Just leave me the hell alone!

My pickup truck registration was due this month, something else that rankles the living hell out of me.

I paid sales tax on the truck when I bought it. I pay (outrageous) taxes on the gasoline she gulps. I pay sales tax on the synthetic oil and top-shelf oil filter I replace every four-thousand miles religiously. I pay sales tax on the parts I purchase at NAPA or Autozone or O'Reilly's and install and/or replace. I paid taxes on the tools I use to maintain our vehicles.

But none of that is good enough for the damned government. I have to register the truck as well.

Fine, give me a registration application. I'll fill it out and mail it back to you or zap it to you via Al Gore's internet.

Oh no you don't. Not so fast there, Tex.

You gotta pony up some cash for that registration.

In looking at the list of taxes just to register my pickup (as well as my wife's Avalon and my Z-car), there are about seven additional taxes listed and all in all, the total came out to around $65 dollars. There was an extra dollar charge if you mailed it in, and get this--an extra TWO DOLLAR charge if you sent it in via the internet.

WTF?

The money is zapped right into the Texas Treasury. No wages had to be paid for typical state employees sitting on their dead asses pretending to be busy. No office space had to be rented. It's the internet.

And for eliminating all that additional labor and office equipment and real estate, it cost two bucks more.

Mind you, I'm not really fussing about paying $67 for registering my truck. I remember a few years back in North Carolina, specifically Nash County, it cost $400 and change to register my truck. Cost more than that to register the wife's car. I told the First In Flight state to kiss my Texas ass and kept the Z-car registered with my address in Texas. We then proceeded to begin looking for ways to get the hell out of North Carolina as fast as we could.

You pay an inordinate amount of money for a motor vehicle, then the exorbitant sales tax on top of it, then the registration fees. . . and that should be it, by God. But no. Always a (expletive deleted) tax or permit or fee on damn near everything you own.

We recently replaced the fence on the west side of our yard. We live in a suburb in the northern hinterlands of the Dallas/Fort Worth metro-madness. Our house is located on a large corner lot on a cul-de-sac. The fence line we replaced was around 115 linear feet. Just as we did with the other two sides of the property, we used concrete posts, 2x4s as rails instead of those wimpy little 1.5 x 1.5 rails that rot after a few years and cause your pickets to fall out. We used the wide cedar pickets. Two-thirds of the fence line was with six-foot pickets. The remaining portion used eight-foot pickets as we have an elevated deck coming out of our downstairs master bedroom and kitchen. The taller pickets affords us better privacy.

Imagine my surprise when some geek from the city shows up and informs me that I'm in violation for NOT getting a permit to replace my own (expletive deleted) fence. Imagine what I called him and suggested he do with his permit.

A fence is required around here, but a permit is required in order to build a structure that the pissants down in City Hall require. Makes no sense. But it gets better.

The pissants at City Hall tack on an additional $100 on top of the $57 permit as a "fine" for not getting a permit to replace a structure required by code but for which a permit is required in order to build the structure so that you will be in compliance with code.

And it gets better yet.

It seems we may have an even larger fine because some fifteen-plus years ago, in the dead of night, the little nutsacks known as Planning & Zoning decided that all new fences on corner/cul-de-sac lots had to be a minimum of fifteen feet away from the sidewalk, or there would be a fine involved.

I measured where our house sits relative to the sidewalk on the west side, where the fence was replaced, and our house sits around thirteen feet from the sidewalk. That means to be in compliance, we'd have to give up a fifth or more of our backyard, PLUS have the fence start next to the house in the middle of our master bedroom picture window in order to be "fifteen feet from the sidewalk."

We explain this to the pissants at City Hall and it fell on deaf and dumb (literally) ears. "When do you want to pay the fine?" was all the women at the desk kept asking.

"I am not paying a damn fine for replacing a structure that had I not replaced it, I would have been fined for not having replaced," was my response.

"We'll send someone to collect the fine from you," was the dude in charge's response.

"Tell him to bring a (expletive deleted) lunch," was my response.

Sunday is Texas Independence Day. Sure as hell don't feel like Independence around here or anywhere else in Amerika any longer, what with all the damned taxes, fees, permission requests, ordinances, zoning, permits and fines for non-compliance of rules you don't even know exist.

In Florida, a woman somewhere near Coral Gables, I think, wanted to live off the grid. The (expletive deleted) city told her she couldn't!

SMFH.

Note to government--just leave me the hell alone.

Live or Die: The Choice Colt, Ruger, Marlin and Mossberg must make.

Gun confiscation is starting in Connecticut.

Call it whatever you want, but the rallying foundation of those of us who have been fighting the anti-gunners have long since held that "Registration leads to confiscation."

When the Constitution State enacted anti-Constitutional laws that infringe upon the right to keep and bear arms and demanded that her subjects immediately begin registering certain firearms, a handful of subjects complied.

But more citizens chose not to.

Civil disobedience, I believe, is what the libtards like to call it when hippies burned their draft cards and marched in the streets, or when the Al Sharpton led race-baiters protested and called for George Zimmerman's head.

