Any woman who defends Islam is out of her mind. When an American Muslim group tries to prove that Islam embraces diversity . . . You really can’t make this stuff up.

Punk is fooling around with a guy’s wife. Punk threatens guy over the phone. Drunk, punk drives to guy’s house with a big club and after being told to leave, approaches guy on his porch. From the Post-Gazette:

In the heated exchange that ensued, the man told Mr. Bittinger numerous times to leave, but he refused, state police said. He came closer and headed up the stairs leading to the front porch. At that point, the man shot him in the chest, killing him almost instantly. An autopsy revealed the arrow, which penetrated 8 inches into the man’s chest, entered at a downward angle, indicating Mr. Bittinger was headed up the steps when he was shot.

The new Castle Doctrine expands the areas where it is permissible for homeowners to use deadly force to include “any attached porch, deck or patio,” according to the statute. The new law also eliminates a homeowner’s obligation to retreat — going inside and locking the door, for example — before going on the offensive. In fact, Trooper Drzal said the man did retreat but then came back outside armed with the bow and arrow.

Be that as it may, I don’t think that the ‘journalist’ author of this article thinks all that highly of ‘castle doctrine’ based upon such lines as, “the case is the first in the county to test the controversial Castle Doctrine, which radically expanded a homeowner’s right to use deadly force against an intruder.” Italics mine.

There’s nothing controversial or radical about allowing someone to protect themselves by shooting (even with a bow and arrow) some punk who has repeatedly threatened him and is now approaching him with a weapon (even a club). Not to me, anyway.

Thanks to reader Andrew for the emailed link to this story.

Not that I’m in any immediate need of surgery but, if I were, I won’t be hiring this guy to perform it.

And, yes, I did use the expression, “hiring.” Too many doctors and dentists forget that the patient is still the customer who is hiring, contracting them to diagnose, treat, cure, whatever.

As an article on Forbes points out; if your password is on THIS list, you need to change it NOW!

Yes, this will certainly prepare students for their future careers. From the NY Post:

Columbia University is offering a new course on Occupy Wall Street next semester — sending upperclassmen and grad students into the field for full course credit.

The class is taught by Dr. Hannah Appel, who boasts about her nights camped out in Zuccotti Park.

As many as 30 students will be expected to get involved in ongoing OWS projects outside the classroom, the syllabus says.

The class will be in the anthropology department and called “Occupy the Field: Global Finance, Inequality, Social Movement.”

Our nation’s youth is in the very best of hands.

The CEO of a chain of restaurants explains just how deadly ObamaCare is to job creation. From Bloomberg News:

Our company, CKE Restaurants Inc., employs about 21,000 people (our franchisees employ 49,000 more) in Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s restaurants. For months, we have been working with Mercer Health & Benefits LLC, our health-care consultant, to identify Obamacare’s potential financial impact on CKE. Mercer estimated that when the law is fully implemented our health-care costs will increase about $18 million a year. That would put our total health-care costs at $29.8 million, a 150 percent increase from the roughly $12 million we spent last year.

[ . . . ]

To offset higher health-care expenses, we will have to cut spending on new restaurant construction, one of our largest discretionary spending areas. But building new restaurants is how we create jobs. An $18 million increase in our costs would more than consume the $8.8 million we spent on new restaurant construction last year, leaving nothing for growth. We will also need to reduce our general capital spending, which also creates jobs and allows us to improve our infrastructure and maintain our business. In summary, our ability to create new jobs could vanish.

Read the whole thing — there are quotes from other business leaders detailing the same problem: Once again that problem is the government.

In many states, when you purchase a gun, the dealer simply calls the NICS (National Instant (Criminal Background) Check System) run by the FBI. Some states also conduct checks at the state level. Virginia is one of them. From the Pilot Online:

Gov. Bob McDonnell said if it’s legally feasible, he’d support doing away with Virginia’s 22-year-old criminal background check program for firearms purchases in favor of a federal system that also screens prospective gun buyers for eligibility to obtain weapons.

Gun rights groups have pressed the McDonnell administration on the issue, calling for an end to the Virginia Firearms Transaction Program, a state police-administered system for checking the criminal history of potential purchasers. Supporters of the state program say it’s an additional safeguard to ensure state gun laws are upheld and attempts to illegally purchase weapons are investigated by local authorities.

More at the link including how some purchase prohibitions in Virginia differ from those at the national level.

