Security and law enforcement idiocy tonight

First, on the molesters at TSA,
After ProPublica published an investigation, reported in conjunction with PBS NewsHour, showing that the X-ray scanners had evaded rigorous safety evaluations, the head of the TSA told Senator Susan Collins that his agency would conduct a new independent safety study. He subsequently backed off that promise, prompting the senator to write the TSA pressing the agency to go ahead with the study and asking it to post larger signs alerting pregnant women that they have the option to have a physical pat-down instead of going through the X-ray scanners.

The TSA has repeatedly touted a series of polls showing strong public support for the scanners. But those polls and surveys – conducted by Gallup, The Wall Street Journal and various travel sites – largely dealt with the privacy issue.

Only one of those polls – by CBS News – asked specifically about X-ray body scanners, finding that 81 percent of Americans thought that such X-ray scanners should be used in airports. But that poll – like all the others – did not mention the risk of cancer.

When confronted with the cancer-terrorism trade-off, however, Americans took a much more negative view of the scanners.
Gee, ya THINK?

and in a move that, unless the Feebs alter the definition to give federal minions some kind of pass,
A recent meeting of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Criminal Justice Advisory Policy Board led to the FBI changing their definition of rape following a series of complaints from activists who said the earlier wording wasn’t broad enough to cover many sexual assaults. When the Bureau officially adopts the new definition in 2012, rape will be considered “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim."

You know those “enhanced pat-downs” that Transportation Security Administration agents are always offering, often with unfavorable backlashes from airport patrons who feel humiliated, violated and disgusted with what the government thinks is an appropriate way to counter terror? Well, that’s soon going to be rape. And the TSA? Serial rapists.
The screaming by the molesters and abusers must've been deafening when they heard about this.


And now to the LE idiocy, in Minneapolis:
Flash grenades are intended to distract and intimidate, not to injure people, but during the raid the device rolled under the legs of Russell, who was seated on a sofa, and exploded. The police were looking that day for a drug dealer, narcotics and a firearm, but found nothing.

Russell, now 31, suffered third- and fourth-degree burns that caused a deep indentation on the back of one leg, requiring skin grafts from her scalp. She is still undergoing physical therapy.
And why did the Minneapolis Popo do this?
On the night of Feb. 16, 2010, 18 officers were executing a search warrant on the apartment at 5753 Sander Drive based on a tip that narcotics were being sold at the address by someone named David Conley.
'based on a tip'. Obvious question: did they actually take the trouble to INVESTIGATE this tip? Or were they too busy putting on their ninja suits and pulling out the ram?

And, in what- after the other disciplinary action that won't happen- ought to result in prosecutions and firings, we have this disregard of law, and of giving a damn:
In what Bennett called "a cascading series of errors," a Minneapolis police SWAT team smashed down the door with a battering ram without warning, when the search warrant police had obtained required officers to announce themselves before entering.

Police had applied for a "no-knock" warrant but did not get it, Bennett said.
Got that? "Fuck the rules, fuck the law, let's take the door!" I guess they're lucky there wasn't a dog around to be shot.

Oh, and let's add 'lying while under oath' to the bullshit:
Police insist they shouted "search warrant" before knocking down the door, according to police reports, and say the grenade was dropped on the door threshold and not rolled toward Russell. Officer Cliff Taylor wrote in after-action reports that he was the one who dropped the flash-bang grenade.
Yeah, he 'dropped' it and it rolled across the room and under her leg. Right.

And in the 'trying to cover our ass' end,
Russell was arrested on a misdemeanor for having a "disorderly house" but never charged. She sued the city in federal court last year.
And, the expected
No discipline was imposed on the officers, Minneapolis spokesman Matt Laible said.
Because violating the law and ethics and acting like a bunch of idiot thugs instead of peace officers isn't a problem, I guess.

I'm going to stop writing now; I'm so fucking pissed and disgusted I'm about to degenerate into really bad language.

Added: found this at FI, and it fits real well:
Yeah, it's from a tv show; it still speaks to exactly the problems we're running into

It's cloudy, cold and damp outside

and most of the damaged joints in my body are telling me about it.

Just in case anyone is not aware, if you go to Baen Books and choose 'Read Baen' you can go to the free library.

Free.

As in you can download a bunch of books free in e-format. Good stuff. And if you like it can contribute to the free library.

Oh, President Hopey-Changey won't like this

Legislation that would withhold United States funds from the United Nations if the U.N. pushes an arms treaty that threatens the Second Amendment has been introduced by freshman Illinois Congressman Joe Walsh, and the Bellevue-based Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms helped draft it.

CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb has more than just a passing interest in this issue. For the past couple of years, he’s been investing hundreds of hours of time, and tens of thousands of air miles flying to Europe to meet with gun rights activists there, and helping to form an international gun rights organization.

In a statement issued late Wednesday afternoon, he noted:

“The United Nations’ effort to adopt a global gun control initiative needs to be reined in. For too many years, bureaucrats in the United Nations have become far too cozy with international gun prohibition organizations, and Congressman Walsh’s legislation seems the best way to get their attention. We’ve been delighted and honored to be part of this effort.”

Walsh, a Republican elected last year, crafted HR 3594 to block this country from providing any funds to the U.N. unless the president certifies that the U.N. “has not taken any action to restrict, attempt to restrict, or otherwise adversely infringe upon the rights of individuals…to keep and bear arms, or abridge any of the other constitutionally protected rights” of American citizens.

A view from Moe Lane on Holder & Gunwalker

Rep. Ted Poe, R-TX: Would you agree that this operation was reckless? It was a reckless operation on the part of the United States?

Attorney General Eric Holder: I mean, I think that the way that it was carried out I’d certainly say it was flawed, reckless, yeah I’d probably agree with that. I mean it was done inappropriately, and has had tragic consequences and is going – as I’ve said in my opening statement – it’s going to continue to have tragic consequences…

Rep. Poe: More people are going to die? Probably?

AG Holder: Unfortunately, I think that that’s probably true.

So. Let us recap.

• The Obama administration created Operation Fast & Furious, which deliberately put large numbers of guns in the hands of people who were considered likely to resell them illegally to Mexican narco-terrorists.
• The Obama administration did not follow the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives’ own rules for selling guns in sting operations.
• The Obama administration did not keep track of the guns.
• The Obama administration did not inform the Mexican government that the USA was arming their country’s drug gangs.
• The Obama administration did not do anything about the Mexican civilian deaths that resulted from Operation Fast & Furious.
• The Obama administration did not keep our own country’s law enforcement personnel in the loop, which inevitably resulted in at least one of our own Border Agents getting shot (possibly even by a weapon that the Obama administration facilitated).
• The Obama administration did not voluntarily tell the truth about any of this.
• And there is at least some suggestion that the Obama administration had a domestic political agenda in mind. One involving domestic gun control.

Let’s not mince words: Eric Holder – and a bunch of other people mentioned by name in this article – needs to resign in disgrace. I don’t care whether he was complicit in Operation Fast & Furious or not; the actions of the Department of Justice are ultimately his responsibility, which means that so are the deaths that resulted from the DoJ’s incompetence/scheming/incompetent scheming.

