I think you meant "ELL ee dee," buddy.

The Light Angel Store is spamming me with ever-more-threatening offers of outdoor lighting.

Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes: Highway Gunplay

Poor Matt Sinclair.

A judge here in Illinois recently ruled that Sinclair can't have his charge of Aggravated Unlawful Use of a Weapon thrown out on the basis that his (apparently allegedly loaded) firearm would have been legal to possess in Illinois, if only he had waited three months, paid a $150 fee, undergone 16 hours of mandatory training, and made application to the Illinois State Police for a concealed carry license (CCL) before waiting another two to three months for his license to arrive. Sinclair's argument was that, since there was a delay between the date that the old statute went away (by court order) and the implementation of the CCL program, he had the right to carry his firearm in the meantime without the permit.

I'm actually kind of inclined to agree with that argument in the abstract, but that isn't how our legal system works in any other case, so there was never much hope for these kinds of desperate moves from defense lawyers. As the judge pointed out in her decision, the law was in place and clearly stated that firearms couldn't be carried loaded in Illinois except with a CCL, and the fact that there was a delay before the CCL could be acquired didn't undo that, especially since everyone knew how long the delay was supposed to be.

I'm sure the judge would claim not to be biased against Sinclair's motion by the other facts of the case, but I freely admit that I'm not rootin' for him. See, Sinclair probably wouldn't have (allegedly) gotten caught with his firearm, except that Sinclair, who played linebacker for the University of Illinois Fightin' Illini and now coaches or administrates or something, got a little worked up on the way home from a game against Purdue in Indiana. There's a very nice lady who alleges that she called the cops because Sinclair "pointed a handgun out of his truck's window" at someone right in front of her on the interstate. For some reason, she panicked and called the cops, who stopped Sinclair at the next exit and (allegedly) found his gun and a set of brass knuckles, which are still verboten in Illinois to this day. It turns out that it was all just a bit of grab-ass hijinks on the highway--you know how boys can be. Sinclair was only pointing the pistol at another U of I staff member, and he was only kidding. The lady behind them somehow misinterpreted a guy pointing a gun at another guy on the interstate as some kind of dangerous and/or criminal situation, though, and here we are.

I'm peppering this with allegedlies mostly for the fun of it; Sinclair, his head coach, and lawyers on both sides seem like they've gotten past the point of trying to argue about whether Sinclair actually pointed a (loaded?) handgun at a dude's noggin in public while driving. The head coach was so outraged that he actually publicly declared that Sinclair had "clearly had a lapse in judgment after returning to Champaign-Urbana on Saturday," language usually reserved for actual rape or attempted murder in NCAA Division I.

I Tried to Warn You People, But Does Anybody Listen to Me?

"Letting USPSA join FIFA is a mistake," I said. "Next thing you know, they'll be clearing the slums in Barry with machine guns and tripling the size of PASA Park using expendable slave labor from the Phillipines.  Gunnuts.net says the refereeing changes are already being rolled out:

Better go RTWT if by some miracle you got here before you saw it there. Paul Hendrix, meanwhile, appears to be starting with denial, but it looks to me like this is one of those cases where someone's likely been getting away with something for a long time . . . so long that they get blindsided when circumstances or technology come along and make it much harder to get away with. It makes you wonder whether Hendrix ever considered that the shooters he was helping (and maybe hurting?) were posting match videos and someone might eventually notice? Or did he just figure it was such an obscure corner of the internet that nobody would bother to check? Anonymity on the internet is one of those things that seems permanent, unchanging and reliable until the day it disappears without warning.

Hendrix even mentioned that he's never heard of the Doodie Project forums (yes, that's a thing.) Well, that's the beauty and the pain of the internet, my friend. You have no idea who is watching this stuff.

Perhaps Trotsky said it best when he observed that, "You may not be interested in the Doodie Project, but the Doodie Project is interested in you." [Citation needed]

Bad Idea, Ebert

I don't want to give the impression that I'm some kind of violent redneck, unless you want to talk about your fantasy of putting me into a "green re-education camp."

We are not going to be re-enacting the Cultural Revolution, here, goober. Nobody is going to try to load me on to a train or put my kids in a glorious farming collective camp. Even if the whole world turned upside down and anybody did try it, I'd kill them really, really, really dead.

I don't do a lot of internet chest-thumping, but something in this guy's plaintive wail touched me deep inside where my trigger-puller lives.

