Overheard…

…just a few moments ago, as I was wrapped in Sabra’s embrace:

“Your ex-husband said you weren’t any good…well, he was a fucking idiot! It was like putting a chimp in the pilot seat of an F-16, he doesn’t have the slightest fucking clue as to what to do! But you put ME in that seat and I’m like Eddie Rickenbacker!”

Sabra, laughing: “Yes, honey, yes you are!”

…you don’t LET her?

That was my response upon reading this:

One local police chief went against the grain of his fellow panel members and said

“you have to remember that this is a law enforcement matter and it is for the Police to respond to. I know you all want to carry a gun, but let me say this as a Chief of Police I don’t even let my wife carry pepper spray nor do my teenage children…”

Doesn’t LET his wife? Oh, no. No, no, no. Goodness, how could any woman put up with such lilliputian control-freakery? I shudder to see what else he doesn’t LET her do. I told Sabra upon reading that, that there was nothing I would ever not LET her do. In fact, even though I would always ultimately leave the decision up to her, if it came down to it I would almost insist that she carry to protect herself. I honestly thought we had moved beyond the relationship in which the man was the boss of the woman. How disgusting to find out that we haven’t — and that there are women out there who will still put up with that.

(h/t Firehand)

Looks like another righteous shoot to me…

…right here:

A homeowner shot and killed a man and then wounded a woman who were reportedly trying to steal tools from his pickup early this morning at a home in northwest Houston, police said.

There were some interesting comments in the comments section of that story, though. “Oh teh noes!!! He killed a man over property! Killing over property is bad, hmmkay?”

There was one that read, “You don’t know that man or woman: you don’t know the circumstances that drove them to commit what seems at best some petty theft, and to express pleasure at the death of a complete stranger says a lot about your own moral code.”

Could be, but I for one don’t give a damn about these people’s circumstances. If they didn’t want to get their asses shot they shouldn’t have been stealing from hard-working, law-abiding people. And that’s all I have to say about that.

It won’t work on a micro level…

…what the hell makes our Glorious Leader think disarmament is going to work on a macro level?

Obama laid out his vision of a nuclear-free world in a speech in Prague in April, vowing the U.S. would take dramatic steps to lead the way. Eight months later, the administration is locked in internal debate over a top-secret policy blueprint for shrinking the U.S. nuclear arsenal and reducing the role of such weapons in America’s military strategy and foreign policy.

One wonders if he really trusts the Chinese, the Russians or the others to get rid of their nukes too. I know I sure as hell wouldn’t. These damned liberal idealists are going to be the death of us all.

Chronsters turning into libertarians?

I doubt it, but it was really nice to see this:

…Starting Jan. 1, county prosecutors are instructed not to file felony charges for drug amounts under a hundredth of a gram.
How much is that? Barely a speck: A McDonald’s sugar packet contains 400 times more powder. But a hundredth of a gram is the absolute minimum necessary to conduct two lab tests: one for the prosecution, one for the defense. In other words, it’s the absolute minimum necessary for a fair trial.
The change is good for justice — but also good for our justice system, which has focused too much of its scarce resources on prosecuting low-level addicts instead of more dangerous criminals. Of the 46,000 drug-possession felony cases the county filed last year, a third involved less than a gram of a controlled substance. Many of those cases involved crack pipes, which almost always carry traces of cocaine residue. (Very likely the bills in your wallet do, too. Those molecules get around.)

Once again, I find myself agreeing with pretty much every single word they write here. I know well the deleterious effects of crack on its users, and (to a lesser extent) cocaine. But sooner or later we’re going to have to take a look at the insane drug policies we have in place and all the deleterious effects of said policies on the Bill of Rights — to say nothing of the effects on the justice system, which were mentioned later in the piece. I realize that we’re not going to get all of it at once, just like we’re not going to get all the liberty-infringing gun laws struck down — but we have to start somewhere, and this is at least as good of a start as any. It’ll be fun to see how far it is from this to not prosecuting those with certain meaningful amounts of currently illegal drugs…

Would that Maureen Dowd’s brother…

…had the plush New York Times gig:

The Republicans, of course, got exactly what they deserved in 2006 and 2008 mainly because they acted like Democrats. Deficit spending and sex scandals are not a good recipe for success.
But by forcing through a government takeover of health care, the auto industry and the banks, the president and his congressional henchmen have brought us in a time machine to Russia 1917. These massive changes have been done in secret and along bullying, straight party-line votes.

Blogging might be sporadic this week. Sabra’s here. 🙂

From your lips to God’s ears, buddy…

…or, I think this guy, notwithstanding his disparagement of our state’s fine cuisine and the propagation of that secession urban legend, is my new hero:

Dear big beautiful Texas with all your gorgeous pageant women and crappy food: you are the only state that joined our Union with a treaty allowing for legal secession.

Here’s the “long story short,” your favorite phrase, Dear Texas:

You can get out now and no one will stop you.

Do I even need to say it?

h/t Cold Fury

How many mothers’ sons will they send to die…

doing the bidding of assclowns like this? From the comments to this story:

It makes no difference if guns kill people or people kill people — they are still dead or severly injured. Get rid of guns.

Ultimately there’s only one thing to say to pronouncements like this: “You can try, I suppose, but you can’t have mine. What’re you gonna do now, Sparky?”

I mean, I hate it as much as anyone that this little girl was injured due to her daddy’s negligence, but telling 80 million gun owners to turn ’em in for the mistakes of a few, well, that’s only gonna end in tears. Do people like the above commenter know this? Do they even care?

Dear God, but I do love this song.

Now playing at The Roadhouse, Sirius Ch. 62: “Two young soldiers from Fort Campbell, told me how they hate that war in Vietnam….sirens echo through an alley, and some woman said some fellow, stabbed a man…”

Man, but that’s a lost classic if ever there was one, John Wesley Ryles’ “Kay” from 1968. He recorded that song when he was still a teenager, believe it or not. As far as I know that was his only hit, but what a great, GREAT song. That was another one of those songs I first heard on the radio in College Station, and as far as I remember I had not heard it since I left that town.

I hope all of you got what you wanted for Christmas. All I asked for was a renewal of my Sirius subscription, and I got it. 🙂

Eye-rolling amusement…

…at David Broder’s column in the Chron this morning…

Six decades after his death, one of FDR’s Four Freedoms will, at long last, be guaranteed to almost all Americans. And the shame of this affluent society tolerating the denial of health care to its own citizens will be largely lifted.
But Lord, what a load of embarrassment accompanies this sense of satisfaction! What should have been a moment of proud accomplishment for the United States Senate, right up there with the passage of Social Security and the first civil rights bills, was instead a travesty of low-grade political theater — angry rhetoric and backroom deals.

I really don’t understand why he would have expected it to be any other way. Did Broder actually think the Democrats were really going to be any less prone to craven deal-making than the Republicans were? What a stunning display of naivete on his part. At least now I know where Broder was coming from with his classification of health care as a “right,” with his citation of Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. I am not sure if I’d ever read about this before, but it does look to be the very root of the decline of American liberalism. Freedom from want and freedom from fear?
Goodness. I shudder to think of how many laws and policies antithetical to liberty have been passed since FDR’s time with the aims of expanding those last two “freedoms.”