He’s my pick, has been since long before there was any serious talk of his running for President, and I’m standing by his campaign in contribution and support.

Blogger Patriot at America Needs Tom Tancredo For President has this excellent Tancredo 2008 video posted at his site.

Representative Tom Tancredo, unlike most of the rest of the Republican field, lives up to the expectations of those conservatives who put him in office, serves up not one iota of political correctness (He’s a man who speaks his piece, period) and he represents a strong, true American’s stand on those issues most vital to the security and sovereignty of the United States.

A good look at Congressman Tancredo and his beliefs in action can be had at his official website.

… over this patently offensive display of what today’s anti-Christian liberals term “art”, I feel it is perfectly in keeping with the rules of civilized conduct that Christians’ response has been objection through speech, emails, letters, calls for a boycott and so forth.

Imagine what the response from believers, world wide, in a certain less civilized religion would have been had the sculpture been of Mohammed….

… at the communist friends you left” was the subject line of an email I received from my friend Jeff. Jeff is not a politics person at all, so coming from him, that statement says a lot.

He was referring, of course, to my having left San Francisco nearly a year and a half ago, and in his email he linked to this article.

SAN FRANCISCO, California (Reuters) — San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to become the first U.S. city to ban plastic bags from large supermarkets to help promote recycling.

Under the legislation, beginning in six months large supermarkets and drugstores will not be allowed to offer plastic bags made from petroleum products.

Naturally, the alternatives will be more expensive for the stores, which means they’ll have to commute the cost of the bags to the consumer. Granted, there are legions of good little liberal “friends of the library” types in their tweed outfits in San Francisco who already bring their own totes to the grocery store, the same ones who make their little five dollar donations to causes they believe in while demanding that all citizens be forced to contribute through our taxes.

What do you bet that the “free” bags city supervisor (that’s what they call a city councilman in San Francisco) Ross Mirkarimi hands out in the video linked in the article were paid for out of city tax money?

As a matter of note, while I still lived there, city supervisors were considered as having part time jobs, and were paid a little under $40,000.00 a year as such. We voted their office to full time status and their salaries were raised to somewhere in the vicinity of $115,000.00 a year, but all that seems to have done was provide them the incentive to expand the boundaries of their leftism.

“I am hopeful that other U.S. cities will also adopt similar legislation,” he said. “Why wait for the federal government to enact legislation that gets to the core of this problem when local governments can just step up to the plate?”

There they go again — “let’s make this a federal case. After all, isn’t it the U.S. Government’s job to become involved in and make laws out of our every whim? Screw the War On Terror, second only to Wal-Mart these plastic bags are the real menace to our country!”

The city’s Department of the Environment said San Francisco uses 181 million plastic grocery bags annually. Plans dating back a decade to encourage recycling of the bags have largely failed, with shoppers returning just one percent of bags, said department spokesman Mark Westland.

Well, Mark, perhaps the shoppers have more pressing issues in their lives than the frantic need to recycle those flimsy grocery bags, or perhaps a large number of these folks use them for garbage or for hanging storage in their tool sheds.

Here’s a city whose streets and sidewalks, even with entire brigades of welfare people sweeping them every day, are perpetually filthy and filled with litter, lined by aggressive panhandlers and drug dealers who sell their products openly while an entire subculture of trashy Goth street people, winos and dopers use the sidewalks unrestrictedly as an open air living room with whatever doorways are handy as restrooms, doing so with total impunity…

…and the city’s political leaders are more concerned with plastic grocery bags.

San Francisco’s mismanagement is the prototype of what we can expect if liberals ever have complete control of the nation.

I have no regrets whatsoever about having moved far away from that leftist hell hole….

As many who have been visiting me here for awhile are indubitably aware, one of my occasional pastimes is sitting in front of my computer, sipping something pleasant and listening to music that dredges up memories from the past. Believe me, when you have more than fifty years of past to dwell upon, there’s quite a bit of material upon which to draw for the purpose of reminiscence – especially if you led a restless, wandering younger life that consisted of copious geographic changes and even more occupational endeavors, friendships and adventures.

