Shall Not Be Questioned – Page 893 – The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …

Yes We Can!

Apparently that’s what the Dems were chanting as they crossed the magical 216 number to pass the Health Care Monstrosity. Let me just update the Democrats on what this really means.

YES WE CAN! Send you back to your district in 2010.
YES WE CAN! Put the Republicans back in charge of Congress, ensuring you never see your bribe pay off promised by Pelosi and her far left leadership.
YES WE CAN! Make your benefactor Obama a one term President who will be such political poison by 2010 and 2012 that we won’t be able to do anything to help you.
YES WE CAN! Implement a comprehensive market-based overhaul the Dem health care plan, getting the government out of deciding for you, and putting the people back in charge.
YES WE CAN! Ensure the Democratic Party locks itself into an ever shrinking handful of urban centers, and finds itself unable to get back to a legislative majority.

I can play this game all night long. Enjoy your victory. It will be a very short one.

I’m hoping that we’ll see more change like this. Bring it on. The states shouldn’t take this ObamaCare crap lying down. It’s going to be as much a fiscal disaster for the states as it will be for the federal government.

More Like Him Please

We need to do everything we can to elect more Congressmen like Rep. Paul Ryan:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwk1aHU-pms[/youtube]

I hope he has a bright future with the GOP. The GOP need to come up with an alternative to ObamaCare and push it like crazy. An alternative that puts individuals back in charge of their own health care. Not the government. Not even employers. Individuals.

Post Health Care: Getting Back to Liberty

It’s a difficult thing for me on this blog to decide how to handle an issue like Health Care, because many of the Congressmen and women the GOP will be targeting heavily in 2010 are NRA A-rated, and I do not wish to damage the NRA’s political reputation by suggesting folks ignore the gun issue.Â But we all, to some degree, have to balance interests. So for those readers who are looking for some paybacks for what Obama and Pelosi have foisted on us in the realm of Health Care, I have some advice.

The first step is to identify key races in your state. If you’re lucky enough to not have any Obamacare traitors in your state, pick a neighboring state, or a state where you feel you have some connection or interest.
Do everything you can to raise the profile of his or her opponent. Facebook and Twitter are two highly valuable tools for the engaged activist. Generally speaking, if find Twitter superior for activist work, but Facebook isn’t bad either.
When it comes close to election time, that’s when it’s time to start volunteering. Politicians typically have a wide variety of volunteer work they can use, and that kind of thing gets noticed and appreciated very quickly. Volunteers are worth gold, especially if they are willing to make phone calls or knock on doors. This doesn’t take much time to do. At most you’ll give up a weekend or two.
If you don’t have the time or dedication for volunteer work, being a pocket book isn’t a bad alternative. All things being equal, money is probably more important than volunteering to help bring votes to the table, because money helps get your name in front of voters. The great thing about donating is, even if you’re not a constituent of the politicians, by being a donor you will have some sway. It doesn’t honestly take that much of a donation before you’ll carry as much weight as a constituent. If you don’t have time to volunteer, and many people legitimately don’t, spread some money around to opponents of the Obama/Pelosi axis. It doesn’t take millions, or even hundreds, to have an impact.

If there’s one bit of advice I could most give for 2010, and probably 2012 too, it would be — don’t just bitch about how much things suck. If all you do is bitch all things will ever do is suck. This is the reason liberty loses in the political process. People who love liberty are very good at complaining that liberty doesn’t get a fair shake, but are very bad at inserting themselves into the process and doing the difficult things to make sure it has a place at the table. There are lots of reasons for this. The chief reason being that liberty minded types are not all that interested in getting halfway toward liberty. They want it all. I can sympathize with this, because that used to be me not too long ago, but things just don’t work that way. Maybe they should, but they don’t. If all we can get is half-way toward liberty in a Constitutional Republic, that’s certainly better than living in a Social Democracy while feeling good about yourself for being true to your principles. It’s time to jump into the pen and wrestle the pigs. You’re going to get dirty, and he’s going to like it, but if you want to feast on bacon, you don’t really have an alternative, do you?

Looks Like The Health Care Monstrosity’s Going to Pass

Watching the whip count over at The Hill, and it’s looking like this is a done deal.Â Get ready for November. We have to teach the Democrats a lesson they will never forget. Cancel your newspaper subscriptions! Turn in the cable box! Don’t just be a passive consumer of the establishment’s news. It’s time for freedom loving people to give involved and become the establishment. That’s the only way to reverse this terrible thing that has been put into motion.

First Day of Spring

What a Beautiful day it is, a perfect day to do some BBQing and restock on some Vitamin D. Got some pork back ribs on the smoker as we speak, and I’m outside in the back yard enjoying a snifter of bourbon. Lately I’ve really liked Blanton’s Bourbon. I like mine with just a splash of water in a snifter, in this case my Monticello snifter, which is aÂ souvenirÂ I picked up while visiting. But the really important part of the first day of spring is getting the smoker going. This is my first smoke in this one. It’s a Weber Smokey Mountain. This winter I was considering whether I wanted to get an offset smoker, but decided, after a bit of research, that a quality bullet smoker was closer to what I was looking for. I have three racks of back ribs in it now, which were rubbed down last night. My previous smoker had difficulty staying at the right temperature, and always wanted to get hotter. This one seems to struggle to stay at a higher temperature, but I will say it holds a much more consistent temperature. I can throw in extra coals without getting a wild temperature flucuation. In a few hours I’ll be able to judge whether the end product of this smoker is better than the previous El-Cheapo Brinkmann. In the mean time I’ll enjoy the sun, the bourbon, watch the woodpecker fly around to the various trees in the neighborhood, and try really really hard not to think about the cluster fuck going on in DC right now.

