You Never Know Who's Packing!

From Monkey in the Middle


From Bob (With Thanks)

"Pistol Packing MAMA MIA!"

And if LOOKS could kill, she wouldn't need a gun ... or a knife, or a sword, or a grenade, or a harpoon, or a flame thrower, or some poison, or an atomic bomb, or even Cloverleaf Food, ...

If Eleanor Roosevelt can have a gun, shouldn't we all be able to have a gun?

BTW:  Even then official pictures looked terrible!

Lonely Voices…..

By: J Robert Giles

“Education: The path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.” - Mark Twain

What happened to tragedy? What happened to the ability to see things as they truly are as opposed to viewing the world through the smudged lenses of our own misconceptions? This weekend provided yet another example of just such an absence of objectivity.

This morning, the people of Oak Creek, Wisconsin don’t really care what your particular political views may be. They don’t really care if you support Obama or Romney. They don’t care what union you surrender your monthly dues to, and they certainly don’t care what your opinion is of their community. What they do care about is the genuine outpouring of emotion that has come their way since the tragic shooting that left six people and one scumbag dead on Sunday.

We are so quick to assign blame in these instances. The mainstream media almost instinctively labels any kind of shooting or ideological based violence as “right wing.” They do so even in the face of zero evidence or credible examples to support such a claim.

A few weeks ago, when tragedy befell the Denver metroplex, connections to the Tea Party were almost instantaneous. Absolutely no evidence had been given to support such a wild accusation, but as long as it gets out there and gets imbedded in the brain of an unsuspecting public, then success can be claimed according to uninformed liberal sources.

Same thing in Wisconsin. Yes, the shooter who has been identified but will remain unnamed on this site because he doesn’t deserve the notoriety, was “heavily tattooed” and “unable to apply for further military service in any branch.” Even if the man was the most racist, vile, hate-spewing bigot on the face of the earth, does that necessarily mean he speaks for all of any group? Does the fact that I loathe everything about Obama’s failed presidency mean that I have anything at all in common with the man who gunned down six innocent people yesterday? No, it does not.

To associate this fool with any political party, ideology, or candidate is simply deceitful. There is no other way to put it. To use this tragedy for political gain is disgraceful. Fortunately, it appears that both presidential candidates have handled the event with measured, but sincere condolences. Sometimes, people just snap. Something in their brains goes haywire and it makes them do things that fall well outside the scope of acceptable behavior.

It simply doesn’t matter what the cause for such action may be. The idiots that carried out 9/11 did so in the name of religious zealotry. Think about the insanity of that statement for a second. Is that an excuse? Is it a reason? What exactly does that weak, absurdly generalized explanation cover? They killed 3,000 people. What God condones such actions? What God would explicitly call for such lunacy? Such a god can only be found in the hearts of truly lost men.

The media rushes to blame because blame gets viewers. People love to feel as though their opinions are shared. Liberals love this more than any other group of people in the universe. They love to feel as though their voice is the only voice that matters. They love to insure that you obey their beliefs and abandon your own. They conspire among the vast network of outlets they have worked so hard to create. They unite with one common goal and that is to blast their opinion and ideas into YOUR head.

All guns are bad in the mind of a liberal. Responsibility and care can’t exist because in the mind of the left and all those in the media who obediently serve the left, anyone who casts a vote contradictory to liberal orthodoxy is a mass murderer just waiting to open fire. We’re all just dangerous, uninformed rednecks who haven’t “progressed” beyond our primitive need for violence. The left believes we are too narrow in our view to accept the fact that killing Americans in the name of a non-Christian god is an act of progressive, enlightened thought. Ironically, their “progress” has also led them to the belief that anyone carrying out an act of violence against a person of non-Christian faith is a small-minded, right-wing, Christian-extremist.

Like the vast majority of liberal thought, this too crumbles in the face of logical inspection. The man who shot those people in Wisconsin yesterday may have felt called upon to do so by his own demons, but those demons were certainly not speaking with a Christian tongue. The voices in his head were speaking in the dangerously consuming tones of hatred, bigotry, and insanity. Too often, those voices yell louder than the voices of reason, logic, and understanding.

