When to only tool you have is a Hammer

All problems begin to look like a nail.

"Historians looking back at this period in America’s development will consider it to be profoundly odd that at the exact moment when violent crime hit a 50-year low, the nation’s police departments began to gear up as if the country were expecting invasion — and, on occasion, to behave as if one were underway. The ACLU reported recently that SWAT teams in the United States conduct around 45,000 raids each year, only 7 percent of which have anything whatsoever to do with the hostage situations with which those teams were assembled to contend."

Well, after all, a bureaucracy's budget must, at all costs, be justified. 

Cold Fury is one of my favorite blogs. I think the only reason Mike doesn't have a bleeding ulcer is his blog.

I do believe it is time for a drumstick.

Stop me if you've heard this one...

Three Choir boys break into the house of an off duty police officer.
Sound familiar?
Said officer is awakened by the sound of breaking glass.  The police officer shoots at all three, kills one.
The news this evening refers to the recently deceased as the "alleged home invader". Let's see, breaking and entering and the room temperature choir boy is in dahouse!  "Alleged" seems a stretch.

Two of the perps escaped. Whether they had extra orifices is unknown at this point.
If so, they'll turn up at Ben Taub Hospital before too long.

Another case of really poor victim selection.*  The house was occupied. This is Texas. The odds of the homeowner having a gun of some type is extremely high. The intended victim happened to be a police officer.
And, there's this little thing called the "Castle Doctrine" which does not require the homeowner to run-hide nor ask what the uninvited "guest's" intentions are prior to shooting him dead.

Kudos to the cop for removing one miscreant from the gene pool.  
Eventually the vunables will decided the risk is to great and maybe a starter job at McDonalds isn't so bad after all, or they will be thinned out by "natural" selection.  The crime rate in states with armed citizens continues to decline.


* I am surprised that no Democrat strategist has seized upon the obvious need for a federal government funded training program for the vunable home invaders to make better choices in their victims. The whole background check / gun registration / gun confiscation thing just isn't working out.
The program obviously will need funding of at least one billion dollars, but they'll settle for 455 million if Al Sharpton is made director of the program.  Oh, and Charlie Rangel too.

In other news

Oh, I almost forgot.
As I arrived home from the auto parts store the news regarding the Zimmerman trial verdict came in over the radio.
Not guilty.
Let the riots begin.

It will not change a thing in your personal circumstances if you participate in a flash mob.
Only you can do that.
But,
you have to make that decision first.

If you decide you cannot, you cannot.
And odds being what they are, you never will.

Traffic tickets

I've had a grand total of two in the 37 years I've been driving. I can assure you it's not because I always abide by the speed limit.
Proud Hillbilly's post about her long commute and lost keys got me to thinking about my bi-weekly drives to Austin and my own daily commute.

I get this funny, "something's not right feeling" sometimes when I'm booking it down the highway.
I've learned to listen to that quiet voice that tells me to back off the throttle just a bit.  70 might be better than 80.

It happened on the way home from work tonight. Left late, after the rush hour traffic was done and done, but there was a wreck on 290  that was messing things up so I elected to take the tollways to get past most of it.

On the inclined entrance ramp to the Westpark tollway not a car in sight in front of me. One thing my little Scion tC will do is climb hills.  A little tweak on the gas pedal drops it into 5th gear and it actually accelerates, going up hill.  It pisses off pickup truck drivers tailgating me. They do catch up eventually though.*
The speed limit in the first few miles of the tollway where I get on is 55. I was at 70 and climbing before I got to the top of the hill.  As I was coming to the merge where it becomes two lanes and the speed limit bumps up to 65.
 I got that funny feeling and my foot reflexively backed off the throttle.
I was decelerating from about 72 to 70 as I blew past an unmarked, and I mean "unmarked" PoPo SUV sitting on the right shoulder.
White.  No Markings.  No antennae. Very dark tinted windows.
I did make out a light bar in the back window as I got closer. The dead give away was the driver's window down and the radar gun. Of course by the time I saw that, the brain is saying, " well, I'm screwed."
So I just held it steady at 70 and kept going, watching my rear view mirror to see if the PoPo lit it up.
He didn't, so after I got over the next overpass I drove like one of my great aunts the rest of the way home.**


*  If I happen to run up behind someone with out of state plates. I've written about this before people! If you are going to bunch up and drive slow, do it in one freaking lane!