It’s interesting and in some ways depressing to remember certain periods three decades ago and beyond when the world was such a different place. People say that technology has made Earth much smaller, yet that really doesn’t seem to be the case. My own perception is that it has grown, in the sense that such things as friendliness, warmth, trust and actual communication between the planet’s human inhabitants has come to be divided by ever expanding gulfs, not only between continents, but between the co-inhabitants of individual cities as well.

The people you pass on the sidewalks in nearly any city you care to name seem to be surrounded by invisible force fields, no doubt a defensive reaction to the legions of panhandlers and other human spam that have proliferated in the last couple of decades. These people move about as though no passers-by exist in their respective worlds. What can you do? Spam is everywhere, on your computer, in your mailbox, on television. In the vast gulf of my own memories, I can’t remember any other time when so many people were continuously forcing their unrestricted, morally and otherwise, marketing campaigns down our throats.

What I find most distressing is that there are no limits to what they advertise and how they advertise it. Perhaps it’s because I was raised in a time when intimate venues were kept… intimate. Today, women’s private items are advertised everywhere and of late there are a lot of ads on TV and spams on the WWW for potions that purport to either counteract “erectile disfunction” or enlarge the male member. There is a KY ad on the tube for an intimate lubricant. There are ads for computer dating services, ads for weight loss programs that disclaim any real results while claiming that gorging themselves on the advertisers’ pre-prepared meals (“if you can eat, you can lose weight”) will take off tens of pounds, Girls Gone Wild ads that would never have made it to television when I was growing up, etc, etc. Spams advertising cheap, foolproof methods of becoming as rich as any garden variety sultan without having to put in any real work or otherwise earn the promised fortune are as common as molecules.

How about spam from folks you’ve never heard of that advertises using their pheromone products to make women pant for you, following you home and into your bed as though you were an erotic pied piper, or whose subject lines come across with “Tired of being a needledick?”

At the risk of being cliché, I ask, is nothing sacred anymore?

This is mostly attributable to the effects that liberal thinking, liberal legislation and Hollywood liberalism have engendered in virtually every aspect of every branch of media in our society. If I invent a new breakthrough in vibrating dildo technology and begin mass producing a product based on it, there is probably some way I could run TV commercials to sell it during prime time.

Now, going back to the era (circa 1969 to 1973) of the music I’m listening to at the moment – the playlist is R & B/ Soul (I’ve never learned the difference between the two, but I love ‘em both, so I don’t suppose it matters), all my memories are wholesome in an extreme, our society was completely different – even the extreme liberals who “helped” us lose the Vietnam war at home weren’t nearly as extreme as the leftist assholes (not only Pelosi & Co on the Hill, but the MSM and the many treasonous anti-war activists from Hollywood and elsewhere) we seem forced to endure today.

Wow, the playlist has moved up nearly a decade, to the song I consider to be the Pointer Sisters’ absolute masterpiece. I have never heard this track played on any stateside radio stations, but I was living in Puerto Rico (yeah, I told you I moved around a lot in my younger years) when it was released, and it was really popular in that part of the Caribbean at the time (lots of airplay on WIBS-FM). It was off Sweet and Soulful, and was titled Sweet Lover Man. My second favorite track on that LP was Could I Be Dreaming.

Okay, so now we’re at a stage in our society where socialism seems to be gradually taking over our democracy – we conservatives do what we can to oppose it, do all we can to get our message out… and our Jello-spined, complacent, self seeking senators and representatives on the Hill continuously cede political “territory” to the Democrats. As a result, no matter what we fight for, what we want, what we believe (even as the majority of voters), etc, etc, is obscured by a media that is totally anti-America, representative of socialist ideals and arse creeps the ACLU, CAIR and other enemies of our great nation and its Constitution, constitute a winning faction. There is a leftist revolution in progress, and it is winning.

For my own part, I see the early years of my life as another, better world.

My friend Cubed and I share the concept that was so well phrased in a 1960s Richard Harris film as applied to where our own civilization is headed:

Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment
That was known as Camelot.

To tell the truth, I’m tired. I really am. This world has become a study in idiocy, and that says a lot more than I can say for the state of the United States Government.

I have decided to retire, screw everything!

