Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance.

William O. Douglas
[A similar thing can be said of guns. The type of gun that was used for a terrible crime yesterday may be used to save many lives the next. The government that protects you one day may next year send you to the gulags--unless you and your kind own and know how to use guns.--Joe]

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them...

Thomas Jefferson
1816
Letter to Van der Kemp
[Although Jefferson wasn't referring to gun control it certainly applies. Keep that in mind when people in high crime rate areas with oppressive gun laws insist others in low crime rate areas enact more gun control with the claim such gun control will reduce the crime rates in the area of the first person. I'm thinking of a certain set of mayors here that should be laughed all the way back to some tiny closet in their respective offices ashamed to show their faces until they have been booted from office, dragged out to the street, and given a swift boot to send them on their way to the dustbin of history.--Joe]

...each Federal employee has a responsibility to the United States Government and its citizens to place loyalty to the Constitution, laws, and ethical principles above private gain. The public deserves and should expect no less.

U.S. Department of Justice
Departmental Ethics Office
Justice Management Division
[If they are required to have a loyalty to the Constitution then how do they get away with working for agencies such as the ATF that are enforcing blatantly unconstitutional laws? Oh, that's right, the constitution and law doesn't apply to them unless they want it to.--Joe]

Via Say Uncle we get this bit of ATF humor. Here is a teaser:

It has come to our attention that an opposable thumb commonly located on a person’s hand can be used in conjunction with a semi-automatic firearm, when placed in a belt loop, can cause said semi-automatic firearm to fire at a higher rate of fire than we originally intended for it to be allowed to fire at.

What happened here was that once machine guns were heavily restricted the ATF had to define what a machine gun was. Human creative being what it is the freedom loving "gun nuts" kept coming up with inventions that bypassed the definitions the ATF came up with. Just recently the ATF went almost absurd in their definition and some smart-ass took it to the logical conclusion. I actually have some sympathy for the ATF in this case. They didn't write the law they are just trying to make sense of it and give us definitions they can enforce to. It's the bigoted politicians that are at fault. Even if all the existing ATF people people did the right thing (most of them should find legitimate jobs) there would be others more than willing to take their place. We need to destroy them at their root--the politicians that encourage them by giving them laws, money, and guns.

It's fairly easy to define a crime when there is a victim. It can be done in terms of the actual injury. Was there more than $1000 of property stolen? Was the victim permanently injured? But try and define an "assault weapon" or a machine gun, prostitution, or recreational drugs (enumeration is possible but creative chemists come up with things not on the list) and they run into problems.

Laughter and humiliation may be the best weapon we have against these anti-gun bigoted politicians and their hired thugs. Let 'em have it with both barrels.

I’m not procrastinating, I still have 25 minutes.

Xenia Huffman-Scott
[Xenia was working on a Government worksheet before school that she thought was due the next period that had a question about Microsoft lawsuits. A friend of mine testified in one of the lawsuits and she was hoping I could give her a quick brain dump and she'd be, essentially, done. She was wrong. She had all of winter break to work on it and I told her to go do her own research as best she could with the available time. It turned out the assignment wasn't due until the next day but it would have served her right if had been just 25 minutes and she wasted two of those minutes talking to me.--Joe]

There is one very well known guaranteed cure for smoking--death. However another one has just been discovered--brain injury:

Scientists studying stroke patients are reporting that an injury to a specific part of the brain, near the ear, can instantly and permanently break a smoking habit, effectively erasing the most stubborn of addictions. People with the injury who stopped smoking found that their bodies, as one man put it, “forgot the urge to smoke.”

This is great news. We may be able to find or create a drug or other means to "flip the switch" and help people from implementing the "universal cure".

I find this very ironic--I always figured you must have had a dysfunctional brain to start smoking in the first place.

Search engines are a wonderful thing. I'm sure the felons at PNNL thought they were great and wonderful as they went searching for information on me (see for example the use of Google on this day).

But search engines are double edged swords. For example doing a Google search for Battelle fraud (Battelle is the contractor that manages Pacific Northwest National Laboratory--PNNL) yielded these pages (E835 and E836) in the Congressional Record:

• Dr. Laul is a nuclear chemist and a nuclear engineer, with a Ph.D. from Purdue University. He spent 15 years at Hanford working on nuclear waste and environmental cleanup problems, analyzing whether that site was suitable for permanent storage of high-level nuclear waste.

