Want to try your skills against some of the best?

In shooting, LAPD SWAT is supposed to be right up there, and someone pointed to this modified pistol qualification:
25 yds: 2 body under 4 sec--3x (same as the Defoor Test #2 shot in DOW #40)
15 yds: 2 body under 3 sec--3x
10 yds: 2 body then 1 head under 3.5 sec--2x
7 yds: 2 body then 1 head under 3 sec--2x
5 yds: 2 body then 1 head under 2.5 sec--2x
3 yds: 2 body then 1 head under 2 sec--2x

Modifications are for ranges where you can't draw from holster.


From three years ago, BRM notes the idiocy of blaming objects instead of the people doing things; the gun bigots and hoplophobes didn't listen then, they won't now.


"What to do instead of something" from Chicago, current version.


On the MSM,
Interesting that Andrea Mitchell had no issue with the press being called “liberal” and found nothing worth remarking on, here except “did you really mean to call the president lazy”, and then narrowing her eyes about it. She’d be a formidable apparatchik in a re-education camp, wouldn’t she? “I’m going to give you a chance to take that back…” I know I’d be terrified.


Also,

I think the Obama administration — the whole boiling of them, and Mrs. Pelosi, Mr. Reid and their posses and pals — have become so confident that a victory in this election means they will never again have to answer to anyone about anything, that in their heads, they’re already there.

I said she gets it almost right. So what are my reservations? Winning this election will only solidify the process, but I think they already reached the point she describes quite some time ago.


"I did not try to mislead you; I was lying my ass off."


Ok, this is going to get really nasty:
 A preliminary investigation has found friendly fire likely was to blame in the shootings of two border agents along the Arizona-Mexico border, the FBI said Friday.


And on the social side,
No, you're not going to 'the wrong wedding', you have a friend who is insane.

The ACLU tends to do a fine job of demonstrating

why so many people think they suck.
The last paragraph is classic. ACLU is calling for more transparency by the Border Patrol. They have yet to call for more transparency from the Department of Justice over Fast & Furious. The ACLU is very concerned for Mexican citizens, but I guess the 300+ who have died by Fast & Furious weapons do not matter.

They also say the Border Patrol “carries responsibility to be accountable to the American public” since they’re the largest law enforcement agency in the US. That’s odd. They haven’t demanded the DOJ to be accountable for their actions in Fast & Furious. No one within the DOJ has been held accountable. They’ve been allowed to resign quietly and take other cushy jobs or reassigned. No one has been fired or arrested despite the fact that there are hundreds of deaths linked to the operation.


Also sucking at a high level, Rep. Cummings(Race-Mongering Jerk-MD).


Rebel Pundit caught up with supporters of the President at an Obama for America rally in Madison, WI on Thursday. When asked if it was “fair” that the President was unable to use a teleprompter during the debates, overwhelmingly the supporters said “no”.
The level of dumb in this, it's painful.


Desmond Tutu; someone else not as shiny as painted

And since someone started the game, I'll play

What's on my playlist I use while working out, or riding the OKCPV to the library:

Ashrei Ha’Ish

La Grange

The Butterfly Jig

Heartache Tonight

Sweet Dreams

Celtic Circle Dance

Barracuda

Sweet Young Thing

Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked

Sexy & 17

Bad Girlfriend

All American Nightmare

Weapon of Choice

White Lightning & Wine

Sea of Tranquility

Winterborn

Classical Gas(guitar solo)

The Night

Unionhouse Branch

Long Cool Woman

Rhythm of My Heart

Gimme the Prize

Snakedriver

Pickin’ Wildflowers

God’s Gonna Cut You Down

Dead Souls

Let's see, country, rock, Israeli dance... I do have a bit of a mix there

The Guitar Saga, Post VII

This past Saturday I very lightly sanded with 800 finish paper, cleaned, and then put several coats on.  Sunday wet-sanded to level, cleaned, and then the last, very light, finishing coat.  Here's what it looks like now:

Yeah, looks a lot better than with the original finish flaking off.

The lacquer instructions say to let it dry 6-8 days before stringing; I'm going to give it the full eight, so I'll string it Tuesday, and see how it sounds.

Remember all the Fusion Centers? The ones that said the tea party

should be considered a terrorist group, that prepping for natural disaster(in tornado season like they'd said people should, yet!) should be considered suspicious and so on?
Homeland Security Secretary Janet A. Napolitano repeatedly misled lawmakers about one of her department’s signature initiatives, the special centers where state and local police share information about terrorism with their federal counterparts, a key lawmaker who helped author a damning report on the project said in an interview Thursday.

A bipartisan report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations states that Ms. Napolitano and her department failed to report to Congress serious problems with the so-called “fusion center” program.

“She was not straightforward to the committee about what she actually knew at the time and what had been documented by [the department’s] own look at the problem,” the subcommittee’s senior Republican, Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, told The Washington Times on Thursday.
What?  Napolitano & Co. lied?  And covered-up?  Who could have imagined such a thing?