The whole thing's here

Holder tells committee "I'm not going to produce things you ordered produced

and you can't make me!"
Things began unraveling for Holder when Issa referred to some 5,000 documents that were mostly e-mails. But Issa raised a curious point: Not one of the e-mails was from Holder. He posed this question:

Don't you think it's a little conspicuous...that there's not one e- mail to or from you related to Fast and Furious in any way, shape or form?

A bit later in the hearing, Franks came back to that issue and it was then that Holder admitted that materials dated later than Feb. 5 of this year…

“…have not been produced and it is not our intention to produce them…”

Throughout the investigation, reams of documents have surfaced, some provided by the Justice Department and others produced by whistleblowers and confidential informants. There have been countless e-mails released as attachments to letters written by Issa and/or Senator Charles Grassley, who is also investigating Fast and Furious. Several of those e-mails show redacted recipient addresses, suggesting that someone who did the redacting decided that those concealed identities did not need to become public.

This raises a serious question: Why not?

Thursday’s Judiciary hearing opens a new avenue for the investigation that may zero on the “conspicuous absence” of any Holder e-mails in documents provided to Issa’s investigators.

Yeah. Impeachment and other charges. Which makes me wonder what and who- besides his own ass- Holder's trying to protect; he knows the chance of them backing off is very low, so is he just desperate enough to hope, or...

So someone is trying the Bellesiles method of 'history' again

These statements are claims about restrictions on civilian gun possession — about who was “permitted to own guns,” who was “prohibit[ed]” from owning guns, who was subject to “firearms restrictions” and “gun regulation,” whose “disarmament” was “allowed” by various “laws,” and so on — and not merely about who could be excluded from militia duty.

Yet unfortunately, none of the sources that the article cites actually shows that early American laws barred poor whites, women, and noncitizens from owning guns. Perhaps there are such early sources. But the article does not cite them, nor do the sources that the article cites on these matters sufficiently support the article’s assertions.... The article [does cite one contemporary source], which says that “the meaning of the right to bear arms, unlike virtually any other right described in either state constitutions or the federal Constitution, was colored by the inchoate notions of class and rank that shaped American politics in this period.” But, however the “meaning” of the right may have been “colored,” that passage points to no statutes that actually limited gun ownership by women, poor whites, or aliens....

The article does include a footnote that says, “I am not arguing that women were prevented from owning arms; rather, prevailing statutes and legal opinions gendered arms bearing in important ways.” So the careful reader might grasp that the article’s claims about women — but not the article’s claims about poor whites and noncitizens — are not what they first appear.

But I am afraid that some readers might understandably miss that footnote. And if they see it, they might understandably be confused, because it is difficult to reconcile that footnote with the article’s statements that:

“[S]ince only ‘First-Class citizens’ were allowed to ... bear arms ..., ... women ... were denied many fundamental rights presently associated with citizenship.”
“[G]un regulation [depended] on a conception of membership in the national community con¬tin¬gent upon ... gender.”
“[O]nly select citizen males could legitimately exercise the right to bear arms.”
“[A]rms bearing was considered congruent to voting.”
“[F]irearms ... could be denied to most ... women.”

...
When the article was available in draft on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), I e-mailed the author asking whether he had found some sources showing that women, poor whites, and noncitizens had indeed been disarmed by law. I asked again after the Law Review published the article. But while the author kindly and promptly replied to my e-mails, neither response pointed to any sources that actually showed that women, poor whites, or noncitizens were legally constrained from owning guns.

It thus seems to me that the article may leave the reader with a mistaken understanding of the matter. I thought this was worth communicating to readers....



About Holder's lyi- ah, testimony the other day:
There you have it: One of the most incompetent (at best) and murderous operations ever undertaken in the name of the Justice Department, and all the attorney general can do is say they’ve closed the barn door now that the horses have fled, taking the guns and ammo with them.

Oh, and promise to get to the bottom of things . . . someday.


Oh yeah, I'd have loved to have someone put it to Holder this way after his "Have you no shame?" bullshit:
Rep. Matthew Hoy (R-Hoystory): Shame? Shame!? Hundreds of Mexicans are dead. Border Agent Brian Terry is dead. The department that you have authority over allowed more than 2,000 guns to cross the border into the hands of violent drug cartels and you have the gall to chide elected representatives of the American people who seek to hold you to account for your lawlessness?

Shame?

Your deputy submitted a letter to Congress that you withdrew only after subsequent disclosures proved it to be full of lies. You can split legal hairs about there being no “intent” to deceive Congress when that letter was originally submitted, but as time goes by that claim begins to look flimsier and flimsier.

Shame?

We found out just days ago that that ATF officials sought to use the violence in Mexico and the fact that U.S.-bought guns were showing up at crime scenes in that country as a pretext to push for further restrictions on Americans’ Second Amendment rights. You, of course, were ignorant of this.

Shame?

It’s been the better part of six months, or maybe 9 or 12, depending on the quality of your memory and the meaningless difference between “weeks” and “months” in your concept of time, since you knew about this operation and not a single individual has lost their job, let alone has had charges filed against them for violations of federal laws.

Hundreds are dead as a direct result of actions undertaken by your subordinates and you wish to shame Congress?

Mr. Attorney General, if you had any integrity. If you had any honor, you would fire those most responsible for this travesty and then resign yourself.

The only person in this committee room who should be feeling shame is you and what you allowed—either by design or by neglect—to happen in Operation Fast and Furious.

Chairman: Member’s time has expired.



Rep. Hank Johnson(NSD-GA): "This is all made up by you!"
Johnson’s comments came during an interview with The Daily Caller outside the House Judiciary Committee hearing room. Attorney General Eric Holder was testifying before the committee about Fast and Furious — a Justice Department program where Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents facilitated the sale of about 2,000 guns to Mexican drug cartels.

“I think this is another manufactured controversy by the second amendment, NRA Republican tea party movement,” Johnson said.
You only wish, Johnson.
And then he moves on to the Gun Show Loophole bullcrap; because SOMETHING has to be done to distract from the actual wrongs done by Holder & Co.


Also from Holder: "I'm far too busy to read the stuff I know you're going to ask me about. And the dog ate my briefing file."


Sipsey Street notes the NYEffin'Times practicing its usual level of journalism:
But Mr. Savage, in his zeal to portray Darrell Issa as the latter-day Joe McCarthy, convicted by the stout-hearted Holder's rebuttal, manages to tell a lie. Not a half-truth, not a misinterpretation, not a misstatement, but a lie.

But Mr. Holder snapped near the very end, after Mr. Issa, who has been a leader of the Fast and Furious investigation, compared him to John Mitchell, the Nixon administration attorney general who went to prison for his role in the Watergate scandal. “The reference to John Mitchell — think about that,” he said. “At some point, as they said in the McCarthy hearings, have you no shame?” The comment was a paraphrase of a famous 1954 rebuke of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican who rose to fame and power by accusing military and government officials of Communist sympathies, destroying careers and reputations. Mr. Issa did not respond.

