I don't care where you just graduated from,

you ain't bulletproof.
And yes, it seems alcohol was involved.


Y'know, I flat LOVE the idea of cops who intrude into your home without a valid warrant, or a warrant that's based on lies, being charged with trespassing; and THEN getting their personal ass sued off. And prosecutors who screw you over also being personally liable for their wrongdoing.
You'd see an awful lot of cleanup of SWAT misuse/overuse, and prosecutors playing games.


The dumping on the Santorums over the baby reminds me of the other demonstrations of the empathy of the left: like writing a crappy attack on Palin using her youngest as the line of attack, like declaring that calling for a 'R' governor to be murdered is freedom of speech, etc. Of course, if you call them on it they tend to drag out the Arizona incident as if it were accepted the nut was sent by the tea party and lecture about the 'vile discourse of the right', etc. ad nauseum.


Speaking of SEALs, 255 kills with rifle; damn.
And Jesse Ventura got what he was asking for.


'Team RINO', that's a good way to put it


I don't really know if it's cowardice or treason(what else would you call wanting to give the enemy secret materials?), but I like the picture anyway:
Anyway, it fits so much else he's done


Now THERE'S an idea for you! As an aside, I wonder if it makes you smell like bacon, too?


Yeah, this is a problem with some women. And more men nowadays, too.


Every one of the idiots/bastards pushing this garbage should be shunned. 'doubts Auschwitz was a death camp' for Deity' sake... And yes, I include Paul in that. Some radio show a couple of days ago a couple of his slightly-more rabid followers called in; Lord, what fools.


So this is why so few bees around the last couple of years? Damn flies.

Now HERE'S some science

for you!

Two posts demonstrating that thugs with badges and prosecutorial misconduct

are still running around out there, and the above-noted clowns really don't want people to know what they're doing.
From Popehat:
Sometimes the pushback is cloaked in shameless OMG-9/11-CHANGED-EVERYTHING rhetoric, and sometimes it's straight-up thuggery. Cops arrest people for filming police conduct — whether it's out in public or from the photographer's own lawn. Cops profess not to recognize cameras and pretend they are potential weapons, sending the not-too-subtle message that pointing a camera might get your ass shot. When they think they can get away with it, they destroy cameras wholesale. Prosecutors back the cops up: they prosecute citizens for things like "wiretapping" or "disorderly conduct" when they record encounters with cops (even — or perhaps especially — angry and abusive cops), and they abuse governmental power in an effort to keep government-created recordings secret.

So, how is this relevant today? Well, a link on Reddit led me to a disturbing but entirely consistent-with-this trend discovery: Google's Transparency Report, in which Google describes the number and type of take-down demands it receives. Did you think that the New Professionals would be content arresting photographers in the street? Hell, no. If we've gone digital, so have they. And they know how to work the system. Google reports:

We received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove YouTube videos of police brutality, which we did not remove. Separately, we received requests from a different local law enforcement agency for removal of videos allegedly defaming law enforcement officials. We did not comply with those requests, which we have categorized in this Report as defamation requests.

Read all of it, you really need to. Then we come to this pile of bullshit:
Seattle has a brilliant solution to their many police problems — refuse to release police dash-cam footage, then sue [pdf] the person requesting said footage.
...
The situation involves two cases Egan handled pro bono. He believed the videos in each case show officer misconduct. Egan wanted to know if those officers had other questionable arrests, so he asked for 36 additional dash-cam videos.

But the city refused, citing privacy laws. Egan appealed, and now the city is suing him.

"This is ridiculous. It would be comical if it weren't alarming," he said.

Egan believes the city is retaliating for making these other videos public.

"I kind of expect for something like this that they really do have something to hide," said Egan.
Gee, ya think maybe?
And you'll REALLY love this part:
Although Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes says the city will abide by the court’s decision, Egan told King 5 TV that the Washington privacy act prevents the footage from being made public until the final disposition of related litigation. That is, until the officers can no longer be sued for what they did in the video.
Miserable, corrupt, crooked, vile little bastards, aren't they?