Assuming his reasoning was somehow related to 9/11, this idiot didn’t even get his misguided attempts at revenge right. He attacked a Sikhi Temple which is vastly different from his assumed Islamic enemy. The man hated everyone. He sang in bands that mumble their desire to see Jews murdered. In his deranged mind, Hitler was a hero. In his views, genocide was the answer. To what end….your guess is as good as mine. Just as long as the world looked like him, thought like him, and had sex like him…..then all was okay. When the world around him refused to conform to such maniacal directives, he opened fire on a perceived enemy.

While I do not share the religious views of the people who were gunned down yesterday, I certainly share their desire to live in a country where religion is a right afforded to every citizen. I choose to follow the same God that the founding fathers of America followed. I choose to follow Him and publicly praise Him for all that He has given my life. I choose to take my family to a Church where many other people who believe as I do gather and share our unified voice on Sunday mornings. In absolutely no way does that mean that I feel anyone who doesn’t believe in God Almighty should be served up with earthly justice.

Our job on Earth is to influence those willing to listen. We are commanded to reach out to those who could benefit from the word of God but we are not to do so in a manner that impedes the life of another human being. My God teaches me tolerance and acceptance of all living things. That’s what He teaches. I’m human and I don’t always act in a manner that would please God, but that’s because sin is a critical component of the Christian journey. Bullets are not mentioned in the bible. Hatred has no place in a Godly world. Those who carry out acts of violence in the name of any god are doing so for selfish reasons, not Holy ones.

As always, thanks for playing.

J Robert Giles

“Stupid” sometimes has fatal consequences

 Commentary by James H. Shott

There are two items in the news today illustrate both how stupid some people are as well as how serious the consequences of being stupid sometimes can be. 

We might be tempted to think that as many such examples as there are of idiotic behavior having horrible consequences that people would begin to figure out that they should stop and carefully think things through before acting.

Holding that particular belief gives people far more credit than they have earned, as the following two tragic stories more than amply illustrate.

The aftermath of these two events also illustrates how some people – too many people – will try to relieve the stupid people of responsibility for their stupid behavior.

In the first incident, from Fox News:

A teenage mom took action recently when an intruder broke into her Oklahoma home. Sarah McKinley shot and killed the man after calling 911 and speaking to a dispatcher who, upon being asked by McKinley if she should shoot the suspect, answered that she should do whatever necessary to ‘protect her baby.’ McKinley says she did just that.

According to the 18-year-old’s account, two men began beating on her front door, prompting McKinley to take her three-month-old baby and lock herself in a room with a gun before calling emergency dispatch.

When the intruders finally got through the door, the mom had no more time left to wait for police and made a judgment call.

“I waited ’til he came in the door, and when he did I shot him. I didn’t know what else to do … I wanted [the police] to hurry and get here before I had to do it, but they didn’t get here quick enough,” she said.

On today’s America Live, Megyn Kelly pointed out that under Oklahoma law it is legal to use deadly force against an intruder, in certain circumstances. Prosecution in the case has decided not to charge McKinley with any crime. The intruder had a second accomplice, however, and he has absorbed the charges, set to be tried for first-degree murder.

In Kelly’s Court, Lis Wiehl and Joey Jackson got into a heated debate over the legal decision, with Wiehl saying the prosecution got this ‘exactly right.’ Do you agree?

And in the second incident:

BROWNSVILLE, Texas (AP) - An armed eighth-grader gunned down by police officers in the hallway of his Texas middle school Wednesday was brandishing a pellet gun that looked like a firearm, and he refused repeated orders to lower the weapon before the officers opened fire, police said.

The carbon-dioxide powered pellet gun 15-year-old Jaime Gonzalez was holding looked like a handgun, and the initial report to police that sent officers rushing to Cummings Middle School Wednesday morning was for a student seen holding a gun, Orlando Rodriguez, Brownsville's interim police chief, said at a news conference.

Robert Valle, a 13-year-old who was among the school's 750 students locked down in their classrooms during the confrontation, said he heard police run down the hallway and yell "put the gun down," before several shots were fired.

"He had plenty of opportunities to lower the weapon ... and he didn't want to," Rodriguez said. Two officers fired three shots, striking Gonzalez at least twice, he said. The autopsy results are pending.

In the case of the mother defending herself and her son, it is difficult to think that anyone would conceive that the woman should be charged in this case. But, liberals have the capacity to defend the most outrageous conduct.

In the case of the 15 year-old student, his parents are understandably grief-stricken that their child is dead, but in their grief want to blame police instead of their son. Most 15 year-olds are in the 10th grade, so we must wonder why this boy was only in the 8th grade.

