I’ve got to hand it to him. This is real journalistic commitment. He writes about it here. Is it torture? He makes a good case that it is. Is it effective? Just watch.
Drowning is one of my deepest fears. Just reading about this was difficult. Yet, I must confess, I’m glad it was used on the four guys we used it on.
Looks like the Columbians FARCed the terrorists up real good. Just one more reason for the Democrats to support free trade with Columbia. Right?
Update:
Those clever Columbians even finally found a good use for those murderer-glorifying tee shirts.
Looking at helicopter’s crew, some wearing Che Guevara shirts, Betancourt reasoned they weren’t aid workers, as she’d expected — but rebels. This was just another indignity — the helicopter “had no flag, no insignia.” Angry and upset, she refused a coat they offered as they told her she was going to a colder climate.
They come from all sides of the political spectrum.
It’s one thing when your religion motivates you to fly airplanes into buildings, saw the heads off of strangers, or strap explosives to your children. But when it won’t even let you like cute puppies, something is wrong.
I get all tingly just knowing that the Senate of the United States of America stands foursquare behind dirt.
Especially if you want to make men look bad and women look like they work harder than men.
I know it’s taken me a while to post anyting about the Heller decision. Fortunately there’s been a lot of good info out there. First, this is cause for relief, but not celebration. We were one vote away from re-education camps, as Chuck Michel puts it. In a world where Supreme Court Justices were required to read at a 5th-grade comprehension level this decision would have been 9-0, not 5-4.
Glenn Reynolds, writing at Instapundit, did make this observation:
What’s most striking about Heller is that absolutely everybody — majority and dissents — says the Second Amendment protects an individual right.
It’s true that the dissenters’ view of that right is somewhere between “minimalist” (to be charitable) and “incoherent” (to be accurate). But nonetheless, all nine Justices specifically said the right is individual, and thus rejected the “collective right” position on the Second Amendment, a position that’s been the mainstay of gun-control groups, newspaper editorialists, and lower federal courts for decades, and one that was presented by those adherents as so obviously correct that those arguing for an individual right were called “frauds” and shills for the NRA.
Yet the collective right theory could not command a single vote on the Court when actually tested. It was, it seems, a paper tiger all along.
(If you don’t read Instapundit regularly, I highly recommend it.)
This is a hopeful opening salvo in what will still be a long struggle. Just as passage of Civil Rights legislation in 1964 didn’t suddenly open all doors for blacks, this isn’t going to suddenly restore our constitutional rights. As in the 60’s, state and local governments will be dragged, kicking and screaming, to comply. Witness this clue-deficient memo sent to District residents by Washington, D.C.’s idiot chief of police.
a.. First, all firearms must be registered with the Metropolitan Police Department’s Firearms Registration Section before they may be lawfully possessed.
a.. Second, automatic and semiautomatic handguns generally remain illegal and may not be registered.
a.. Third, the Supreme Court’s ruling is limited to handguns in the home and does not entitle anyone to carry firearms outside his or her own home.
I guess she has yet to, you know, read Scalia’s remedial English lesson.
It’s going to take lawsuits. Lots of them. Fortunately our side is getting lawyered up. Chuck Michel sent this out yesterday.
The incorporation lawsuits are not the extent of the NRA’s plan nationally, nor is the SF suit all that is planned in California. We have a full “dream sheet” of litigation we want to bring, using both the Heller ruling and the Fiscal preemption ruling (Prop H).
NRA is leading and working with like minded civil rights groups including CRPA, CCRKBA, SAF (represented by Alan Gura), GOC, PP and reps from calguns. Hopefully we can hold all the groups together for the long haul. Factionalism is counterproductive. At this stage everyone seems to recognize that overreaching too soon could result in bad precedent not just for California, but nationally.
Some examples of what is coming down the road:
Oakland has already been served with a pre-litigation demand to repeal its “ultra compact handgun” ban. SF’s UCH and .50 caliber handgun bans are also in our sights.A renewed challenge to all or part of the semi-auto ban is also in the works. CRPA has already has significant funding set aside for this effort. TMLLP is coordinating with Calguns on a semi-auto licensing suit, which may include other elements. We can work together on this effort, but we need to time it carefully. This case is probably not the forum to litigate the incorporation issue. Consider how clean the SF ban on guns in public housing challenge is — the SF gun ban is broader than the ban that SCOTUS struck down in Heller. That allows the lawyers on our side to focus the court on the threshold incorporation issue. Until we get that issue resolved, state and local governments are not restricted by the Heller ruling.
I am also in contact with some of the lawyers and groups advancing CCW litigation. This is also a licensing issue, not as clean as challenging a flat out ban.