The only problem with this is that Darrell Issa DID respond. And anybody who was paying attention in the room heard it and knew it. When Holder demanded of Issa, "Have you no shame?" Issa INSTANTLY shot back: "Have YOU no shame?" Now, Issa's words were -- for whatever reason -- barely picked up by the mike, but they certainly carried to everybody at the press table, where I was at. Savage's false account makes it seem like Darrell Issa was somehow silenced by the valiant Holder. That is a lie. It is, however, the standard of reportage we have come to expect from media lickspittles like Charlie Savage. Of course, the sad thing for Charlie is that there is now a new media to call out the lies of the dinosaur media. Poor Lyin' Charlie. Poor New York Times.


More to come, but I'm out of time

Well, let's see,

"The dog ate those memos."

"You think my aides don't know what not to mention?"

"It depends on what the meaning of 'is'- wait..."

"So, you see, we need more gun laws to keep my staff and underlings from doing things like this!"

"Whadda you mean, I HAVE to answer you? Don't you know who I am?"

"I am the Emissary! You don't dare lay hands on me!"

Suggestions accepted here, and also please leave them at the origination point

And the 'I' word was used to Holder

SENSENBRENNER: The American people need the truth. They haven’t gotten the truth from what has been coming out of the Justice Department in the last year and they were relying on Congress to get the truth….You’re here today as a way to get the truth, but the answers that you have given so far are basically saying ‘Gee, well somebody else did it.’ And there is really no responsibility within the Justice Department. If we don’t get to the bottom of this, and that requires your assistance on this, there is really only one alternative the Congress has. And it’s called impeachment.

It appears they've been studying under Bill Clinton:
Per Holder, no one lied.
'It all has to do with your state of mind and whether or not you had the requisite intent to come up with something that would be considered perjury or a lie," he said in reply to a line of questioning by Rep. James Sensenbrenner.
Can you say "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is."?
Have to wonder about this:
Among some of the surprises: Holder was not sworn in as Issa had requested. Chairman Lamar Smith indicated the attorney general was already technically under oath.
So it wouldn't hurt to make sure it wasn't just 'technically', would it? Is Smith playing games on some deal with the administration?


And Holder playing "You wound me, sir!"
Also at Ace:
The background on this is that Holder is taking the position that because he appointed an Inspector General to look into this matter (someone who is alleged to be covering this up, of course), he does not have to produce any documents created since that appointment (which was in February of this year).

Why? I suppose his claim is that it might interfere with the investigation. But so what? As a commenter said earlier, "Co-equal, motherf***er, do you speak it?"

The fact that the Executive is performing its own investigation (supposedly) does not disburden Holder from his duty to respond to legitimate Congressional inquiries.

And, FYI, this is all a nonsense cover-up; this "independent investigation" was started just so they could start saying "We can't comment on that until our investigation reports back to us on January 25th, 2012."

I bet having the word Impeachment said openly to Holder about his future must've caused some heartburn. And I hope it irritates his hemorrhoids, too.

Hey, Thailand: The King is a Fink!

And you're full of crap.
And your Queen wears army boots. Big, ugly ones.


The smartest guy Biden knows, who they looked to for financial advice, doesn't know what happened to that $1.2 BILLION he was entrusted with. And he feels terrible about it, 'so leave me alone', etc.


Since DHS is supposed to be worried about SECURITY, i.e. catching terrorists and such, what the hell are they doing playing 'social justice' games?


Remember the idiots in Boston who run the Tynan Elementary School? It gets a bit deeper:
Wilder declined to comment on any possible calls to the state, but said generally they are legally obligated to report incidents of sexual misconduct to the agency.

“We’re mandatory reporters as a school employee,’’ he said. “We have to report any type of accusation of sexual assault or sexual harassment that is reported to a school employee.’’
Remember: Lynch was being choked by his attacker and kicked in self-defense; and the morons at the school are wanting to screw him over FOR SEXUAL ASSAULT OR HARASSMENT. Not going after the attacker for choking him, oh no.
Borrowing from P&P borrowing from Steyn,
If officials of the Boston public schools system genuinely believe that when a seven-year old kicks another seven-year old in the crotch that that is an act of “sexual harassment”, then they are too stupid to be entrusted with the care of the city’s children. If, on the other hand, they retain enough residual humanity to understand that a seven-year-old groin-kick is not a sexual assault but have concluded that regulatory compliance obliges them to investigate it as such, then they are colluding in an act of great evil.


In North Carolina, some sanity in the school system:
The story of Emanyea Lockett's suspension last week, first reported by WSOC-TV of Charlotte, N.C., created a national controversy. Tuesday, the Gaston County School District apologized to the family and said there was no sexual harassment.

Jerry Bostic, principal of Brookside Elementary School in Gastonia, told WSOC on Tuesday night that he had retired because of the controversy.
Bostic whines "I only made one mistake!" Don't know about that, but the one that got this attention was a BIG EFFING MISTAKE, bozo.(found thanks to Uncle)


And back to the PROM: "How dare you actually seem HAPPY to score, you little bastard! That'll cost you the points!" If the Redcoats showed up in Boston today, they'd hand them the keys to the city.


And from Idaho, the gentleman got a comment: The majority of (real)Amer­icans agree with everything the OWS stands for and you ignore their message at your own peril. You will "get it" from their peaceful protest or you will get it through more forceful means, but you will get it.
Aren't they such peaceful, persuasive people?

At the time of the attack, the top guy in the Army was worried about it 'hurting diversity'

in the Army; so why should this bullshit be a surprise?
Sen. Susan Collins on Wednesday blasted the Defense Department for classifying the Fort Hood massacre as workplace violence and suggested political correctness is being placed above the security of the nation's Armed Forces at home.

During a joint session of the Senate and House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday, the Maine Republican referenced a letter from the Defense Department depicting the Fort Hood shootings as workplace violence. She criticized the Obama administration for failing to identify the threat as radical Islam.
And they won't; they don't have the balls or integrity.

I don't know much about General Casey, but when I read that statement of his my first thought was "You're a fucking disgrace to those stars you wear and the troops you command." I'm still pissed about it.

Just to remind people of what scumbags we're dealing with in DOJ

and BATFE:

No one at DOJ is known to have been held accountable for this attack on Dodson. Meanwhile, the whistleblowers who blew the top off Fast and Furious are paying the price.

• Agent John Dodson, after nearly a year of harassment, including being given menial assignments and being barred from areas of the ATF building in Phoenix, is in the process of trying to sell his home in Arizona so he can transfer to South Carolina.
• Agent Larry Alt transferred to Florida. He still has unresolved legal claims against the ATF.
• Agent Pete Forcelli was demoted to a desk job after he testified before Congress. He has requested an internal investigation to address retaliation targeting him.
• Agent James Casa took a transfer to Florida.
• Agent Carlos Canino, who was a deputy attache in Mexico City, was moved to Tucson.

Meanwhile the officials who went along with the operation and its subsequent cover up have mostly been rewarded. “These transfers/reassignments have never been described as promotions in any of the documents announcing them,” said an ATF statement after journalists noted that those who didn’t become whistleblowers profited from their silence. The ATF says that because these officials pay didn’t go up they weren’t promoted; however, in many cases their titles and positions have inarguably been enhanced.

