Please post your off-topic and general interest items here.

If he is right, all political bets are off. I think the Democrats could lose the House and effective control of the Senate. I think you would also be talking about the rise of third party and perhaps a challenger to Obama in 2012.

I think the Democrat Party could be destroyed for a generation.

In fact, I’ve been counting on that all along.

PHYLLIS CHESLER: Talking ‘Bout Ft. Hood Terrorism on CNN:Pajamas Media vs. Nation Magazine. And being well-received. “Last night I was on the Lou Dobbs show on CNN to talk about whether the Fort Hood massacre was or was not a terrorist attack. . . . Trust me: This is unusual.

So unusual that Lou quit the network today before his contract expired.

Mr. Dobbs has been with CNN since its founding, save for a two-year stint at a Web site called Space.com. He has evolved over the years from a straight-laced business anchor to an outspoken commentator who rails against illegal immigration and taxpayer bailouts, among other subjects.

As usual, the illiterate NYT propagandists misuse a perfectly understandable word.

Lou Dobbs speaks out against illegal immigration and taxpayer bailouts.

“Rail” in the sense the two propagandists are misusing is defined thusly:

“–verb (used without object)
1. to utter bitter complaint or vehement denunciation (often fol. by at or against): to rail at fate. ”

Its synonyms are:

” fulminate, inveigh, castigate, rant, revile.”

I’ve listened to Dobbs quite a bit, and I’ve never heard him rant, revile, fulminate, or castigate. He may inveigh on a very mild level.

This is just the barenaked leftist prejudice of the NYT propagandists showing. I’m sure they believe that any opposition to illegal immigration or socialist bailouts is just plain evil, and so they feel no qualms in railing against Lou Dobbs.

Dumbass bitches. Yeah, I know they’re guys.

Welcome to the family!

The title isn’t snark, by the way. If you have only one carry gun, it’s a good idea to make as sure as you can that what you hit goes down. A .45 is undisputed at possessing this capability.

Look into the Glock 30 if you want a nice, concealable carry piece. Or my own Taurus PT-145, which is quite a sweet-shooting little pistol.

On the other hand, there is a lot of truth to the old adage: Carry the one you can shoot the best.

One word aptly describes Ft. Hood mass murderer Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan: traitor.

Austin Bay should have stopped right there. That is all he, or anybody, needs to say about the traitorous Muslim jihadi Nidal Malik Hasan.

Oh, yeah. Except the last word he should ever hear: “Fire!”

I doubt many of the respondents to that Gallup poll could specify exactly what the “qualifications” for the President are. It’s a singular position, with qualifications that change based on current events, and the mood of the electorate. I suspect the electorate of 2012 will be looking for someone who isn’t a “community organizer” with a shady past and zero governing experience, riding a wave of uncritical media adulation and touting an education at elite universities. Palin doesn’t have the only resume that fits the bill, but nobody else’s resume is selling millions of copies at the moment.

Americans are stupid, but almost none of them voted for Obama based on his non-existent “qualification” - unless they considered “Being President While Black” as being a qualification.

Oh, wait a minute….

Carefully, but with daring determination, some Cubans whose blogs once focused largely on the frustrations of daily life are moving toward sharp-edged commentaries and activities that some fear will eventually lead to a crackdown by the communist government.

“We do not have a common position . . . but yes, some people have been doing actions that go beyond the click and the keyboard and try to exercise the rights of a free person,'’ said Reynaldo Escobar of the Havana blog Desde Aquí (From Here).

Desde Aquí in English. He used to be a Cuban “journalist”

In several of the published photos Dr. Raúl Castellanos, cousin of Carlos Lage, appears. At first I didn’t connect him with the impeccable bureaucrat of the Revolutionary Orientation Department who had the kindness to tell me the truth: “Do not defend yourself from any accusation, you are leaving journalism simply because you do not think like us.”

