First Door on the Left

From a right-wing blog which will not be linked…

Along the way, we stopped at one of my favorite stores: a marina/gas station/bait shop/beer store and armory. It’s hard to think of a recreational need they can’t satisfy. There is a big red sign on the wall facing the road that says “Guns & Amo.” (I know, that’s not how I would spell “ammo” either, but you go ahead and tell the proprietors their sign is wrong.) Inside, the store is crammed to the gills with firearms–shotguns, rifles and handguns–with plenty of “amo” and a supply of knives. A variety of bumper stickers and posters are stuck on the walls, all of them, not surprisingly, conveying a conservative message.

My wife likes this store as much as I do. There is something about strolling amid aisles of firearms that gives one a sense of safety and well-being. [emphasis added]

Let’s see what happens to your sense of safety and well-being when one of those firearms is loaded and being pointed directly at you or someone you love by some guy with a wild devil-may-care look in his eyes. I guarantee it will change your definition of terrorism.

Yesterday’s Doonesbury strip has Scott Johnson at Power Line all worked up.

It’s a cartoon, dude!

“Queens College Professor Michael Mailer” asks:

When exactly did it become fashionable on the “left” to put down people for working for ideals without pay, or for not being affluent like Trudeau and his buddies?

and answers:

Maybe when their candidates were 100+ millionaires like Edwards and Kerry.

Lest we forget, Professor… George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are also 100+ millionaires. In fact, most members of the Bush Administration are multi-millionaires. So what’s your point?

It’s a flippin’ cartoon, dude!

Critics Call Radio Hosts’ Trip Propaganda Mission

WASHINGTON � A contingent of conservatives talk radio hosts is headed to Iraq this month on a mission to report “the truth” about the war: American troops are winning, despite headlines to the contrary…

“The reason why we are doing it is we are sick and tired of seeing and hearing headlines by the mainstream media about our defeat in Iraq,” Melanie Morgan, a talk radio host (search) for KSFO Radio in San Francisco and co-chair of Move America Forward, said.

Morgan said the media is “imposing a Vietnam template on this war.”

“This is not Vietnam,” she said. “War is war, and it’s dangerous, and the killing is taking place all of the time. At the same time, where there is danger, there is success and there is a mainstream media that is determined to shut out that success.”

She said the group is going to Iraq to support American troops, who see a disconnection with what they experience and what’s being reported in the United States. She said the incongruence is leading to “morale problems.”

I do not know about the propaganda charges, but I do know that it is just a bit disconcerting that these people know what they are going to report back before they even get there.

Why waste their time and money going if they already have their stories written? Why don’t they just stay home, file their stories and say they went?

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.