Seems pretty obvious to me…

The answer to this question, that is:

What if Mexico is compelled to accommodate organized crime and acquiesce to its demands? How do we protect our own nation? Our state? Our city? Our families?

An assault weapons ban and closing of the gun show loophole…

(and yes, that was sarcasm)

There is a silver lining, I suppose…

…to Rolling Stone magazine being yet another PR firm for the Democratic Party.

You’ll recall my musing in this space before about Rolling Stone’s (and publisher Jann Wenner’s) cluelessness vis-a-vis rock music and who should be recognized in a Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame worthy of the name. Well, the 2011 nominees were announced this morning — and it looks like cock-rockers extroadinaire Bon Fucking Jovi, dance music gurus Donna Summer and Chic, and punk-rockers-turned-hip-hoppers the Beastie Boys get nominated this year while the greats of the ’70s and ’80s still get the finger. (Can anyone explain to me why, for example, Bad Company and Rush are still not in the Hall of Fame? Rush put out some of the most intelligent and thought-provoking music of all time, and their influence on the rock genre and several subgenres is pretty much undeniable. As for Bad Company, they put out some of the most enduring, timeless straight-ahead rock of the decade — AFTER forming from the ashes of several defunct bands.) And of course, there was that letter, which is pretty self-explanatory…

With as clueless as these people are about American rock music, their declared area of expertise (the Hall of Fame nominating committee consists of — among others — Wenner and several current and former RS writers, IIRC, with Wenner exerting substantial influence over who ultimately makes the cut), why should anyone give a shit about what they say about anything else?

(Welcome, visitors from MArooned! Main page is here, pull up a seat and stay a while!)

They had to fill the space somehow, I suppose…

Jan Jarboe Russell in Sunday’s San Antonio Express-News:

The only way I see White winning is if Texans wake up on Election Day, see through the haze of anti-Obama fog and suddenly arrive at the conclusion that 14 straight years of Perry — and his political apparatus — is not in our best interest.

 Lovely. So JJR apparently thinks if Perry wins, Texas voters are in a haze. Texas might not be “recession-proof” as Perry claims, but the fact is that Texas has weathered the recession better than pretty much any other state. Of course you don’t see Jan Jarboe Russell elaborating on exactly why 14 straight years of Rick Perry’s governorship isn’t in our best interest. It would have perhaps been in JJR’s best interest to elaborate on that, or at least it would have been in the best interests of the page designers working at the Express-News on Saturday night.

And here’s a photographic explanation of what I mean by that. Here is a photo of the first paragraph of Russell’s column as seen in Sunday’s print edition:

For comparison, here’s a photo of the first graf of the neighboring Scott Stroud column:

I used to work in the journalism field as a page designer; I have extensive experience with the QuarkXPress page layout program. One of the ways to make a certain piece fit in a certain amount of space with Quark is to adjust the tracking, or the space between letters and words. You track something (decrease the spacing) in to fit in a smaller space, and you track it out (increase the spacing) to make it fit in a larger space.

Anyway, I told you all that to tell you this. It might not be obvious on the first glance, but here’s what I could tell. I’m guessing the tracking on Stroud’s column was normal, but they had to track Russell’s column out to what looked like it might have been its upper limit. She apparently had so little to say that they had to stretch it to make it fit…

Pesky explosive laws and regulations…

Gotta watch out for those, you know…(last graf)

Not-so-random hits: UT shooting, and old man getting beaten

Dude with the gun at UT obviously forgot the law. Guns aren’t allowed on college campuses in Texas! Maybe he shot himself out of pure embarrassment upon the realization of that fact.

Bob S. asks this in reference to an old man getting beaten in East Texas:

So, Mr./Ms. Anti-Rights Advocate — what do you have to say to Mr. Whittington?

And we all know the answer to this, right?

“Tough shit, dude.” *shrug* “Sorry about your face, but social control is the overriding goal here. Eggs, omelet…you know the rest.”

Get rid of them, eh?

One wonders what the logistics of that would entail:

Paraphrasing Pareto, 80 percent of our religious problems come from 20 percent of those who consider themselves religious. Get rid of them, and 80 percent of our headaches are gone.

Can you imagine what the reaction would be if a conservative had said that? As for this:

Maybe we find it embarrassing for kids to know that Christians systematically slaughtered 11 million Native American men, women and children? That Germany was a Christian country during the Holocaust? That Christianity was the seed for Heaven’s Gate and the Jonestown Kool-Aid Klub? It’s never been about religious faith but about the loons that hijack that faith, whichever faith it may be.

We’d only find it embarrassing for kids to know from the perspective of religion because, well…

A. The slaughter of the Native Americans had almost everything to do with territorial acquisition and nothing to do with religion, which makes the fact that their killers were Christian irrelevant.

B. WWII Germany’s status as a Christian nation was also irrelevant because Hitler saw Jews as a threat to the Aryan race, not the Christian religion. In fact, from what I’ve read, Hitler actually opposed anti-Semitism on religious grounds before he came to see Jews as a threat to the Aryans.