Mr. Coburn said the department had deliberately stonewalled the subcommittee’s oversight function.

Department officials “threw up roadblocks in every area. They didn’t want this report to come out because they knew how bad it was,” he said.
But don't worry, Homeland Security spokesman Matthew Chandler dismissed the report as “out of date, inaccurate and misleading.”
Of COURSE it is, has to be, right?


About all those non-union people connected to GM who were screwed out of their pensions?  Yeah, Obama was connected to that being done.  Anybody surprised?


A lot of people have talked about how bloody awful Obama was in the debate; I wasn't surprised by what I read, for two reasons:
A: Had you ever listened to any of the recordings of him when he went off teleprompter?  Unless he was in a audience of total supporters(and sometimes even then), he's awful; stuttering, hesitating, "Uh, ah, uh," on and on.  Someone would talk about how wonderful a speaker he is, I'd mention those, and they'd either ignore it or dismiss those as 'cherry-picking'.  Well, in a way they were: they were the ones the major media never played if they could avoid it; they didn't fit the image of Obama as The Great Orator.  So a lot of people had either never heard those, or- if they heard about it- dismissed.  So when he did it in the debate...
B: Like everyone pointed out, with very few exceptions the media hasn't actually challenged him on anything for years: they've insulted/dismissed/slandered anyone who did, they've carried his water, so he flat was not prepared- maybe could not imagine anyone daring to- for being hit hard.  It showed.

Obama's not stupid.  Arrogant as the devil himself, insulated, yes.  I'd imagine he'll be a lot better in the next one.  I'd guess the big thing for Romney is to keep not letting him lie and get away with it; challenge him on it when he lies, when he throws out fake numbers.


New Jersey: where the facts and truth don't mean squat.


On the That was upsetting post a few days back, yesterday afternoon I went through that .45 brass; either the case the little piece of brass came from wasn't picked up the day it was fired, or that's not where it came from; none of the primers showed any bits missing.  So that mystery continues.  I did fire that pistol again Wednesday, no problems.

Don't they know they're hurting Mother Gaia?

In linking al-Qaeda to the deadly wildfires, Mr Bortnikov pointed to calls to launch a "forest jihad" by various extremist websites which he said also publish detailed instructions about how and where to best carry out arson. 

He said it was very difficult for special services to find and prosecute such arsonists.


On the 'Only Ones trained enough' front,
Armed Internal Revenue Service agents need more thorough firearms training and they need to be more consistent in reporting accidental firings of their guns, said the tax-collecting agency's watchdog on Tuesday.

"Special agents not properly trained in the use of firearms could endanger the public, as well as their fellow special agents, and expose the IRS to potential litigation over injuries or damages," said J. Russell George, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

A: If' they're 'not properly trained', then why the hell did you turn them loose with sidearms and police powers?
B: Just how many 'accidental firings'(what we call 'negligent discharges') are we talking about here?  Inquiring minds want to know.
C: You maybe get the feeling they're more concerned about being sued than about the other stuff?



Found at the Irishman's


To the ladies out there: why do so many women seem to consider that act of checking tire pressure to be something done, oh, every few months or so?  If they think of it?


Oh, and to people like Tingles Matthews,

Now that's a comment!

From Bob Owens:

Some people eat when they get depressed. I hope Michelle put Bo outside for the night.

Hehehehehe.....


While the USDA- pushed by Mrs. Obama- is telling students to eat like she doesn't,
While students pick at their vegetables, USDA’s cafeteria menus are loaded with unhealthy options for government employees — from pesto chicken pizza to BLTs with cheddar cheese, Cuban pork paninis to Philly steak subs, cheeseburgers to French toast.

“If the USDA demands that 100,000 school districts change their menus and justifies this mandate because schools receive federal money for lunches, then taxpayers should demand that the USDA cafeteria meet the same standards, as USDA operates in taxpayer-funded buildings,” Huelskamp challenged Tuesday afternoon. “Let’s see if they eat enough to function. Let’s see if they like having choices taken away from them.”



A: Why the HELL would you 'need' the SWAT team for this?
B: Nobody on the effing raid could tell the difference between marijuana and daisies?  Really?
People need their ass kicked for this.  And, if they're so desperate for things to do that they're used for crap like this, their SWAT team needs to be disbanded.

Oh, this'll be interesting:
On Thursday, the New York Post reported Zimmerman is suing the Peacock Network. 
According to the Post, the complaint will be filed against NBC News President Steve Capus and correspondent Ron Allen who was the Today reporter involved in the March 27 broadcast. 

A source told the Post, “The suit will be filed imminently against NBC and its news executives. The network’s legal department has put everybody in the news department involved with this incident on notice, telling them not to comment.”
No idea how this'll do in court; to a non-lawyer, looks like NBC could lose its ass over this.