I have decided to take the clause in a contract for a new offshore job that gives me an out, and have opted to simply drop out of the marketplace entirely, bury myself in a big U.S. city and retire – live off my investments, blog, and work on the manuscript of a novel I’ve been working on for quite sometime. I am blessed with the financial circumstances to do so, and the very idea becomes more attractive by the minute….

One of the most important elements of security is controlling access to information that might be used to expose the principal, whether it is a company, a segment of vital infrastructure or a government entity, to the theft of industrial secrets by a competitor, to a terrorism or criminal act, or to a successful enemy espionage coup. Any security expert, agency or department will tell you this without a second’s thought. At least, any that can truthfully be considered even one iota beyond the level of rank amateur.

Many people whose occupational responsibilities lie outside the protective complain that a number of the time and effort concessions they are compelled to make in order to observe company security proceedures are inconvenieces (who the hell is going to want to steal this stuff, anyway?), yet when they ignore or sluff off on security policies and something goes wrong as a result, they are the first to lay the blame on the very security personnel who created those policies.

Having said that, while information security has always been vital, in today’s atmosphere of global terrorism, especially given the fact that on the terrorist world map the United States appears as a fat round target, any and all infrastructural information that can be of any use to terrorists should be very tightly controlled on a need-to-access basis.

I have posted before on holes in the security at some U.S. airports, but in those previous posts I mainly vented my concern (I fly a lot, you damn well better believe I’m concerned!) about actual physical security discrepancies.

My concern here is rooted in information security:

Orlando International Airport officials already scrambling to plug security gaps had a new concern to explain Friday: how sensitive documents detailing the airport’s layout, fuel-storage facilities, communications systems and power lines wound up in a Dumpster.

The documents, part of an OIA 20-year growth master plan updated in August 2004, are labeled “sensitive security information” that should not be released without a “need to know.” After being shown the documents by an Orlando Sentinel reporter, airport officials vowed to tighten security to prevent a similar mistake.

This is the kind of thing that should never have happened, nor should there have even been any condition or circumstance that allowed it to happen! This business of “…airport officials vowed to tighten security to prevent a similar mistake” is pure and total bullshit. Simply put, had the airport’s security manager been even remotely competent, there would have been safeguards against this happening to begin with. If it was a case of an employee being negligent, that employee needs to be severely disciplined or fired.

There’s another possibility here — one based on timing. What if an employee placed those documents in the dumpster so they could be retrieved later by someone else, and the young man that found them simply beat the intended “finder” to the punch?

One thing we can be certain of is that had the airport authorities learned of this and it had not been reported, they would have kept the affair to themselves and carried on as if nothing had happened, not wishing to “rock the boat” of passenger confidence or spend money on increased vigilance on classified information.

Read the entire article here.

A great big hat tip to my friend Bob for this one, LOL, and soooooo true!

Government Organization

The monkeys on the bottom look up
and see nothing but assholes.

…of the media is the oil industry, for example,

Higher gas prices had Dean Reynolds of ABC wondering on March 12. “[A]ll of this leads to questions about oil company profiteering,” said the reporter during “World News.”

yet,

But a resounding “No” came from energy analyst Bill Paul, who told viewers that companies are only “charging what the market will bear” and are not profiteering.

While oil companies may profit greatly, they also pay taxes – an average of 39 percent, compared to a 33-percent tax rate for other industries. “[O]il companies have paid in taxes more than three times what they earned in profits” between 1977 and 2004, according to Jonathan Williams of the Tax Foundation.

Governments receive a windfall of profits from oil revenue – $158 billion from Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Exxon Mobil payments in 2005 alone. On top of that, the government collects taxes directly from consumers on every gallon of gasoline sold.

California’s consumer prices are even higher, not due to oil company greed, but because state excise taxes are the second highest in the country by 2% and California exerts environmental based regulations on the industry that drive up the costs for both the oil companies and gas station owners.

So don’t blame the oil companies, blame the gubmint and its durned greed for taxes and regulation of private industry.

One Future Victim, of not only the media but also Hollywood supersizedstar Al Gore, could well be not only America, but the entire world.

