… and to that end, a positive note, well delivered as always by Greg Crosby.

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….

…who actually have respect for Islam!

… I’m a good Jewish kid, but…

My current playlist includes such items as Sleighride (Boston Pops), Christmas Wrapping (the Waitresses), I Believe In Father Christmas (Emerson, Lake & Palmer) and Do You Hear What I Hear (Andy Williams).

I love Christmas music!

My favorite Christmas classic is the Andy Williams song mentioned above.

And my playlist goes on…

Here are three factors that contribute to a major imbalance in the very existence of the United States of America:

1. We are exporting our product assembly and customer service/support positions.

2. We are replacing our domestic blue collar employment – that is, depriving Americans of work – with cheap labor from Mexico and other Third World countries (if you don’t, because of its proximity to the U.S., think Mexico is a Third World country, you probably haven’t spent much time there or ventured far from your Mexico City or Cancun hotel room).

What’s wrong with that picture? Well, gee! Jobs are heading out in one direction while illegal immigrants are coming in from the other and snatching up jobs that have been left behind.

Yes, the latter are supplying cheap restaurant help, providing lower tier labor and harvesting various crops for farmers at “affordable” rates. “They are doing,” the liberal mainstream media and Democrat politicians advise us, “the jobs that Americans won’t do.”

What they apparently don’t remember to include among these jobs that Americans won’t do are carpenters, masons, roofers, furniture movers, painters, mechanics, framers, electricians, plumbers, landscapers, cooks, construction laborers and a few other occupations I’ve probably missed.

I have toured more than one “township under development” wherein there was a contingent of illegal Mexican labor ensconced in a dormitory-like living environment at the convenience of local builders, available for whatever work is offered. One such municipality is a mere fifty or so miles from Manhattan, in Putnam County.

Here in Chicago, a federal immigration enforcement agency authorized to enforce the law would have a field day…

However, and I really don’t want to sound “I-told-you-so-ish”, last year before the elections, when the President signed the Border Fence into law, I expressed my doubts that this was anything more than a vote-getting device, and, well, I told you so…

Congress isn’t funding the proposed double fence, wherein vehicle patrols can do their thing, in fact I’d wager that even the single fence among the remains of the broken promise won’t ever be completed.

3. More than ten million people sending half or more of their mostly untaxed wages out of the United States, to support their poverty stricken – at first — families in the old country.

It’s nice (pick some nice flowers) that they do this (insert violin music), but it takes an awfully big bite out of our economy. Do the Math.

Something’s gotta give. If not, well, sayonara America!

Merry Christmas!

Linda Chavez has most certainly pegged Scooter’s successor in the annals of legal vandalism from the left.

His name isn’t yet familiar to most Americans, but I expect it will be by the end of 2008: Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. He is the man, according to recent press reports, who ordered the destruction of interrogation tapes made by the CIA, which allegedly show the effects of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” used against terrorists Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. In the next few months, his name will likely be dragged through the mud, and he will be vilified as a rogue official engaged in a massive cover-up. I think he deserves a medal.

Hard Astarboard is behind her column 100%. It’s like, like… some occult prescience or, at the very least, simply a conclusion based upon what The Racing Form refers to as Past Performances, only applied to donkeys instead of horses.

I am in full agreement that Rodriquez is highly deserving of a medal for his actions, not the collosal villification he’s sure to have come his way in the not too distant future.

…in liberals’ war on Christianity,

(CNSNews.com) - With Dec. 25 only days away, a central image in the celebration of Christmas — the manger scene featuring replicas of Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus — has become the focus of attacks by vandals and leaders of “the secular Left,” Christian groups charged on Wednesday.

Okay, so how far do some of these G-dless folks take this? What’s all the hubbub about? Well, here’s one example:

While the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights was erecting a nativity scene in New York City’s Central Park, the group issued a news release condemning three dozen instances in which manger scenes were vandalized or stolen from Antioch, Calif., to Leesburg, Va., this Christmas season.

“In perhaps the sickest incident, a public school coach in Marietta, Ga., drove students around the area in his pickup truck, instructing them to thrash Christmas displays after dark,” League said.

During their Dec. 8 vandalism spree, 46-year-old John Hayes and several middle school students damaged a number of Christmas displays, let the air out of inflatable figures and rearranged plastic reindeer into X-rated sexual positions.

According to the WGCL TV, Hayes has been charged with trespassing, contributing to the delinquency of minors and reckless conduct.