Hillary Clinton: "Please let us put our 'investigation' off

until after the election!"

And in the meantime, while the FBI has been kept away from the 'crime scene', Deity knows what's already been stolen by the bad guys.  And curious locals.  And the Libyan government...

Freaking marvelous

Why it should be possible to fire teachers

The teacher allegedly told the girl to take off the shirt, saying it was like wearing a Ku Klux Klan sheet. The teacher allegedly threatened to use a marker to cross out Romney’s name and that of Rep. Paul Ryan, his running mate.  The teacher also allegedly tried to throw the student out of class.

The teacher also allegedly said that Carroll was "a Democratic school."

Typing with my right hand & wrist wrapped up

does nothing for my speed.  Or spelling.

Did something to my self a few days back, not really sure what; the hand is better(mostly) but the wrist is making its displeasure known on a number of actions.  Like dry-firing; actually having to draw and shoot with speed would not be fun, to say the least.

And, as Tam noted some months ago when her right was somewhat out of commission, I don't have a left-handed holster either.  I guess it's pocket pistol for the next week or two.

And yes, I usually try to get some weak-hand practice in when I hit the range.  Good thing.

speaking of .gov agencies we have no reason to trust,

Environmental Protection Agency officials are keeping mum today about a potential landmine of a lawsuit that claims senior executives there have used secret email accounts to conduct public business without being subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

The suit was filed last week by the Competitive Enterprise Institute's senior fellow, Christopher C. Horner, Hans Bader, CEI's counsel for special projects, and Sam Kazman, the conservative think tank's general counsel.

Ih the suit, CEI asks the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to order EPA to produce "certain records pertaining to 'secondary,' non-public email accounts for EPA administrators, the existence of which accounts Plaintiff discovered in an Agency document obtained under a previous FOIA request."
...
Federal law requires all government employees to use only official email accounts. If they do use a private account to do official business, however, they are required to make that available to their employing department or agency.

On that earlier post on 'vertical integration of LE',

something noted at Sipsey,

Mind you, the eTrace system upon which this proposal is based is shot full of chaos and inefficiencies -- multiple traces, administrative traces having nothing to do with crime, etc -- and this proposal would provide trace information to people and organizations who, according to one of sources, "have no business in the law to it." And Arends understands the legal mienfield he is proposing to defeat by evasion:

While the ATF’s policy of not sharing one agency’s trace data with another agency does exist, there are still ways in which multiple agencies can work together using trace data.

Fancy way of saying 'there are ways for us to break the policy and the law, and get away with it.'  Just the kind of crap we've come to expect from these people.

Sharyl Attkisson, apparently one of the only real reporters

in the major media, is getting some recognition for it. 

And, since it also concerns government agencies we've got no real reason to trust,
Vertical integration of all law enforcement under federal command raises red flags citizen journalist Mike Vanderboegh of Sipsey Street Irregulars warned yesterday in an exclusive analysis, citing an attorney source characterizing it as “the ‘single scariest proposal’ he'd read recently.”He’s referring to a report published in the September issue of Police Chief Magazine, “The ATF’s iTrafficking Program: Linking Firearms Trace Data with State Fusion Centers.”
...
As should a partnership with the IACP, itself a major beneficiary of the notoriously anti-gun Joyce Foundation, a United Nations-approved leader in global disarmament and monopoly of violence maintenance efforts, and a signatory to the Brady Center’s brief against the landmark McDonald case, where the Supreme Court ruled the Second Amendment applies to the individual states. 

Likewise, fusion centers themselves have been the focus of concerns, from absurd warnings issued under the FBI’s imprimatur about “domestic terrorism” to include “the purchase of popular preparedness items and firearms accessories as ‘suspicious’ and ‘potential indicators of terrorist activities,” and with Homeland Security adding “Constitutionalists” for good measure. And it’s not like Operation Fast and Furious has given Americans cause to view the Justice Department or ATF as purely-motivated honest brokers of just about anything.
Read it all; along with everything else, there's some- let's say 'sloppiness'- along with the previously-demonstrated crookedness of some of these agencies that ought to scare hell out of anyone who gives a damn about honest law enforcement, and the 2nd Amendment(among others).

The University of Wisconsin lets itself be used fror the Obama campaign

and screw the students.  Except the information they can extract from them for the Obama campaign.
For that, they pay tuition? I could email my notes for the whole semester, but these are students who pay$40,040 tuition per year! ($21,350 if they are Wisconsin residents, a break they get because their parents pay the exorbitant Wisconsin taxes that help keep this stellar university going.)

From an earlier post:
 "President Barack Obama will hold a campaign rally on Bascom Hill this Thursday." Openly announces the University of Wisconsin—Madison. 

After I went to all that trouble to critique the earlier attempt to frame the visit as historical and presidential, when it was really a campaign rally. 

