STALKER

It appears that I have a stalker.

All I know about her is that she often passes my house on foot, obviously checking me out. She is attractive, dark, younger than Middle Age, and a tenacious, very determined female. And, no, I have not yet filed a police report.

In this b’logging business, wherein an individual’s safety is sometimes at risk due to angry, sometimes deranged individuals, we learn to be careful. For instance, right after I published the Twelve Danish Cartoons of the Muslim prophet, Mohammed, I received several emails and letters in what I think is Arabic or Persian. Are they threats or do they agree with my rather strong position? I don’t know, I don’t read any Near Eastern script. People die daily for the stupidest reasons. I would rather go filled with years and wisdom in my own bed.

There were, of course, nasty emails in English. I don’t mind those as much since their meaning is obvious.

I have been aware of this ‘stalker’ for some time. But this evening, with dinner on the stove, I caught a glimpse of her skulking around the back of my little apartment. I waited for the right moment and held my breath as I inched toward the metal door ever so slowly. Silently, Stealthily.

Flinging it open I saw her face to face, up close and personal, right there on the mat just beyond the opening.

I was so startled that I couldn’t speak.

She uttered only a single word, simple, direct one syllable.

“Meow” was all she said.

IT IS TIME TO UNFUND THE GEORGIA MUSIC HALL OF FAME AND THE SPORTS HALL OF FAME

I first got the news from a NewTown Macon mid-week post. Then it hit the media.

Shudder….the Georgia General Assembly is wrangling over how much to slash the cash pipeline flowing from taxpayer pockets into the veins of the Georgia Music Hall of Fame and its sister venue, the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame.

The Tourist bureau is outraged, of course, arguing that if we de-fund the museums, it will damage the renaissance taking place downtown. It won’t, of course, that’s knee-jerk posturing. Any loss of funds should be offset by increased promotion and haqrd work on the part of the employees and the community.

It’s about time to have a serious debate. These two boondoggles should have become self-sufficient years ago.

I ride or walk past the GMHF two or three times a week and always count the cars in the parking lot. It is empty or nearly so almost every day. Even the most casual observer would think that this is not a thriving business attracting thousands of daily visitors off the interstates.

Museum folk don’t have to bust butt when they are lavishly fueled and underwritten from the public trough.

I remember well a night in September of ’06 when the Music Hall of Fame opened. It was a gala and a half, a huge event for our small city. Yours truly spent much of the night behind the bar of the club I owned along with my son Rob. We had a great band going, food went fast, drinks even faster. The evening saw a wonderful mix of hotshots skipping out of the main event to hear our band and a packed house of regulars. Party people, especially given the amount of alcohol available, spoke freely.

I was told in no uncertain terms by folks close to Governor Miller, Grandpop of the GMHF, that the politicians in Atlanta were giving the museum five years to became solvent. If it didn’t, it would be Shanghaied to Atlanta, or Athens where it belonged in the first place according to the powerful bozos (Democrats, largely) who felt from the beginning that sleepy little Macon could never host so important a facility.

More than twice five years have come and gone and the General Assembly seems ready to reduce the download of dough. Maybe. It might be that they are posturing, pretending to save the taxpayers a tiny bit of money in the grand scheme of the massive State budget. Maybe Macon’s chickens are returning to the roost.

The place seemed to start off with a bang. Lots of activity: Tourists. Parties. Busloads of School kids. Then, after a couple of years things changed, becoming less dynamic, less fulfilling, vanilla. The great ones on the staff, those with drive, imagination, flare, and a sense of innovation, individuals like Nikki Randall, Marty Willets, Rob Blunt, Paul Brown, even Newt Collier the ultimate volunteer, found themselves out in the cold, no longer needed, replaced by others better connected politically. From that point on the Georgia Music Hall of Fame went down the well-worn primrose-lined path to perdition.

