Senator Rick Santorum drove up here to Wilkes-Barre yesterday with a seven-figure federal check it tow. You know, federal pork bucks. Oh, and the second phase of our downtown street lighting project is now paid in full. To those of us that can put partisanship aside--including our democrat of a mayor--this is really good news for Wilkes-Barre. But, for those of us who are capable of nothing more than going Tora! Tora! Tora! every time a member of the opposite side of our political duopoly does us good, this happening will be mocked and little else.

You see, Rick Santorum is one of those old-fashioned elected folks who still believes in God, and is not afraid to tell us that moral relativism is eating away at the fabric of what once made this country unflappable in it's convictions. In our current political climate, he is constantly taking fire from the folks who want every other baby aborted, and those who want every baby that somehow escaped being aborted to be embracing some sort of sexual perversion. He thumps on the Bible now and again, so he is no longer welcome in the minds of the ultra-leftist folks who claim to be so completely tolerant of others. In the mind of your average leftist, tolerance is afforded to only the like-minded.

Putting aside my overzealous bashing of the butt-plug-plagued left, Rick Santorum's biggest crime is that he is an opinionated sumbitch in a country that is being increasingly balkanized along political, religious and idealogical lines. He's probably not a bad guy for the most part, but the collection of single issue groups that make up the scattershot Democratic party do not want anyone judging their new-age curiousities being incrementally and systematically portrayed as quite normal.

For instance, a homosexual lifestyle is to die for these days, while no cure for AIDS appears on the radar screen. Doesn't sound like a plan to me. Priests are not allowed to sodomize your children, while so many of their public school teachers have first dibs on their bottoms. That'll work. School vouchers are unconstitutional, so give little Johnny a gross of condoms and send him off to the local federally manipulated former home of higher learning. Our babys should be slaughtered in the womb, while our borders should be wide-open. And as the indigenous population fades in numbers, the illegal immigrants will succeed where the Soviet Union had failed so miserably. Invasion complete. I like to live in Amerika!!!

Mickey Ds is blamed for childhood obesity and not the hours upon hours spent sitting in front of a video game by said porkers. Our information economy--our computers are poluting the entire Earth, while China and India boast three smoke stacks belching into the sky for every man, woman and child on the rosters. Rare snails should be protected at all costs, but not high-paying jobs. Nuclear power plants should have protestors at their gates 24/7, but make sure my hair straightener doesn't run out of juice. We should pray to the flowers and the trees, while denying the existance of the being that created them.

Little boys should be drugged, while our little girls should be empowered, if not steered towards a militant feminist state of mind. Teachers should be showered in adoration and tax dollars, even though they blame the parents when the little kiddies get their asses kicked by the immigrants kids at the big spelling competition. It takes a village? Talk about a freakin' commie-inspired cop-out. The caribou should never have to share their pristine wide-open spaces with oil rigs. Rather, Americans should be beaten over the head until they embrace conservation without giving it a second thought. Yeah! Have you seen Route 81 during a full-blown rush hour? Americans are about as interested in conservation as Ted Kennedy is in sobriety.

And being that America has become so balkanized due to the inane and incompetant mumblings emanating from the persistent lefties, guys like Senator Rick have been targeted for an untimely political undoing. Not only is he a Republican (EWWWWWW!), and not only does he stand for old-fashioned American values (YUK!)--he also believes in God. Need I say more? Can't we elect ourselves a heathen like those more progressive minded states do?

Anyways, the new street lights will be going up in the very near future.

End rant.

I ran across this story, Major Terror Plot Against U.S. Ignored, at NewsMax.com.

The mainstream U.S. media outlets have failed to report a major terrorist plot against the U.S. - because it would tend to support President Bush's use of NSA domestic surveillance, according to media watchdog groups.

News of a planned attack masterminded by three Algerians operating out of Italy was widely reported outside the U.S., but went virtually unreported in the American media.

Italian authorities recently announced that they had used wiretaps to uncover the conspiracy to conduct a series of major attacks inside the U.S.

