Happy New Year, All Americans, and thanks for being a part of the blog and a part of my life.

Here’s to 2010! May the once silent majority continue to roar!

Photo Credit: Optical Illusion

In 2009, more and more Americans became licensed to carry a concealed weapon. According to the “National Instant Criminal Background Check statistics,” there was “an increase of 25 million background checks from a total of 75 million to 100 million initiated by Type 01 federally licensed firearms retailers between April 5, 2007, and April 4, 2009.”

Bill Brassard at Buckeye Firearms Association notes, there was a decline in violent crime in 2009, leading a person to doubt the liberal argument that more guns equal more crime:

Preliminary statistics released by the FBI for the first half of 2009 show that violent crime continues a downward trend that began in 2006. The figures show crime falling in all categories–robbery, aggravated assault, motor vehicle thefts, etc.–with murders down a remarkable 10 percent from the previous year.

The FBI statistics undermine a favorite argument of anti-gun groups and some mainstream media that “more guns equal more crime,” especially when you consider that the decrease in violent crime from late 2008 through the first half of 2009 occurred at the same time that firearm sales were surging.

The most popular firearms selling at that time were handguns and modern sporting rifles (AR-style rifles)–two types of firearms that anti-gunners never miss an opportunity to demonize.

An American uses a firearm defensively every 13 seconds. With more guns on the street in the hands of law abiding citizens, I wonder if that number isn’t lower now.

Best tweet I’ve seen in a long time, if not ever.

As I wrote yesterday, the left was giddy with the thought of a dead Rush Limbaugh, and by sending tweets and leaving comments, they left themselves open for one of the most cutting tweets I have ever read:

“The people calling for Rush Limbaugh to die are the same people who ask to control your healthcare.” – LDoren

Well put.

This is what you are missing on Twitter. If you aren’t on it yet, read this and learn why you should be.

Rush Limbaugh has been taken to a hospital in Hawaii with chest pains. He was last reported to be in serious condition:

KITV reported Wednesday that paramedics responded to a call at 2:41 p.m. from the Kahala Hotel and Resort where Limbaugh is vacationing.

The station, citing unnamed sources, said paramedics treated Limbaugh and took him to The Queen’s Medical Center in serious condition.

Queen’s spokesman N. Makana Shook says the hospital is unable to comment on the report.

Limbaugh is a trending topic on Twitter. (For those who don’t know what that means, it’s something on Twitter that a lot of people are talking about.) Already, the liberals are falling over each other to be the most vile:

• SpankyBrown : Rush Limbaugh … Drink some bleach !!! Kill Yo’ Self !!!!
• billpalmer : @tracycoyle oh come on, don’t you wish God would kill Bin Laden? this is no different – Limbaugh‘s done just as much damage to the U.S.
• _FOBI_ : is it wrong that the news about rush limbaugh made me smile?
• cookiez17 : RT @fatstradamous: RT @phontigallo: I was scared of another death this year til I heard Rush Limbaugh was in the hospital. Come on 2009; don’t fail me now.
• its_flipside : Rush Limbaugh in the hospital! In a year full of deaths, I think we can afford one more.
• meganspanda I hope Rush Limbaugh dies and I will not take it back. He’s a horrible man.
• Hurgledurf : @Joshuabradenp A) Praying won’t do anything because there isn’t a God and B) Rush Limbaugh should die for being a giant douchebag. Shut up.
• godhatesacoward: RT @amazingatheist: Rush Limbaugh hospitalized with chest pains. Let’s all hope he dies.
• corsi75 : First thought, good riddance RT @cnnbrk: Radio host Rush Limbaugh was rushed to a Honolulu hospital with chest pains
• IntrnetSuprhero : RT @Pumpy_Beanis: if everybody mentally wills rush limbaugh to die at the same time maybe he will. help me out folks #tcot

There is a lot more where that came from, but let’s check the blogs now. Over at The Huffington Post:

• No, I don’t want him to dye suddenly. It should be very very sloe and pane-full. So he can truly understand how broken our health care system iz!!!!!
• “HAPPY NEW YEAR”…..
• This truly is a GOOD NEWS!