His attacks are not exactly direct attacks. A good example It’s not funny which questions the wisdom of Castro nationalizing US corporations property after the “revolution”. After every paragraph he stresses “I do not agree with the blockade.”
Three others with English versions.
Voices through the Bars

I believe that in order to criticize one must earn the right. Not all prisons are the same, and for that reason I can’t imagine the international community thinking that Cuban prisons are a paradise. Only we, the political prisoners, especially those of the cause of the 75, know what it’s like to live, if you can call it living, in solitary and enclosed cells without being exposed to the sun for 18 months, with visits allowed only every three months, and matrimonial encounters every five. In other words, we have sex with our wives twice a year.

Bags weighing 30 pounds. No telephone. Two religious meetings in about two years. Enduring the crazed screams of those condemned to death. Since they won’t separate us from the common prisoners, we have learned to live in the jungle, together with the actual delinquents, rapists, child molesters, assassins, the worst of Cuban society.

I’m convinced that none of us will ever be the same again. And it is not because of weakness. Quite some time has passed and we have remained as hard as rocks. But really, we now will never return to being ourselves.

Now I have my blog, which as I always say belongs to all. If someone believes that Cuban prisons are heavenly, then please forgive me: they should cleanse their brains. There are days when I have written about a common prisoner, with my ulcer acting up and my kidney barely letting me rise from my bed. Nevertheless I continue forward. Without knowing if I will ever emerge free from this tomb of living men. My only hope is in knowing that I am a prisoner only because of my thoughts and my desire to be a free man. Then it is worth it.

Pablo Pacheco, Canaleta Prison

Sin Evasion (Without Evasion)

In contrast with the ramshackled economy, the inescapable state of malaise that prevails in the island and the clear signs of the system’s breakdown, the Cuban régime has seen fit to invest in a monument to its ideology once again. This time, in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Camilo Ciefuegos’s mysterious disappearance,

I wonder what the Castros know about that disappearance.
Generationy Which among other things talks about racism in the Cuban Paradise.

“I stopped for you because you’re white,” the taxi driver tells me after the tires screech in Reina Street around midnight. From his wide mulatto lips come the justifications, one after another, for why he doesn’t accept clients “of color” at this late hour. He looks for complicity in me, who was born in a majority black neighborhood and who loves skin the color of cinnamon. I barely listen to him. Those who discriminate against people like themselves especially bother me: the hotel doorman who berates the Cuban but lets a shouting gesturing tourist pass; the prostitute who will go, for ten convertible pesos, with a Canadian twice her age but doesn’t want to seem “defeated” by accepting a fellow Cuban; the Santiaguan who, once installed in Havana, mocks the accents of people from his own city.

Not as hard-edged as the Blogs in the US and other allegedly free countries, but they do exist and are inching towards freedom.
Each day they’re online, each post and every comment is another chip in the foundation of the State.

American International Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer Robert Benmosche told the company’s board that he is considering resigning from the job he’s held for three months, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the situation.

Benmosche told directors at a meeting last week that he was “done,” though he agreed to think it over after board members reacted with shock, the Journal reported.

The CEO is chafing under constraints imposed by AIG’s government overseers, in particular a recent compensation review by Kenneth Feinberg, the special master on pay in U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration, according to the people.

Who could possibly have imagined that slashing pay for everybody could result in people leaving, and forcing the company into a non-competitive position in trying to recruit replacements?

What is the financial equivalent of a company that manufactures only left shoes, ala the old Soviet companies? You know, the ones where they pretended to pay you, and you pretended to work?

Fair warning: I’m going to blast the first moron who rears his head here and blabbers idiocy about “If they take taxpayer money we get to tell them how much they make.”

That’s the position of an ignorant baby. If they take your money, you want them to succeed, right? And the way you succeed in a market economy is to let the market make decisions - even on pay scales.

I can’t say I’ve come up with any answers other than to keep on keeping on. I can’t say my future looks all that bright at the moment - I see no other option than to keep working at least until I’m seventy, if I can - but then, whose future does look bright? Certainly not our own nation’s, given that we aren’t able to identify those who mean to destroy us even as they do it, thanks to the treachery of fifth columnists of every description among us, and even leading us.

