Wednesday, January 21, 2004

I missed the State of the Union speech last night, but thanks to Spoons & many others I think I've gotten the gist of it.

Of interest was the following from Bush:

"There is a difference, however, between leading a coalition of many nations, and submitting to the objections of a few. America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country."

Hmm. So he says the U.S. does not need permission slips to defend itself yet in this very nation U.S. citizens need & often do not receive permission slips to defend themselves, their families & communities. D.C., NYC, & Chicago come to mind, as do national parks & airports. Odds are this irony completely slipped by his speech writers, and was apperently missed by Bush himself.

Via The Volokh Conspiracy I found a link to a post on the Constitutional nature of the State of the Union Address. No permalinks as Mayerblog seems to be brand new, so scroll down to the post from January 20th entitled The Unconstitutional State of the Union Address. Give it a read.


Sunday, January 18, 2004

Now this is funny. In this thread from The High Road a rather amusing story about a pro-Kucinich website unfolds. The website original used this picture entitled "Guns Kill" (found at the top of the article) to emphasize Kucinich's willingness to "save the children" from unregulated gun violance. It was found about halfway down the page underneath yje "On Gun Control" section next to a link that explained how Kucinich had voted "no" on a bill reducing the NICS waiting period for guns show purchases to a maximum of 24 hours. The link carries you here where you'll find out more in depth about Kucinich's stance on gun control. (Please note it states that Kucinich is in favor of "Renew[ing] the ban on the sale or transfer of semi-automatic guns.")

In any case, the picture that was linked to was from a pro-Right to Arms site & was used to denounce the picture & its intent, whereas the pro-Kucinich site intended it to stress the need for gun control. The pro-Right to Arms site wasn't too happy when they discovered that the pro-Kucinich site hijacked their pic, so they made a little switch. Here's the pro-Right to Arms site's explanation of event, along with the original pic & their replacement.

BTW, the pro-Right to Arms site is called Orange County Shooters.com, & that'd be Orange County, New York. While I was there I found this link which is guaranteed to make every gun owner drool.

There's another graphic in the "On Gun Control" section which also appears to be a replacement of the one originally used. It's next to a link that leads to a page that talks up an effort for Dean to get an NRA endorsement. I believe the original graphic was an NRA logo that was swiped from another pro-Right to Arms site; Students for the Second Amendment.

Here's a Yahoo cache of the website which has a slightly different graphic than the one currently replacing the NRA logo.

Ah, going back it appears they replaced the first replacement graphic with something less profane. Those crazy kids.

The pro-Kucinich website operators haven't seemed to notice the switch in graphics. & judging from their original intent they haven't noticed that pro-gun control is not how the Democrats are wanting to spin things, as it can lead to lost elections.

Hope y'all find all this as amusing as I did, & I hope the pro-Kucinich website's webmaster has other accounts as I think he'll lose this one. Once they figure things out that is.

Update: The guys at the pro-Kucinich site have figured things out & replaced the linked graphics with ones embedded on their site. (Do I get bonus points for using the word "embedded"?)

However the link above to the Yahoo cache of their page still displays the switched graphics as does this link to a screen capture of the page provided generously by The Patriette in her post about said events.