There were some people over there offering prayers for RUsh, which I thought was pretty classy.

iowntheworld noted some less than classy comments at TMZ:

I hope he dies. Posted at 10:03PM on Dec 30th 2009 by Chris
2.

Best news I’ve heard in years…Hope he joins MJ, the sooner the better! Posted at 10:02PM on Dec 30th 2009 by Ron Burgundy
1.

good riddance! Posted at 10:01PM on Dec 30th 2009 by james
18.

Oh, please let him die! Preferably quickly and very painfully. Please, please, PLEASE!!! Posted at 10:06PM on Dec 30th 2009 by Shittohead

Liberals are the compassionate ones, right? That’s why they behave like this whenever a prominent right winger dies. Remember how they jumped for joy when Tony Snow died?

Over at one of my old hangouts, Newsvine, now owned by MSNBC.com, the liberals are doing more of the same:

• I’m not praying for this fool as long as his underlings are praying for Obama to fail–to hell with the pompous gas bag.

• …it can’t be a heart attack, since he doesn’t have a heart in the first place. Must be ingestion. Perhaps someone he ate?

Finally, there’s Fark:

• DIE Rush Limbaugh DIE.
• Ding Dong the Witch is Dead!
• Oh please oh please oh please oh please
• Fark that guy. As an added bit of good measure, I hope Donovan McNabb is invited to give his eulogy.
• I’m not going to say I want him to die… but the world WOULD be better off if he did.

  Just saying.

Nice. Imagine what will happen when W finally passes on.

Back in August, the Whole Foods Chairman John Mackey caused many a liberal head to asplode when he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling for health care reform with “less government control and more individual empowerment.”

The rabid left called for a boycott.

Mackey didn’t back down from his position. In fact, he is still calling for free market solutions to the health care problems in America. On Fox Business’s “Stossel,” Mackey kept preaching the right wing gospel:

Wait for it. Soon there will be a Mackey2012.com. There’s already chatter on the Ron Paul forums.

Over at BigGovernment.com there is a story on a proposed program for new teachers in the state of Minnesota. One of the prerequisites is to fully accept that America sucks or go through remediation.

No, really:

What’s the task force’s main recommendation? That new teachers be immersed in a liberal political agenda that’s highly critical of American social norms, particularly the notion that all people can positively influence their own destiny through hard work and determination.

The task force “recommended that aspiring teachers must repudiate the notion of the ‘American Dream’ and instead “must embrace – and be prepared to teach our state’s kids – the task force’s own vision of America as an oppressive hellhole: racist, sexist and homophobic,” according to writer Katherine Kersten of the Star Tribune.

“The report advocates making race, class and gender politics the ‘overarching framework’ for all teaching courses at the university,” Kersten wrote. “It calls for evaluating future teachers in both coursework and practice teaching, based on their willingness to fall into intellectual lockstep.”

The task force recommends that prospective teachers begin by confessing their own bigotry. They would have to prepare a report “describing their own prejudices and stereotypes, questioning their ‘cultural motives’ for wishing to become teachers, and take a ‘cultural intelligence’ assessment designed to ferret out their latent racism, classism and other ‘isms,’” according to the newspaper.

More than anything, “future teachers must. . . recognize and denounce the fundamental injustices at the heart of American society,” the article said.

What about those prospective teachers who refuse to fall into “intellectual lockstep?” After all, there’s bound to be a stubborn conservative or two who think America’s a pretty decent place to live, work and raise a family.

For them, the university “must develop clear steps and procedures. . . including a remediation plan,” the report said.

Good Lord.

FIRE has the report here.

Pardon me if I want my teachers to believe that America is a special place where people can be whatever they want to be and that the American Dream is not only still alive, but worth chasing.

Liberals have been working this angle for decades. This is one of the main reasons the left opposes private schools, vouchers and homeschooling. They can’t control the message. And as we all know, if you can get the message to the youth, you have gotten the message to the future.

I remember when I was in elementary school how the message was switched from America as a melting pot to America as a salad bar. The idea was that people didn’t come to America and assimilate, but came to America and stayed the same as they were when they came to America.

Sorry, but that bit of indoctrination just didn’t stick.

