Something has been bothering me about the whole Cindy Sheehan story from the beginning. I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but it’s been there, nagging me. Today it finally occurred to me. What would Casey Sheehan have thought of his mother’s protest? I doubt he would have been pleased. She talks about offering to drive him to Canada, even suggested she should have forced him…

He chose to serve.

Living to serve anyone is a noble goal. Living to serve and protect the defenseless is an even more important goal. Everything I’ve read about him suggests Casey Sheehan was that kind of person. He volunteered to risk his life to protect others. He knew the price that could be exacted for his beliefs, and he volunteered. To suggest that his death was useless is to dishonor his life.

He chose to serve.

My father passed away a few years ago after a long fight against cancer. I disagreed with some of the treatment decisions he made, but they were his choices. I disagreed with some of the things he did during his last years, but it was his life. I’m still saddened by his loss, but I can celebrate who he was. If I was to protest something he did or believed in, it would dishonor his life. His choices made him who he was. He probably could have prolonged his life by making different choices, but would it have been his life? I try to remember him for those things that made him who he was, not regret them.

He chose to serve.

Casey Sheehan was a soldier by choice. He was a hero by choice. He was brave by choice. By protesting his choices, Ms. Sheehan is trying to make him into something he never was. Sure he could have lived safer, he could have made choices that let him live longer, but would he still have been the Casey his family knew and loved?

You have to honor him for who he was, because he chose to serve.

ATF, Virginia Police Accused of ‘Persecuting’ Gun Shows

How many times must the ATF abuse it’s power before they have it taken away. Every time you think they have finally gotten control of that agency, they try something else. How much do you want to bet that despite laws to the contrary, they have kept records of the people who made purchases at that show? They need to be slapped down again, and harder this time.

Do a Google search on BATF and Abuse and see how many times they’ve screwed up before and how many times they’ve had their hands slapped for taking authority that wasn’t theirs.

This is hilarious. I wish I’d written it, but of course I killed off my inner Democrat a long time ago.

The results of the Obscene Court’s ruling. This travesty must be overturned! This is obscene.
Hat tip to Emperor Darth Misha I at Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler.

Where is the… I’m so pissed off about this I’m having trouble form complete sentences. Billing somebody for not vacating the house you stole from them…

That was painful enough. But while the homeowners were battling in court, New London was calculating how much “rent” they owe for living in the houses they were fighting to save. (The city’s development corporation gained title to the homes when it condemned them, though the owners refused to sell and haven’t collected a cent.)

The homeowners could soon be served with eviction notices, which is justified by the court ruling. But the rent is something else. For some, it comes to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Kelo, whose name is on the landmark case, could owe $57,000. “I’d leave here broke,” she told the Fairfield County Weekly. “I could probably get a large-size refrigerator box and live under the bridge.”

This is wrong on so many levels I’m can’t wrap my head around all of the implications. Obviously the five morons on the Obscene Court have no concept of them either. Makes me wonder how the Lost Liberty Hotel Project is going. While I’m not as a rule an angry or excitable person, part of me agrees with the Grand Emperor.

“Five blackrobed Nazis, swinging from a tree, C-H-O-K-I-N-G.”

and

“This country is long overdue for a good lynching party.

Let’s start with certain deserving judges and a certain city council.

THEN we hit their families with a demand for a complete refund of their dead relatives’ combined wages, salaries, fees and benefits from the moment they entered public “service”, because they sure as Hell haven’t been serving anybody but themselves.”

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King County Government in Action

No method of contraception or disease prevention is effective when practiced incorrectly or inconsistently. A 1988 National Survey of Family Growth found abstinence to have a contraceptive failure rate of 26% when not practiced consistently. So, in abstinence, as in condom use, consistency is key.

Maybe I’m not understanding the word abstinence, but shouldn’t it have a lower failure rate than that? I think the key to abstinence wouldn’t be so much consistency as actually practicing abstinence.

When I was a teenager “inconsistent abstinence” wasn’t so much a problem as a goal.

Mohammed at Iraq the Model has a fantastic message for Cindy Sheehan. I’ll only post an excerpt, but the whole post is fantastic.

Your son sacrificed his life for a very noble cause…No, he sacrificed himself for the most precious value in this existence; that is freedom.

Thanks to Black Five

We all know that Hillary doesn’t really want to be a Senator. She wants to be President, the Senator thing is just a stepping stone. What I can’t believe though is that a Democrat actually said that publicly. Here is a question posed by former top Clinton campaign adviser Dick Morris, and the reply by McAuliffe.

“And I said, ‘Do you think Hillary runs for re-election to the Senate if she has a tough race?’”