A major terrorist plot against targets in this country was foiled? For real, that's frickin' news to me. The NewsMax story claimed that news outlets all over the world reported that news, while every U.S. newspaper save one chose not to report it. So I did a Google search under "Algerians arrested" and sure enough, the only place that the story wasn't passed along was right here in the good ole U.S. of A. Why might that be? Why wouldn't the media is this country want us to know when wiretaps lead to foiled terrorist plots? Can anybody think of a reason for that?

Here's one of the results of my Google search from TurkishPress.com:

Three Algerians arrested in Italy over plot targeting US Published: 12/23/2005 ROME - Three Algerians arrested in an anti-terrorist operation in southern Italy are suspected of being linked to a planned new series of attacks in the United States, Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu said Friday. The attacks would have targeted ships, stadiums or railway stations in a bid to outdo the September 11, 2001 strikes by Al-Qaeda in New York and Washington which killed some 2,700 people, Pisanu said. The Algerians, suspected of belonging to a cell established by an Al-Qaeda-linked Algerian extremist organisation, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), were named as Achour Rabah, Tartaq Sami and Yasmine Bouhrama. The first two were arrested Friday in the Salerno area south of Naples, and in Curingia, in the southern Calabria region, respectively. Bouhrama, 32, had been in jail in Naples since November 15 in connection with another investigation of the GSPC. He is believed to be the head of the Salerno cell and to have liaised with other cells in Milan, Brescia and Naples. The three in custody are also alleged to have procured false papers and funds to finance the GSPC, a hardline fundamentalist movement that rejects the Algerian government's attempt to draw a line under years of Islamist rebellion. Pisanu said Friday's swoop was part of a wider operation involving other countries. Links were uncovered between the GSPC's Italian activities and groups in Britain, the Italian news agency Ansa reported. 12/23/2005 16:39 GMT

Want an unbiased free press? Move to Turkey.

Check this gibberish:

(CNN) -- An Arabic language news network has aired a video of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's top lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in which he called on U.S. President George W. Bush to admit defeat in Iraq. Here is the full translation of the video as it aired on Al-Jazeera: "Even though I send my condolences to my Islamic nation for the tragedy of the earthquake in Pakistan, today I congratulate everyone for the victory in Iraq. You remember, my dear Muslim brethren, what I told you more than a year ago, that the U.S. troops will pull out of Iraq. It was only a matter of time. "Here they are now and in the blessing of God begging to pull out, seeking negotiations with the mujahedeen. And here is Bush who was forced to announce at the end of last November that he will be pulling his troops out of Iraq. "He uses the pretext that the Iraqi forces reached a high level of preparedness. But he doesn't have a timetable for the pullout. "If all of his troops -- air force, army -- are begging for a way to get out of Iraq, will the liars, traitors and infidels succeed in what the world superpower failed to achieve in Iraq? "You have set the timetable for the withdrawal a long time ago and Bush, you have to admit that you were defeated in Iraq, you are being defeated in Afghanistan, and you will be defeated in Palestine, God willing."

Wait a friggin' second! Wasn't that John Murtha's latest outburst? Did al-Zawahiri rip him off?

Bush lost in Iraq? Well, there's proof that even martyrs suffer from mental illnesses. Poor delusional cave-dwelling bastard.

I know you didn't, but if you asked me, I'd say the only losers in Iraq are the Sunnis who happen to be fueling the insurgency for the most part. First they shunned the political process, then reversed course after the initial round of voting was concluded. The goal of the insurgent attacks was to disrupt that political process, but produced no results. Then, with Shiites lining up to dominate the ranks of both the police and military apparati, the goal was to dissuade Shias from doing so by way of suicide bombings. That has produced no discernable results as the lines at recruitment centers grow even longer.

So, what's next for those disaffected Sunnis? More bombings? A civil war perhaps? I'd seriously rethink that civil war bit that Kevin Lynn is praying for. Follow me here. If the police, the military and the government are all heavily Shiite-laden, then why would 20 percent of the population out of the power loop seek a protracted engagement with the 60 percent of the population holding all the cards? I know suicide attacks are all the rage in that part of the world, but I fail to see how a mass suicide would do much of anything to further along the Sunni agenda.

