Sunday, July 27, 2008

Blogging to be light for the next few days

Blogging will be light this week. I am heading off to Daleystan for a conference, and won't have Internet access during the day.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

More on the CNSF

Over on Obama Exposed, I've previously posted about Obama's proposed "Civilian National Security Force." There's more on it over at the Volokh Conspiracy.

Voluntary national service? That's great. But mandatory "volunteerism" does more than play havoc with the English language. The mere fact that a member of Congress is proposing the creation of a our own Red Guard/Obamajugend should scare the piss out of any American who loves freedom and has any historical knowledge.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

More updates at Obama Exposed

Several more updates at Obama Exposed. Check it out.

D.C.: Still Not Getting It After Heller

So the District of Corruption introduced a new gun law in response to the spanking it got from the Supreme Court in D.C. vs. Heller. The new law isn't a ban, but is still oppressive.

City leaders say the legislation goes as far as it can on gun regulations while respecting the high court's ruling. Weapons must be unloaded, disassembled or trigger-locked, except when there is a "threat of immediate harm to a person" in the home.

FAIL. The Court specifically addressed this.

"Oh, excuse me Mr. Burglar. Can you wait over there while I get my gun out of the safe and load it?"

I look forward to seeing this struck down, and hopefully, these clowns will be held personally liable under 42 U.S.C. Section 1983.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

D.C. vs. Heller - What's Next?

Robert Levy, the man behind the D.C. vs. Heller case which reinvigorated the Second Amendment, has a piece at Cato Unbound on what's next.

Check it out.

Monday, July 14, 2008

Post-Heller Congressional Action On "Second Amendment Enforcement Act"

Friday, July 11, 2008

As mentioned in last week's edition of our Grassroots Alert, following the Supreme Court's favorable Heller decision, city officials in Washington, D.C. have been planning to obstruct D.C. citizens from exercising their right to keep and bear arms, despite the Supreme Court's clear statements. And some in Congress are planning to do something about it.

On Thursday, Representative Mark Souder (R-Ind.) introduced H. Res. 1331, a rule to govern House consideration of a modified version of H.R. 1399--the "District of Columbia Personal Protection Act."

H.R. 1399 was introduced in March of 2007 and has 247 cosponsors. (For more information on H.R. 1399 and on its Senate companion bill, S. 1001 by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), please go to www.nraila.org/Issues/FactSheets/Read.aspx?id=72&issue=020) This rule (H. Res. 1331) would force House consideration of H.R. 1399 if activated by a discharge petition, which will require 218 congressional signatures. It would provide for speedy consideration of legislation to enforce the Supreme Court's decision in District of Columbia v. Heller by repealing the provisions of the D.C. Code that were at issue in that case, and by preventing the District from enacting new and burdensome restrictions on its residents' Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

Among other things, H. Res. 1331 includes provisions that would repeal D.C.'s ban on many semi-automatic firearms, and repeal the District's firearm registration system, as in H.R. 1399. It would also reduce the District's burdensome restrictions on ammunition, and repeal the District's unique law that allows manufacturers of certain types of guns to "be held strictly liable in tort, without regard to fault or proof of defect," for injuries caused with those guns. D.C. has used this law to bring suits against the firearms industry, but those suits have now been blocked by the "Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act."

NRA-ILA is fully committed to restoring the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding residents of Washington, D.C., and will fight this critically important battle until victory is in hand.
We will be sure to keep you informed of new developments as we move forward. In the meantime, please be sure to contact your U.S. Representative at (202) 225-3121, and urge him or her to press Congressional leadership to bring H.R. 1399 to the House floor.


Via NRA-ILA.

Friday, July 11, 2008

More updates at Obama Exposed

I've posted several updates over at Obama Exposed.

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

New Blog: Obama Exposed

I started a new blog with the intention of trying to answer the question, "Just who is Barack Hussein Obama?"

Check it out here.

