I’m not what you would call a major fan of David Letterman, in fact on the rare occasions I actually watch TV, I make a point of not watching his show.

However, had I only known, I would definitely have watched this episode.

It didn’t take long for fireworks to erupt last night when Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly guested on David Letterman’s “CBS Late Show,” with the late night host finally admitting he wasn’t “smart enough” to engage in a debate over the Iraq war.

The verbal fisticuffs began when Letterman asked if O’Reilly had a good holiday.

O’Reilly responded: “I had a nice Winter Solstice,” prompting a contentious exchange over whether Christmas traditions were indeed under attack.

But the confrontation really heated up when Letterman suggested, “Let’s talk about your friends in the Bush administration. Things seem to be darker now than they might have been heretofore…

Read on, heh heh.

Back in late December I posted about this, and am profoundly relieved that the perpetrators of the large explosives theft have been caught, the stolen materials recovered.

Three charged with stealing explosives at N.M. bunker
The suspects weren’t trained in handling the dangerous stolen property, say federal agents who tracked them down.

The explosives were specialized, powerful and dangerous in the possession of untrained handlers.

That’s exactly the situation federal agents say they came upon when they tracked down a sloppy band of thieves who broke into bunkers belonging to a nationally recognized New Mexico explosives expert.

The ATF, the same folks who unnecessarily brought us Waco and Ruby Ridge, says that there was no connection between the people who stole the explosives and any terrorist organizations, and that the theft was a “crime of opportunity.” According to the author of the linked article on the arrests and recovery, Alicia Caldwell, the feds said they don’t believe the perps even knew what they had.

Hmmmmmm.

I sincerely hope that the investigation doesn’t stop there.

“Duh, yeah, we ripped off all that plastique, ossifer, and coincidentally, outta’ sheer dumb luck, we also grabbed all the DetCord we could find, but we didn’t know it was C-4 and DetCord, duh…”

If I was somewhat hard on theft victim Chris Cherry for his inexcusably negligent lack of security that facilitated the ease of the theft in my previous post on same, I can only be doubly enraged now.

On Dec. 18, Cherry, who works for the Sandia National Laboratories and trains military and law- enforcement personnel in bomb disarmament, reported the theft. He is the head of Cherry Engineering, and the stolen materials were the property of his firm and not affiliated with his work for the government, according to an arrest affidavit unsealed Tuesday.

{Above emphasis added mine}.

The man is an explosives expert who trains military and law enforcement personnel…

If anybody should know the magnitude of the potential danger to citizens that could result from the theft of such a quantity of explosives, it is Cherry, that stupid son-of-a-bitch, and his failure to implement adequate security procedures to safeguard those materials is way beyond inexcusable.

If he is permitted to store any more explosives, the government officials who allow it should be fired without pensions and charged with criminal negligence, charges that Chris Cherry should even now be facing.

Asshat!

An Austrian civil liberties group called Quintessenz has been hacking into, downloading imagery from and then sabotaging lawful police surveillance cameras in public places.

When the Austrian government passed a law this year allowing police to install closed-circuit surveillance cameras in public spaces without a court order, the Austrian civil liberties group Quintessenz vowed to watch the watchers.

Members of the organization worked out a way to intercept the camera images with an inexpensive, 1-GHz satellite receiver. The signal could then be descrambled using hardware designed to enhance copy-protected video as it’s transferred from DVD to VHS tape.

The Quintessenz activists then began figuring out how to blind the cameras with balloons, lasers and infrared devices.

It’s interesting that these folks don’t seem to have anything to say about asshole tourists in various cities who practically shove their videocams in your face as you go about your business, without asking permission, or simply tape streams of passing pedestrians without asking anybody if it’s okay, and those are not illegal activities.

The videocams police set up to record activities in public places are not, therefore, infringing on anybody’s privacy. Anything you do in a public area is just that, public, including strong armed robbery, drug dealing, unlawful obscenities, hooking, picking pockets or engaging in terrorist acts. Picking out suspicious persons or known suspected criminals on realtime video can prevent everything from felonious assaults on innocent citizens or prevent multiple murders.

And, just for fun, the group created an anonymous surveillance system that uses face-recognition software to place a black stripe over the eyes of people whose images are recorded.

In my opinion, these people are obstructing legitimate law enforcement tools and protective venues endorsed by the majority of their fellow citizens and in so doing, creating public endangerment.

If interference with any of these cameras results in the monitoring authorities’ not being able to identify someone about to commit, or in the process of committing a crime or terrorist act, or to spot one of said situations in time to prevent it, the saboteurs — yes, that’s what these “civil liberties activists” are — the penalties for this sabotage should be equal to the punishment merited by the perpetrators they have protected.

Feline to the rescue!

Police aren’t sure how else to explain it. But when an officer walked into an apartment Thursday night to answer a 911 call, an orange-and-tan striped cat was lying by a telephone on the living room floor. The cat’s owner, Gary Rosheisen, was on the ground near his bed having fallen out of his wheelchair.

Rosheisen said his cat, Tommy, must have hit the right buttons to call 911.

“I know it sounds kind of weird,” Officer Patrick Daugherty said, unsuccessfully searching for some other explanation.

I can’t say I disbelieve this story, as unlikely as it sounds, as I once had an experience where a couple of friends were away for a week and they asked me to feed their three cats while they were gone.

The food came in envelopes they stored in a very high cabinet above their kitchen sink. One day I was a couple of hours late getting over there, and I found the cabinet open, the box laying on the sink counter and three envelopes ripped open near the cats’ three bowls.

Scary.

Even though I’m not a cat person, it just may be that them thar critters’re a mite smarter than most folks’d give ‘em credit fer, if not downright sayyy-tanic…