However, as the citizens are refusing to register their legal firearms, the Constitution State is now drafting and sending out letters of confiscation.

There are a number of problems here, obviously. But one of the biggest problems I, as a gun-owner, shooter and enthusiast have is the fact that at least four major gun manufacturers maintain a significant presence in Connecticut in spite of the relentless war on guns and those who own them is being perpetrated.

Colt, Ruger, Marlin and Mossberg. Four brands of firearms I have long admired and owned products of continue to operate in a state that is now moving towards outright confiscation of firearms it doesn't like based upon nothing more than cosmetic appearance.

The "assault weapons" the Constitution State (oh, what irony) gets their panties in a wad over are nothing more than dressed up semi-automatic firearms.

Colt makes an "assault weapon." Ruger makes an "assault weapon." Marlin makes an "assault weapon." Mossberg makes an "assault weapon." All four manufacturers have or have had semi-automatic rifles in their manufacturing lineups. Yeah, Marlin's was a .22LR but it was still a semi-automatic. Glue a pistol grip (or half-eaten Pop Tart) to it, paint it matte black and add a red-dot to it and it'll be on the "Dangerous Guns You Cannot Own In The Freedom Loving Constitution State" list.

I love my Colt firearms even though Colt fell seriously out of favor with me when they got all elitist and tried the "We're only going to sell to government and law enforcement" route. I love my Rugers, especially the decidedly deadly, dangerous 10-22. My Mini-14 is only a danger to anything broader than the side of a barn because as is most Mini-14s, its accuracy is such that it is hard-pressed to consistently hit the broad side of any barn. There is no finer revolver than a four-inch Ruger GP100. There are wheelguns just as good, mind you, but none better.

And the Mossberg. I love Mossberg pump-action shotguns. I've had my Model 500 with a wooden stock (I don't like synthetic stocks on much of anything) for almost twenty-five years. It's never even hiccuped or given any indication that it might not fire or perform exactly designed.

My days of purchasing new Colt, Mossberg, Ruger and Marlin products have come to an end.

So long as these major gun manufacturers remain in a state that is now in the business of firearm confiscation, I will not spend one damned dime supporting them.

Yes, I realize it is expensive to just "up and move." But consider this: How expensive has it been in blood, sweat, tears and the lives of our men and women, going all the way back to 1776, who fought for our freedom and defended our freedom throughout two-plus centuries? Are the gun manufacturers listed above simply willing to let those sacrifices ultimately go down in absolute vain because it's expensive to "up and move" from a location who has made it clear that your money is welcome here, just not your product or  your supporters?

It may turn out to be a helluva lot more expensive to stay.

Do the right thing, Colt, Ruger, Marlin and Mossberg. Pack up and leave. There are still plenty more states out here that are far more supportive of the Constitution rather than the Constitution State.

Connecticut newpaper using the 1st Amendment to destroy the 2nd.

I first saw this op-ed from the Hartford, Connecticut litter-box liner The Courant several days ago.

It made my blood pressure rise enough that I set it on the back burner for a few days so that I could write about it without having to use one non-stop string of expletives.

Only the leftist, bed-wetting, communist-pinko sympathizing thumb-socking, political ass-kissing losers in the Fourth Estate could be this blind to the blatant hypocrisy they demonstrate, daily in most cases, with an op-ed about going after the "scofflaws" in Connecticut who have refused to register their so-called assault weapons and high-capacity magazines per the state's new anti-Constitutional law.

Yes, you read right: The editors at the birdcage-liner, The Courant, refer to those refusing to yield their Second Amendment rights as "scofflaws" and they do it in the headline of their slop-ed piece.

Here's an interesting little snippit:

Guns defined in state law as assault weapons can no longer be bought or sold in Connecticut. Such guns already held can be legally possessed if registered. But owning an unregistered assault weapon is a Class D felony. Felonies cannot go unenforced.

 I especially love that last line: "Felonies cannot go unenforced."

Really, now.

What was one of the original rallying cries of the anti-gun control movement? I think it went something like "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns."

Congratulations Connecticut. With the stroke of a pen, you've created fifty-thousand more criminals in the Constitution State--an irony that does not escape the rest of us. And now, the very rag I wouldn't use to clean dog crap off my work boots, The Courant, is urging tough action by the authorities.

Yet, the same rag has a number of stories praising or promoting civil disobedience by those Americans who disagree with a particular law or verdict. The dead-fish wrapper, The Courant, had an editorial praising the civil disobedience after the Trayvon Martin verdict, naturally, and decided that perhaps some laws needed to be re-examined or changed.

The rag praised the civil disobedience of blacks on Martin Luther King Day. Isn't that interesting. Nobody denied Rosa Parks a seat on the bus. Nobody denied blacks water in department stores. But Ms. Parks wanted equality and to be able to sit at the front of the bus. Blacks wanted to drink out of the same water fountain the white folks did. So they exercised some civil disobedience--for equality--and the modern day newspapers, rightfully, praise them for it.