• Dr. Laul is also a whistleblower, and a friend of the taxpayers, who put his career on the line when he blew the whistle on fraud and mismanagement by Batelle, Inc., a DOE contractor. Five days after disclosing that Batelle inappropriately and illegally used equipment paid for by the Government, Batelle fired Dr. Laul, saying he had improperly disposed of a hazardous waste--a violation DOE later said Batelle used as an excuse to lay him off and silence him.

• After losing his job, Dr. Laul brought a False Claims Act suit against Batelle and won, resulting in Batelle reimbursing DOE $330,000. Today I submit for the Record an article describing the case and reporting on Dr. Laul's vindication, and thank him for the important and honest work he did on behalf of this country. Dr. Laul lost his job because he had the nerve to stand up for what was right.

You might say that's all well and good for the taxpayers. But if you read further you might have cause to change your mind about that:

U.S. government investigators agreed that scientist Jagdish C. Laul was fired for turning in his managers for fraud.

A federal appeals court agreed Laul could sue the Hanford contractor for whom he worked for wrongful termination.

The government made the contractor, Battelle's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory pay back $330,000 for double-billing lab equipment--and even recommended Battelle managers be criminally prosecuted for fraud.

But who picked up the $750,000 tab for defending Battelle against Laul's lawsuit?

U.S. taxpayers.

Laul's case is the most recent example of a system that allows private nuclear contractors to rack up huge legal bills fighting whistleblowers--even when the contractor's in the wrong.

Battelle settled with Laul in January to head off a federal jury trial in Spokane.

The cost of his case to taxpayers includes the $250,000 settlement paid to Laul; $400,000 in legal fees to Battelle's outside law firm, Davis Wright Tremaine of Seattle; and about $100,000 in legal work and other Battelle costs to fight Laul.

If Laul had won at trial, taxpayers would have paid that bill, too. That's because of a Cold War agreement in which the U.S. government promised to pay all legal costs of its nuclear weapons contractors when they agreed to run the government's weapons plants.

The agreement, called indemnification, is still in effect today. It applies to Battelle, which works on Hanford cleanup and other government nuclear programs.

Isn't that nice? Battelle paid $330,000 for the fraud which sounds like was the amount they had illegally charged the government to begin with. And the Federal government has to pay all the legal costs of Battelle's defense. So... assuming Battelle decides to engage in some illegal activity to increase their bottom line the worst case scenario is that Battelle comes out even in the end because the Feds are required to pay the legal bills. Best case is they get away with it.

In my case the Feds will, assuming I win, pay Battelle's legal bill and any settlement I get from them. Battelle is held financially harmless by the Federal government. Just so you know. Perhaps your congress critters would like to know that as well.

Continuing the search engine exploration... So what happens if we do a search for Battelle whistleblower? That was interesting... We end up with this story which with a little more searching results in this and digging a little deeper yielded this (UT-B means the partnership between the University of Tennessee and Battelle that manages Oak Ridge National Laboratory [ORNL]):

In my settlement, I made sure that DOE and UT-B explicitly agreed that I had won the case. There were two reasons for this. One was that I did not want UT-B to be able to claim that I "dropped the case" or any such thing. But the other was that back in 1995 at PNNL, following a settlement in which Battelle paid their fired former employee J. C. Laul a sizeable amount for a whistleblower case that Laul was very likely to win if it had played out to the last act (legally speaking), PNNL head and later ORNL head Madia characterized the payout as "a straightforward business decision with the best interest of the US taxpayer in mind". But as a Government Accountability Project lawyer pointed out, Battelle spent over $400,000 of taxpayer money defending against Laul's whistleblower action, plus the $330,000 it had to return to the government for the fraudulent action that Laul (accurately) reported. Madia stated that the message of the settlement was "Don't sue us [Battelle]", but of course the true message was "We will get away with whatever we can".

So what our search engines report for us with just a little looking is that Battelle has a history of making stuff up and firing people. I was telling Barb this new information and she said, "You would think they would learn." Well yes, but there wasn't much to learn and it's a different lesson than the one we want them to learn. They have learned they can commit criminal acts and the worst that will happen is they come out even in the end--guaranteed by the contract they have with the Federal government. There are more amazingly great terms in their contract that I'll save for another day. I wouldn't want you to burst a vessel from a blood pressure spike.