What does all this mean? The General Assemblyneeds to give the Halls a firm deadline for the lopping of funds….and stick with it. They will never rise to any real kind of greatness, stand alone success, until the umbilical chord is cut.

NRA ALERT FOR GEORGIANS

Received the following notice from the NRA which regularly sends out 'alerts' state by state warning of impending Second Amendment oriented legislation. Please read and act. I was unable to get an answer from my own state senator earlier in the year. His refusal to acknowledge my letter will become a political issue.

GEORGIA: Most Important Right-to-Carry Reform Bill in Over 20 Years Needs Your Help! House Bill 89, critical Right-to-Carry Reform legislation, is being held up by the Georgia State Senate! Back in January the Georgia House passed HB 89 by an overwhelming vote of 111 to 58. THE SENATE IS STILL REFUSING TO CONCUR! It is crucial that HB 89 be brought up for a FINAL floor vote. HB 89 would make numerous improvements to Georgia's right-to-carry law by expanding the areas where permit holders may carry to include state parks, public transportation, and restaurants; reduce the time limit to issue a permit, and allow permit holders to possess a firearm in any private motor vehicle while on any publicly accessible parking lot. Help protect your right to self-defense in Georgia. The 2008 Session ends Friday, April 4, so please make sure that you call your State Senator, as well as State Senators Joseph Carter and Ronnie Chance, members of the Senate Conference Committee, today and urge them to bring HB 89 up for a final floor vote. Senators Carter and Chance can be reached by phone at (404) 651-7738. To find your Senator and contact information, please click here. Please also call Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle at (404) 656-5030 or via email at casey.cagle@ltgov.ga.gov and Senate Majority Leader Tommie Williams at (404) 656-0089 or via email at tommie@tommiewilliams.com and urge them to request HB 89 come up for a final floor vote.

Springtime Is Supposed To Mean Baseball

We lost our baseball team this week.

Wasn’t a particularly great team, but it was a fun team, and it was ours. We attended games in what seemed like large numbers, we baseball starved fans who preferred the antics of the bottom of the minors to the drugs and bloated salaries of the Show.

Attended games in an old ballpark where the kids of summer played on real grass and dreamed of going to ‘The Bigs’ in a far-off someday that will likely never come.

But they entertained us well, played some pretty fair ball, showed spunk and courage under fire, and filled sweltering evenings with something to do that wasn’t television, movies, or bar-hopping.

These were family-friendly times. A kind of throw back to the 1950’s…or ‘20’s when your local nine was more important than any Big League outfit in some far-off city you might never get a chance to visit.

Heck, we lost the whole league last week. Our pain is multiplied in smaller cities where baseball was once the true national pastime and young kids in uniform were heroes to even younger kids with freckled faces and missing teeth, dreaming to be just like those big boys. Sign my baseball sir? Sir is glad to. At eighteen he’s as much caught up in the moment’s excitement as the ten-year-old standing before him.

We were promised a return in 2009. Won’t happen. One day there will be an announcement buried on page four of the DAILY BLATT AND BUGLE’S sports section that the league is gone forever, forced to close due to the perilous economics of the times.

Maybe someday. Maybe.

One More Example of Why Mike Adams Is Such A Pain In The Ass To His University's Administration
Way To Go, Mike

But before I leave for my trip to UNC-Gomorrah, I want to share my latest bit of correspondence with the administration here at UNC-Webmasters (hereafter, UNCW). It should provide some insight into this interesting question: Which is the biggest problem in our universities today, a) Administrative Intolerance, or b) Administrative Incompetence?


You have to give Mike Adams credit for having the largest testicles in the world of what used to pass for ‘Higher Education’.

A professor (but not Full Professor of criminology) at UNC Wilmington, Adams stands out among his limp-wristed academic colleagues as a hard-hitting, often abrasive, pain in the glutes of college administrators everywhere.

