As usual, lots of entries came in this last week of February but because I expanding the shooting line so much I still have 22 more shooting positions available.  I have 38 positions taken now.  I’m also officially in the black on paper.  That doesn’t count the loan I made to Boomershoot for the new explosives magazine last year and all the chemicals I purchased last year or the new generator I bought a month ago.  But since I had purchased nearly enough materials for this years event last year my cash flow has been very good this year.  I have paid back $1650 (including interest) on the loan and paid for the generator with this years money so I’m feeling pretty good about the money situation.

Since we have all the bloggers showing up this year I had hoped to get wireless internet service onsite.  I talked to the provider yesterday and found out that there are political obstacles to that happening.  They have been working on providing service in that area for some time but aren’t quite there yet.  There are permits they have to obtain and stuff like that.  The current schedule looks like “end of the summer“.  So, maybe Boomershoot 2006 will be the first to have live blogging.

There are just under nine weeks to Boomershoot 2005.  Next Saturday Ry and I will do a full day of experiments aimed at getting the mix more sensitive.  Then we will be ready until just a few days before the event when the work really begins.

I drove 400 miles round trip to have dinner with a friend on Wednesday evening.  I always enjoy my time with him immensely.  Very, very, funny, and thought provoking.  I’ll share his solution to our war with Muslim extremists in some other post but a newspaper article I saw this evening reminded me of something else he said.  He made a comment about Bush’s State of the Union speech being insane if you read between the lines. “Oh?”, I asked. “How is that?” The answer I got was, “He wants to export freedom to everyone. That’s not much different than Caesar saying he wanted to bring civilization to everyone and the Conquistadors bringing Catholicism to everyone.”  Interesting viewpoint.  I hadn’t thought of it that way before.  My friend doesn’t exactly think everyone is ready or capable of handling freedom as we know it.  I’m not so sure but he has a number of data points from dealing with other cultures that I don’t have direct experience with.  Anyway the news indicates, insane or not, foreign governments are taking Bush seriously.

From the LA Times:

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak called Saturday for a constitutional amendment to allow other candidates to run against him for the first time, a surprise move that could be a historic turning point in a country that has endured decades of repressive rule.

The announcement by Mubarak, a staunch U.S. ally, came days after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice canceled a trip to the Middle East this week amid mounting tension over the autocratic Egyptian leader’s crackdown on political opponents.

Yeah, I know, so what else is new?

They report on the bill before the U.S. Senate to protect the gun industry from junk lawsuits.  They claim:

 In September, the families of victims in the sniper shootings in the Washington area won a $2.5 million settlement from the dealer who supplied the snipers’ assault rifle.

Being generous to the reporter and editors, they are misleading when they say this.  The gun was stolen from the dealer by the two criminals.  Do they claim a bank that gets robbed provided money for the criminal to buy illegal drugs?

To give them credit where they deserve it, they did quote a spokesman for one of my Senators:

A spokesman for Senator Larry E. Craig, an Idaho Republican who sponsored the bill, said the lawsuits were inappropriate.

The suits “attempt to achieve gun control through judicial rather than the legislative means,” said the spokesman, Sid Smith. “If a drunk driver hits someone,” he said, “the car manufacturer is not held responsible so long as the car functioned correctly, so why should the gun industry be any different?”

Overall I give them a grade of ‘C’ on this article. In addition to the above blatant bias they only gave a few lines of coverage to the pro-freedom viewpoint and the vast majority to the anti-freedom viewpoint.