Snuffy Pfleger suspended again? I'll believe it when I see it--again.

So the good monsignor Michael "Snuffy" Pfleger has apparently been suspended by Cardinal George . . . again. Second City Cop dared to go there with a post entitled "You're Pfired!" That kind of punning takes . . . . well, it certainly takes something.

Personally, I find that I haven't really changed my outlook since the last time Cardinal George suspended Snuffy; back in 2008 I wondered, "Seriously, Cardinal George, what does it take?"

The list hasn't changed much, because Pfleger hasn't changed much:

"Theoretically, is there an act Pfleger could commit that would shame the Catholic church and the archdiocese of Chicago enough that they'd decide to cut him loose?

• We know injecting the church into elections, thus at least theoretically jeopardizing their tax-exempt status in any just world, isn't enough.
• We know that praising bigots like Louis Farrakhan from the pulpit isn't enough.
• We know that publicly lying repeatedly in his official capacity as a priest isn't enough.
• We know that threatening to "snuff out" John Riggio wasn't enough.

So, just for my own idle curiosity, what would it take? Does he actually have to start assaulting people physicall--or would that be tolerated, too?"

It remains to be seen whether mentioning that you won't take a job in a high school is on that list, too. We'll see whether this suspension is any more "permanent" than the last one.

QOTD: IGOLD Arithmetic

"I already posted about a TV person in the hall with all of us there in our GOLDEN finest. With a straight face she said that our count was "OVER ONE HUNDRED FIFTY people in attendance".

YEAH, LADY. IN EACH ROW!"
--"Badwater Bill" at www.illinoiscarry.com

Media accounts of numbers vary widely, but that's . . . . hmmm.

When this picture was taken, from the railroad viaduct next to 3rd St., the back end of the crowd still hadn't turned the corner from 7th St. four blocks back. Maybe I'm too generous, but it's enough to make me wonder whether she genuinely flubbed it.

Mayor Daley Pleads In Vain for Gun Control Questions at Chicago Press Conference

(Sorry, the video absolutely refuses to embed for some reason. It's worth clicking, believe me.)

This was edited down to a short bit of Mayor Daley appealing "Just one question?!? Please?" in the report that went out on air. But this raw excerpt shows so much more: Mayor Daley is holding a joint press conference with Representative Mike Quigley, D-Chicago 5th, the heir to the throne previously warmed by the butts of Rahm Emanuel, Rod Blagojevich and Dan "Rosty" Rostenkowski. The duo were presenting a petition demanding that Congress "Fix Gun Checks" by requiring background checks on every single firearm purchase nationwide . . . in other words, the complete prohibition of private sales. But that's not the really interesting part, nor is it Rep. Quigley's charming talking point, "With a 30-round clip, you're hunting people and that's all there is to it!"

No, the interesting part was Mayor Daley's near-meltdown as he realized that the reporters present didn't care about his anti-gun initiative and had really only shown up to pepper him with questions about their new leader, Lord Mayor Twinkletoes. He began asking for questions "about gun violence," then asking more forcefully, and ended up nearly pleading for someone, anyone, to tee up a gun control softball like the old days. Finally one reporter offered to ask a question about guns, and Da Mare was visibly relieved.

And then the reporter asked what he thought about the momentum in favor of right-to-carry legislation in Illinois this year.

Da Mare lost it at that point and went Full Daley. The furious squeaking of serial rhetorical questions was a sight to behold. It could not be clearer that Da Mare has no idea where the public is on this issue.

In case anyone wonders, I now present my own answers to Da Mare's rhetorical questions:

"Do you think in your community somebody should carry a concealed weapon?"
Yes.

"To your synagogue?"
If we had one, sure.

"To your daughter's school?"
Yes.

"Should they go to a park?"
Everybody should go to a park. Parks are nice.

"All out there, can anybody carry a gun where you live?"
No, but it's coming, and you and yours don't have enough dirty tricks left to stop it.

"Do you think that's the right thing to do?"
Yes, it is.

"Do you think America should be proud?"
Yes, I do.

"Welcome to America, carry a gun?"
Yes, although I don't mind if you want to limit that to law-abiding residents for now.

"I mean, if this should, you should be outraged about this!"
I thank you for your opinion.

"You're a journalist, you're a reporter!"
Well, one dabbles . . . sweet of you to say, though.

"You have a right to write anything!"
That's true. For instance, mustache ice cream is shorty-sicle elephant parade!

