For the record, the only reason this interests me is since it is bloody hot down here most of the year, and wearing a jacket or long shirt over my usual t-shirt is simply not going to happen.  And since I’m a girl, wearing the typical shorter-tailed girlie type shirts, this means belt carry under my shirt is not possible.  Any sort of movement, even walking, will cause my holster to be visible, which will undoubtedly cause old ladies to keel over in fright.  Therefore I usually wind up carrying in my purse, which A) is extremely heavy and annoying, and B) is like not carrying a gun at all.  Passage of this bill means I can belt carry and not worry about being arrested when some Neanderthal deputy – which seems to be the only kind they’re hiring these days – sees a flash of holster on a sunny day.

Alas, my county’s sheriff – who on a good day has delusions of being the next Joe Arpaio – thinks this is all Very Bad:

A visible weapon could provoke crimes of opportunity, and concealed-weapon permit holders — unlike deputies — don’t have to pass physical fitness tests, said Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd.

…

In phone interviews, each sheriff said he supports the Second Amendment. Judd said he’s an advocate of the NRA.

“But at the end of the day, this is bad legislation and should not be passed,” he said.

They’re worried that deputies who respond to a conflict won’t know who to disarm if they see several people with guns.

I am quite pleased the top cop in my county is apparently a sniveling moron, who will not take responsibility for hiring adequately evolved individuals with enough native intelligence to disarm “several people with guns” long enough to check their IDs/permits.  I am also pleased there’s no intention of better training said Neanderthals to carry out the above simple operation sans pants-filling.  This seems like a spectacular usage of the property taxes I pay to this county every year.

Here’s a thought, Sheriff Judd:  If your homunculi deputies come across “several people with guns,” shoot the ones who turn the guns on your deputies.  Because if folk who have bothered to sit through the concealed carry class (as well as get fingerprinted and background checked, and pay the cash money required for the license) are stupid enough to actually point their pieces at a man with a badge, then we surely don’t need them in our rank and file and you are more than welcome to their cooling corpses.

Alternatively, man up and actually TRAIN your people to be more than mere shit-kickers.  Oh, and kindly check the stats in the OTHER FORTY THREE STATES that allow open carry to their CC holders.  Rube.

Updated to add anecdote: Yesterday the kids and I were grocery shopping.  My son – who is 13 – said, “Hey, did that open carry bill pass?”  I said, “Not yet, why?”  He said, “There’s a guy over there with a gun on his belt.”  I looked, man with a high and tight wearing nice dress pants and a dress shirt, gun holstered neatly on his belt.  I said, “Probably a cop.”  Son shrugged and said, “Hey, can we get some Cheerios?”

No hysteria, no pants-filling.  And unsurprisingly (at least to those of us with sense) none whatsoever from the rest of the grocery-shopping public as well.

TAMPA – Hillsborough County soon will begin enforcing its strict ordinances governing adult businesses now that a federal appeals court has ruled the restrictions are constitutional.

…

“But we will make sure that these businesses comply with the law,” she said.

The ruling from the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals means that dancers at bikini bars will have to stay 6 feet away from patrons, and the sale or consumption of alcohol will be prohibited at adult businesses.

Additionally, adult video stores would be prohibited from having private viewing booths and workers would have to pass a criminal background check before they are hired.

When I lived in Atlanta, you could go to a nudie bar and have your 14th shot of tequila served to you by a butt naked chick grasping the glass in a way that would, from first appearance, be viewed as anatomically impossible. Now, if you wished to keep your nose centered between your eyes and mouth, you didn’t want to grope the girls but they’d touch you, that’s for sure.

In a free society, what I wish to pay for is my business. If I want to go watch some lady take off her knickers while consuming absinthe with a handful of Flintstone vitamins and having taco sauce poured over my freshly shorn genitalia for $25.95, that’s my business. No one else’s. Period. It doesn’t matter how ‘icky’ you find it, how morally degrading it seems to you, it’s none of your business.

But that’s the problem we have in our society, and both sides, left and right are to blame. When the left sees someone not caring enough, they give the government more power to take away things and redistribute. When the right sees someone parking their trailer in the wrong side of the gas station, the impose “community protections”. And both have the audacity to bitch when the other side does the same thing.

Look, we can’t live in anarchy. I’m not a full blown Libertarian because they don’t have enough of a plan to keep society from tearing its own throat out. The non-aggression principle works fantastic when everyone is non-aggressive. I can even understand the idea of zoning for businesses and residential areas. But that’s about it, folks. Once you say “You can run business of type X here”, that’s where the line is drawn.