Here are some of the lessons being taught to Battelle. This is right after being dinged for the first fraud case I mentioned above:

Battelle is expecting to receive an "outstanding" rating for fiscal year 1999 from the Department of Energy for its performance in operating Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland.

The rating is to become final and be announced in late December.

Last year, Battelle also received an outstanding rating. Even though its 1998 score fell just barely shy of the number needed for the top rating, DOE awarded the outstanding rating because of Battelle's strong efforts in key areas.

This year, Battelle expects to be well above the minimum score needed for an outstanding rating, based in part on the lab's self-assessment, outgoing lab Director Bill Madia said Wednesday during a meeting with the Tri-City Herald editorial board.

The real problem here is that Battelle/PNNL has no incentive to be responsible for their actions. It's like a child that gets in trouble at school and the parents intervene in such a way the child is totally protected from any punishment. There is no downside for their misbehavior--there is only upside. That's one of the ways criminals are created. After sufficient criminal activity they eventually get caught and then they go to prison. Which is has been my end goal from the beginning in then case. The PNNL felons need to spend some time being rented out by the quarter hour to fellow inmates bidding the most cigarettes for a few years and perhaps then the behavior of their previous co-workers will improve.

The above is just the tip of the iceberg. Battelle has other "skeletons in it's closet" that are most likely to come tumbling out soon. I don't have enough details to really be comfortable in talking about it even if I was at liberty to discuss it. I have been assured that I will be among the first to know when the details become public.

I'll keep you posted.

Update: A reader pointed out one of my links was broken. That is fixed now.

Also worthy of update is another source that is more readable and has the potential to be less biased is the actual ruling of the DOE in Westbrook's case:

There is evidence in the record that suggests that the RIF sheets, which contained the objective information on which the termination selections were to be made, were not given serious attention, and were drawn up to favor a pre-selected individual. I have reviewed the criteria set out on the RIF sheets and find troubling inaccuracies and manipulation.

...

In my view, the Company’s use of this criterion [transferability of skills] to assess whether an employee is flexible enough to “satisfy” or “get along with” customers is so strained that it suggests a manipulation of the system to reach a predetermined result. .... That leads me to believe its use was an afterthought, one designed to downgrade Westbrook and target her for termination. As such, it detracts from Battelle’s position that the RIF was performed impartially with respect to Westbrook.

I received an email from my lawyer today about my lawsuit against Pacific Northwest National Laboratory:

We do have service on Battelle. It was served on 1/22/07.

Whoo hooo!! Full speed ahead!

Of course that is in "legal time" rather than in "Internet time" like what I'm used to.

I also received a phone call yesterday from someone that heard about my case. They had lots of interesting information about other illegal activities Battelle has been involved with. He is sufficiently upset about it that he is taking it up with some government officials. I shared what I could with him. I'm not sure his information will be that useful to me but I hope to soon be posting some of it here or on my PNNL.info website. He claims some pretty egregious and illegal stuff.

It's not too surprising I guess. I did have a guy at the lab tell me and another fairly new employee, "See this badge? This means the law doesn't apply to us." That same "fairly new employee" recently sent me email saying, "I can definitely atest to a pattern of illegal and unethical activities at the lab" and "I do think it is my obligation as a citizen to see justice prevail."

The guy I received a phone call from had first called over two weeks ago. I put him in touch with "fairly new employee" and that contributed to the update yesterday about his plans to talk to the GAO, Congressional oversight committees, and the DOJ in the near future.

I have some hints that my previous plans to avoid getting former co-workers involved may not be possible. Now might be a good time for some of my friends that still work there to get new jobs (hint, hint). Things will be much more comfortable for them if they don't have to worry about getting fired for reporting information that is embarrassing to Battelle after being deposed. Also I've been hearing rumors of business being a little tight for them right now. If certain government agencies become displeased with all the illegal activities Battelle has been engaged in then business could get much worse soon.

I've been working for several days on the log files requested in the interrogatories for the PNNL lawsuit (no, I'm not converting them to EBCDIC although I gave it a few seconds of thought just for the amusement value). I only had a subset of the logs they wanted in a reasonably well organized manner. They wanted more than what I had organized, some of which I didn't have, lots of logs weren't in my preferred organization, many of the websites were hosted simultaneously on two different servers at the same time for a while, and the logs came from at least four different servers. It's been a lot of work but I'm nearly done with that part of it.