"This ought to be a headline, i-i-i-i-i-in your newspaper, asking people to appeal for common-sense gun laws."
On the Opinion page, of course. Right? I mean . . . that's what you meant, right, sir?

"I mean, not Mayor Daley, not Mayor Daley, this is their fight behind me, this is not Mayor Daley's fight, or Representative Quigley's . . . . . ."
That's the thing, Mayor. You are shedding allies for a reason; this is increasingly your fight. The public doesn't see this issue your way anymore, and you don't have the grip you once had on government or, clearly, media to steer public opinion for you. You would have to do a lot better than these tantrums from now on . . . . if you stay in the game.

Nine Eleven Two Thousand Ten

Well, it's September 11th again, and nine years after the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the unknown third target, the big news is the fight over a mosque to be built in Manhattan (sometimes called the "Ground Zero Death to America Mosque and Terrorism School" by people who don't have enough real problems to get worked up about in their own lives.) The latest zany turn in the fight over whether people have the right to buy a building and use it for lawful religious purposes is the national furor over whether a deranged mustache in Florida, acting through its human puppet-avatar, has the right to burn a pile of Qurans (or possibly Korans.)

I'm not writing about this because I think there's anyone who might read it today who will say "Really? I hadn't heard about that!" It's all anyone is talking about today. I'm just recording that fact here so that, in the next few years, I can check a hypothesis. I think once the Mad Mustache gives up on book-burning (at least book-burning that makes terrorists angry) and the Westboro Baptist Nutty-Butter Church of Crazy burns an even bigger pile of books while chanting and holding up signs (such as "God Hates Everybody" and "What Does It Take to Get Martyred in This Country, Anyway?) the whole thing will die down. I think the mosque will get built, and the world will turn, and it'll probably turn out to be just another "community center." And I think that once that happens, the whole furor will be more or less forgotten by most Americans. Maybe by me, too, with the damage 24-hour news and internets have done to my precious, irreplaceable attention span. I just want to have a record here so that on future 9/11 anniversaries I can look back and remember that in 2010, we gave up on the idea of commemorating the attack that killed thousands of innocent Americans in one day, made us question everything we had assumed we knew about our own lives, and launched two wars. In 2010, we decided 9/11 was a good day for trivial bullshit, and I can't even pretend to be above it all because my own blatherings are recorded in my own archive in the post prior to this one.

At the very least, no matter how far I got sucked into the triviality and foolishness, even if I bought the hype just a little, let the record reflect in my defense that I managed to remember the real reason today matters in time to be a little ashamed.

So, let me get this straight . . .

The media and the gossip columnists want to gut the candidate for Ted Kennedy's seat because he posed for a Cosmopolitan centerfold rated somewhere between PG-13 and R in 1982?

So, if you cheat on your wife and murder one of the mistresses, you have an inspirational story of overcoming obstacles in your life--and when you're done, people will actually speculate that maybe your victim would have said it was worth it for her to drown in cold, dark water as long as you were able to overcome her death's political implications to fight for abortion rights and "free" health care. But if you won a beauty contest and posed for one nude photo, Gawker will announce that you're a "vintage porn star" and make fun of your party for considering you--even if you're already a state legislator with a real record, and running within ten points of the Democrat candidate in Ted Kennedy's district.

Oh, did I forget to mention that we're talking about Scott Brown, the Republican candidate? No big deal; you might not have known Scott Brown's name, but I'm sure you knew I wasn't talking about a Democrat. I think I also forgot to mention that the Republican party appears to be rolling over and offering Brown up as a sacrificial lamb . . . . but I bet you aren't surprised at that, either.

Why even ask Roland Burris that question?

I can see a tree and a concrete parking barrier right behind him, and either of them could have explained it better. Don't be lazy, reporter guy.

So Roland Burris says the Constitution contains a clause empowering Congress to "provide for" the health of American citizens. Turns out he was thinking of the preamble to the Constitution, which A) Doesn't say that, and B) is a preamble.



Seriously, children and politicians everywhere, I realize that the preamble to the U.S. Constitution says the words ". . . promote the general welfare . . ." But the thing is, those ellipses aren't just random, they kind of matter. Specifically, the ones right before the phrase that justifies a huge amount of our federal government stand in for the words "in order to," among others. They were never meant to bestow any power upon any part of the federal government. That is done very explicitly later on in the clauses designed for the purpose. All the preamble says about the general welfare is that it's one reason for the powers and limitations that will be created in the main body of the document.
To say that the powers and limitations put on Congress in Article One (By the Beard of Odin's Manservant, it's right there on the same page, people) are irrelevant because of the clause that was only supposed to explain why those powers and limitations are there in the first place is perverse.