2011 was not kind to me (nor 2010) but I hope and pray that 2012 will be better. I think it will, near the end of it. For several reasons.

Anyway, 6:15 this morning, ice storm in Vermont. Taking it cautiously, I actually make it all the way from Fairlee to White River Junction (where I work) because the salt trucks had been out. 27 miles I go (seeing folks off the road along the way but I’m a slow-poke) and as I’m on Sykes Ave (a major business district road — salted) and I drive past the dealership I work for and make the right-turn onto Bowling Lane — Hey, it’s dark, Bowling Lane has no street lights — and ‘eff ME! — it hadn’t been salted. My old decrepit Forrester hits glaze ice and slides into the curb.

Well, at least it happened a few feet from where I work — at the service department at a car dealership. But, I hit hard enough to, now that it’s diagnosed — bend the LF control arm beyond repair, and bust the control arm mount and anti-sway-bar link. And bend the wheel. And, there’s a bad noise coming from the rear.

Total damage — well, the local Subaru dealer parts department didn’t get back to our parts department. Pretty typical for them.

Tech estimates that (even with a used control arm) I’m looking at four-hundred-fifty dollars with labor. Which I don’t have. Fuck-me! I made it past wreck-after-wreck and then just a few dozen feet from where work I lapse and fuck-up my car. I just never figured — I should have — that the town hadn’t salted a side street off the main drag.

As my boss (a great guy named Paul — NOT the head-honcho-guy you hear in the ads) pointed out, I wasn’t hurt: It could have been much worse and it could have been me in a gully on the side of 91. They gave me one of the service loaner cars.

In the meantime, I’m optimistic. I always am. About my own situation. About our country. About getting rid of the useless, socialist creep currently in our White House in the next election.

2011 (and 2010) were tough on my two oldest cats, too. Crispy is going along okay at the moment — two operations behind him and a controlled diet. Removing the thyroid glands certainly helped. Samantha — she’s not doing well and with her lung condition . . . She’s as skinny as a wasp and breathing very hard. I have a tough decision to make, soon. Damn.

But, I have a job and an apartment and heat and a computer connection and especially, I have you. Yes! You! You kind folks who click-here to read my occasional ramblings. Your visits, your comments, your links, your donations, your suggestions, your presence on Alphecca keeps me going day after day. My “day job” sucks although it pays most of the bills. My early morning job, blogging, gives me the impetus to get out of bed at 4:30 each morning (an hour-and-a-half before I have to leave for work) and get on the computer and blog. My sincere thanks to all of you for that. Living a life must have a purpose and my day job doesn’t give me that. Blogging here on Alphecca does. But! But, only because of your visits. If I had no readers, I wouldn’t blog. I would therefore have no purpose in posting anything.

I truly hope that all of you and your families have a healthy — and I currently am — 2012. That’s so much more important than anything else. A busted car, an overdue payment, is small beans compared to you or your spouse’s or child’s health.

Secondly, I hope that all of you have a better job or better pay or . . . you know; better circumstances.

Lastly, please be careful tonight and enjoy the New Years Eve safely and soberly.

Happy New Years to all of you and thanks so much for stopping by!

Over at Opposing Views, Orin Kerr discusses a recent court decision saying, “Yes.”

From the Washington Post:

A federal judge Thursday rejected a request for $3.1 million in legal fees for lawyers who worked to overturn the District’s handgun ban and instead awarded them $1.1 million, a ruling the D.C. attorney general called a victory for the city.

The six attorneys for plaintiff Dick A. Heller in the historic gun-control litigation had asked the judge to order the city, which lost the case, to pay legal fees totaling $3,126,397. The office of D.C. Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan argued the city should be required to pay $840,166.

More at the link, of course.

It starts off as an article discussing the NRA’s prowess at fund raising but evolves into trying to tarnish America’s largest 2nd-Amendment lobbying group. Of course, the NRA does much more than just lobby. Full article here.

One part of the probe is how the NRA requires some of its grant recipients to purchase their supplies through an NRA web site. From the article:

At least one dealer, Champion Shooters Supply LLC, of New Albany, Ohio, isn’t as happy with the NRA. The company, which deals in target-shooting equipment, complained last year that it was losing business because the NRA Foundation had established an online store where its grant recipients were required to purchase scores of commonly used items, including ammunition and targets.

Many items in the foundation’s store were priced higher than at Champion Shooters Supply, according to a letter written by Susan D. Rector, an attorney for the company.