This is one of the many reasons my wife and I have chosen to homeschool our children. I can choose history books like Winston Churchill’s “The Great Republic” rather than have Howard Zinn write the public school textbook.

Take control of your children’s education, people, or someone else will.

One of the stories that hit while I was on Christmas/Blizzard ’09 Part II break concerned a December 17th executive order issued by President Barack Obama.

It reads:

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 1 of the International Organizations Immunities Act (22 U.S.C. 288), and in order to extend the appropriate privileges, exemptions, and immunities to the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), it is hereby ordered that Executive Order 12425 of June 16, 1983, as amended, is further amended by deleting from the first sentence the words “except those provided by Section 2(c), Section 3, Section 4, Section 5, and Section 6 of that Act” and the semicolon that immediately precedes them.

(Emphasis mine, as it is throughout this post.)

Steve Schippert at ThreatsWatch explains what this order does:

It grants INTERPOL (International Criminal Police Organization) a new level of full diplomatic immunity afforded to foreign embassies and select other “International Organizations” as set forth in the United States International Organizations Immunities Act of 1945.

By removing language from President Reagan’s 1983 Executive Order 12425, this international law enforcement body now operates - now operates - on American soil beyond the reach of our own top law enforcement arm, the FBI, and is immune from Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

It gets worse:

Property and assets being immune from search and confiscation means precisely that. Wherever they may be in the United States. This could conceivably include human assets – Americans arrested on our soil by INTERPOL officers.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air suggests Schippert overreaches with his last argument and asks an important question:

American law does not consider people as “assets.” It does mean, though, that Interpol officers would have diplomatic immunity for any lawbreaking conducted in the US at a time when Interpol nations (like Italy) have attempted to try American intelligence agents for their work in the war on terror, a rather interesting double standard.

It also appears to mean that Americans who get arrested on the basis of Interpol work cannot get the type of documentation one normally would get in the discovery process, which is a remarkable reversal from Obama’s declared efforts to gain “due process” for terrorists detained at Gitmo. Does the White House intend to treat Americans worse than the terrorists we’ve captured during wartime?

Here’s a better question: Why would he do such a thing? Why would he write an order elevating a law enforcement agency above the Constitution?

Andy McCarthy at The Corner may be onto something here:

Interpol works closely with international tribunals (such as the International Criminal Court — which the United States has refused to join because of its sovereignty surrendering provisions, though top Obama officials want us in it). It also works closely with foreign courts and law-enforcement authorities (such as those in Europe that are investigating former Bush administration officials for purported war crimes — i.e., for actions taken in America’s defense).

Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee also writes at Pajamas Media. He offers a look at what might be motivating this move:

If President Obama and his radical allies in the Democratic leadership have their way, American soldiers could presumably be brought up on charges as war criminals by enemy nations and marked for arrest and deportation by an international police force on American soil. They would face charges in a foreign land without the constitutional protections they fought and bled to protect. The White House seems to be on the bewildering path of giving al-Qaeda terrorists who murder innocent women and children more legal protection than the very soldiers that risk their lives trying to bring terrorists to justice. The asinine court-martial charges being brought against three Navy SEALs based upon the word of a terrorist they captured suddenly make a sickening kind of sense.

It also stands to reason that Obama’s seeming willingness to put American soldiers’ lives in the hands of a corrupt international community could also be brought to bear against his political enemies. Foreign investigators of dubious intent, and our own left-wing extremists, have long branded officials of the previous administration “war criminals” for actions they’d taken in the war on terror. It is entirely conceivable — perhaps even likely — that these same organizations and enemy governments that went after 25 Israeli government officials through INTERPOL and the ICC would quickly move to indict a wish list of current and former U.S. government officials for alleged “war crimes.” Former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney would obviously be at the top of such a list of politically motivated suspects, but such a list could just as easily include General David Petraeus, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, congressmen, and senators.

Rick Moran writes:

I would speculate that McCarthy has hit upon the reason; the president may solve the problem of “torture trials” by turning the whole thing over to the International Criminal Court. There are several hands in the Obama foreign policy shop who would support this move, while he would definitely get back in the good graces of his far left base.

But that’s just speculation. Perhaps it’s terrorism related. Maybe he’s just trying to please his European friends.