And here's what the Roland Burrises of the world may genuinely not understand: when the preamble says that the Constitution is ordained in order to accomplish some objective, such as promoting the general welfare, it means that the limits on federal powers contained in the Constitution were conceived for that purpose just as much as any of the powers. The Constitution is a document of strict limits on the federal government for a reason. If nothing else, it should worry us that we're using laws that were intended to limit federal power as our excuse to remove all limits on federal power. When you use Super Glue as a solvent, bad things happen.

"Sniper no sniping, sniper no sniping!"

"Aw, maaaan!"
I think I've been home with the baby too long. He doesn't even bat an eye when I have slips like that . . . . .

240v Wiring Bleg--Don't know what I'm doing

So, if you read the last post entitled "Why is the smoke coming from under the stove?" you know that we had a power surge during a storm last night and the electric cooktop in the kitchen succumbed. I tried to figure it out between EMS calls last night with little success, and at 1:00 in the morning I ended up just disconnecting the wiring pigtail for the cooktop from the junction box. I really don't get 240v wiring, but I figured it was connected red/red, black/black, white/white, bare/bare, so how hard could it be? As I understand it, the only big difference from 120v is that there are two 120v feeds, so both the black and white are probably live with 120v.

I figure I need a new cooktop; it's an ancient Kenmore, so parts are probably worse than a new one if I keep it simple. But I don't want to have to go buy the first one I see this morning, so I thought I could cap the wires in the junction box and get the other appliances on the same circuit working again. That didn't work; the circuit is dead now.

What do I have to do to cap that junction safely and still have the rest of the circuit live? I'm tempted to wire the two 120v "hot" wires together, but I don't really see the point and I'm afraid of damaging the wiring because (I might have mentioned this before) I don't know what I'm doing. I just wanted to do the monkey-smart part, pulling out the old appliance and connecting the new one exactly the same way.

Luckily, my wife is smarter than me, and she called me awhile ago to tell me I should just plug the refrigerator into one of the working outlets in the kitchen with an extension cord until the circuit can be fixed. Thank God I'm pretty.

It's hard to see what's going on in this photo on the right, but this is one of the rheostat switches on the cooktop. This is where the smoke came from. One side of the plug is completely severed and the whole thing is covered in black, greasy crud. The cooktop was old and impossible to clean anyway, so I won't miss it. I just don't want to buy one, plunk it in and then watch it go up in smoke, too.
(I guess the advantage would be that parts should be available for the new one . . . as long as it doesn't burn the house down.

Update: Mark Kirk Senate campaign not helping

As I mentioned earlier, I called Mark Kirk's Congressional office on Monday to see when his "Downstate Swing" is scheduled. I want to be at the meetings, and since he's running for Senate, he's running to be my Senator.

The Congressional office took my phone number to forward it to the campaign office, which is only right--they have to keep those things separate. But it's now Thursday and the campaign office hasn't called back, so I gave them a call directly today.

According to the campaign workers, the meetings haven't been scheduled yet. Hmm. Well, they now have my address, phone number and email, so I should be contacted this time. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that someone clumsily put out a story about a "downstate swing" with public meetings in 14 specific cities before anyone had scheduled the meetings. But I can't help but observe that people all over the country are in full, screaming outrage over being shut out of "town hall meetings" and jerked around over the Obama healthcare plan.

The fact that Kirk is campaigning against the Obama health care . . . . thing . . . . means it would be unpleasantly ironic if his campaign managed to get him caught up in that same outrage.

Waiting By the Phone . . .

I called the state board of education today to see where they are on the letter I sent them. Basically, I applied for an approval to teach special education with my certificate based on the classes I've taken. They sent me a deficiency statement with a deficiency I don't have--I sent them a transcript showing that I got an "A" in the class they say I haven't taken. Yesterday, the college confirmed that the class in question satisfies the requirement. So I called today, and the lady on the phone was very nice and very helpful, but all she could tell me was that there is a record that they received my letter on the 13th of July. Someone will call me back to discuss it, but it'll probably take "at least a couple of days."
They're just like everybody else in state government--5 people do the work of 10 because all the money went t0 redecorate some professional son-in-law's corner office.