The Bloomberg piece continues by raising questions about whether this conflicts with the organization’s tax-exempt status.

Lot’s of quotes — many by ex-NRA turncoats.

Some of these questions could have been answered by the NRA, but:

LaPierre declined requests for an interview. Andrew Arulanandam, the association’s chief spokesman, e-mailed the following statement:

“The NRA will not participate in agenda journalism driven by a news organization owned by an avowed enemy of the Second Amendment — a politician who has been aggressively working against the interests of the NRA, our members and the nation’s gun owners for years.”

I’m not sure that was the best course to take but the author of the piece obviously felt insulted and spent the next several paragraphs in a tortured attempt to exonerate Mayor Bloomberg, to pointing out that he (Mayor Blowhard) has nothing to do –these days — with Bloomberg News (!) and that Mayors Against Illegal Guns operated a sting where unlicensed on-line firearms sellers sold guns to those who should not have them. Well, that’s nice, but those sellers had nothing to do with, did not work for, nor represent the NRA.

Anyway, read the whole thing if you care to.

The Main Stream Media has decided that if the Obama administration is currently silent on additional gun control laws, then they will pick-up the slack.

Darn, it’s tough trying to digest and write about all of this at 4:30 in the morning . . .

But, municipalities could ban them from ‘recreational facilities’ and therein lies the controversy. Some cities are trying to circumvent a new state (preemptive) law allowing CCW permit holders to carry into parks. From the Daily Reflector:

When the General Assembly passed a law this year that prohibited municipalities from banning concealed weapons in local parks, it swept away dozens of local regulations starting this month. But the law also included a provision that lets cities ban concealed weapons from “recreation facilities,” defined in the legislation as “a playground, an athletic field, a swimming pool and an athletic facility.”

So far, about 20 cities and towns across the state have either approved or discussed ordinances that aim to do just that, according to advocates on both sides of the question. In theory, those cities are well within their rights to ban guns in those “recreation facilities,” but as so often happens with legislation, it’s not so simple.

It’s not so simple because there’s enough wiggle room in the law to allow a city to declare a lake a ’swimming pool’ and therefore it is a ‘recreational facility’ and therefore the city has the right to ban guns from the shores of it. That’s just an example but it appears that all of this will be heading to the courts.

More at the link.

In many states it is legal to openly carry a holstered firearm. What we’ve seen though (for instance a couple of years ago in Milwaukee) is that cops will tackle you, harass you, and maybe charge you with disorderly conduct or some such thing if some hoplophobe gets all scared over the sight of your gun. In Utah, one lawmaker is working to prevent that. From KSL TV:

A bill proposed for the 2012 Utah Legislature would prohibit a person who is lawfully carrying a firearm in public from being charged with non- firearm related crimes such as disorderly conduct or disturbing the operation of a school.

HB49, sponsored by Rep. Paul Ray, R-Clearfield, states that, “… in the absence of additional threatening behavior, the otherwise lawful possession of a firearm … whether visible or concealed” would not in itself constitute a violation of various criminal statutes.

More at the link. The bill is a work in progress and it appears there will be a lot of clauses in it.

I admit it. When I lived in the NYC area, I liked listening to her. She was the quintessential New York liberal but she was also witty, cynical, and always kind to callers. I know. One night after she mentioned a news story or something about alien abductions, I called her and ended my call saying that the flying saucer was outside my window — the aliens had come to abduct me. She liked that and after that, for a year or so, I would regularly call her (Jeff from Hackensack) and comment on whatever the discussion was about, but end the call with, “Uh-oh, the aliens are here to take me away. . .” and she would always enjoin with, “There he goes . . .”

From the Star News Online:

Several similar confrontations in recent months makes it seem as if clerks like Headstrong increasingly are embracing deadly force as a means of protection in a city that sees its fair share of armed robberies. Earlier this month, a man who tried to rob the A&J Food Mart on Princess Place Drive was encouraged to leave after an employee trained a handgun on him.

The trend happens to coincide with a controversial overhaul of state laws to better shield employees from civil and criminal liability should they defend themselves with a gun.

More at the link including — of course — the wails of indignity by the gun control crowd that law abiding citizens are starting to protect themselves.