I obtained more log files from my old web-hosting provider last night and although there will be a few tweaks to the numbers the following is pretty close:

• Websites: ~30
• Directories: ~170
• Files: ~170,000
• Size: ~6 Gbytes

I realize they asked for this mostly to cause me pain, almost for certain they won't bother to do their own analysis, their own internal email and testimony will make this irrelevant, but I have been wanting to organize this stuff for several years anyway. I want to finish my web log analysis program (NoDooce) and this data set will be very useful for both development and testing. And besides, being the Aspergers type, I actually enjoy this type of work. I hope they find some expert witness to look at everything, pay him outrageous amounts of money, and he has as much fun as I have had with the data.

This is just the log files. There are also hundreds of pages of notes, documents I have obtained, and emails. I can't wait to start digging into the stuff they have to supply to me.

It's a little large to put it in your pocket or hip holster but you could mount it on your starship or even your Humvee:

MOODY AIR FORCE BASE, GA. — The military calls its new weapon an "active denial system," but that's an understatement. It's a ray gun that shoots a beam that makes people feel as if they are about to catch fire.

The technology is supposed to be harmless — a nonlethal way to get enemies to drop their weapons. Military officials say it could save the lives of civilians and service members in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

The weapon is not expected to go into production until at least 2010, but all branches of the military have expressed interest in it, officials said.

During the first media demonstration of the weapon Wednesday, airmen fired beams from a large dish antenna mounted atop a Humvee at people pretending to be rioters and acting out other scenarios that U.S. troops might encounter in war zones.

The device's two-man crew located their targets through powerful lenses and fired beams from more than 500 yards away. That is nearly 17 times the range of existing nonlethal weapons, such as rubber bullets. Anyone hit by the beam immediately jumped out of its path because of the blast of heat. Though the 130-degree heat wasn't painful, it was intense enough to make participants think their clothes were about to ignite.

...

The system uses electromagnetic millimeter waves, which can penetrate only 1/64 of an inch of skin, just enough to cause discomfort. By comparison, microwaves used in the common kitchen appliance penetrate several inches of flesh. The millimeter waves cannot go through walls, but they can penetrate most clothing, officials said. They refused to comment on whether the waves can go through glass.

Early in my career as an electrical engineer I worked with millimeter waves some. I'm sure it will go through most glass although it is possible to make glass it won't penetrate. It is also trivial to make clothes that block it. That doesn't mean it's useless but it will cause adversaries to spend time and money to acquire and utilize the necessary protective equipment.

As it is currently shown it's vulnerable to a well placed bullet. My advice is to armored that spot a little bit better before going to production with it. Otherwise a single agitator could disable it and enable a crowd to riot (whatever).

I'm attempting to just make just one pass before moving on. We'll see. In any case I wanted the three erroneous assumptions in a place I could find them easily in the future.

Someone in the U.K. commented to a post by Kevin and Kevin engaged him in an email debate. I responded with my own email:

From: Joe Huffman
Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2007 7:39 AM
To: nhpud AT[NOSPAM] hotmail.com
Cc: gunrights AT[NOSPAM] comcast.net (Kevin Baker @ The Smallest Minority)
Subject: You comment at The Smallest Minority.

You wrote:

It is unbelievable that there are people like you lot who can defend guns as 'harmless fun' or seriously state that 'guns make you safer'. If you weren't so dangerous the absurdity of it all would be hilarious.

I love how the topic quickly moves from your gun fantasies to your racial genocide fantasies in one swift paragraph.

I particularly like the idiocy of these comments.

"if you're not a young black male living in an inner city, your likelihood of dying by homicide (regardless of weapon) is about equal to that of someone living in Europe."

"if you remove the crimes committed by blacks and latinos, the U.S. violent crime rate is almost identical to that of Canada."

Like duh!! What a surprise eh? So if I remove the most deprived higher crime areas and people from the US figures and then compare it with the average in Europe (that includes all their deprived higher crime areas and population) it is 'roughly similar. Is there no amount of distortion of statistics you lot will go to to justify your idiocy? Let alone your thinly disguised prejudice against black people. Deny black people opportunities so the majority end up in poverty stricken neighbourhoods with little or no prospects and then when they act all dysfunctional, use this to justify your superiority and racial fantasies. I despair for humanity when there are dumb f***s like you walking the planet.