Well, losing a war and trashing the military

do go together
Well he has done it. I am not certain at all that the war in Afghanistan could have been won. But you could hardly pick a strategy better suited to losing it than the one Obama has employed. His faux surge sent troops to a war zone with an expiration date. The Taliban waited out the Soviets and they must have been laughing when he stood in front of the cadets at West Point and announced his ludicrous plan. Our enemies knew that our troops would be gone before the 2012 elections. Obama ordered our forces to war and made sure they had no way to win it, because he needed to "end" the war and return to his real passion as Campaigner in Chief. Shameful, truly shameful.

He began running his mouth as a Senator about the bad war in Iraq causing us to lose focus on the good war in Afghanistan. He was a lead voice in the cut and run chorus and did all he could to lose the war in Iraq. If we had listened to his advice, we would have suffered the exact same kind of defeat there that we are about to suffer in Afghanistan. We will now cede the field of battle, where so much US blood has been shed, to the enemy. And we will sue for something less than peace from the very people who hosted the planning and execution of 9/11. Bravo, well done sir.

along with

Sorry to break it to the White House, but that’s not a “realistic strategy”. It’s a wish. I can’t tell you how many times, since the advent of the airplane in combat, I’ve heard it said that the necessity of maintaining ground troops is coming to an end.

Yet here we are, with troops in Afghanistan and 10 years of troops in Iraq. Libya was a one-of that still hasn’t come to a conclusion and as I note above, what we’re seeing now doesn’t appear to improve the situation for the US – and that should be the goal of any sort of intervention. I certainly appreciate the desire not to nation build, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you need less ground troops available in a very dangerous and volatile world. Air and sea are combat multipliers, but as always, the only sort of units that can take and hold ground are ground combat units. That hasn’t changed in a thousand years. If you want to talk about contingencies, there are more of them that require those sorts of forces than don’t.

On the "Let's fire some people and hope Grassley and Issa go away" theme,

a piece borrowed almost entire from Sipsey:

Breaking: ATF reportedly relieves Fast and Furious managers prior to OIG report

Gun Rights Examiner and Sipsey Street Irregulars received information this evening that three of the prime Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives players in the Fast and Furious gunwalking scandal have been relieved of duties.

William Hoover, ATF's Deputy Director during Fast and Furious who was recently reassigned as Special Agent in Charge of the Washington Field Office, Assistant Director in Charge of Field Operations Mark Chait, likewise reassigned as head of the Baltimore Field Office, and Deputy Assistant Director of Field Operations William McMahon have reportedly been sidelined pending the outcome of the anticipated report from the Office of Inspector General. Debbie Bullock a mid-level manager has reportedly been advised that she is now the acting SAC for Baltimore to assume Chait's functions.

My partner in inconvenient federal revelations has more here.

This correspondent also received a copy of a letter authored by Assistant Attorney General Weich, he of last February's now "withdrawn" letter to Senator Grassley falsely denying that the DOJ was aware of gunwalking. This letter is addressed to Senator Grassley and Congressman Issa and indicates to this observer that the stonewalling in the Gunwalker investigation continues. It is, as most of Weich's previous letters have been, personally insulting to the intelligence of both Grassley and Issa, and sticks a thumb in their collective eye while patently subverting the oversight process.

Here is a transcript of the body of the letter, sent on 21 December 2011.

Dear Chairman Issa and Senator Grassley:

This responds to your letter to the Attorney General dated November 1, 2011, which requested a comprehensive schedule of records of all government surveillance of suspected straw purchases of firearms in the United States.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) advises that it does not maintain a searchable database of cases involving surveillance of suspected straw purchases. ATF advises that creating the schedule you have requested would require a manual review of thousands of firearms trafficking case files in order to determine whether surveillance of suspected straw purchases occurred. This would entail an extraordinary commitment of time and resources that ATF is not equipped to undertake at this time. Further, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Drug Enforcement Administration advise that they do not conduct surveillance of straw purchases in the ordinary course of their law enforcement activities. We are not aware of any other Department components that would be likely to conduct surveillance of straw purchases. We also note that any surveillance records would likely implicate significant law enforcement and individual privacy interests.

We regret that we have been unable to assist you with your request. Please do hesitate to contact this office it we may provide further information on this this, or any other matter.

