Tomorrow, I’m switching to another hotel here in New York, not because I don’t like where I’m at or the location I’m in – the upper west side is awesome – but because the new location will be closer to where I tend to spend my time and to where I want to establish a more permanent presence.

So I want to give mention to a few things regarding food up here on the upper west side.

Usually, after I get back to the hotel for the evening and am hungry or before I go out and want breakfast first, I call restaurants for delivery.

First, the best: Texas Rotisserie and Grill (since this is already New Yawk, ha ha, you can’t say “get a rope!”), on the northwest corner of 96th & Broadway.

My first day here, I happened to be strolling past and the aromas coming out of the place were heavenly, so I snagged one of their delivery menus, folded it and stuck it in my back pocket.

On the first occasion that I needed a delivery, I referred to it.

So many choices, not only where entrees are concerned, but appetizers and side dishes as well, and all coming out of one place. I’ve had their rotisserie chicken and their meatloaf, and such sides as their from-scratch mashed potatoes and gravy, stuffing, macaroni and cheese, whipped sweet potatoes and garlic parsley potatoes, and have nothing but great things to say about all of them.

I am a major meatloaf maniac, and their meatloaf, made with beef and turkey, has got to be the best meatloaf I’ve ever gotten from a restaurant. Yum!

To boot, all the portions they serve are profoundly oversized yet under-priced from a New York standpoint.

Dessert wise, their chocolate chip cake is to die for.

And their delivery time is nothing short of amazing. The knock at your door seems to come almost before you’ve hung up the phone.

Second, the worst. Artie’s, a Jewish deli at about 83rd & Broadway.

I stopped in there for a couple of potato knishes on my second day here, and they were easily of a quality to sing songs over. So…

A couple of days later, when I was hoping to get an early start, I called them at opening time (9 a.m.) and gave them a breakfast delivery order: a Nova lox platter, a potato knish, a chocolate egg cream and two large coffees. The woman who took the order told me it would be around 15 minutes.

At 10:25, I called to ask why the food had not yet arrived. The same woman told me that the cashier was sorry, she hadn’t put the order in on time, but that it was now on its way to me. 25 minutes later it arrived, I paid for it and tipped the delivery guy and took everything out of the bag. There was no knish, though it was on the receipt.

I called Artie’s, and the same woman, in a totally indifferent tone of voice, asked me, “Oh, so do you still want the knish?”

“Since I paid you for it,” I replied, beginning to feel just a little miffed at her attitude, “I would assume so.”

The lox platter was great, generous and very filling, there was a lot of stuff included in it besides the Nova, a bagel and so forth, but when I went to drink the coffee I found it was old and burnt beyond drinkability. When the knish arrived at about 11:00, I was so disgusted I simply threw it in the trash can.

I tried calling the manager to register a complaint. I was told that he would be back in 2 days and that his name was Omar.

I tried, for a couple of days after he was supposed to be back, to get in touch with him, but he apparently doesn’t want to hear customer complaints and is always, therefore, “not there”. The mysterious Mr. Omar, in my opinion, is a scumbag who runs a shoddy business – the indifferent bimbo who runs the place on weekends probably Monicas him to keep her job and as payment for her under-the-desk services, the mutt excuses her ineptitude and lack of any customer service attitude.

Since then, I’ve looked up customer reviews of the place and find that most of them are unfavorable where service and even cleanliness of the place are concerned.

So while I wouldn’t recommend Artie’s for the dog you hate the most, I give major marks to Texas Rotisserie & Grill.

Two upper west side eateries to enjoy dining out at, both also reasonable by NY standards, are Acqua, an Italian restaurant on Amsterdam Ave at 95th that uses a wood oven and serves delicious, wafer thin crust, Italian style pizzas as well as some pasta & veal (I’ve had the aforementioned dishes there) that are extremely desirable to eat, in ways I can’t begin to describe beyond the “adjective” yum!. The other, more laid back but a must for locals-oriented Italian dining, is Perfecto, on Broadway between 92nd and 93rd Streets.

I treated a new acquaintance I met a few days ago to dinner at the latter (her recommendation). For my own part, I had had mussels in a wine and tomato sauce for an appetizer (I sampled my companion’s grilled octopus and it was excellent, as well), and my entrée was linguini with white clam sauce, while she had veal marsala. We tried one anothers’ dishes, and both were Perfecto.

Since then, I’ve tried the Sicilian pizza at Perfecto, and it is also Perfecto.

The above places (with the exception of piece-of-shit-Omar and his Artie’s) are all among the locals oriented eateries that you don’t see in the out-of-town yuppie guides, they are places that locals dine at, within the average middle class budget and every bit as good as the more pretentious “to be seen at” restaurants one reads about in the society pages., where there are dress codes, etc.