I can't believe the University is shutting down, closing buildings such as the Law School, depriving us of the rooms for regularly scheduled classes, for an entire day, to accommodate a campaign rally. The grounds and the students are provided for a massively intrusive photo-op. Of course, the students don't have to attend. But they will. They've paid their tuition for classes, which they're not getting, and their bodies are repurposed for political exploitation.
Hey, what's losing a day of classes you've been charged out the ass for when they can use you to push The Lightworkers' campaign?

Gordon Lightfoot, just because

Oh, pretties,

I want some.

Damn, I miss making things.

Today, first time in a loooong, time, pulled out the portable forge and lit it; had three knives needed heat-treating(still can't do much in the way of forging).  Right now I still smell like coal smoke; a very familiar scent.

Just stuff

TSA: Taking child molesters off the street by hiring them

First he was fired for allegedly groping young girls, then hired to frisk them at an airport.

A disgraced former priest, defrocked from his New Jersey diocese over allegations of molestation in 2002, was three months later given a job as a TSA officer, it has been revealed.

Thomas Harkins was employed in a role where his duties would include doing pat downs on children, according to local news, after the agency failed to do a thorough background check and offered him a position at Philadelphia International Airport.

So the biggest threat to freedom of speech is people who depend on it

but don't like other people having it; freaking wonderful.
I'm sure they'd object that they don't mind other people having it as long as they don't say anything that causes trouble.  At least, trouble that they don't approve of...


Few days back we hit 2000 troops killed in Afghanistan(with, I'll note, no countdown from the media like they did when Bush was President); what does Obama & Co. do?
Team Obama didn’t mark the occasion by capturing or killing Bin Qumu. They also didn’t hold a memorial service to honor the ultimate sacrifice of 2,000 military men and women.
Instead, they gave Omar Khadr, a convicted murderer detained at Gitmo, a one-way ticket to Canada. This is the same Khadr who pled guilty at a military commission trial in 2010 to killing one of those 2,000 troops, Army Sergeant First Class Christopher J. Speer.
Hey, the President doesn't like the idea of actually winning the war, or using the word 'victory'(except when he's trying to claim credit for Iraq, that is), and seems to loathe the military as much as Bill Clinton; you expect him to give a rats ass about the troops?


I'd heard something about a guy 'shooting his son by accident' the other day but hadn't dug up the story; turns out it's not what that headline would have you think.


"How dare you say you're not a racist for posting on this?  That PROVES you're racist!"  Etc. ad bullshit.


Surveillance cameras in the bathrooms and locker rooms... you can't get away from the damn things ANYWHERE...

How did I know that, somehow, the backstabbing Afgans murdering our troops

would be our fault?

If you don’t want to be shot in the back by your Afghan training partners, the Pentagon advises, don’t offend their religious sensibilities. Don’t kick your feet up on a table, for instance, and never ask to see a picture of their wives and kids. “There’s a percentage [of attacks] which are cultural affronts,” Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said in a recent interview.

I probably don't need to say that the fact that General Dempsey ordered this safety standown makes him a world class tool. Responding to incidents and widespread operational issues like this with our troops with solutions like this further confirms for me the exact consistency of the chewy center of this poopy flavored lollipop; and evidently, I am not the only one who has had to lick this thing...

 “I would like to see a public affairs officer explain to the press where showing the bottom of your shoe to a Muslim or shaking with your left hand was legitimate grounds for murder,” growled one US Army official.
“The cultural affronts excuse is a bunch of garbage,” a senior US Army intelligence official told me. “The Afghans that know we’re doing all this PC cultural sensitivity crap are laughing their asses off at our stupidity.”

I'm at the point of thinking we should take these PC-at-any-cost assholes, ship them to A'stan and leave them there.  Everybody else comes home.  There's a problem there?  Bomb the shit out of it, and anyone connected to it.  I am God-damned sick of having our 'allies' murder our guys and blame us for it, I'm sick of that asshole President demanding more payoffs because of our faults, and I am- while I'm  on it- sick to fucking death of our media ignoring the deaths of our troops as much as they can because Obama's in charge.

That video on the knife attack at a store the other day

triggered some thoughts.
No technique, nothing fancy, just slashing and chopping and stabbing.  Which made me think of that rule 'Open your distance if at all possible, change angles, anything to get some space and grab some weapon.'  Scary as hell to watch.

Note: I saw that bleep-damned Blogger ate the embed in the earlier post.  It's been doing that since they 'updated' things.

Remember that DHS report that the tea party is made of of terrorists?

A large portion of the country, being profiled by their government as possible terrorists, did the appropriate thing and yelled at the government representatives who were still friendly to them, and thankfully, the report was shelved.

It is now nearly three years later and, it’s back.

