On The Third Hand

Mineta Resigns As Transportation Secretary

Via Glenn, who is taking credit. (I should take credit too - it’s only two years or so since I called for his removal.)

Any rate, never mind credits, I’m glad he’s out. Unless they replace him with someone worse…

Man With Bloody Chain Saw Let in to U.S.

James gets my quote of the week for the following:

One doesn’t have to be Quincy, M.E. to spot blood on a chain saw, especially when the guy is also carrying a sword, a hatchet, a knife, and brass knuckles. And looks like the guy in the photo.

Click the link to see the photo. And if you’ve been following the various MSM obsessions lately, do his eyes remind you of anyone? (Just wondering.)

Read: Drop Those Nose Hair Clippers, Soldier!.

The following is a must read… and it has a surprise ending too. But it doesn’t reflect very well on airport security. So here you are: The Sandmonkey Airport Incident and The Sandmonkey Airport Incident part 2.

Oh, and before anyone gets offended at the titles, please note that The Sandmonkey is the blogger. He’s Egyptian. You can call him Sam if his pen name bothers you. If you aren’t reading him, btw, you should. He has an interesting perspective on things.

By Fred at Rantburg on the subject of the FBI discovering explosives in Terry Nichol’s home. Which appear to date from before the Oklahoma City atrocity. The FBI is watching out for us. Do you feel safer now?

Man Locked in Cargo Hold Flies to Philly

A young man loading baggage into an airplane in Milwaukee got locked in a cargo hold Friday and stayed there on a flight to Philadelphia, Midwest Airlines officials said.

“He was in the process of securing a wheelchair, tying it down,” airline spokeswoman Carol Skornicka said Friday night, “and they didn’t see that he was still in there when they closed the door.”

She said the man, whose name was not released, is a ramp agent who loads baggage and any other cargo that goes in the hold.

The cargo hold is heated and pressurized, so the unexpected trip to Philadelphia didn’t hurt the man, Skornicka said.

Lucky for him…

NRA leader advocates guns for teachers

All options should be considered to prevent rampages like the Minnesota school shooting that took 10 lives - including making guns available to teachers, a top National Rifle Association leader said Friday.

“I’m not saying that that means every teacher should have a gun or not, but what I am saying is we need to look at all the options at what will truly protect the students,” the NRA’s first vice president, Sandra S. Froman, told The Associated Press.

Gun-control restrictions would not have prevented Jeff Weise, 16, from killing nine people and himself Monday at Red Lake High School near Bemidji, Minn., said Froman, an attorney expected next month to be elected president of the NRA, which claims 4 million members.

The presence of an unarmed guard at the school failed to stop the siege, she noted.

What amazes me is people who consider an unarmed guard to be security… The NRA is making sense here. Let the teachers carry guns (those who can and will). Not that many will listen.

Tommy Thompson - A Wealth of Information

Mr. Thompson should just go home and post a sign on his front lawn announcing there are no guns in his house (after getting rid of any guns he may own, of course).

Link thanks to Tig, who has been surfing about digging up links just for my enjoyment (ok… that’s a blatant exaggeration but I did find a lot of clickables in that post, no matter what his motivation in hunting them down).

Tenet calls for Internet security

Former CIA Director George J. Tenet yesterday called for new security measures to guard against attacks on the United States that use the Internet, which he called “a potential Achilles’ heel.”

“I know that these actions will be controversial in this age when we still think the Internet is a free and open society with no control or accountability,” he told an information-technology security conference in Washington, “but ultimately the Wild West must give way to governance and control.”

Note to Tenet: It’s the very lack of “governance and control” that is the Internet’s greatest defence. I hope Porter Goss has a better understanding of the concept. If he doesn’t, I’m quite willing to explain it to him, in detail. (And, yes, I do have contacts that could get me a hearing.)

Hat tip to Screaming Memes, the only site I know of that rivals Protein Wisdom for just-plain-weirdness.

(And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Jeff were involved in both.)

Border Crisis Becomes Homeland Security Concern.

A problem at the border could lead to a Homeland Security threat, the Local 2 Troubleshooters reported Wednesday. It is not about illegal immigration. It’s about terrorism, the safety of our southern border and a lack of critical resources forcing the government to release people into our communities.

Every day, immigrants illegally run across our southern border unchecked. Homeland Security officials are not as concerned with the ones from Mexico as they are with the ones who may be hidden within other groups – the ones our government refers to as OTMs, known as Other Than Mexicans, such as people from Central and South America, and countries like Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. Nationwide, our government has lost track of 400,000 of these OTMs.

The problem is felt in almost every Texas border town.

In Del Rio, Tommy Vick spent the last 15 years on the banks of the Rio Grande where the water is barely ankle deep. Vick expects to see illegals using his backyard as a gateway to the U.S. What he did not expect to see was a man in his front yard asking for work.

“He appeared to be Anglo, but he had an accent. I was talking to him and he was Russian. He was from Russia,” Vick said.

Val Verde County Sheriff D’Wayne Jernigan sees anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500 OTMs released into his community every month.

“At a time when we’re so concerned with terrorism in our country, we don’t know who is coming into our country. We don’t know. We don’t know. We don’t know who these people are,” Jernigan said.

In Eagle Pass, so many OTMs are being released daily to roam the streets, border patrol officers call it “OTM alley.”

“If Homeland Security is important, then this should stop immediately,” said Pepe Aranda, Maverick County judge.

They just fade into the populous – New York City, Boston, San Antonio, Houston,” Jernigan said.

The reason that so many OTMs are disappearing from law enforcement’s radar is because the U.S. does not have enough detention space to hold all of them while our government works out deportation arrangements, the station reported.

Might I suggest some tent cities? Or would putting these people up in the same sort of conditions our military have been dealing with in Iraq be considered ‘abuse’?

Link via Jihad Watch.

Citizen Smash’s When Counter-Proliferation Fails and Froggy’s response, Pondering the Nightmare

It’s an old conversation and I don’t think a nuclear attack is inevitable; however, I do think it is possible and certainly something we should think about.

For an earlier conversation, which also includes chemical and biological attacks, see this post by Wretchard at Belmont club, the thoughts on that post by Steven Den Beste, and Wretchard’s response to Den Beste.

My thoughts on the subject are closest to Den Beste’s post, including his comment on the danger of biological warfare (though I consider it the least likely WMD to be successfully used by terrorists). I consider the current administration’s policy to be our best chance of avoiding such attacks, thus our best chance of avoiding ever having to use nuclear weaponry again. In many ways, I fear our response to a serious attack more than the attack itself.

A Scream From The Den……..

The too-tightly-twisted-turban-crowd™ is this country’s real enemy; no doubt about it at all, as evidenced by this extensive article from U.S. News & World Report. What little skullduggery they’ve not tried is absurdly small. Those mullahs mean to rule the world, and nothing short of absolute rule will do.

When will the United States and the rest of the world wake up? Probably not until the next large terrorist attack outside the Middle East wreaks death and damage beyond even the disaster that was 11 September 2001. This country has a unique window of opportunity right now to see that Iran is removed from the active player list by whatever means it takes. If we let it pass by, we are stupid, ignorant, and ultimately exhibiting a death wish for our country as we know it. If we fall, the rest of the world will be left to be run over by the tyrants.

WAKE UP, AMERICA !!