Self-composed

My wife an I attended the Freedom Rally last night. Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, and Oliver North all made it to Oahu this week. This is a rare treat as I don’t recall many conservative events making their way to Hawaii. The three might have needed a vacation, but I doubt the could have set aside much time for themselves. Hannity was doing his radio and television broadcasts here, they visited vets and Tripler Army Medical Center, did some events at Pearl Harbor, and did some book signings. Those are just the ones I know about.

I took a quick look at the Honolulu Advertiser’s website - I couldn’t find any coverage of the rally. Two thousand attendees, three people known nationwide, including a potential presidential candidate spoke. Not a peep. Tho I didn’t dig that much. When whackjob Ward Churchill showed up at the University of Hawaii, that’s all you heard about. Two hundred people showed up.

All in all it was a good time. The hours of waiting in line to get my books signed (geez I wished I’d dropped by Costco beforehand) were much more painful than the price of tickets for the front section. I’m not going to go in to what Hannity said - you can probably guess. He was his usual self, and his material wasn’t anything new. I will say he’s a good speaker, and its a nice change to listen to him be able to make his points and carry a train of thought without commercial interruptions every five minutes.

Newt Gingrich blew me away. The man is a genious. He explained what has gone wrong with the leadership, government, and politics in this country. I wish I knew how to get a transcript or recording because I’m not good at recalling entire speeches. I can share a few points that stick out in my memory.

June 13, 1942, Long Island New York, four German saboteurs disembark a U-boat and sneak ashore in the middle of the night with enough explosives and money to sustain a two-year mission of secretly sabotaging our defense-related production, with the secondary purpose of bringing the war to American soil and terrorizing American citizens.

June 17, 1942, a group just like the first one lands near Jacksonville Florida with the same agenda.

June 27, 1942, all eight have been arrested before even beginning their mission. Of $175,000 they brought, they’d only managed to spend about $600 of it. They never had a chance to use any of their weapons or explosives.

By the end of the summer, they had faced a military tribunal, sentenced, and executed (except two who cooperated and got life in prison.) Germany never attempted to land spies on our soil again.

Fast forward a generation or two…

2007, over five years after 9/11, the Fort Dix Six are captured only after a store clerk alerts the authorities about a suspicious video. The six Muslims had planned to massacre as many servicemen and women as possible. All were born outside the U.S., three had been here illegally for 23 years. They had something like 75 run-ins with police during their time here, during which it was never figured out they were here illegally, much less that they were terrorists.

Another point he made is how, in the “world that works” a person can go to a foreign country, put a plastic card in a ATM machine, punch in a four-digit number, and eleven seconds later the network has accessed his bank account 4000 miles away, verified he had the money for the transaction, withdrawn the money, converted it to local currency, and spit it out. But the government never seemed to notice that some illegal alien was the 42nd person to use the same social security number. Its shocking enough red flags didn’t go up the second time someone used the social security number. That’s government.

He continued to make contrasts between the “world that works” and our broken, incompetent government (my words - can’t remember how he put it) as well as outlining what it’ll take to fix it. He pointed out that we didn’t lose the election in 2006 because America doesn’t want conservatism - and he cited some poll numbers that prove this - the election was lost because people are tired of how the politician are (not) doing things.

On with the pictures.

This is the line of people waiting to get their books signed before the event. I got in line about two hours before they showed up. There was another line after - the guys stuck around to get anyone they didn’t get to before the rally.

Something like 2000 folks showed up. One thing you might notice from these pictures - something that sort of bothered me when I noticed it last night, is that the majority of people you see here are white. Why is that bothersome? Because white’s make up around 10% of the population in Hawaii. That’s another post.

Here’s Hannity working out some last minute details at the sound board right before the show.

Not only is he a brilliant man, he’s also extremely friendly and outgoing. While he was signing books you could tell he was having a great time. That’s my wife Norma, he called her over when he saw me trying to get a picture of them both.

The Colonel was willing to pause for a pose with my wife as well.

That’s about it. I’ll update if I recall anything else I should add.

I did a lot of stupid things when I was a kid. Fortunately none of them left scars. Kids, if you think the best way to enjoy alcohol is lighting it on fire, blow it back out before you pour it in your mouth and all over your face.

Be careful out there.

Its always entertaining, if nothing else, to read her take on things. This time its immigration and the current backlash. Her column.

Apparently, my position on immigration is that we must deport all 12 million illegal aliens immediately, inasmuch as this is billed as the only alternative to immediate amnesty. The jejune fact that we “can’t deport them all” is supposed to lead ineluctably to the conclusion that we must grant amnesty to illegal aliens — and fast!

I’m astounded that debate has sunk so low that I need to type the following words, but: No law is ever enforced 100%.

We can’t catch all rapists, so why not grant amnesty to rapists? Surely no one wants thousands of rapists living in the shadows! How about discrimination laws? Insider trading laws? Do you expect Bush to round up everyone who goes over the speed limit? Of course we can’t do that. We can’t even catch all murderers. What we need is “comprehensive murder reform.” It’s not “amnesty” — we’ll ask them to pay a small fine.

Got a sample of this one with the pound of Guildford Courthouse I ordered. Not bad for a English type blend with Latakia at the fore. Its pretty round with a little sweetness, and that touch of vanilla is there throughout the bowl. Not sure if I’ll buy it, but nice to have around while the sample lasts.

I’ve had about 10% of the “issues” I expected to have transitioning to Ubuntu/Linux. Linux is definitely ready for prime time if you go with this distro. All the stuff like ripping CDs, playing music, including jukebox functions, writing CDs, and on and on are all available. If you are interested in what it looks like and what is there, check this out. Then check this out.

View a full size image of my desktop.

When you install Windows fresh, you have to go out and look for, and often buy, the best programs to do all the things you want to do - office suites, CD and DVD burning software, image viewers and graphics editors, etc. With Ubuntu, they’re already there set up to use, or all you have to do to find them is go to the add/remove utility, browse or do a search for what you are looking for, then check the box next to the programs you want to enable them, then they are downloaded, installed, and added to the menu automatically.

Installed the Ubuntu distro today. Its amazing how far Linux has come along. It was quicker and easier to install than Windows. Getting the video driver to work was only a matter of checking a box and hitting OK. Linux downloaded it and installed it. Everything else about the install was pain free.