C. Although it incorporated elements of the Christian faith, Heaven’s Gate was not rooted in Christianity. In fact, it was more of a New Age faith, incorporating elements of many faiths and influences from many other fields, including psychology.

D. The Jonestown massacre also was not rooted in Christianity. In fact, the people of Jonestown went there to create a community of socialists who eschewed religion completely because they viewed it just as Karl Marx did, the “opium of the people,” and they saw socialism as a path to enlightenment — not Christianity.

Does the San Antonio Express-News have ANY standards as to what it will publish? Or is this some plot by the secretly conservative editorial page editor to make leftists look stupid and/or ignorant? If it’s the latter, it’s brilliant — and WORKING.

UPDATE: From my lovely wife, in comments:

Re B:  Nazi Germany was not a Christian nation.  (You live with me for six months and still don’t know this?)  Nazi = National Socialist.  Socialism, by definition, is atheistic.  Faith should be in the State, not in God.  “Gott mit uns” on SS belt buckles–the most common “evidence” I come across from the dumber atheists out there as to Nazism’s Christianity–was no more meaningful than “In God We Trust” on US currency.

That would have been a better way of putting it, yes. I was putting more of the emphasis on the fact that from a religious perspective it didn’t matter what religion was predominant in Germany — but when you consider that socialism is atheistic by definition, it makes the letter-writer look even MORE ignorant and/or stupid. 😉

Everybody knows what’s at fault here…

…right?

An alleged drug dealer was convicted of murder Monday and sentenced to 20 years in prison for shooting a customer in the back during an argument over the price of marijuana.

It’s all the gun lobby’s fault. After all, if there had been a more strict background check requirement along with registration and licensing, this drug dealer never would have gotten a gun. It couldn’t have been the fact that marijuana’s illegality leads to it being dealt in the dangerous black market, no sir. It’s all the gun lobby’s fault.

On a more serious note, if you read on you’ll see the assistant DA said the dealer could have argued he acted in self-defense. He did note that he was not saying the jury would have gone along with it, but it was something the prosecution had to think about. It strikes me that the only reason the dealer and his attorney didn’t argue self-defense was the circumstances. In any other situation they could very well have argued that and won the case. It might not have been a slam-dunk, but this whole situation still strikes me as very, very wrong.

Now, you all know…

…what would have prevented this, right?

BAGHDAD (AP) — An American serviceman is being held in Iraq in connection with the fatal shootings of two soldiers and the wounding of another following an apparent argument, the U.S. military said Tuesday.
…

Col. Barry Johnson, a U.S. military spokesman, said a “verbal altercation” broke out among four soldiers last Thursday and the suspect “allegedly took his weapon and began shooting the other soldiers.”

If only the police and military had guns…

Oh, look! Another gun control law failure!

This time in Florida:

A man shot and killed his estranged wife and four of his stepchildren and then killed himself early Monday, but he spared his two biological children, police said.
…

Police said there was a restraining order against (Patrick) Dell, who was in the midst of a divorce from his wife. He had gone after his wife with a knife in December, telling her “you will be going to the morgue,” police said.

Now, I know for a FACT that Mr. Dell was a prohibited person as per the terms of the Lautenberg Amendment to GCA ’68 because of that restraining order. Yet despite he still managed to get a gun and kill five people. Wow. It’s almost as if gun control doesn’t work.

I should note that I wouldn’t be supporting Lautenberg if it DID work, just on the general principle of the thing; if there are people out there so dangerous they can’t be trusted with guns, they shouldn’t be trusted with knives, rope, matches, gasoline or anything else that can be used to kill. In other words, as so many of us have said so many times before, if these people are so dangerous they can’t be trusted with guns, they ought to be locked up. This case is proof of that, as Patrick Dell had already gone after his estranged wife with a knife. And he got that knife without having to go through even a background check, let alone having to be licensed to own that knife or register that knife. Why was he not in jail? And why do gun banners not care about that?

Do what, Kenny Chesney?

I have to wonder what kinds of people Kenny Chesney talks to and/or hangs out with…

You could ask a guy my age or 90 when was he the happiest and had the most fun, and everybody that I have talked to said it was when they played high school football.

I guess this is probably the band nerd in me talking, but I can’t imagine ever saying anything like that. I had fun in high school, and my experiences with the band ranked way up there, but it certainly isn’t where my happiness in life peaked. Of course I’ve mentioned before that that I identify a lot more with songs like Cross Canadian Ragweed’s “17” than, say, Jason Michael Carroll’s “Where I’m From,” the tune that mentions a variety of cliches, among them the quarterback dating the homecoming queen — but even so, I’d like to think that even if I had been the star quarterback it wouldn’t have been when I was “happiest and had the most fun.” Maybe that’s not a fair assessment of what Kenny Chesney’s saying, but if that’s the case why is it that he so often goes back to that particular well? “Young,” “Never Wanted Nothing More,” “I Go Back,” and now “The Boys of Fall”? I understand looking back on those days fondly now and then, but there’s a difference between that and what seems like constantly having your head turned…

(h/t Country California)