Sarah Palin for PRESIDENT!

Ah hell, let’s just run Sarah Palin for president against Barack Obama. John McCain can go home now. You want CHANGE in Washington? Put a woman in the White House.

Wild Thing for President of the USA!

I am The Blog Author. and I approved this message.

/JZ

Entry for August 29, 2008

Swiping a slice of pie from the table of Obama political strategy, John McCain just played his superficiality and fluff trump card. Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is obviously a woman, and choosing her as veep is a plain and simple tactic to woo some women voters over to his side of the voting booth. She is young, attractive, intelligent, patriotic, conservative, gutsy, articulate, and ambitious. She is a gun-toting, NRA card-carrying political maverick. She is “Wild Thing.”

Cactus John and Wild Thing have their work cut out, and the next sixty days will be a tough row to hoe. I think she is every bit as qualified as Hillary or Barack, but that is not a high standard. McCain and Biden carry the only credentials in this race. Sarah Palin and Barack Obama will be the race on superficiality and emotion, high ideals and big ideas, chances for barriers to be forever broken.

In making this choice, did McCain have a stroke of genius, a stroke of desperation, or just a stroke? Was this a defining moment or a senior moment? We will find out for sure in November.

I still say Condoleezza Rice as veep would have bagged this race for McCain. Maybe she was too intimidating for the crusty old boy. She would make a better president than either Obama or McCain. Sorry Condi, maybe next time. She will be the only part of the Bush administration that I will miss.

I am still a believer. I believe it’s now time for three fingers of bourbon.


/JZ

Entry for August 27, 2008

Just for fun, let’s do a “one gun” scenario. Let’s pretend that for some reason, either because of some bizarre government law or because of limited personal finances, I can only own one gun. I can choose a handgun, rifle, or shotgun, but I can only have one firearm.

My choice would be to keep a pump action 12-gauge shotgun, one of my Mossberg-500s.

First off, the variety of loads available for the 12-gauge shotgun provides the means to bag game ranging in sizes from mallards to moose. Birdshot, buckshot, slugs, and sabots, are all available and affordable.

Second, the reason that law-enforcement and the military use 12-gauge pump shotguns is because they are reliable and effective.

The Mossberg-500 is versatile, having interchangeable barrels available for any hunting or home-defense contingency. If I desired, for home defense I could remove the shoulder stock and put a pistol grip on the gun.

I consider a handgun a better primary home defense weapon, but if I can only have one gun, a shotgun will be it.

/JZ

Entry for August 25, 2008

To those that like issues and experience, Joe Biden, with a certifiable big mouth and plenty of on-the-job experience, offers some credibility to the presidential campaign of our Junior Senator from Illinois. After November, it will be long argued whether this decision won or cost Barack Obama the election. The cynic in me believes politicians win on emotion and superficiality, and Obama was winning that war on every front. An Obama / Clinton ticket would have united the election money and machinery. Now the Obama / Biden ticket needs to make some machinery repairs and attend to some deep ego wounds. By bringing this down to an equal footing of issues and name-calling, Obama may have just put this race dead even.

Should McCain choose an unknown, we can all save the TV time and call it “game over.” A Mitt Romney as veep may just make this game go into extra innings and hanging-chads.

Entry for August 21, 2008

Never catching on like the competing Glocks and Sigs, H&K dropped their entire line of squeeze-cocking pistols from production.

The German Police have retired all of their old Heckler and Koch (H&K) PSP P7 service pistols. Quite a number of these lightly fired, factory-reconditioned pistols are available in the USA for around $700 each; roughly, half of what was the price of a new P7/M8. A couple of months ago I added one of the surplus PSP P7 pistols to my collection.