According to Morris, McAuliffe replied: “No, why should she squander $30 million getting reelected to a job she doesn’t want?”

I’m sure this just warms the hearts of New Yorkers, to know how much their Senator cares about her job and constituents.

This would suck. You’re talented enough to get to the Majors. You’re in the game, on third, ready to run and you get tagged out. Not in the rush of the game, but while waiting for the pitcher, who doesn’t even have the ball, to pitch. Mike Lowell has pulled this off twice in the last year. He rocks, and I’m not even a baseball fan.

I’ve written about PETA once or twice already, but they are in the news again. In what appears to be one of their most absurd protests ever, they’re now comparing the death of animals with lynching and concentration camps.

The really odd part is that they seem surprised by the bad reaction they’re getting. Imagine showing pictures of beaten and lynched blacks from the last century and comparing them to pictures of butchered livestock. Then comparing branding of cattle with the branding of people in Nazi Concentration Camps. See the similarities? Neither do I. Apparently I’m not the only one who didn’t like the comparisons.

One man demanded that the NAACP get involved immediately. Five minutes later, Scot X. Esdaile, president of the state and Greater New Haven chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, arrived at the scene, surveyed the photos and blasted the organizers.

“Once again, black people are being pimped. You used us. You have used us enough,” Esdaile said. “Take it down immediately.”

“I am a black man! I can’Â’t compare the suffering of these black human beings to the suffering of this cow,” said Michael Perkins, 47, of New Haven. He stood in front of a photo of butchered livestock hung next to the photo of two lynched black men dangling before a white mob.

“You can’t compare me to a freaking cow,” shouted John Darryl Thompson, 46, of New Haven, inches from Carr’s face. “We don’t care about PETA. You are playing a dangerous game.”

I wasn’t surprised by the hostile responses described in the story, I was surprised by the restraint shown by the viewers. I don’t think I would have been nearly that polite.

Teaching PETA some manners
I particularly liked the comment by “KFC luncher Rusty Smith”. Now that is someone who shares my idea of a good diet.

“I think there’s a place in this world for all of God’s creations … right next to the mashed potatoes.”

Losing the Iraq War - Can the left really want us to?
Christopher Hitchens sums up something that has been bothering me for some time. He points out that that a number of people aren’t thinking of the far ranging consequences of losing the War in Iraq.

How can so many people watch this as if they were spectators, handicapping and rating the successes and failures from some imagined position of neutrality? Do they suppose that a defeat in Iraq would be a defeat only for the Bush administration? The United States is awash in human rights groups, feminist organizations, ecological foundations, and committees for the rights of minorities. How come there is not a huge voluntary effort to help and to publicize the efforts to find the hundreds of thousands of “missing” Iraqis, to support Iraqi women’s battle against fundamentalists, to assist in the recuperation of the marsh Arab wetlands, and to underwrite the struggle of the Kurds, the largest stateless people in the Middle East? Is Abu Ghraib really the only subject that interests our humanitarians?

Democrats’ new strategy: Almost winning
Mark Steyn clarifies the new Democratic strategy we’ve all been seeing, the “deferred success.” strategy. Very clever.

“In nearly the biggest political upset in recent history, Democrat Paul Hackett came within just a few thousand votes of defeating Republican Jean Schmidt in Ohio’s Second Congressional District.”

Yes, indeed. It was “nearly the biggest political upset in recent history,” which is another way of saying it was actually the smallest political non-upset in recent history.

How exactly did the New York Times think this would go? What did they expect? I can’t see an upside to this for them. The investigation of children by a major new agency for political reason is beyond the pale. They claim to have made only “initial inquiries”, but that is too much. They had absolutely no evidence that anything was amiss, yet they invaded the privacy of children, just to see if they could dig something up.

Americans didn’t flock to Canada after Bush win

What!? If you can’t trust celebrities and other public figures to keep their promises then who can you trust? Here I was waiting for the rush of celebrities, public figures, and random Democrats moving to Canada. Apparently I’m waiting in vain. I was hoping at least Alec Baldwin would go.

I love this story. Who knew Governor Pawlenty has such a way with words?

“PETA should stay out of Minnesota’s proud fishing lifestyle,” Pawlenty said Tuesday in a two-paragraph news release issued by his staff. “Because of their letter, I’m going out for a walleye dinner tonight.”

He was responding to a July 29 letter from Karin Robertson, manager of the “Fish Empathy Project” for the Norfolk, Va.-based PETA. In the letter, she argued that fish feel pain, just as people do, and she urged him to outlaw angling.

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