• Former Acting ATF Chief Ken Melson, after refusing to be a scapegoat for this operation, became an adviser in the Office of Legal Affairs in Washington, D.C.
• Acting Deputy Director Billy Hoover is now the special agent in charge of the D.C. office.
• Deputy Director for Field Operations William McMahon—he’d received detailed briefings Fast and Furious—is now at the ATF’s Office of Internal Affairs.
• Former Special Agent in Charge of Phoenix William Newell—he oversaw Fast and Furious and lied by saying guns hadn’t been allowed to go south of the border—is now at the Office of Management in Washington, D.C.
• Phoenix Deputy Chief George Gillette is now in to Washington, D.C., as ATF’s liaison to the U.S. Marshal’s Service.
• ATF Group Supervisor David Voth—he managed Fast and Furious out of the Phoenix office—is now in a management position in Washington, D.C.
• Agent Hope McCallister—she had management duties on the team that ran Fast and Furious—was given a “Lifesaving Award” after it came to light she’d ordered agents to stop tailing suspects who the ATF had allowed to buy guns.

I'd written to my Rep., Lankford, a while back on Gunwalker; a couple of days ago I got a response that included this:
As a result of our investigations, every person in the chain of command surrounding Fast and Furious has either been demoted or released, including the acting director of ATF.
I just replied, pointing out- with a link to this article- that these people don't seem very 'demoted or released' to me.

If it turns out Lankford is not serious about this, I'm going to be very disappointed in him.

I cannot argue with any of this

The Parable of the Police

So Gingrich is comfortable with screwing gun owners

If I had any reason to vote for him, this kills it.

I do wonder how he'll respond if any interviewer asks him about this

al-Husseini officially meets with Adolf Hitler to discuss “the Jewish problem”

An anniversary I missed


There had to have been less painful ways for him to off himself.


Uncle is right: every public official involved in this prosecution should be tarred and feathered. And fired.
Of course, so should a lot of other clowns who happen to wear badges. By the way: the response to anyone saying "If you have nothing to hide, you won't object to being searched" would be to make a anonymous call about 'something wrong' at their house or seeing something in their car and seeing if they object to the police searching(no, I'm not recommending that; I'm saying I doubt they'd be all that thrilled with "We want to search. Because we want to.")
Oh, and I have an answer:
The only reason to have 33 bullets loaded in a handgun is to kill a lot of people very quickly [why Lautenberg's magazine ban bill exempts current, and even retired, police is left unexplained--are the police expected to need to "kill a lot of people very quickly?].
Lautenberg is a nasty a bigot as you'll run across, of COURSE he wants the Only Ones to have whatever the hell they want; that's why. Plus he figures it'll get them on his side.


"You're muslim, and not used to drinking, so no real penalty for beating the crap out of someone."


He may build good bikes, but Jesse James is a friggin' dirtbag.


Any police department that accepts a bunch of military gear without actual reason(Hello, Richland County SO with your heavy machinegun on the APC) ought to face some serious "Just what the hell do you plan on doing with this?" questioning. Or retirement or something. And the first time any of it is used in a wrong-address/wrong-person/shouldn't-have-happened-at-all raid, the people responsible should be fired; I'm sick of this crap.


The gun bigots are downright unhappy with The Lightworker; I'm tempted to say that anything that RWPP Jackson is in favor of is almost by definition bad for a free people. Not quite true, but close.


Last, what the HELL is wrong with some of these people?

And extra something nice from Crimson Trace

noted over at LG&M.

"Adam, I think we have a problem."

Oops.

In the delusional state where Great Britain once was,

Furious parents vented their anger at a headteacher who turned off his school's heating on one of the coldest days of the year.

Pupils at Ansford Academy in Castle Cary, Somerset, were forced to grip their pens through thick gloves and wear their coats and hats in class as temperatures dropped to 1C.

The school's headmaster, Rob Benzie, shut down the radiators as an experiment to show students how the school could cut its carbon footprint.
It got down to 33 degrees in the building. But it was a success, according to the effing greenie moron running the school:
But headteacher Mr Benzie, 52, defended the day, saying it was 'a success.'

'We turned off the heating as an experiment to see if we can lower our carbon footprint,' he said.

'We allowed pupils to wear as many jumpers as they liked and everyone seemed to be happy enough although it did get pretty chilly.
Yeah, I'm sure everyone was just friggin' delighted that they were trying to write while wearing gloves and shivering.

You know, if those assholes meeting in Durban to plan the downfall of civilization have their way, you'll have dead students in the northern US and Canada because they'll HAVE to shut off all the heat- and probably the lights- to meet the targets they favor

From Insty: keep you finger off the bang switch

and things like this won't happen.

December 7, 1941

The attack on Pearl Harbor, the official start of our active participation in the global production of bodies known as World War II. 2,402 killed and 1,282 wounded. And yeah, if there'd been more worry about outside attack and less about sabotage, well, who knows.

I'm sure there's going to be lessons taught in some schools that it was all our fault, the Japanese shouldn't be blamed, and things like the Rape of Nanking and Unit 731 will either be ignored entirely, or minimized.

We came back. In the Pacific the Doolittle raid, buying time, and then Midway and on till the end.

Also, Sharyl Atkisson is still working on Gunwalker

Now it seems that the big spike in arms supply to cartels didn’t come from local gun shops at all, but from the US government approving a rapid increase in direct sales from manufacturers to the Mexican government, whose purchases got diverted to the cartels — a fact known to the Obama administration all along. Sharyl Atkisson continues her excellent investigative reporting for CBS on OF&F with this exposé:


...Here’s how it works: A foreign government fills out an application to buy weapons from private gun manufacturers in the U.S. Then the State Department decides whether to approve.

And it did approve 2,476 guns to be sold to Mexico in 2006. In 2009, that number was up nearly 10 times, to 18,709. The State Department has since stopped disclosing numbers of guns it approves, and wouldn’t give CBS News figures for 2010 or 2011. …

The State Department audits only a tiny sample – less than 1 percent of sales – but the results are disturbing: In 2009, more than a quarter (26 percent) of the guns sold to the region that includes Mexico were “diverted” into the wrong hands, or had other “unfavorable” results.
My, my.
While the ATF allowed two thousand or so guns to “walk” across the border without the ability to track them, the Obama administration was already aware that the direct-sales program had a 26% fail rate — which would have meant almost 4,900 weapons fell into the hands of the cartels based on sales approved by the Obama administration’s State Department in 2009 alone. That’s more than twice the amount “lost” by the ATF and DoJ in OF&F. And we don’t know how much worse the problem got last year or this year, thanks to the stonewalling of the Obama administration on the numbers.

So Burke "It's all a LIE!!" of the AZ AG office

is full of crap? Not exactly a big surprise, is it?
Now we find out, thanks to an email provided to Sipsey Street, that Billy Hoover wasn't the only ATF manager who thanked Dennis Burke for his hardline approach to the Grassley letter.

From: Melson, Kenneth E.
To: Burke, Dennis (USAAZ)
Sent: 2/3/2011 7:51:58 PM
Subject: Grassley

Dennis: I just got back from the Interpol meeting and wanted to thank you for your help on the Grassley response and for your work on Fast and Furious. Ken

This email is proof that if Melson ever was "sick to his stomach" as he claimed to the Issa and Grassley investigators, then he must have found the Phenergan pretty quickly.