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Crossover Mac Bug

There's a bug in Crossover Mac v7.0.0, the latest version. For some reason, MS Visio 2003 will not run if it is installed into a bottle in which other MS Office programs are installed. Visio will install, but when launched a box will pop up stating "IOPL Not Found."

The workaround is to create a new bottle and install Visio into that. Once you do that Visio will run normally.

ESR on Obama

Eric Scott Steven Raymond mirrors some of my thoughts:

No, what really put me off Barack Obama was the increasingly creepy and pathological tenor of the relationship between him and his fans. I think it was in mid-February, a bit before the Jeremiah Wright story got really ugly, that I started to notice my “Never Again!” nerves tingling.

I’m not Jewish. But I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich at an impressionable age. Years later, what I learned in that book made me into an anarchist. What it did much sooner than that was to instill in me the same sense of the Holocaust as the central moral disaster of the 20th century that the Jews feel. It left me with the same burning determination: Never again! Ever since, I have studied carefully the forms of political pathology behind that horror and attended even more carefully for any signs that they might be taking root in the West once again.


Read the whole thing.

Monday, July 07, 2008

Poison Ivy, Again

It's Monday and I'm sitting at home today after a nice weekend away with SWMBO, waiting for my 11:45 AM doctor's appointment.

It seems that sometime last week I either got too near some poison ivy, or brushed against something that was contaminated. I've got a patch of contact dermatitis on the back of my left hand. Since I'm left handed this especially sucks. It's gotten a bit worse each day since Thursday, even though I've been scrubbing the heck out of it with Zanfel. The Zanfel and hydrocortisone ointment is keeping the itching under control but I don't want the rash to spread any further. Time to go get a prednisone shot, and maybe oral prednisone. The last time I had this I put on 13 pounds (~5.9 Kg) from the steroids.

Frack!

More Post-Heller Action

Apparently, Hawaii's A.G.Mark Bennett will review the state's gun laws in light of the Supreme Court's decision in Heller. Considering that Hawaii's state constitutional RKBA provision is a word-for-word copy of the Second Amendment, this is a good thing for Hawaiians.

Hawaii's gun laws are already onerous. E.g., you need permits to keep and acquire firearms. Both concealed and open carry are felonies. (See the link for more details.) It's likely that Heller will foreclose further infringements.

{H/T mrreynolds on THR.)

Obama's Accomplishments


No thanks, keep the change.

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Crossover Mac

Earlier this month I downloaded an evaluation version of Crossover Mac from Codeweavers. This is a commercially supported version of WINE for Intel Macs. WINE is a reverse engineered implementation of the Win32 APIs, which allows you to run some Windows applications on a Mac or other *NIX box without having a copy of Windows installed.

Although I have Parallels Desktop, the idea of being able to run a few Windows apps on Rohan without having to actually fire up XP was attractive. For example, I sometimes need to access web sites which require Internet Explorer for full functionality. Starting XP just to do that is clunky.

Crossover for Mac installs easily and the software installation wizard allows you to download and install IE6 SP1 with two or three mouse clicks. AAMOF, I am actually posting this using IE6 on Rohan. One thing I can do in Crossover that I cannot do in Parallels Desktop 2.5 (not the most current version, but the version I have) is paste text from an OS X application into a Windows application. E.g., a URL from TextWrangler into IE's address bar, or a URL from Firefox into the hyperlink box of Blogger's composer.

Crossover isn't perfect. It doesn't let me run any and all Windows applications. For example, I was able to install Sprint's Blackberry connection manager in Crossover but it does not detect my Blackberry when I connect it. Codeweavers maintains compatibility lists, which are worth consulting to see if it's worthwhile for you to try.

I currently have IE6, MS Project 2003, and Visio 2003 installed under Crossover. So far, so good. For someone with minimal Windows software needs it's worth a look. Codeweavers gives you a 30 day free trial, and if you decide that it does what you need, the cost is $39.95. Of note, any improvements the Codeweavers team makes to WINE make it back to the open source project, so by purchasing Crossover, you help WINE development.