There are a lot more possibilities. Lawyers are still studying the Heller decision and considering its implications. Ultimately though, any case challenging a state of local law in California will have to get a hearing before the Ninth Circuit, or perhaps SCOTUS, on the incorporation issue. Hopefully, everyone in the self-defense civil rights community can appreciate the need to get incorporation resolved as quickly and simply as possible before moving to phase two.
I support the fledgling calguns foundation, and encourage you to support it too. You should also know, however, that because of the depth of the legal challenges pending, any California donor making a donation to NRA-ILA, the NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund (501(c)(3)), CRPA, or CRPA Foundation (501(c)(3)) can count on that money (and then some) being spent in California. Checks made out to those entities can be sent c/o TMLLP for processing to ensure this if you desire. (And yes – you get a free magnet. Come to think of it, I will restock my “Don’t Get Screwed by California Gun Laws” screwdriver giveaway and throw one of those in too.)
Although Heller does not go as far as I would have liked, and we were one vote away from re-education camps, we are now looking forward to better days my friends.
One can only hope that the narrow margin on this decision (plus another awesomely stupid decision) will weigh on voters’ minds this November. In any case, I share both Jefferson’s fears and view that America was founded to make water run up hill.
Update:
I’ll add more links as I find them, starting with one which found “Strictest Scrutiny” in a Heller footnote.
Jonah Goldberg’s Airpower Guy hopes Obama feels a ka-POW.
Having been mentored as a young attack pilot by people who had been
beaten so badly they thought they’d been paralyzed, had their arms
tied so tightly behind their backs and suspended from ceilings so that
their sternums split lengthwise, been deprived of every conceivable
aid for wounds suffered in battle and then tortured to the point of
temporary insanity, I can tell you they are not a candy-assed bunch of
shuffle-board playin’ old timers.I can’t wait to see the first Medal of Honor winner POW alumnus come
up on the net and take these clowns apart. Granted, the MSM is so in
the bag for their candidate that the guys will have a harder time
breaking through the defensive shields but if the lads of the 4th
Allied POW Wing (yes, there is such a thing) get some exposure the
Great Unraveling may completely eclipse Kerry’s humiliation in 2004.
One can only hope…
This is supposed to be a picture of Iran’s First Lady.
I assume she’s the glum one under the blanket, not the dufus with the facial hair and cheap suit.
But it really looks more like a caption contest waiting to happen.
My entry is: (singing) “Me… And my sha… dow!”
Well. It helps if you do the soft-shoe sound effects with it.
Feel free to use the comments section for your entries.
He signed the stealth creationism bill, lowering educational standards in Luisiana.
Between that and his siding with radical feminists, I don’t see him as any great up and comer.
If there’s a next Ronald Reagan out there, he’s still running in stealth mode.
Because this guy, and at least five Supreme Court Justices, belong there.
NB: Before clicking the link, know that it contains a description of the young girl’s injuries. And there’s no nice way to describe them.
Ramesh Ponnuru’s post reminds me of something I was thinking after a meeting with some air traffic controllers. My natural inclination has been to “privatize everything”. But, clearly, there have to be limits. Ramesh writes:
When the private sector is competent to do something that the federal government is now doing, then the government should simply get out of the field and let the private sector do it. I would hand over mail delivery to the private sector, for example. When only the government can do something—provide for the national defense, for example—then the mechanisms it uses to achieve that goal should be determined by a range of practical considerations. In some cases, putting a job out to private-sector bidders may get the job done better and cheaper than having government employees do it themselves. But contracting out can have its downsides, too: It could, in some cases, create a powerful interest group that works against the public interest.
Ask any pilot how the privatization of the Flight Service Stations has gone. As I mulled this I at first thought that the key would be “infrastructure”. That’s why the government can do roads, air traffic control, etc. But now I think a better test might be the market: If there’s a natural market for something, as in the possibility of real competition, the private sector should do it and the government should butt out.
You shouldn’t have two militaries, sets of roads, or air traffic control systems, so you’re better off having the government do it. But the government should, it’s now clear, get out of the postal delivery business. There’s plenty of robust competition due, in no small part, to the transportation infrastructure.
So, a partial list of the things the market can do, and the government shouldn’t would be:
The unionized, moronic, jackbooted goons in charge of the orwelian kabuki theater known as “airline security” are bad enough. Now customs officials are seizing laptops and cameras without cause.
The security value of the program is unclear, critics say, while the threats to business and privacy are substantial. If drives are being copied, customs officials are potentially duplicating corporate secrets, legal records, financial data, medical files, and personal E-mails and photographs as well as stored passwords for accounts from Netflix to Bank of America. DHS contends that travelers’ computers can also contain child pornography, intellectual property offenses, or terrorist secrets. (Emphasis added)
Suggestions:
This is just absurd.