Having eaten at some of the most expensive restaurants in NY in the past, I can honestly say that these “common” establishments (we’re talking NY here, where competition is king) feature fare that is equal to or in some cases better than the places where, choked into a suit and tie when you’re not even at work, you can dine for hundreds of dollars, just to say you’ve eaten there.

To tell you the truth, I’d rather have dinner at Mike’s Pizzeria on Yellowstone Blvd in Forest Hills, Queens, than at Mama Leone’s any day of the week.

This year, I decided to do my own taxes for a change, just to see how easy or complicated it might be.

Wow!

Tax accountants really have a good racket, though I won’t say that it’s an easy one — on the other hand, they do have the specialized knowledge that most of us non-accountants don’t. What we laymen (and lay-women) don’t have any particular training in is meat and drink to the accountant.

Now, I realize that lawyers and accountants in Congress bend over backwards to enact rules and regs that guarantee work for their colleagues and, once they return to the private sector, them by the simple expedient of complicating their respective fields to the point of requiring interpretation by said professionals, I also have to say that this practice is directly comparable to the steamy brown piles one encounters in your run-of-the-mill cow pasture.

The government already charges us for the privilege of earning money, why should we also be required to pay others to figure out how much we have to pay for the selfsame privilege of making a living?

So I get the 1099 from my brokers, listing all my trades on both the buy and sell sides (keeping in mind that I once worked back office on Wall Street, some 2-plus decades ago and learned to pluck liquidations from long lists, in actively complex accounts, of day trades, etc). I have a number of trades that involved averaging up from the original investments, that is, adding shares to already existing members of my portfolio because the original positions were notably bullish.

The problem is that the 1099 provides one list of buys and another of sells, and it’s left up to the client to match them up with the liquidations. Sure, this may sound like a no-brainer, but they don’t bother to include a breakdown of which added purchases belong to which positions, and the appropriate tax forms (1040, schedule D) demand only purchase and liquidation figures.

Do these extra 400 shares belong to this position, or that one? Do these 200 belong to this initial trade, or the other one in the same stock? Etc, etc…

I call my brokers, and they suggest that I ask my tax advisor. I call the IRS, and they give me what amounts to doubletalk — I say, “Look, I’m only interested in paying taxes on whatever profits I made on stocks in the course of 2007. I can present that figure to the dime.” They say, “You have to itemize each buy and sell, stock, dates and P&L.” and then get into the form numbers of the additional documents I’ll need to submit.

What a bunch of B.S.!!!!

Considering the hassle versus the volume of my trading, I don’t think I’ll ever buy stock again. If it’s absolutely necessary that I pay someone else to figure my taxes on same, then why should I? I already have to pay the government thousands of dollars in taxes, why should I also have to pay someone else to figure out how much I have to pay? Either they simplify the process, or stay at home!

Now, I have no objection (well, little objection) to paying taxes, since that seems to be a part of the scheme of things, but having the general issue complicated to the point of having to pay what amounts to an interpreter is beyond the pale! The 1099 includes the P&L for the year, yet the IRS requires that I itemize to detail what is already on the effin’ document (Line 1A) rather than submit the document {as someone who works for someone else would a W-2} with a single figure in a box.

My point is that if the a&&h@%%s want to collect taxes, they should take it upon themselves to make calculating the damn things a simple process for those who have to pay them, not a feat that requires a middleman (or woman) whose services require a secondary payment.

I can’t help but wonder what one of those folks dressed up as indians who participated in the Boston Tea Party would have thought of this…

…life of late has been a bit crowded where time is concerned. I’ve been dividing my time between a work project and a commitment I made to help someone out in the maintenance of his own business (no compensation to speak of, more in the nature of a favor), and it hasn’t left me much time to post. I manage to make my rounds in the blogosphere, but only have limited time to comment. This will shortly change — I’m beginning to think I was born with a shoestring schedule or the like, considering that I’m trying really hard to be semi-retired.

I commented recently to a friend, while we were listening to Katrina & The Waves’ Going Down To Liverpool (to do nothing) that I had come to Chicago to do precisely that, only it hasn’t yet worked out as such.

That said, I took some time out earlier to watch a DVD of Live Free Or Die Hard, and must say that I found it profoundly entertaining. The Die Hard series is among the few whose sequels are worth watching, and a third one that qualifies thus is worth remarking upon.

Non-stop action (though the stunt scenes are a bit unbelievable when applied to “real life” probabilities), a plot based on something that I’m not entirely unsure couldn’t happen given the criminal minds that seem to migrate into the field of computer hacking and, as a welcome change, an F.B.I. deputy director who is portrayed by Hollywood as a competent, dedicated law enforcement official rather than the usual corrupt, criminal mastermind the left coast film liberals enjoy portraying.