Well, not so much the report itself. But one of the main authors of the report, Daryl Johnson, was giving testimony to Dick Durbin’s (D-IL) committee.  For those not quite up to speed on committee assignments, that would be the Senate Judiciary Committee. The hearing was titled “Hate Crimes and the Threat of Domestic Terrorism” and Mr. Johnson got to sit in front of a governmental body and go MSNBC all over the place.
A: Dick Turban is a sack of crap enemy of the United States.
B: Does it double-check me as a terrorist if I say Daryl Johnson is a scum-sucking bigoted fool?

Well, well, a little past history on our noble AG

pointed to by a commenter:
As a freshman at Columbia University in 1970, future Attorney General Eric Holder participated in a five-day occupation of an abandoned Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) headquarters with a group of black students later described by the university’s Black Students’ Organization as “armed,” The Daily Caller has learned.

Department of Justice spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler has not responded to questions from The Daily Caller about whether Holder himself was armed — and if so, with what sort of weapon.


 'Why would anyone want to carry a gun to the store?'
Maybe because there are nutcases out there?
And salute to the store owner: injured, surprised, still managed to make a solid shot and put the attacker down.
Found at Arms and the Law


 Found at Uncles, revolver speedloader review
Also, a bit of fashion advice on concealed carry.


From Sarah Hoyt: some thoughts on hopefulness, the future, and its enemies:
I can see it.  It’s so close I can taste it.

So can the luddites.  Which is why they’re screaming and thrashing around like banshees and making use of 20^th century communications tech to TRY to keep the future at bay.  It annoys me, because if they succeed the transition will be unnecessarily painful, unnecessarily bloody, and I might not live to see the other side.

What makes me wake up in the middle of the night is the fear that the land I love, and my children born here, will not live as an entity to see the other end of this either.


British judge says "You break into someones' home, you face a risk and that's how it should be"; hoplophobes wet their knickers(again).


And last, the administration doesn't want employers obeying the law when it might cause them problems; so they try to threaten, and then bribe them.

More on Univision doing the job PBS and CNN and

CBS and NBC etc. won't do:
The report also shed more light on a fact that many in the media have attempted to ignore — namely, that Operation Fast and Furious was not the only federal gun-walking operation providing weapons to criminals at this time.
Operation Castaway, run with the same bloody-minded approach as Operation Fast and Furious, provided more than 1,000 guns to cartels via the Tampa ATF. Those guns leaked out across Honduras, Colombia, and Venezuela, according to the U.S. veteran who smuggled some of the weapons, Hugh Crumpler:

“When the ATF stopped me, they told me the guns were going to cartels,” Hugh Crumpler, a Vietnam veteran turned arms trafficker, told Univision News. “The ATF knew before I knew and had been following me for a considerable length of time. They could not have followed me for two months like they said they did, and not know the guns were going somewhere, and not want for that to be happening.”

Univision also uncovered evidence of weapons being smuggled from Texas: two gun-smuggling programs similar to Fast and Furious are rumored to have put thousands of additional weapons in the cartels’ hands in operations larger than Fast and Furious. U.S. Senator John Cornyn has repeatedly pressed the Obama administration for information about the documented trail of weapons coming from two Texas ATF areas of operations. The Department of Justice has denied the existence of such programs, despite the physical evidence of guns recovered suggesting otherwise. While the Univision report focused on guns the DOJ ran to Mexican cartels, there is enough evidence to suggest other Obama administration-sanctioned gun-walking plots arming domestic criminal gangs, such as the so-called Gangwalker plot;in Indiana, which supplied Chicago street gangs, and similar rumored operations in California, North Carolina, northern Florida, and elsewhere, which provided weapons to gangs in U.S. cities. Nor has the Univision report focused on weapons that have found their way to cartels via the State Department or the Department of Defense.
So not only did Univision investigate F&F, they took the trouble to dig into the OTHER gunwalking programs which our media won't even mention(of course, it took how long for them to even mention Gunwalker?)...

Last night I happened to turn PBS on, just as a commercial began for  their coverage over the next month of the debates and such; and it included various journalists talking about how important their jobs are, how they're the 'filter' between the news and us; I wonder if it's ever occurred to these clowns that their 'filtering' is a big reason we don't trust them?

As if there weren't enough reason to say 'F*** Afghanistan

and every child molester in the country' already...
So, this is how I’m hearing that the attack happened this morning. A sergeant first class and a contractor approached an ANA checkpoint and struck up a conversation with the officer in charge of the outpost. In mid-sentence, the ANA officer shot the contractor and the sergeant first class, who went down returning fire.

As the sergeant first class was shot, the entire 17-man Afghan unit opened fire on the US convoy which was passing through the checkpoint. Three other soldiers were injured, and one is critical.

That means that there were 17 m’er f’ers who had slipped through the system that we were assured was in place to weed out the goat raping thugs who planned on killing Americans. 17 of them in one unit.
A WHOLE FUCKING UNIT of our 'allies'.
Gee, I wonder how much Obama will hand over to Karzai this time to assuage his hurt feelings over the nasty things we'll say about the corrupt little shit and his friends?