I’d like to see some others – like Eugene Volohk or Richard Posner – weigh in on this before hitting the panic button.

It’s the hesitance to hit the panic button that makes me mention this post by Jonn Lilyea at This Ain’t Hell:

Basically, the only thing Obama is changing is removing part of a sentence. That sentence refers to text that has to do with import duties on INTERPOL’s stuff they bring into this country and the withdrawal of the text gives them tax exemptions for income they earn here.

…

Yeah, it’s real riveting stuff. Let’s get outraged about things that are real – Lord knows, Obama does enough real stuff to get angry about.

Other bloggers writing about this:

• Dr. Melissa Clouthier did a podcast interview with “constitutional scholar Clyde Middleton of the Patriot Room.”
• Brutally Honest
• Wizbang
• The Anchoress
• Pink Flamingo Bar
• A Soldier’s Perspective
• Patriot Room
• Weasel Zippers
• Infidels Are Cool
• Flopping Aces
• Moonbattery
• Flopping Aces…again
• Political Pistachio
• The Liberty Sphere
• Doug Ross
• Alphecca
• Snowflakes in Hell

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Leave a comment below and sound off.

The United States has always had the best weapons systems in the world. The billions of dollars spent in the Department of Defense have insured America’s dominance in this field.

Currently, two systems are being tested that I find simply amazing. The first one is lasers.

The Air Force recently test-fired its Advanced Tactical Laser from a C-130 Hercules, scorching a truck’s hood. And last month the Army and Air Force teamed with Boeing Co. for a demonstration in which lasers on the ground shot down drones at China Lake, Calif., company officials said.

Laser weapon projects in the works include the Navy’s powerful Free Electron Laser; the Advanced Tactical Laser; the Laser Avenger, which was used to shoot down the drones at China Lake; and the Army’s High Energy Laser Technology Demonstrator, or HEL TD.

“The technology is there,” said Scott McPheeters, senior research engineer at the Army’s Program Executive Office Missiles and Space in Huntsville, Ala. “What we need to do is get the systems put into more rugged configurations [to handle different environments].”

The lasers are working, both in the air and on the ground. Incredible.

Once these are deployed to the battlefield, I wonder how long until they are found on drones. If you can fit it on a Hummer, you should be able to attach it to a drone. I’m sure there would be different hardware and software requirements, but it’s definitely possible.

The second system that impressed the heck out of me is the Navy’s railgun. We are talking about a ship mounted weapon that shoots projectiles are around Mach 5. Yeah, it’s that cool:

The Navy is researching rail guns because they would weigh less than conventional ones, and since they rely on electromagnetics to fire rounds, you wouldn’t need a big, dangerous pile of explosives stored in a magazine. All of that means a lighter ship, and a much more deadly ship: a combat-ready rail gun would be able to fire Mach 5 projectiles over 200 miles with pinpoint accuracy, hitting 5 meter targets.

The Navy tested one of these guns in February. As the link above noted, it destroyed everything it touched. Check out this amazing video:

Very impressive. The projectile is traveling at 8,270 feet a second, or 5,640 mph. And the weapon was fired at one third its power.

Now if we can just keep the liberals from gutting the R&D funding, these weapons will make America even stronger.

Cross posted at Right Wing News.

Terrorists (are they still called terrorists now, or is it “facilitators of man caused disasters) have finally gone and crossed the line by blowing off their genitals as a way to punish the West.

Good plan.

Since the sub-humans are now hiding their explosives in the nether regions, can we expect hernia checks every time we board a plane? According to the TSA, no. But you will get full body pat downs if you are coming to America from a foreign country.

Pat downs that don’t check the area that was just immolated on Flight 253.

It won’t be long before people start complaining about airport workers manhandling their goods and then expect to see a blast from the past making a comeback.

Back in 2003, we were introduced to the Backscatter X-ray, a device that delivered very clear pictures of passengers, sans clothes. It was thought then to be too revealing:

Ever since terrorist Richard Reid tried to detonate a bomb hidden in his shoes, the government has been searching for a faster, more efficient way to detect plastic explosives.

“The technology we’re using today, in some cases, can take 12 seconds to do a scan,” says Randal Null, Chief Technology Officer of the Transportation Security Administration. “We’d like to drive that down to a few seconds.”