Bush lost? Who writes al-Zawahiri's speeches?

Nancy Pelosi?

I was in there a while back and bought me some (take a guess) used CDs. I bought some really obscure titles that you'd never expect to find anywhere other than in some buy-sell-trade type of concern. In actuality, that dude has a ton of cool thingies in that rather small retail space of his. I'll have to bop in there again and see what he has added to the already interesting mix. Thanks for the reminder.

I think every college town has a used music store. Back when I was driving truck, I used to deliver to the Hotel McGee on the main drag in Bloomsburg. It was always my first stop, and I would arrive there in the back alley off of Iron Street before the Sun even thunk of coming up. And just a few feet away sat Mugsy's Discount Records. It wasn't open at such an unGodly hour, so I'd run the route, make my deliveries and then double back into that tight alley for a look-see before heading back to Bevaco.

It was but a hole-in-the-wall, but Zappa titles kept showing up on the shelves back when I was trying to collect the one-hundred-plus FZ titles on disc as cheaply as I could. Let's put it this way: If we took what I've spent, first, on Zappa Lps and then, on Zappa CDs, we could pay off the national debt and still have enough money left over to buy every person in America a rubber f>ck doll. Sorry. I figure that if I'm going on and on about Zappa, I might as well sound like Zappa.

I gotta girl with a little rubber head. Rinse her out every night just before I go to bed. She never talks back like a lady might do. And she looks like she loves it every time I...

Sorry. Sorry! On with the madness.

Any-friggin-who, I dropped in on "Mugsy" each and every Wednesday afternoon. We was nice enough, and very willing to gab when music was the topic at hand. He came to know my face, and he knew I drove that Bevaco truck parked on the sidewalk just across the alley, but our relationship was limited to pretty much that.

There was this one Wednesday that proved to be not only interesting, but quite lucrative. Once the pallets were stacked and the truck was virtually empty, I made my way to the Lightstreet truck plaza for a very healthy dose of diesel fuel and then turned due south towards Mugsy's. As per usual, I parked on the sidewalk, pulled that air brake knob back and wandered into the store. And as soon as I had stuck my fat head halfway through the door, it immediately dawned on me that something was seriously amiss. There was no Bugsy behind the counter reading his newspaper. Nope. Instead, there was a thirty-something looking lady confronting a shoplifter.

The shoplifter was a black kid around 15-years-old and all of, say, 130 pounds. She yelled at him to open his coat, and he F-bombed away. She kept it up, and so did he. I stood there watching in stunned amazement. Then she reached for his coat and he sent her sailing to the floor with one swipe of his right arm. She went down in a lump and whacked her head off of the counter just a ways behind her. As for me, I was even more stunned than I had been just a nanosecond or so before. We all know these sorts of things happen, it's just that we are rarely prepared for being thrust into the middle of such a deranged scene. (Suzie Q? Surreal?)

So the two of us--the shoplifter and I--gazed down at this flattened lady until he finally came to his senses (?) and made a mad dash for the door, which I was still standing right next to. I had no idea if this kid really was actually trying to rip stuff off, and I had, like, a second to process what was unfolding right in front of me. And as soon as he got within range, I hit him with a straight right and he crumpled backwards onto the horribly worn carpeting. He growned for a moment and then tried to get up, only to have both of my knees crash down upon the middle of his back. He was pinned to the floor, and very quickly got to begging me to release him. The lady got herself upright, grabbed the phone and called the Bloomsburg P.D.

When they arrived, I had one foot on the back of his neck and all of my weight was on that lone foot. As soon as they saw his face they recognized him and slapped the cuffs on. He was spirited away by two cops, while the other talked to the lady and I while compiling his report. Before he rolled, he thanked me for bothering to get involved. I was kind of perplexed by that. What was I supposed to do? Watch some kid deck a lady, and then open the door for him on his way out of Dodge? He's lucky I smashed his temple rather than his nose.