Glenn Reynolds is fond of uttering the hackneyed axiom, “Elections have consequences.”

More accurate, and more to the point, Decisions have consequences. If you decide that you are okay with the fall of capitalism and the imposition from above of liberal fascism lite, then elections are an afterthought that serves only to seal the deal you’ve already made.

But I don’t have any answers for the death-wishes of so many of my fellow Americans except to keep on opposing them, and in the meantime doing everything I can to prepare for the dark times I see coming. And yes, I do believe that we will look back on what we are enduring today as bright, sunny uplands.

I know, that’s depressing, too, but then, we live in depressing times, or at least most of us do.

I’m not going to blather anything about being of good cheer. Sometimes you fight even when you don’t think you have much, if any, chance of winning. Some Americans have always done that. Most don’t.

That’s just the way it is. I’ll keep fighting because that’s the only thing I can think of to do.

1. Thompson/Center Arms Muzzle Loader
2. Remington 870 Pump-Action
3. Bushmaster AR-15
4. Smith & Wesson Model 10
5. Colt M1911

I only own the Remington 870 pump. I guess I’m not running with the Kool Kidz.

The economy currently sucks. Competition for everything is heavy, and profit margins are tight. Spending on luxury items is greatly reduced. Raises and benefit expansions are on hold. Some people are taking pay or hour cuts to remain on the payroll.

So United Food and Commercial Workers Local 99, which represents 15,000 Fry’s and 9,000 Safeway grocery store workers is threatening a strike if an “acceptable offer” is not presented by Friday.

In the interest of full disclosure, my wife worked for Fry’s for about three months as a non-union employee, and a sister-in-law is currently a union employee. My wife’s pay was about what those stores are offering “temporary” employees - $9.00-9.50/hr. My sister-in-law has been an employee for years. I have no idea what she gets paid.

Something tells me that Fry’s and Safeway will have a lot more job applicants than they’ll have job openings. The Union isn’t doing its members any favor, here. I would not be surprised if my sister-in-law didn’t have a job come Christmas.

One of my youthful memories of my home town is the closure of the Ball Brothers glass factory in 1962, when I was sixteen. Some of my friends’ parents lost their jobs. BB was one of the town’s largest employers, and its departure signalled the beginning of the collapse that would result in the regional “Rust Belt” that still exists today. Why did BB close their plant?

The unions. Their demands would have bankrupted the corporation, and so the owners closed the plant in Muncie, and opened new, non-union operations in the south.

All their local union employees lost their jobs, of course. Unions are good at accomplishing this, by the way. Which is why they seek to use the club of government to extort tax dollars from your pockets in order to line their own.

Related - Former NFL football star O.J. Simpson offers to “assist in any way possible” as Fort Hood investigators continue their search for motives… developing…

Well, that should do it.

(CNSNews.com) — Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said he has “no other choice” but to filibuster a health care bill that contains a government-run health insurance option, adding that while reform is needed, the public option would be harmful to America’s future and that he would use his right as a senator to try “to stop it.”

“I have no other choice,” Lieberman told several reporters on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. “I’ve got to use the right I have as a senator to stop something that I think is going to be terrible for our future, which is the public option, not health care reform. I want to vote for health care reform.”

Note: Lieberman doesn’t say anything about “trying” to stop it. He says he will stop it.

While I’ll believe it when I see it, if the GOP does remain solid in opposition (which RINO crap sandwich Olympia Snowe probably will not do), Lieberman can stop it all my his lonesome.

It screws up the look and feel.

Thanks.

There are no allegations, and no suspicions that he was the man who killed 13 innocents, and wounded another thirty. What the Muslim appoligists of the Muslim Sucking Media are hanging their hat on is whether he can be convicted of murder in an American court. There will, of course, be an effort to avoid so convicting him on the grounds of insanity.

But that is meaningless in the larger sense, given that Nidal Malik Hasan is not a criminal - he is a warrior for his god, and his slaughter was not a crime, but an act of war.

