren.

I'm not making this up.

OK... I can tell from that look on your face that you don't believe me; but it's true... all of it. Yes, a man was convicted for what would be a perfectly lawful activity in the US. He defended himself against two teenage burglars who broke into his home. One goblin got his ticket punched, while the other was merely wounded. In the US, this is called a "good shoot". A 16-year old and a 29-year old constitute a grave threat to a 54-year old man. But not only was Tony Martin arrested, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to 5 years in prison. And on top of that, the wounded burglar is suing him!

Tony Martin is finally getting out of prison, after previously being denied parole. (Friends mocked the parole board saying that Martin was being kept behind bars because he poses a threat to Britain's burglars.) He's been threatened by local thugs and a wealthy neighbor purchased the siren as some sort of self defense device. I'm sure that the man meant well. After years of being told that defending your own life or property is somehow anti-social behavior, he probably didn't see how silly the gesture really is.

Of course, the siren will merely signal to all within earshot that Mr. Martin has been killed.

The Biased Broadcasting Company

Brian Carnell dissects a highly biased, anti-gun story from the BBC.

Never bring a paintball marker to a gunfight.

I suppose that the question is: Will the State's Democrats lash themselves to the rails and go down with Gray Davis' sinking ship? Or will the rats go over the transom?

Eye in the sky.

The Northrup-Grumman Global Hawk spy plane is going into production. The Global Hawks that provided so much valuable intel in Iraq and Afghanistan were merely prototypes. These impressive spy planes can loiter for nearly a over a target at an altitude that makes them nearly impossible to target and hit with a SAM.

Some bad days lie ahead for the "evil doers".

The FreeRepublic Quote of the Day: "The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data.'" from CholeraJoe.

Today is a sad day for the United States: Bob Hope, 1903-2003.

The gun thing didn't work, so now the nation's trial attorneys are going after ice cream.

Another anti-gun lawsuit bites the dust. This is the case from the NAA(L)CP in NY. The funny thing is that the judge in the case was cherrypicked by the hoplophobes. It was supposed to be a slam dunk for them. So even their hand selected judge couldn't come up with a way to make their claims work.

BWAAAHAAAAHAAAAHAAAA!!

"Hurricane" Jackie Goldberg (D-Los Angeles) and ten of her Democrat cohorts were caught on an open mic in Sacramento plotting to extend the State's budget crisis for political gain. Their conversation was picked up by a "squawk box" and broadcast throughout the capitol building.

Kinda reminds ya of Frank and Hotlips, don't it?!

Ayatollah bugs

(Not to be confused with a rabbit in a turban.)

I don't know why you're a Democrat either, Tammy.

Some local stupidity...

James Swan documents some of our local stupidity in Bowless in Burbank. The Burbank city council has voted to ban bow hunting in the city. "So what" you ask? Perhaps you think that there's no where to hunt in the city. There is just such an area. The Verdugo Hills stretch from the Foothill Freeway south towards the intersection of the Ventura and Golden State freeways. This is the line of hills you see to the east of Burbank Airport. There are roughly 500 deer in those hills; more than enough to support bowhunting of the herd. There are also small game animals and coyotes to hunt.

The yuppies jogging on the trails (Appearently unaware that the mountain lions who moved into the area attracted by the deer like to chase things that run. They are cats, after all.) didn't like seeing bow hunters hiking into the hills. They whined to the city council, and the city council, in its wisdom, voted to remove the herd's top predator from the ecosystem. Not smart. Without their top predator, the deer will over-graze. When they start to run out of natural food, they'll move into people's gardens. More than a few will wind up bouncing off the hoods of the yuppies' Volvos and Lexuses. (Or would that be "Lexi"?) Of course, the lions will also move into the neighborhoods looking for the deer. But once they get into town, they'll realize that there are plenty of tasty dogs and cats. They may be small , but they're easier to catch than deer. Small children are even easier for lions to catch, by the way.

But none of that mattered to the city council. Deer are cute and fluffy and hunters are Neanderthals in the council's tidy, little world. Let's hope that the DFG or the courts straightens this out before too much harm has been done.

Paul Greenberg: How diversity became Orwellian

Sandra Day O'Conner gets complimented as a "doubleplusgood doublethinker". (Also on FreeRepublic.com.)

The French are always good for a laugh.

Cathryn Crawford writes about Big Brother and his big GPS. An Oregon governmental task force is proposing to install GPS transponders in private vehicles to monitor, and then tax, road usage.

I'm starting to wonder about this "African Uranium" controversy. Are the Dems swinging at a tarbaby?