This Melson email to Burke shoots his "What, me Gunwalker?" defense in the head.

Dead.

It is obvious that the Committee has some more questions -- hard questions -- to ask Kenneth E. Melson. The principal question for the rest of us onlookers is, who is playing whom?
Back at the time of Melson's testimony I gave him a certain benefit of doubt, that maybe having the costs of this operation thrown up before him really might have broken through; apparently I need to stop giving any of these people any such benefit.

Also, further rumors the gentleman reports from Sodom on the Potomac:
1. Committee is said to be ready for a document dump today, possibly emails from Dennis Burke to Holder and Napolitano, among others, that will blow those two Gunwalker conspirators out of their jobs.

2. Kevin O'Reilly, erstwhile State Department employee of Hillary's, fresh from the desert clime of Iraq, is said to have retained his own attorney and either has, or soon will, make his statement before the committee investigators.

3. Lamar Smith, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee from Texas, may, according to conflicting sources, either be about to cravenly fold on a sell-out deal with the Obamanoids to stop the damage at Eric Holder's career and call it a scandal, or is a stand-up guy who is determined about to take the scandal to the next level, no matter what the damage the truth has to the administration. Place your bets, for the roulette wheel is turning.
If you live in Texas, especially in Smith's district, it might not be a bad thing to call and present an opinion as to which he should do.

A site I'd not seen before on self-defense

I think I'm going to spend some time going through the place over the next while

"First, it's Bush's fault! He started it!

Second, ATF and the AG in Arizona lied to Holder & Co.! So it's not our fault we lied under oath to the committee!" Etc., lather, rinse, repeat.

Sometimes you just run into a string of things at a blog

all of which should be spread around. So from a link Tam had to Popehat, we get in total
Idiocy from the Border Patrol, which should really be more worried about the AG and DHS and others trying to get BP agents killed;

The general rule for good health(it seems) when talking to law enforcement: "Shut up."

Various idiocy from LE organizations. Which seems to include "If you don't have something to hide, then you'll tell us whatever we ask. Like it or not." Quote from linked post:
A spokesman for the D.C. police, who had not seen the film, said the rules are good rules to follow. “However,” he said, “if you have nothing to hide and police are doing some kind of investigation, you should tell them whatever they need to know. Police are there to protect the society and the community in which we work.”
And who decides what they 'need to know'? You sure as hell don't.
Also, from Cato: Ten rules for dealing with police

So let's give credit where it is due, to Mr. J Stevens

of Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts. The man who gave us the .22LR cartridge.

Found at Tam's place

Gun bigots in Canada: "You will be allowed to attend

the memorial if you throw out your principles."
The long-gun registry hasn't accomplished squat, but if you don't want to do it more and harder, then you 'don't caaaarree about women!', etc. ad bullshit.

Ferraris and Mercedes and Nissan,

oh bloody my!
A fleet of high-performance cars, including eight Ferraris, has been involved in one of the most expensive accidents in history after an astonishing multi-car pile-up in Japan.

What? A government agency may have helped Government Motors

(formerly just GM) hide a problem with the Volt? Whoda thunk such a thing...
Apparently, way back in June, General Motors heard about a Volt fire that happened three weeks after said vehicle was crash tested, yet it wasn’t until November that the company, nor NHTSA disclosed there was a potential problem, urging both dealers and customers to drain the battery pack immediately following an accident.
...
Joan Claybrook, a former adminstrator at NHTSA believes part of the reason for the delay was the “fragility of Volt sales.” Yet she also believes that “NHTSA could have put out a consumer alert, not to tell them [customers] for six months makes no sense to me.”
Think they'd have had such concern for, say a Ford(non-GM that is) product? Me neither.

Oh, and on that buy-back offer that GM made, well, they seem to have changed their mind on that:
Tony Faria, auto industry expert at business professor at the University of Windsor, said Akerson's comments are causing public relations headaches for the automaker.

"That certainly may be something that will hurt GM more than anything else because it makes it sound as if GM very confidently went forward and said, 'we're so confident in this vehicle and all the satisfaction of the owners of this vehicle and we'll buy it back if anyone is concerned.' This sounds like they've had second thoughts about it, which makes it a little bit worse than what it really was."

So Rep. Pelosi(Vile Progressive-CA) threatened to release confidential

information in an attack on Gingrich:
“One of these days we’ll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich,” Pelosi, D-Calif., told Talking Points Memo. “I know a lot about him. I served on the investigative committee that investigated him. Four of us locked in a room in an undisclosed location for a year. A thousand pages of his stuff.”

Oops
“I’d like to thank Speaker Pelosi for what I regard as an early Christmas gift. Well, she’s suggesting that she’s going to use material that she developed when she was on the ethics committee. That’s a fundamental violation of rules of the House and I would hope that members would immediately file charges against her the second she does it. I think it tells you how capriciously political that committee was that she was on it. It tells you how tainted the outcome was that she was on it."

Slight problem when your target won't cooperate.
And now
But this afternoon, Pelosi’s spokesman, Drew Hammill, suggested that her comments have been misconstrued beyond the leader’s intent.

“Leader Pelosi was clearly referring to the extensive amount of information that is in the public record, including the comprehensive committee report with which the public may not be fully aware,” Hammill wrote in a statement.
No, she wasn't, and we know it, but this is about the only way to back out open to her without admitting she was going to violate the rules.

Yeah, she is a slimy piece of work, isn't she?'

I don't much care for Gingrich. I just heard a little of the interview he did on Beck's show, and it showed just how much of a DC insider he is(Subsidies have a 'long history, so they're no problem' and other such crap); but he's done something most of the other Stupid Party candidates won't do, which is go after Obama, go after the Democrats, and I think that is a big reason he's shot up in the polls.

"Democrat Party and President Obama sued for racist actions

and words, and refusal to apologize; video at ten!"
The plaintiffs, who refer to the defendants as the “Father of Racism,” allege that as an organization, the Democratic Party has consistently refused to apologize for the role they played in slavery, Jim Crow and for other subsequent racist practices from 1792 to 2011. Mrs. Frances P. Rice, the Chair of the National Black Republican Association is also a named plaintiff in the class action lawsuit.

The case cites the collective work of over 350 legal scholars and includes Congressional records, case law, research from our nation's top history professors, racist statements from Democratic elected officials, citations from the Democrat's National Platforms regarding their support of slavery, excepts of speeches from Senator Obama, individual testimonies from blacks who lived in the Jim Crow South and opinions from the NAACP.
This ought to stir the pot a bit. I wonder if the people who've insisted "The nation must apologize for slavery!" will also insist the Democrat Party apologize for the part it played in the matter? And its actions after the Civil War?