Yet those same papers, using the term loosely, are willing to discriminate against those seeking their Second Amendment civil rights and instead turning them into felons and then encouraging their arrest.

So what we have is a newspaper, albeit using the term loosely, cowering behind their First Amendment rights working overtime to deny tens of thousands of residents in the Constitution State their Second, Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights and demanding action by the authorities, which would mean the police, in apprehending and trying these "scofflaws" who dare exercise their Constitutional rights.

Perhaps the sniveling cowards at the not-fit-for-even-paper-mach´rag, The Courant, might want to think about something:

There are an estimated fifty-thousand plus owners of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines who are telling the "authorities" in the Constitution State to kiss their freedom-loving, patriotic asses. There are over a quarter of a million gun-owners in Connecticut alone. There are less than seven-thousand total cops in Connecticut.

The reasonable conclusion?

Molon Labe.

Gun Owners - 1. Piers Morgan - 0.

Finally.

Perhaps one of the most obnoxious, imbecilic junior Pee-Wee talking heads of the mainstream media has just had his plug pulled.

I guess the next question is why CNN, headquartered in Atlanta, would want to bring an in anti-gun, anti-American asshole from Great Britain to wail away at every thing we do.

Doesn't CNN have enough anti-gun, anti-American assholes right there in their own employ in Atlanta without having to search abroad?

To be honest, the only time I ever caught a Piers Morgan snippit was on YouTube or if someone e-mailed a story to me. CNN, and all their affiliates, have long since been locked-out on every remote control in our household. MSNBC and MTV are locked out also along with most of the ESPN channels.

Life is too short to waste much time listening to the antics and rants of the Ted Turner nutsacks in his employ.

Morgan thought he could make a name for himself, send ratings skyrocketing and change the course of America by demonizing and berating gun-owners.

Well, Piers, don't let the door hit you on the bum on the way out.

Who's next?

Subhuman Mongrel? If you think that offends you. . .

As can be expected, the pansy-asses among us are wringing their hands and moaning over Ted Nugent's calling Barack Hussein Obama a "subhuman mongrel."

If this offends you, then my advice is to stay far, far, FAR away from your average Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and/or American Legion posts.

Trust me, you'll hear the SOB/CIC called a lot worse than a "subhuman mongrel."

"But this is bad for gun-owners," some are saying.

BFD. You do not beg for your Constitutional Rights. You demand them. Millions of men and women shed blood for those rights. What do you suppose they would call a president who literally shits all over the very document they gave their lives to defend?

It'll be worse than "subhuman mongrel," I guarantee you.

Do we really need a list of all the transgressions Obama has perpetrated on the Constitution, those who defend it and those who revere it?

Apparently so.

• Fast and Furious and the death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
• Ordering flags to be flown at half-mast for Whitney Houston, ignoring the death of Navy SEAL hero Chris Kyle.
• Voter intimidation via the new Black Panthers (speaking of subhuman mongrels) in Philadelphia which the regime has refused to even look into despite freaking VIDEO EVIDENCE.
• How many gazillion executive orders?
• How many gazillion miles traveled on Air Force One for wife and family and how many rooms and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on hotels and luxuries while telling the American serfs we need to "tighten up our belts and stay away from places like Las Vegas."
• Sleeping through the Benghazi attack while getting ready to travel to Vegas for a fundraiser.
• Selfies and footsies with another head of state at Comrade Mandela's sendoff.
• Pushing for United Nations control over our Second Amendment rights.
• "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon."
• The regime continuing to ignore black on white knockout game crimes, but vigorously prosecuting the one white on black knockout game--especially since it happened in Texas.
• Regime jackboots raiding Gibson guitar factory, charging a crime in which the alleged victim (India) said there WAS NO CRIME.
• IRS' targeting of conservative PACs, especially Tea Party supported groups?
• Denying Fort Hood survivors and victims their rightful benefits by classifying it as "workplace violence" rather than the terrorist attack it was.
• NSA spying on Americans.
• Putting monitors in newsrooms to ensure that the "priority news" is what is broadcast.
• Firing every flag officer in the military who is not in lockstep with his new vision for the military.
• Court-martialing four Navy SEALs for doing their job a little "too well."
• Court-martialing Marines for pissing on the bodies of dead Taliban--same Taliban who killed Marines.

And this is just a handful of the transgressions all from Obama's office that I could think of off the top of my head in the time it took to quickly type them out.

The son of a bitch is running our country into the ground and stomping on it.

And yet, we cry and moan over an aging rock and roll guy calling Obama what a huge number of us think he is.

"Bad for our image," is the rallying cry. And now Rand Paul is grandstanding and demanding an apology?

Mr. Paul. You can kiss my ass. We are in a war for the survival of our nation and our way of life. If you'd ever had the balls to serve and fight, Mr. Paul, you'd know that wars are not won--nor lost--with words.

They are won with conviction. Conviction of purpose and conviction of the objective. You blow-dried, pompous overpaid/underworked pansy-asses on Capitol Hill can hold all the filibusters you want, grandstand in front of the C-Span cameras until the cows come home, you can flood us with robot-calls and patronizing radio and tv ads, but at the end of the day, you are viewed by the overwhelming majority of the American people as being far more of the Problem than you are the Solution.