Okay, having gotten that bit out of the way…

Anyone who visits this blog with any regularity knows how I feel about John McCain being the next President of the United States (Tancredo or Thompson, one of you guys get your ass back here, right now, or send Mitt!).

While I know where Ann and Rush are coming from — let Hillary preside over the coming four year disaster, so a Democrat will have been on watch — I’ve finally come to terms with the distasteful fact that I’ll have to pull the lever for the RINO — he’ll be the lesser of two evils in the general election, albeit not by much, though I won’t donate a dime to his campaign. Let Russ Feingold or La Raza make a donation in my name if it strikes their fancies.

As I said before, I despise the thought of having to choose between the measles or the mumps, but there it is…

But I didn’t come here to rehash things I’ve already posted. I came here to talk about one aspect of a McCain Presidency that actually gives the Arizona guy a checkbox in the positive column, at least for me, as a Jew: His stance on Israel.

Yesterday, I got into a debate with a new friend, one who is a kindred spirit from a political point of view rather than a shiftless liberal, over the concept of negotiating with Arabs. He firmly believes that as far back as the Golda Meir administration, Israel could have struck an equitable deal with Egypt and, as a result, the Arabs in general, in the way of establishing peace in the Middle East.

While his points were good from the usual optimistic humanist viewpoint, they were delivered from the perspective of western thinking — that everyone shares our outlook on life, reasonableness and can, as a result, be negotiated with. My own point that Muslims are 180 degrees different in that respect from us didn’t seem to register. What I couldn’t get across was that when you’ve “negotiated” agreements with an entity more than half a dozen times and while you honor your side of the deal every time while the other party ignores theirs, you have to realize, finally, that it’s pointless to enter into further negotiations.

Especially when each time, you make major life and death concessions that give the other side major strategic advantages that afford them ever increasing, indelible opportunities to destroy you, all your issue and all you stand for.

Elements of his side of the debate cited the massive proportion of Arabs to Israelis with the factors of Iran (he believes that Iran could beat Israel in a war, I believe that given a free hand to conduct such a war utilizing all their capabilities without politically motivated restriction, Israel could kick Ahmadmanjihad’s butt) and Hezbollah mandate negotiation in the interests of Israel’s survival.

How many times does Israel have to “negotiate” away land and release terrorists from prison before it sinks home that dealing with the Arabs is a one way street? When Israel is down to one square mile of sovereign territory, all incarcerated terrorists have been freed and “Palestinians” are hailing down rockets on that tiny, crowded acreage, will our leaders continue to press for “negotiations”?

But as usual, I digress.

Back on topic (have I actually been there yet, to begin with?), McCain’s statements regarding the Israeli-”Palestinian” situation are right on point. My debating “opponent” was right when he said that McCain is a true friend of Israel.

The success of Hamas and Hizbollah in the Middle East is not only a danger for Israel, but also a threat to US national interests, said John McCain, the US Republican presidential candidate.

“If Hamas/Hizbollah succeeds here, they are going to succeed everywhere, not only in the Middle East, but everywhere. Israel isn’t the only enemy,” Mr McCain said in an exclusive interview with The Jerusalem Post.

“They are dedicated to the extinction of everything that the US, Israel and the West believe and stand for. So America does have an interest in what happens here, far above and beyond our alliance with the State of Israel.”

The American who will almost certainly be the next POTUS actually grasps the reality of the situation.

“I really think that we should understand that the US and Israel are partners. Israel is not a client of the United States,” he said. “If you are partners, then you don’t dictate what you think the terms of the survival of a nation should be.”

If only our last several administrations had been bestowed with such clear insights into the Israeli-Arab situation…

…and I’m sitting in front of my computer, feeling satisfied that I’ve actually had the time to read at numerous other blogs and comment at several of them.

I just finished reading a small-but-fun book by Julia Gorin titled Clintonisms: The Amusing, Confusing and Suspect Musing of Billary.

The book is great, I’d recommend it highly to anyone who treasures clarity in the realm of mainstream political figures, especially one whose every agenda is directed towards killing off the success as a nation that America has enjoyed since its inception as would appear to be a Clinton goal.

From my speakers comes the In My Life album by Judy Collins. Suzanne, Pirate Jenny, Hard Lovin’ Loser, Sunny Goodge Street. Memories from when I was a kid living with then hippy parents, mother and step-father, in 1967. Echo Park, Los Angeles, and later Montecito Heights.