So I’ll let one of his followers do it.
The Prophet Muhammad is the model we follow. He took ‘Aisha to be his wife when she was six, but he had sex with her only when she was nine.
Interviewer: When she was six…
Dr. Ahmad Al-Mu’bi: He married her at the age of six, and he consummated the marriage, by having sex with her for the first time, when she was nine. We consider the Prophet Muhammad to be our model.
Oh, he waited until she was nine. That’s OK then.
If your resume fit on the back of your drivers license you’d be tempted to pad it, too. May I suggest not doing it this way, though?
About 46 seconds into the ad, we are told that Obama “passed laws” that “extended healthcare for wounded troops who’d been neglected,” and in the usual manner of these political commercials we are given a little citation at the bottom. The citation reads “Public Law 110-181 1/28/08”. That law is the only federal legislation cited in the ad — the other two items mentioned were from the Illinois legislature.
Public Law 110-181 was the 2008 defense appropriations bill. It passed the Senate by 91 to 3 in January, with six Senators not voting. Among those six absentees was Barack Obama. So he cites a bill he didn’t even vote for.
Bwaa-ha-ha.
So said James Randi. He wasn’t kidding. Here’s the nightmare story of what happened to one mom because the school board believed a psychic. A psychic.
Heads should roll for this. But they won’t. Because it’s a school board. That’s the plural of moron.
but not paying attention to him.
Quranic verses 3:28 and 16:106, as well as Muhammad’s famous assertion, “War is deceit,” have all led to the formulation of a number of doctrines of dissimulation — the most notorious among them being the doctrine of taqiyya, which permits Muslims to lie and dissemble whenever they are under the authority of the infidel. Deception has such a prominent role that renowned Muslim scholar Ibn al-Arabi declares: “[I]n the Hadith, practicing deceit in war is well demonstrated. Indeed, its need is more stressed than [the need for] courage” (The Al Qaeda Reader, 142).
but you can try.
Update:
Just because you have most of the media on your side doesn’t mean people are going to buy it.
“The majority of the British public is still not convinced that climate change is caused by humans – and many others believe scientists are exaggerating the problem, according to an exclusive poll for The Observer. The results have shocked campaigners who hoped that doubts would have been silenced by a report last year by more than 2,500 scientists for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”
Shockingly, almost two thirds think it’s just a scheme to raise taxes.
Nanosolar, of San Jose, CA, reports that they have a production tool with a 1GW/year capacity. That’s a single $1.65M tool which can crank out the equivalent of a nuclear power plant every year. Something tells me they’ll make more than one of these tools.
They plan to supply their wholesale market first, and have cheap solar panels available retail in 2009. I knew (through a very smart friend who has been tracking this because he wants to use it to charge his Tesla) this was coming which, combined with a lack of cash, is the main reason I haven’t gone solar at home yet.
It may be time soon.
Debbie Schlussel finds, to nobody’s surprise, that the Hijab Two who were dissed by Obama have worked for pro-terrorist groups.
Note that even though you’d think that Obama is clearly the one they’d rather have win, since he’s the America-hating Marxist (oops, I meant to say Messiah of Change) in the race. That’s as opposed to the America-loving Socialist he’s running against. Anyway, the point is that they’ll go after anybody anytime if they think it suits their jihad.
It’s the very idea that we elect presidents that they’re fighting. Under Sha’ria there will be no voting.
Now a “scientist” wants to blame it for earthquakes.
I guess we should trust him since he has previously discovered and explained the purpose of existence of the entire Universe. This guy knows about everything.
This is absolutely fascinating. An experiment using E. coli has been running for 20 years. Scientists discovered the evolution of a major new trait and, because they kept samples of past generations, they were able to replay the process.
The replays showed that even when he looked at trillions of cells, only the original population re-evolved Cit+ – and only when he started the replay from generation 20,000 or greater. Something, he concluded, must have happened around generation 20,000 that laid the groundwork for Cit+ to later evolve.
I wonder how the Discovery Institute will squirm out of this one.
Update:
Here’s more info.
Those of us who are hoping for another Ronald Reagan to rise to party prominence appear to be in for a long wait. I had heard good things about Bobby Jindal, who was cleaning up the cesspool of Louisiana politics and cutting taxes. He’s mentioned approvingly as being on the short McCain Veep list. Then John Derbyshire points out that it’s hard enough to defend the Republicans to his liberal friends who call it the “snake handling party” without Jindal’s help.
Now Jindal seems to be forsaking his medical training in favor of superstition. I hope he does the right thing and vetoes the bill.
But, I fear, we’re in for a long wait.
