It's OK ... He's Probably Gonna Join a "Well Regulated Militia".

In his blog today, Ian Lind, former reporter and still a journalist of the first order, provides an interesting look at three major issues now facing the U.S. Allow me to summarize his summaries:

* The U.S. has anywhere from five to eight times more of its citizens in prison than any other western industrialized nation.

* The U.S. spends more on health care than any other country in the world, but has poorer results than most of those same countries.

* The U.S. spends more on “defense” than all the rest of the world combined.

And still the politicians blather about the U.S. being the greatest country in the world and are outraged at any candidate for office who dares to suggest that some other country may have found a better way to deal with some of these issues.

Propose health care reform and you’re a socialist. Propose more gun control or prison reform and you’re siding with the criminals. Propose a cut in military spending and you’re soft on terrorism.

What’s maddening is that most of those pompous, blowhard politicians know better, but are pandering to (and thereby willfully perpetuating) ignorance and arrogance among the electorate … and all in the name of patriotism.

We’ve got a helluva lot of waking up to do. And we’d damn well better get started on it.

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They are out there and they are among us!

Let me say at the outset that I used to have a small collection of old guns. My favorite was a Model 1861 Springfield rifle. Firing it was an adventure: First I poured what I recall as about a thimble-full of black powder down the barrel, shoved a round lead ball down after it with a ramrod, stuck a copper percussion cap on the hollow nipple protruding from the chamber, pulled the hammer back, aimed and … BLAM!

I will tell you honestly that it was a helluva lot of fun. And I actually got pretty good with the thing … could put two out of four balls into an 8-inch fencepost at 70 or 80 yards. At the time, we lived in rural Connecticut and couldn’t see our closest neighbor. In other words, it was a reasonably safe hobby that was of no danger to anyone but, possible, myself.



But times have changed. The National Rifle Association is meeting right now in Phoenix and the paranoids and the loonies are out in force. Some of the locals there have had the temerity to express the thought via letters-to-the-editor that their town might be better of if the NRA met elsewhere. Here is a sample of the comments that thought elicited from the gun nuts:

You mentally bankrupt, driveling, woefully ignorant and unbearably simpleminded, liberal boor.

I am fed up with this double-standard stereotyping and liberal Leninist bigotry.

[We’ll see] the open invasion of our country by 20-30 million law breakers soon to be handed Democrat voters cards who being criminals lead lives of crime while sending the booty back to Mexico.

[Use cash for] some more ammo, because you never know when OBAMANATION is going confiscate all of our stash (knock, knock in the middle of the night).

And John McCain and Mitt Romney and Michael Steele and a host of other Republican politicians are right there in Phoenix sucking up to all those folks.

Is that pathetic … or what!

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The Sky is Falling ... and It's All Obama's Fault!

NEWS ITEM: AMMO HARD TO FIND AS GUN OWNERS STOCK UP

Well, that’s all we need: A bunch of gun nuts running around in a panic because they think the gummint is gonna take away their AK-47s.

Gee, maybe if the NRA tried to calm things down ... Nah, that's not what they do.

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