Two more things and that's it for the night,

and both involve government bullcrap.
First, I remember when it was decided the military would go to the Beretta 9mm for a sidearm; seems the decision process was even more of a swamp than I'd previously heard.


The second, remember the "How to ignore posse cometatis  and use the Army if the tea party takes over a town" crap?  Well, it appears some people really want the military to hate people like us(long post copied from Sipsey):

Meet Arie Perliger, West Point professor now dabbling in "domestic extremism."

Many thanks to the reader who forwarded me the link to this article: "Identifying Three Trends in Far Right Violence in the United States."

The author, Arie Perliger, is, according to his own bio:

(T)he Director of Terrorism Studies at the Combating Terrorism Center and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the United States Military Academy at West Point. His research focuses on political violence and extremism and the principal ways democracies respond to these challenges; the politics of security and the radical right in Israel, Europe and the US.

He is the author of four books and more than 20 articles and book chapters. His work has appeared in peer reviewed journals such as Social Forces, Security Studies, PS: Political Science, Criminal Justice and Behavior, Armed Forces and Society and others.

Dr. Perliger is the co-editor of the journal Democracy and Security and is a regular reviewer for Columbia University Press, Chicago University Press, Routledge, Polity Press, Political Psychology, Critical Studies on Terrorism, Terrorism and Political Violence, Armed Forces and Society and other journals.

And what, you may ask, is the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point?

Mission

Situated at the nexus of theory and practice, the Combating Terrorism Center serves as an important national resource that rigorously studies the terrorist threat and provides policy-relevant research while moving the boundaries of academic knowledge. The CTC’s distinguished scholars, international network of experts, and access to senior U.S. government leadership set it apart from any other like enterprise.

We Teach: As an institution, we embrace the unique responsibility to prepare cadets to think critically about the challenges they will face during war and peace. To this end, the Center directs multiple graduate-level seminars on Terrorism and Counterterrorism and administers a minor in terrorism studies. In addition, the CTC directs counterterrorism educational programs for four partner government agencies.

We Research: The CTC’s research program produces path-breaking analysis on the dynamic and evolving terrorist threat. The Center’s deep intellectual capital and ability to apply theory to practice creates a unique research model that not only informs strategic counterterrorism thinking but moves the boundaries of academic knowledge.

We Advise: Due to the Center’s unique position at the nexus of academia and practice, the Center leverages its deep expertise to contribute to discrete advisory efforts for federal, state, and local governments including: strategic analysis, operational support, and organizational strategy design.

Take a look at the CTC's personnel list. These are some serious folks.

Now, all of Perliger's previous research and experience has been in Israeli "right-wing extremism," see here, here, and here.

Apparently, however, Perliger is now branching out, into a subject about which he apparently knows exactly . . . dick. First evidence? Look at his sources listed on his website:

Predictably, under "Relevant links" lists The Southern Preposterous Lie Center and under "Datasets" lists SPLC's "Hate Incidents."

Also, given his sources listed at the end of the article in Note 2: Richard "Abens'" American Militias; Joel Dyer's Harvest of Rage; and Kathlyn Gay's Militias: Armed and Dangerous, it is not surprising that his paper reflects "The Narrative of 1995" critiqued by historian Prof. Robert H. Churchill in his book To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face: Libertarian Political Violence and the Origins of the Militia Movement.

Heck, this West Point "professor" schmuck didn't even get Richard Abanes name right. Here is what Prof. Churchill has to say about the quality of Abanes' and other "Brown Scare" writers of the 90s:

The militia movement has been the subject of at least a dozen books and hundreds of articles, yet it remains one of the most poorly understood political movements of the twentieth century. In the months after the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building by Timothy McVeigh, civil rights organizations issued at least a dozen published reports on the militia movement, and civil rights activists offered "expert" commentary in hundreds of news stories. Within a year, books by leading figures associated with civil rights organizations, including Morris Dees, Kenneth Stern, and Richard Abanes, offered a coherent narrative of the origin of the movement.

What America learned in these months was that the militia movement was an outgrowth of the racist Right. Civil rights activists portrayed the militias as the armed wing of a much larger "Christian Patriot" movement. They warned that Christian Patriots numbered in the millions and that Christian Patriotism called for restoration of white, Christian, patriarchal domination. The Christian Patriot movement as a whole, and the militias in particular, were antidemocratic, paranoid, virulently anti-semitic, genocidally racist, and brutally violent. Much of this literature suggested that Timothy McVeigh was the movement's highest expression. In this narrative, the militias and the Patriot movement took on the guise of the perfect racist "other," and the threat they posed was best articulated by Morris Dees' apocalyptic vision of a "gathering storm."

