One thing I hear a lot during campaigns is along the lines of "I wish there was a candidate that wasn't such a politician," or maybe "They all seem the same, I wish there was someone that would bring something different to the table."

Fred Thompson was that man. Read this. I think by November a lot of people are going to be wishing Fred was still in the race.

The Islamification of Europe is turning into a cornucopia of Orwellian "newspeak." People who don't like that Muslims in Europe are beating gay people on the streets need to become more "liberal" and accepting of other religions. We just need to understand Islam, and then we will accept their desire to kill Jews and gays and live under sharia law. Read this.

Look, you may not like the Iraq war and all that jazz, but that is no reason to excuse Muslims around the world for anti-gay, anti-Jew, and anti-women acts. Reporters and news organizations are ignoring the truth of what's going on, because they are scared of retaliation, because they don't want to seem intolerant. Because it's not P.C. to speak against Muslims, even as they stone their women and drive gays from their countries and vilify Jews for their very existence.

I urge you all to throw away the shackles of newspeak and think for yourselves. And if, after reading the truth contained in articles like the one linked to above, you still don't think you should speak out against these atrocities... Well then I feel sorry for you.

So much for Fred Thompson. Who will I vote for now? I have no idea. It's a depressing feeling. I'll get over it, though. I'm about to have a yummy dinner.

As some of you know, and many of you don't, I am embarking on a new entrepreneurial enterprise. I am now running a brand new software consulting company, www.flywheelconsulting.com, so if anyone needs any applications written for their business, look us up.

Seeing as I am not a programmer, my job will be two-fold, at least to start. Administrative stuff, and business development, which is basically sales. I'm NOT a salesperson by nature, but I think I could sell our services ok. I want to do well, so I started reading Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People." I'm not such a fan of self-help books, but I have noticed some character flaws in my own makeup, and despite realizing these flaws, they haven't gone away. Hopefully something like this will help, and it already has some. I have noticed that I am overly critical of other people in many situations, and I don't want to be anymore. Carnegie is helping me understand why I do that, why people don't react well to it, and what I can do to fix that about myself.

Yet another reason to end the "War on Drugs" in the United States. No, it's not so much the one outright murder by a SWAT officer of a woman holding her baby, while the man they had a warrant on was ALREADY IN HANDCUFFS. It's that things like that happen again and again, and our police are not supposed to be quasi-military forces. We're supposed to be able to trust police, but the drug war has turned peaceful citizens against police, and made them distrustful of the people that are supposed to protect them. The drug war is probably the single biggest reason for racial wealth disparity in this country, seeing as it's hard for a black man to earn a good living and support his kids when he's in jail for smoking a little weed. And once they (no matter the race) go to jail, they tend to become real criminals when they get back out. And again, the police are not supposed to be military. A lot of raids gone bad happen in the first place because the quasi-military SWAT teams have to do something to justify their existence, so they bash down doors with guns blazing and I don't know how many stories I've read lately about raids where they just didn't bother to investigate very thoroughly first. It's much easier to bash down a door and shoot everyone and ask questions later than to actually use investigative skills to find the real culprit.

I read about one recently where they had a warrant for a black dude, so they bashed down a door and started shooting. Turns out the house was owned by a Vietnamese family. Had the cops investigated at all, even just looking to see who owned the property and who all the mail is addressed to, they might have realized that a guy named Phouc Tran is not an African-American. Instead of doing their jobs, they shot up this guy's family. Just sickening.

The War on Drugs has to end.

Also read this. He makes a great point about how it's really the War on "Some" Drugs. Take ritalin, for example. A lot prescription drugs have very bad side effects and could be very damaging to most everyone that takes them, but they are legal. What about ritalin? Why is that legal? Supposedly it helps calm down hyper kids. So does marijuana, and pot has the added bonus of not being able to overdose, and not altering people's personalities. In fact it has more positive and less negative effects than ritalin, so why is ritalin legal?

If you love freedom, you must watch these video clips. A little background.... Remember the Muhammad cartoons that caused riots all over the Muslim world a year or two ago? So the clip is the editor of a Canadian publication that printed the cartoons making statements in front of the Alberta Human Rights Commission. It's basically a court that was created outside of the judicial system, and it has been co-opted from what it was started to do (mostly help poor people with housing situations like an evil developer trying to push people off their property and such) and turned in to a kangaroo court that seems to care more about promoting the interests of radical Muslims. So some Imam sued the editor through this Human Rights Commission (man, talk about newspeak).

The first video is the defendant's opening statement, and it's awesome. My favorite, however, might be the second clip, where he says he's done a hundred interviews where he discussed exactly why he published the cartoons, but for this joke of a court, he will only say that he did it with the worst of intentions, with every bad intention implied by the Imam's complaint, and that he has every right under the law to do so.

Here is an article about a company that wanted to put low level clinics in CVS locations in Boston. They would be equipped to help people with easy issues like poison ivy and sore throats, and the nurse practitioners would also be trained to spot more severe problems that need a real doctor or hospital. The issue is that the plan has been blocked by people in the Boston government who think that it's bad for a retail shop to make money off sick people. I guess it's ok for doctors and hospitals and insurance companies and drug companies to make money off sick people. What about pharmacies? Aren't they retail? Besides, opening something like this would reduce the number of people making insurance claims for minor issues, an issue often cited as one of the primary reasons why our health insurance system blows. These clinics would allow minor illnesses to be treated like oil changes in a car. You don't use car insurance for an oil change, and you shouldn't use health insurance for poison ivy. Unless, of course, you are severely allergic and need serious medical care.

Just want to point out that Fred Thompson made some major waves at the GOP debate last night. I didn't watch, but many sources are proclaiming him the winner by landslide. Should get a nice bump in South Carolina, maybe enough to get him some real press.

Due to the writer's strike, TV is going to mostly suck for a while. There are some bright spots, however. Lost comes back January 31st for 8 episodes, Jericho rises from the dead for a short season starting in early February (if you missed it the first time around, all the episodes are available FREE on the CBS website), and, perhaps best of all, CBS is going to show a watered down version of the first season of the Showtime hit "Dexter." Trust me, you'll want to watch it. Incredible show, and I'm thinking most of the watering down will just be cutting out some of the gore. Little of what happens on Dexter would be out of place in CSI, as far as "adult images" or whatever, so I would think it would be mostly unedited. Oh, I guess they'll cut some of the cussing, too.