Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Let’s reexamine where the Mexican drug lords get military-grade weapons, shall we?

Most of these weapons are being smuggled from Central American
countries or by sea, eluding U.S. and Mexican monitors who are focused
on the smuggling of semiauto- matic and conventional weapons purchased
from dealers in the U.S. border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona
and California.

[...]

These groups appear to be taking
advantage of a robust global black market and porous borders,
especially between Mexico and Guatemala. …

So we know that the screechy gun control crowd is way off base when they claim that drug cartels get their weapons of war in the United States, but what about the evil “assault” weapons that make Carolyn McCarthy soil herself in fear and trepidation?

Well, apparently, they do the same thing to John Kerry.

At Monday’s hearing, committee Chairman Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.,
said he had been shocked to see killings and beheadings “just a stone’s
throw across the Rio Grande from where we’re sitting this morning.”

[...]

Kerry called for a ban on the imports of assault rifles, such as
the AK-47, into the United States. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., and Sen.
Roger Wicker, R-Miss., opposed the idea.

Assault rifles bought in the United States are favorites among
cartel gunmen, who find them effective for the urban warfare, William
McMahon, deputy assistant director of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives, told the committee. ATF agents have traced many guns
confiscated in Mexico to purchases in the United States, McMahon said.

For example, more than 60 guns seized following a shootout
among factions of the Tijuana cartel in April 2008 were traced to
purchases in Los Angeles, Houston, Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle,
Philadelphia and Denver, McMahon said.

Tricky wording here.  It takes proper identification, paperwork and a background check (in some states) to purchase a semi-automatic rifle.  If you want to get an automatic rifle, you would have to buy a pre-ban machine gun, pay a $200 fee and go through numerous background checks. How many of you think that Mexican drug lords would be able to meet those requirements?  So, how many of you think that the Mexican cartels get these weapons legally?

Now… raise your hands if you believe that banning the import of “assault” rifles into the United States will stem their supply to criminals in Mexico, especially when there’s a cheap easy supply of scary weapons of war coming in from Guatemala?

Now… raise your hands if you agree that John Kerry is just a ginormous tool.

I seem to remember growing up in a little place called the Soviet Union.  For those of you who don’t know, that little place was run by communists.  And for those of you who don’t know what life was like there, I can describe it in a single word:  SHITHOLE.

I remember having no toilet paper.  Only those with special connections could get toilet paper.  My aunt could.  Sometimes.  The rest of the time, you wiped your ass with wadded up Pravda, which is really all that rag is good for anyway.

My parents would send me to the store for milk.  It was rationed.  I received four bottles, and because the sack I used to carry the milk back from the store had a hole in it, and one of the bottles of milk slipped through and fell to the ground, shattering.  We couldn’t get any more.  My parents were pissed.  I was happy.  I never liked milk much.

I remember parties.  The height of opulence was having vodka and sardines for your friends when they came over.  Sometimes you even got some ingredients for a charming salad Olivier.  Sans chicken.  You’d use gross bologna as a substitute.  Rotten potatoes. And pickles.  We put pickles in everything.

We didn’t have shit, but neither did anyone else (except those with connections).  So we were all equally miserable (except for those with connections).

And now, the communists want to bring back those heavenly days of bliss and equality.  They claim the current Russian government has ruined the Russian economy… as if they can do better.

Russia’s Communist Party is to hold nationwide rallies on April 4 to
call for the government to step down over what it calls a failure to
deal with the economic crisis, the party’s deputy head said on Monday.

Ivan Melnikov, who is also a member of Russia’s lower house of
parliament, said the government’s anti-crisis measures “were either
ineffective or were carried out in the interests of a small circle of
individuals.”

Ummm… because the communists never did anything that benefitted a small group of individuals during their reign, right?

Russia has been hard hit by the global financial crunch that was
sparked by the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States last
summer and quickly spread to the rest of the world. Unemployment is up,
and the ruble has lost about 40% of its value. The economic slump has
also seen a drastic decline in oil prices, Russia’s most important
export.

Yep, the global economic crisis is ALL our fault, and so is Russia’s shitty economic situation.  It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that their economy is completely dependent on oil and natural gas and based their entire spending plan on the premise that oil and natural gas prices would remain obscenely high, as they were during the summer of 2008.  Granted, external demand for Russian exports is also plummeting thanks to the global economic downturn, but when you put all your eggs in one basket in a blind devotion to a single line of exports to prop up your entire economy, what the hell do you expect?

I remember telling a politics professor at Johns Hopkins – in reply to her euphoric pronouncements about the fall of the Berlin Wall – that I fully expected history to repeat itself and the communists to assume power again after a couple of decades of failed crony capitalism.  She disagreed.  I argued.  She gave me a “C.”

We’re not there… yet.

Every once in a while, I’ll troll the Internet for things to amuse me while I hang around the house alone, waiting for the munchkins to return from their various adventures in the neighborhood.  I’ll generally unwind from a long day by searching for funny stories.

And then I run across something like this, and I keep wondering what the writer had to be thinking when he wrote this:

“He volunteered to police that he had a stick and a
torch inserted in his anus for sexual gratification. He had inserted it
because he was depressed.”

For those of you who don’t know, a torch is a flashlight.  This numbskull had a flashlight up his ass.  Apparently he had a case of the blues and thought that inserting a foreign object into his anus would cure the problem.

I remember watching a video of a newscaster when I was in broadcast journalism school, trying to keep a straight face while reporting on the Lorena Bobbitt story.  I remember thinking I’d never be that unprofessional when reporting on a legitimate news story.

And then, several years later, I had to interview Charlie Dick, the late Patsy Cline’s second husband.

And when your morning show co-host is just as much of an immature jackass as you are, your segment turns out to be a complete disaster!

So I can’t help but wonder what the writer had to be thinking when writing a paragraph that involved the words “inserted,” “torch,” and “anus.”  I’m betting he was chuckling for a while.

But hey – at least he wasn’t live on the air with thousands of listeners realizing that their morning show co-host is a complete asshat.