It’s progress

One small step at a time then a half step backward–Iowa Permits Same-Sex Marriage, for 4 Hours, Anyway.

I’m happy about this for three reasons:

  1. I believe same sex marriage has more benefits to the individuals and society than making it illegal. Hence it’s “the right thing to do”.
  2. It causes Democrats heartburn in the coming election.
  3. It forces the issue of full faith and credit between the states with regards to licenses of all types–including concealed carry licenses.

I do agree it really should be handled in the legislative arena rather than the judicial arena but court action such as this forces the legislature to address it.

Quote of the day–Clayton Cramer

A politician has to wear a mask that hides who he is really is–to be different people to different interest groups–in order to get elected. For a lot of homosexuals, unless they choose to be open about it, they also have to wear a mask that hides who they really are. Perhaps all these gay politicians are the consequence of people who get used to wearing a mask about their sexuality–and find it very easy to then leapfrog into politics, a career that does not require, but certainly encourages equivocation, shading the truth, and flat-out lies.

None of this would matter if Craig had either been discreet, or intelligent. But he managed to fail on both counts with this stunt in Minneapolis, and made all of this relevant.

Clayton Cramer
August 29, 2007
I Just Noticed That Larry Craig’s Three Kids Are All Adopted
[I disagree with a lot of Cramer opinions about gays, but I think he has it right this time.–Joe]

Larry Craig is resigning

Hot off the AP press:

Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig will resign from the Senate amid a furor over his arrest and guilty plea in a police sex sting in an airport men’s room, Republican officials said Friday.

Craig will announce at a news conference in Boise Saturday morning that he will resign effective Sept. 30, four state GOP officials told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity.

It’s a significant blow to the gun rights movement at the Federal level. He is one of our strongest allies. Even if he is replaced with someone as rock solid on the issue they won’t have the seniority and hence the power Craig had.

As Sean and I were discussing at lunch today–I don’t care what he does with consenting adults in private. Hooking up in public restrooms (assuming he was doing that) is just plain stupid.

Bummer

Via Sebastian I discovered our NRA Board Member, and Idaho Senator, Larry Craig was arrested and plead guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct. Here are the articles I’ve read so far:

From the second article:

According to the police reports, a man, later identified as Craig, kept watching the undercover police officer through a crack in the stall, Roll Call reported. Craig then entered the next-door stall and placed his luggage against the opening under the stall door.

“My experience has shown that individuals engaging in lewd conduct use their bags to block the view from the front of their stall,” said the officer, Sgt. Dave Karsnia, in the report cited by Roll Call.

The report continued: “At 1216 hours, Craig tapped his right foot. I recognized this as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct. Craig tapped his toes several times and moves his foot closer to my foot. I moved my foot up and down slowly. While this was occurring, the male in the stall to my right was still present. I could hear several unknown persons in the restroom that appeared to use the restroom for its intended use. The presence of others did not seem to deter Craig as he moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot which was within my stall area.”

The report said Craig swiped his hand beneath the stall divider several times, and Karsnia showed his police identification under the stall.

It doesn’t appear anything happened beyond a creepy game of footsies, but it’s conduct unbecoming a Senator. Especially so for one that is one of gun rights strongest supporters.

On a local email list the subject line of the thread discussing this is “Is Larry a Fairy?”.

Update: The police report can be found here.

Left wing wackos for guns

Left Wing Wackos for Guns is an interesting read even if it’s all old news to us at the forefront of the gun rights movement. It’s more evidence that we are winning. I look forward to the day when I can put gun rights on the “back burner” to simmer and increment by two the Constitutional Amendment of my primary focus.

Its Happening Here, Too

When our first child was born, and again after the second, a state case worker was assigned to visit us, inspect our new house, ask us a list of questions and determine whether we were deemed by the state to be fit to keep our own child.  We were allowed, but only after installing fire extinguishers and making a few minor changes around the house, which I had planned anyway.  I had almost forgotten about that small, (to me then) but at the same time insidious, outrage.

Fast forward 14 years, to a post I’d already been working on:

***

Your Doctor as a Politician, Politicians as Doctors

My wife took our son in for a sports-physical the other day.  The kid’s as healthy as any.  I can almost be persuaded to go along and agree with the school’s requirement, but only in empathy with the administrators, in light of what the trial lawyers have done to our society.   Football is strenuous, sure, but so are a lot of things.  We don’t get a checkup every time we plan a bicycle trip, or for doing farm work, which he did this summer, or shoveling the snow…

The typical string of health related questions was asked, then this question, tagged on at the end:

“Are there any guns in your house?”
“Yes, several”
“Are any of them loaded?”
“Uh, I don’t think so.”
“Well…….stay safe!”