(above emphasis mine)

So this Hayes fellow is one of those modern, “progressive” school faculty members to whom parents entrust their children and the minds of said children for several hours a day, five days a week. Now isn’t that special…

In addition to physical attacks, nativity scenes are “part of a larger war that the secular Left is waging on all things Christian,” said Gary McCaleb, senior counsel with the conservative Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) - which describes itself as “a legal alliance defending the right to hear and speak the Truth through strategy, training, funding, and litigation” - in a news release.

During the past week, ADF attorneys have offered to defend free of charge two cities in Wisconsin that faced legal action from the secularist Freedom from Religion Foundation (FRF) if those governments did not remove nativity scenes from their public holiday displays.

Thank G-d that there are some people like those at the Alliance Defense Fund out there to counter satanic wingnuts like FRF.

Face it, these self appointed grinches fall into two and two categories only:

1) Socialists with communistic leanings who understand that as long as the majority among the masses are united by common religious beliefs, these beliefs will stand between the people and total government control of hearts and minds, and

2) Spiritually empty pond scum who feel it is their duty to force their atheism on the rest of us. The mutts described in “1)” do all they can to encourage these soulless losers to do whatever it takes to dumb down Christian religious expression, and Christmas is the most accessable target because being the holiest, it invokes the most outright public symbolism of any Christian holiday.

The claim by liberals (liberals, atheists, same thing) that Nativity scenes on public property constitute the ironclad merging of church and state is pure fallacy, another piece of lying propaganda by a segment of our society that has been eroding the core values of our nation, principally through left leaning courts and portside politicians, for the last three decades, increasingly gaining momentum along the way.

The linked article, in its entirety, can be read here.

…time on my hands, one thing I did to keep myself entertained was watch a lot of movies. One of them was Covert One: The Hades Factor.

I never saw it the “first time around”, as it were, and when I ran across it and saw that it was based (though loosely) on work by the late suspense/espionage novelist Robert Ludlum, I thought I’d buy it. So I did.

The premise of the film boiled down to Islamic terrorists smuggling a biological agent into the United States…by infecting themselves with it prior to entering the country, then coming into the U.S. before the symptoms became visible.

Had the bad guys been along the lines of, say, Nicholas Baader (though he reportedly, as did his girlfriend and co-terrorist Gudrun Enslin, hung himself in his prison cell at the end of things) most IRA types or the various and sundry terrorist groups in South America, I’d have done what I do with a lot of action films — let it go in one eye and out the other and enjoy the story and the action as intended, for its pure entertainment value.

However, most western fanatics plan and execute their operations with the intention of surviving them. They will place their explosive devices and then get out of Dodge before the big bang or they will open fire on their targets from safe vantage points and have their escape routes planned. They will kidnap and demand ransom or political concessions, or they will kidnap and murder. The ones with the brown curduroy pants, burgundy sweater vests and coke bottle glasses might email computer viruses to their “oppressors” while the eco-terrorists burn down peoples’ houses or hammer nails into trees so as to cause grave injury to loggers.

But they all have one thing in common: They don’t want to die in the course of “championing” their causes.

Islamic terrorists, however, thrive on the concept of murdering themselves along with the soft targets they specialize in killing.

The U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut over two decades ago. The scores of Muslims who strap on suicide vests in the name of Allah and walk into crowds, restaurants, hotel lobbies, board buses, etc and happily blow themselves up along with the people around them. The 9/11 hijackers, who knew long before that terrible day that when it arrived, they would be crashing airplanes into buildings.

Professionally, I’ve long considered the probability (as opposed to possibility) that al-Qaeda or affiliates thereof would one day lay hands on biological weapons. Looking at it from their point of view, a bio attack would be far more logistically feasible than one involving a suitcase nuke — radioactive materials are far more easily detected than are micro-organisms, and the technology used to address the former concern is abundantly deployed beyond, for obvious reasons, the radar of the mainstream media. The NYT would publish instantly, under the pretext of outrage that the jackbooted thugs of the Bush regime were invading the privacy and human rights of innocent Americans (including the children) by monitoring their radiation levels, or some such idiocy (liberals don’t pay much attention to the logic or intelligence employed in the course of their diatribes, they just spew whatever it is they spew and assume that those on the receiving end will perceive it as mature, sane and logical).

Back, however, to The Hades Factor.

Early on, the main character, played by Stephen Dorff (actually, to me the main character was Mira Sorvino’s, but that’s just me), an expert on biological warfare, is asked at a conference, as a speaker, if a bio attack is preventable, and he replies in the negative.

He is absolutely correct.