The PSP P7 handles the 9MM Parabellum cartridge (AKA 9MM Luger, 9X19) with a unique piston that retards the blowback ejection of a spent cartridge. This allows for a lighter slide weight and use of a fixed barrel. The pistols are very accurate, and their thinness, low relatively weight and compact size make them suitable for concealed carry. They are very fast to bring into action from a holster; just draw the pistol and squeeze the grip and it is ready to fire. Yes, strange as it seems, squeezing the front of the grip cocks the pistol; releasing it uncocks the pistol. I am always reluctant to use the word “safe” when it comes to describing any gun, but much of the overall design of the squeeze-cocker was to make this pistol as fast and as safe as possible.
The PSP P7 enjoys something of a cult following to which I do not belong, but I do find it to be a very well designed, interesting, functional pistol.

NOTE: Reportedly, H&K is very slow to provide any needed repair parts.

/JZ

Entry for August 19, 2008

To me, the Colt Anaconda always looked like a Colt Python on growth hormone and steroids. It had the same lines as the Python, but never any hint of the elegance.

I sold my Colt Anaconda .44 Magnum shortly before I retired. I originally purchased it with the hope of using it during the state of Illinois annual pistol season for deer. Finding the time and a suitable place to hunt proved to be major obstacles, so the Anaconda never saw more than a few trips to the pistol range. Even though it is heavy enough to shoot full magnum loads accurately, I would have needed substantial range time to gain the skills needed to take a deer with it.

Colt dropped double-action revolvers from their product line, making the Anaconda more of a collector’s piece than a shooter, so I took my profit from the sale and moved on. If an opportunity arises to pistol hunt deer, there are other options available in the gun safe.

Entry for August 16, 2008

One of the oldest guns I own is a first generation Colt Frontier Six Shooter. According to a Colt-archive letter of verification, it left the factory in the year 1881, making it now 127 years-old. My revolver is not as nice as the one in the photo, but has the same configuration of wooden grips, 7 ½-inch barrel, and caliber of .44-40 (AKA 44 WCF or Winchester Center Fire).

As a collector’s piece, the value of mine is at the low end of the price wars since, even though all of the part-numbers match, it was refinished at least once and the barrel etching for “Frontier Six Shooter” is very hard to make out. The gun makes a nice knockabout shooter or a very good candidate for a proper (and very expensive) restoration by a true expert.

Revolvers of this vintage were designed to shoot cartridges loaded with black powder, which generates much less pressure than modern smokeless gunpowders. Shooting smokeless loads in this revolver most likely would cause irreparable damage to the gun and possible grievous injury to the shooter. I do have several hundred rounds of cartridges loaded with modern black powder substitutes that would be safe and very effective to shoot in this gun.

Entry for August 14, 2008

It has been a while, so a couple of hours today were set aside to go to the pistol range and blow some cobwebs out of a few guns. Actual range time was only about an hour, the balance spent driving there and back. Another couple of hours more have yet to be spent cleaning and re-oiling the pistols.

I only took three pistols today, a Glock 26 9mm, an old Berretta Jetfire .25 caliber, and a Seecamp .380 caliber. One hundred and thirty rounds were put through the Glock 26, which consisted of emptying three ten-round magazines that had been lying around loaded for quite a while, plus another couple of boxes of cartridges. I emptied two eight-round magazines through the Berretta, and only seven rounds through the Seecamp.

All three pistols that I fired today are semi-automatics. A full-automatic weapon most people know as a “machine gun” will continue to fire as long as the trigger is pressed. A semi-automatic will fire only one round for each pull of the trigger, same as double-action revolvers do. Both semi-automatics and full-automatics feed (self-load) cartridges from a magazine to the chamber of the gun via the action of a reciprocating slide or bolt activated by the round being fired. (NOTE: Some machine guns feed cartridges from a belt.)

The Glock 26 is a compact 9MM pistol with a light, high-tech polymer frame with a steel slide and barrel; capacity is ten rounds in the magazine plus one in the chamber.

The Berretta Jetfire is a .25 caliber; small, pocket size pistol, aluminum frame with a steel barrel and slide; capacity is eight rounds in the magazine plus one in the chamber.