Since I ordinarily visit blogs in the alphabetical order of my blogroll, I was disappointed early on when I went to post some comments at AB Freedom, and was notified that AB had banned my comments. I don’t understand why this happened, as I have never posted anything offensive there, but that’s the way it goes. If AB finds something offensive about me, it’s his thing to do. Since this isn’t a mutual thing and I agree with his political outlook, I will continue to visit his site and retain it in my blogroll.

The most striking post into which I’ve run this morning has come from Mike’s America. If any Democrat voter can reinterpret that, he or she is politically myopic.

Well I started out on burgundy but soon reached the harder stuff
Everybody said they’d stand beside me when the day got rough
But the joke was on me, there was nobody even there to bluff
I’m going back to New York City, I do believe I’ve had enough…

– Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues (A Bob Dylan composition), Judy Collins cover

My schedule is kind of erratic, here I am in the wee hours, there I am in the afternoon or at midnight. When do I sleep?

Whenever it’s convenient!

Yesterday, I had a delivery from a local eatery called Sarpino’s Pizza. I ordered their average lasagna and ordered some meatballs on the side. I had the latter sent without sauce so I could heat them up later and have them on sandwiches with garlic mayo. Yum!!!!!!

Later is now. Yum yum, eatem up! So much for a conventional Sunday breakfast, LOL.

Tubewise, I recently bought the Stacy Keach Mike Hammer TV series and have been watching it at my leisure. What can I say? I’m a great fan of the late, great Mickey Spillane and Keach seems to have a grasp on things where the tough, two-fisted shamus is concerned.

Well, enough rambling for now… It’s time to chow down!

I will admit to a certain amount of disappointment at the path the bulk of Republicans have chosen to take on the road to November, 2008. McCain.

Worse, he will be facing either Hillary Clinton or Hussein Obama, and it looks increasingly likely that the latter will triumph in that particular contest.

Gee, what great and diverse options we will have at the polls some 8 1/2 months from now!

“We’ll give youse a choice: Ya wanna coupla’ broken legs, or ya wanna coupla’ broken arms?”

On the right side of the political equation, we had some good candidates, but have tossed them in the dumpster in favor of arguably the worst of the lot (I exclude Ron Paul from this category, but then, I exclude Ron Paul from anything outside the realm of cartoons).

On the left side, they didn’t have any serious candidates to begin with, at least not for the leadership of this country, but have progressed from there to one who is both a career criminal and an unabashed socialist versus a… well, I think Wesley Pruden’s got a firm handle on it.

Barack Obama’s great gift is to persuade his audiences to fill in the spaces in his speeches he leaves deliberately blank. This particularly infuriates Hillary and her followers, stuck with a record consisting of the specifics of dozens of policies, proposals and promises, while Barack Obama offers a blank slate to anyone who inquires about specifics. He speaks in parables flavored with nuance and evasion. His rhetoric, sometimes brushing eloquence, dazzles the young and innocent, particularly those who have never sat in the pews of black churches to fall under the spell of powerful preaching of the Gospel.

The senator’s boast of his early opposition to the war in Iraq and his implied indifference to the demands of the larger war against terror further infuriate those who regard radicals in the Islamic world as real, the hour as late.

Obama’s found that he can take advantage of the more gullible, naive and downright stupid among us by promising them the moon while promising them nothing.

“Don’t ask me to explain, just trust me.”

What a gig! Any more openings?

“The great weapon the [Islamic radicals] have is persistence and patience,” Michael Chertoff, the director of homeland security, warned only yesterday, “and the one weakness that we have is the tendency to lose patience and become complacent. It strikes me as hard to accept that anybody would believe the threat is over. There is nothing these terrorists are doing or saying that could lead a reasonable person to believe that they have somehow lost interest. Our biggest challenge is making sure we do not drop our guard because time passes.”

Nobody listening to the man from Illinois wants to hear real-world stuff like this, not when you can groove to the mellow rhythms of the mesmerizing song of a messiah. Barack Obama is regarded even by his critics as sui generis, truly one of a kind, but his followers are like those of Chauncey Gardiner, the Peter Sellers character in the movie “Being There,” who is mistaken by the gullible masses for a wise man, whose casual remarks (”… first we plant the seed, then the sun and rains come, and the plant matures …”) are taken as political science for the ages. You can’t blame Barack Obama for seizing whatever is offered by glassy-eyed seekers of a bargain-basement nirvana…

Anybody remember The Who’s Rock opera Tommy?

Thankfully, the very last line of both that paragraph and the article is, based upon previous American experience, an accurate one:

We can be grateful that the magic of America is its ability to ride out storms.

I wouldn’t be at all amazed to see video of Obama performing, as a political speech, the track from Tommy titled Sensation.