This "narrative of 1995" produced by civil rights organizations, coupled with the horror of the Oklahoma City bombing, triggered what Steven Chernak has referred to as a moral panic. Through published reports, their influence over the news coverage of the movement, and testimony at prominent public hearings, leading militia "experts" injected their portrait of the movement into public consciousness and popular culture. In news coverage, popular novels, episodes of Law and Order, and movies such as Arlington Road, the public became well-acquainted with the archetypal militiaman, usually protrayed as warped by racial hatred, obsessed with bizarre conspiracy theories, and hungry for violent retribution.

The moral panic over the "militia menace" strongly resembled previous moral panics over the "communist menace" that had swept the nation in the aftermath of World War I and again in the early 1950s. Less well known than these two Red scares is America's "Brown Scare." In the late 1930s, political activists on the left warned that an array of far right opponents of President Roosevelt and the New Deal . . . constituted a fifth column composed of fascist brownshirts . . . (T)he ensuing moral panic facilitated a campaign of repression waged by the U.S. governemnt against the Far Right during World War II. In 1995-6, the moral panic over the militia movement blossomed into a second American Brown Scare.

The literature produced by the second American Brown Scare has had significant impact on academic analysis of the movement, and this poses a problem for continuing scholarship. The civil rights organizations that produced the narrative of 1995 conceived of themselves as political opponents of the militia movement, and these organizations made the legal suppression of the movement one of their central political objectives. That political objective has systematically shaped their reporting on the movement. Their analyses might serve as a primary source base for an interesting analyis of how the activist Left perceived the Far Right at the turn of the millennium. To use this literature as a primary source base in an analysis of the character of the militia movement itself is to allow the movement's opponents to define it.

Unfortunately, much of the scholarship on the militia movement produced in the last ten years has not broken free from the influence of the narrative of 1995. Too many scholars have relied on the reports and books generated by the Brown Scare as primary evidence of the character of the movement. Others who have avoided this first error have nevertheless allowed the narrative of 1995 to unduly influence their research agendas. Finally, even the best scholarship on militias tends to inappropriately conflate the militia movement with other movements on the far right of American politics and to overstate the influence of millennial thought on militia ideology. . .

The final academic legacy of the Brown Scare is an emphasis on the allegedly close association of militia groups with other far right organizations, such as white supremacist groups, Christian Identity ministries, common-law courts, and tax protest societies. The narrative of 1995 lumped all of these disparate far right groups together in the "Christian Patriot movement," a misguided simplification that has led a number of senior scholars to blur the lines between different groups with quite different worldviews . . .

Since the turn of the millennium, three scholars have begun the task of freeing scholarship of the militia movement from the narrative of 1995. . . As an historian, I hope to contribute to this field an insight gained in the study of other partisan political crises in American history: in evaluating the ideology of an insurgent movement, one must not allow the movement's partisan allies, much less its partisan enemies, to speak for it. (pp. 7-11)

It is obvious that Perliger either hasn't read Churchill's work, or, if he has, he doesn't care to let it get in the way of his own narrative. Perliger presents his own "Typology of the American Violent Far Right."

Three major ideological trends can be identified within the American violent far right: racist, anti-federalist and fundamentalist. The ideological characteristics of the various groups impact their operations in terms of tactics used and target selection.

It is the relabeling of the older terms "militia" and "patriot movement" into the "Anti-Federalist Trend" which makes Perliger's faulty analysis particularly dangerous.

The anti-federalist trend (which is usually identified in the literature as the “militia” or “patriot” movement) appeared in full force only in the early to mid-1990s with the emergence of groups such as the Militia of Montana and the Michigan Militia. Anti-federalist and anti-government sentiments existed in U.S. society before the 1990s via diverse movements and ideological associations promoting anti-taxation, gun rights, and a “survivalist” lifestyle. Yet most scholars concur that the “farm crises” of the 1980s combined with the implications of rapid cultural, technological and normative changes in American society, as well as attempts to revise gun control and environmental legislation, facilitated the emergence of a fairly ideologically cohesive movement, as well as its rapid growth.[2]

Ideologically, anti-federalists are interested in undermining the influence, legitimacy and practical sovereignty of the federal government and its proxy organizations, such as the U.S. military or Federal Bureau of Investigation.[3] This rationale is multifaceted, and includes the belief that the U.S. political system and its proxies have been hijacked by external forces interested in promoting a New World Order (NWO),[4] in which the United States will be absorbed into the United Nations or another version of global government; strong convictions regarding the corrupted and tyrannical nature of the federal government and its related natural tendency to intrude on individuals’ civilian lives and constitutional rights; and finally, perceptions supporting civilian activism, individual freedoms, and self governing the way they were manifested in the frontier culture in U.S. history, especially during the Revolutionary War and the expansion to the American west. Hence, anti-federalist groups see themselves as part of a struggle to restore or preserve the United States’ “true” identity, values and “way of life” and as the successors of the country’s founding fathers.

Recent research conducted by this author shows that in the case of the anti-federalist trend there is compatibility between ideological tenets and operational characteristics. Two-thirds of the attacks by anti-federalist groups were directed against the government and its proxies, such as law enforcement (65.8%); while attacks against minorities (11%) and infrastructure (6.1%, which could also be seen as attacks against the government) comprise most of the rest.