** Actually, the cops down here tend to work speed traps in pairs. Not seeing another after a few miles I ramped the RPM back up.  Hey. I haz to get home and gots to grocery shop on the way.

Uhm...Yes

Should the NYPD Even be Issued Firearms?

And be required to spend much, much more range time. 

(and maybe a smidge of tactical training as well)

In light of the fact that it appears that all nine of the civilians recently shot in New York, were shot by the police, Mr. Owens believes that the beat officers should have applied less lethal force.

Let's see.  Sumdood is pointing a pistol at you, how do you respond:  a) Night Stick. b) Taser or c.) Service Pistol.
Mr. Owens believes answer b) is the correct answer.
I kept reading between the lines searching for hints of sarcasm in Mr. Owen's post at PJ Media, if it was there, I missed it.
If sumdood pulled a gun on me, I don't think I'd be drawing a taser. Hell the reflexive muscle contractions alone would probably cause him to squeeze off a round.

Police Militarization and No Happy Ending

The Harris County Sheriff's Department raids a few massage parlors.
I don't know if the add preceding the video will still be the same, but when I watched it, it was a clinic's or Doctor's add for back and neck pain. Targeted advertising?
From the article, petitions and lawsuits were filed, which sounds more "civil" than "criminal".
So, not only did citizens have to petition before the cops did anything about it, the Sheriff's Dept. thought it necessary to go full face cover anti-terrorist mode to arrest a bunch of whores.
K, so it was only one deputy in full face cover. Que'?
I happened to witness about 5 unmarked cars, small ones mind you, Impalas I think. Dark tinted windows, all white no markings, aggressively maneuvering through traffic a while back. They got hung up in the exit traffic I was idling in. I saw one of the guys in one of the cars. All decked out in complete black Tacticool talking feverishly on his radio.
Normally, having a LEO in sight gives me a sense of security.
The way those guys were driving, the black gortex, and the blacked out windows did not.
I was more concerned about them than what they might have been chasing.

Mastermind Criminal Draws $300K Bail Requirement

Thank the Almighty this guy is off the streets.

One thing bothers me about this though. Because he walked in and tried to hold up the Po Po Station, he gets bail set at $300K.  I've seen bail set much lower in news reports for much more heinous crimes.

Oh, wait. My bad. The Po Po are the authorities having jurisdiction and should be the only ones to have guns.

How dare he.

More on Holder and OK City Bombing

I just found this on Free Republic

Documents obtained by Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show then Clinton Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder authorized members of the FBI to provide explosives to Oklahoma City bombing criminals Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols immediately prior to the April, 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building.
Holder had authorized the FBI to provide the explosives to McVeigh and Nichols in conjunction with a Clinton Administration undercover operation named PATCON, an acronym for “Patriot Conspiracy.” As Jesse Trentadue describes it, “PATCON was designed to infiltrate and incite… militia[s] and evangelical Christians to violence so that the Department of Justice could crush them.”
Both Waco and Ruby Ridge are now known to have been PATCON inspired, Department of Justice plots. Shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing, Holder instructed FBI agents to recover from Terry Nichols any remainder of the explosives the Bureau had provided him and McVeigh.
To the chagrin of Eric Holder, the explosives were later discovered by another agency, complete with the fingerprints of both Nichols, McVeigh and 2 FBI agents.
Holder had reportedly offered Nichols respite from the death penalty for his cooperation in recovering the explosives. Obviously the Deputy Attorney General considered covering up his criminal complicity in the bombing eminently worth sparing Nichols just punishment for the murders of 168 innocent Americans.
Jesse Trentadue accidentally came across PATCON while investigating the murder of his brother Kenneth at the hands of the Clinton Department of Justice.