Of course, that would take control away from the elite, and they’re not real keen on giving it up.

Now, the constitution doesn’t allow mini-tyrants local governments to prevent people from running nudie bars. So what to the tyrants legislators do when they can’t directly attack the constitution? They impose “regulations”

Imposing tight regulations is one way jurisdictions can attempt to control adult businesses after courts ruled cities or counties can’t pass such restrictive zoning requirements that leave no place for the businesses to operate. The regulations don’t outlaw the businesses, just stringently regulate them.

You see, you can still run a tittie-joint but the girls must wear county approved pasties, dance no more than 78″ away and not less than 72″ from the patrons, only operate between 3AM and 4AM, cannot serve any alcohol, and must employ only blind nuns who have never been in a car with anyone who’s ever had a speeding ticket. As long as you follow the near-impossible set of regulations, you can run your business as you see fit.

Reminds me a lot of “common sense gun regulations”.

Here’s another little factoid – I don’t particularly care for strip joints. Never have. For one, I am a very, very cheap bastard and paying $10 for a watered down coke just so some strung out bint can shake her plastic tits in my face isn’t what I’ve ever considered economical. For much less I could always get some girl drunk enough to take home which not only cost less, it generally ended up being much, much more enjoyable than just watching. Generally. And I know it’s cheesy, but the prude in me always felt sorry for the dancers even though most of them did not want nor need my pity.

But that’s me. If you like it, who am I to tell you no? And that’s what pisses me off so much. If you value freedom, then that means letting other people do things you would never consider. I’m not into the whole gay thing. Not my bag of tea. But I’ll be damned before I let some jack-ass politician tell me who (or what) I can and cannot have relations with.

Each time you allow your representatives to tack on more and more “regulations”, you limit your freedom more and more. Each time you vote to increase the power of the government, even when you think that particular increase is beneficial, it will never go away and always be added on to, generally by people who you didn’t want to have that power in the first place. Don’t like the way Bush uses his authority? YOU gave it to him. Maybe not directly, but by constantly assuming it’s the government’s responsibility to do X, you grant them more and more power.

This isn’t how free men and women live, this is how slaves are created.

High school students across Texas would no longer get extra credit in their grade point averages for some advanced classes under rules proposed by the state’s higher education commissioner.

The proposal from Raymond Paredes, intended to bring more fairness to college admissions decisions, sparked a furor Monday about one of the most controversial topics in high schools: GPAs.

I swear to Zog.  When did the concept of Life Not Being Fair get kicked to the curb?  Last I heard you had to actually WORK for what you got, and that actually made the entire experience…quel surprise…all the more valuable.

I get the guy’s point that the classes need standardization, so some schools aren’t fielding an AP Underwater Basketweaving class just to make their graduating classes look good, but the effect it is going to have on the students…who, let’s face it, are lazy bastards…is going to result in the most embarrassing sort of backlash when they all choose Advanced Cookie Making or Intermediate Garage Sweeping, and then can’t even get in to the local junior college.

Bright side:  Texas will never have a fast food worker shortage.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was briefly evacuated from her downtown Denver hotel on Saturday when a man carrying two hunting rifles and two pistols tried to check in to the hotel.Secret Service spokesman Malcolm Wiley said 29-year-old Joseph Calanchini of Pinedale, Wyo., faces a charge of unlawful carrying of a weapon after police officers at the Grand Hyatt hotel noticed him carrying a rifle-type case while checking in. Calanchini did not have a concealed weapons permit, said Lance Clem, spokesman for the Colorado Department of Public Safety.

SIGH.  When did common sense just go by the wayside?  If a man were seriously going to shoot that rabid cow bitch would he seriously check into the hotel with the murder weapon in plain view of everyone?  Or would he set up on a nearby rooftop and play canasta with the pigeons until go-time?   Hmm.  Let. Me. Think….

Via This + That

In an effort to get homeowners to attend an annual meeting, a Long Neck condominium association has threatened to fine homeowners $100 if they don’t attend or at least return a proxy.

Bayshore Condominium Association President Tom Durkin said in order to conduct business, at least half of the 147 condominium association members must attend the annual board meeting, Saturday, Aug. 23.

People will find that the vast majority of the arse-stupid resolutions HOA’s manage to tease out of their stunted forebrains are neither legal nor enforceable, just like this one.  What they’re going to get instead is a lawsuit by some disgruntled homeowner against which they’ve levied this “punishment.”

