November Blogmeat

Since my writing tonite seems to be related to the stuff that other bloggers have found, I'm going to switch to a BLOGMEAT format!


One in a Row has early returns from San Francisco's Proposition H.
What does it say? Well, as of this writing (21:20 on Election Night), they have 36,000 votes and less than 10,000 returned ballots. I'm not too concerned . . . so far . . . that the measure to prohibit posession of firearms within the San Francisco City Limits is winning 3 to 2.
It's a SCAM, folks!

UPDATE:
November 9, 2005
The passage of Proposition H in San Francisco caught me unaware. I knew those people were crazy, and I knew that they were stupid, but I had no idea of the extent of their mania.

I use to live there, in the early 1970's. I met some fine folks, and I loved the town. Hated the politics, hated the crime, and I missed 'real weather' so I finally moved.

The weather was just blah. Occasional rain, lots of cold winds, but I admit I was enchanted by the Fog Monster slithering down the main west-east thoroughfares on its way from the ocean to the Bay.

Crime was more than your typical bank robberies and muggings. I was living in Oakland during the Zebra Killings and the Patty Hearst/SLA business. I was there during the Black Panther shootout in Oakland. And I was there when my next door neighbor was mugged in the Safeway parking lot by two middle-school girls. My car was burglarized twice, once while it was sitting in the enclosed parking lot of the apartment house where I lived and which I managed; it was obviously one of my neighbors. Later, someone slit the convertible top 'just for the hell of it'.

The politics, even then, defied imagination. Obviously, the current generation has completely succumbed to the Nanny State mindset which we saw evolving during the period when I lived there.

I got out just in time.



Publicola is incensed that many of his readers come from RKBA-repressed areas . . . DC, California, Illinois, NJ, etc. He asks why, if these read are interested in gun-blogs, they still live where they do?

I'm sure there are good reasons, but darned if I can intuit them.


Vile Bill (Firing For Effect) writes about a pig roast and a Jungle Run!

Hey, this idea is catching on everywhere, and from the many photos Bill provides, it looks like a tough stage..

I'm glad to see that Bill is posting more and more lately, not only because he is an IPSC shooter but also because he always has something interesting to say.

Incidently, he is willing to trade total ownership of his blog for an SVI. Good luck, Bill.

Oh, and before I forget, Bill has joined the Gun Blogs Ring, as I have (see the link array at the bottom of the page, just below the Day By Day cartoon.) His link hasn't yet appeared, but take heart Bill. It took three weeks before they got around to 'certifying' my link. I think this is a worthy effort, if only because it provides a good way to cycle through all your favorite gun-blogs quickly and easily.

My blog is worth $8,468.10.
How much is your blog worth?

And Bill is responsible for the reference to the "How Much Is Your Blog Worth" bot, included here.


Syd at Front Sight, Press offers his usual brilliant collection of RKBA-related links, including this article about Alito's decision that the ban against private ownership of full-auto firearms is unconstitutional! (Scroll down to "SUPREME COURT NOMINEE SAMUEL ALITO'S VIEWS COULD IMPERIL MOST FEDERAL GUN, AMMO, AND EXPLOSIVES LAWS")

Remarkably, this article was featured in SFGATE, those wonderful folks who support Proposition H (See above).

For John Roberts, it was a "hapless toad'' in the path of a California housing development that represented the limits of the federal government's power to regulate activities within a state. For Samuel Alito Jr., it was a machine gun.

In a lone dissenting opinion as a federal appeals court judge in 1996, Alito argued that the federal ban on possessing machine guns was unconstitutional -- a stand described by both admirers and detractors Tuesday as one of the most revealing cases in the lengthy judicial record of President Bush's nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Not so remarkably, the SFGATE article strongly features a quote from "The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence", formerly known as HCI.

. . . Dennis Henigan, legal director of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said the opinion is "perhaps the most powerful evidence that Judge Alito is very much a right-wing judicial activist'' willing to disregard congressional judgment. Another critic, Douglas Kendall, executive director of the Community Rights Counsel, said Alito's opinion is disturbing for reasons that have little to do with gun control.

The case "suggests that he will impose rather significant limits on federal authority'' over interstate commerce, the basis for a wide range of laws, said Kendall, whose Washington, D.C., organization supports regulation of the environment and public health. He said the issue of federal power is critical to two cases the Supreme Court plans to review this term testing the limits of the government's authority to prohibit pollution of wetlands under the Clean Water Act.

Emphasis mine, and obviously I think that the comment that Alito is "... willing to disregard congressional judgement ..." is the salient quote of the article. I can't think of a better reason to install Alito to the Supremes!

Alito began his dissenting opinion by suggesting that the majority was treating the Supreme Court's 1995 ruling as "a constitutional freak'' rather than a recognition that the Constitution "still imposes some meaningful limits on congressional power.''

Alito is looking better all the time. Go read the entire article, and decide for yourself whether he's a loose cannon.

The second quoted paragraph demonstrates HCI's The Brady Center's disenguity; how much credibility can we give to an organization which calls itself the '"Center To Prevent Gun Violence", and then tries to hide its anti-RKBA activism under the guise of an organization which "... supports regulation of the environment and public health." These folks have no shame, no shame at all.

In fact, they quoted RINO Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma to boister their nebulous criticism.

And I so appreciated the article that I wrote an email to the reporter who wrote it.

UPDATE: December 29, 2005
I fulfilled one of my New Years Resolutions ahead of time, by re-editing this article to change the Judge's name from Alioto (a former Mayor of San Francisco, and a well-known fish-house owner) to Alito, which is the name the judge was born with. I do so reluctantly because I was getting a LOT of hits from search-engines. It seems that I'm not the only one who can't spell Alito's name properly. That's why I've seeded this update liberally with references to "Alioto". If I didn't, I would miss those guys!

Gullyborg (Resistance is Futile!) tosses his hat in the ring to be known as the Jack of Spades.

This is in response to a blogger meme for Hallmark Cards for Bloggers (h/t Arron per Hugh Hewit).

Me? I'm bidding for the Four of Clubs. Four clubs in the Columbia Cascade Section of USPSA (ARPC, TCGC, Dundee and COSSA). How hard can it be to represent a minor sport in a minor state?