I'm also waiting with bated breath for a call from Representative Mark Kirk's campaign office with the dates and times for his "Downstate Tour" town-hall meetings. There will be two local to me, and I intend to get to both. Kirk needs to understand that the gun-banning (and boasting about it!) that played so well in his yuppie north-suburban district won't fly statewide.

OH MY!

I'm sorry, but two different bloggers I love wrote about this story and neither used the One True Headline. It had to be done. Go read it at View From the Porch and SaysUncle and then you can try to tell me I'm wrong.

Wait . . . oh, snap. Jack Landis hit the original article's comment section with t3h r34l 1nf0:

Dear Ms. Doyle,
I am used to the inability of anyone in the media, or anyone from the various “Ban the Gun” groups, to distinguish between fully automatic machineguns (all real assault weapons are select fire weapons capable of fully automatic fire) and black colored semi auto guns. Real machineguns are used in violent crimes in the single digits on an annual basis nationally, when used at all. All TV crooks have machineguns and spray bullets everywhere. To the general public, a black gun with a pistol grip is a “machinegun” because everything they see on TV says it is, and that’s just the way it is. So what was it that brought my eyes to such a screeching halt as I read your article a few minutes ago? It was these two paragraphs:
”Authorities have noticed an increase in high caliber(!?)weapons in Los Angeles. One of the most startling incidents was when a Fabrique National 57, an assault pistol used to kill big game, was found, etc…".
“You use it on large lions, tigers and bears,” said LAPD Deputy Chief Michel Moore, commander of the Valley Bureau”.
This is so wrong in SO many areas that I just had to write you.
1.There is no such thing as an assault pistol. I won’t go into all the reasons the term is an oxy-moron.
2.I am assuming he is referring to an FN FiveseveN pistol. The FiveseveN refers to the diameter of the bullet it shoots, 5.7 millimeter, or .22 caliber. I don’t know if you are aware of it or not, but .22’s are universally considered to be “Small” caliber. The pistol is a standard looking and operating, polymer frame, semi auto that is functionally and appearance wise no different than any other pistol of this type, i.e.’ Glock, etc.
3.Since we are constantly being bombarded with the message that “Assault weapons have no sporting purpose, they are just designed to kill people.” how do we have an assault pistol designed to kill “large lions, etc.?”
4.The correct designation of the cartridge is 5.7 x 27 FN. The 27 refers to the length of the case in millimeters and as such, is just over 1” long. The case is a bottleneck whose largest diameter is less than .32 caliber. As you can see, small bullet, small case. The cartridge has about one third the muzzle energy of the 5.56 NATO cartridge fired in the M-16 rifle by our military. In the civilian world, the same cartridge, called a .223 Remington, is considered a medium range (< 250 yards) varmint cartridge. This means ground squirrels, prairie dogs, woodchucks, etc. Are you getting the picture here? A cartridge with 3 times the power of the 5.7 x 28 is used for varmints, a type of game not generally considered to be in the same class as “large lions, etc.”.22 caliber rifles, no matter how big the cartridge case they use (which determines how much powder is behind them, and thus, pretty much, their power), are illegal (too small) for deer hunting in most places in the US. Africa’s dangerous game minimum legal caliber rifle is, in most places, a .375 H&H Magnum. This cartridge generates ~ 20 times the energy of the puny 5.7. In energy, the 5.7 falls at the low end of 9mm Parabellum and the high end of the .38 Special. Again, LIONS?????
5.Our esteemed Deputy Chief apparently thinks his service pistol is entirely adequate for hunting “large lions, etc., and thus probably hunts rhino with a switch, or needs have his medication changed (or fire the ignoramus who gave him this info).
6.This information that I have given you is also available at the following websites:
http://pun.org/josh/archives/2005/01/fn-57-pi... ; http://www.gundigest.com/article/FN5.7_PartTw...
We have just been exposed to too much deliberate disinformation over the years. In the immortal words of Molly to Fibber McGee,“It just ain’t so McGee!”

