Guns OK in Texas Capitol

What an eye opener.
This is great, Texas citizens with a conceal carry license do not have to go thru check points to enter the State Capitol of Texas.
The reasoning is sound, a great step towards fulfilling the full expectations of the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.
I hope this is the first of a trend where Conceal Handgun License become a passport to avoid the usual hassles of metal detectors and baggage search while trying to access entrance to a public building.


UPDATED: Checkpoints open; guns OK in ‘express lane’

Without fanfare, the first step to airport-style security checkpoints were opened today at the four entrances to the Texas Capitol.


The public, visitors and lobbyists must walk through metal detectors and have their purses and briefcases searched. In coming weeks, their belongs will have to go through X-ray machines yet to be installed that will complete the new screening procedures.

State employees can walk around the checkpoint if they show a valid state ID, as can Texans who carry a concealed pistol with a permit.

It’s perhaps the only public building in the country where pistol-packing average Joes can walk through security undeterred.

The express lane for gun owners is clearly marked: “CHL Holders.”

http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/politics/entries/2010/05/21/capitol_checkpoints_open_guns.html

North Korean Act of WAR

What are they thinking?

Can't feed their own people the North Korean government torpedoed a South Korean ship, then denies their action.

Must be nice to act so shamelessly knowing their own nation is immune to retaliation.

NKorea warns of war if punished for ship sinking
 
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - Tensions deepened Thursday on the Korean peninsula as South Korea accused North Korea of firing a torpedo that sank a naval warship, killing 46 sailors in the country's worst military disaster since the Korean War.


President Lee Myung-bak vowed "stern action" for the provocation following the release of long-awaited results from a multinational investigation into the March 26 sinking near the Koreas' tense maritime border. North Korea, reacting swiftly, called the results a fabrication, and warned that any retaliation would trigger war. It continued to deny involvement in the sinking of the warship Cheonan.

"If the (South Korean) enemies try to deal any retaliation or punishment, or if they try sanctions or a strike on us .... we will answer to this with all-out war," Col. Pak In Ho of North Korea's navy told broadcaster APTN in an exclusive interview in Pyongyang.

FULL Story

"Associated Press Video

European Union

My observations of a commentary by George F. Will

I must wonder, what the heck is going on over there?

When Chancellor Angela Merkel decided that Germany would pay part of Greece's bills, voters punished her party in elections in Germany's most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia. How appropriate.

 

The 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War, ratified Europe's emerging system of nation-states. Since the end of the Thirty-One Years' War (1914-1945), European elites have worked at neutering Europe's nationalities. Greece's debt crisis reveals this project's intractable contradictions, and the fragility of Western Europe's postwar social model -- omniprovident welfare states lacking limiting principles.

Greece represents a perverse aspiration -- a society with (in the words of Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan) "more takers than makers," more people taking benefits from government than there are people making goods and services that produce the social surplus that funds government. By socializing the consequences of Greece's misgovernment, Europe has become the world's leading producer of a toxic product -- moral hazard. The dishonesty and indiscipline of a nation with 2.6 percent of the eurozone's economic product have moved nations with the other 97.4 percent.

 

-- and the United States and the International Monetary Fund -- to say, essentially: The consequences of such vices cannot be quarantined, so we are all hostages to one another and hence no nation will be allowed to sink beneath the weight of its recklessness.

 
 

 

 
 

  

The European Union has a flag no one salutes, an anthem no one sings, a president no one can name, a parliament (in Strasbourg) no one other than its members wants to have power (which must subtract from the powers of national legislatures), a capital (Brussels) of coagulated bureaucracy no one admires or controls, a currency that presupposes what neither does nor should nor soon will exist (a European central government), and rules of fiscal behavior that no member has been penalized for ignoring. The euro currency both presupposes and promotes a fiction -- that "Europe" has somehow become, against the wishes of most Europeans, a political rather than a merely geographic expression.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/14/AR2010051404279.html