Microsoft has been removing guns from the ‘Live Avatar’ marketplace. Since I don’t have an Xbox, I’m not sure what that all means. From the Verge:

If you’ve had your eyes on a Golden Hammerburst or Lancer (with matching chain) for your Xbox Live Avatar, you’ve only got about a week to grab it. An official post from community manager Raczilla on the Epic Games forums has told users that, as of the new year, Microsoft is removing all gun-like items from the Marketplace – though you’ll still be able to equip anything you’ve bought in the past. This new restriction is added to the already long list for developers of what avatars can and can’t do, including talking, smoking, and violence.

More at the link.

Life’s Little Mysteries has a list titled, Top 11 Toys of All Time. Really that’s a misnomer and the author admits as much when she reveals that this list is based upon unit sales. Anyway, the list includes such ho-hum stuff as the Pet Rock, Star Wars Action Figures, Mr. Potato Head, and the Slinky. Jeez, I’m glad I didn’t grow-up in a house with gifts like that.

Conspicuously missing from the list are toys I received, or bought with money I earned from mowing neighbors’ lawns and my paper route, (and some were handed-down to me by my Grandfather) including:

1. Lincoln Logs. Hours of fun.

2. Erector Set. For those too young to remember them, it was steel girders and other steal shapes and nuts and bolts. You could put together some cool stuff including cars with it.

Okay, it was much better than that photo makes it look. There were a lot of different sets, bigger, more complete in components. I loved mine. I think it was a hand-me-down from my older brother.

3. Lego. Come on! How could any list be complete without Lego Sets?

4. Any sort of ball and bat or mitt or basketball. Maybe those are considered athletic equipment and don’t fall under the “toy” category.

Now, these other toys are a bit more obscure and only older readers will remember the era when kids were trusted with stuff that today’s kids are not. Welcome to the nanny-state.

5. Vacuform. From Mattel. You warm-up a sheet of plastic and then, using a vacuum device, mold it into creations such as boats, etc.

6. Creepy Crawlers. Also by Mattel. You poured Plasti-Goop into molds that were then heated up to cook the goop and, Voila! Snakes and spiders and all manner of bugs. What more could a young boy ask for?

7. Okay, this next one would probably be considered more educational than a “toy” but, I was given this huge chemistry set made by Perfect Scientific and gosh I did have a lot of fun with it. Also, I had a Bunsen Burner! The toy store in town sold Perfect Scientific add-ons including bottles of chemicals, etc. Chemicals that Homeland Security would bust you for! You could literally buy the ingredients for gun powder, etc. Imagine seeing such stuff for sale at a Toys-R-Us store in this nanny-state age!

Lastly, some other staples of youth that didn’t make their list:

8. I did not have a BB gun when I was growing up but I’ll bet a lot of you did.

9. How could a Frisbee not make their list? Everyone had a Frisbee!

10. Yo-Yos. ‘Nuff said?

11. Slot Cars! (My town had a slot car race center, about ten different tracks for all size slot cars including HO.) Remember the ritual of changing brushes? My HO Green Hornet slot car used to kick-butt!

12. Lionel Train Sets. A wonderful gift from my Grandfather Morris.

I’m sure you could think of others.

Merry Christmas to all of you. May your day be filled with happiness. I wish you all wellness and joy and, as always, thanks so much for stopping by!

From Daily Finance:

The year-end housing news is sobering — U.S. homes are expected to lose more than $681 billion in value in 2011. But there’s an upside — that’s 35% less than the $1.1 trillion lost in 2010, according to new research from Zillow (Z), a real estate information marketplace.

Meanwhile the Republicans — both in Congress, and fighting for the 2012 nomination — continue to devour themselves. We may be stuck with The One for another four years.

Thugs beware! From KCCI TV:

The number of Iowans seeking permits to carry handguns and other weapons has increased 170 percent this year.

Iowa recently changed its law, giving the local sheriffs who issue the permits less discretion in whom they can turn down for one.

How else can you interpret this?

The Justice Department on Friday rejected South Carolina’s law requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls, saying it makes it harder for minorities to cast ballots. It was the first voter ID law to be refused by the federal agency in nearly 20 years.

The Obama administration said South Carolina’s law didn’t meet the burden under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which outlawed discriminatory practices preventing blacks from voting. Tens of thousands of minorities in South Carolina might not be able to cast ballots under South Carolina’s law because they don’t have the right photo ID, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez said.

I guess they don’t have driver’s licenses. I guess they don’t cash checks, board airplanes, or do any of the other things where a photo ID is required.