Here’s a clue, you idiots…if you can’t get the homeowners to attend, then pass a resolution that’ll get their attention…like only requiring 10% of them to be present.  Then, when they hate the decisions you 10% are making, they’ll be motivated to show up.

Why am I the only one with any common sense?

Oh yeah…nanny-staters wasting our time and money with mind-bogglingly moronic legislation:

The Illinois General Assembly bill, also known as HB 4520, was introduced in January by Rep. Ken Dunkin (D- Chicago), who then insisted: “This legislation is not laughable. On the surface it’s like, ‘Oh wow, what is this?’ But it’s becoming more and more of a common problem with people haplessly crossing an intersection and almost killing themselves.”

Oh, yes, Kenny…it IS laughable. You are, in effect, saying that people are now officially too helpless to walk themselves across the street. Does your constituency often enjoy being called stupid? You should go ask them.

Under the proposed law, Illinois residents would get slapped with a misdemeanor and a $25 fine if caught using a cell phone or other wireless device while traversing streets.

Well, THAT should deter them, for sure. I know 25 whole dollars would put a mighty big hole in my, er…daily Starbuck’s fund.

“The secretary headed a task force on driver safety, and this issue came up, and he was intrigued by the idea,” said David Drucker, a spokesman for Secretary of State White’s office. “He’s seen a couple of instances of [walking and texting] himself. Right now, though, he feels that it needs more study.”

I’m going to go out on a limb here in predicting that Secretary of State Jesse White is eleventy million years old, and thinks “texting” is some newfangled method of walking a cat, which as we all know is quite dangerous, hence this vital bit of legislation.

It is just baffling, honestly, that the combination of walking plus pushing little buttons on a small electronic device seems to equal DISASTER! I suppose if gravity had a habit of erratically responding, then yes, it might be something to fret over. Or if people had horny plates and/or actual spikes on their chitinous exoskeletons instead of being quite squishy in most spots, bumping into them could indeed be somewhat hazardous.

No, it’s just the very same overreaction all of our overpaid, underbrained hirelings are prone to, a DNA-level bit of programming that demands they justify their existence no matter how desperate and far-reached the method.

Last August, a train struck and injured a teenager in Elmwood Place, Ohio, as he sent a text message from his cell phone. Oblivious to the train’s horns, he walked around crossing gates. The town’s dumbfounded mayor said that “the kid was apparently just daydreaming.”

I, for one, am glad that individual will not be adding his genetic material to the future of our species, and you should be too.

Let’s face it, people. If you cannot walk and do at least one other thing, sending a text message included, without injuring yourself or others, then you’re urgently needed in the Opposable Thumb Return Department.

I have absolutely no compassion left for jackasses and idiots who think that they can be a big man just because they can pick up a handgun.

This particular little prick needs to be publicly flogged.  He comes into my town, to the mall where my family shops at the pet store, and pulls out a gun to shoot somebody because of freaking gang colors? WTF? Is this East L.A.?  This little bastard shot somebody within 30 feet of the window where my wife and son and daughter stand to look at the baby bunnies.  Across the hall from the pet store is the cafeteria where my mother in law takes my kids to lunch every so often.  AND THE GODDAMNED MALL IS A “GUN FREE ZONE”! Gee, that really seemed to work.  Lakeland Square Mall has the balls to tell me that I or my wife or my mother in law can’t carry our legal concealed handguns into their second rate excuse for a shrine to commerce, but a goddamned Bloods and Crips shoot out is ok?

Breathe, Ted. Breathe.

Then there is this story from last week.  Seems a little graduation party got a wee bit out of hand. Estimates of the crowd range from two hundred and fifty all the way up to four hundred.  Partying in the street. Kids as young as middle school age were present, according to some reports.  So here we have another sterling example of ‘big gun/big dick’ syndrome.  Jackass boy starts shooting his gun into the air, while the police are actually on scene to break up the party.  That takes extra special numb nuts right there. Extra extra double dumbassery since there were gunshots at the same location the night before:

Bacon didn’t attend Saturday night’s party but said she was at a different graduation party at the same lodge on Friday night. There were gunshots that night too, she said.

So when the cops tell him to drop the gun, he does the absolute wrong thing. Now he is dead. A seventeen year old boy. Dead.

)(*^&(*&^*^T*OGOT^*#@*)({*($* YT($*#YP(*$#Y(!!!!