Needless to say, after the cops took off, said lady was my biggest fan and then some. She talked to her hubby on the phone, and then he wanted to talk to me. Turns out, he was my second biggest fan. I was flattered to some degree, but at the same time, I did what I'd expect most adult males to do when put in the same situation. Am I wrong?

So I checked the Zappa bin, the new wave bin and the punk bin only to be disappointed by what was contained therein. I said my goodbyes to the suddenly upbeat lady, and she was still making like my fan club of one. Cool. Whatever.

Exactly one week later, my day started behind the Hotel McGee and ended directly in front of Mugsy's Discount Records. I engaged the air brakes and headed inside as I had done so many times before. I can only surmise that "Bugsy" had thoroughly quizzed his wife about whom it was that had come to her aid one week prior when the fan club thing started all over again. He made a mountain out of what I had done despite my clinging to it being a no-brainer of a molehill. And then the guy told me that I was not leaving his store until I had selected a pile of CDs--completely free of charge.

This is where I go Harry Chapin on ya.

Another man might have been insulted. Another man would have rejected such a generous offer and be content in the knowledge that he had done the right thing. But yet another man is hopelessly addicted to his personal dope--CDs--so I made my selections and said bye-bye 'til next week. Fact is, it probably would have been cheaper for "Mugsy" if the shoplifter was allowed to run away with his selections in tow.

And the moral of this story that you neither wanted, nor needed?

If there's some cheap CDs out there somewhere, expect to find me lurking somewhere nearby.

Sounds like a cry for help, don't it?

Pics of graffiti assholes caught in the act? Cool. By all means, send them my way.

I gotta tell ya, this lame, on-going debate about the dangers of being under surveillance is such a non-issue, it makes me wanna spray paint the homes of the feckless folks mis-quoting Ben Franklin time and again. When we use the ATM, that camera staring back at us is never an issue. The cameras in Turkey Hill have been in place for years, everybody knows it, and no one is claiming that their civil rights are being tossed into the hopper. When we go into the local bank--BINGO!--more cameras. When we shop at Boscov's or Rite-Aid, we are being watched closer than the Iranians are being spied upon by NSA satellites parked in permanent orbits. Gus Genetti has taken it upon himself to videotape an intersection known for violent car wrecks, but he seems to have fallen through the ACLU cracks. Because of my employment, I regularly visit massive facilities with more cameras on hand than the Fox News Network currently brings to bare.

The thing is, if we were all trustworthy, no one would have ever even thought of watching our every move. Sadly, out of every ten people, two will always seek to commit crimes, two would never do such a thing, and for the rest--it depends on their current circumstances. With that said, why shouldn't those who invest massive amounts of money in their businesses be allowed to protect their investments by any means possible? Do you really want to videotape me when I visit one of your properties? I'm good with all of that. But don't go callin' the cops when I throw your cameras the bird, or when I expose my left cheek when no one else is looking. That's called funnin' on ya.

The fact is, the graffiti we find so utterly annoying is the best graffiti that we could ever hope to have inflicted upon us. In the big, big cities, graffiti is a constant reminder to the hunkered-down residents that the lawless gangs control the streets, and not the cops. In our city, graffiti is little more than a constant reminder that some knuckleheads armed with cans of paint have nothing better to do with their time. In my demented place, knuckleheads are always preferable to organized gangs. Pick one: Crips, Bloods, or bored knuckleheads?

But...short of catching them in the act, if we want to stem the rising tide of graffiti, if we really want to discourage those talent-less moonbats who see themselves as hit-and-run street artists, we need to eradicate their latest offerings just about as fast as they created them. When they spray, we need to hose right quick. And if they spray the same property again, we need to hose even faster. And in our downtown environment, the property managers involved need to be Johnny-on-the-spot when the screw-ups work their latest lack of magic.

As a property owner, you should do a few Google searches and explore the web sites where these knuckleheads display their latest "art" for all of their fellow knuckleheads sneaking out after Mom and Dad fall asleep. There's an internet network in place whereby these slackers share with the rest of the slackers their latest works. It's much the same thing the perpetual rent-a-mobbers have in place. Camped out in voting booth lately, without even casting a single vote? Whoopee! The malcontent network needs to be updated. Seriously, do a few searches. You might find yourself a face posted on the internet that looks eerily similar to those faces your video cameras caught.