Jack Landis
Technical Services Manager &
GunTech Editor
American Gunsmithing Institute

Overheard in the Kitchen: Miracles

The kitchen is bright on a summer morning. Don is cooking breakfast for His Bride; she is reading a book at the small round dinner table with a red checkered table cloth. The children are asleep, and so the cardinals can be heard whistling outside the window. The kitchen smells of hot oil, toasting bread, and rich coffee. Don has a pan heating for eggs and another with shortening heated to a liquid state. Using an ice cream scoop, he carefully ladles out a large dollop of leftover mashed potatoes from a tupperware container. With any luck, in a few minutes he will serve His Bride delicious potato pancakes, with smooth white centers enclosed within brown, crispy outsides. He flattens the dollop in the center of the pan and sprinkles garlic salt over it. It would be fair to say that he is feeling smug at the prowess with which he is cooking his wife breakfast in gentlemanly fashion. In a moment, he plans to break the eggs one-handed because he once read that this impresses women.

Don: "Whoa!"
Bride: "Whoa what?"
Don: "I'm not really sure . . . I've never seen that happen before. The potatoes melted."
Bride: "The what? What did you do?"
Don: "I didn't . . . I just put a scoop of mashed potatoes in the oil to make, you know, like potato pancakes. Like latkes."
Bride: "So what's wrong?"
Don: "I put the potatoes in the oil, and flattened 'em out, and they just disappeared. It was like they melted into the oil. It's actually pretty freaky. Can starch even do that?"
Bride: "Honey?"
Don: "Yes dear?"
Bride: "That's a container of Crisco I fried fish in awhile ago."

I figure it could have been worse. Could have thrown a pat of butter on there and eaten a spoonful cold . . . or filled a big bowl of mashed potatoes in thrown it in the microwave for a couple of minutes, thus starting the Grease Fire of '09.

Never did find out what Crisco pancakes taste like.

Are We Forgetting Something?

Some of you may have read the last post about zoo time (and nuns, and assault weapons, and political fund-raising . . . .) and thought, "that's nice. Hope they have fun."

Well, here's the thing. We got the blue-tongued monster all cleaned up and sent the other one through the shower--I'm pretty sure most of him got wet--and were about five minutes from getting into the car when My Bride did the facepalm.

That's never good. "Peter!" she said.
"Uh . . . Paul!" I replied helpfully.
"Peter's birthday party at two o'clock!" she said.
"Oh."

Today was the day of our nephew's fifth birthday party. We had both completely forgotten the big event and didn't even have a gift for the poor kid (don't worry, we rushed out and got him a radio-controlled red pickup truck and a package of batteries, so he's all set now.)

The thing that gets me is that we arrived fashionably late with gift in hand, we ate birthday cake, we watched the kids play virtual table tennis and shot each other with squirt guns and threw a football around and my cousin got Peter's little dirtbike out and taught all the kids all the safety rules and a good time was had by all . . . . and then, as we were gathering up the baby to go home, My Bride couldn't contain herself anymore and she just had to tell Peter's mom how close we'd come to not showing up at all.

Sigh.

It's a good thing she's so pretty.

So, anyway, good times today, but no zoo. Zoo tomorrow. You come back then.

So Many Things are Wrong About this . . . .

I'm not sure where to start. David Codrea would say "Forget it, Jake, it's Chi-town," but I can't let it go. So let's start with the "Hired Truck Scandal." The link goes to Wikipedia's excellent summary, but the short-short version is that Chicago was supposed to be leasing privately-owned trucks for city jobs, thus saving all the expense of buying and maintaining their own fleet. What they did instead was to give huge amounts of money to trucking companies owned by the mafia and by friends and family of the Daleys (but I repeat myself.) They rented trucks by the hour which sat motionless for days on end. They also allowed the drivers of these trucks to drive off with huge amounts of the city's asphalt, which was then used in private projects. Your basic Chicago money-saving reform, in other words.

OK, that's the start. Then we have another scandal, in which Mayor Daley's nephew (Robert Vanecko) was for some reason given the job of investing $68 million in funds from the police, fire, and municipal pension funds. He poured the money down all manner of ratholes, making himself and his friends very rich in the process. Daley was shocked. Shocked, I say. Again, your basic day in Chicago, nothing to get too worked up about, I guess. Then Vanecko and his partners bought a 90% interest in a warehouse on Pulaski. The warehouse was near one of the city's asphalt suppliers, and since the city was now leasing a bunch of trucks long-term (remember, hiring the trucks by the hour for jobs didn't work out so well) they wanted to use the warehouse as a storage facility for their trucks. The city and Vanecko both say that he wasn't really involved in any negotiations, and the city says they moved in before Vanecko took ownership of the building.
They said it, I believe it, good enough for me.