Aside from being completely irrelevant to a sports exam, it’s a bit of a trick question, isn’t it– are any of them loaded?  We teach our kids to treat every gun as if its loaded, never to assume it is unloaded, but I digress.

I wish I’d been there, so I could have explained my point of view to the good doctor, preferably while holding a baseball bat, you know, just to demonstrate that although we keep baseball bats in our house, we keep them for sporting purposes only.

We all need a medical doctor once in a while.  Sometimes our lives may depend on it.  This of course is why people who desire control over other people are trying so desperately to get hold of the medical industry.  Our doctor had ceased being a doctor with those gun questions, and had become a schlep/tool for anti-gun activists, fishing for potential leverage against gun owners.  Remember during the 1990s when they were defining “gun crime” as a “public health” issue?  That was about the same time our co-president was pushing for full nationalization of health care (I say “full” because we’re already halfway there).

Our doctor asked no questions about any of several more common and statistically far greaterd dangers found in a typical home.  “Do you have any insect poisons? for  instance, was not asked.  Nor was anyone in the medical field interested in how much time our kids are spending on bicycles, around a swimming pool, around matches and gasoline, in the sun without sunscreen, or whether there are stairs in the house, or unlocked liquors (which there are, by the way).  They didn’t ask about access to sharp knives, time spent on the highways, running with scissors, unprotected sex, or the condition of our house wiring.  Therefore the gun questions can without hesitation be said to have been motivated exclusively by politics.

***

After writing that, I came across the following, courtesy of K. Dutoit.  The Britts are taking kids away from parents by the thousands, it seems:

He tells Mrs Brookes: “I would like you and your baby to stay in hospital until the courts have made a decision.”

As though they were being given a choice.  That’s cute.  Its also dishonest and sickening.

The social worker says the two or three days the mother has with her baby in hospital will allow her to begin breast-feeding and that once the infant is taken away, social services will pick up expressed breast milk from her home and deliver it to the foster carers (sic) for bottle-feeding.

I can imagine the Social Services (SS) worker speaking in a German accent:  Vee haff come for zee breast milk.  If you haff not met zee quota, schnell! (Those of you with children will understand.  The rest of you will think I’m trying to be funny.)

The social worker admits to the couple that a back-up plan is being drawn up in case the judge refuses the application for a care order. He says: “What we also have to think about is a child protection plan that looks at you, at home, with your baby. There is no immediate risk to your child from yourselves, that’s my understanding from reading documents.”

Throw ’em a bone of hope in an insane situation, like you’re on their side.  F*<%ers!  Those of you with children will understand.  Those without children:  You can never understand the extent of the pure evil of this.  Its how they get you.  You cannot fight them.  You cannot do anything but hope you can have your child back.  Its all that matters to you, and you won’t do anything to risk upsetting those in charge of your baby’s fate.  It is a hell like you cannot imagine.  Nothing alleged to have happened at Abu Ghraib under U.S. control comes anywhere close. I am not kidding.

Juxtapose the UK story with our doctor’s incongrous gun questions for my son here in the U.S., and I submit that unless we stop this sort of thing, smack it down wherever it pops up, we’ll end up with our very own police state, with the medical profession, social services, and lets not forget education, as integral parts of the enforcement system.  All acting very polite of course, saying, “Please do this” and, “Please do that” while they have absolute power over you.

Hillary-Care anyone?

No.  I’ll opt for Liberty, thank you very much.

Honoring Our Troops

Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton, among others, is telling us that we might “honor” our troops.  This “honor” is not to come in the form of allowing them to win, and not through convincing the enemy that they will be utterly defeated no matter what it takes, but by bringing our troops home.

Lets apply that same logic to our firemen:  Lets “honor” our firemen by keeping them out of fire trucks and away from fires.  While we’re at it, we can “honor” our public school teachers in similar fashion, by sending them home, sparing them the difficult and often unpleasant task of dealing with the ins and outs of teaching kids: Planning course syllabi, meeting on-going certification requirements, writing and grading assignments, dealing with administration and parents, etc..  We can further “honor” our poor, suffering teachers by accusing them of torturing kids.  We can then “honor” them by launching false prosecutions and endless investigations against them.

As long as we’re “honoring” whole cross sections of society, we might consider “honoring” our senators by reducing legislative sessions (and adjusting pay, of course) to one day per year.  Would could at least “honor” Hillary by “redeploying” her out of Washington, possibly to the Philippines, where she could be called in on two or three-days’ notice in the event we desperately need her inside an hour.