How 'bout the editorial published in the Voice today?

Create stakeouts to fight graffiti 01/07/2006 What Wilkes-Barre might need to put an end to graffiti vandalism is a sting operation. The huge scope of the graffiti problem came to light this week when the brand new state office building on South Washinton Street was marred by graffiti. It brought the subject to light and other downtown graffiti victims added their frustration with the problem to those upset about the state office building. The Greater Wilkes-Barre Chamber of Business of Industry sent a workman to clean graffiti from the Irem Temple building. It was tough going. Experts says it's important to clean off graffiti because if it is left on a building more vandalism will be the next stage. But the program director at Catholic Social Services said cleaning graffiti only creates a canvas for new graffiti vandalism. If the graffiti is cleaned off on a Friday, she said, new graffiti will be on the building by Monday. Significantly, maybe the determination of the graffiti vandals may provide a way to catch them. Perhaps police could post a hidden stakeout in the area of a recently-cleaned wall and wait for graffiti vandals to hit it. Then the police could make an arrest. And the graffiti vandals could be sentenced to community service work cleaning off other graffiti. This process could be repeated, with stakeouts at different locations, until would-be graffiti vandals realize they could be caught and punished.

Perhaps police could post a hidden stakeout in the area of a recently-cleaned wall and wait for graffiti vandals to hit it. Then the police could make an arrest. And the graffiti vandals could be sentenced to community service work cleaning off other graffiti.

This process could be repeated, with stakeouts at different locations, until would-be graffiti vandals realize they could be caught and punished.

Um...that's wonderful and all so long as someone other than our cops are doing the stakeouts. Have the security guards do it. Have some Crime Watch folks in position to catch the knuckleheads. Buy me a couple of used CDs, and I'll take my turn. But the very last thing we need is to to divert our cops from getting after the drug dealers, and, or patrolling our streets after dark. While there is no denying that graffiti is a major, and sometimes costly annoyance, there is also no denying that no one has ever been life-flighted because of it. At least, not in this city.

During the latter stages of the Summer, I bypassed 911 and called a city official when I had some graffiti slackers dead to rights under the South Street bridge. The result was a call for some caged-units to escort a whole bunch of slackers to the city-owned brig.

We need to keep our eyes open while out and about, but then again--we do need to sleep. The thing is, cameras have no need for sleep. They'll keep watching no matter what the muck we might need to do. And when the safety and security of everyone involved becomes the issue, I'm thinking those cameras are a cheap and effective way by which we can reclaim our streets from the useless knuckleheads of the world.

500 bucks? You know, if I had it to do all over again, I would have thanked Mugsy for his generous offer of free CDs and walked away knowing full well that doing the right thing needs no compensation. And if I run across any knuckleheads working their "magic" on any of your properties, I am going to punch them in the head and temporarily collapse their airways, too. I've had it up to here (pointing to my eyeballs) with the idiots that continue to sully this city's reputation, and it's about time that we pull out all of the available stops at our disposal.

Big Brother is watching me?

Well, it's about frickin' time!!!

Me gotsta go. You know I'm wishing all sorts of horrible things upon the teams the Jints might have to face in the NFL playoffs, but with Phil Simms being my all-time favorite Giant, I have to spend three hours cheering on his NFL quarterback of a son. Today, I love Chris Simms. Tomorrow, I'll love Eli Manning. And if they happen to bump heads next weekend, I'm ready and more than willing to wish all sorts of awful things to rain down upon Chris Simm's head. Such is the nature of the devoted NFL fan. And such things become the 'norm when those NFL loyalties find themselves being split, if even for a few hours.

What? You're rooting against the Jints? I hope the locusts swoop down from whatever altitude it is that they prefer and eat your children. Well, that's assuming that Bush hasn't already eaten your offspring. Did I just digress again? So be it.

Enjoy.

See ya after the Jints game is histoire.

Later