That brings us to this week's story in the Chicago Sun-Times. Now we meet Candy Basselen, the owner of Springfield Supply, a steel fabrication shop operating, coincidentally enough, in that same warehouse on Pulaski. Well, it used to operate. Basselen says the city put her out of business by refusing to let her renew her business license last September when she moved into the warehouse. Their excuse? The warehouse (the one she doesn't own, remember?) doesn't meet city code. Maybe, like Basselen, you're thinking that sounds like a problem for an owner, not a tenant, but that wouldn't be The Chicago Way. In Chicago, the way it works is, somebody had a problem with Basselen in that warehouse, so Basselen had to have a problem, too, and somebody kept looking until they found a good problem for her to have. So she was completely out of business from September of last year to April of this year, when the city finally relented--after it was too late for her to stay in business because she had brought in zero dollars for eight months. I can't wait to find out what the real reason for all this was. My guess is that Basselen's business was in the way of a deal that was going to make Vanecko or another crony very rich.

Oh, and what were the city code violations for which the tenant of the warehouse on Pulaski was denied a business license, while the city used the same facility? The property didn't have enough trees and shrubs, and it didn't have a wrought-iron fence. One owner of the property says the required changes are "less than $75,000 of work." And apparently everyone involved is dead serious and saying all this with a straight face.

Chicago business licensing; because employing people sucks, and Chicago hates you for it.

White Supremacist Crazy-Head Arrested for Threatening Chicago Judges . . .

. . . . Chicago Tribune can't help but call him "blogger" instead.

I kid the Trib, but seriously, this is a guy who hosts radio shows and works with National Vanguard and other white supremacist groups, and to make your headline:

Blogger arrested in threats on federal judges

Well, it just seems like maybe they're letting some emotional content shine through, there.

I don't know a whole lot about Hal Turner except that he's another white supremacist (or separatist, or racialist, or whatever term he prefers) who doesn't get how the real world works. He's also full of beans, as evidenced by his years and years of making threats. He posted his ideas for unmanned drones with bombs to attack the Obama inauguration with the words, "I'm not saying what I'm going to do, but after Tuesday the name Hal Turner will go down in history." Only Tuesday came and went, he did nothing, and nobody cared.

He was actually arrested a couple of weeks ago on charges of inciting violence against state officials in Connecticut and elsewhere, but today it's the FBI who picked him up because the targets of his alleged threats were, again according to the Tribune, the three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals who ruled in favor of Chicago's handgun ban last month. I can certainly understand why people are angry at those particular judges, because the ruling was ridiculous (that was the one in which the 7th claimed that the right of self-defense is not fundamental; that the legislature creates the right to defend yourself, and if the legislature passes a law requiring that you submit to attack or murder, then that's that) but judges say and write stupid things all the time. These particular judges were swimming against the tide on that decision, and they knew it. They knew there was a pretty good chance that they would be overturned by the Supreme Court, and in fact the case has already been appealed to that body. So why freak out and threaten to kill these judges over that case?

You want my guess? Because, A., Hal Turner is the kind of nutjob who sees the world in terms of who he can blame for everything and never really needed a rational reason to whip out yet another death threat, and B., Hal Turner has learned from long experience that death threats are no big deal. He's been frothing away for years, not following through on any of these big macho threats, and nobody has done a whole lot about it. Reading between the lines, it looks like the Connecticut case may come to nothing as well; legal experts are saying that incitement will be hard to prosecute based on internet postings. Personally, I'm of the opinion that the internet is Serious Business--I saw it on a lol poster once--but the law doesn't see it that way. Apparently there's a de facto "loudmouth on the internet defense" built into most incitement statutes.

Security Theater Bredalucion Solidarity!

Update: Here's the link to the locks I mention later in the post.

Reading about Breda's experience being felt up by TSA agents* (and finding on the way back that they might stop at 2nd base if you tell them about your prosthetic leg up front--who says the system doesn't work) made me think about my experience traveling to the Blogger Weekend at the Training Facility Formerly Known as Blackwater. But when she found that all the intrusive, humiliating pretend-security had failed to locate her knife through the use of metal detectors, I felt true kinship. You see, I too have smuggled a deadly terrorist weapon into a secure area. The main difference is that mine was a .45 caliber pistol and ammunition and it went into checked baggage rather than carry-on.

I was sure I had written about this, but I can't find any mention of it other than this short teaser I put up as part of a wrap-up post after the trip:

Guessing game: Can the TSA's Reveal Imaging CT-80 scanner detect a steel/aluminum pistol and one box of ammunition packed in an ordinary pistol case? Place your bets; I'll tell you this evening.