So now, instead of looking at your shoes, Null says, “we are actually going to do a full body scan of an individual.”

Airport security screeners have the ability to take the shirt right off your back, “so all anatomical features are shown,” says Null.

It’s called Backscatter X-ray — low levels of radiation that could deliver high levels of embarrassment at airports all across the country.

Cowan demonstrated what its going to end up showing folks to Diane Marsh who says, shaking her head, “Oh no. I don’t like that. No I wouldn’t like that.”

Stacey and Elliot Goldstein of New York feel the same way.

“You feel like strangers are really looking at you,” Stacey says. “I don’t know; it would really creep me out.”

But would you rather be patted down or would you rather go through this?

Currently, the backscatter xray is used in “18 airports, 4 court houses, and a correctional facility” in America. But with the new need to check passenger’s, um, “carry on,” I would suspect you will see a new push for these machines.

From a security standpoint, these would be the way to go. Hands off, detailed, and easy. From the passenger point of view, they reveal too much.

I’d feel more comfortable flying if everyone went through one of these, but I can also understand why people find them a bit over the line. What do you think? Will these become standard in airports and are they too much?

I don’t know how many people in the rightosphere take time to write out goals for their blog, but last year I did. I thought it was important that I look at where I was going, and why, if I was going to be a top tier blogger.

I still think goals are important, which is why I just finished writing my goals for 2010. But first, let’s review the goals for 2009 and see how I did.

2009 Goals

1. 1,500 RSS Subscribers
2. Average 2,000 Unique Visitors a Day
3. Get Published
4. Generate $250 Monthly Revenue
5. 52 Original Articles
6. Improve Community on Forum
7. Publish an E-book

Goal #1: 1,500 RSS Subscribers

This is the one goal I feel I actually put some effort into achieving. I read quite a few articles on increasing subscribers and implemented some of the strategies. For example, I had Andrew add the “SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE VIA RSS OR EMAIL” graphic to the header. The graphic also asks the reader if they understand was RSS is, and tells them where they can learn if they don’t.

I thought it was important that readers who might not be as tech savvy as others understood RSS subscriptions were free. I even wrote a guest post on it for Liz Strauss’s blog.

Another thing I did to increase subscriptions was encourage Right WIng News readers to visit All American Blogger and subscribe. I did this by ending my cross postings there with, “This post was cross posted at All American Blogger, where you can find other great original articles. While you are there, subscribe to the free RSS feed. Don’t know what RSS is? Click here to find out.”

John Hawkins is generous enough not only allow me to put that on the posts, but encourages me to put it there.

Finally, the 2009 All American Christmas Contest made it mandatory you be a subscriber to see the link to the post. While my social networking efforts really sabotaged that plan, it did result in new subscribers from when the contest was announced to when it was closed.

In the end, I did get close. As of right now, my Feedburner widget shows 1225 subscribers. Not bad.

While I didn’t meet my goal, had I not set it I think my current numbers would be far lower.

Goal #2: Average 2,000 Unique Visitors Per Day

Not even close.

While my numbers aren’t terrible, they are no where near where I wanted them to be now. I think it has to do with the lack of original content. No, I don’t mean I’m scraping content from other people. Everything I put on here I created. What I mean is, I find myself generally writing a comment or two, quoting what someone else has written, then ending with another comment or two.

That’s not original content in my book. That’s saying, “Look what someone else wrote.”

Original content is stuff like, “I Bought A Gallon of Milk Today” or “Gun Free Zones and the Ketchup Bottle.” Those you can’t find anywhere else. And articles like that get linked to by other bloggers. Most bloggers aren’t going to link to a simple link post like I can churn out in ten minutes. Oh, they may Hat Tip me, but that doesn’t result in a lot of unique visitors.

But if another blogger reads an original articles, quotes it and adds a link, you will get more and more visitors. Only a few will return, but that little bit helps your overall numbers.

There are many reasons why I didn’t write a lot of original posts for AAB this year, one of them being the completion of the next goal.

Goal #3; Get Published

When the American Issues Project started its column and blog section this year, I was approached to contribute an article a week. It was a huge milestone in my writing career. I was now going to be a paid columnist.