An FBI informant familiar with the Oklahoma City bombing story, Kenneth was found hanged in his cell after having been jailed by the FBI. Though an official FBI report had listed Kenneth as a suicide, it was obvious that he had been severely beaten and his throat cut….

 

 Geez I'm really getting paranoid.  I need that tin foil hat of my hubby's, but I smell a rat.  A big fat rat.

Well this is not good

Okay, yesterday my gun talk radio show posted up on their facebook an article which apparently links an Eric Holder led FBI operation to the Oklahoma City bombing.

That's right.  Apparently, according to these sources, there was a sting operation set up much like Fast and Furious which resulted in the bombing.

Evidence was tampered with and a witness that could implicate those on high is dead.

I'm not sure of the truth of this because I can't verify the source but I'm hoping that some of my blog-buds who are much smarter than I am can pick up on this and dig in.

If this is true.........   I'm speechless..........   wow.

The two articles that were linked to both via facebook are here and well.......  the article on American Free Press is now missing........   hmmmm


UPDATE:  Kenneth Trentadue was an FBI Informant.

TSA Keeping Us Safe............

Geez, this goes beyond nuts.

Apparantly there are three old ladies that have come forward claiming to have been stripped search by the TSA, on of which had her panties pulled down in a private room.  We've heard of the TSA making elderly folks remove their Depends/Adult Diapers, humiliting innocent elderly people just to keep us 'safe'.

I sure am glad to know that they are putting their best foot forward and using their common sense so that we can all be safe.

Good god. Benjamin Franklin once said, "Those who are willing to sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither."

What in the hell have we as a country allowed to happen to ourselves where our individual freedoms are so much under assult?

I am almost resigned to never fly if I can help it.  I don't want to be groped, prodded or treated like a criminal so that I can take a trip somewhere.  This is freaking insane.

Fast and Furious Scandal gets "Furiouser"

No commentary. The link has the detail.


Entire Case File on Brian Terry Killing Missing




.

What's that in the sky?!!

A bird?  A plane?
No! it's the Tomball PD!
Yes, that Tomball, of Goodson's Cafe fame (where they have the chicken fried steak that makes Uncle Jay growl in subsonic frequencies)
Irony. They got this just in time for the rain to finally kick in.


Via Al Fin Potpourri

Oh! those sneaky Police!

The global warming gig just isn't what it used to be. Jail? Really?
Even the police are tired of it.

Better late than never..I guess

Or as a subtitle "never bring your fists to a knife fight, or how about never bring a knife to a gunfight"

Police said officer C.E. Hightower and another off-duty officer were working an extra job directing traffic in the parking lot of the El Chaparral club about 2:15 a.m. when they saw a group of men get into a confrontation outside a nearby gas station.

Some lack of situational awareness?

The officers went to the station at 4401 W. 18th near the 610 West Loop and intervened. They pulled one of the men away, but he went to his vehicle, grabbed a knife and began stabbing another man he had been fighting.

Hightower saw the assault and ordered the man several times to drop the knife. The man ignored the commands and continued to stab the other man

Knife vs. gun

Hightower, fearing for the victim's safety and the safety of others nearby, fired several shots, hitting the knife-wielding man, HPD officials said. The man got up after he was shot, climbed into his vehicle and drove a short distance, plowing through several bushes and striking a few cars in the bar's parking lot before he stopped.

"fearing for the victim's safety and the safety of others nearby" Johnny on the spot that officer was.

Not only that, he had a high degree of confidence in his aim, considering the the proximity of the "perp" to the victim and "others nearby". And yet, the "perp" managed to get up, get into his car and drive a short distance before he passed out from blood loss (and apparently bled out).

Don't get me wrong. I support the police. They have really dicey job. But this situation was completely FUBAR on their part. They managed to let one of the combatants walk away from them, to his car, grab a knife, walk back and stab the other combatant to death. Then the officer finally shot him.

The sad state of affairs is that the police are crime janitors.

Keep your powder dry.