Most of this column is taken up with a one-sided correspondence between Adams and Rosemary DePaolo, Chancellor of his university. :I say ‘one sided’ because that clay-footed administrator doesn’t respond to his requests to advertise a Christian speaker. Adams must be getting under her thick skin these days. He has ‘tenure’ meaning he can’t be fired for insubordination.

Great little piece. Gives us an insightful glimpse into the fractured concept of ‘free speech’ on today’s hidebound, politically correct universities. You will find it at The Chancellor’s Dog Ate My Homework

It appeared a few days back on Town Hall

Congressman Pete Hoekstra
Muslim Extremists Do Not and Cannot Understand
FREE SPEECH

Criticism of Islam, however, has led to violence and murder world-wide. Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie over his 1988 book, "The Satanic Verses." Although Mr. Rushdie has survived, two people associated with the book were stabbed, one fatally. The 2005 Danish editorial cartoons lampooning the prophet Muhammad led to numerous deaths. Dutch director Theodoor van Gogh was killed in 2004, several months after he made the film "Submission," which described violence against women in Islamic societies. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Dutch member of parliament who wrote the script for "Submission," received death threats over the film and fled the country for the United States.

To the radical Islamist, ‘free speech’ is a dirty term. He doesn’t understand it, or any of our traditional Western freedoms, for that matter. Nor the long process involved in bringing something like most of the the Bill of Rights to Democratic nations across the globe.

Peter Hoekstra, born in the Netherlands, is the ranking Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Mr. Hoekstra penned an opinion column for the Wall Street Journal this past week. He comments especially on the concept of free speech and how it is foreign to the hard core Muslim who prefers to live under Shariah Law just as his forebears did in the eighth century.

It is quite a piece, well worth our attention for it captures the contrast between one system and the other in light of Geert Wilders short Film, FITNA, discussed in this b’log twice already.

You may access Hoekstra’s essay at Islam and Free Speech

It was brought to our attention by the good folks at the American Congress for Truth.

DICK MORRIS
Hillary's Fantasies Continue

These “embellishments” of Hillary’s biography are similar to those of Al Gore during his race in 2000. But her claims to foreign policy experience and domestic policy influence in the White House are far more important. Nobody ever questioned the experience of competence of the Vice President as he ran for the top job based on his decades of serving in federal office. But Hillary has had just seven rather uneventful years in the Senate (and she hasn’t shown up for the last year while she was campaigning for president.) We have to take Hillary’s word about what role she played in the Administration’s policy formulation. And her word has been increasingly disputed.

Dick Morris. On Hillary’s embellishments. Again.

This guy won’t let up, will; he? He seems to be relishing his ‘revenge’ on the former first lady. Suspect their enmity will follow them both beyond the grave.

This column is probably better written than most of the columns Morris has churned out lately, so vast* is his output, so much of his time is devoted to his role as pundit. Wonder what he will do to fill all that time after November’s general election?

Read it here Hillary’s Soccer Fantasy and ask yourself the all-important question: did Hillary make a good soccer mom>

Ciao

*as opposed to ‘half vast’.

GOING GREEN
On Boulevard
PIG-TAILED LIGHT BULBS

For several months I have been replacing burned out 'traditional' light bulbs with those government mandated (ugh!) cork screw things that cost a week's pay and last, it is claimed, for years. They are both economical (in the long rung (or is it 'wrong'? and will husband our country's precious energy resources until we can conquer enough of the Middle East to bring the cost of energy down.

Great. I want to cooperate with the feds...and save money and already use as little power as possible. I also recycle (sometimes) and plough vegetable scraps and coffee grounds into the garden.

But I'm not sure about these new bulbs. They don't give off as much light as the old, incandescent variety. And they change the color spectrum in the apartment. Freshly prepared ood often looks not a little moldy, it is harder to see what I am putting on the checks I write, and, horror of horrors, in the the tiny bathroom it is impossible to tell from the color of the water whether the commode got flushed after the last leak.