The topic, fiscal policy, was a little intimidating to me. I felt I could do the job though and I relied heavily on my editor for advice. She came through when I needed her, and I wrote quite a few original pieces for AIP. If you want, you can read them here.

I also spent a bit of time marketing these articles, not only here, but on StumbleUpon, Free Republic, Twitter and Facebook. Because of that, I found my articles featured in the “Most Read” section of the site quite often.

Unfortunately, the site just wasn’t bringing in the numbers some felt were necessary and the contract was ended. It was a good run however, and helped me become a better writer.

Goal #4: Generate $250 Monthly Revenue

I don’t even think I thought about this goal when I set it. I pretty much pulled the number out of my hind end. $250 a month comes out to $3,000 a year. In order to do that, I would have to average $58 a week, or $8 a day.

Look at the site today. The only ad on it is the big Adsense 250×250, which readers rarely, if ever, click on. I think most have it filtered out by their browsers anyway. My Topspots brings in a little change, but I never see that as it get funneled back into the blog, I think (Andrew maintains that.)

The only affiliate link on the site is the “What Duane’s Reading” graphic in the sidebar. It gets a few hits now and then, but it seems people aren’t buying much.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not whining. While I would love to get to the point where I am making some money on this blog, right now it just isn’t happening and that is totally my fault. I just have not taken the action.

But in 2010, I will.

Goal #5: 52 Original Articles

The idea here was simple. I would update the blog daily with stories as they happened, but each week would feature an original article to bring in the traffic. I intended to have it be around 750-1000 words, heavy in information, much like the posts you find in the “Best Of” section.  

Something like “The 10 Most Outrageous Terrorists of the Right Wing Mob.” That brought in a lot of traffic via tweets and links.

It didn’t work out that way. I started the year out with a bang, but found it easy to sluff off and rely on the link posts and such. This failure did the most damage to the other goals in my opinion. Had I worked harder on this, I feel it would have had a positive impact on not only the other goals, but the blog, my reputation and my brand.

So why didn’t I do it? It’s hard. It’s that simple. I have a full time job, working 12 hour days on a rotating schedule. Some weeks I work nights, some weeks I work days. That’s a tough row to hoe as it is. Then you factor in a wife and five kids, a house and five acres to maintain and other personal obligations and I found myself stretched pretty thin. Sitting down to write, I’d just want to pound out four or five quick posts and go to bed.

That’s where I find myself now.

Again, not whining, but being realistic. Can I even achieve this goal? It is hard, but I think I can do it, so expect to see it on my list for 2010. I mean, reading 100 books in a year was hard too, but I did that.

Goal #6: Improve Community on Forum

Forum? What forum?

The blog did have a forum at one time. But when it was rebooted earlier in the year, it was removed. People just weren’t using it.

Again, I blame myself. I wasn’t directing readers there enough, nor was I participating in it enough. I’d like to see a robust forum operating on the blog, as none of the other conservative blogs have one, but I don’t know if it will work.

I mean, there’s probably a reason none of the other blogs have one, right? Still, I’d love to have a community of people adding their own content and opinions on the site. Is this something you think you’d participate in?

Goal #7: Write an E-Book

I did quite a bit of research for an e-book, both on how to write and publish one successfully and one the topic of the book. I just never took the first step in writing it.

I think it is mainly because of what I wrote about before. Lack of time, or rather, lack of organizing my time. I found myself focused on getting content on the blog and not working on the book.

Because of that focus, I didn’t write the first word of the book.

Plan on seeing this on the 2010 list as well.

So, looking at them as a whole, I didn’t achieve any of my goals for 2009. Why not?

I wasn’t focused on them. I wrote them down in my Moleskin.

But I never reviewed them. I didn’t have them in a place where I could stay focused on them. And being out of my sight, they were out of my mind.

Looking to 2010, I have a new set of goals for All American Blogger and myself. You already know some of them, but I want to go over the rest with you as well. I also have a plan on how I am going to keep them fresh in my mind and how I am going to set myself up for success, rather than allow myself to drown in my own disorganization.

Did you set any goals for 2009, blogging or otherwise? Care to share them in the comments?