NW Blog Munch V 2.0

Blog Munch on Nov. 9, 1800hrs, La Cabana on Beacon Hill ( http://tinyurl.com/5rclvd )..

Seattle
2532 Beacon Ave S
Seattle, WA 98144
(206) 322-9643

Cya there!

The National Anthem

As performed by Cher...there's a reason she's a gay icon...and it's not just her showmanship...



Nothing short of amazing...

ABC: An Impartial Media Source?

Or in the bag?

Nickels Follies, An Update

Increasingly globular Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels tells us he's not trying to make life inconvenient for Seattleites...a hint that it just comes naturally to him. A partial list of his more spectacularly foolish moments includes:

• In June 2008, in blatant defiance of state law, Nickels proposed to ban the lawful carry and possession of firearms in all city buildings, parks, and facilities - claiming that the Pre-emption Clause barring this very thing only applied to statutes and ordinances passed by political bodies subordinate to the Washington State Legislature, claiming acts by adminstrative fiat (Mayoral temper tantrum) were somehow outside the statute.

• In November of 2008, Nickels (in the face of a formal legal opinion from WA Attorney General Rob McKenna stating in painful detail that mayoral temper tantrums were not exempt from state law) claimed he would go ahead with his shiny new gun ban, as he needed "clarification" of the AG opinion.

• In the midst of "challenging financial times" Nickels is ram-rodding through the City Council a plan to ban foam containers at restaurants and grocery stores, and impose a 20-cent fee for each disposable paper and plastic bag used in the checkout line at all grocery, convenience and drugstores - with plastic containers/implements/etc banned in July of 2010. In a display of solidarity with less well-off residents that use grocery bags as garbage can liners rather than paying for "extra special" designated baggage, Nickels in an interview said "If you use grocery bags to line your trash can, Nickels says, "that's great, 20-cents."

• After various questionable efforts, Nickels managed to lose Seattle its' pro basketball franchise - the Sonics - for a return of not quite zilch. Good going there, Nickels. Bet those fans will love you come the next elections.

• In 2006, the Seattle Weekly reported Nickels diversion of funds earmarked for the Film & Music Office (the kids supposed to be luring big money film productions to town for fun & profit) to support his passion for smooth jazz.

• At the same time, in 2006, the Seattle Times reports Nickels pushed an adult entertainment ordinance so noxious that even do-gooding sorts voted to repeal it in a local referendum.
  

• Nickels kept a police chief that can't even keep track of his own gun, one Gil Kerlikowske, who doubles as Nickels puppet-in-chief for gun control in Olympia each legislative session, even after a vote of no confidence in said "chief" from the Seattle Police Guild.

• Nickels has achieved what few Seattle mayors have - designation by local media as a megalomaniac.

• Nickels cronies in the Parks Department, in a triumph of symbolism over sanity decided to take down a long time Seattle tradition, in a sop thrown to "global warming" - beach fires at Alki Beach and Golden Gardens city parks while a factory burns tires for fuel a short distance away. At least until public outcry forced a Parks Department climb down...
  

• And then there's that loony notion, "car-free" days on local roads - trapping local residents or barring them from their homes if they have the temerity to make an appointment or try to come home during the "forbidden hours".

• Under Nickels, a group of bicycle riding hooligans once a month magically ride above the law, engaging in random property damage and - most recently - assault.

• Nickels, frustrated that the rest of the state won't buy into his delusions, suggested on 4/18 that the Seattle/TriCounty (King/Pierce/Snohomish County) area secede from the rest of the state.
  

Greg Nickels is running for a third term as Mayor/Petty Tyrant in November 2009 - the next likely opportunity for sane folks to get shed of this nutjob.

What Illinois Gun Owners think of Obama..

Quoted from Pink Pistols mail list:

Illinois State Rifle Association Executive Director Richard Pearson Issues Open Letter to Nation's Sportsmen Regarding Obama's History in the Illinois Senate
Chicago

Fellow Sportsman,

Hello, my name is Rich Pearson and I have been active in the firearm rights movement for over 40 years. For the past 15 years, I have served in the Illinois state capitol as the chief lobbyist for the Illinois State Rifle Association.