In one of a few ongoing email debates I’m having with persons of the liberal persuation, I recently mentioned the erosion of common morality that has become commonplace in modern television sitcoms and in movies, all of which are products of the liberal establishment that owns Hollywood these days.

His reply was the stock liberal line: That the TV networks and movie producers are merely catering to a society whose sensibilities and tastes have changed in the years since I was a lad.

Right.

It’s amazing how the left can peddle this reasoning without even an iota of guilt at the very lie.

I know that I have touched on this in long ago posts and comment threads, but….

….the truth of the matter is that the majority of mainstream American adults watch prime time TV and get most of their news from television networks, and that current films come up in conversation all the time, indicating that people go to the movies with some regularity.

Long and short — what people watch on the tube and at the movie theatre has a strong influence, based at least partially on trust in the rating agencies, has a lot of influence on what they believe is acceptable for viewing. When exposed to enough of certain material, they become accustomed to it and it comes to seem acceptable, even completely normal.

…at the very lie… I say this because they are intentionally putting the cart before the horse. The media in question are not following the public interest, they are creating it by gradually introducing more and more permissiveness into their products. Similarly, they make political statements in much of their programming, for example having characters in sitcoms making “Bush is stupid” statements as though it were an established fact understood by everybody.

Or look at the movie D.E.B.S. that I referred to in a post not long ago — here was a film that was all about a lesbian relationship between two high school aged girls. The delivery was cute and the rating was PG, since there were no profanity, graphic violence or sex involved, and the movie’s target audience was obviously young people.

This is how Hollywood does its part to indoctrinate the American public to liberal ideals, yet they then claim that they are simply providing entertainment according to the evolution of public demand. This is little different from the narcotics dealer who preys on stupid kids, getting them addicted to one drug or another, then claiming that he is only supplying a demand.

Couple that with the liberal indoctrination children are being bombarded with in the public school system, and the left has successfully covered all the bases….

…. is summed up in as complete and spot-on an analysis of a single event as I’ve ever come across in this column by Dennis Prager.

… that inescapable, time-oriented professional responsibilities have prevented me, and not for the first time, from being where I really want to be — in this case, in Washington, DC for “A Gathering of Eagles”. Another example of Murphy’s Law, as usual coming from left field. To do penance {just kidding, donating to one of the most worthy American causes in modern history is by no means penance, it is helping in a modest way to propagate the survival of the greatest successful political experiment since Adam bit into the apple}, I will send a generous (more generous than my already significantly large — from the working man’s point of view, anyway, donations to causes I believe in) contribution to Move America Forward, who are sponsoring the great patriotic event. Unfortunately, due to my upcoming change of employment status, business matters at hand have a time stamp on them and therefore have to take priority over all other activities on my calendar.

My calendar — ahem! — does that sound pontificative, or what?

However, it doesn’t mean I can’t at least get in my opinion on one issue or another, or comment on that which I feel needs to be commented upon.

Recently, my friend Always On Watch posted on her becoming co-host of blog talk radio station The Gathering Storm.

The station’s prime mover is WC, owner of a blog I’d been previously unfamiliar with that bears the same name, The Gathering Storm, but with profound thanks to AOW for posting about it, I have since been pleased to have made its acquaintance and have since added it to my blogroll.

WC puts out a free weekly newsletter you can subscribe to for delivery to your email inbox(subscription can be arranged from a link at The Gathering Storm site) that keeps subscribers updated on attempts by Islamic entities to further their inroads into injecting their religious and political doctrines into western society, particularly an all too unwitting America, with the abettance of organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR, which is staffed by supporters of jihad yet given all too much creedence by our very own government) and our very own ACLU, whose Marxist roots dictate that they oppose anything that adheres to the real language or intentions of the Constitution. More than a little of the information you’ll find at the weekly newsletter is unavailable in the liberal mainstream media — duh, wonder why!

The Gathering Storm newsletter is compiled with a tenacity that borders on superhuman vigilance.

I would highly recommend that anyone who is truly interested in the truth about Islam’s intentions for America and the west as a whole subscribe to this newsletter.