So one of us, an ordinary American citizen, calls the president a subhuman mongrel, and another political animal (Rand Paul) immediately gets offended and demands an apology?

Senator Paul, I believe you just exposed a little more of your true self than you would have preferred.

But that seems to run in the family.

Oxymoron: Today's Military Leadership

This is difficult to write.

It's been more than a couple of decades since I last put on a pair of combat boots and a military uniform, but of all the things I took away from my service, it was that you do whatever you must for the man beside you.

Above all, you never leave a comrade behind and you never forget. Ever.

The leadership, soft and pussified as it is, of today's military would be wise to remember these lessons.

Two U.S. Air Force airmen, majors, were shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War. They were listed as Missing In Action--MIA.

Last year, their remains were discovered by the Laotians, verified and returned to the United States. Military honors were given, except for one.

The pansy-assed take-a-leak-sitting-down so-called leadership of today's U.S. Air Force was too cheap to give these two heroes the traditional honorary flyover.

Said it wasn't in the budget.

Click on the link to see some old warbirds from eras past do what the mighty Air Force of today couldn't.

How much is a warrior's life worth to these asshats? And I'm curious as to something--Among the numbnut colonels and generals that were too cheap to do a flyover for these men, how many of these pathetic excuses for leadership wore command wings? The job of the U.S. Air Force is in the air and it has long rankled officers who did not wear wings that they were treated like second-class citizens.

Too bad. The job of the U.S. Navy is in the water. Officers who maintain their careers in the Navy at a desk far away from the fleet and who've never barfed after a couple of sliders during a tropical storm at sea simply do not get the respect that fleet officers and naval aviation officers do.

Likewise, the Army and Marines are primarily ground forces and officers who never saw any duty (or action) in actual skirmishes or combat are not afforded the same respect as those who have.

We called such people "REMFs" back in the day. My fellow vets know this term like they know the back of their hands--or better yet, the backside of our asses because that's what you constantly had to cover when REMFs were in charge.

Two U.S. Air Force aviators shot down, classified as missing in action, presumed dead, their remains discovered and sent home by another government, and our own stinking candy-assed "leadership" of the Air Force is too damned cheap to give these men the final flyover they earned.

That is failed leadership.

We've seen many other examples of failed military leadership under this bozo of a CIC. Navy SEALs brought to trial for doing their job too well, Marines court-martialed for pissing on the very scumbag Taliban animals that had killed other Marines and were trying to kill the ones who sprinkled a little urine on their dead carcasses. Allen West, for crying out loud.

It would seem that our military leadership has taken the same cowardly "me first" and "it's all bout me and my power" pathway that our corporate Big Business executives have, and that our elected officials have and that our law enforcement chiefs across the nation have.

I served under some damn good officers, one of whom retired as Chief of Staff, United States Air Force and who was like a surrogate father to me. He was a man's man and a leader who led from the front. In my line of work, I often cross-decked with my brethren in the Navy, Army and the Corps. Again, I met and worked  under some damned fine leaders.

Unfortunately, I also worked under some real chickenshits as well, and it was with dismay that I watched them scamper up the ladder higher and faster than the more qualified leaders?

How and why you ask?

Because the real leaders were--and are--too busy doing the real job of defending the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Their place is with their men and women, not shining a seat in the Pentagon with their ass, to paraphrase the colonel from First Blood.

The thing about veterans is we take care of our own, and we don't let people or politics or rules get in our way. Sure as hell not budgets. Those old warbirds are not inexpensive to maintain or fly, yet when asked if they'd do the flyover. . .

That's leadership. And God Bless them for it.

Please. Just share this.

In 1995, I was recruited to Kansas City to work for what would be the best ad agency I was ever blessed to write a line of copy in.

It was called Barkley & Evergreen back then. Today, it is simply Barkley and it has become even more awesome. It is the largest employee-owned advertising agency in the U.S. and it is the best place I ever worked.

I miss Barkley and I miss Kansas City.

We lived in the suburbs, in a small town called Olathe  in Johnson County, Kansas. Today, Olathe has grown quite a bit.

When you move to a new locale, you pretty much have to start over on everything from which mechanics to use and trust to finding new doctors and accountants to which restaurants to eat at and which grocery stores to shop at.

Among those things, I was looking for a place to cut my hair.

I found a little shop around the corner from our house one lazy fall afternoon not long after all the moving boxes had been unpacked. I drove over, put my name on the list and waited for my barber. When I  saw her, I almost audibly gasped.

She was beautiful. I mean, stunning as in gorgeous as in jaw-dropping pretty. She was also an artist with hair--men's hair or women's hair. She did a superb job on my ugly head of locks--so much so that my wife made an appointment with her for the upcoming Saturday. My wife and her hit it off immediately.

Her name was Bella, she had just turned twenty years of age and she had an accent that would make a stone statue come to life. She and her husband and their new baby had just come over from Ukraine six months earlier. My wife is second-generation American with most of her heritage coming from Poland and Russia on her daddy's side. Bella and my wife bonded immediately.