Now, my own thoughts on the election: It’s a long way off, and in truth there’s not much to be said — the two finalists will be spending that time competing for the most powerful political office on earth, and they will say whatever it takes, shape and reshape their images and recreate themselves according to the strategic needs of a given moment, verbally degrade the opinions, policies, records, charactar and asset value (to our country) of one another. Politicians, the media and thousands of bloggers will both register opinions and report on the positives and proclivities of both nominees. Mud will be slung.

To me, it’s going to be little more than a dreary 8 1/2 months of people brawling over which of two undesireables is more desirable than the other, and in the end, as I wrote in an earlier post, we’ll be well qualified to decide whether we’d prefer the measles over the mumps.

That said, I see no point in blogging ala the merits of McCain over those of Obama or vice versa, so I’ll be posting little in the way of campaign related articles over the next several months (I said “little”, not “none”). Much hay will be made in picayune “he said, (she, or) he said” areas, pundits analyzing the most trivial uttered words, attitudes or postures during photo ops to emphasize some point or other that really won’t matter come November — we’ll get the fid no matter which of the two wins.

But once again, I’ll recall that last line of the Wesley Pruden column: We can be grateful that the magic of America is its ability to ride out storms.

Storm January 2009 - January 2013 will require one whole hell of a lot of riding out, and with any luck America, despite the incumbent, unprecedentedly profound and hyper-emotional split between our two major domestic ideologies will rise to the task, as Americans, of reclaiming a grasp on reality and fixing what will certainly be broken in the course of that four year period.

On a side note…

Russia came under mounting international pressure to allow independent inspection of detention camps in Chechnya yesterday as reports of torture and rape of its civilians sparked a further exodus of refugees.
Escapees from a Russian “filtration camp” north of Grozny, the destroyed Chechen capital, painted a picture of horrific abuses by masked Russian prison guards. International aid organisations and human rights monitors, which have been largely denied access to Chechnya, raised the alarm.

A Chechen man of 38 who spent weeks in the Chernokozovo camp north of Grozny before bribing his way out said women and men were being raped by masked Russians. The inmates, 16 to a cell, were beaten almost daily with iron bars, ordered to crawl before their Russian jailers, and forced to use their cramped cells as open toilets, he said.

…I’m kinda’ sorta’ wondering why champion of captured “freedom fighters” rights Dick Durbin isn’t right on top of this GITMOean outrage!

…Move America Forward has a YouTube video up that well reminds us of just where Code Pink is coming from.

So,

Marines are war criminals

Marines target civilians

Al-Qaeda is not a threat

WWII was an unjust war

Communism is okay

I don’t care what it says on these Code Pinkers’ birth certificates, driver’s licenses, state I.D. cards or passports, they definitely need to be deported, where is not important. The only way they should be acknowledged as Americans should be as the basis for prosecuting them as traitors.

The last few days have found yours truly in a bit of a funk — while I haven’t felt much like posting, I have been making the rounds of other blogs, just commenting sparsely because I’ve been somewhat preoccupied with the current state of affairs and what it may all mean for our country’s not so distant future. Expressing my feelings on the subject in too many forums just now might only serve to intensify what I can only describe as a budding rage.

That John RINO McCain will get the Republican nomination is all but a foregone conclusion, which just goes to show that the liberal media still wields a lot of clout among Republicans who are too obtuse to have yet caught on to the fact that that the MSM is no longer about fair, accurate and balanced news, but that they have become a propaganda unit for the political left. Therefore, it strikes none of these fools as significant that the NYT and their ilk endorse McCain.

Next up, Israel.

Bar Kochba did a post over at Goat’s a few days ago that mirrored my own thoughts on the situation in Israel and what needs to be done about it, but in attempting to comment, I found myself just too frustrated and angry to type the things going through my own mind into a comment box.

I used to post a lot more on Israeli/”Palestinian” affairs, but more recently have realized that most of the problems the Israeli people continue to face regarding terrorism are largely a product of their own making — they allow a veritable menace to their society such as Ehud Olmert represents to remain in office (I recently read that among the Israeli population, the split between those who want Olmert to step down or be otherwise removed from office hovers right around an even split, a little over 50% for getting rid of the mutt, a little under 50% for allowing him to remain in office) and continue to give away the store. As a Jew, the existence and well-being of Israel are of profound importance to me, but it is up to the people who live there to decide how badly they want their nation (and themselves) to survive, and act accordingly. So far, there’s a lot of rhetoric over there, but Olmert is still in office and more confident daily that he will remain there.

So, I’ve been doing more watching than blogging where Israel is concerned, the old “hold your breath and cross your fingers” routine.