As is typical with other words misused by leftists, it seems the words “honor” and “support” have taken on new and diametrically opposite meanings.

I would therefore like to; “Honor Hillary.  Send her home!”  She can’t win anyway.  Her war against America is a lost cause, based on a lie.

More OUO material

I got in trouble with PNNL because someone thought my daughter might have had access to “Official Use Only” material. The material in question was marked OUO but was never OUO. We managed to get evidence of that after filing a motion to compel with the judge but legally it just didn’t matter. Someone saw the markings, didn’t bother to check to see if the markings were valid, see if Xenia actually had access, and acted accordingly–I lost my job. Here is another document marked OUO: I Found Ted Kennedy’s Safe! (nice demonstration video of .50 BMG capabilities). I reported the OUO material from the TSA about three weeks ago.

What’s interesting to me is that you find quite a lot of stuff if you do a search for “Official Use Only” on Live Search (142,637 items) or Google (about 815,000 items). Most of that is not actually government OUO material but some of it is and was put on websites and indexed when it really shouldn’t have been. And then there is the stuff marked as OUO for political purposes. And even some of the material marked and protected as OUO is still available under the Freedom of Information Act:

The For Official Use Only designation is also used by CIA and a number of other federal agencies, but each agency is responsible for determining how it shall be used. The categories of protected information may be quite different from one agency to another, although in every case the protected information must be covered by one of the nine categories of information that are exempt from public release under FOIA.

Some agencies use different terminology for the same types of information. For example, Department of Energy uses Official Use Only (OUO). Department of State uses Sensitive But Unclassified (SBU), formerly called Limited Official Use (LOU). The Drug Enforcement Administration uses DEA Sensitive. In all cases the designations refer to unclassified, sensitive information that is or may be exempt from public release under the Freedom of Information Act.

The fact that information is marked FOUO does not mean it is automatically exempt from public release under FOIA. If a request for the information is received, it must be reviewed to see if it meets the FOIA dual test: (1) It fits into one of the nine FOIA exemption categories, and (2) There is a legitimate government purpose served by withholding the information. On the other hand, the absence of the FOUO or other marking does not automatically mean the information must be released in response to a FOIA request.

Part of why I’m doing all the FOIA requests is to demonstrate that the material Xenia supposedly had access to, which was a major component the supposed reason I was fired, is in fact available to anyone that asks for it. This doesn’t matter in a legal sense in terms of a wrongful termination lawsuit–they could make up a rule that says people can’t trim their nose hair or some such thing and fire people that do. Of course this is all rather embarrassing to PNNL and they are just ignoring the FOIA requests–because they think the law doesn’t apply to them. The person that said “See this badge?  This means the law doesn’t apply to us.” was Newton Brown, who instigated the investigation against me.

More details on the entire story of what happened to me at PNNL including how they let unauthorized people, perhaps including foreign nationals, have access to hundreds of computers with OUO material on them, some other time–I want to reload some ammo this morning before I have lunch with Barb.

Quote of the day–Mark Twain

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.

Mark Twain
[It’s a bit simplistic but as a general rule I’m inclined to agree. Majorities have a strong tendency to ignore inalienable rights and abuse minorities. And I’m talking about all types of minorities including those based on things like sexual orientation and habits (include “sex workers”), recreational drug use, gun ownership, and types of hobbies (think “model rocketry”).–Joe]

It’s all in the mindset

The headline reads SF Leads Nation With Toughest Gun Control Law. It’s not true, Washington D.C. and Chicago are tougher with near complete bans on handguns and severe restrictions on long guns. But that’s not my main point. The headline could just as accurately be SF Bigots Implement Repressive Law Against a Minority but that might make the bigots feel bad about themselves.

Quote of the day–Martha Stout

A person without conscience, even a smart one, tends to be a short sighted and naive individual who eventually expires of boredom, financial ruin, or a bullet.

Martha Stout
The Sociopath Next Door
[At first I was rather depressed by the book. In the U.S. one in 25 people has no conscience. They can do anything they want and not feel the least bit of guilt. Fear of getting caught and punished yes, but that just means they work a little hard and smarter to get away with whatever they want to do. Torturing animals, torturing humans, lying, cheating, backstabbing, murder, rape, whatever relieves their boredom. Those that follow the rules are stupid and naive. All part of the mindset of the sociopath. And it is the sociopath that is the dictator, the corrupt politician, the serial killer, and one of the reasons the average person needs to own a gun. As I got near the end of the book I heard about what serious deficits they have in their emotional lives and how their lives frequently end. This gave me hope. Hope that perhaps justice is more sure than it sometimes appears to be.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Oscar Wilde

Democracy is a bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people.