Right now I have a garbage bag filled with the old-fashioned bulbs hanging in the garage, each packed carefully in layers of newspaper. One day after the federal mandate has emptied the stores of the older product, each of these little fellows should be wroth at least ten bucks on the black market.

Just call me 'Pusher." Some of you who are worried about the state of the Stock Market of late, might consider putting any leftover cash into bulbs.

Wonder if we could get more jail time for selling crack cocain?

Sonny Perdue Says 'No' To SUnday Sales

That Georgia sits athwart the buckle of the Bible Belt is no exaggeration.

The state is dominated by Baptists…Southern Baptists, White Baptists, Black Baptists, and Reformed Baptists, Baptists, Baptists everywhere and not a drink to drop.

Baptists, there are more than a hundred and thirty separate variants of them, and most of those are found right here in Georgia.

And most of them associate a social glass of vino with a hard drunken bout complete with delerium tremens and hangover in perpetuity.

Sonny Perdue, our governor, normally a pretty rational guy, is dead set against any form of local option Sunday Sales….and he says so here: The Tragic Cost of Sunday Alcohol Sales sounding just a bit too much of a tent preacher’s doing his thing by kerosene lanterns,

Sonny is wrong. Sonny is in error. I respect too much the office and man to say he is full of it.

DICK MORRIS
BEWARE THE ADVISORS SURROUNDING HILLARY

The same team that freed hardened terrorists to win political markers for Hillary - the same team that's now willing to tear the Democratic Party apart in its desperate bid to steal the nomination for Hillary - would once again be empowered to free the guilty and endanger the innocent, whenever it suited their political needs.

Busy Beaver, Dick Morris, takes a look at the team of advisors that currently surrounds Mrs. CLinton, many of whom once surrounded her husband in the nineties. Not mentioned by name in the column, many of these names are nonetheless familiar as they served as attack jackals whenever Billary got his tail caught in a crack. And, according to Mr. Morris, they feel a kind of earned or unearned entitlement to another eight years quarterbacking the Presidency.

Horsecrapola, of course, these clowns are no more entitled than is Mrs. Clinton.

From this piece we learn something of the smarmy political machinations behind presidential pardons of convicted Puerto Rican terrorists in the days before 9/11. Amazing stuff.

Read it for yourself at: Team We Can’t Trust Then ask yourself the question, “Are these ‘advisors’ up to the task of advising a president of the United States?

GEERT WILDERS ANTI-QUORAN FILM
FITNA
NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE

A week or so ago we called attention to a NYT profile of Dutch Politician and outspoken burr under the blanket of European Islamofascists, Geert Wilders. (Scroll down)

Mr. Wilders was waiting for distribution and showing of his fifteen minute film which ties murder, violence, and atrocity to the teachings found in the Quoran itself. Nobody in his home country would show the film, but just today it came online thanks to the Internet and is now available to everybody. Take fifteen minutes and watch FITNA *

I just now vied the thing. It is, perhaps, the most disturbing short film I have ever seen.

The difference between US (Westerners) and THEM (Muslims) is this: We view religion and state as two separate entities. To the Muslim they are one and the same. The state is governed only in accordance with the Quoran, not recognizing that much has changed in fourteen hundred years. That’s a long time to be cooking on camel dung and pounding the hot sands.

From Riverside Red
Getting It Right About Obama

DICK MORRIS REPORTS ON
"Hillary's List of Lies"

Why has McCain jumped out to a nine-point lead over Obama and a seven-point lead over Hillary in the latest Rasmussen poll? OK, Obama has had the Rev. Wright mess on his hands. And Hillary has come in for her share of negatives, like the Richardson endorsement of Obama and the denouement of her latest lie — that she endured sniper fire during a trip to Bosnia. But why has McCain gained so much in so short a period of time? Most polls had the general election tied two weeks ago.

Here is a neat little Dick Morris offering called, simply, Hillary’s List of Lies

He starts of listing the candidates falsehoods she has already admitted to. He then goes on to detail lies she has never acknowledged as such. It’s quite long. Some of them go way back to her days as First Lady.