Moving right along…

Those of us who are more aware of what is happening around us than, say, a box of rocks is aware, understand that Islam is in the process, both militantly and judicially, of making its move toward subjugating the free world under the freedom-devoid umbrella of Sharia law. The United States and numerous allies are fighting a global war on terror. Our brave troops are battling terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While our involvement in these two countries, Israel, Iran, North Korea and our own homeland security issues are considered matters of grave concern and are discussed “hither and yon” (I’ve longed for years for an excuse to use that phrase, by gum!), we almost completely ignore — and by this, I include the “news” media — the ongoing situation in the Balkans.

Essentially, the Clinton Administration got us involved over there with shouts of “ethnic cleansing!” The pro-Slick Willy MSM echoed the cry: “Ethnic Cleansing!” Forthwith, we went to war on behalf of the Muslims, who were doing a great deal of their own ethnic cleansing: Cleansing, wherever the opportunity presented itself, infidels. Somehow, we didn’t hear a peep from the media about the brigades of militant Muslims who were doing pretty much what Hezbollah and friends were doing in Lebanon a quarter century ago. We went after Milosevic on behalf of Obama Osama and his merry men, or fellow travellers thereof.

Basically, we were assisting Islamists in their loving chore of killing off or otherwise subjugating unbelievers. Exit Clinton (or should I be so Roman messengerly as to say, with great trepidation nonetheless, Clinton I?), enter George Dubya Bush.

The song remains the same: We still support the fine folks in the Balkans who want to abolish freedom and administer a high Koranic to all infidels everywhere.

“Wheah ya’ frum?”

“Me? Ah’m from Bendover, Massachusettes.”

Julia Gorin is probably the most expert blogger/columnist I read on the Balkans and she doesn’t pause in her reporting for such items as pulling punches or any pretense at political correctness.

Recently, she posted this excellent and majorly on-top-of-things article at JWR’s Political Mavens. It’s a lengthy piece, in terms of links and so forth, but is worth every second of the read for anyone who wishes to know the truth of what’s happening under the auspices of western governments, while the MSM ignores what amounts to our own government aiding and abetting the same enemy we’re at war with in other parts of the world, in fact helping that enemy’s rise to power in a strategically significant part of Europe.

No, Billy Bob, Albania is not a brand of Melba toast.

Back to the U.S.A.

Are our Second Amendment rights being taken seriously enough?

If you want a gun permit in Pasquotank, you can go to the new Pasquotank Public Service Building in Elizabeth City, but you must stand in line. The only problem is that you, a law-abiding citizen, may have to stand in that line with convicted sex offenders. That’s because if you’re there to get a gun permit, there’s only one line you’re allowed to stand in; and the sign at the head of that line reads, “Gun Permits/Sex Offender Registration.”

W, as they say, TF!!!!????

That’s right. In the county’s public service building, law-abiding citizens are forced to mingle and wait with some of the worst criminals in our society. As Bob Halbert, a 26-year retired Navy officer who was recently humiliated by standing in the line said, “I feel they’re putting me or a person coming in for a gun permit in the same category as sex offenders. If someone comes by who knows you and sees you, all it takes is one bad rumor and bam, you’re marked for life.”

Halbert went on to say, “A close friend of mine’s son recently visited us after his return home from Iraq, where he served for 15 months as a military policeman. And yes, he did put himself in harm’s way as I did numerous times in my career … with 26 years of honorable service to this great country of ours. But in Elizabeth City, we are grouped with sex offenders if we want to apply for a gun permit.”

Commenting on the sign that requires that the two groups mingle, Pasquotank Sheriff Randy Cartwright said, “I don’t know where (else) we would put it.”

Did they ever consider having two lines?

I don’t know how many readers receive and read NRA emailings entailing the anti-Second Amendment legislation they are battling against, state-by-state, on a never-ending basis as the anti-gun lobby never sleeps, but it’s nothing nice.

What the dedicated people at the NRA have committed themselves to makes the 12 Labors of Hercules look pretty easy. As fast as they address one anti-gun law proposal in one state, sixteen more pop up in a dozen other states.

And the rich?

What can we say about a guy who became the richest man in the world thanks, in major part, to our capitalist system, then, once untouchably rich, decided to denigrate capitalism?

Free-market advocates say the world’s richest man doesn’t seem to understand that the same system that made him wealthy can make life better for the poor around the world.

Bill Gates told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week that under pure capitalism, “the great advances in the world have often aggravated the inequities in the world. The least needy see the most improvement, and the most needy see the least.”

Gates said he was “impatient” with capitalism.

Yeah, he and George Soros, both. Read the entire article, some good points are imparted therein.

