Sorry about that, I couldn’t help myself. What a pun! What a — oh… well, the title of this post certainly applies; if one considers what the mainstream media has been focusing on of late. First there’s the 100% political firing of a small quantity of U.S. attorneys, which happens to be a mid-term event that is practiced by nearly all administrations — as we know, Clinton’s Justice department terminated all of theirs. There was no MSM uproar when the latter occurred under Clinton, but since there is a Republican administration ensconced at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue led by George W. Bush, the former has been blown up to Armageddonal proportions by the liberal media as the Democrats raise the roof with blaring accusations and utterly moronic, blatantly politics-based innuedo….

It is eroding the Anna Nicole moment, which was just starting to wan, anyway, for all except those who are truly without lives of their own to live, and as it gathers momentum, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announces that she is going to Syria on a “fact finding” tour. The White House requests that she not go, but she announces that she’s going, anyway.

She does, and not only does she perform the Kiss of Shame on Bashir Assad, she delivers a false diplomatic message from Tel Aviv to Damascus that not only isn’t she asked to deliver, but there has been no message sent. Then she reports false peace policies of Assad’s government regarding Israel to the local media. There is no “fact finding” involved in her tour, only hints and not so subtle hints that indicate that the United States has two completely different sets of official policies on the execution of the War on Terror, and that the Democrats’ policies are equally as official as the President’s. What she is doing is in total violation of the concerned articles of the U.S. Constitution, dangerous to both our diplomatic relations and Bush’s message to the world on America’s resolve to defeat terrorism and a serious threat to U.S. troops in Iran and Afghanistan.

Some of the same liberal media that supports her editorializes her activities in a negative light while most of the same liberals that disagree with every point made at conservative blogs they frequent of course present laughably thin, generally downright stupid defenses of Pelosi’s harebrained, purely political exploits.

Don Imus comes into the picture, making a joke that has the race baiting team of Sharpton & Jackson crawling out from beneath their respective stones — did I employ the word “picayune” at the top of this post? Um, sure did! Back in the 1970s when I lived in New York, Imus had the morning show on an A.M. station while Howard Stern worked mid afternoon to early evening on the same station. Both of them were shock jocks, and both made a living out of boldly offending whatever or whomever came to mind. Nothing has changed with either, particularly Imus. Now he makes a “nappy haired ho” remark about players on a female college basketball team, which is not, by far, the most offensive thing he’s ever said into the mic, and it’s suddenly treated as the most important, dynamic story on the planet by the MSM and Democrats (as well as a few soulless Republican politicians whose lives revolve around pandering for votes wherever they can find them), conveniently drowning out much of the Pelosi-in-Syria affair. Now, Nancy’s talking about taking a trip to Iran to nasalize some butt for Ahmadmanjihad.

Liberal politicians are doing their best to take a bite out of our First Amendment rights by enacting “hate crime” laws that aren’t crimes.

The Democrats have absolutely no issues of a positive nature on the table, everything they do attacks the President, the Constitution and the American way of life, and most of their purely political assaults are based upon trivialities that they themselves have blown up into maelstroms of misinterpreted laws and ridiculous innuendo, from Scooter Libby, who did nothing wrong, to the federal judge firings, the liberal media conducting disinformation campaigns to bring things to a boil.

The media we are confronted with today is a joke, I mean why waste money on a newspaper today when one can enjoy the same awareness of what’s going on in the world by reading The Onion?

…the parameters of my own professional bailiwick, I thought it only right that I remark upon it.

Wal-Mart is in the midst of a kerfuffle involving its corporate security people, the nucleus of which consists of one Bruce Gabbard.

BENTONVILLE, Ark. (AP) — Wal-Mart won a gag order to stop a fired security operative from talking to reporters, and a judge ordered him to provide Wal-Mart attorneys with “the names of all persons to whom he has transmitted, since Jan. 15, 2007, any Wal-Mart information.”

The court papers made public yesterday follow a string of revelations about the retailer’s large surveillance operations and its business plans.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. filed a lawsuit and request for a temporary restraining order with a circuit court judge after court hours Friday.

In the lawsuit, Wal-Mart says former security operative Bruce Gabbard violated trade secrets law by revealing to reporters “confidential information about Wal-Mart security systems and operations” and “highly confidential information about Wal-Mart’s strategic planning.” It seeks unspecified damages.