So I have to conclude that the Globular Warmering clowns in Durban

either don't know at all what the hell they're talking about, or the LIKE the idea of destroying every country developed beyond the level of, say, Haiti.
Issued by the chair of COP-17, the negotiating draft is “an intermediate product presenting work in progress, a Saturday snapshot of where we are at the end of this first week of COP 17.” Consider some of the proposed cuts in emissions that are being demanded of developed countries. One of the more moderate proposal demands—with proposed phrases in brackets—that “developed countries as a group should reduce their greenhouse gas emissions…[by][at least][40][45][50] per cent from 1990 levels by 2020.”
Or, for an even more idiotic/insane/genocidal idea,
But if that proposed emissions cut is not ambitious (read: delusional) enough consider the draft proposal that demands that rich countries “undertake ambitious national economy-wide binding targets for quantified emission reduction commitments of at least 50 per cent of their domestic greenhouse gas emissions during the period 2013 to 2017 and by more than 100 per cent before 2040, compared with their 1990 levels.” Instead of trashing and trying to replace 70 percent of U.S. electric power generation and half its vehicle fleet in nine years, get Americans to sign a treaty that commits them to doing that in as little as two years.
I shall have to descend to bad language: What the FUCK is in the minds of these people? Do they know they're pushing absolute bullshit, or do they want(without having the balls to say it outright) the levels of death and destruction that would occur if this were tried? Because if you actually tried to cut our emissions by that level, lots and lots of people would die. Ignore destroying our(and China and India and Europe and Russia and- well, damn near everybody above the level of Haiti) industrial base for a moment: we couldn't grow enough food. We couldn't keep people warm in winter. I hate to think of the number of dead bodies to dispose of(before they start producing greenhouse gases, must consider that) that such insanity would produce.

But we're supposed to take these morons meeting in Durban seriously. Well, I do; just not in the way they demand

I call the place Hollyweird; this goes beyond weird to

hanging, drawing & quartering territory:
Revelations of this sort come as no surprise to former child star Corey Feldman.

Feldman, 40, himself a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, unflinchingly warned of the world of pedophiles who are drawn to the entertainment industry last August. "I can tell you that the No. 1 problem in Hollywood was and is and always will be pedophilia,” Feldman told ABC’s Nightline. “That's the biggest problem for children in this industry... It's the big secret.”
...
“This has been going on for a very long time,” concurs former “Little House on the Prairie” star Alison Arngrim. “It was the gossip back in the ‘80s. People said, ‘Oh yeah, the Coreys, everyone’s had them.’ People talked about it like it was not a big deal.”

Arngrim, 49, was referring to Feldman and his co-star in “The Lost Boys,” Corey Haim, who died in March 2010 after years of drug abuse.

“I literally heard that they were ‘passed around,’” Arngrim said. “The word was that they were given drugs and being used for sex. It was awful – these were kids, they weren’t 18 yet. There were all sorts of stories about everyone from their, quote, ‘set guardians’ on down that these two had been sexually abused and were totally being corrupted in every possible way.”
Might help explain all the opposition to bringing Roman Polanski being brought back to face charges; a lot of people consider it no big deal for such an 'artist', and others would be scared as hell it might lead to further investigations. Of course, you have to wonder what kind of screws are loose for someone to consider drugging and raping girls to be no big deal as long as you're a great director or something.

Found at Ace

I cannot remember where read it years back, a guy was writing about the modeling industry and kids and said if his daughter were offered a contract there'd be two stipulations: First, mom or dad would be there while she was working. Always. Second, if someone tried to get the kid to work without them around, the contract would be void(preferably with enough of a penalty to get their attention). From what he said it wasn't just pedophiles who worked around the industry, but teenage girls were a target of some of the older female models as well.

Well, a lot of them are socialists too...

The curious coincidence is that this wasn’t the first time Marcus’ monument has been defaced. As mentioned in the previous post about Marcus, in 1938, after Austria was unified with Germany under the Third Reich, the Nazis tore down this very statue and every other memorial in Vienna that honored Marcus as the inventor of the automobile. That time Marcus’ monument was also defaced by self-righteous people convinced that the only way to save the world was to make people act the way they wanted them too. They were adept at focusing their hate on identifiable targets, for example, like Jews and Gypsies.

Of course I’m not saying that radical environmentalists are akin to Nazis. Nowadays, too many people have no perspective and throw around the word “Nazi” or compare people to Nazis without a clue about how wicked and evil and cruel the Nazis really were. So obviously I’m loathe to say that the greens in Vienna acted like Nazis when they defaced Marcus’ statue, but the simple facts are that they vandalized the same monument that Nazis vandalized in 1938.

I have no doubt that some hardcore environmentalist earth firsters can be as totalitarian as human beings are capable of being. Clearly some radical environmentalists put their own values above the value of some human life. Still, like I said, I’m not going to call greens Nazis. I will say, though, you’d think the environmentalists would have thought twice before acting like Nazis.
Of course, they'd have to A: know their history and B: care.

Sounds a lot like the crap in the Clinton 'Assault Weapons Ban',

doesn't it?
If the above paragraph seems dense, it admittedly is. It is also a gross simplification of the legislation, which is highly technical and riddled with numerous caveats and exemptions. The laws were written in such a way to ensnare the maximum possible number of firearms into the prohibited and restricted categories, severely curtailing their availability to the public. But since the government of the day — the Jean Chrétien-led Liberals — didn’t want to admit that was their intention, they had to hide their motives behind benign-sounding technical jargon. In doing so, they created a bureaucratic monster.

The NDP are its latest victims. Ruger, an American-based firearms manufacturer, builds the Mini-14 rifles, in several different variants. The different variants are essentially identical in terms of their mechanical operation — the “guts” of the rifle, with the highly complex moving parts and delicate components — are common across every variant. Only the finishing touches differ, and those are easy to slap on in the final phase of manufacture.

The reason for the different finishing touches is unremarkable: It’s all marketing. The “Ranch” variant of the rifle is marketed to hunters and farmers, and has few bells and whistles. It has a wooden stock — nothing fancy — and a long barrel, good for accuracy at long ranges (like those found, for example, on a ranch). The “Tactical” variant of the rifle, though mechanically identical, is marketed towards sports shooters, and has a shorter barrel, a black plastic stock and the option to attach accessories like flashlights.

But small differences can have big effects. The Tactical variant of the rifle, due to its shorter barrel, is classified as restricted under Canadian law. The Ranch variant, with two inches more barrel, is non-restricted. That’s how the NDP made their innocent mistake. But it also goes to show how needlessly complex the classification system is. The Ruger Mini-14 Tactical looks somewhat scarier and is slightly shorter (and thus, the logic goes, easier to conceal). But can anyone seriously say it’s more dangerous? Two extra inches of barrel won’t stop a madman from firing into a crowd. Two inches less doesn’t mean it can’t be used for hunting.
If you recall, several Democrats sat down with a catalog and decided that any rifle with 'X' features that made them lose bladder control was therefore a eeevilllleee Assault Weapon and the peasants should not be allowed such. Which meant manufacturers could change a few cosmetic features and the guns were legal to make and sell. And then the gun bigots bitched and whined that "They're following the letter of the law, but violating the spirit!" I think that line actually came from Schumer(long walk/short dock, etc.). Who, being a lawyer, you'd think would know better than to say such a thing; but I guess he was hoping to shame them or something instead of revealing that idiots had written a law and gotten some of the usual results.