That said, despite the fact that I am well aware that our current crop of politicians are by-and-large more interested in political correctness as a way to get votes than they are in the security of our country and the continued freedom guaranteed by the Constitution, I am appalled by the extent of their acquiescence to the blatantly obvious propaganda generated by Islamic venues (of course, much of this is due to the treason-representing, anti-America sycophancy of today’s Democrats to hearty funding by their well heeled liberal masters and leftist DNC politicians like Pelosi, Kennedy, Murtha and Reid — & Co), I cannot help but be appalled by the Republicans’ lack of unconditional verbal rejection of multiculturalists’ and PC advocates’ consideration, even the most picayune of same, of the spewings of Islamic ideas as applied to American laws, customs, educational programs or public sensibilities.

In this week’s Gathering Storm newsletter, for example, there is a link to an article on a Muslim New Jersey high school graduate who charges discrimination because his school’s graduation ceremony is to be held in a church. He claims that his religion forbids him to enter a Christian church, however…

… Other, more “moderate” Muslims see no problem with attending such an event in a church. So this kid is making up his religious beliefs as opportunity presents, and, with the support of sympathetic organizations, filing suit. He stands to set a precedent, if he wins in court, that could further the goals of Islamic fascists toward changing our way of life and impinging on our schools’ (not that they aren’t already infected by liberalism) freedom of choice as to where they hold commencement exercises, etc. Should they hold their graduation ceremonies in a Wahhabi mosque instead, requiring the girls to cover their faces?

Or how about another topic discussed in the same weekly newsletter?

March 9, 2007 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLIneNews.org - One might have hoped that the 9/11 attacks would have constituted an “education by murder” for Americans, an example of radical Islam in its most lethal form; so why has the New York City Department of Education decided to open an Islamist public school whose curriculum shares the same ideology as the September 11 terrorists?

Why, they ask.

Can it be that New York, already and fairly recently a bastion for leftist ideals (I grew up there and love the place, all of which really hurts me — we New Yorkers are supposed to be some profoundly sharp individuals, yet here we see where our reputed intelligence has been severely diluted by a fresh majority of stupid and award winningly short-sighted, pseudo-intellectual morons) has gone completely overboard in its neauveu(French, SPIT!!!!) hatred of everything American?

I recently sent an email inquiry to my congressman, Robin Hayes, regarding this situation (a tax-financed, jihad oriented Wahhabi Muslim school), because local school systems are subsidized by federal tax revenues, stipulating that my email be brought to the attention of staff member Kevin Klein, who responded to my prior communication, and received no reply. I have since sent the above link.

Islam is waging a campaign to assert its dominance on the entire world. In most regions, its adherents employ terrorism to enforce their ambitions — this seems to be working rather well; The Brits are capitulating and other countries, such as Spain, are expressing their capitulation at the polls.

Here in the United States of America, Islam is winning in Congress, the judiciary and in the education system, largely because the mainstream media, in all its multiculturalism, liberalism and PCness, elects to ignore the true facts of that satanic religion’s goals in the west.

That’s right — while in so many other nations (read that as EU countries), the socialist-oriented electorates permit themselves to be cowed by terrorist acts and lick derrier as such by surrendering their freedom in fear of further samples of Islam (the Religion of Peace) in action, we here in the United States of America, as a matter of our historical strength of charactar and downright courage tend to spit our defiance and will to live free back in the face of our enemy, said enemy has to adopt a different strategy — defeat from within, using our very freedoms against us.

They have a distinct advantage there — most Americans, due to our history of security (we haven’t had a war within our own borders for 140 years) tend to be skeptical of any kind of conspiracy of the magnitude that Islam presents. “No way”, they say. “C’mon, you people are paranoid!”

Organizations like CAIR depend on this reaction.

What modern Americans fail to grasp is that we are confronted by a religion that has absolutely no respect for modern thought — there is no chronology to Islam and there are certainly no concessions therein to modern developments — they are still living in the 7th Century, when the pedophile Mohammed walked the earth.

If the skeptics in both the electorate and Congress don’t wake up very soon, the MSM doesn’t begin reporting the truth and we don’t become hardnosed where the Islamic invasion of the west is concerned, our future generations may as well kiss freedom goodbye….