The Seecamp is .380 caliber (the .380 cartridge is AKA 9MM Kurz, 9MM Corto, 9MM Short, 9X17, 9MM Browning), capacity is six rounds in the magazine plus one in the chamber, and is actually a bit smaller than the Jetfire and made entirely of stainless steel. While less powerful than the 9MM Glock, it is substantially more powerful than the .25 caliber Berretta. The recoil of the .380 cartridge is harsh in such a small pistol, and your trigger finger will take a beating from bouncing off the trigger guard with each shot fired. It is the smallest .380 caliber semi-automatic pistol in the world, the most powerful semi-automatic pistol for its size. Larry Seecamp certainly knows how to pack power into a small package. He also makes the same pistol in .32 ACP, which has somewhat less recoil than the .380 ACP and is still more powerful than the .25 ACP. (NOTE: ACP in gun jargon is short for Automatic Colt Pistol ammo designed by the late John Moses Browning.)

How well did I shoot today? Fair to middlin’, I’m out of practice, though I would never win a shooting tournament on my best day. Collecting and shooting guns is a fun, somewhat expensive hobby. I hope to get into the habit of making it to the range more often.

Entry for August 05, 2008

Call me a dumb patriot, but I really want to think of the FBI as a bunch of heroes. It sure is hard to do sometimes. When they screw up by being too conservative or organizationally disjointed, buildings blow up. When they are too aggressive, they often ruin the lives of innocent citizens using tactics that border on psychological torture. The following AP article says it better than I can.
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FBI used aggressive tactics in anthrax probe

By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer

Before killing himself last week, Army scientist Bruce Ivins told friends that government agents had stalked him and his family for months, offered his son $2.5 million to rat him out and tried to turn his hospitalized daughter against him with photographs of dead anthrax victims.

The pressure on Ivins was extreme, a high-risk strategy that has failed the FBI before. The government was determined to find the villain in the 2001 anthrax attacks; it was too many years without a solution to the case that shocked and terrified a post-9/11 nation.

The last thing the FBI needed was another embarrassment. Overreaching damaged the FBI's reputation in the high-profile investigations: the Centennial Olympic Park bombing probe that falsely accused Richard Jewell; the theft of nuclear secrets and botched prosecution of scientist Wen Ho Lee; and, in this same anthrax probe, the smearing of an innocent man — Ivins' colleague Steven Hatfill.

In the current case, Ivins complained privately that FBI agents had offered his son, Andy, $2.5 million, plus "the sports car of his choice" late last year if he would turn over evidence implicating his father in the anthrax attacks, according to a former U.S. scientist who described himself as a friend of Ivins.

Ivins also said the FBI confronted Ivins' daughter, Amanda, with photographs of victims of the anthrax attacks and told her, "This is what your father did," according to the scientist, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because their conversation was confidential.

The scientist said Ivins was angered by the FBI's alleged actions, which he said included following Ivins' family on shopping trips.

Washington attorney Barry Coburn, who represents Amanda Ivins, declined to comment on the investigation. An attorney for Andy Ivins also declined to comment.

The FBI declined to describe its investigative techniques of Ivins.

FBI official John Miller said that "what we have seen over the past few days has been a mix of improper disclosures of partial information mixed with inaccurate information and then drawn into unfounded conclusions. None of that serves the victims, their families or the public."

The FBI "always moves aggressively to get to the bottom of the facts, but that does not include mistreatment of anybody and I don't know of any case where that's happened," said former FBI deputy director Weldon Kennedy, who was with the bureau for 34 years. "That doesn't mean that from time to time people don't make mistakes," he added.

Dr. W. Russell Byrne, a friend and former supervisor of Ivins at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md., said he had heard from other Ivins associates that investigators were going after Ivins' daughter. But Byrne said those conversations were always short because people were afraid to talk.

"The FBI had asked everybody to sign these nondisclosure things," Byrne said. "They didn't want to run afoul of the FBI."

Byrne, who retired from the lab four years ago, said FBI agents interviewed him seven to 12 times since the investigation began — and he got off easy.