Here's the sit: Bush, in his last State of the Union address, mentions a British report. That report claims that Iraq tried to buy uranium from an African nation. At about the same time, the CIA had a letter, supposedly bogus, that mentions an attempted purchase of uranium from Niger. This letter and the British report are two different things. The Brits still stand behind their story. (The CIA's letter, BTW, has been tied to France.) In other words, there is no there there. Bush didn't lie, he didn't deceive, he did nothing wrong. The sequence of events is easily explainable.

So why isn't the Bush Administration making that easy explaination?

Enter the tarbaby. The Bushies are, if nothing else, slick politicians. Nothing happens in Dubya's White House by accident. I doubt that the clumsy handling of this controversy is purely accidental. Rove and company may be waiting for that last foot to get lodged in the tarbaby. He and Dubya have left a lot of hoof prints on people who "misunderestimated" Bush. This may be another example of them setting up his adversaries.

Bob Barr does deserve hazardous duty pay!

Instapundit noticed some interesting backpedaling from the anti-gun crowd...

But here's the most revealing quote:

Matt Nosanchuk, litigation director for the Violence Policy Center, a gun-control advocacy group, said there is no evidence that greater access to guns reduces crime.

Remember how anti-gun folks used to say that reducing gun controls would lead to "blood in the streets?" Now the best they can claim is that it probably won't reduce crime.

I guess that Sarah's minions realize that the "blood in the streets" thing needs actual blood in an actual street at least once to be effective.

The Clinton "legacy": Road Ban in Forests Is Leveled

Clinton's land grab attempt out here in the West was overturned. This was a sleazy attempt to use the Wilderness Act to seal off millions upon millions of arces of public land. The harm it did to logging is obvious. Loggers need to cut roads to get to their timber leases. But other suffered as well. There are pockets of private land surrounded by these wilderness areas. Owners were unable to build or, as I understand it, maintain roads to their property. Also, hunters and others use the roads to get into the back country. Letting the roads go to pot prevents people from getting at land that they pay taxes to maintain. What good is Public land if the Public isn't allowed in?!?

A good question: PETA--Legitimate Organization or Cloaked 'Onion' Contributor?

Circular reference

More on my Linux box...

I've been trying to figure out the intricacies of Samba. We have two machines: This dual boot box and a Win2k only box. I could see that other box from Linux, but not the other way around. After a good deal of searching, I found
this page on a FreeBSD site. The suggestions here did the trick as did another page's suggestion that the Win2k box be set (in local security policies: to allow sending unecrypted passwords to a 3rd party SMB server. (We're behind a firewall, so security is less of a concern.)

...Oh yeah. I also added the Win2k box to my /etc/hosts file.

So why blog this? Blogger is owned by Google now. The more places this info is, the easier it is to search it out.

Gun law's author hit right on target

A great profile of Minnesota's Joe Olson. He was one of the driving forces behind that State's recent "Shall Issue" law for concealed weapons.

So where did the out-of-state gun story end up? The A section, of course.

So where will this story end up in tomorrow's L.A. Times? It's the story of a guy going postal, with a gun, at a factory in Missouri. I wonder because this local story about a guy going postal with a sword didn't make the A section, let alone the front page.

One would think that a local story warrants greater coverage than an out-of-state story; however, one lunatic used a gun while the other used a sword. Will the Times hype the gun story? Or will they give it less coverage than the local story they relegated to the B section? We'll have to wait until tomorrow to see.

How does one blog a radio program? I almost drove off the road yesterday laughing myself silly. I was listening to the John and Ken Show. Their guest was Democratic strategist Bob Mulholland. During his entire appearance, Bob managed to avoid answering a single question. John Kobylt, at one point, realized that it was necessary to remind listeners that this was a real guest, not a joke. A caller would ask about the budget and Bob would ramble about abortion and gun control. When asked about taxes, he blurted out something about George Bush. John ased him if he had Tourette's and described the conversation as being like talking to a mental patient. It was great radio, however unenlightening Bob might have been.

Ostensibly, Mulholland was there to tell why Wile E. "Gray" Davis shouldn't be recalled. With friends like Bob...

Will the Skeet-Geeks finally get it? James Swan writes about the UN's small arms conference coming up next week in NYC. He points out what many gun rights activists have been saying for years: The UN would like nothing more than to disarm average citizens. The skeet-geeks are the hardest to get involved in protecting our gun rights. They convince themselves that no one's interested in taking their guns. In fact, groups like the UN view their pretty shotguns as identical to RPGs and machine guns. To them, a gun is a gun is a gun. Let's hope that articles like this one wake them up to that fact.

