…to return to the United States, I wasn’t kidding.

You simply can’t trust any politicians in that G-d forsaken liberal hell hole — just before leaving San Francisco, for example, I voted for Gavin Newsome for mayor. Why? Because he was the most conservative and businesslike of all the candidates, despite being the usual liberal. And what was his first big move? To personally and massively conduct same sex marriages!

Previously, I had voted for Arnold Schwartzennegger to replace lying left winger Gray Davis as governor during the recall election. Under Arnold, the state’s government has now produced this.

The holidays are a busy time, so there’s a pretty good chance that you weren’t aware of a new California state bill which was passed a few months back and took effect last month. Better sit down for this one, it’s a doozy! On October 12th Govern-ator Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law California Senate Bill 777. That bill eliminates Education Code 212, which defines “sex” as “the biological condition or quality of being a male or female human being.”

In effect the bill redefines the term “gender” for all schoolchildren by adding Educational Code 210.7, which will read: “‘Gender’ means sex, and includes a person’s gender identity and gender related appearance and behavior whether of not stereotypically associated with the person’s assigned sex at birth.” In other words, it is a redefinition of gender that says you are whatever you choose to be regardless of your anatomical make-up. It tells kids that just because you are born a little girl or little boy, that doesn’t mean you are.

Unbelievable! Well, perhaps not for California. The word “tolerance” out there means forcing liberal agendas down peoples’ throats, and doing so by writing such efforts into law.

The ridiculous law has effectively banned use of the terms “mom” and “dad” from California schools. The reason? Using those terms promotes a discriminatory bias against alternative lifestyle parents. I never thought I’d live to see the day when “mommy” and “daddy” would be considered bad words. All kinds of vulgarity and foul language are just fine in these modern, progressive times - but you better not say “mom” and “dad!” That’s wrong! What country am I living in anyway?

It’s important to understand that this stuff will be taught to all children in the public school system beginning in kindergarten! Indoctrinating five and six year-olds to favor sodomy as a healthy and normal lifestyle choice has rankled some parents to say the least. Various Christian grassroots organizations have now joined together in calling for an “exodus” from the California public school system. The coalition includes Eagle Forum, the Campaign for Children and Families, and Exodus Mandate, as well as ten others.

Here is where we see why liberals oppose school vouchers; Such a program would enable children to escape the clutches of a public school system that seeks to indoctrinate them into beliefs that run contrary to those embraced by mainstream American society since our nation’s beginnings.

Because several million California families can’t afford to send their children to private schools (and is there enough room in said institutions to handle all the children of right thinking families?) or have them home-schooled (and just imagine how difficult it would be to find enough home-school teachers to accommodate the numbers involved!), the kids are literally trapped in this situation that will have a negative effect on their futures and those of California society, such as it is.

The California school system has been effectively turned into a wingnut farm.

I applaud the efforts of the various organizations that support an exodus from California schools and wish them luck, but also have to wonder what, exactly, they can accomplish as a bottom line. It seems to me that the only realistic alternative, since the population of the state is mostly liberal-voting, would be for concerned parents with average household incomes to move their families out of California altogether.

Alternative lifestyle groups claim that all they want is the end of discriminatory bias. Officials with the Gay-Straight Alliance Network and the Transgender Law Center already have outlined what they believe to be nondiscriminatory treatment in the school system. “If you want to use a restroom that matches your gender identity … you should be allowed to do so,” the groups advise. “Whenever students are divided up into boys and girls, you should be allowed to join the group or participate in the program that matches your gender identity as much as possible.”

Further, the groups advise, “If you change your name to one that better matches your gender identity, a school needs to use that name to refer to you.” Get it? Take your choice. Who do you feel like being today - Max or Maxine? The advocacy group also warns schools against bringing parents into any such discussion with students. Yeah, keep those parents out of this by all means. It takes a village, not parents.

California is a supremely beautiful state, but what festers among its population and political body far outweighs any reason I, as a right thinker, would have for living there again.

…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!

…let’s just concentrate on getting the Hispanic vote!

In a CNN debate in Austin, Texas, Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton agreed Thursday night that the Secure Border Fence Act of 2006, which directs the secretary of Homeland Security to construct 700 miles of double border fencing along specific sections of the U.S.-Mexico border, should not be enforced as written.