Sincerely,

Ronald Weich

Now, recall readers that the Lone Wolf Trading Company was set up for video and audio by the ATF. Acting Director Melson himself would sign on and observe dealings going down. And the ATF can't find ANY cases "involving surveillance of suspected straw purchases?" This, like the pre-OIG Report identification of the sacrificial goats of ATF, is simply more stonewalling in service of the cover-up.

As David concludes his story about the sidelining of Hoover, Chait and McMahon, "This latest reported development lends itself to the observation that Holder is protecting something else, and that this is a tactical move in anticipation of the report's release and his next trip to the Hill."

My sources concur. "The White House intends for Holder to go into the next hearing with a preliminary OIG report in his hands, indicating that he's got it all cleaned up, which is bullshit," said one. Said another, "They'll be firing some big names to convince everybody there's nothing left to see here."

On the human interest side of the story, another source was derisive about the three goats apparently now selected by the White House for sacrifice, believing them to be long overdue for some sort of karmic reckoning, saying:

"Hoover ran the Bureau with his little head instead of his big one as he was more interested in banging Anna Marie Paskalis (ATF attorney) than he was in paying attention to the ATF mission. Chait is a douche bag who abandoned his post as the SAC in New Orleans after Katrina. . . (a) no-account, low character coward. McMahon is a do-nothing boob whose involvement in running western region field operations amounted to hitting the forward button on such items as the wire tap documents for F&F while he was jet setting around the world with his girlfriend on ATF’s dime."

The question is, can Holder's ATF kabuki theater succeed in containing the blame for the Gunwalker Scandal to ATF personnel and the Phoenix U.S. Attorney's office? Based on information that this correspondent has received, and which will form the basis for future stories, I doubt it. But it will be fun to watch them try.

Law enforcement agencies that move into politics not only

are violating what they're supposed to be, they SHOULD be opposed. From Sipsey, reviewing a book called Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America:

Right. Social scientist Goss attempts to give the gun control movement elitists a game plan for rising above their elitism (below?) to appeal to the common man (or, rather, woman, since Goss identifies them as the gun banner's natural audience) to create a mass movement for gun control. The book is by turns turgid, illogical and contradictory. The gun banners loved it, though, with dust jacket endorsements from Sarah Brady, Carolyn McCarthy and Robert Spitzer. There are, however, some raisins in the turd if you choose to pick them out from the brown stuff.

Note well the above phrase, "the inability to secure patronage resources." Among the most important of these, Goss explains, are governmental, bureaucratic "patronage resources," and chief among them, the ATF.

"By the late 90s, with a pro-control president in the White House, BATF was poised to become a quiet ally to gun control organizations. . . To avoid arousing the gun lobby, the agency justified its research projects in terms of "enforcement" of existing laws, which gun rights organizations were on record as supporting. . . One insider summarized the bureaucracy's strategy as follows: "We had a plan to move from enforcement to policy to politics without anybody noticing, and that's what we did."

The footnote to this quote indicates that it is based on a "personal interview with (a) former Treasury official, March, 2002."

And, here, gentle readers, is the genesis of the Gunwalker Conspiracy. Absent the political will for the kind of disarmament schemes the elitists sought -- in the face of the political blow back that embracing gun control cost the Democrats and RINOs -- blocked at almost every turn by these factors even with the willing assistance of the news media which could never quite persuade the American people that citizen disarmament was a good thing -- the gun grabbers inside the present administration, made up largely of people from the Clinton administration who remembered the 1994 landslide loss with palpable pain, recognized that whatever they were to accomplish had to be, in Obama's words to Sarah Brady, "under the radar." Ipse dixit.

And nine months after Obama took office, the clandestine gunwalking program was off to the races. It was their only hope of changing the political realities faced by the gun ban advocates. That it didn't succeed is not for lack of trying. Only now they have to face the music, and the judgment of a rightfully wrathful people.

Note that line well:"We had a plan to move from enforcement to policy to politics without anybody noticing, and that's what we did." Law enforcement that starts playing this game is violating ethics, is violating what LE is supposed to be; and anyone/everyone involved in this cannot be trusted. At all. And should have been fired the moment they stepped over the line.
5) Police seek and preserve public favor not by catering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law is one of Peel's 9 Principles; I'd say ATF violated that bigtime. And in Gunwalker we're seeing one of the consequences of them getting away with this crap for so long.