…And the global warming maroons have begun researching the enviro-perils of cow burps, which, in the Utopian world of the liberal, might lead to the vanquishment of steers and therefore the mandatory deprivation of beef — vegetarians shout it out! I can just picture me now, without legal access to a juicy, delicious, rare ribeye, going through perspiration-laced, spasmodic withdrawals as I chomp on a leek.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I promise I won’t become afflicted by McCain/Hussein/Billary Derangement Syndrome or anything like that, but I think I’m entitled, as a free thinking, conservative American, to be at least a little pissed off at and to feel somewhat betrayed by the very people we’ve elected to govern our nation. To that end, I blame both major political parties.

In a comment on one of my recent posts, Old Soldier made an excellent point: The GOP is now soliciting contributions by invoking the evils of a Hillary Clinton Presidency.

What, I ask myself with much chagrin, is the difference whether we have John McCain or Hillary Clinton in the White House?

Sure, the Republicans in Congress would be much more likely to fight the liberal espousements of a President Hillary than the same drivel emitted by a so-called Republican John McCain, but at the end of the day, we will surely see changes that we, as conservatives, will not like, even a little. The changes, because of our nation’s status in the world, will have global ramifications that will, as well, not be good for America or our friends and allies.

Not if we, as a people who enjoy the right to vote, continue to do so irresponsibly, thereby continuing to let the bad guys win…

The GOP now appears to have the same low degree of respect for the intelligence of its constituency that its Democrat opposite numbers do for their proponents.

John McCain, if he is elected POTUS, will change the course of U.S. politics: His doctrines will combine port and starboard so that both parties end up drawing our water from the same well, and it will be water polluted with the same socialism causing, sovereignty surrendering, lie-rich bacteria that the Democrats have been drinking for several years running.

I’ve been sort of avoiding posting on politics for the last few days, a short break as it were, but there seems to be an issue in the wood work that I feel a need to remark upon.

It’s this whole Obama-Clinton thing wherein the media and, to some extent, the concerned candidates themselves have brought up the color of the former and the gender of the latter in the course of their Presidential campaigns.

What causes me to take notice here is that the left, which includes the mainstream media (MSM), places so much emphasis on the minority status of one and the female status of the other.

The first black President, the first female President.

One result of this is the evident need of Hillary Clinton to shout from the rooftops of hers and her husband’s infinite and historical quest for equal rights and opportunities for blacks. Despite, of course, the former POTUS’ completely empty record in that regard.

Point being, we’re seeing the history of our political left repeat itself: For decades, they have demanded equality, for everybody else, to American born white males. I completely agree that all Americans should enjoy total equality in the marketplace, in the neighborhood and everywhere in between.

That said, those we select to represent us in government should be elected purely on the merits of their policies and their patriotism, their ideals and their courage, not because they are a certain color, a certain religion or a certain gender (I know that there are generally only two genders from which to choose, but I once lived in San Francisco and in that municipality, there may well be a third sex — I mean, I would not even consider personally investigating this from a field perspective, so I’ll leave it in the realm of uninvestigated conjecture).

But the liberals and their Democrat political domestic staff insist, as they always have, in making sure to hammer home the fact that Obama is black and that Hillary is a woman.

This is divisiveness at its highest order. Everyone knows that Hillary Clinton is a woman and that Barak Obama is black. Just look at a photograph of either. The media has a lot of influence upon questions asked and the issues involved — they do, after all, have the job of informing the public as to the above. So when they stress the genders and colors of the two Presidential candidates, what are they doing? They are disrespecting both, creating artificial wedges between them. Do we want a female or a black chief exec? For that matter, what about a Mormon?

Keeping bigotry alive is a primary objective of the left, its believers, its politicians, its media — the MSM. Without the ability to play the “race card”, liberal activists and Democrat politicians alike would lose a valuable propaganda tool — they could no longer blame a white, conservative Judeo-Christian society for “oppression” against all those who don’t belong to “the club”. They could no longer brand patriotic, conservative blacks “Oreos” or “Uncle Toms” (among others, Justice Clarence Thomas comes to mind) for succeeding on their own two feet rather than pursuing the victim agenda, and pit them against lesser achievers of the same minority status’.

They would be forced to confront the equality status for which they have purportedly fought (purportedly is the key word here) as the reality it has become, and concentrate on the true issues our politicians need to address in order to competently govern our country.

Well, at least they would have a few less distractions with which to razzle-dazzle the American people while, “behind the scenes”, they eased us into the adoption of socialism as a new platform for the distribution (allocation?) of our tax payments.

In summary, we need to ignore the ethnic prejudices projected by the MSM, and start looking at the candidates themselves. The media folks have pretty much demonstrated that they are too biased, racially and otherwise, to be acknowledged as an accurate source of information or political guidance…

…so we’re talking SPAM here.