Reportedly, he assaulted one student prior to the shootout, and verbally threatened to shoot at police.

It is difficult to feel any sympathy for the cretins who broke into the young mother’s home, or the kid who took a real-looking gun to a school and threatened to shoot people. They acted stupidly and got what they deserved.

It is equally impossible to blame the young mother for defending herself and her child in her own home, or the police who thought the gun was real and acted when the boy refused to drop it.

They are innocent and should be commended for acting appropriately in a dangerous situation.

Cross-posted from Observations

Media dishonesty and complicity are in the news once again

Commentary by James H. Shott


Not too long ago the light of truth shined on climate scientists who cheated in trying to persuade the world that its end is near when a series of emails were made public revealing their fraud and deceit.

Now, a series of online discussions between journalists, academics and others of a similar mind have been discovered in which the dialogue centered on how to manipulate the voting public, and other matters equally out of bounds. The journalists represent several media outlets, including The Washington Post, Time Magazine, the Guardian (Britain), National Public Radio, The Nation, The New Republic, Bloomberg News, Salon, and Harper’s. The emails were posted at an online meeting place, a list-serve called “JournoList.”

Some people defend the activities of JournoListers as nothing unusual. Mike Hoyt, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, asserts that the communications are normal interaction between associates. To him there is nothing unusual or improper about journalists discussing how to distract the American public from the negatives of one candidate in a presidential election. Boys will be boys, you know.

But journalism professor Jim Campbell of the State University of New York at Buffalo finds the JournoList troubling. “At one level it could be thought of as just colleagues throwing ideas out to one another, but from another standpoint it almost looks like collusion … where virtual talking points are shared and solidified in a group.” “That can’t be healthy for the country – or for the media, for that matter,” he added.

Bingo.

One useful tactic of the JournoListers was to distract attention from negative Obama news with some sensational charge against a prominent conservative. Someone named Spencer Ackerman, at the time on the staff of the Washington Independent, suggested to participants that to distract attention from Barack Obama’s racist and anti-America minister Jeremiah Wright, pick a conservative like “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares – and call them racists.”

Manipulating information for political and ideological gain wasn’t the only topic these folks discussed in this virtual smoke-filled back-room. They also thought freedom of the press should be done away with, because it allows Fox News to exist. Daniel Davies, a columnist at the Guardian, commented that “I am genuinely scared” of Fox because it “cannot be controlled by any form of peer pressure or self-regulation.” Imagine that: a news outlet that can’t be “controlled.” He continues: “In order to have even a semblance of control, you need a tough legal framework.”

We need a “legal framework” to control Fox News, while the media outlets where the JournoListers work continue to operate unfettered? That sounds both fair and constitutional, doesn’t it?

Jumping on the anti-Fox News bandwagon was Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at UCLA, who suggested a more strong-arm solution to the Fox News dilemma: “[I]s there any reason why the FCC couldn’t simply pull their broadcasting permit once it expires?” This man is a law professor?

Journalists are supposed to be in competition with one another, not in collusion, formulating “talking points” with each other. It is, obviously, a glaring conflict of interest when journalists pick a side and conspire to support one candidate or one side of an issue over the others. Such conflicts are scrupulously avoided by ethical professionals.

And what a horrid concoction of arrogance and insecurity these media people have. They are so arrogant as to think their ideas are more important than those of their fellow Americans, and yet are so insecure about their ideas that they believe they have to fool the American people into supporting them.

This perverse exercise has revealed such curious creatures as journalists who want freedom of the press for some but not others, and who conspire to manage information, and a law professor who believes Fox News has an FCC “permit” that can be revoked at will.

Good grief!

We are witnessing another once-honorable profession abandoning its integrity and hawking a personal agenda as it takes its place in the Hall of Shame alongside climate science.

At its best, news journalism is a noble and vital profession that adequately informs the public by objectively supplying accurate information so people can be well informed in order to make good decisions. It makes a point of covering controversial issues fully, because controversial issues are the ones most in need of public discussion. It does not favor one side over another, and leaves the picking of winners and losers to the American people, where it belongs.

At its worst, it is a corrupt and dishonorable perversion that controls information on events and issues to fit an ideological agenda. It ignores stories that will damage its chosen beneficiaries and over-emphasizes its point of view on important issues and its chosen candidates. It focuses extra attention toward its opponent’s negatives and ignores the positives. All to the detriment of the country and the citizens it is ethically bound to serve. Such integrity-challenged “journalists” throw ethics on the trash heap, and reduce themselves to partisan players in the political game.