New Jersey Finally Wises Up

They are instituting a bear hunt in New Jersey for the first time in five years. This is badly needed. There are many groups, including HSUS, the Sierra Club, and the North Jersey based BEAR group. They are already filing a lawsuit to try to stop the hunt. This is going to be a doozy for the folks who decide to do the bear hunt. Animal rights activists are a lot battier than even the battiest anti-gun activists. Expect the PSH to be particularly flowing and smelly on this issue.Â So fierce we might have to suggest one of these to animal rights activists, along with this handy chart.

HSUS claims that people hunt bears for trophies and nothing more. This is false. Otherwise how do you explain bear recipes here, here, here, and here. This is just the tip of the iceberg. And the great part about bear is you get a nice rug when you’re done with all the bearÂ recipes. How often do you get a free rug when you stock up on meat at the local Sam’s Club?

NRA Comes Out Against Obamacare

No, not that NRA, the other NRA.

Feuding over Dogs Results in Doggie Shooting

This is a really odd story. Neighbor buys a new dog Keira, doesn’t like Coco, one of the other neighborhood dogs. Accusations fly around about which dogs are mean to the other and neighbors stop taking to each other. Keira apparently mauls Coco once, leaving Coco’s owner with 3000 in vet bills. Keira escapes and charges at Coco and his owner Â shoots Keira dead through the head, and ends up facing animal cruelty charges and disorderly conduct:

“Why didn’t you pick up a shovel, a stick or pepper spray?” Assistant District Attorney Shannon Crake asked Menichini.

I find the ADA’s attitude here more than a bit disconcerting. It is not her place to evaluate the man’s chosen means of self-defense. What he had available is a pistol, not pepper spray. I think pepper spray is a wise choice, but it’s a choice. Does she really expect him to carry a shovel with him? To search frantically on the ground for a stick big enough for self-defense? Sorry Ms. Crake the statute itself says “A person commits a misdemeanor of the second degreeÂ if he willfully and maliciously kills, maims or disfigures any domestic animalÂ of another person or any domestic fowl of another person.” The key words here is “maliciously” which means the actor would need to be acting with malice. If this is a case of self-defense, that’s not a malicious act and not animal cruelty. There very well may be facts not reported here that would indicate malice on the part of the actor, but from this article, it looks like the ADA is more interested in second guessing the means of self-defense the actor had available and used, rather than making an argument for willful malice on the part of the actor.

Speaking of Classical Music

I promise not to bore my non-classical-music-loving readers with this part of my life often, but my post yesterday comparing skills and knowledge got me thinking about piano again, so I was thinking back to some old pieces that I had started on and never finished. I have CDs of many of them so I was going back for a listen. The real danger of iTunes is that you suddenly have a world of music at your fingertips, and can go find, download, and listen to anything immediately. This can be a problem for the credit card if you lack self-discipline. But you can tell the pieces I’ve always been in love with by how many different recordings I have of them. One thing I never got to do when I played was play a piano concerto. One of my great disappointments in life that I never had the discipline to complete one when I could play. One day, when I have a lot of free time, I might finally learn one and then go find a local amateur orchestral group to play it with. It’s an oversight I’d really like to fix someday.

I started, but never finished Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor. You could just as easily say the Grieg Piano Concerto, because he only ever wrote but one. It’s fairly well recognized even by non-classical music fans though, and most people are familiar with the first couple of measures of the piece. I have only one recording of it though, by Pianist Santiago Rodriguez. Rodriguez is an excellent Pianist, but his interpretation of these pieces is a bit too fast tempo for my liking. Excessive tempo is a common pet peeve of mine in classical recordings. I feel that often a slower, more deliberate pace allows more of the color in the piece to come out. One exception to this is the complete recording of Beethoven’s Symphonies by John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique, which are at faster tempi than normally recorded, and on period instruments. In this case I believe the pieces are enhanced by the faster tempo, and the period instrumentation and orchestra size produces a very clean sound. It’s so good I have a hard time listening to a slower recording with a modern orchestra without thinking how much better this recording sounds.

But back to the Grieg. I was looking for a different take on his piano concerto, so I just downloaded, and am really enjoying Arthur Rubinstein’s recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy conducting. It’s a slower, more expressive pace than the Rodriguez recording, but hey, it’s also Rubinstein,Â who is regarded as one of the great pianists, if not the greatest pianists of the 20th century.Â Along with the recording of the Grieg Piano Concerto I get yet another recording of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto Number 2 in C Minor. I have two others, one by Earl Wild, and the other by Vladimir Ashkenazy. I’m probably more partial to the Ashkenazy performance than I am by the Earl Wild performance, but there’s much to be said for both of them. We’ll see how I end up liking Rubinstein’s take of the piece.