From Osama’s POV, while a mushroom cloud over Manhattan would be great PR, well, as a default scenario, millions of Americans writhing in the purest agony, emergency rooms overflowing and American cities and the commerce within paralyzed while the government scrambled helplessly and ineffectually to do something about it would be just fine. Hell, break open that bottle of non-alcoholic Piper-Hiedsieck and let’s party! C’mon, let’s get some good tunes playing in this damn cave, let’s dance! Eat hummus, be merry!

What’s to stop such an attack, once the bad guys get their hands on a bio agent, from happening? If a guy (or gal, for that matter) has no problem self-detonating anyway, why not simply become infected with an easily communicable virus and distribute it via the simple means of coming into contact with other people and infecting them as well? Ten family members alone would infect 30 or 40 people (spouses, children) who would in turn spread the bio agent to classmates, fellow PTA members, neighbors, employees at the grocery store, etc…

If there are a few hours or a couple of days before the symptoms become evident, the bearer of these grim tidings needs only pass through Customs and Immigration with a legitimate front. Yeah, yeah, there’s a terrorist watch list and all that. Right. They search Habib’s luggage and find nothing, because the national security threat is flowing through his veins or his lymphatic system or whatever.

Imagine 100 or so such terrorists entering this country as tourists, students or businessmen, deploying into all of our largest cities.

I’m not trying to be an alarmist here, I’m simply pointing out a very real, very grim reality.

The threat, however, doesn’t end with the above. Rather, it is enforced by our own legal system or, to be more precise, the liberal attorneys (think ACLU and that ilk) who are more concerned with defending the rights of our enemies than they are with protecting the very lives of Americans in America.

These cowardly folks of low degree simply assume that the government they assail will protect them from the disastrous results of their arguably treasonous lawsuits. Stupid idea. You don’t disable your protection and then expect to be protected.

To be blunt: Our most lethal and most immediate enemy consists almost homogeneously of Arab Muslims, and they demonstrated, on 9/11, that they are highly skilled at entering our country legally, studying the means of executing a terrorist attack against us in our own learning institutions and then carrying out their plan.

The Bush Administration has done a fantastic job of protecting the United States and those of us living here from terrorism for over six years, but…Dubya’s done so under artillery fire from the MSM, who have done all they could to undermine his efforts.

The long and short of it is that in order to at least attempt to prevent a bio attack, the administration (not only this one, but all those that follow until we’ve decisively beaten Islam in this war that our own government misnames “The War On Terror” –we are not at war with some guys in a cave, we are at war with a faschistic political system disguised as a religion) needs to become as tough, if not tougher, than the Israelis are when it comes to letting people fly into their country or even board one of their commercial airplanes.

Remember that old Bob Dylan line I quoted some time ago?

“And if my (thought) dreams could be seen

they’d probably put my head in a guillotine…”

Well, I know exactly where he was coming from….

My Jonesing, as William Teach so aptly described it in a comment in one of my last two posts before Mr. Inspiron passed away, has come to an end — I just received my new Dell XPS-M 1330 (a couple of hours ago, actually, but there’s all that set-up stuff you have to do, in which I’m still involved).

The reason for my relative silence these last couple of weeks is, simply put, that I can’t stand Internet cafes and library computers. I’m spoiled that way — ever since I first started blogging I’ve always done so from home or from hotel rooms, with my own choice of atmosphere (music, silence, whatever) — also, being a smoker, I prefer that option as well when I write posts or visit and comment at other blogs, something you can’t do at libraries or Internet cafes. They’re also distractive.

I seem to form these strange attachments to my computers: I don’t like other people using them, and I don’t like to use other peoples’ computers. I don’t know if this is merely a personal eccentricity or whether a lot of other folks are the same way, but that’s me.

The configuration of places to plug in cables, etc differs greatly from that of my Dell Inspiron, where all were located in the back. On this notebook they’re on the sides; The DVD/CD ROM drive is bay-style, you slide the discs in through a slot, and there is a touch pad above the keyboard that allows you to play, pause, control volume, eject and so forth without having to maximize and use the controls on the media site to do everything.

I haven’t had much chance to explore yet, so I have no idea whether or not there will be any difference on my part where the Windows Vista operating platform is concerned.

I’ve owned three computers in my life, one desktop, my Inspiron and now my second notebook, and this one is by far the fastest — according to the folks at Dell, it’s their best model currently in production. I have 2 gigs of memory, so I don’t foresee any problems there, and once the carrier I ordered arrives, I’ll be able to use my old hard drive as an external and put a lot of stuff from the late Mr. Inspiron’s lifetime into the new computer.

I have a few more set-up related items to deal with and a veritable 18 wheeler load of emails to deal with, after which Ah’ll be bock!