But it gets even better:

The local race baiters, the Uhuru’s, are protesting the police, the witnesses aren’t talking to anybody except the “lawyer” that said baiters have hired, and the news coverage is full of all the saccharine crap about ‘he was such a good kid’ that always seems to come out just before a nice riot. I just want to say for the record that it is a shame that he was such a dumbass at that particular moment of his life.  But it isn’t nearly as big a shame that he now has a twin sister who is mourning him.  ‘Cuz she has the same genes and gods above and below only know if she is gonna pass them along to another dumb kid some day.

How come when Bill Cosby talks, nay, preaches, that black men have got to take control of their families and raise their kids with some morals and responsibility, he is called Uncle Tom; but when Borat He Hate Me Obama does it on Father’s Day from the pulpit, he is praised by the press and the black community?  Oh, I see the difference now, Borat wants to make sure that black men can take care of their spawn by funding more programs with our tax dollars, rather than expecting them to actually be parents.

(!!#R(#@(*&ULFVSJFH&@$^*!&$$H(C(Y@#E!

It’s gonna be a long summer.

From the, er, horse’s mouth:

Labour backbencher Julie Morgan spent the day in the Commons arguing for the voting age to be lowered from 18 to 16.

“The purpose of the voting age (reduction) bill is straightforward: to reduce the legal voting age to 16 for all public elections across the United Kingdom,” she said.

“That is the only way to engage the young people to whom we desperately need to talk as politicians and the only way to send the message that we really care about the issues that affect those people.

From the sounds of things, you’re not going to even pique the interest of 16 year olds, much less “engage” them, without a bottle of uisghe or a swingin’ cod.  People with those sorts of priorities are not in the least bit interested in the political process.

If you lot could un-ossify your brains, you might recall YOUR priorities when you were 16 years old involved transportation, tail, and fundage…and the order of importance depended on the hour of the day.

These are the fine upstanding citizens you wish out there casting votes?  No, these are the malleable, suggestable blank slates you wish to train to party standards.  Get ‘em while they’re young and impressionable.

“I believe that by involving young people at a younger age we are more likely to involve those in older age groups as well, because people can get into the habit of voting when they are still in schools and institutions.

See?  They don’t want thinking voters, they want habit voters.  “Oh, this is all too complicated, I’ll just vote Labour and they can sort it out.”

“The longer young people are denied involvement in the formal democratic process, the less chance there is of engaging them ever.”

“…denied involvement…”  Waiting two measly years to gain a bit of much-needed emotional maturity is denying involvement?  No, stupid, it is simply common sense.  Adults surely do become engaged later in life…when they see what a cocked-up mess you troglodytes have made of everything, and move to vote you out of power.

At least those who bother paying attention do.

People who fail to tackle climate change are acting like an Austrian man who locked his daughter in a cellar for 24 years, an Anglican bishop has said.

The Bishop of Stafford, Gordon Mursell, wrote in a parish letter that not confronting global warming meant people were “as guilty as” Josef Fritzl.

Personally, I think Mister Bishop there should have just used the word “shortsighted” instead.

A mural meant to bring people together is causing a rift in the Bastrop community.

The painting in question, a student project completed in 2003, adorns a wall in the corridor leading to the Bastrop High School gym. It depicts the sometimes unpleasant history of the town, showing scenes of a Mexican and Comanche raid and slaves working in a cotton field, as well as unifying visions of children of different ethnicities reaching out to one another.

..

Among the images on the mural are an Aztec sun, ancient Egypt’s King Tutankhamen, Buddha and Shiva, a Hindu deity, dancing on a demon of ignorance.

The stereotypical prayer-meeting-having homeschooling mom wants the (TEN THOUSAND DOLLAR) mural removed:

“When she showed it to me, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh,’ ” said Hansell, who added that the mural presents a new age idea of peace and unity that could be confusing to Christian students.

You just can’t make this stuff up. Keeping firmly in mind that I am a COMPLETE CYNIC when it comes to organized religion, and the destruction it has wrought across history, I just have to say, yes, I could see where ideas of peace and unity would be confusing to Christian students. Can’t have them thinking that everyone is equal, no matter if they pray to Buddha, Coyote or the stunted begonia on their front porch, because, as the pig says, some people are clearly more equal than others.

The extra-special-bonus comes at the end of that article, where we’re treated to a glimpse of the future:

As Mandi Colvin, a sophomore at Bastrop High, sees it: “It’s breaking the First Amendment. It needs to come down.”

Oh indeed? The mural is making laws that interfere with the free exercise of religion? Or it is making laws that infringe the freedom of speech and the press? Maybe it is limiting the right to peaceably assemble? Or limiting the right to petition the governemtn for a redress of grievances?

What? Murals can’t do those things? Amazing what you’re NOT learning in Civics class, isn’t it.