Sitting duck zones

Depending on which news report you read, the rat bastard *terrorist at Fort Hood fired off a hundred rounds or so, hitting 42 people in the 3-5 minutes it took for Fort Hood Police Sgt. Kimberly Munley and her partner to arrive on scene and return fire.

If trained (but unarmed) military personnel facing a lone gunman are sitting ducks until an armed cop arrives on scene to take the bad guy out, what chance do the rest of us have?

*Yeah, you heard me... terrorist. If Timothy McVeigh was a domestic terrorist because he was pissed off at his country and decided to kill a bunch of innocent people, then Nidal Malik Hasan certainly seems to qualify.

Harsh realities indeed.

From NewsBusters...

Noting tomorrow’s 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Sunday’s Today show, former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw claimed East Germans were “still adjusting to the harsh economic realities” of life after communism.

Yeah. And we just may have to adjust to the harsh realities of life under it.

Well, that's ironic.

Joseph Cao was the lone Republican voting for the House's health care reform bill last night. According to his bio...

Anh "Joseph" Cao was born in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnam. His father, an officer with the South Vietnamese Army, was imprisoned by the Communists.

At the age of eight, Joseph escaped to America with two of his siblings. He learned English, thrived in school, and earned a physics degree from Baylor University before he began studying for the priesthood.

Joseph first arrived in New Orleans in 1992. He left to earn a Master's degree in philosophy from New York's Fordham University, returning to Loyola University to teach philosophy and ethics. As he prepared for priesthood, his faith was strong.

However, his confidence in government's ability to care for those in need weakened by the day. Before long, Joseph ended his quest for priesthood in a personal crusade for social justice.

Isn't "social justice" allegedly one thing the Communists and the North Vietnamese were supposedly fighting for?

They're still throwing that 90% number around.

From Foxnews via the AP

It seems as though the quantity of cash and guns seized at the U.S.-Mexican border is up. I don't doubt that. Hell, I don't doubt that gun-running into Mexico is a lucrative business.

But here's a useless statistic from the story:

Mexico asked U.S. authorities to trace 12,073 firearms last year, up from only 2,906 in 2007 and 2,654 in 2006, according to the ATF. Of those successfully traced, the firearms bureau said about 90 percent came from the United States.

No shit? Really? You mean that, according to the United States Department of Justice's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, 90% of the firearms in question for which they have a record and were able to trace came from (or at some time were part of an FFL-recorded transaction in) the United States?

90%? 90% of what number?

From the U.S. State Department's eTrace fact sheet...

Firearms tracing is the systematic tracking of the movement of a firearm recovered by law enforcement officials from its creation by the manufacturer or its introduction into U.S. commerce by the importer through the distribution chain to the first retail purchase.

How about answering these questions: Of the 12073 firearms Mexico asked us to trace...

How many had identifiable serial numbers that would theoretically be traceable?

Of those, how many were the ATF able to trace to the U.S. as the country of origin (as in either manufactured in the U.S. or imported into the U.S. from the manufacturer directly to FFL dealer, wholesaler, etc.)?

Of the remaining ones (presumably those for which the ATF had no record), how many were identified by the manufacturer as being first shipped to a non-U.S. dealer?

In addition to the 12073 firearms they asked us to trace, how many others were seized for which an ATF trace was not requested.

If Mexico seized 12073 firearms and asked the ATF to trace all 12073 of them, and if the ATF got a hit on 10000 of them and turned out that 90% of those (9000) were involved in U.S. commerce at some point, well that's one story.

But if the ATF got a hit on 500 of the 12000+ firearms and 90% of those (450) had U.S. ties, well, that paints a whole different picture.

Stimulating government tit.

From FoxNews

Using stimulus dollars as bait, President Obama is coaxing states to rewrite education laws and cut deals with unions as they compete for $5 billion in school reform grants, the most money a president has ever had for overhauling schools. And it may end up going to only a few states.

Really now? Red states or blue ones?

In Wisconsin, where Obama will visit Wednesday, lawmakers are poised to change a law to boost their state's chances. Nine other states have taken similar steps.

And states can't even apply for the money yet.

"There is an appetite out there for change," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in an interview with The Associated Press.

No. There's an appetite out there for money. Government money. There's a big, $5B government tit out there, and the states, school boards, and teachers' unions are trying to latch on before the milk runs dry.

"If you put a very large, $5 billion program in front of the entire country, everyone eyes that as an opportunity," said Wisconsin state Sen. John Lehman, a Democrat who chairs the state's Senate Education Committee and a former high school teacher.

Opportunity? See 'tit' reference above.

No president has ever had that much money for schools at his discretion. Only Duncan -- not Congress -- has control over who gets it. And only some states, perhaps 10 to 20, will actually get the money.

Again, which 10 to 20 states? If this were a roulette game and the colors were red and blue, I'd be betting on blue right about now.

Obama sees the test score data and charter schools, which are publicly funded but independent of local school boards, as solutions to the problems that plague public education.

The national teachers' unions disagree. They say student achievement is much more than a score on a standardized test and that it's a mistake to rely so heavily on charter schools.

"Despite growing evidence to the contrary, it appears the administration has decided that charter schools are the only answer to what ails America's public schools," the National Education Association, the largest teachers' union, said in comments submitted to the Education Department.

The NEA added: "We should not continue the unhealthy focus on standardized tests as the primary evidence of student success."

How about if we use the students' future performance as a metric. Students who go on to secondary education and receive a diploma or certification from a college, university, or trade school and/or whose yearly reported income 5-10 years after high school graduation is x-times the national poverty level.

"There are lots of ways to use the data aside from firing and discipline," Wilkins said. "That said, unless you figure out a fair but fast way to remove truly incompetent teachers from classrooms, they're going to continue to be cycled into the highest poverty schools."

True. The poor kids are the most likely to suffer. So you either use the current data to ID and weed out the bad teachers as soon as possible, before they can do more harm, or you wait 5-10 years for some other metric data to come in and weed them out then. In the meantime, 5-10 more classes of students are screwed, because they only have one chance to get a quality education before dropping out or being turned loose.

Feeling stimulated yet?

According to recovery.gov, the Federal government has paid out $207.3B (or approximately 26%) from the $787B total funds available in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a.k.a. the stimulus package, but generally referred to here in Gatorland as the Political Payback and Pork Redistribution Act of 2009.

The link State And Agency Data Reported by Federal Contract Recipients is a per-state summary of the funds awarded by and received from various federal agencies. Just in case something goes wrong with the recovery.gov site, I printed the current summary to a PDF file.

It'll be interesting to see how the numbers change for some of the blue/swing states as the Dems dole out money just in time for the midterm elections in 2010.

You're expendable

Kevin notices a restaurant/bar in Tucson is posted, sends the manager a letter of disapproval, and gets a reply.

The manager's reply in a nutshell: As an unarmed patron, you're expendable.

If shit happens and someone shoots up the place, oh well... the entire mall is posted, this particular business is also posted as allowed per the new gun/restaurant/alcohol law. "Our signage clearly prohibited bad guys from entering the property with weapons." They might be sued if they allowed you to carry your weapon and you had an ND or used it and hit an innocent bystander. They probably won't be sued if the bad guy shoots and/or kills someone, because, after all, guns were probibited there.