The article doesn't given us the statistical evidence upon which Perliger rests his claims, but if he's counting on the Southern Preposterous Lie Center, that is a slender scholarly reed indeed.

The important point is that Perliger has managed, by describing these "violent right-wing extremists" as "anti-federalist", to expand, elide and conflate these perceived enemies and, I'm sure, to present to the cadets at West Point the specter of "constitutionalist terrorists."

This is dangerous stuff. It may also be argued that the neo-Nazis and "Christian" Identity types which make up the other two-thirds of Perliger's article, are not even "right wing" since their particular collectivisms derive from variants of socialism. The constitutional militias, as Churchill quickly recognized when he did his own original research, were largely libertarian in make up and natural enemies of all forms of collectivism.

As I commented back in 1999:

“I think in some ways Christian Identity is designed for pantywaists who are afraid to declare themselves true Nazis,” Vanderboegh jibed. “These are the folks who have to tell their mommas or their wives, “It’s OK that we hate blacks and Jews, dear, because God and Jesus told us it’s OK. Whereas the Nazis don’t worry about that kind of thing. They’re sort of beyond excuses.

“You know, when you’ve got Adolf Hitler as your standard-bearer, what else have you got to be embarrassed about?” Vanderboegh said.

“They each come to their pus-filled beliefs by different roads, but they agree on the destination.” -- “Christian Identity is for pantywaists” by Jeff Stein, Salon, 11 Aug 1999.

Yet, according to Perliger, we "anti-federalists" (and I surely acknowledge my Anti-Federalism, going back to Founders like George Mason and Patrick Henry) are now one of the "three trends of far right violence in the United States." AND THIS ILL-INFORMED SCHMUCK IS TEACHING WEST POINT CADETS.

Like I said, this is dangerous stuff.

Have a little time now, and I'll start with the Univision report

on Gunwalker:
Indirectly, the United States government played a role in the massacre by supplying some of the firearms used by the cartel murderers. Three of the high caliber weapons fired that night in Villas de Salvarcar were linked to a gun tracing operation run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), according to a Mexican army document obtained exclusively by Univision News.

Univision News identified a total of 57 more previously unreported firearms that were bought by straw purchasers monitored by ATF during Operation Fast and Furious, and then recovered in Mexico in sites related to murders, kidnappings, and at least one other massacre.
More on the report at Legal Insurrection.
Yes, I know, the media and people like Cummings will start yelling "We need more laws!"; I still wonder if this might cause the major media to pull their head out and start actually, y'know, reporting on this...


Also,
Congressional Republicans are threatening to subpoena a White House official who declined to speak to them in their investigation of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) gunwalking operation: Fast and Furious.
This should've been done a long time ago.


Remember that bullcrap story(literally a 'story', here) in  Fortune?  The one that 'explained' that Gunwalker was all a Stupid Party plot to attack Obama & Holder, etc.?
Scooping other media with an exclusive story, Dylan Byers of Politico today reported he had obtained a copy of a letter dated yesterday from Robert N. Driscoll, the attorney for ATF whistleblower John Dodson, written to Fortune managing editor Andrew Serwer, that demanded retraction of a report by Katherine Eban the letter calls “demonstrably false in many respects.”
 Which in plain language is "Eban lied her ass off, we've got proof, we want a retraction."

 Ignoring all the other stuff, the way the media has carried Obamas' water on Gunwalker is flat disgusting on its own, and a lot of us have wondered if ANYTHING would be enough to make them actually start imitating reporters... we'll see.

More Mexican reporters doing the job American journalists won't do

Somebody sent me this link, a CSM story  that Univision- whose reporter actually asked Obama real questions- has a story coming up on Fast & Furious.  Then ran across this:

Watch More News Videos at ABC | 2012 Presidential Election | Entertainment & Celebrity News

which story includes
Additional guns, previously unreported by congressional investigators, found their way into the hands of drug traffickers across Latin America in countries such as, Honduras and Colombia, as well as the U.S. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. A person familiar with the recent congressional hearings called Univision’s findings “the holy grail” that Congress had been searching for.

So; if you paid attention only to the Official Media, you'd never have heard of Fast & Furious and the crap involved at all; if you listened only to them, you'd have been told that all you heard elsewhere was nothing but partisan political crap- and racist at that- from the Evil Republicans(ignore the conservatives and libertarians, they either don't count or count as Stupid Party members).  And now, while our media is chasing anything Romney says that might count as a 'gaffe', and ignoring anything bad Obama says or does, Mexican media actually investigates something our media could have- SHOULD HAVE- been digging into for years at this point.

Somebody said one reason the media really needs Obama reelected is that if he isn't, they're screwed by their own actions; sounds about right.

Maybe more time to yell about things tonight, but this I had to post on.