Oscar Wilde
[My original source claimed it was Wilde but I can’t confirm it. But in any case–this is part of the reason why we have a republic rather than a democracy. But these days one could make the case there isn’t all that much difference between the two.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Jeff Knox

I can’t endorse the bill because it is wasteful and supports an unconstitutional program, but I won’t oppose it because it contains provisions that I consider critically important — things I’ve been writing about for years — correcting the injustices of permanently denying Second Amendment rights, without recourse, to tens of thousands of people. Maybe I’m missing something and maybe I’m wrong, but at this point, I think our energy can be expended in much more productive ways — making sure Tiahrt passes comes to mind.

Jeff Knox
Hard Corps Report
May – June 2007
Volume 4, Issue 3
[Jeff captures my take on it quite well. I wish I had got around to reading it before I posted my own opinion of the Tiahrt amendment.–Joe]

A look into our future

From Canada, Turning Legal Gun Owners Into SOCIAL LEPERS:

Citing concern over the “sinister uses” of guns, University of Toronto officials are closing down their 88-year-old shooting range. No word yet on the fate of the university’s chemistry labs.

More than just one more example of political correctness run amok (which of course it is), I take this gesture as academic ideologues’ invitation to government to follow suit and ban gun sport and gun collecting nationally. Alas, I think the initiative might find broad public support. To many liberal Canadians nowadays, tolerating gun use in any capacity is akin to complicity in Bambi’s mother’s murder, fatalism regarding school massacres and genuflection to American imperialism.

And from the same article it looks like I have a new book to read:

In a recently-published book discussed on these pages last Thursday, Mistakes Were Made:Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson argue that many social and cultural problems spring from humans’ inability to admit when they’re wrong. How right they are. And as further evidence to those adduced in their book, I would cite: the blinkered ideologues who punish responsible gun users for the sins of criminals; police who automatically privilege the idle or fabricated concerns of disaffected women over men’s property and civil rights; and governments who continue to throw good money after bad in perpetuating an institution that fails utterly to deter gun crime, but succeeds magnificently in stigmatizing an identifiable minority of law-abiding citizens as criminals in waiting.

Our future as gun owners doesn’t have to be same as that of Canadian gun owners. Right now we essentially have the bigots at a standstill. We need to keep pushed them and change the attitudes in this country. We have to have the right mindset and turn the anti-gun bigots into the social lepers.

Quote of the day–Will Rogers

It’s a good thing we don’t get all the government we pay for.

Will Rogers

Quote of the day–Plato

Access to power must be confined to those who are not in love with it.

Plato
[This concept, more fully expressed in the U.S. Constitution, has been around for a very long time. It’s sad this fundamental truth is ignored by the majority of people.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Alan Korwin

Popularity isn’t the basis for war. The struggle for human freedom is. War is ugly by design, and instigated by tyrants, oppressors, fascists, religious fanatics bent on world domination, and other enemies of freedom.

Alan Korwin
April 2, 2007
Genocidal Peace Supporters

Republican Machinegun Shoot/Fundraiser

Now here are some people who know how to have fun.

Tired of the usual chicken dinners, the Manchester Republican Committee is planning to arm supporters next month with Uzis, M-16 rifles and other automatic weapons for a day of target practice at a Pelham firing range.

“The thought just struck me one day: a machine gun shoot. What the heck?” said Jerry Thibodeau, the committee chairman.

We can expect the usual hysterics from the anti-freedom crowd, which of course adds to the fun.  They’re actually talking about firing sub guns and assault rifles at the fund raiser, but the term “machine gun” sounds more interesting I guess.  For myself, I’d like to fire a nice M2 at some old trucks and a few of Joe’s boomers.  Ma Duce is big, well-made, heavy, powerful, and loud as hell.  What’s not to like?

I find it encouraging that politicians on both sides of the turd feel the need to appeal to American gun owners.  We’ll see whose appeals are honest (or should I say the least disingenuous).

Quote of the day–Charles Edward Montague

War hath no fury like a non-combatant.

Charles Edward Montague
[Sounds like Cindy whats-her-name and most of the Democratic party doesn’t it?–Joe]

Quote of the day–Elbert Hubbard

The only foes that threaten America are the enemies at home; and these are ignorance, superstition, and incompetence.

Elbert Hubbard
June 19, 1856 – May 7, 1915
[Add in “malice” and that statement is as true now as it was then. One only need look at what political left is currently trying to do in regards to the war.–Joe]