"I think I'm the only person at USAMRIID who didn't get polygraphed," he said.

Byrne said he was told by people who had recently worked with Ivins that the investigation had taken an emotional toll on the researcher. "One person said he'd sit at his desk and weep," he said.

Questions about the FBI's conduct come as the government takes steps that could signal an end to its investigation. On Wednesday, FBI officials plan to begin briefing family members of victims in the 2001 attacks.

The government is expected to declare the case solved but will keep it open for now, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation. Several legal and investigatory matters need to be wrapped up before the case can officially be closed, they said.

Some questions may be answered when documents related to the case are released, as soon as Wednesday. For others, the answers may be incomplete, even bizarre. Some may simply never be answered.

It is unclear how the FBI eliminated as suspects others in the lab who had access to the anthrax. It's not clear what, if any, evidence bolsters the theory that the attacks may have been a twisted effort to test a cure for the toxin. Investigators also can't place Ivins in Princeton, N.J., when the letters were mailed from a mailbox there.

Richard Schuler, attorney for anthrax victim Robert Stevens' widow, Maureen Stevens, said his client will attend Wednesday's FBI briefing with a list of questions.

"No. 1 is, 'Did Bruce Ivins mail the anthrax that killed Robert Stevens?'" Schuler said, adding, "I've got healthy skepticism."

Critics of the bureau in and out of government say that in major cases, like the anthrax investigation, it can be difficult for the bureau to stop once it embarks on a single-minded pursuit of a suspect, with any internal dissenters shut out as disloyal subordinates.

Before the FBI focused on Ivins, its sights were set on Hatfill, whose career as a bioscientist was ruined after then-Attorney General John Ashcroft named him a "person of interest" in the probe.

Hatfill sued the agency, which recently agreed to pay Hatfill nearly $6 million to settle the lawsuit.

Complaints that the FBI behaved too aggressively conflict with its straight-laced, crime-fighting image of starched agents hunting terrorists.

During its focus on Hatfill, the FBI conducted what became known as "bumper lock surveillance," in which investigators trailed Hatfill so closely that he accused agents of running over his foot with their surveillance vehicle.

FBI agents showed up once to videotape Hatfill in a hotel hallway in Tyson's Corner, Va., when Hatfill was meeting with a prospective employer, according to FBI depositions filed in Hatfill's lawsuit against the government. He didn't get the job.

One of the FBI agents who helped run the anthrax investigation, Robert Roth, said FBI Director Robert Mueller had expressed frustration with the pace of the investigation. He also acknowledged that, under FBI guidelines, targets of surveillance aren't supposed to know they're being followed.

"Generally, it's supposed to be covert," Roth told lawyers in Hatfill's lawsuit.
In the 1996 Atlanta Olympic park bombing that dragged Jewell into the limelight, the security guard became the focus of the FBI probe for three months, after initially being hailed as a hero for moving people away from the bomb before it exploded.

The bomber turned out to be anti-government extremist Eric Rudolph, who also planted three other bombs in the Atlanta area and in Birmingham, Ala. Those explosives killed a police officer, maimed a nurse and injured several other people.

In another case, the FBI used as evidence the secrets that a person tells a therapist.

In the Wen Ho Lee case, Lee became the focus of a federal probe into how China may have obtained classified nuclear warhead blueprints. Prosecutors eventually charged him only with mishandling nuclear data, and held him for nine months. In what amounted to a collapse of the government's case, prosecutors agreed to a plea bargain in which Lee pleaded guilty to one of 59 counts.

In 2004, the FBI wrongly arrested lawyer Brandon Mayfield after the Madrid terrorist bombings, due to a misidentified fingerprint. The Justice Department's internal watchdog faulted the bureau for sloppy work. Spanish authorities had doubted the validity of the fingerprint match, but the U.S. government initiated a lengthy investigation, eventually settling with Mayfield for $2 million.
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Associated Press writer David Dishneau contributed to this report from Hagerstown, Md.