Ack!

Illinois Carry and the Examiner publishing tool are both down . . . and I have the shakes. I guess I have to go do more actual work.

Obama "Kenyan Birth Certificate" Hoax

Why, it can't be! I'm SHOCKED, I tell you!

No, wait, no I'm not. This was completely predictable and widely predicted. Sorry, I forgot for a minute there.

Fine cotton business paper: $11

Inkjet printer: $35

1940 Royal Model KMM manual typewriter: $10

2 Shilling coin: $1

Pilot Varsity fountain pen: $3

Punkin' the Birthers: Priceless

Before you get your panties in a knot, observe that those aren't my words. I'm quoting the person who used a few dollars worth of office supplies to expose Birthers as what they are: people who really, truly believe in the power of magical thinking.

Hat Tip to Little Green Footballs.

Chicago GRE: SAF and Heller attorney file new suit over D.C.'s ban on bearing arms

SAF and Heller attorney file new suit

over D.C.'s ban on bearing arms

Alan Gura and the Second Amendment Foundation are headed back to court, this time suing the District of Columbia to force it to issue concealed carry permits. They've got four plaintiffs who should all have standing. If you're keeping track, this is three current lawsuits by Gura and the SAF that could all end up back in the Supreme Court before we're through.

Seattle Gun Rights Examiner Dave Workman has a piece on the same subject from a different angle; Dave writes from Seattle, near the home of the Second Amendment Foundation.
"Sotomayor confirmed as SAF sues District of Columbia over gun rights"

And the Gun Rights Examiners welcome a new GRE today, Grand Rapids Gun Rights Examiner Skip Coryell. Skip is an author and firearms trainer who founded the Second Amendment March and is active with MCRGO, the organization that inspired much of the current pro-gun movement in Illinois.

So there you have your daily assignments . . . . go read!

Back off, Montag!

Piss Tam off any more than she already is, and you might not live long enough to worry about the Mechanical Hound.

Personally, I have a large stash of old books of all stripes, including lots and lots of children's books. But what about the next generation? What are they supposed to read, Mama Voted for Obama! and a picture book with sissy, sparkly vampires in it?
Won't someone please think of the children?

Chicago GRE:Yet another anti-NRA hit piece misses the mark

Newest Chicago Gun Rights Examiner piece is up here:

Yet another anti-NRA hit piece misses the mark
A Sun-Times columnist apparently figured she'd dash off a little hit piece decrying the NRA for standing in the way of Important Scientific Research on Gun Violence. She killed her credibility in a couple of ways, though:

• She quoted Kristen Rand of the VPC approvingly and without questioning Rand's assertion that "information is the enemy for the gun lobby." Coming from someone who falsifies "research" and puts "IMPORTANT STUDY" labels on Google searches for a living--and makes high six figures doing it because the Joyce Foundation isn't selective enough to ask where their money is going--that's risible.
• She quoted Todd Vandermyde of the NRA, but she completely ignored what he said and simply stated that it was an admission of guilt, as if saying it made it so. What he actually did was to explain the bias that has been practiced in so-called "public health research on gun violence" for the last 20 years. It may or may not be convincing, but pretending that it was never said is not terribly convincing on her part.
• She conveniently didn't mention the numerous examples of troubled public health research ranging from bad methods to outright fraud that took me literally a few seconds to find and a few minutes to confirm. I didn't have room to mention all of them, either . . . . but the link is there. Reading them makes it obvious why the NRA would say that federal funding shouldn't be going to these quacks.

Go read the whole thing and tell a friend, please. I don't make much money on these columns, but I'm finding that they're important in other ways. If you think so too, then spread the word every chance you get.

Good Luck With That, Chi-Town

I doubt it'll matter much to the elderly widows turning in their husbands' rusty Iver-Johnson revolvers, but the Chicago Police Department is advertising that their gun turn-in next weekend will pass out Mastercard debit cards that can be used anywhere "except gun shops."

Three days after calling and being passed from department to department, I got a call back today . . . . it seems that they're simply "requesting" that people not use the filthy lucre in a filthy gunseller's den, because that would subvert the "intent" of the program.

Right. Have these people even met an American?

On the bright side, I think we're just about done with the polite fiction that they're purchasing weapons the state used to own (this is a "turn-in," not a "buy-back") and might even have seen the end of the old "criminals are turning in these guns" canard. I'd say they just admitted that they expect their customers to be people who take requests from police departments.

Coincidences

UPDATE: Well, yesterday, after I wrote this and set it to publish on Saturday morning, Congress went to work on a $2 billion funding bill to make sure the program could continue. Good . . . . news? I guess?

Yesterday something over at Captain of a Crew of One caught my eye. It seems that The Revenuers have decided to suspend their "Cash for Clunkers" program. It was supposed to pay car dealers big money for older, less fuel-efficient cars taken in trade for newer cars. The Revenuers put up $1 billion for the program because it sounds like a lot, it's a nice round number, and the people who proposed it weren't paying the freight. What the good Captain noticed was that The Revenuers said they had paid out $9.6 million out of the billion on almost 23,000 "clunkers" and were now suspending the program because they were afraid they were out of money. How could they be out of money after spending less than $10 million out of $1 billion? Because it took forever to get the program started, and now they have a huge backlog of deals The Revenuers haven't processed yet. By my math, if roughly 1% of their money represents, conservatively, about 22,000 deals, then the remaining 99% should be around 2,178,000 deals they have backlogged right now. That's a lot of backlog.

The reason I'm posting this here instead of just in Captain's comments is that it reminded me of another story I heard on Thursday. It appears that the EPA has rather abruptly adjusted the fuel economy of a lot of old models upward (though, to be fair, they say they've adjusted many downward as well.) That move resulted in lots of people finding that their clunkers are no longer clunky enough to get some of that free federal money nobody pays for, and that's a problem. There are even reports of dealerships calling customers to give them a choice between paying the difference or returning their new cars and taking back their clunkers.

When I first heard that story (confession time: I heard it on Rush Limbaugh's show) I figured it was a weird coincidence that looked really bad from a PR point of view. Now I wonder. It seems like we're asking rather a lot of coincidence these days.