By Jeremy Lott on RCP:

Talk about your inconvenient truth. Five days after Chicago Mayor Richard Daley had held a press conference touting the benefits of the city's handgun ban by brandishing a rifle with a bayonet and -- I swear I am not making this up -- cracking a joke about shoving it up a reporter's bum, an 80-year-old man on the West Side of Chicago traded gunfire with a burglar, killing the intruder.

For advocates of gun control, the optics on this story are just awful. It's nearly impossible to drum up any sympathy for the deceased, Anthony Nelson, who had a long history of drug and weapons convictions and was on probation. He attempted to break into the house, brought a gun with him, and fired twice at the so-far unnamed homeowner.

Conversely, it is impossible to fault the homeowner. The man who killed Nelson was a veteran of the Korean War. He fired only one shot and got the intruder in the chest. On that morning, the man was protecting not just himself but his wife and a 12-year-old great grandson who was staying over. A son told reporters "My father had no choice. It was him or the other guy."

Rest of the piece can be found here. Let's not forget that our current President hails from the Windy City and doubtless agrees with Mayor Daley on at least some level regarding firearms.

Interesting read.

Gotta love the United States. Apparently Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) was jogging and had a coyote go after his dog. He shot it dead with his trusty Ruger LCR. Ruger is now releasing a "Coyote Special" edition to celebrate this event. Only in America.

On a related note, I have some money set aside to buy a new firearm. I'm trying to decide if I want to buy a M1 Garand through the CMP or if I want to buy/build an AR of some sort. I've always wanted to own an M1 and the NRA high-power matches look like a lot of fun. On the other hand nothing annoys the anti-RKBA crowd more than an AR-15 with a few 30 round magazines. That's probably the wrong motivation to have when considering a four digit purchase, but there you go :)

I'll probably go with the M1, to the disappointment of all my friends with ARs. Hard to pass up owning a piece of history like that.

It's official.

I have to say that I'm surprised by this. I always figured that Cuomo had political aspirations beyond Governor of NYS. Running for this office makes little sense if he does -- the Governors mansion is where political careers go to die. As Attorney General he has the ability to effect change -- whether that change is positive or not depends on your viewpoint but the ability is there. As Governor he will be held hostage by our corrupt Legislature and entrenched special interests. The electorate of course won't understand this -- all they'll remember is that he went to Albany promising to clean up the place and failed to deliver.

I suppose he could win in a landslide and take a mandate for reform to Albany that the Legislature would be unable to ignore but I rather doubt that will happen. Spitzer won 59 of 62 counties with 69% of the popular vote and still proved unable to change anything in Albany. It's hard to see Cuomo doing better at the ballot box or having the courage to take on the special interests, most of whom favor his party. From a political standpoint I think he's making a huge mistake here. Much better to stay where he is or try to knock off Gillibrand in a primary race.

John Stossel on the 1st amendment. God bless America.....

Snippet from RealClearPolitics, Congress Accelerates Out of Control:

When the news broke about alleged safety defects in Toyota vehicles, official Washington was appalled. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood accused the company of being "safety deaf" and said "they have a very bad business model."

Then there was the reaction from customers, the very people whose lives and safety are at stake every time they get in a car. In the first four months of this year, Toyota's U.S. sales did not fall, as you might expect. They rose by 12 percent.

Sticky gas pedals, sudden acceleration, alleged violations of the law, federal fines, multiple recalls -- none of them sent Americans fleeing in panic.

Oops. Our bad.

Anybody else have the issue where you only see one icon for a friend/fan? I have people who are both and I only see the green friend icon. Used to see both of them, friend and fan.

I use Firefox, but this is an issue in IE too.

My apologies to the people whom posted in my journal about this previously. My journal entry was disrupted by a few individuals whom apparently have nothing better to do than troll my journal in an attempt to restart old arguments not related to the topic at the hand. That problem has now been addressed and will not be happening again.

The original journal entry was about Google's new "everything" sidebar. You can see an example of that sidebar here. I regard this as as a sad attempt to copy Bing at the expense of the minimalist interface that made Google famous. As yet Google is not providing a way to opt-out of this new "feature". Several people have taken matters into their hands. halcyon1234 posted a greasemonkey script in the original journal entry I did about this story.

I hope that Google does eventually provide an opt-out so such measures aren't necessary. The everything sidebar might be useful for some people but it contributes exactly nothing to the search results as far as I'm concerned. If the comments on Google's forums and other sites are any indication I'm not alone in this belief.

The transcript for McDonald v. Chicago is now available. I don't have the time yet to read through it all but have printed a copy and will be updating this journal later with my thoughts about it.

George Will's op-ed for tomorrow should be required reading for those /. readers condemning the recent SCOTUS ruling on campaign finance "reform". Some highlights:

Emphasis mine on that last bit. This is something that I've been patiently trying to explain for the last few days. How is a law that regulates the political speech of organizations like the Sierra Club, NRA, ACLU, or AARP compatible with free speech? Those who are eating up the FUD on this ruling ought to stop and consider this point very carefully. In this country we have the right to petition our government for a redress of grievances. One of the more effective ways of doing this is to band together with like minded people. If the Federal Government can muzzle the aforementioned groups then what good is free association and speech?

Interesting article that I found today, on public sector unions and the power they've secured for themselves at the expense of the rest of us.

WSJ op-ed.

This bit kinda sums up in a nutshell why I'm bitter: Mr. Obama has not governed as the centrist, deficit-fighting, bipartisan consensus builder he promised to be. And his promise to embody a new kind of politicsâ"free of finger-pointing, pettiness and spinâ"was a mirage. He has cheapened his office with needless attacks on his predecessor.

Another interesting point: For example, he voted for the bank rescue plan in September 2008 and praised it during the campaign. Yet on Dec. 8 at the Brookings Institution, Mr. Obama called it "flawed" and blamed "the last administration" for launching it "hastily."

Oey vey

So Time Warner finally got off their collective lazy asses and increased our upstream here in the STNY market. Must have happened recently but I didn't notice it until today when I took my traffic shaping rules (configured for the old upload speed) offline to do some unrelated testing. Noticed that I had a full megabit of upload and called them to confirm it. Previously they topped out the upstream at 384kbit/s on the standard tier and 512kbit/s on the turbo tier.

The new tiers are 15/1mbits for turbo and 10/1 for standard. A few months ago they bumped up our download speeds to those rates but had left the upstream at the aforementioned slower rates. Previous to that we had 8mbits/512kbits for Turbo and 5/384 for standard. Glad they finally increased the upstream to a more realistic value. The downstream is nice, although I can't really peg it unless I fire up three or four different downloads. If my employer wasn't paying the bill I'd consider dropping it down to standard. Same upstream bandwidth and more downstream than I need.

I wonder if this means Verizon is eying our market for a FiOS roll out? It seems that TW's MO is to lowball their bandwidth tiers in the markets where they don't have any competition, then they bump them up right before someone else moves in. Would be nice to have a second option. I'm too far away from the CO to get DSL with any decent speed. In this neighborhood it tops out at 1.5 and is borderline at that. TW is currently our only realistic choice. Not sure I'd change away from them to go to FiOS (I hate Verizon with a passion) but it would be nice to see someone actually compete with them for a change.

This about sums it up. To bad everybody is so fixated on abortion and the public option to debate the merits of the rest of the bill.