Has the CA State GOP sprouted some cojones? The State budget is about to slam into a wall and the Republicans in the senate refuse to budge on taxes. Looks like they've found their collective mojo since Mojo left.

Ugliness at Oxford...

A professor at Oxford sent this missive off to a PhD candidate:

From: "Andrew Wilkie" awilkie@worf.molbiol.ox.ac.uk
To: "Amit Duvshani"
Sent: Monday, June 23, 2003 9:58 AM
Subject: Re: PhD application

Dear Amit Duvshani,

Thank
you for contacting me, but I don't think this would work. I have a huge
problem with the way that the Israelis take the moral high ground from
their appalling treatment in the Holocaust, and then inflict gross
human rights abuses on the Palestinians because they (the Palestinians)
wish to live in their own country.

I am sure that you are
perfectly nice at a personal level, but no way would I take on somebody
who had served in the Israeli army. As you may be aware, I am not the
only UK scientist with these views but I'm sure you will find another
suitable lab if you look around.

Yours sincerely,
Andrew Wilkie

It took chutzpah to write this and then complete stupidity to hit the send button!

Over at The Corner on National Review Online: "CHIEF JUSTICE FUNNYMAN"

I don't know how many times I've self-censored myself on FreeRepublic today. I hit the reply button and then realize that nothing I have to say would fail to be offensive. What have I been censoring? Well... Let's put it this way: There's a nexus between the Texas Sodomy case, California's run-away taxes, and the acronym BOHICA.

Cow...

Here's a cool tool for blogging on the fly. Go to this page on Blogger.com. There's a link called "BlogThis" near the bottom of the page. Drag that to your personal tool bar. It's a little javascript that opens a blogging window. This one's obviously for Blogger.com users. Other services may have their own. Mozilla users should check out MozBlog.

Firearms Industry Wins Another Court Victory

In another significant legal victory for the firearms industry, a New York appellate court on June 24 upheld a trial court's August, 2001 order dismissing a lawsuit brought by New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer against gun makers. The appellate court said manufacturers of lawful and non-defective products cannot be sued for allegedly creating a 'public nuisance' when criminals misuse firearms.

From The NRA-ILA News Center

Another nuisance suit quietly bites the dust.

Everybody else is chiming in on the "Texas Sodomy" ruling, so I might as well join in...

There's a lot of talk about the... um... mechanics of the acts involved. As a libertarian, I respect the right of people to do dangerous, immoral, and destructive things to themselves. It's your life; who am I to tell you not to ruin it? And since I don't want you poking your nose into my affairs, I ought to afford you the same courtesy.

However, I'm torn on the larger issue at hand: Should the US Supreme Court be telling the states how to run their affairs? On the one hand, I like the reservation of powers and rights embodied in the 9th and 10th Amendments. Governance in the US was intended to be from the bottom up; not the top down. On the other hand, I don't want things like gun laws written by the loons in Sacramento. In that case, I'd like nothing more than to see SCOTUS use the 14th Amendment to ram the 2nd down their throats.

The garmongous FreeRepublic thread on this is here.

Got that dual boot thing working. (For those who are curious, my old Win2k drive is set up as the master on IDE0 with the new Linux drive as a slave. I let LILO write to the master's MBR and everything's happy.) My next bit of fun is convincing Windows that there's really something to see on that new drive. (Linux sees the Windows drive with no problems.)

Blogger just completed an update. They were down for most of yesterday. Oddly enough, I missed it.

There are some new features to the interface. It ought to be easier to use.

I'm sure that there was something in the news that I could have commented on over the weekend, but I was on vacation. (The mountains were lovely. Thank you for asking.)

I've been playing with Linux this past week. I loaded Slackware 9.0 onto a "new" harddrive. (It came with what was then a new machine; however, it was pre-loaded with WinXP so I stuck to my old drive with Win2k and all my stuff rather than messing with XtraProblems.)

Thus far, I'm impressed. It fired right up, and saw our home network. It's so much easier to monkey with things when the Google is available. LILO isn't happy with how I have the old Win2k drive installed. (Or perhaps Windows is broken.) But I can still see the drive so all my stuff's safely copied to the new drive. (I'll see if Grub can get the old drive to boot later.) For now, I'm having fun tinkering.

The staff at Reason goes after the NY Times and UCLA over a recent study on gun dealers. The NYT headline screamed "50% of Dealers Willing to Sell Handguns Illegally, Study Says". But, as Jacob Sullum writes, reality is a bit different...

The question of an illegal straw purchase was broached with a different, much smaller sample:

The researchers also made 20 follow-up calls to randomly chosen dealers and said they needed to buy guns for girlfriends or boyfriends because they were not "allowed to."

