“Why stand we here idle? Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God. I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

Patrick Henry - Speech in Virginia Convention March 1775

“I ran away from my masters. I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t heard those songs of liberty that saluted my ears and thrilled through my heart.”

-Jehu Grant, Former Slave, American Soldier, American Revolution

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicides consisted of 55% of the nation’s nearly 31,000 firearm deaths in 2005. And 2005 was not a fluke year. Gun related suicides have outnumbered firearm homicides and accidents 20 of the last 25 years.

Attention has been focused upon these stats due to the recent Supreme Court decision which struck down the handgun ban enacted in the District of Columbia in 1976. One public-health study found that suicide and homicide rates in the district dropped after the ban was adopted.

The high court’s majority decision made no mention of suicide, but in Justice Breyer’s dissenting opinion he used the word 14 times. Further, he made this insightful remark: “If a resident has a handgun in the home that he can use for self-defense, then he has a handgun in the home that he can use to commit suicide or engage in acts of domestic violence.”

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I can’t believe the hubris of some of the folks in Washington. David Vitter, for example, has asked the Federal Election Commission if he can use campaign funds to pay for the $137,177 in legal expenses he had incurred after it was revealed that he was involved in a high priced Washington D.C. prostitution ring.

Vitter has paid $70,000 of the legal fees personally, and is asking that the money be re-imbursed through his campaign funds. His attorneys argue that Vitter’s involvement in the matter was predicated solely on his status as a United States Senator and that others involved were not dragged into the legal proceedings and did not incur the related legal fees. Vitter has $1.6 million in his campaign coffers.

Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the D. C. Madam involved in the case, was convicted in federal court in April of money laundering, mail fraud and conspiracy. Palfrey committed suicide in May, two weeks after her conviction. She faced four to six years in federal prison.

John McCain’s jailer in North Vietnam, Tran Trong Duyet, revealed in an interview that he would vote for McCain despite the fact that he lied about being tortured and placed in solitary confinement while being held captive.

Duyet believes he made up those stories to win more votes.

Duyet made the following remarks about McCain: “He’s tough, has extreme political views and is very conservative. He’s very loyal to the U.S. military, to his beliefs and to his country. In all of our debates, he never admitted that the war was a mistake.”

It looks as though gay couples are taking full advantage of their new right to wed in California. In the two days since the ban was lifted, over 2700 marriage licenses were issued. The statewide average for a whole week in June is 2,460.

The marriage licenses were issued to both same-sex and heterosexual couples, although county clerks in many locations indicated that the vast majority handed out Tuesday were to gay couples. The new marriage application replaces the terms “bride” and “groom” with “Party A” and “Party B” and does not indicate whether the people marrying are of the same sex.

His nightmare began when he suffered a spinal injury and was discharged from the Army. Stevens’, 28, in a wheel chair, found himself penniless and fighting off the sexual advances of another man in a homeless shelter.

Like thousands of other vets, Stevens is waiting for his disability payments. Many wait from six months to a year before receiving them. “When I got out, I hate to say it, but man, that was it. Everybody just kind of washed their hands of me, and it was like, ‘OK, you’re on your own,’” said Stevens, who was discharged in November and was in a shelter by February.

Col. Becky Baker, assigned to injured-soldier transition at the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office, said that there is now a change in policy; however, the changes have been slow to take hold across an Army stretched by war. It’s definitely a practice that is new. It takes a while for new practices to be institutionalized.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUvQzgxTxmE
YouTube - bob dylan - only a pawn in their game (newport 63’ 6/16

What effects will this have on the 08 Presidential campaign? Democrats should be thrilled with recent past election victories in the Senate. NRA-backed candidates in Pennsylvania, Montana, Missouri, Minnesota and Virginia all lost in 2006, even though the gun group spent more than $1 million on their races, according to federal election data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics.

To be sure, we have not heard the last from the powerful NRA, but they could very well be a victim of their own success. They have pounded the Democrats into submission so badly that I am reminded of an old saying: if you can’t beat them, join them.

McCain likes to illustrate his moral fibre by referring to his five years as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. And to demonstrate his commitment to family values, the 71-year-old former US Navy pilot pays warm tribute to his beautiful blonde wife, Cindy, with whom he has four children.

But there is another Mrs McCain who casts a ghostly shadow over the Senator’s presidential campaign. She is seldom seen and rarely written about, despite being mother to McCain’s three eldest children.

For nearly 30 years, Carol has maintained a dignified silence about the accident, McCain and their divorce. But last week at the bungalow where she now lives at Virginia Beach, a faded seaside resort 200 miles south of Washington, she told The Mail on Sunday how McCain divorced her in 1980 and married Cindy, 18 years his junior and the heir to an Arizona brewing fortune, just one month later.

Carol insists she remains on good terms with her ex-husband, who agreed as part of their divorce settlement to pay her medical costs for life. ‘I have no bitterness,’ she says. ‘My accident is well recorded. I had 23 operations, I am five inches shorter than I used to be and I was in hospital for six months. It was just awful, but it wasn’t the reason for my divorce. ‘My marriage ended because John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens...it just does.’

Some of McCain’s acquaintances are less forgiving, however. They portray the politician as a self-centered womanizer who effectively abandoned his crippled wife to ‘play the field’. They accuse him of finally settling on Cindy, a former rodeo beauty queen, for financial reasons.
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But Ross Perot, who paid her medical bills all those years ago, now believes that both Carol McCain and the American people have been taken in by a man who is unusually slick and cruel – even by the standards of modern politics.

‘McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always reaching for attention and glory,’ he said.

‘After he came home, Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona. And the rest is history.’