I lobbied Barack Obama extensively while he was an Illinois State Senator. As a result of that experience, I know Obama's attitudes toward guns and gun owners better than anyone. The truth be told, in all my years in the Capitol I have never met a legislator who harbors more contempt for the law-abiding firearm owner than does Barack Obama.

Although Obama claims to be an advocate for the 2nd Amendment, his voting record in the Illinois Senate paints a very different picture.

While a state senator, Obama voted for a bill that would ban nearly every hunting rifle, shotgun and target rifle owned by Illinois citizens. That same bill would authorize the state police to raid homes of gun owners to forcibly confiscate banned guns. Obama supported a bill that would shut down law-abiding firearm manufacturers including Springfield Armory, Armalite, Rock River Arms and Les Baer. Obama also voted for a bill that would prohibit law-abiding citizens from purchasing more than one gun per month.

Without a doubt, Barack Obama has proven himself to be an enemy of the law abiding firearm owner. At the same time, Obama has proven himself to be a friend to the hardened criminal. While a state senator, Obama voted 4 times against legislation that would allow a homeowner to use a firearm in defense of home and family.

Does Barack Obama still sound to you like a "friend" of the law-abiding gun owner?

And speaking of friends, you can always tell a person by the company they keep. Obama counts among his friends the Rev. Michael Pfleger - a renegade Chicago priest who has openly called for the murder of gun shop owners and pro-gun legislators. Then there is his buddy Richard Daley, the mayor of Chicago who has declared that if it were up to him, nobody would be allowed to own a gun. And let's not forget Obama's pal George Soros - the guy who has pumped millions of dollars into the UN's international effort to disarm law-abiding citizens.

Obama has shown that he is more than willing to use other people's money to fund his campaign to take your guns away from you. While a board member of the leftist Joyce Foundation, Barack Obama wrote checks for tens of millions of dollars to extremist gun control organizations such as the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence and the Violence Policy Center.

Does Barack Obama still sound to you like a "friend" of the law-abiding gun owner?

By now, I'm sure that many of you have received mailings from an organization called "American Hunters and Shooters Association (AHSA)" talking about what a swell fellow Obama is and how he honors the 2nd Amendment and how you will never have to worry about Obama coming to take your guns. Let me make it perfectly clear - everything the AHSA says about Obama is pure hogwash. The AHSA is headed by a group of left-wing elitists who subscribe to the British view of hunting and shooting. That is, a state of affairs where hunting and shooting are reserved for the wealthy upper-crust who can afford guided hunts on exclusive private reserves. The AHSA is not your friend, never will be.

In closing, I'd like to remind you that I'm a guy who has actually gone nose to nose with Obama on gun rights issues. The Obama I know cannot even begin to identify with this nation's outdoor traditions.

The Obama I know sees you, the law abiding gun owner, as nothing but a low-class lummox who is easily swayed by the flash of a smile and a ration of rosy rhetoric. The Obama I know is a stony-faced liar who has honed his skill at getting what he wants - so long as people are willing to give it to him.

That's the Barack Obama I know.

The ISRA is the state's leading advocate of safe, lawful and responsible firearms ownership. Founded in 1903, the ISRA has represented the interests of millions of law-abiding Illinois firearm owners.

WEB SITE: http://www.isra.org

SOURCE Illinois State Rifle Association

Heh.

Fun with Photoshop.

Blogger tricks

If you like the "Scribe" template for blogger,but REALLY want it to be three column - found a nice little guide on how-to at "Tips for New Bloggers" - enjoy!

Alright, I'm slow today

The standard HTML is not a-workin' for me here...

How, in blogger, does one insert a horizontal line into the html of a post w/o using the standard approach? Works in this post, but not the last one....

Grr...