This affair leaves a rather bad taste in my mouth, as it calls into question the loyalty of a protection professional to his principal, in this case Wal-Mart — the security business is a little different from most other career venues, in that it is considered unethical, to the extent of a taboo, to disclose proprietary information on an employer, even an ex-employer, unless they have broken the law. Keeping company secrets is no less important than circumventing pilferage, shoplifting, workplace violence, industrial espionage, vulnerability to terrorist activity, workplace safety risks, fraudulent activities, unauthorized access, embezzlement, internal policy violations, liability risks such as fraudulent and/or overstated lawsuits, etc, etc…

Further, it is incumbent upon a security professional to establish the parameters of both the legalities of his/her responsibilities and the policies of his/her employer. That said…

The suit and restraining order were filed two days after Wal-Mart apologized to activist shareholders for Mr. Gabbard’s revelation that they were considered potential threats and ahead of a story in yesterday’s editions of the Wall Street Journal on Mr. Gabbard’s assertion that Wal-Mart had a supersecret Project Red aimed at bolstering its stagnant share price.

Wal-Mart declined to comment on the Project Red report except to say, “Our senior management, our board and their advisers regularly conduct thorough, strategic reviews of all aspects of our business. That’s just good governance. We look at a full range of alternatives, many of which are considered and rejected, and we will not comment specifically on any of them.”

…Mr. Gabbard had his directives. Corporate security is not the lingerie department. It was up to Mr. Gabbard to examine the legalities of his assigned tasks. When you hire a security professional, you hire a creative, thinking mind, not a robot that blindly follows orders. In doing as directed, he will, as a pro, have researched his orders. Had he found any legal discrepancies, it would have been his job to bring them to the attention of his supervisor and declined to put himself and the principal at risk by implementing them.

However,

Mr. Gabbard, a 19-year Wal-Mart veteran, was fired with his supervisor last month for purportedly recording phones calls between a reporter and company officials and for intercepting pager messages between other people.

Wal-Mart said he violated its policies.

Mr. Gabbard was part of a 20-member security team called the Threat Research and Analysis Group.

The question here is whether or not Gabbard exceeded his brief, that is, allowed zealousness or an unreasonable drive to please his employers, whether they liked it or not. Or if he merely acceded to the lure of the “power” his access to surveillance technology afforded.

Shaken, not stirred.

Wal-Mart’s corporate leadership, on learning just how far Gabbard had pushed the envelope, dismissed him and his immediate boss, and denied having had anything to do with his excesses.

According to Wal-Mart’s upper management, he was a loose cannon on deck who took it upon himself to play Big Brother, and was, as a result, terminated from his employment.

As a supporter of Wal-Mart in the war the Democrats have declared, on behalf of their union lucre contributors, on the retailer, I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how this case is resolved.

The Wall Street Journal presents a more detailed account, but access to the actual article requires a WSJ subscription. Luckily for those who don’t subscribe, an anti-Wal-Mart site called Wal-Mart Watch has conveniently reproduced the WSJ article in its entirety.

Definitely read the comment thread on the post, it’s right-thinking dominated to the point that the liberals-in-charge don’t seem to have much to contribute.

I’m sure we can now expect some new rhetoric from the left and their myriad anti-Wal-Mart sites containing lots and lots of nazi and fascist accusations, along with a healthy dose of “violation of privacy” alarmism and so on, and so on….

…(which portsiders aren’t misguided?) get their due herein, one, a punk (I truly cannot locate, after much thought, a more accurate descriptive) whose celebre eminates from among the columns of the New York Times, from his fellow Democrat and undoubtedly the best former mayor New York has seen in my lifetime despite his political career having been spent on that side of the aisle, the other, a braying, disgusting, megablubbery, smelly looking, treasonous pig comedienne cum TV personality, from one of the more aggressive right thinking political commentators of today.

First, there is Koch on Kristof.

The hostile views that Nicholas Kristof expresses in his March 18, 2007 column correspond with those held by former president Jimmy Carter.

Kristof is distressed that the Democratic Party leadership is too supportive of the State of Israel. He says that he prefers the view of U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Barak Obama who recently stated, “Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people,” for which he says Obama was “scolded.”

Kristof does not mention that Palestinian suffering has in large part been brought on by the Palestinians’ own actions. Their leaders rejected the United Nations vote in 1947 dividing historic Palestine into two states: one Arab and one Jewish. They supported or actively participated in at least seven wars against Israel: the 1948 War of Independence, the 1967 Six-Day War, the 1968 War of Attrition, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the 1982 Lebanon War [1] and the 2006 Lebanon War [2]. Their leadership declared two intifadas (insurrections) in 1987 and in 2002, which still goes on.