Be it noted, Holder & ATF & Co. are trying to set up Gunwalker as a personnel matter: "See, we're dealing with this; now go away and stop annoying us."


Associated matter: "It was to make sure security measures are in place and properly followed," Milligan said. And it had NOTHING to do with getting people used to openly-armed federal agents 'securing' buildings and saying "Papers, please."
According to one Homeland official in the Washington, D.C. office, Operation Shield. is an effort that uses routine, unannounced visits by FPS inspectors to test the effectiveness of contract guards, or protective security officers -- "detecting the presence of unauthorized persons and potentially disruptive or dangerous activities."
Yeah. Because it requires a display of armed/armored agents to do that.

Local radio guy has a group for people like Alec Baldwin:

American Society of Hollywood Air Travelers, ASHAT. Seems appropriate


Gee, maybe they don't put a scanner there because... oh, it's too easy.
So there you have it: The government believes it is in possession of a technology so vital it is willing to dose its citizens with ionizing radiation, but a decade after the Sept. 11 attacks it still hasn’t figured out a way to utilize this technology in one of America’s most sensitive airline terminals. It’s not for nothing that Senator Collins is skeptical of the TSA.


So, Obama said Afghanistan was the 'real' war, the one we had to win; so now he's handing the place over to the enemy...


Yeah, them's some really skanky prosecutors

Well, it's not us but EUROPE IS GONNA DIE!!! Updated

Etc.
A sleeping super-volcano in Germany is showing worrying signs of waking up.

It's lurking just 390 miles away underneath the tranquil Laacher See lake near Bonn and is capable of ejecting billions of tons of magma.

This monster erupts every 10 to 12,000 years and last went off 12,900 years ago, so it could blow at any time.
I didn't know there was a volcano, dormant or extinct, there; can learn something every day

Update: thanks to Marja, I found this:
The article in the Daily Mail is about as substance free as you can produce – it starts off with the usual doom claptrap: “a sleeping super-volcano in Germany is showing worrying signs of waking up.” Now, you have to look carefully for what their supposed signs are – all two of them.
Dammit. I've got a lot more reading to do

So Holder will be testifying again: make sure he's officially under oath

this time.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa today announced that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has been scheduled to testify on February 2 about the Department of Justice’s knowledge of, and response to, gunwalking that occurred in Operation Fast and Furious. The Attorney General will be asked to address management deficiencies within the Department that occurred both during and after the conclusion of Operation Fast and Furious. This will include the Department’s steadfast refusal to disclose information following the February 4, 2011 letter to Senator Grassley, which the Department has withdrawn because it contained false information denying allegations made by whistleblowers about Operation Fast and Furious. The committee’s investigation has found documentation that numerous members of the Justice Department knew the letter to Congress contained false information both before it was sent and later withdrawn.

And this somehow seems appropriate in the current climate:
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition" —Rudyard Kipling

So the molesters and thieves of TSA want arrest powers,

because being able to humiliate and assault people isn't enough authority.
I wonder if the guards' union at Auschwitz campaigned for safety handrails on the guard towers so they wouldn't topple out when drunk?
Few years back I'd have thought that was over the top; after a few years of toys confiscated, lying, people molested, people with medical problems humiliated and endangered, theft and general assholery, I don't.

Mr. Elk, we're AMERICANS, we're not supposed to have 'unquestioning compliance' with clowns who want to treat us like crap and violate our rights. Screw you.

Ireland, this is just bloody sad

Did these morons actually think Hitler winning would've been GOOD for Ireland?
Be pissed at the English all you want, just don't let it eat your brain, ok?


What? The Russians may have done something unethical in this? Damn, can't trust anybody, can you?
Yeah, I'm sure this will make the Poles all tingly at the thought of being friends with Russia.


Employers are facing more uncertainty in the wake of a letter from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission warning them that requiring a high school diploma from a job applicant might violate the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Can every activist clown in every federal agency. And in some cases, can the agency. Before they completely ruin us.


Yeah, this is really going to make the OWS clowns friends, isn't it?