---

THR Update

After all the fuss and screaming, rec'd the below this morning:

---

Welcome to the new home of The High Road(tm) forum.My name is Oleg Volk, and I am the owner of The High Road(tm). When I started the forum in 2002, my vision was to create a place where people from around the world could engage in cordial discussion of RKBA related matters. Since then, you have helped make The High Road(tm) one of the best places on the web for learning about firearms, for educating new shooters and for supporting effective advocacy of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

Due to pending legal issues, I am moving the forum to a new home at TheHighRoad.us. This is the one and only official site at this time, owned by me. The same high standards of civility apply. In the near future, we will provide more than just a forum. The High Road(tm) is becoming an information and activism center for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

With the help of GeoVario, our new host, The High Road(tm) is now online in its new home. The new location of The High Road(tm) -- http://www.thehighroad.us -- will serve our members while the conversion of the .org domain name by THR's former sysadmin is being challenged in court (Copy of the complaint available: http://www.geovario.com/legal/Complaint1.pdf ).

Feel free to mirror this announcement on your blog (here is a link to mine with details of this matter and how you can help. http://olegvolk.livejournal.com/474369.html ). If you link to THR, please update the link to point to thehighroad.us Eventually, both .us and .org addresses will point to the same site again.

Thank you all
- Oleg Volk, Owner
The High Road(tm)

---

Interesting stuff. Good to see THR back w/ the usual staff (mostly) though...

Obama - nothing to be scared of?

We all saw McCain yesterday trying to throttle back his supporters anger and fear, saying Obama was a decent sort he happened to disagree with and nothing to fear as President.

Obama may well be a decent person, as an individual. The sort of guy you know is wrong-headed, but is so darned charming that you enjoy sitting at the local coffee shop bs'ing with as the afternoon passes, and that you can agree to disagree with - unfortunately, that lasts in Obama's case until right about the time he gets somewhere near the levers of power, at which point fear and anger are utterly appropriate.

The increasingly apparent widespread voter registration fraud perpetrated by Obama's old friends at ACORN in the finest style of cemetary-voting ballot-purchasing Chicago politics is just cause for quiet - or perhaps rather demonstrative - fury. The sheer hypocrisy, alone, of after two rounds of the liberal left crying wolf about "stolen elections' that a left-wing group such as ACORN should systematically go about corrupting multiple states voter registries is, by itself, infuriating.

The Obama historic position on guns - barring concealed carry nationwide, supporting every anti-gun bit of legislative nonsense to pass his desk - should inspire fear in not only every gun owner about to be nominated for a bright shiny new set of Federal felonies in an Obama presidency with a co-conspiring Democrat-held Congress, but in any other student of history. "First they came for , then they came for me..."

Proceeding onwards, implementing a bunch of exciting new taxes on the group of folks (investors and the moneyed types) who, at the end of the day, we're going to end up needing to save our economy is downright madness, creating active disincentives to investment and the flow of capital from investors to entrepreneurs. That "makes more than 250,000/yr" crowd is where an awful lot of the capital that drives our economy comes from - taxing the bejabbers out of them is unlikely to much affect the day to day lives of the target group...but it will tend to divert their spending from investment and economic growth to maintaining the life they have collectively come to enjoy.

Under Obama, again with the co-conspiracy of a Democrat-dominated Congress held in messianic thrawl by the "Great One", we can expect vast new regulatory adventures making our nation less competitive in world markets, growing an ever larger black market as the risk:profit ratio is distorted beyond recognition and folks are motivated by desperation and greed to go "around" much of the bright shiny new regulation and become economic criminals.

Then we have Obama's associates, folks who, however distasteful, Obama has shown an astonishing willingness to cold-bloodedly throw under the bus as quickly as they cease to be immediately useful to him. Rezco, Wright, and Ayers leap to mind as the highest profile folks introduced to the low-riding option on the Obama Express...but they are far from the only ones...

Which leads to the question - when was the last time you heard of a Chicago Mayor or elected official who wasn't a Democrat? (Or, for that matter, not a Daley or someone who'd cut a deal with the Daleys?) If Obama is elected, with the corruption ACORN has already apparently introduced, then perhaps we should ask when or if we'll see an honest election again?