Still, the MSM will continue to spread FUD about “allegations” and “suspicions” when it is obvious to any sane observer - not to mention the dozens of witnesses who watched him do it - that Nidal Hasan was the man who gunned down dozens of them, and slaughtered 13 while howling “Allah Akbar” (Allah is Great!) at the top of his lungs.

The general conclusions I would draw, based on the statements of the authorities, those in the military, the media, and the general public, are something like the following:

(1) Most people do not wish to be smeared as bigots, racists, or anti-Muslim, and therefore they will resist suggesting that such violence fits a pattern involving radical Islamic hatred.

(2) Most people assume either that the authorities will break up the plot before it reaches 9/11 proportions, or that the lone-wolf attacker will kill someone else far away, and therefore conclude that they are safe enough and it is a tolerable problem.

(3) Most also accept that (a) most Muslims in the U.S. are not violent, and therefore (b) we have no way in a free society to pick out in advance possible bad actors, and (c) the most likely preemptive strategies — screening imams, infiltrating “charities,” monitoring hate literature, reporting radicals at work, and screening web postings — are all fraught with civil-liberties and political-correctness land mines, and are as likely to boomerang on the authorities or well-intended citizens as they are to produce firm evidence that deters an Islamist killer before he acts.

Bottom line: The society at large, driven by the sermonizing of its elites, has come to an unstated conclusion that, unfortunately, a few Americans will have to be sacrificed from time to time, for the larger goal of establishing the fact that Americans in no way think Muslims are any more likely than any others to commit either random or premeditated terrorist violence. I think that is the initial lesson of Fort Hood.

While I often find myself disagreeing with Hanson, I find this analysis accurate - and damning.

Americans are children, for the most part, unable and unwilling to take responsibilty even for the accuracy of their own senses and thoughts. Of course, in large part they have been infantilized by the very state they have created in order to have somebody to tell them how to live their lives, and even how to think about living their lives, but this, in itself, is evidence of their basic childishness.

And, of course, it also demonstrates the truth of the axiom: Socialism is the opiate of the masses.

But won’t your pledge hurt Democrats?
It never hurts Democrats to keep their promises to the voters. The American people respect strong leaders who have the courage to stick to their beliefs. And it will only help Democrats in the next election to stand by their commitments to a core constituency. If Democratic voters aren’t motivated, they won’t vote. We are concerned that the President’s failure to fulfill his promises may suppress voter participation not only from gay Democrats, but from our families, friends and allies. In a very real way, this is an effort to ensure that we get-out-the-vote in 2010, 2012 and beyond.

Pretty funny, watching one of the lefty Dem plantations wake up and notice they’ve been eating Obama crap sandwiches for a year now.

Recorder Jeremy Freedman, sitting with two magistrates, rejected her claim that she could not help making the loud noise during sex.

He said: “We are in no doubt whatsoever about the level of noise that can be heard in neighbouring properties, in the street and in the back lane.

“It certainly was intrusive and constituted a statutory nuisance. It was clearly of a very disturbing nature and it was also compounded by the duration - this was not a one-off, it went on for hours at a time.

“It is further compounded by the frequency of the episode, virtually every night.”

Hours? Every night? Somebody tell her old man to cut back on the Viagra.
Personally I think her neighbors are just jealous. And they’ve got real thin walls.

I want to see what he made me see. He forced us to look at our little girl laying in a coffin. I want to see justice done. I want to see him take a last breath…I want to be able to describe it to the rest of the family.

I take no joy in this man’s execution. But I support it 100%. Sitting in judgement of our fellow man is what makes us free and human. There is nothing wrong with retribution. This… thing was a monster who committed acts of terrorism, and should be put down like the scum he is. I hope at this very moment it is being done.

In many cities, other crimes including homicide, robbery and rape have been dropping for several years, according to FBI statistics. But burglary stands out because it was actually rising between 2007 and 2008, and experts expected that trend to continue as the recession dragged on and unemployment rose.

I’ve worked nights and know that daytime TV is even worse. This leaves the jobless bored and with the time necessary to spy on the neighbors.