Today, it seems there is much more “journalism at its worst” than ever before.

Cross-posted from Observations

Chicago: 36!

by Findalis

What a number. A new record!

Is it the number of games the Chicago Cubs have lost in the last month? NO!

Is it the number of bribes any Chicago Politician took yesterday? NO!

Is it the number of seconds that Oprah went without mentioning herself, Dr. Phil, or Barack Obama? NO!

It is the number of young men and women who were gunned down this past school year. 36.

With three weeks left before summer break, a record 36 Chicago Public Schools students have been killed this school year, marking the third straight year that youth homicides have climbed into double digits. Chicago has surpassed New York City and Los Angeles for having the highest youth homicide rate in the nation.

"I think people in Chicago have almost gotten numb to the statistics," said Dexter Voisin, a researcher at the University of Chicago who studies the impact of violence on adolescents.

The latest victim in Chicago's long year of student killings is 15-year-old Alex Arellano. On May 1, he was chased, beaten with baseball bats, run over by a car, shot and burned. His body was found days after he disappeared from his family's home on the city's South Side.

Police continue to investigate the killing; gang activity has been suggested. His grieving family members have denied any gang connections and continue to look for answers.

"The homicide rate is just the tip of the iceberg," Mr. Voisin said. "Those with nonfatal injuries are almost 100 times that of our homicide rates. You think for about every one kid who is murdered, 100 kids witness the murder or are victims of nonfatal injuries, of robberies, muggings and gang-related incidents. A lot of times, this exposure goes undocumented or unreported."

Black youths, he said, are two times more likely than white youths to fail or drop out of school, and at the same time they are also eight to 10 times more likely to be victims of homicide than whites.

"I don't even know where to begin," said Diane Latiker, who runs a program for at-risk youths out of her home in the city's Roseland neighborhood. "There aren't any words for what I feel for what is going on for our youth."

Ms. Latiker uses three rooms of her six-room apartment to run a nonprofit program called Kids Off the Block. She offers tutoring, mentoring and travel opportunities designed to show Chicago youths who want successful futures that the violent culture they see daily is not the norm.

The local drug dealer in a big car with flashy rims, wearing cool sneakers, appears to many to be the model of success, Ms. Latiker said.

"The A and B students, they have family and community support," she said. "What about the kid who is struggling, hanging out there on the street corner and joining that gang because he feels hopeless? That's what I'm hearing from our youth. They feel they have nothing to live for."

Read the full story here.

Where is Jesse Jackson? Where is Al Sharpton? Maxine Waters? Why is the Daily Kos and Huffington Post both silent on this? Why is the left silent? Black children are being killed!

Yet not a word about this from them. If it came out that Black children were being killed by the Chicago police, white men, or KKK members, they would be marching in the streets. But a little gang violence and they remain silent on this issue. THAT IS RACISM!

Why is it that Jackson, Waters and Sharpton will go ballistic if the 'N' word is used by a comedian, radio personality or other WHITE person, but are remaining silent when a rapper like: Mac Dre, Snoop Dog, Master P, and Lil Wayne all tell young people not to snitch, don't cooperate with the police. So the murderers go free to kill again and again. The rappers get rich, the murderers get away with the crime, and the people of the neighborhood are less safe, less secure in their homes.

And still the only cry that goes out is: Take away people's guns. If there were no guns, there would be no gun violence, the liberals say. The truth is that these crimes are not committed with legal weapons, but illegal ones. AK-47's to be exact. That is not the type of weapon one can walk into a gun shop and pick up.

Gun control is NOT the answer. The answer is for the Black Community to stop the culture of gangsterism. It is for parents to sit down with their kids and explain to them that the rappers and gangsters are not the best role-models for them. That snitching is not wrong. That testifying in court is your civic duty. That solving one's problems with a shooting is just plain stupid. Most important it is time for Black leaders to say these things. For Black leaders to march in the streets of Chicago screaming for justice for these 36 children. For Black leaders to stand up to the gangsters and take their culture back.

In September, Chicago will begin a new school year. Let us all pray that the next year will see no child shot, no child killed by gangsters. That each child will have a chance to grow up and become a useful and productive member of this great nation.