Moving right along, we have our chasuble-clad pseudo-minister and bigot du jour, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (Obama's pastor for twenty-some years - you'd think Obama'd have noticed and distanced himself rather sooner than mid-campaign if he had any substantial disagreement...), convicted felon Tony Rezco with home Obama cut some rather questionable real estate deals, and domestic terrorist Bill Ayers (yes, it does matter if you hang out with someone who tried to blow up the Pentagon, Capitol Building, killed police officers, and generally was very naughty).

Obama's support for our troops abroad has been tepid, at best, and as far as I can tell the man never studied the beginnings of WWII in the European Theatre - or he'd have wrapped his head around the notion that "better living through appeasement" is long disproven as an effective tactic.

The list goes on, however...

Yes. There is every reason to fear an Obama Presidency; but that I could accept and join the political resistance, so long as it was honestly won. With the treachery of ACORN and it's merry voter registering activities, I'm not prepared to be nearly as accepting.

Throttle back? Hell, let's get the fire going - if the response of various overwrought Democrats is any indication, that may just be what it takes to win this one...

Election Finance Issues...

Is it really legal for a 3rd party to produce a 2-hour plus campaign ad at a cost of several million dollars and release it three weeks before the affected election under the current campaign finance rules?

Just wondering......

What say we hold an honest election?

It appears, as has long been evident in the blogosphere and now has been formally recognized by FBI raids and a federal judge, that ACORN has been very very naughty and needs to be spanked. Voter fraud is tacky, and doing it on a grand scale and then flinging ones hands in the air and claiming that quality control is impossible doesn't make it any better.

But that, of course, is just the warm up. Knowing that the voter rolls have been significantly corrupted in up to perhaps 22 states (i.e., if ACORN operated in a state, it appears reasonable to consider the voter rolls in that state suspect) and that the Presidential race is tight enough that relatively minor tampering could swing the election one way or another, what can be done to cleans the voter rolls and hold an honest election?

There comes a time when it's time to pull the pin on the grenade and hurl it squarely in the center of the manure pond - it'll be messy as all get out, and all will be splattered with some fairly nasty stuff, but the crap will at least get broken up a bit.

Similarly, when faced with a corrupted election the answer isn't to just shrug ones shoulders and soldier on to a dishonest result - handing the saboteurs their fondest desire. Rather, the answer is to act to clean up the election (delaying it, if necessary) and make the process as painful as possible for the bad children trying to export Chicago political tactics.

Purge the voter rolls and, outside of verifiable military or other absentee ballots for verifiably absent persons, suspend absentee ballot usage. If necessary, delay the election a month or two, along with the inauguration - it's more important to have a verifiably honest election with real live breathing voters (as opposed to Bugs Bunny, the animated Warner Brothers cast, and the residents of various cemetaries), than to have one that's held on schedule.

If necessary, dump entire states voter rolls (say, the irretrievably corrupted Illinois, for instance) and insist on re-registration and verification of the entire voter base in affected states.

The process should, intentionally, be so hideously painful that the very mention of commiting voter fraud in the future causes mass rebellion in the ranks. Let it hurt - a lot. Honest elections are important, and it's taken us a long time to get them as clean as they are - reverting to the casual corruption and bullying of Chicago and New Orleans is simply not acceptable.

I've been a little distracted...

I apologize for not writing much lately, but we've had a wee surge of complexity around the Manse.

As some of you know, Mom has been suffering severe back pain since July, and after conferring with various physicians, a final diagnosis of Spinal Stenosis with compression of the nerve canal in the L4-L5 region was delivered by the orthopaedic surgeon consulting. Effectively, the L5 vertebrae had spent the last several years sliding forward (see: intermittent back pain) until it went critical about the time it had slid 1/2" to 3/4" out of alignment, compressing the nerve - this resulted in pain, the pain resulted in muscle spasm, the muscle spasm further compressed the area, resulting in yet more pain, etc.

Things went critical about July 23rd, we had a couple of ER episodes for pain, and a third near-ER episode a couple of weeks back as we maneuvered the diagnostic and scheduling process.