We found out a few months later that the U.S. made things easy for illegal immigrants and difficult for legal immigrants. Bella and her husband were having some difficulties that if not resolved, would lead to them being deported. Long story short, I called in some favors I had earned with two U.S. Senators from back in my DOJ days and my wife worked her rolodex from her days as a television reporter with CBS.

Bella and her husband and their baby had become like younger siblings to my wife and I. We helped them with their path to citizenship and they helped us see what was going on in the former Soviet Union. It wasn't pretty.

It's still not.

One little two-minute video isn't going to explain it all. But what I hope it will do is at least move people to perhaps spend two more minutes sending an e-mail to their elected officials or a phone call to them and demanding that we start paying more attention to the former East Bloc nations and territories who want FREEDOM.

Many of you who read my blog and who have read my novel are veterans. You fought for and defended freedom. You know the sweet taste of liberty and freedom because you put your butt on the line for it.

These people in Ukraine are fighting--and dying--for their quest for freedom and liberty. The least we can do is pick up the phone and let our Congressmen and Senators know that we damn well support these folks who are brave enough to stand up to the corruption and tyranny that is left over from the Soviet Union.

Just share the video. And ask someone to take two minutes to make a call or send an e-mail.

It's about Freedom. Isn't that worth a few minutes of your time?

Thank you.

What is it with granola heads?

Okay, so I might be a little late to this party. But then again, maybe some of you still haven't got the news.

The latest granola-head entry to crap on the civil rights of a certain segment of the consumer population would be Sprouts Farmers Market, headquartered in Arizona, of all places.

Must be the Kalifornia sewage overflowing into the Grand Canyon State.

Or maybe it's just Hanoi John McCain looking for one last dump on the Bill of Rights, ala McCain-Feingold, before he gets his traitorous butt booted from office.

The wife and I get through eating barbecue at a local joint a few nights ago and on the way home, decide spur of the moment to stop by our local Sprouts. I had bought a nebulizer way back in the late 90's and would put eucalyptus oil in it and run it on occasion in our house.

For the record, our house is one of those idiotic open-concept money pits where the ceilings are a gazillion feet high, windows everywhere including in the ceiling (skylights), an upstairs open loft at the end of an open-air hallway that has the guest rooms, office and another bathroom. It all looks kinda neat until you get the electric bill in during a normal Texas summer month. You have to heat and cool all that idiotic open-concept air that is doing nothing more than making my electric company rich during the summer, and my natural gas provider rich during the winter.

The result of all of this open-concept air is a lot of open-air allergens flying around resulting in some Texas-sized sinus congestion and stuffiness due to allergies. My (former) secretary was a granola-head and she suggested the nebulizer and eucalyptus oil to help keep the sinuses cleared up while I was at home. It worked!

We had run out of eucalyptus oil several years ago, thus the sudden big idea to stop by Sprouts. Normally the parking lot is packed on a weekday night, but this time I noted that I was able to get a nice spot right up close. As is normal, I parked in between two typical suburban granola-head vehicles--a Subaru and a Volvo wagon. One had a "We did it!" sticker on it--the other had a "Hillary 2016" sticker.

Our Congressional district is 92% Republican and 8% Brain Dead. Guess where the Brain Dead prefer to shop?

So out of my pickup truck we get--replete with an NRA sticker, an Aircraft Owners & Pilots Association sticker (my additional carbon footprint), a Sea Ray logo and of course, my "Texas Secede" sticker--lest any of the Brain Dead doubt which side of the line I lean towards. We head towards the doors and my wife stops faster than our neighbor's Golden Retriever when it hits the electric invisible fence.

"What the HELL is this!" she practically shouts, pointing towards the sign on the door. It is the infamous Texas 30.06 sign written specifically for businesses and bureaucrats who are frightened by law-abiding citizens who own firearms and choose not to be sheep led to a slaughter.

She had her Smith & Wesson Airweight .38 in her gun purse, and I was toting my Beretta PX4 Storm in a Blackhawk holster. We'd just finished eating barbecue and then drove to the grocery store in our pickup truck. The quintessential Texas evening experience.

"Well, screw them," my wife declared, already spinning around and heading back to the truck.

It had been a couple of months since we shopped at Sprouts. Normally it was a weekly (at least) experience and after looking up our expenditures there over the past year, it was over $12,000. A few other family members spent more than that--they still have kids at home.

So I send a letter to Sprouts Farmers Market stating my disappointment, and I get some bravo-sierra boilerplate form response back from some little (or hell, she may be a lard ass for all I know) airhead named "Stephanie" stating how they are striving for a "safe shopping environment."

Uh-huh. Right. Just like the safe no-guns allowed theater in Aurora. Or the safe no-guns allowed shopping mall in Omaha. Or the safe no-guns allowed elementary school at Sandy Hook.

You simply cannot argue with idiotic liberal sheep (triple redundant)--they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.

