Beltway sniper lessons learned: None

It's hard to believe that it's been seven years since John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo cruised the Washington, DC area picking off people at random from their car. Muhammad was put to death by lethal injection last night here in Virginia.

Their three-week murder binge during October of 2002 claimed 10 lives, and struck close to home for me personally when two of them occurred just a short drive from my house. The second of those shootings occurred on Route 1 here in Spotsylvania County as Mrs. Pool Bar and I were on our way from out having breakfast. We were passed by a county Sheriff's car at high speed which pulled into an Exxon station ahead of us where a couple of other Sheriff's cars had just arrived. We got the news when we returned home that 53-year-old Kenneth Bridges had been shot dead while pumping gas at the station.

The shootings took place just a year after the 9/11 terror attacks, and law enforcement authorities moved swiftly to disassociate Muhammad's acts of terrorism from his Muslim religion in exactly the same way authorities today are disassociating Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's shooting spree from his Muslim religion. Law enforcement authorities have become conditioned by our excessively politically correct culture to not consider Islamist fundamentalism as a possible motivator in violent acts.

This kind of political correctness amounts to malpractice on a grand scale and it must be stopped.

One man's terrorist...

We may assume that Christopher Monfort, the accused Seattle cop-killer, isn't a Muslim. Why? Because law enforcement authorities have branded him a "lone domestic terrorist", unlike Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan who gunned down 13 people while reportedly yelling "Allahu Akhbar".

A man shot by police as he was sought in connection with the Halloween killing of a Seattle police officer has been identified as 41-year-old Christopher Monfort.

At a news conference Saturday, Seattle assistant police chief Jim Pugel called Monfort "a lone domestic terrorist."

So while everyone responsible for protecting US citizens from terrorist attack, from the President on down, ties themselves into knots not to call Hasan a terrorist, Monfort gets the label pretty easily.*

One man's terrorist is the same man's poor, suffering stress puppy.

* I should note that I don't have a real problem categorizing Monfort as a domestic terrorist, given the information in the article. But it seems there's an irrational fear of doing so when the perpetrator may have been motivated by Islamist ideology.

Nurse suspended for offering prayer

In Britain a nurse has been suspended for offering to pray for a patient.

Caroline Petrie, a committed Christian, has been accused by her employers of failing to demonstrate a "personal and professional commitment to equality and diversity".

[ ... ]

She insists she has never forced her own religious beliefs on anyone but politely inquired if the elderly patient wanted her to pray for her – either in the woman's presence or after the nurse had left the patient's home.

Maybe next time she should ask instead if the patient would like her to sacrifice a goat in the patient's name.

Gender roles

The city of Gainesville, Florida last year made an amendment to their anti-discrimination ordinance allowing "transgender" people to use which ever public restroom they feel comfortable using, and not everyone's happy about it.

A blond girl heads from a playground into a women's restroom. A scruffy man, lurking outside, darts in behind her. "Your City Commission Made This Legal," the words on the TV screen read.

The dark ad came from opponents of a gender identity provision added last year to the city's anti-discrimination ordinance, which now allows the city's roughly 100 transgender residents to use whichever restroom they're most comfortable using.

Foes want to repeal the new protection with a March 24 ballot measure that has divided Gainesville, a generally gay-friendly university city surrounded by staunchly conservative north Florida.

Whether Gainesville is "gay-friendly" or not is orthogonal to the discussion. A lesbian or a gay man is not necessarily "transgender". According to the dictionary, a "transgender" person is one "appearing or attempting to be a member of the opposite sex, as a transsexual or habitual cross-dresser." In other words, they're by definition weird.

What Gainesville is effectively saying here is that if some perv is feeling a bit frisky, he can throw on some make-up and a dress and cruise public womens' toilets all day long.

This really isn't all that goddamn difficult...if your driver's license says "male", you use the men's room, if it says "female", you use the women's room.

Blog fodder

I've been looking for something to post today that hadn't already been covered at length by my betters, but without much luck. Let's see...Supreme Court declines to hear stupid Obama birth certificate case? Done. Major MSM outlet goes Tango Uniform? Done. Khalid Sheik Mohammed and others want to "confess" at Gitmo? Done. Detroit bailout? Done, done and done. Even the Joe Satriani sues Coldplay for copyright infringement story...done, as well as the Boy George arrested after freaky gay sex story...done.

Just as I'd despaired of finding something newsworthy or just plain weird that hadn't already been done by the Big 3...manna from heaven.

Several UK internet providers have blocked access to a Wikipedia page about German heavy metal band Scorpions due to an album cover that features a nude prepubescent girl, news agency AP reported on Monday.

The site was placed on the Internet Watch Foundation’s list of forbidden websites last week, spokesperson Sarah Robertson told AP. Many of the country’s internet service providers use the foundation’s list to guide them in choosing which sites to block, she said. Internet users first tipped the Internet Watch Foundation off to the image, and the organization concluded that it could possibly be considered child pornography.

The 32-year-old cover of the “Virgin Killer” cover features a naked pre-teen girl, and was met with so much criticism when it was released in 1976 that the band re-released the album with a different cover in several countries. The new cover featured the five band members.

Here's the Wikipedia entry in question.

Now, if references to "nude", "naked", "pre-teen", "prepubescent" and "freaky gay sex" don't drive up my Google hit count, I give up.

Random boat parade not as popular as Christmas boat parade

So as not to exclude those who don't observe Christmas, the eggheads in Patchogue, NY changed the name of their annual Christmas Boat Parade to more inclusive "Boat Parade of Lights". Not everyone was enthused about the change.

About 1,000 people showed up Sunday for the Patchogue (PACH'-awg) Boat Parade of Lights. That's 500 fewer than usually showed up when it was called the Patchogue Christmas Boat Parade.

[ ... ]

Organizers say the parade still was a success.

Well, of course they said that, and it was successful in the sense that a parade actually took place. But driving off a third of your usual audience is hardly a "success".