Well, hmmm… I haven’t been procrastinating, I promise, I’ve just had a ton of activity on my plate.

The other day, Always On Watch, a friend and one of my favorite co-bloggers, named me as one of her five picks in the Thinking Blogger Award. Given her intellectual pulchritude, so to speak, and the multitudes of great bloggers out there, I was greatly honored and not a little humbled at her considering yours truly for such a bestowment.

The entailment is that each blogger named post the names/handles/websites of five other bloggers whose product causes one to really think… There is no obligation here, while one is “tagged”, one can either participate or not.

This one has been tough for me, because I read a lot of blogs and I’d be infinitely better off if I could name twenty rather than five, but that particular luxury is not afforded here.

So…

After a considerable and time consuming period of narrowing down (I hate this, there really are so many more blogs I would like to name), here are my five picks for the Thinking Bloggers Award:

Old Soldier– here is a retired military man who posts from the perspective of one who has put his life on the line for our country and our freedom, and who posts from the perspective of one who is truly enraged by the fact that so many of those elected to govern America choose to take umbrage with its very existence. His blog is an excellent read.

Civil Truth, who has for some time been a great commenter here at Hard Astarboard, whose comments have both made me think and precipitated my doing some serious research just to keep up with him, and who has recently begun posting at Raven’s blog and thanks to whom I’ve learned a lot of things I didn’t know.

Back at you, Always On Watch! You rarely post anything that doesn’t require some serious thought!

In agreement with one of AOW’s own picks — credit, as they say, where credit is due, GM Roper– thank you, George, your posts never fail to make one sit back and give thought to the topics you discuss.

And…

Brendan, a blogger whose site is probably unknown to most of us in our segment of the Blogosphere yet is deserving of much more exposure – whenever I visit Space Tropic, I find myself enjoyably and/or thoughtfully immersed.

… watching Ann Coulter speak.

Scroll down for the video, where she discusses her latest column.

This year’s Democratic plan for the future is another inane sound bite designed to trick American voters into trusting them with national security.

To wit, they’re claiming there is no connection between the war on terror and the war in Iraq, and while they’re all for the war against terror — absolutely in favor of that war — they are adamantly opposed to the Iraq war. You know, the war where the U.S. military is killing thousands upon thousands of terrorists (described in the media as “Iraqi civilians,” even if they are from Jordan, like the now-dead leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi). That war.

As Howard Dean put it this week, “The occupation in Iraq is costing American lives and hampering our ability to fight the real global war on terror.”

This would be like complaining that Roosevelt’s war in Germany was hampering our ability to fight the real global war on fascism. Or anti-discrimination laws were hampering our ability to fight the real war on racism. Or dusting is hampering our ability to fight the real war on dust.

I have no trouble understanding why liberals hate her. Like Islamofascists, they have a very real problem when anyone has the collossal nerve to speak the truth.

All I can say is, “Let ‘em eat {California} spring rolls.”

…. You’ve gotta read this.

For most of this year, I’ve wondered about the abrupt absence, which commenced in January, of one of my favorite all-time bloggers, the Dissident Frogman. I seriously missed his posts.

Checking my email a few minutes ago, there he was!

YES!!!!

My friend Raven, at And Rightly So, posts excellently on Tom Tancredo, one of the few members of Congress today who has shown the courage to stand up to the PC forces that protect illegal immigrants and promote ignorance of all the damage they do to our country, to address the problem point blank and to get real results from his perserverance and the force of sheer, powerful, unrelenting drive to succeed.

I had wanted to post on President Bush’s speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center and include excerpt links, but I ran into the usual problem: MSM articles on Bush speeches only pick out one or two statements he makes that they can spin and turn into a false theme for the entire speech.

Yes, fair, balanced reporting. Not!

Instead, straight from the White House website and in its entirety, the transcript of the speech can be read here.

You gotta read this, it’s great!

Ann Coulter asks, Why Can’t I Get Arrested?

Freelance Journalist Michael Yon, who has gone into harm’s way in Iraq to bring us the real deal rather than the spun, twisted and sanitized left wing, Bush hating, politics-over-truth, shameless Mainstream Media’s version of events, while showing the compassionate humanity of the American soldier that the liberal media blatantly ignores, is one of the finalists for Time Magazine’s Photo of the Year for his emotion-inspiring photo of an American officer, Major Beiger, comforting the fatally wounded little Iraqi girl named Farah after a terrorist blew himself up in a crowd of children.

Read about the voting for photo of the year, view the pics and then vote, from here, at Michael Yon’s Online Magazine.

Michael Yon has posted another of his well received journals, filled with photos and great commentary, this one titled Birds Of Baghdad.

Yes, I’ve now moved into my new place, though there’s still renovation and redecoration in progress, none of it my own work, but that of the great people I mentioned in my last post: Phin and Sadie, who were responsible for the awesome new look, and Pixy, who hooked me up with Mu.Nu, the ultimate host for any blogger privileged enough to make this elite entity’s acquaintance.
To refer to their efforts as “contributions” would be false, because it would insinuate that they weren’t the collective prime movers in the rebuilding of my blog. My deepest thanks, therefore, go out to this creative trinity, as much for the excellence of their work on my behalf as for their taking the time to do it for me.

Thanks, guys and gal!