So I took to Sprouts' Facebook page and posted the following, which I also sent to them in hard copy:

Your store in Flower Mound, Texas has a 30.06 sign on the door. Your boilerplate response is that you do not trust me, a veteran and former federal law enforcement person, to safely and professionally carry my handgun, concealed in your place of business.

Yes, I agree with your boilerplate response that it is your right. It is also my right and that of my immediate and extended families' to take the approximately $32,640 spent in your stores across north Texas in 2013 elsewhere.

Somehow you trusted me to carry a number of firearms and weapons far more capable than my sidearm into all manners of places around the world in defense of Freedom and Liberty. You trusted me to carry my firearms openly--even in your stores--while I was in the employ of the United States government enforcing our laws.

But now as a civilian, the very individual our Bill of Rights guarantees rights and protections to, you no longer trust me with the very same firearm I carried into battles abroad and countless hostile situations here at home.

I think you have the trust issue reversed: It is I who cannot trust you with my hard-earned money and my consumer loyalty. Therefore, I and my immediate and extended families (we're all veterans, by the way) will take our combined expenditures elsewhere.

In addition, I will make it a point to let every veteran in our area VFW and American Legion posts know how much you trust us. I will let every local, county, state and federal law enforcement professional I know that it's all right for them to visit your store while they are armed, but it is not all right for their wives, daughters or mothers to do the same.

In short, having defended your rights with my sweat and my blood and my life, I will now work to ensure that customers are aware that their rights are a distant second to yours--and that they should take that into serious consideration in deciding where to spend their hard-earned money.

No surprise that Sprouts chose not to respond publicly, but instead simply deleted my post from their Facebook page. No big deal--that's the way today's Big Business operates. Screw the little people, we have shareholders to answer to.

Who do these granola-heads think is going to defend them when bad times come? Who do they think is going to act neighborly and give them sanctuary when the roving gangs make it to the suburbs? How do they expect to defend themselves? One only need look at Chicago, Seattle, Anywhere Southern California (where the police are almost as likely as the gangs to victimize you), Detroit, Philadelphia, Denver, Boston, New York, WASHINGTON DC. . .

Oh well. I understand most granola-heads also believe strongly in Darwin. Works for me. In fact, I'll make some popcorn and watch.

I just won't buy it--or anything else--at Sprouts.

The three little pigs.

No, not Nancy Pelosi, Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Those would be three large porkers, not three little pigs.

Back in the days of the western frontier, wheelguns with long barrels were referred to as hoglegs. Ever since I was a little boy back in west Texas, I've had a fascination with hogleg wheelguns.

One of the cowboys on the neighboring ranch always carried around a hogleg .357 Magnum in a shoulder holster. He shot many a rattlesnake with that thing, more than one coyote and a few wild/feral dogs. He even shot a drugged out vagrant hitchhiker who he caught sleeping in a shed and who rushed him with a rather wicked looking knife. That same hitchhiker had broken into a farm home in the next county several nights prior and slashed up a grandmother pretty good with that same knife.

.357 Magnum - One.
Drugged out knife-wielding vagrant - Zero.

Over the holidays, I came into possession of a beautiful, barely fired but much admired Smith and Wesson Model 17-4 .22LR with an 8 3/8" barrel. It joined the Smith and Wesson Model 29 .44 Magnum and the Smith and Wesson Model 686 .357 Magnum, both of which sport 8 3/8" barrels.

I'm quite familiar with the Model 17, especially in a four-inch barrel as it is my favorite firearm in which to teach new shooters. I have not fired this particular Model 17, but it's been primarily due to time restraints. I have plenty of .22LR ammo stashed between here and the hangar and elsewhere--and I'm amazed at how hard it is to find, and then when you do, how damned expensive it has become.

No shortage of ammunition for the 17's big sisters as having been a reloader now for over forty years, there is ample stock.

There is something about a wheelgun that just suits me perfectly. Maybe it's my country, cowboy upbringing. Maybe it's my west Texas roots, or just my Texas roots. Maybe it's the simplicity of a wheelgun--you point the thing and then pull the trigger. No magazines, no safeties, no muss, no fuss.

Maybe it's because it's hard to pimp out a wheelgun. I'm sure it can be done, but the commandos and gun-store snipers break out in hives at the thought of carrying anything that holds less than two dozen rounds augmented by six more magazines carried on the belt, in the jockstrap and on each ankle right next to the BUG (which I only recently this past year found out stands for Back Up Gun--something we used to call a "throwdown" back in the day).

And of course, there are the trained internet killers and kings of caliber bragging who argue that no wheel gun caliber can ever match the sheer and awesome stopping power of semi-automatic calibers.

Dunno about you, but I'll take a .38 Special over a .380 and a .357 Magnum over a .40 S&W and a .44 Magnum over a .45ACP any day. And I like .380ACP, 9mm and .45 ACP a lot. I'm still trying to warm up to 40 S&W, but I don't have anything against it.

It's always entertaining when I head out to the local gun indoor gun range and I have one (or more) of the wheelguns with me. You'd be surprised at the number of shooters who actually admit they've never held a revolver, let alone fired one. I generally try to rectify that observation by letting them run a couple of cylinders of ammo through them.