Thus, Mom was quite pleased when surgery was finally scheduled. We went in to Swedish Orthopedic at 601 Broadway ( a new facility on the Swedish Campus) yesterday morning at 0845, and Mom went into surgery at 1130. The surgeon utilized a new minimally invasive (arthroscopic) technique which promises a more rapid recovery and better long term prospects. Using this new technique, he fused the L4-L5 vertebrae, drew the L5 vertebrae back into alignment, and inserted a small wedge to ensure proper spacing between the vertebrae. The surgery wound down at 3:30 p.m. and Mom was out of recovery (though still a bit woozy) at approximately 5:30 p.m. - while she is still experiencing some post-recovery pain, she is expected to be released in 2-4 days.

The surgeon (and what I could tell of the results) felt the surgery was very successful, and the standard neuro tests ("can you feel feet, hands, toes? Flex/squeeze your feet/hands/toes") all seemed to be well within the normal range. Mom is having some difficulty resisting the urge to "do for herself", trying to re-arrange herself on the bed rather'n calling for a nurse immediately post-surgery (nurse scolded her very mildly ).

After visiting her today (post-surg, Day 1) she's having a lot of pain cutting thru the pain-killers, but that's apparently par for the course with this surgery - that Day 1 is nasty, Day 2+ are a steady upward curve.

The adventure continues, but things seem to be turning the corner.

Gay.com upgrade

Gay.com, for those with no reason to be aware of it, is a chat site oriented primarily towards gay men. Some go there to gab, some to pick up their next ex-husband, and others to pick up the fling du jour. Sometimes folks even go there to kill time on a weeknight without the annoyance of driving across town to a bar. A lot of folks combine one or more of the above in their personal gay.com mission statement.

They just upgraded, in what has got to be one of the most ass-backward so-called upgrades consisting of take-aways, bandwidth-nuking, and idiocy promotion I've had the misfortune to be an end-user for - thus, the poison pen came out to play. Enjoy.

______________________________________________

Good god.

Flaming hatred from the Seattle room. Were a decision-maker revealed, it appears many would support stringing them up by their balls over a slow fire. Much talk of terminating premium memberships, with the gist generally "I paid for the old gay.com, the one that worked - not to be some goddam beta tester for a piece of maggot ridden crap pretending to be a chat program"

IRC looks positively charming compared to this, and with none of the ads. You have a very short time-frame before migration begins at a significant level...

Losing the ignore lists that protected us from stalkers, lunatics, assorted bastardry, and adbots is simply unacceptable.

Randomly eliminating regional and local chatrooms does not improve user experience. Eliminating the ability for users to create their own rooms suddenly makes systems like IRC, which is wide-open to such things, much more attractive. Those servers are still up - the only thing gay.com has ever offered is ease of use, and the ability to rapidly access profiles and pics.

With the slowing of the site caused by forcing everyone through an over-burdened and unpleasant web interface, much of the advantage is gone - when someone can simply go to MIRC.com, download a thin client, and log into efnet or undernet.

Add to that, the breaking of the ability to pvt/IM someone internal to the site, and you can suddenly make a strong business case for roll-back to the last working backup (one hopes you have preserved backups) either permanently or untile these and other issues can be resolved - before making your entire user base unwilling and unwitting beta testers of a fundamentally dysfunctional system.

That business case is simple - gay.com and planet out depend on premium memberships for revenue, and perhaps survival (given your rather public fiscal challenges). Doing something that pisses off your customer base for those memberships with even half this level of thoroughness is an active of active boneheaded stupidity worthy of expulsion from the corporate clubhouse and removal of the washroom keys for every person involved from coders on up through whichever dippy Vice President that signed off on this suicidal idiocy.

I paid for a working system. Granted, the java client was so fouled up as to be useless, but there were functional alternative chat clients that left me with a reasonably pleasant user interface. One that worked, and made up for Gay.com's fundamental inability to produce a good user interface.

Now I'm left with a partly used membership for a broken and slow system, with no effective alternative way in.

I'm going to be wanting my money back right soon.