Stressing her desire to be deferential to the views of people who live along the border in Texas — which on March 4 will hold a primary that is widely viewed as a must-win event for the New York senator — Clinton said of a border fence, “there may be limited places where it would work. But let’s deploy more technology and personnel, instead of the physical barrier.”

“This is an area where Senator Clinton and I almost entirely agree,” said Obama. “I think that the key is to consult with local communities, whether it’s on the commercial interests or the environmental stakes of creating any kind of barrier.”

Both Clinton and Obama argued that the Bush administration was being too aggressive in pushing to build the border fence mandated by the 2006 law.

By “too aggressive”, they surely mean “verbally” aggressive. How much fence have they built in the last year and a half?

The agreement among the senators came in response to a question asked by CNN’s John King, one of the moderators of the debate.

On September 29, 2006, the Senate voted 80-19 for passage of H.R. 6061, the Secure Fence Act of 2006. (It passed the House on September 14, 2006, by a vote of 283-138). Clinton and Obama both voted for the act.

The law mandated that the secretary of Homeland Security build more than 700 miles of double fencing along specific segments of the U.S.-Mexico. Then House Homeland Security Chairman Peter King (R.-N.Y.), the principal sponsor of the law, explained its purpose in a floor speech on the day of the 2006 House vote. “It provides over 700 miles of two-layered reinforced fencing,” King said, according to the Congressional Record.

Above emphasis mine.

All 435 members of the House of Representatives and one third of U.S. senators faced reelection contests just one month after passage of the Secure Fence Act.

Yeah, sure… Voting for the bill was one thing, especially before an election, while actually allocating the funding to see it to fruition, after the election, is another thing entirely.

While Obama apparently has the black vote sewn up, he and Hillary are still vying for the Hispanic vote, yet neither wants to dumpsterize the vote of those favoring the enforcement of our immigration laws, so they offer straw-grasping alternatives neither would actually embrace, once elected, to the legislation they themselves voted for, in order to wear both hats.

That either specimen is actually a seriously considered candidate for leader of the free world is a telling example of how little today’s Democrats value even an iota of honesty in their political choices. But then, that became abundantly clear when they re-elected Bill Clinton.

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.

…and the rest of their kind, like the MSM and your general purpose liberal, as we know are still actively campaigning against the big Dubya, despite the fact that he’s not running for anything.

This is pretty much a mainstay of the liberal mindset. That is, they substitute platitudinal input for proactive tangible action — they have to know that their efforts to do whatever it is they want to do to George W. Bush is undoable, that they are merely making foolish noise in the process of burning up the contributions gleaned from their faithful followers, and more often than not making preadolescent style spectacles of themselves at the same time. I entertain no doubts as to the resentment the Three Stooges would feel had they been able to see these folks attempting to upstage them in the lunacy department.

When the Berkeley kerfuffle commenced (the peoples’ and city government’s war on the Marines recruiters there), I received a bunch of emails from Move America Forward on the issue and on their response to it, and have of course read of it in numerous other places. The backlash from around the country was sufficiently intense as to cause a couple of the Kommie San Francisco suburb’s city legislators to back pedal somewhat.

They say they support the troops but oppose Bush policies. In the same breath that they tell us they have nothing against the Marines, they tell us that the same Marines are murderers and torturers who mercenary themselves to Big Oil.

The U.S. Marines, meanwhile, are but one of several elements that comprise a community whose mission is to insure that those dizzy people in Berkeley remain free to speak out against the government and even…even against the Marines!

Please pardon me, but when the issue hit the news, and when I received the outraged emails from MAF, I hardly raised an eyebrow. I mean, this is Berkeley we’re talking about. These are the same varmints who, before the fires had even been put out on 9/11, were declaring that our country had deserved the terrorist attack. That we’d earned it. That it was our fault. How could anybody actually be shocked at anything of a treasonous nature that comes out of that lefty hell-hole?

If I were suddenly appointed king of America, I would certainly deny any voter in Berkeley, the city government included, even a dime of federal funds for anything, anything at all — this would be right before I had a large, unbroken “keep ‘em in” wall built around that leftist hell hole and then had it declared a nuclear waste dump. From then on, all people convicted of treason would be sentenced to life in Berkeley.