Only, as near as I can tell, I never did tell anyone. Since this was before I acquired the Gun Blog .45, I was using my beloved SIG P220 as a carry gun. I had read the airline's regulations on transporting firearms quite carefully. I was to put the pistol, unloaded, into a locked hard case. The ammunition was to be packed in factory boxes, and I was to declare the firearm at the ticket counter, where I would be given a "declaration" form to fill out. Then, the luggage containing the case was to be taken to the security station, where I could declare it once more and the security professionals would open the case (I bought a specialized lock designed to be opened by TSA keys after being advised that I might be separated from my luggage and the TSA would cut my lock if they couldn't open it--leaving me on my own to find another lock, if I could, or be prohibited from flying with the firearm) and then add my declaration to the case before locking it again and sending my luggage on its way.

Flying with the firearm without the "declaration" form locked inside the case, I found, was considered a serious violation and could land me in a heap of trouble. But when I flew out of St. Louis, the process was no worse than the average professional dental tooth cleaning. It wasn't until the Blackhawk bus dropped me off at the Norfolk airport for my return that the ominously yellowish clouds appeared above the trailer park that was my evening. I declared my firearm and procured my declaration form without incident, then walked my overstuffed baggage about twenty feet to the right, where a grandfatherly gentleman with a kind smile was helping another customer. As soon as he'd finished putting the young lady's bags through the Reveal Imaging CT-80 scanner, he picked mine up and tossed it onto the conveyor.

"There's a firearm in that one, sir," I told him in chipper tones, "but I've got the declaration form here."

"OK, it'll set off the scanner, but we'll get it when it comes out." That sounded fair enough, but it was at this point that my phone rang, and I made the fatal error of answering it as the friendly old man turned to another traveler. I closed the phone and turned back just in time to see another highly-trained security professional pick up my bag and chuck it with considerable panache through the plastic curtain that led to the rear, "secure" area from which it would be loaded on the plane.
"Uh, that bag had a firearm in it! I need to put this declaration with it, don't I?" I asked with my charming midwestern naivete. His shrug was surly, yet expressive and soulful, and he turned and left without a word. I can only assume it was time for a coffee break and the union would have penalized him if he'd stayed to help. I turned to my friendly old man and explained to him that the bag with the firearm had just been panache-chucked into the loading area. I admitted that I hoped no one would think I was attempting to smuggle anything on board the plane. He considered my situation for a long moment, looking from me to the Reveal Imaging CT-80 scanner to the inscrutable plastic curtain as if checking my story and decided that I was telling the truth. He considered my options, the legal and ethical issues involved, and came up with an elegant solution:

"Well," he told me, "it didn't set off the scanner, so I guess it'll be OK."

We're all friends here, so I'm going to admit to a certain skepticism bordering on cynicism. The truth is, I thought he might be kidding. He was not, and he resented the implication. Words were exchanged, gestures were made, but he made no move to retrieve the bag. Strike two for Don. Eventually, I think it dawned on him that I must be very early for my flight and therefore would not sigh and go running for the gate soon, and he offered to get his supervisor. I very carefully and politely told him that I would appreciate it if he would do that for me. The supervisor, alas, did not find my predicament compelling.

"I mean," she allowed, looking up at me earnestly, "it made it through the scanner and didn't alert security, so it'll just get off at the next stop and you can get it then. Are you going to go nonstop from here?"
"Well, no, I have a stopover in Philadelphia first."
"OK, see, the luggage will go straight from plane to plane, so it probably won't go through security again. It'll be fine."
"Uh . . . right, but . . . if it does go through security, or I get caught with an undeclared .45-caliber pistol and ammunition on an airliner some other way, I'll be in Philadelphia. What do I tell them? The TSA supervisor in Norfolk said it'd be OK?"
The next moment was probably shorter than it seemed. There was silence and staring. I blinked, but I don't think she did. In retrospect, I wonder if the synchronizers on the gearshift of her mind were not a bit worn; she seemed to be having trouble downshifting. In the end, life unexpectedly animated her features and a smile spread across her face. She'd had an idea.

"Sir, would you like me to go get the bag out of the back so you can do the declaration?"

"I . . . would . . . appreciate that very much. Thank you."



*Google returns 37,700 results for "felt up by TSA agents." Just thought you should know.