“Awright, Moose, we got one replica watch, eleven people whose lives are dedicated to enlarging our penises, six companies that are offering us cheap drugs, two time shares an’ a couple o’ women who say they’re real hot and they wanna talk to us.”

“Great, Biff, then we’re all set. First we’ll buy the phony Rolexes, then we’ll add a few inches to our love muscles, then we’ll order some cheap Viagra, then we’ll get some time in a Florida condo, then we’ll call the hot women. I guess we’ll have to let that Nigerian education minister smuggle in his twenty million bucks so we can use our 20% to get the watches, drugs, Miracle Grow and time shares.”

Where the hell, you ask, is all this going?

It’s just an observation: When a certain type of commercial overture goes on for a few months or years and then dies out (as has, for the most part, the above mentioned Nigerian scam — believe you me, they have replaced it with others, just check out this site, for example)… to go on,

When a certain type of commercial venture is going hot and heavy in the old “bulk mail” or spam filter, it indicates that it is profitable, thus being continuously pursued with much vim and vigor.

The spambot traffic that is arrested by the Akismet Spam filter at this blog averages 15,000 attempted such intrusions to my comment threads per month, and when I occasionally scroll through them, they are typically promoting sexually stimulating drugs, “nude celebrity photos” or pornography that goes to extremes that should land the purveyors in prisons or mental institutions for life.

My concern, here, is that unless there was a substantial and enduring market for these “products”, they wouldn’t be advertised so pervasively or over such a long period of time.

Some people are making major money off all too many other people who need some serious help!

Attorneys are an integral part of our Constitutional legal system. That is, they are as necessary under our form of government as are litter boxes to cat owners, composters to serious gardeners, carpet stain removers to hotel housekeeping departments or grease traps to restaurant kitchens.

There are a lot of honest, hard-working lawyers out there, but there seem to be an equal or greater number who are parasites that prey on any situation they can in as despicable, sleazy and dishonorable a fashion as they need to in order to milk the most money possible out of said situations.

These latter include liberal trial lawyers whose victimization of defendants via manipulation of the legal system has created a litigious atmosphere (and cottage industry) in this country that has businesses and individuals investing large sums of money and man hours in protecting themselves from frivolous lawsuits. One biproduct of this is a lot more work for lawyers who enjoy large retainers on the defensive side of the equation.

One thing I don’t miss, spending a paucity of time nowadays in front of the television, is all those commercials you see for law firms that specialize in sueing companies. You know, “if you’ve ever worked for a company that employed (name the chemical or compound) in their manufacturing process, you may be entitled to a significant cash award. Call Joe Schmoe Law Associates at 1-800… Now!”, or that tele-ambulance chaser’s ad a few years back that ended with an obvious welfare case bragging that “Ah got five thousand!”

These unscrupulous toilet cakes have corrupted our courts, severely damaging and making a mockery of our legal system for the sole motive of making money for themselves. Now don’t get me wrong, greed is good in its own arena, but these people are “officers of the court”. They are licensed to practice law, not to twist it and bend it according to their financial desires, nor to make victims of law abiding individuals, hospitals or business firms for the purpose of personal gain.

Also of the same low degree are attorneys found at such political institutions as CAIR and the ACLU. The former use the threat of lawsuits whose legal costs alone would bankrupt the average citizen as a way of stifling freedom of speech, the latter use lawsuits against all levels of government in order to stifle religious expression.

I won’t even go into the prophalactics who make careers of specialization in defending sexual predators, celebrity murderers, terrorists or drug traffickers.

But the sleaze doesn’t end at private sector level. It also seeps into the courts themselves, in the form of activist judges who legislate from the bench by way of decisions that reflect their own political agendas rather than the letter of the Constitution or even the will of The People. Remember, also, that these judges are lawyers, and if the “loser” in one of those politically motivated decisions needs to appeal to a higher court, such as SCOTUS, one or more lawyers will make a lot of money representing him/her/them on the appeal.

Moving right along, we go upstairs to the attorneys who become politicians and find their respective ways into lawmaking capacities.

The Senate. State or U.S., take your pick.

Think about that — lawyers making the laws.

Hmmmmm……

While it makes sense (musicians make music, engineers engineer, artists create art, writers write, designers design, etc)… I mean, pornographers create pornography, so why shouldn’t lawyers be allowed to create laws?…

Sidebar, as they call a conference at the bench between opposing lawyers and a judge: I am reminded of the term nepotism, only changed to replace family members with colleagues.

Back from sidebar: The more laws these lawyers in elected office enact and the more technically complicated they make them, the more work they generate for fellow lawyers and for themselves as well, in the event that they lose an election and have to go back into private practice.

We have are a society ruled not by government, per se, but by lawyers.

With that thought in mind, I need a good, stiff drink….