Thursday - political news, views and satire 1 of 5

Another Thought On Guns

There's a time and a place for guns, or so my thinking goes. Great for hunting, or for shooting at a range. I'm not so big on folks carrying weapons in public places.

Is the following story true - or is it just a joke? Doesn't matter - it helps me make my point.

An elderly Florida lady did her shopping and, upon returning to her car, found four males in the act of leaving with her vehicle. She dropped her shopping bags and drew her handgun, proceeding to scream at the top of her voice, "I have a gun, and I know how to use it! Get out of the car!"

The four men didn't wait for a second invitation. They got out and ran like mad.
The lady, somewhat shaken, then proceeded to load her shopping bags into the back of the car and got into the driver's seat.

She was so shaken that she could not get her key into the ignition. She tried and tried, and then it dawned on her why...For the same reason she did not understand why there was a football, a Frisbee and two 12 packs in the front seat...

A few minutes later, she found her own car parked four or five spaces farther down.

She loaded her bags into the car and drove to the police station to report her mistake. The sergeant to whom she told the story couldn't stop laughing. He pointed to the other end of the counter, where four pale men were reporting a car jacking by a mad, elderly woman described as white, less than five feet tall, glasses, curly white hair and carrying a large handgun.

No charges were filed.

So, the reasoning goes, if those guys in the car were all carrying, they could have pulled their own weapons and blown the old lady away. How many bad mistakes will be made if a significant portion of the nation is armed? Sort of reminds me of the old west - and the sheriffs who required the gunslingers to leave their guns at the edge of town so that their was peace inside the town limits.

Oh well, just some thoughts that ran through my mind after I saw the joke posted on another web site.

Makes Sense to Me

The following is from a post on the J-Walk Blog

A snippet from Martin Wagner's post, Why do atheists speak out? This is why.

I confess to being puzzled by the idea that I should consider a being who consigns anyone who does not worship him to his satisfaction to an eternity of agonizing torment as "wise," when my own, pitifully inadequate notions of human wisdom tell me that a being like that is by definition a horrendously wicked and evil tyrant.

Any God who refuses to make his existence unambiguously clear, and then is willing to consign individuals to eternal torture simply for doubting his existence, can only be unutterably evil, and the fact that Christians think that
such a God is a paragon of all that is good is a view that quite simply perverts any meaning the notion of "goodness" could possibly have. For a Christian to hold such a view and still think he is "better off than the atheist" reveals the intellectually and morally corrupting force of Christian "faith" more powerfully than any atheist critique ever could.

Opinion - Where Liberals Live

From the J-Walk blog comes this interesting report. Click here to read the entire blog post and to see the links to the resources used.

Left-Wing Conspiracy?

Larry Beinart writes: Dispatches From the War on Stupidity .

It is now a conventional complaint on the Right that university faculties are dominated by liberals. It's true.

A Washington Post story reported on a study that said: "72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative ... The disparity is even more pronounced at the most elite schools, where, according to the study, 87 percent of faculty are liberal and 13 percent are conservative."

Naturally, Right-wingers claim this is a vast left-wing conspiracy.

His conclusion:
A university faculty is home to people whose profession is thinking. To survey such a population is a valid way to select for people who think, as opposed to a random sample of the general population.

From that point of view, we see that among people who think, 72% are liberal and 15% conservative. Among elite thinkers, the portion of liberals goes up 87%.

Thinking leads to liberalism. Think about it.

Do You Care - American Corporations

Following is a great ediortial from Austin Cline over at Jesus General's blog. Click here to read the whole thing.

The American citizens, who will never be offered "contributions" from a company like Halliburton, have other reasons to be concerned: Dubai appears to be a prime location for transferring banned, "dual use" exports to countries not supposed to receive them. These are products which can be used to produce nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Dubai buys far more than it keeps, so where is all the extra material going? The U.S. government has its suspicions, but Dubai is too much of an ally for those suspicions to be voiced too loudly.

What's truly surprising about all of this is how surprised people seem to be. None of this is new — American corporations have been trading with America's enemies for as long as they have been able. They are corporations first and Americans second. A corporation's ultimate allegiance is to the bottom line and the pursuit of profit, not to American liberty or justice. American corporations have a long history of sacrificing the long-term interests of the environment, their own workers, and even the economy for the sake of the short term and the profits of the next quarter.

Did You Know - Republican View

Republicans have become the party supporting "corporatism" - a nation run by big business. All of the problems confronted by the country, under this view, are the result of poor functioning by the worker class. To wit, from the April 2007 issue of Playboy...

From a report produced by the Republican-controlled Missouri legislature's committee on immigration: "The lack of a traditional work ethic combined with the effects of 30 years of abortion and expanding liberal social welfare policies have produced a shortage of workers and a lack of incentive for those who can work."

I have found such proclamations interesting, as this is not the first statement of this sort I've read. For one thing, do the legislators somehow excuse themselves from this damnation? Are they somehow NOT the product of our liberal society? Is it that they DO have a work ethic, and thus are qualified to damn so many others? I am intrigued as to the evidence they might have in condemning everyone who is not them.

And also, what do they propose to do with the poor, the infirm, the handicapped, the mentally challenged people, and the unwanted infants left in the streets, if they will not provide welfare programs for them? Let them die? Send a street cleaning crew around once a week to pick up the bodies?

Interesting people, the legislators. They live in their own little world.

"Without enemies of America -- What would President Bush do?"

by Stan Moore
Media Monitors Network
"He has no domestic policy or goals, except perhaps to loot the treasury and thus maximize the indebtedness of the American people and increase the gap between American "haves" and American "have nots". But that cannot keep a President occupied and thus Bush works hard at converting friends into enemies so that more wars can be waged."