Boy am I glad I don't live next door to you guys.

PS Gun deaths have dropped from 368 a year to 163 since we banned handguns in the UK. You might want to follow our example and save 15,000 US lives a year by halving your gun deaths as well.

I have Just One Question for you:

Can you demonstrate one time or place, throughout all history, where the average person was made safer by restricting access to handheld weapons?

Basically your error is due to three unstated assumption:

1. Crimes committed with guns are independent of those committed with other weapons or merely greater physical strength. They are not. Just because a criminal does not have easy access to a gun doesn't mean they won't use some other weapon such as a knife, rock, club, feet, or fists.
2. All deaths or injuries inflicted with a firearm are bad. They are not. Many homicides and injuries committed with a firearm are legally justified and some are even praiseworthy. These incidences must be subtracted from the "bad" category and added to the "beneficial" category.
3. Restrictions on firearms will reduce the detrimental uses of firearms more than the beneficial uses of firearms. Typically anti-gun people either ignore or severely misrepresent the number of innocent lives protected by firearms. When they do try to pretend to take beneficial uses it into account they only count killings of a criminal and ignore the cases where the mere brandishing of a firearm halted an attack.

I look forward to your answer to my question.

-joe-

At some point you have to decide whether you're going to be a politician or an engineer. You cannot be both. To be a politician is to champion perception over reality. To be an engineer is to make perception subservient to reality. They are opposites. You can't do both simultaneously.

H. W. Kenton
[Substitute "scientist" for "engineer", I am both, and "An Inconvenient Truth" (the phrase as well as the movie) just screams at me when I read this quote. Thanks to my son James for bringing this quote to my attention.--Joe]

Sounds sort of like cleaning up campaign finance to me. Different people but with the same world view--people cannot be trusted with freedom:

Chinese Communist Party chief Hu Jintao has vowed to "purify" the internet, state media reported on Wednesday, describing a top-level meeting that discussed ways to master the country's sprawling, unruly online population.

...

Hu, a straitlaced communist with little sympathy for cultural relaxation, did not directly mention censorship.

But he made it clear that the Communist Party was looking to ensure it keeps control of China's internet users, often more interested in salacious pictures, bloodthirsty games and political scandal than Marxist lessons.

In the process of organizing my log files and complying with the Interrogatories I came across what appears to be the home IP address of one of the PNNL investigators or someone they reported the results of the investigation from the previous day (see also the first day of investigation).

Tracing it through various websites reveals more evidence the whole thing was about guns. Among the evidence is they had a lot of interest in a picture of me with a holstered gun on my hip and interest in Boomershoot.

One has to wonder if it's because they care about what we think of them or if it's just because they want to add people to "the list".

Someone at the US Senate did a Technorati search for Schumer and came up with my QOD from Kevin Imel.

Domain Name		senate.gov ? (United States Government)
IP Address		156.33.63.# (U.S. Senate Sergeant at Arms)
ISP		U.S. Senate Sergeant at Arms
Location		Continent  :  North America Country  :  United States  (Facts) State  :  District of Columbia City  :  Washington Lat/Long  :  38.8933, -77.0146 (Map) Distance  :  2,072 miles
Language		English (United States) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft WinXP
Browser		Firefox Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050225 Firefox/1.0.1
Javascript		version 1.5
Monitor		Resolution  :  1024 x 768 Color Depth  :  32 bits
Time of Visit		Jan 24 2007 6:56:31 am
Last Page View		Jan 24 2007 6:56:31 am
Visit Length		0 seconds
Page Views		1
Referring URL		http://www.technorati.com/search/schumer?language=en&start=0
Visit Entry Page		http://blog.joehuffm...e DayKevin Imel.aspx
Visit Exit Page		http://blog.joehuffm...e DayKevin Imel.aspx
Out Click
Time Zone		UTC-5:00
Visitor's Time		Jan 24 2007 9:56:31 am
Visit Number		129,171

I object to the term "born" for any of those slimeballs.  "Hatched" is probably closer although most are turds so would more appropriately have been "shat".

