Independence Sunset

RT @IrishTea1 I love this picture so much! RT @Beyond_I_Do: A patriotic sky this Independence Day. http://t.co/0PQXvwOdOi http://twitter.com/IrishTea1/status/485216236855644160

Attenshun Crimnals!

The local police are in the midst of an undercover operation, and here's the proof:

Move along, nothing to see here...

Long Time No Blog... Again

Yeah, I know. I thought that the Android Blogger app would be a bit easier to use so I could blog on the go. However, even the simple things are not simple...  Plus, busy got in the way again. I'm thinking of chucking Blogger for WordPress. Most of the other cool guys have done so - some long, long ago.

And, I am a statistic now. I was forced to use Dear Leader's horrid ObamaCare to obtain something resembling health insurance. That means I helped Obama count one policy to his goal of 7 million by the end of March. Ick.

Abuse of Power - Lawless Obama

Clearing the Browser Tabs

Here are a couple links I saw today that were interesting...

"Securing Your Six: Teacher's Edition" One guy's thoughts on how to defend a class room from the spree shooter. Lot's of common sense. Too much common sense would be arming teachers, I guess.

"How a Seemingly Innocent Charge $9.84 on Your Credit Card Statement Could Be Bad News" Don't ignore that little charge on bill. The scam has been around a while, too.

"Gone Fishing on the River Chess" Bunch of chessy goodness for someone supposedly gone fishing.

As you were...

Nashville Closed! Come Back later.

Yep, in Nashville we close for COLD WEATHER. Not snow, mind you... It is simply COLD. Seriously. According to @NashvilleSevereWX, there will be NO SNOW.  But we're closing the schools.

If Obama has lost USA Today...

And he just may have. Here's an item that refers to Obama's "weaponized IRS" in the nation's largest liberal newsrag. Oh, wait...  The author is Insty. Wow. They published Professor Reynolds? Maybe there's hope...
The larger point is that Obama has weaponized the entire government and they're all targeted at us.

Fifth Anniversary of Citizens United

Five years of Left Wing Heartburn and free speech later...
 via PowerLine

Don't Leave America

...if you want Second Amendment Rights. Seems that Amendment is ignored in our Nation's capitol to the extent that merely possessing an inert shotshell, a shotgun round that can NOT be fired, gets one prosecuted.

Thus, the single vaguely legitimate remaining charge for “unregistered ammunition” is the misfired shotgun shell that Mr. Witaschek has kept as a souvenir from deer hunting years earlier. The shell cannot be fired because the primer was already stricken and failed to propel it.

Of course, if you are a member of the "only ones" like David Gregory the prosecution will ignore their "law."

I guess Washington, D.C. is not in America.

(via Of Arms and the Law)

A Return To Blogging? Maybe.

It has been almost two years since I last put up a post... The reasons I stopped are many and varied. The biggest two reasons have since been more or less resolved here and here. I remember three or four years back combing through thousands of posts looking for any links I may have posted to clients of RightHaven on my personal blog and having to consult an attorney before that regarding posts on a chess blog I had regarding - of all things - chess politics. Now, RightHaven is a disgraced memory and the Ninth Circuit Court has recognized, as noted attorney William A. Jacobson writes, "I Got Rights."

I even starting catching flack at my former job (I worked for the nation's largest newspaper publisher) about my blog being competition.  I left them last September so that's another reason gone.

In the meantime I've had fun keeping up with old blogging friends and new friends on Twitter and - very sporadically - on FaceBook.  I keep reading that blogging is dead as more of us lose our attention span for anything more than 140 characters.  Despite that, it seems almost everyone has a blog and even most traditional media types disseminate their wares via the blog format.

So, a return to blogging?  Maybe.  Who knows?  Perhaps I need a bigger space than Twitter allows to vent my spleen.  Then again, maybe not.  Decisiveness is my middle name.

An Interesting Question

From David Hardy:

An interesting question:
After President Obama apologized to Afghanistan for a soldier who cracked and killed 16 Afghanis, shouldn't he apologize to Mexico for the 300 deaths caused by Fast and Furious?

End of an Era

From FoxNews: After 244 years, Encyclopaedia Britannica ends sale of print edition.

I remember in the '70s when my dad was a salesman for Encyclopaedia Britannica. I still have a set he bought with "heirloom" binding in 1977. I also have a 1958 edition I picked up in the '80s. I recall as part of his sales pitch Dad would pick up a volume using one page to show how well made they were and how they would last.

I once had a library full of dictionaries, thesauruses, encyclopedias, and other reference works. Many are now gone and I haven't purchased any such in a long, long time. It's all on the web, you see... I may be alone, but I think our world is poorer for it.

Police Department Shut Down; 9-Year-Old Tasered

When is it appropriate to Taser a nine year old boy? Mt. Sterling, Ohio police decided the line was drawn when a nine year old boy wouldn't go to school.