In 16 of those cases, or 80 percent, the dealers responded with unequivocal "nos," indicating that the purchases would clearly be illegal. In the remaining four cases, the dealers agreed to sell the guns, even though they indicated that they knew that would be illegal, the researchers said.

In other words, the percentage in the headline for "Dealers Willing to Sell Handguns Illegally" was off by a factor of two and a half, and that's assuming the sample of 20 dealers adequately represented gun retailers nationwide.

The original study from UCLA doesn't make the headline's claim, but the abstract can easily leave one with that impression. It does make the statement "Most dealers were willing to sell a handgun regardless of the end user", but one has to go digging to find out that in most cases, the dealer was being asked if they'd make a legal sale. Only a small percentage were asked about blatantly illegal sales. And of those, most in the small sample said "no".

Of course, one can brush off the Times as being only a little more reliable than the World Weekly News. When they start reporting on Bat Boy, let me know. I am, however, disappointed with the study's primary author, Susan Sorenson. I know Dr. Sorenson. And while we may not agree on firearms policy, I would have hoped for better. The study is sloppy and the results misleading. The study compared dealer behavior across jurisdictions. What's shady for one dealer may be perfectly legal for another. And in most cases, the dealers were asked if they would be willing to make legal transactions. (What a shocker; they were willing to do so!) Larger samples chosen on a per jurisdiction basis would have been revealing. Also, though I don't know what difference this would make, the study limited calls to dealers in large cities with more than 10 dealers. Los Angeles is mentioned as just such a large city, but there aren't 10 dealers in the city limits. Thus L.A. dealers should have been excluded. Should the handful of dealers in the nation's 2nd largest city have been included? Perhaps so, but the paper doesn't make it clear if they were or weren't.

All in all, the study confirms that gun dealers are willing to sell guns. Some, though we cannot say with any confidence how many, will sell guns illegally. In the same fashion, we can also guess that tobacco dealers will sell cigarettes; and that some small percentage will sell to minors. In short, some part of any population, like the population of gun dealers or tobacco dealers, will break the law. Most, however, do not. The study's claim that a Federal gun registry would solve the problem is unwarranted. Tracking transactions between law-abiding parties will not do anything to affect the behavior of those who break the law.

Separated at birth??

Heh, heh, heh... Ralph Nader is thinking of running for President again.

Go, Ralph, go!

An incendiary temper is one thing, but this is ridiculous...

Have you ever know a person who goes out of their way to be offended? I'm sure that we all know someone like that; the person who thumbs through dirty magazines looking for pornographic pictures. The person who stands next to a smoker and coughs loudly. The person who reads the L.A. Times opinion page on the look out for naked liberalism. You know the type. They seek out that which gets their dander up. Well there's just such a person who found offense on a dirt road in the middle of the California desert. The source of their displeasure? A cross.

Out in the Mojave Desert, on what's now public land, is a cross. The cross was erected in the 1930's by a group of WWI veterans. They built it as a memorial to their fallen comrades. Back then, the rocky outcrop was in the middle of nowhere. Decades later, it's now part of the Mojave National Preserve. According to the ACLU, that makes it a Federal establishment of religion in violation of the 1st Amendment.

Why did this story catch my eye? Because I know the area where the cross is located. I had never seen it so I did a little research to find out where it is. It turns out that it's on a stretch of road that I've travelled before, though I never noticed it. There is, however, an individual who did, somehow, spot it from this obscure road. And this individual was "deeply offended" by the sight of it.

At this point, you might think that the "deeply offended" party is a local resident. That would explain how they noticed something that I so easily missed. That's not the case, however. The guy who filed suit to have the cross torn down lives about 3 hours away. He reportedly saw it while driving from Rialto, CA to Las Vegas, NV. But as I said, I know the area. He would have driven miles and miles out of his way on a dirt road to see the 6' tall cross in the Mojave.

For the moment, the cross is covered with a tarp. There was a Federal judge who ordered it torn down, but that order has been stayed pending appeal.

This morning, Dennis Prager had an interesting thing to say about Mr. Deeply Offended and his allies at the ACLU. He compared them to the Taliban. And he compared their wish to destroy this cross to the Taliban's destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan in Afhganistan. He said that both the Taliban and the ACLU were motivated by the same thing: Religious radicalism. And he's correct. Both are radical adherents to their respective religions; The Taliban to Islam and the ACLU to Secularism. Both seek to destroy anything that offends their religion. (And neither shrinks from vandalism, which is why I haven't said exactly where the cross is!)