Radioactive Cows? In Berkeley? Mooooo!

However, I didn’t come here to talk about Berkeley. Screw Berkeley. Knock knock knockin’ on treason’s door…

A projected nine inches of snow is in the process of being dumped on Chicago, even as we speak (they’re so lucky in the Burbs, where the snow will stick, covering trees, rooftops and everything else, making for a beautiful morning after), so I’ve spent the day at home, catching up on professional stuff.

There’s a deli here called Ashkenaz that delivers a pleasing variety of Jewish fare, though I have to say that their knishes wouldn’t sell in New York — they lack every single attribute of a genuine knish, from seasoning to filling. But then, Chicago isn’t called the Second City for nothing. However, they do produce lox in all its glory, belly lox, Nova (Nova Scotia lox), etc, and deliver by the pound. They’re rather costly in this endeavor, but as far as I’m concerned, the quality of the product inspires the overlooking of their $40.00+ per pound price for cut lox. To me, salmon rules in its every form from smoked to poached in the seafood category, surpassed only by those big, meaty langostas one finds in the Caribbean.

So I’m spending this particular segment of my evening munching, in leisurely fashion, on lox and cream cheese sandwiches with ultra-thin sliced red onion and, having blown the dust off my old Enya albums (just kidding, I actually downloaded them from Yahoo! Music Jukebox), am listening to Watermark and Shepherd Moons. Celtic music with New Age overtones, good stuff.

However, I actually came here to make reference to yet another portside idiocy, one which, excluding all the above, will not take up all that much of your time. That is, the Waterboarding thing.

The left has villified it on a mega-scale, even the RINO, John McCain, has opposed it, and the tone of the arguments against it has been one that suggests it to be one of many horrible, unconscionable tortures our government employs to wrench, brutally and unmercifully, for days on end, even the most trivial, useless information from captured terrorists. It is business as usual for the fascistic, nazi Bush regime, etc, etc…

And the liberal media plays it up conjure nightmarish thoughts of the torture chambers at Prinz Albrechtstrasse or 2 Dzerzhinski Square.

Meanwhile, only three prisoners, major terrorists all, have been subjected to the actually non-harmful interrogation technique, and the longest duration involved was that of Sheikh Khalid Mohammed, a terrible minute and a half! All three subjects revealed information that saved a lot of innocent lives while leading to the neutralization of a large number of terrorists and their plans for further butchery of Americans and others.

Our intelligence pros aren’t electrocuting the functionality out of their testicles, beating them to a bloody pulp or decimating their minds with lysergic acid and amatol, they’re merely creating non-damaging discomfort for what amounts to mere seconds (while SKM, an abnormally tough customer, held out for some 90 seconds, the average is 1/3 of that time).

Yet our political left, who have just as much access to information as the rest of us, have chosen to ignore the facts and use waterboarding as an anti-Bush soap box, transforming the truth into exaggerations and bald faced lies in order to promote their false doctrines — in truth, given their desperation to strip us of our Constitutional system of government and quagmire us in socialism, I can’t say as I blame them: if you want to screw an entire electorate, you have to lie to them in a convincing manner. You have to promote your intended back-door entry as a pleasurable experience, one the entire family will enjoy, knowing that once they’ve let you in, the merciless shishkabobbing, weeping and gnashing of teeth will be beyond their control.

It doesn’t matter whether the sodomist is John McCain, Barak Hussein Obama or Hillary Klinton, the results will be the same.

Speaking for myself, when it comes to interrogating terrorists, I’d just as soon we refer to the Jack Bauer manual. Our misplaced sympathy for “ill-treated” terrorists is well defined in the old song about the gentle woman (for goodness sake) who saved the snake.

We’ve watched our politicians, justices and media intentionally misinterpret the Geneva Convention to “humanize” and redefine the status of the inmates at GITMO, and heard “certain parties” strongly suggest that we bring these terrorists into the American legal system for prosecution.

What it all boils down to, I think, is that these misguided souls are so secure in their illusion that certain bizarre things could never happen to them that they are confident that they’ll be safe, even if they eliminate the very safeguards that keep them safe.

What a bunch of maroons!

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.