The huge grin that ensues is thanks enough.

I'm sure I'll have that same grin whenever I finally get around to firing this beautiful Model 17.

I'll be sure and let you know.

Sure. Blame it on Beretta.

It seems Maryland, like California and Colorado, has become two (almost) separate states, with the eastern loony Yankee half on one side and the rational, sane, Southern half (actually western) on the other.

And as you'd guess, it's the rational, sane side that is wanting to tell the eastern side to go shove a blue crap up their behind.

They say the sides are irreparably split.

I've always, since I was old enough to remember, despised and reviled Yankees. My great grandmother called them "bluebellies" and "Union whores" (referring to the Confederacy versus the Union) and "scum-sucking sons of bitches." Then she'd start getting ugly.

Thank God she wasn't alive to see that I married outside of my race in 1992. In 1990, I met the woman of my dreams, took her on a flying date and was absolutely smitten. Yep, I married a beautiful woman from Maine. Can't get much more yankee than that. Still married, too.

In Texas, yankees were especially reviled as so many Confederate soldiers and refugees fled here after the War of Northern Aggression. When the redlegs and bluebellies came to Texas trying to arrest or hassle or outright rape and pillage our newest guests, things rarely ended up well for the northern soldiers--who, for the record were rogue sons of bitches who had no honor whatsoever and soiled the name and reputation of all soldiers.

So, I find myself in the rare situation of empathizing with some folks in western Maryland.

You see, upon joining the military and suddenly being thrust into the great melting pot, I learned that "yankee" was really more of an attitude than anything else. It was a state of mind versus a geographical location. Today, I consider "yankee" to be synonymous with "bed-wetting pinko communist alpha-hotel."

And it seems the western half of Maryland is fed up with the eastern bed-wetting pinko communist alpha-hotel side of the state.

Hooyah!

We've seen this in California on the north side of the state in which a handful of counties have had enough and want to form their own state, calling it "Jefferson," I believe. Same in Colorado where I think there are at least eleven sane, rational, American counties left who wish Denver would move to Chicago and Boulder would move to Berkeley.

Of course, just as with western Maryland, it will not happen, but nonetheless it is encouraging to see at least one thing about it all.

And that is that we have irreconcilable differences in this nation.

 We have the liberals and entitlement-minded, socialists who see government as the answer to everything on one side, and we have the conservatives who see government as more of a problem to most things rather than a solution. You've all seen the famous "red/blue" election map. In land mass, lot more red than blue.

I've been a huge proponent of simply dividing the U.S. up along those lines, with the red states taking New Mexico and Colorado, tossing out the yankees and making the states red so that we do not have to drive or fly around them to get to Arizona, Utah or Wyoming. Nevada is a toss-up. Give Vegas to California and we'll keep Hoover Dam and call it square.

The northeast states, from eastern Maryland up through Maine can stay blue, as can the Pacific rim of California, Oregon and Washington. We--the red states--will keep Alaska and the blue can have Hawaii if they can pry it away from the Japanese.

We'll have to do a little housecleaning in Wisconsin and Michigan, but it shouldn't be too bad. Illinois will be easy--just one big tremendous flush of the national commode and we'll send Chicago to Bejing.

I read from the keyboard commandos about Civil War II, or CW2, and I keep thinking it's some video game--since that is what keyboard commandos basically are all about. I read about preppers and survival zealots and mall ninjas running around with pimped out black guns and spandex cargo pants getting ready to tactically do something or the other.

No need.

The elections since 2000 have shown we are a nation evenly split down the middle. Why fight about it? Blue states go their way, red states go our way. We have the guns, after all. The keyboard commandos fret over the heavily armed DHS stormtroopers, but I don't. I've seen them shoot. Besides, they'll be needed in the new Blue America every time there is a food or cell phone shortage or some sports team wins a championship.

Once again, we have another example of why this nation needs to start drawing new borders, and of all things, Maryland is now in the mix of it all.

Beretta saw it and said, "Hey, we'll save you the trouble. We're moving." They'll leave their suits in Maryland for a little while, but the business end of the gun maker is moving to Tennessee. Magpul is out of Colorado for Wyoming and Texas. AR15.com fled New York for Texas.

The elections this November will be a preview of things to come. The elections in November 2016, I think, will determine the future of America and whether or not  we stay one nation or divide into two.

One thing's for certain--it's going to get interesting.

Okay, so it's been over a year.

Well, at least I'm still alive.

For the natural-born detectives, investigators, copyeditors and simply astute observers, one will note that the original masthead, "An Ordinary American" is back, replacing "Texan." Multiple reasons for that and I'll (probably) address a few of them in upcoming topics on slow days.

But with the ever-growing amount of asshats inside the beltway and in each state capital and inside each City Hall in every American municipality, shouldn't be too many slow days.

In brief--

• Got rushed to the hospital last February as I suddenly became sicker than hell and had pain in the chest and mid-right side that not only would not go away but got continuously worse.