Kevin Imel
Tuesday, January 23, 2007 2:47 PM
In an email to: LewistonPistol@googlegroups.com
[In response to an urban legend kind of email that mistakenly claimed the birth month and year for the following politicians were all the same:

Albert Arnold Gore
Jr., Hillary Rodham
John F. Kerry
William Jefferson Clinton
Howard Dean
Nancy Pelosi
Dianne Feinstein
Charles E. Schumer
Barbara Boxer
--Joe]

In this sense strict anarchy may be the highest conceivable grade of perfection of social existence; for, if all men spontaneously did justice and loved mercy, it is plain that all swords might advantageously be turned into plowshares, and that the occupation of judges and police would be gone.

Thomas H. Huxley

If I've heard it once I've heard it a thousand times:  We have a "consumer based" society and as such, the more we spend, the better the economy, yak, yak, yak.  One of our recent presidents (I forget which one-- it doesn't matter as it could have been any one of them) was convinced of this well enough that he made a public statement asking Americans to go out and buy something, so as to help the economy.

No, Grasshopper.

A capitalist society (that is to say, a free socisty) gets its wealth from one source and one source only-- People who dream of new things, get excited about them, figure them out, and put them into practice and/or production.  Simply put, wealth is a product of a winning combination: The creative human mind in concert with hard work and determination.  I will herein go so far as to call it love.

"Hah! you idealist fool" you say, "oil and gold are not produced by humans, and THAT's wealth."  I say, tell that to a frog.  To a frog, petroleum is a dangerous, smelly goo that is to be avoided, and gold is just harmless and worthless.  The human mind on the other hand, has dreamed up, invented and created ways to locate, extract, refine and, more importantly, make use of, oil and gold-- they were not resources before the creativity of the human mind made them so.  

Other than a base, stone-age existence then (actually, remove the stones from that scenario, because humans invented stone tools) real wealth can only come from imagination, creativity, invention and productivity.

What the aforementioned U.S. President should have said (if he'd had a smidgeon of a clue) was, "Dream, Oh People.  Imagine something, create something, find a better way and then build a business around it.  Either that or throw your support behind someone who is doing it or has already done it.  In so doing you will be helping yourself while serving Mankind."  To my admitedly limited recollection, the only politician I've actually heard speak that way was, of all people, Condi Rice.

The next time you hear someone decrying the distastefulness of our "Consumerism" you can correct the major error in their thinking by stating this obvious fact:  Production is a prerequisite to consumption.

Therefore what we have, to the degree that ours is more successful than others, is a society built on "Producerism".

I find it more than a little telling that the word "consumerism" is in the dictionary, but the word "producerism" is not.

Socialist societies get their wealth from consuming (consuming other people's property) by plunder-- extorting from their own (all for very good reasons of course) and from conquest and enslavement.  Socialists are unhappy, defective, paranoid, upside-down individuals-- they have no imagination, which makes them unable to see or comprehend anything other than extortion and fraud as the primary means of getting things done.  This would certainly explain their hatred (even self-hatred) for the wealthy.

Update:  I forgot blind luck.  In addition to extortion and fraud, a socialist sees blind luck as the other means of enrichment, as in "Winners of Life's Lottery", etc..

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.  But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God.  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

Thomas Jefferson
[A concept that has served us well for over 200 years but the Muslims still have not learned. It appears they are slow learners. But then if you look at our recreational drug laws and gun laws we still have a lot to learn as well.--Joe]

I updated my personal website. It's pretty badass right now.

Xenia Joy Huffman-Scott
Updated Website
January 21, 2007
[Yup. It's very pretty.--Dad]

Acknowledging the existence of evil - not just evil people but evil itself - is a prerequisite to understanding and controlling it. Denying that evil exists, and that it is a proper metaphor for the worst kind of behavior, ensures that evil will prosper.

Cal Thomas
4/24/95
Column

I found it posted on Michelle Malkin's blog:

Trust me-- you'll want to read the whole thing.  You might also want to print it and hang it on your wall, framed, next to the Bill of Rights (you do have a copy, don't you?).  Though the term is over-used, I will say that this man was in fact a "Real American".  The kind of American that made America in the first place.

This man was more articulate at the age of 23 than I am at 48.  His parents, teachers, and home-town folk must be some pretty great people.  Now excuse me, I can't type anymore.