Taken together they tell a story, a somewhat sordid yet sad tale of a bad character flaw Mrs. Clinton seems unable to shake.

There is much more to the column but that should whet your appetite, ae we continue to watch the unfolding nemesis, a fall from both grace and viability, that is the real story of a presidential campaign gone bad.

Speaking Of Little Old Ladies.....

This just came into my mailbox a few minutes ago. It is a hilarious story from a friend in Norway.

SILENCE FROM COUNCILMAN ERIC ERICKSON
Does He Really Hate Senior Citizens?

An article written here a few days ago titled CITY COUNCILOR ERIC ERICKSON
RAMPS IT UP AGAINST SENIOR CITIZENS (scroll down) has brought in a flood of email.

In the piece thirty-two-year-old Macon City Council member was chided for making derisive, snide comments about Senior Citizens.

The most frequent question asked has been, "Did Ericson ever comment about your article? Did he explain himself to you?"

The answer is a resounding 'NO'!!!

Apparently Mr. Erickson has chosen to ignore the charges and is taking the usual politician's (read 'cowardly) tactic of pretending to be aloof, above the fray, as it were, perhaps too busy 'doing the people's business', echoing thus Mr. Clinton's attempt to avoid impeachment and get back to fun and cigars in the Oval Office.

I don't know what Erickson is thinking. I do know that at least twice in recent weeks he has insulted a generation of Americans whose contributions have made ours the Nation many would like her to be.

The point might be made once again that Mr. Ericson, ranked as this country's sixty-ninth most influential conservative, is a better pundit/blogger than he is an actual, sho'nuff, Birkenstocks-on-the-pavement politician.

FROM THE JPFO
A FREE SPEECH
FIRST AMENDMENT CASE

Here are two important links from our friends at the JPFO (Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership) that came in only late this afternoon.

It deals with a potential First Amendment Case which will probably be heard by the SUPREME COURT at the end of the week. A chap named Rick Stanley has been jailed for six years for threatening, in court, to sue two judges. He was already on a terrorist watch and had run afoul of a local gun law subsequently struck down as unconstitutional.

From what I gather from these two links (below) the guy was railroaded by some vindictive judges who used their vast power to jail the poor guy quite illegally.

The Links:

1. http://www.jpfo.org/articles-assd/rick-stanley.htm A concise write-up about the case

2. http://youtube.com/watch?v=qn3_2eIQ684 a statement by stanley’s lawyer made for You Tube. Have to say it is refreshing to see a lawyer working in a T-Shirt.

MALVINA REYNOLDS
LITTLE BOXES

Long before there was "Weeds" on SHowtime, there was Malvina Reynolds, song-writer, folk singer, critic of society.

Her reaction to what she saw as an increasingly conformist, coercive society was to write LITTLE BOXES way back in the fifties.

There are hundreds versions of this folk-ish song. This is the original. We published the lyrics oncve upon a time, before there was Thou Tube.

Wonder what she'd be writing if she lived in the era of the Islamofascist Terrorist and the American Neocon?

DICK MORRIS:
ANOTHER HILLARY FALSEHOOD

She said that Chelsea was jogging around the World Trade Center on 9/11 and happened to duck into a coffee shop when the airplanes hit. She said that this move saved Chelsea's life. But Chelsea told Talk magazine that she was in a friend's apartment four miles from ground zero when the first plane hit. Her friend called her, waking her up, and told her to turn on the TV. On television, she saw the second plane hit, disproving Hillary's claim that "she heard the plane hit. She heard it. She did."

Dick Morris gives us a glimpse into the mind of Hillary Clinton, the candidate who can make up a believable lie in the middle of a speech or interview.

The piece is short and sweet. In Hillary’s Other Fabrication

It appeared this morning on NEWSMAX and will be all over the ‘Net before noon.