Of course, we also have that idiot McCarthy demonstrating that she was pushing for laws on things she knows absolutely nothing about; apparently she hadn't seen the catalog, or even bothered to find out what it was she was trying to ban. 'Shoulder thing that goes up' for Deity's sake!

"This way I won't have to deal with Congress"

President Obama's team of negotiators at the United Nations Climate Change Conference may agree to a tax on foreign currency transactions, designed to pay for a "Green Climate Fund," that would fall disproportionately on American travellers and businesses, according to a group attending the conference that is skeptical of the UN position on global warming.

Negotiators at the conference are considering "a new tax on every foreign currency transaction in the world," according to the Center for a Constructive Alternative (CFACT). "Every time you travel abroad, you'll have to pay a climate tax," explains CFACT, the group that released the "Climategate" emails. "More importantly, every time we import goods, every time we export our fine products (think jobs) we will do so with a climate tax skimming off the top."

European countries would evade much of the tax burden, however, because "transactions within the Eurozone won't have to pay this new tax."
...
CFACT suggests that Obama is open to implementing this tax and similar policies in the absence of a full climate treaty, which would require congressional approval.

You want to know how effing stupid the people running the schools are?

This effing stupid:
Emanyea Lockett is the fourth grade boy who was forced to sit home for two days. The young man is confused by the situation, telling local press, “I was talking to my friend and I said Miss Taylor was cute.”

According to several accounts, that conversation between school friends was overheard by a substitute teacher and reported. The principal at North Carolina’s Brookside Elementary School allegedly said to the child’s mother that the comments were a “form of sexual harassment.”
The only good thing in this story is that(at least for now) they're not threatening to put him on a Sexual Offenders List.

You want to know just what a scumbag Eric Holder is?

Go read this. All of it. One excerpt:

The most egregious and bizarre claims of executive privilege came in exchanges with Senator -- and Judiciary Chairman -- Orrin Hatch. The 1996 report from Margaret Love that had recommended against clemency was accidentally released to the committee, and Hatch asked Holder to comment on it.

Holder: The letter should not have been produced. It seems to me that the information contained in the letter is clearly within the bounds of executive privilege.

Hatch: Seriously?

Holder: Excuse me?

Hatch: Seriously, you can't really believe that.

Holder: Oh, absolutely.

Hatch: Well, we have a copy of the letter. And you are aware that she recommended against clemency.

Holder: I really would not comment on what recommendations were made by the pardon attorney. As I said, I think that falls well within the bounds of executive privilege.

Later, Hatch asked Holder about the 1999 report that he and Roger Adams prepared that effectively replaced the 1996 Love report that recommended against clemency.

Hatch: Did the second report contain a recommendation of whether the president should or should not grant clemency?

Holder: Mr. Chairman, with respect to those questions, it seems to me the answers to those questions are prohibited by the assertation of privilege of the...

Hatch: How? Tell me. I mean, where in the law do you find that?

The befuddled senator never received an answer.

Hatch also asked if there had been any attempt to obtain information from those offered clemency concerning some of their co-conspirators who remained at large.

FALN bomb-maker William Morales was -- and still is -- hiding in Cuba. Macheteros Victor Gerena and Filiberto Ojeda-Rios were on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list (Gerena has now been on that list for a record 27 years, and Rios was killed in an FBI shootout in 2005).

Holder replied that "to my knowledge[,] those requests were not placed."

Hatch: You're a former prosecutor. I mean, don't you want to get to the bottom of these things?

Holder: Sure.

Hatch: Well, then, why weren't those questions asked?

Holder: Because it seems to me you're talking about a group of people who did not recognize the right of the government to even--

Hatch: What's that got to do with it?

Holder tried to shift the blame to Clinton. "Well, as I said, the power of the president is absolute in these areas...again, it is for the president to decide."

"Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"

(pic & comment stolen from SSI)

So it appears that Holder & Napolitano & Mueller & Co. broke some MORE laws

than we were aware of.
As we continue to watch the general uproar over the Operation Fast and Furious program, and specifically what Attorney General Holder knew and when he knew it, it needs to be noted that perjury is not the only apparent violation of law to have occurred.

I refer to the apparent violation of at least one (probably two) major U.S. laws by the Holder Justice Department. A few years ago, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701, the follow-on to the Trading with the Enemy Act) was expanded in order to criminalize any transactions between U.S. entities — to include departments and agencies of the U.S. government — and all foreign drug cartels.
...
A violation of any of the IEEPA sanctioning programs or the Kingpin Act carries stiff penalties, both criminal and civil, and potentially totaling decades in prison and tens of millions of dollars in fines. It is not necessary that an individual or governmental entity be shown to have “knowingly” violated any of these programs: it is illegal for any U.S. entity or individual to aid, abet, or materially assist — or in the case of Operation Fast and Furious, to facilitate others to aid, abet, or materially assist — designated drug traffickers. There are no exceptions within IEEPA programs for unlicensed U.S. law enforcement or intelligence agency operations.

Based on the July 5, 2010, memo to Eric Holder, it would appear that Fast and Furious facilitated the delivery of weapons to — at a minimum — the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico. The U.S. Department of the Treasury, which administers both the IEEPA and Kingpin Act programs, has designated numerous members of the Sinaloa cartel under both programs. IEEPA prohibitions apply to the U.S. government as well as to individuals, and as stated there are no exceptions within IEEPA programs for unlicensed U.S. law enforcement or intelligence agency operations.
So how stringent are these laws?
...To illustrate and emphasize this point: even during the run-up to war in Iraq, the U.S. secretary of Defense had to obtain waivers (specific licenses) from the Treasury Department to allow U.S. Special Forces and their necessary equipment (to include weapons, intelligence gathering, and targeting gear) to go into Iraq, as Iraq at the time was under separate IEEPA sanctions.
Hmmm... I wonder if Tax-Cheat-In-Chief Geithner is going to say he authorized this? Somehow, I doubt it.
So some more really interesting questions for Holder on Thursday.

First, change the law so police and prosecutors are PERSONALLY liable

for damages they do that they're currently protected from; then you'll see a lot of this crap stop.
In fact, very little about the raid that was unusual. For the most part, it was carried out the same way drug warrants are served some 150 times per day in the United States. The battering ram, the execution of Whitworth's dog, the fact that police weren't aware Whitworth's 7-year-old child was in the home before they riddled the place with bullets, the fact that they found only a small amount of pot, likely for personal use -- all are common in drug raids. The only thing unusual was that the raid was recorded by police, then released to the public after an open records request by the Columbia Daily Tribune. It was as if much of the country was seeing for the first time the violence with which the drug war is actually fought. And they didn't like what they saw.
Do you have any idea just how fucking sick I am of hearing wrong address/wrong person/dead dog SWAT raids excused from any responsibility for doing wrong by the chief or whoever saying "They were following standard procedures"? If this garbage is according to your procedures, then you need these procedures shoved right up your ass.

Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they're fighting a "war," and the consequences are predictable. These policies have taken a toll. Among the victims of increasingly aggressive and militaristic police tactics: Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Md., whose dogs were killed when Prince George's County police mistakenly raided his home; 92-year-old Katherine Johnston, who was gunned down by narcotics cops in Atlanta in 2006; 11-year-old Alberto Sepulveda, who was killed by Modesto, Calif., police during a drug raid in September 2000; 80-year-old Isaac Singletary, who was shot by undercover narcotics police in 2007 who were attempting to sell drugs from his yard; Jonathan Ayers, a Georgia pastor shot as he tried to flee a gang of narcotics cops who jumped him at a gas station in 2009; Clayton Helriggle, a 23-year-old college student killed during a marijuana raid in Ohio in 2002; and Alberta Spruill, who died of a heart attack after police deployed a flash grenade during a mistaken raid on her Harlem apartment in 2003. Most recently, voting rights activist Barbara Arnwine was raided by a SWAT team in Prince George's County, Md., on Nov. 21. The police appear to have raided the wrong house.
...
...But just three days before Loughner's rampage, police in Framingham, Mass., raided the home of 68-year-old Eurie Stamps. Stamps wasn't the target of the drug raid. Police were after the son of Stamps' girlfriend, and actually apprehended him outside the home. They raided the house anyway. Stamps, who was unarmed and broke no laws, was shot and killed by a police officer. By my count, he's at least the 46th innocent person killed in a botched drug raid. Every politician in Washington condemned the Loughner shootings, and rightly so. But nearly every politician in Washington supports the laws and policies that led to the death of Eurie Stamps.
God only knows how many dead dogs that adds up to.

I forgot it's called Markley's Law, (Updated)

so I'm posting it to remind myself:
That has to be some kind of variant of Godwin's Law: As an online discussion of gun owners' rights grows longer, the probability of an ad hominem attack involving penis size approaches 1.

[Therefore, let it be know throughout the entire Internet that henceforth when an anti-gun bigot attributes the exercise of the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms to the inadequate size or envy of male genital that it be referred to as Markley's Law, as first articulated by AlanR and named by Hank Archer.]

Update: Crotalus' Corollary: If guns are an extension of a man's penis, then men advocating gun control must want to be castrated.
(thank you, Joe)

Reminded of this by a visit to Joe Huffman's place

It's a sick damned culture that considers

this kind of thing 'honorable' living.
Smack in the middle of one of Canada’s most proudly cosmopolitan cities — Montreal, where they lived — this family of Afghan immigrants was still imprisoned in their homeland’s archaic culture.

The boys of the family were spying on the girls, looking for signs of loose Western behaviour; the older girls were so desperate for a way out they agreed to marry virtually any boy who looked at them twice; the two wives, quietly living in an illegal and secret polygamous marriage, were at one another’s throats, with the fertile one lording it over the older, barren one.
...
Pleading not guilty to four counts each of first-degree murder are the family patriarch, 58-year-old Mohammad Shafia, second wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, and their oldest son Hamed, 20.

Well, we don't have cobras around here-

except at the zoo...*- but we do have rattlesnakes and copperheads, and they're all coming out by April 15.

If this is correct, the people running Boston Public Schools

are friggin' morons. First, if the other kid started it, he had every right to protect himself.

Second, sexual harassment? For a punch in a fight? I repeat, friggin' morons.

I didn't know there was a Fossil of the Day Award;

but we ought to be winning the damn thing. Canada, however,
"Canada is kicking ASS in the Fossil Of The Day Awards! - Stan

I'm going to steal three comments from the blog he links to:
I’m going to cut down and burn a random tree tomorrow in celebration.
...
I hope we come back with the effing T-rex award, then we can drag it around Canada Like the Olympic Flame, As proof of Canadian Common Sense..
...
Personally, I think every Canadian should have a fossil award to put on display in our living rooms every winter, when we have the furnaces fired up to the max to keep warm and toasty when it’s -50 C outside. BRING – IT – ON!!!!

Oh, and maybe one to hang from the rear view mirror in our gas guzzling vehicles, especially those that have a block heater installed that has to be plugged in overnight when it’s colder than -20 C, otherwise they won’t start in the morning, and we won’t be able to see through the windshield because the cold air has frosted/fogged it all up.

And I won’t even mention how far we have to drive to get from point A (where we live) to point B (where we work) after we get the damned things started when it’s -50 C throughout the month of January and part of February. But it’s a good thing we do get to work, cause without that income, how could we send all that foreign aid to backward countries spewing CO2 into the atmosphere.

But that’s a Canadian thing. We’re a hardy lot. We like it.

Anyway, I want my fossil award!!! And I want it now!!!!


Added: from the Whole Foods "Buy Local!" list:

So why ARE anti-gun people so violent

& stuff?

The secret squirrels! They're REAL!

click to watch

From This Ain't Hell

First, I think the big reason Obama hasn't openly pushed gun bans

and other restrictions is
A: He used up an ENORMOUS amount of political capital in shoving Obamacare through, so he didn't have it to use for other things, and
B: Too many Democrats saying, behind the scenes, "You want to fuck us even MORE? Stay away from that!"
Take away either of those and we'd have had open attacks on the 2nd Amendment. As is, he's stuck with letting Holder talk about a new 'assault weapon' ban(maybe as a feeler, and didn't like what he felt) and pushing for federal judges and Supremes nominees who don't like the 2nd. And, I'm convinced at this point, making the 'under the radar' attack that we know as Gunwalker. That last tells us a lot about him and his minions(or handlers in some cases?): they were willing to violate US laws, subvert a number of LE agencies, to hand weapons to the murderers of the cartels in order to further their political aim. To let bodies pile up 'for the greater good'. And now they're all lying under oath and- I don't doubt- trying to destroy or cover-up evidence.

I keep coming back to that comment he made in Ohio, "I'm not going to take your guns away! Even if I wanted to, I don't have the votes!" and the attitude behind it. Obama isn't openly pushing for more anti-gun-ownership laws because it'd destroy any chance of reelection, and he knows he won't get them; otherwise he'd be out there talking about 'for our communities', 'for the safety of our children', etc.

Tam writes about listening to Maddow,

and in comments some whacks at Rush Limbaugh, which included the 'attack on Chelsea Clinton' bit. On that, my understanding is that when he had a tv show, one episode he mentioned a news story about CC and oen of the staff flashed up a picture of a dog instead of the girl. He chewed them out, and apologized. A while later was at a party Hillary Clinton also attended, looked her up and apologized again. Not exactly the same as the attacks on Bushs' daughters and such.

Not apologizing for him. Nobody needs to: with his problems he still starts off at a more honest level than clowns like Maddow: he says up front "This show is about me telling you what I think about things", as opposed to Maddow and Tingles Matthews & Co. claiming to be unbiased journalists.

Still tend to listen to him, partly out of habit. When he first came on the air in this area gave him a try and got hooked. Partly the humor, partly the commentary, in big part because- in those pre-internet(for lots of people) and pre-new media days- he reported on lots of information that didn't make the nightly news. All those stories that sounded like something was missing? Or that you flat KNEW were full of crap? He threw in the information journalists* like Rather left out, or talked around(because you didn't need to know that, they thought); for which they hated his guts and for which lots of people listened.

Can be annoying at times, and far from perfect; but a big step above a lot of the clowns at MSNBC and CNN and CBS in some ways.