The incident occurred when Michelle Perry called police because her nine-year-old son, Jared, would not go to school. Authorities responded, and when the child became unruly, an officer used a Taser gun on the boy. Neighbors have described the child as "large for his age," according to The Columbus Dispatch, though they have chosen to remain anonymous.

Police Chief Mike McCoy has been suspended for not reporting the incident to city officials. Council President Lowell Anderson told the local paper that an investigation is currently underway. The entire department has been closed, and Sheriff Jim Sabin has been given authority to patrol the town.

Words fail me.

Ted Nugent Destroys CNN Gun Control Spin

Piers Morgan plays the dummy...





Via @Smitty_One_Each at TOM.

AT&T, You Suck

This Wired item is why my latest AT&T contract is my last (plus the fact that I had to spend ~14 hours on the phone with "tech help" to fix my warrantied phone). AT&T Adjusts Data-Throttling Policy in Response to Customer Complaints

Here’s how AT&T’s new policy works, according to the carrier’s updated support pages:

If you have a smartphone that works on our 3G or 4G network and still have an unlimited data plan,

• You’ll receive a text message when your usage approaches 3GB in one billing cycle.
• Each time you use 3GB or more in a billing cycle, your data speeds will be reduced for the rest of that billing cycle and then go back to normal.
• The next time you exceed that usage level, your speeds will be reduced without another text message reminder.
• If you have a 4G LTE smartphone and still have an unlimited data plan, the same process applies at 5GB of data usage, instead of 3GB.

You’ll still be able to use as much data as you want. That won’t change. Only your data throughput speed will change if you use 3GB or more in one billing cycle on a 3G or 4G smartphone or 5GB or more on a 4G LTE smartphone.

Wired reached out to AT&T to determine the degree to which user speeds will be reduced under the new throttling plan, but the carrier hasn’t yet responded.

GOP Slightly Ahead in Voting Enthusiasm - Gallup

I likely won't do much 2012 POTUS posts since I'm not very motivated by the remnants of the GOP lineup, but it seems even we Red Staters are more enthusiastic about Mittens and Company than the Democrats are by the train wreck that is Barack Obama. From Gallup: GOP Slightly Ahead in Voting Enthusiasm

By 53% to 45%, Republicans, including independents who lean Republican, are slightly more likely than Democrats and Democratic leaners to say they are "more enthusiastic than usual about voting" this year. Republicans have consistently led Democrats in voting enthusiasm since last fall, but to varying degrees.

Heh, guess it sucks to be Blue.

Andrew Breitbart Dead at 43

The Flame of the Right New Media and the Bane of the Left is gone.

Stacy McCain and IrishSpy have comments, Legal Insurrection has a detailed wrap-up. And, of course, Bretbart.TV.

If You Love Me You'll Ride The Lightning.

From Patch.com:

With the idea to teach his 70-year-old wife how to use a self-defense Taser, 76-year-old Thomas accidentally deployed the weapon, striking the her in the face, according to the Dorchester County Sheriff's Office incident report.

It seems Harry thought this would be a good after Church activity.

Come to think of it, there are times... Nope, don't even think it.

Obama Abandons Tennessee - No State Campaign HQ

While I was in the ATT store tending the broken CrackBerry, a "gentleman" came in wearing a blue polo shirt with the horrid "O" Obama emblem over the heart and "Rusty" stitched on the left. It seems he is an acquaintance of the ATT tech fellow who was trying to fix my phone. They began conversing about the 2012 Election during which the Obamite stated he is fairly high in the Tennessee Obama minion structure and that Obama will not establish a Tennessee campaign headquarters. It seems Obama's team has given up on Tennessee as a "Red State."

The Obama minion went on to state that the Tennessee Obamites are traveling to North Carolina to campaign there instead of in Tennessee as they think it will be a closer contest and a more likely Obama win.

Fair Warning to Bob Owens and Sister Toldjah... Targets headed your way.

Tech Help Blues

AT&T and BlackBerry, this time... I wasted NINE hours on the phone yesterday with a multitude of techies from both AT&T and BlackBerry trying to find out why my Torch would not access WiFi. It will log on to the WiFi, but won't use it. It will only go online via the mobile data connection.

Before I finally got to the BlackBerry techs, the AT&T techs (don't know if it was their mobile phone folks or their Uverse guys) found a way to not only wipe all data from the phone, but also corrupt the backup files on my BlackBerry desktop software.

Fun.

So, this morning has been spent re-creating the environment I had made on the Torch over the past three or so months.

A special place in Hell is reserved for the Gmail folks who thought it would be a good idea to not only stop support for the Gmail app for BlackBerry, but also cleanse the entire web of the app. It occurred to me this morning that I still had the Gmail app on my BlackBerry Bold so I copied it from there to the Torch.

The upshot is that the phone is no where nearer being fixed than it was when this started yesterday, and I've lost a lot of data that WAS backed up before the "experts" got involved. Consensus is that the phone is at fault, which is what I told everyone from the start.

Where do I go to get a wasted day and half of my life back?