Turns out my appendix decided to go rogue on me, so it's off to the ER we go, hi-ho, hi-ho, hi-ho.

A few hours later, that sucker is gone and in some new surgeon's scrapbook or empty peanut butter jar as a souvenir. All is good, I'm thinking and a few days later they wheel my butt out the front doors and inform my lovely wife that her vacation of solitude and peace in the house is over.

• A week and a half later, I'm having lunch with the oldest adopted daughter and the adopted grandsons and the four-year-old informs mom that "Gwampa izzn't wooking so good." Mom concurs and calls the wife who concurs and all the while I'm running this fever of 103F and it's going up faster than the bullshit detector needle while listening to Hillary and Obama talk about Benghazi.

Six hours later, back in the ER. It seems that the rogue appendix had ruptured during its removal and so now I had an abscess and one helluva infection.

The quack they sent to fix me this time was a retired military doc (you know where this is going, I bet). Treatment? Hook me up to a pole with lots of tubes and pump IVs and antibiotics and pain meds (read: morphine, then dilaudid) into me for four days at a cost of just under $28K a day for this incredible, brilliant medical treatment. On the fifth day, as my temperature continued to rise along with my blood pressure, I'd had enough and uttered the magic words:

Malpractice lawsuit.

Two hours later, I was wheeled into radiology where a (real) doc took his cameras and scopes and lasers and suction gadgets and other assorted hardware, put me under, went back in one of the original incisions and pulled out the abscess and cleaned everything up. Within a couple of hours I was already feeling better. Within eight hours, I was off all the IVs including pain meds.

A few weeks later, at home recovering, I got the bills in. It seems my local quack hospital chose a surgeon's group not covered in my Blue Cross network. In fact, this quack group isn't covered under anyone's network--they're a cash and malpractice group.

I told them where to stick the bill. They sent collectors after me. I sent lawyers after them. All is now quiet.

Imagine.

• Lots of reloading and flying this summer. Acquired a new Beretta PX4 in 9mm that is now my daily carry, replacing the 92. Acquired a Smith and Wesson Model 17-4 to go with the other S&W hoglegs.

• Back in the medical world in September. Pain in the chest below the right side of the rib cage would not go away. I suspected gall bladder, but what the hell do I know? Only way to find out in today's medical corporate world is to run a battery of tests, so batter me they did.

A gastroindigestion quack announced that I was in the early stages of liver failure due to my excessive alcohol consumption and that he would need to stick a camera up my ass (colonoscopy) to confirm his diagnosis. It doesn't take much imagination to guess what my response was. On a side note, November 1 of this year will mark 30 years of absolute sobriety, so the excessive alcohol intake was about as far off as a diagnosis could be.

Off to see some other thoracic specialist and in the course of countless CT scans and MRIs and who knows what else that involved bad-tasting liquids and cold steel tables, they found a tumor on my adrenal gland.

Uh-oh.

So we go from gall bladder and a simple operation to now, "Mr. American, if this tumor ruptures, you will not live to see Easter of next year." And we go for more tests and biopsies and x-rays and scans and MRIs. I even had an ultrasound, for crying out loud. Imagine being a guy and sitting in a waiting room full of bubbling, expectant women with bulging bellies all complaining about swollen ankles, aching backs but can't wait to find out if their baby will take its leaks sitting down or standing up.

Finally I go see a doc (surgeon) who's left his initials inside my thoracic cavity on previous occasions and he tells me he's got it covered. We schedule a surgery a week or so before Christmas, he opens me up, removes a bad gall bladder, sticks his iPhone inside my guts and goes racing around like our four-year-old grandson with a Tonka Truck and takes pictures of everything including his new wedding band (barely visible underneath his glove).

Tumor is benign, liver is hardening, gall bladder is gone. Pain in rib cage and abdominal area persists, probably always will. Pain in pocketbook is acute.

• Above Reproach continues to sell steadily and I've been enjoying (mostly) positive feedback from readers. The anti-gun folks send me real nice e-mails but it's obvious that they are as ignorant about anatomy and sexual acts as they are the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

• The second book, False Gods, is getting closer to head off to the editor. Probably another three weeks so so before it's ready to ship off. The cover absolutely kicks ass.

The novel returns many of the characters from Above Reproach and deals with the three "false gods" which are Big Government, Big Business and Wall Street and how the three are in collusion with each other to destroy the middle class.

So far, excellent feedback from the beta readers, and I'm even more excited about seeing this book into publication than I was the first.

I'm going to be in near virtual hibernation for the next few weeks getting the manuscript finished and polished and ready to send out, but seeing as how the weather here in Texas is about as appealing as an Obama selfie, there's no better time to buckle down and get 'er done.

In the meantime for the rest of today, I think I'll be content to sit here in my big ol' overstuffed leather recliner by the fireplace (making sure to leave a healthy carbon footprint), make sure the Keurig stays full of water and enjoy my newest discovery--hot green tea with a bit of unfiltered honey in it stirred with a cinnamon stick and sipped from a coffee mug with the H&K logo on it with their tagline, "In a world of compromise, some don't."

That's right. That's me.