Imagine that! Another liberal who is comfortable with ignoring the facts in order to press a political agenda. Of course, he and his fellow members of the anti-Israel persuation have no choice but to employ the communistic technique of sweeping the truth under the rug in order to replace it with propaganda for consumption by the masses. If you simply gloss over the realities, you don’t have to work all that hard at revising history, modern or otherwise — sort of like lefty teachers do in schools these days, but let’s not digress, for once (that means you, Seth).

Kristof denounces Israel’s building “a better fence” or seeking “more weaponry.” What does he mean? That in his opinion Israel may not erect a fence to help keep the terrorists out? Does he suggest that the U.S. should deny the sale of new weapons to Israel unless it also makes them available to the Palestinians? Kristof’s tortured reasoning led to the fall of the Spanish Republic to which we would not sell arms to defend itself from Franco’s fascist armies which were supported by Hitler and Mussolini.

Liberals, who yearn desperately for the implementation of that provenly oppressive failure called socialism to “come to our rescue”, never miss an opportunity to opine that any and all democracies should bend over backwards to sabotage themselves in the face of the enemy. Thus the leeches over at the ACLU, for example, are forever using the courts in an attempt to erode the security measures the United States Government takes to repel terrorism from our shores, and the liberal anti-Israel crowd demands that the Jewish state tie their own hands and that the U.S. turn our backs on them in order to allow the forces of their terrorist enemy to destroy them.

Kristof clearly wants the U.S. and the Democrats seeking the presidency to end what every president since John F. Kennedy has called “a special relationship” with Israel — that of an ally — and create a new climate of neutrality. Even the Arabs have accepted that special U.S. relationship with Israel; nevertheless, they have asked the U.S. to take the role of mediator/broker, knowing that only the U.S. would be able to get Israel to make concessions based on hopes and promises rather than concrete confidence-building measures by the Palestinians and their supporters.

Emphasis mine.

************

The second subject of conservative OpEd attention is a truly twisted soul who is the epitome of ugliness inside and out, and who embodies treason in a most abrasive and wingnutty way, from a forum that used to be (prior to her arrival) a light hearted, acceptable-to-all political groups, womens’ talk show.

Here is O’Reilly on O’Donnell.

Armed with propaganda and dangerous with passion, Rosie O’Donnell has turned a morning coffee klatch TV program into Al Jazeera West. Where once “The View” dealt with menopause and shopping tips, the program now routinely assassinates the characters of anyone Ms. O’Donnell finds objectionable….

Read the entire column here.

All I can say about O’Donnell is that I find her to be one of the most offensive, disgusting TV personalities in existence and one who truly doesn’t merit citizenship in our great nation. I really don’t like to say derogatory things about women (no chauvenism intended, just a conservative Jewish upbringing and a profound appreciation and respect for the female of our species) but that horrible creature is a real toilet cake.

To that end, Thespis also has a thing or two to say regarding O’Donnell that aren’t exactly rosie (pun intended)…

Well, hmmm… I haven’t been procrastinating, I promise, I’ve just had a ton of activity on my plate.

The other day, Always On Watch, a friend and one of my favorite co-bloggers, named me as one of her five picks in the Thinking Blogger Award. Given her intellectual pulchritude, so to speak, and the multitudes of great bloggers out there, I was greatly honored and not a little humbled at her considering yours truly for such a bestowment.

The entailment is that each blogger named post the names/handles/websites of five other bloggers whose product causes one to really think… There is no obligation here, while one is “tagged”, one can either participate or not.

This one has been tough for me, because I read a lot of blogs and I’d be infinitely better off if I could name twenty rather than five, but that particular luxury is not afforded here.

So…

After a considerable and time consuming period of narrowing down (I hate this, there really are so many more blogs I would like to name), here are my five picks for the Thinking Bloggers Award:

Old Soldier– here is a retired military man who posts from the perspective of one who has put his life on the line for our country and our freedom, and who posts from the perspective of one who is truly enraged by the fact that so many of those elected to govern America choose to take umbrage with its very existence. His blog is an excellent read.

Civil Truth, who has for some time been a great commenter here at Hard Astarboard, whose comments have both made me think and precipitated my doing some serious research just to keep up with him, and who has recently begun posting at Raven’s blog and thanks to whom I’ve learned a lot of things I didn’t know.

Back at you, Always On Watch! You rarely post anything that doesn’t require some serious thought!

In agreement with one of AOW’s own picks — credit, as they say, where credit is due, GM Roper– thank you, George, your posts never fail to make one sit back and give thought to the topics you discuss.

And…

Brendan, a blogger whose site is probably unknown to most of us in our segment of the Blogosphere yet is deserving of much more exposure – whenever I visit Space Tropic, I find myself enjoyably and/or thoughtfully immersed.

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.