Bleeping bloody hell!
If you don't get a bang, CHECK EVERYTHING


Friend saw this one, said
"Don't let the Army guy pilot the chopper"
(both found at the Irishman)


A: Yes, boycott New York
B: ESPECIALLTY boycott New York Effing City(cleaned up version of what Kim always called it)
C: Mr. Gura, are you available?
Please note, also, that Meckler(in linked article) was NOT carrying: his pistol was in a locked case, etc., as per federal law and so forth, as he was traveling through that damned city; he was arrested in violation of both FOPA and common sense. g

Bill Wade, the outgoing chair of the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees,

you're a miserable little bastard, aren't you?
So a disturbed young man who willfully gunned down four people in the city, someone who fired upon park rangers and killed one in order to make a mad dash into the woods, would have refused to enter the park if there was a law against bringing firearms there? That must be what Bill Wade means, because I simply cannot fathom how his remarks could be taken any other way.

In my opinion, Bill Wade is a disgusting human being to use this tragedy to advance his political agenda. Why doesn’t he think that visitors to the park with their own guns would at least have a small chance of fending off violent criminals seeking to harm their families?
You have to remember, James, gun bigots like Wade don't WANT people able to defend themselves; they're supposed to cower and hope for the best until(if?) the properly certified minions of the State arrive.

Mitt Romney

I commend to your attention this New Year's morning, gentle readers, the unabashedly hypocritical irony of the unprincipled political windsock which is Mitt Romney. First, by directing you to this story -- "Mitt Romney: Eric Holder should resign for Fast and Furious mishap."

And then, to this one: Romney signs off on permanent assault weapons ban.

Or, more comprehensively, to this one.

I guess Romney is just upset about Obama's methods, not his goals.

Post borrowed from Sipsey

So the TSA admits they're snarling traffic and violating

that oath they took and otherwise being assholes, but it's all ok, honest! To borrow Tam's response,
In other words, you don't see any elephants around here, do you? So the elephant repellant must be working! Also left unexplained is how the public's confidence is supposed to be bolstered by getting their crotch randomly sniffed by that noted Fourth Amendment legal expert, Fluffy the Uberhund.
I've been wondering when one of their "We have to get you used to being screwed over" demonstrations would wind up with
An ambulance stuck with a dying patient while these clowns get their exercise,
Somebody has a panic attack and the clowns tase them,
somebody has enough and tells them to eff off, which will be followed by tasing, which- sooner or later- will be followed by a bunch of other pissed-of citizens jumping in. Especially in some parts of the country, it'll happen.

Tactical Corsets...

there are certainly possibilities....


Link fixed; I hate it when that happens

They left out the post-bite treatment:

kill the snake.


A list of some of the worst media malpractice of the past year, which includes
8. Goodbye, Iraq. The bias was so pervasive this year that I need to bring out something I haven’t yet touched, namely the Associated Press’s historical revisionism two weeks ago as U.S. troops were about to leave Iraq. Readers here only need to see five words to get a clue as to how bad the AP story was: “No WMD were ever found.” Memo to Rebecca Santana and Robert Reid: Yes they were — along with 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium found in Iraq after Saddam was overthrown, specifically “the stuff that can be refined into nuclear weapons or nuclear fuel.”
I know people who 'can't believe anyone still believes there were WMD's in Iraq'; they also tend to be "Bush LIED!!" types. They dismiss the information on various grounds, which all boil down to "I want Bush to have lied and there to have been none, so there weren't!"


More of what idiots do instead of actually doing something. Which may be to the good: while they're wasting time on this they're not screwing with us in some other way. And at this point the clowns are going to be messing with us, unless we can actually get a lot of them laid off or fired.


Never heard of Quanell X before; apparently one more RWPP jackass. Hey, here's an idea for you, asshole: try teaching your kids
They don't HAVE to have some friggin' $200 running shoes,
They SHOULD act like civilized human beings, not spoiled brats, and
Why the hell should the company or the sports guys take a hit because you can't bother to teach your kids the above? Fuck you, X. And all your little jerk friends, too.


The earth, she isn't exactly static, is she?

Circle K, you really suck

and I won't be buying gas from you anymore.
A sales clerk explains how he was fired from his job: tackling an armed robber who threatened to shoot him.

Happy Day, etc.

Sto- borrowed from GFZ