Blood Donation

It’s the holiday season again, and our friends over at the Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center are once again requesting for people to give blood. For a long time I gave blood, until the process got to be too much of a pain in the ass. The list of exclusions keeps getting longer, and I got really tired of being rejected because some idiot phlebotomist wouldn’t listen to me.

In 1991, I received a blood transfusion while out of the country. Specifically, I received blood while in Saudi Arabia. This is a lifetime disqualification, except for one minor detail. I received the blood transfusions from 5th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital and 251st Evac Hospital. This means I am not disqualified, since the blood transfusion was performed by the US military. I got really tired of explaining this to people doing the paperwork and then getting them to explain the facts to the physician. If the idiot reviewing the paperwork does not explain it correctly, I end up wasting my time because the physician DQ’s me. It got to the point where I had about a 50-50 chance of the morons from M.D. Anderson getting it right. So I gave up. It became more of a pain in the ass for me to donate blood than it was worth to me.

Here’s a handy tip: if you are asking people to provide you a valuable commodity for nothing out of the goodness of their hearts, don’t make the process intrusive, complicated and bothersome. It makes a certain portion of the population kind of grumpy, and less inclined to donate.

Grit Your Teeth and Smile

My lovely wife forwarded me this post from Lone Star Times. Color me highly amused. Just barely sworn in and already acting like an asshat. I guess all you efenants can get on with your buyer’s remorse now, huh?

What’s even funnier to me is the bitching in the comments. Essentially, some of the party faithful are complaining that they didn’t have any other choice. That depends on how you look at the issue and what your goal is. If your only goal is to get somebody from the efenant club elected, then, no, I guess you didn’t have any other choice. However, I don’t have that goal and I was under the mistaken apprehension a lot of self-described conservatives didn’t either.

I have this funny idea that party affiliation is (or should be) shorthand for a set of principles and beliefs about government. It’s most useful in dealing with candidates that have not been elected before and have no track record. More important are the ideas the politician in question is espousing, not the party affiliation. With the newly anointed CD22 representative, you had a track record to examine. If anybody in CD22 who actually cared about fiscal restraint or social issues or any of the other things that “conservatives” claim matter voted for SSG, they deserve what they got. If party affiliation trumps principles, you can whine about how you feel betrayed by her actions and we can all laugh at you. If you, as a precinct chair, voted for or endorsed SSG, you made a conscious decision and don’t get to whine about “no other choice”. There were other choices available, and collectively, y’all picked a piss-poor candidate because it looked vaguely possible she might have a chance. Real conservatives were presented and rejected or they dropped out. So Her Royal Pinkness got the nod, and now you wanna complain. Too little, too late. You should have made some more noise and bucked the system a little more and maybe you wouldn’t be here.

Frankly, the GOP and Tom DeLay handed CD22 to Nick Lampson. The entire thing was a goat-fuck from the minute Tom DeLay resigned, and the GOP’s response ended up making the whole thing worse. If anybody in the GOP wants to point fingers they need to point at (in descending order) Tom DeLay, Tina Benkiser, and Jared Woodfill.

Of course, my candidate lost completely, but I didn’t have the slightest bit of embarrassment voting for him, and it sure didn’t leave me with any regrets. I voted for a guy that can understand the concepts of fiscal restraint and limited government, which are things efenant politicians have completely forgotten. I can guarantee that if my candidate had won, you wouldn’t be seeing this kind of behavior.

As a final note for all the efenants out there, maybe if you had actually fielded a decent candidate you wouldn’t have got your ass handed to you. Instead, business as usual was the order of the day and the donks have Congress. Way to go, asshats.

NRA Issues

I think I have mentioned before my belief that the NRA is too quick to compromise and isn't militant enough about the RKBA. The endorsements the NRA has handed out for the current election cycle have done nothing to endear the organization to me. In fact, J and I are both so disgruntled with the NRA we sent the following letter to the NRA-ILA and the NRA-PVF.

It is difficult for us to express our current level of disappointment and frustration with the NRA. We have sitting in front of us the most recent issues of American Rifleman and Woman’s Outlook. The cover of both magazines is a giant warning about what will happen if the Democratic Party regains control of the Congress. Yet, inexplicably the bottom portion of both covers recommends we vote for Nick Lampson, a Democrat. Our friends in a neighboring Congressional district inform us you advised they vote for Shane Sklar, another Democrat. You repeatedly warn us of the ills that will befall us if the likes of Nancy Pelosi are in power, yet you endorse the very people who would put them there. Is there some deeply held philosophical principle that would produce this result, or has the NRA gone completely insane?

What makes this result so particularly galling is that in both of these races, there are candidates with much better track records than either of your endorsements. Your choices appear to be based on nothing more than the correct answers on your questionnaire. Endorsing Nick Lampson over either Bob Smither or Shelley Sekula-Gibbs means that you must have completely overlooked his actions when he was in Congress. Endorsing Shane Sklar over Ron Paul indicates that concern for the Second Amendment takes a back seat to industry protectionism.

Frankly, we are having difficulty finding reasons to continue our financial support of an organization that can make such inconsistent and, frankly, idiotic recommendations. There are other organizations which understand that compromise on principle is never an acceptable means to the end of safeguarding our rights under the Constitution, something the NRA appears to have forgotten. If, however, we are wrong and there is some principled and comprehensible justification for the endorsements you have made, we would be eager to hear them. If we receive no reply, we will regretfully be forced to conclude our funds can be better used supporting organizations with more integrity.

Sincerely,
T, Member #
J, Member #

We'll see what, if anything, they have to say. GOA can always use more money since the NRA appears to be falling down on the job.

Why The Surprise?

Okay, John Kerry (D-umbass) opened his mouth the other day and stuck his foot in it up to about where his hip should be. No problem, that’s what we’ve come to expect from politicians of all stripes. More specifically, he said something about the military that got everybody’s panties in a twist.

I can understand calling him on it. I tend to figure if you make an asshat statement, you should get called on it. Similarly, if you stand up in front of cameras and microphones and start lying your ass off, you should get called on that as well. What I don’t understand is why anybody with a pulse who has followed John Kerry’s career is the least bit surprised by him making slanderous and insulting statements about the military. Have we all forgotten the events which launched his political career? Did we forget the “reminiscent of Genghis Khan” bullshit? John Kerry has a career long inability to speak the truth about the American military.

I am, of course, amused by him claiming that it’s all a hatchet job.

“If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they're crazy.”

Well, shit, John, nothing ever stopped you from slandering everyone who served in Viet Nam. Why would we think you’ve changed? Apparently, I’m crazy for thinking you’ve done something once, so you might do it again. This might make me distrustful and cynical, but not crazy.

Damn, I wish this asshat would lose his seat so I can quit hearing about him. Of course, that didn't work so well with Al Gore. Someday, someone will have to explain to me the donk fascination with their failures.