Loathing In the Mainstream Media; Is Mitt Ready For It?

Is Mitt Romney ready for the loathing the media seems ready to heap on him as they did Ronald Reagan and as they currently do George W. Bush? According to Dean Barnett at Hugh Hewitt’s blog, he’s more than ready.

"...like Ronald Reagan, Romney effortlessly gets under his critics’ skin for having the audacity to be smarter and more insightful than they are. The media routinely dismissed Reagan as a senile dunderhead. Reagan was in good company there. Eisenhower had the same reputation a generation earlier. It never dawned on the gluttons at the press buffet to wonder how such dopes habitually ran circles around them. And how it must have shocked them when it turned out that Reagan was a more skilled and lucid writer than all of the knights of the keyboard who so vainly hounded him.

While Romney will be tougher to dismiss as an intellectual lightweight than Reagan was because of his impressive resume, his "simple" faith in America is sure to madden the media. It’s also telling that Klein attacks Romney for his "speed of delivery" and "sleight of hand." One of the things that drove the liberal Boston media nuts about Romney is that they were convinced he had something up his sleeve, but could never find it. For four years the local media unloaded haymakers in Romney’s direction, and never laid a glove on him. Drove them nuts."

It’s well worth reading the whole post. Here’s a link. Scroll down to "When Media Pit-Yorkies Attack".

http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/

Practicing For a Day I Hope Never Comes

The day after the Virginia Tech shootings I went to the range and, for the first time in my life, bought a "human" target, a police training "thug" target like the one pictured. After practicing on regular pistol targets, I "qualified" by firing 50 rounds. I used magazines with 10 rounds each, and did all double-taps at about 21 ft. I had 13 misses, mostly "hits" outside the gray scoring area. Two or three were outside the target area, but still on the paper. I assume all the misses were the second shot from double-taps. A "double-tap", by the way, is two shots fired in quick succession, followed by a momentary pause to assess the effect, if any, on the target. A week or so later I went back, got another "thug" target, and "requalified", this time with 50 rounds fired at about one-second intervals, no double-taps. The picture is of that target. I had one miss that was on the target but outside the scoring area. My intention is to go back at least on a monthly basis and try to get better with double-taps.

Prior to the shootings at Trolley Square in Salt Lake, I’m sure a lot of people in Utah were comfortable with the assumption that something like that couldn’t happen here. The week after the Trolley Square massacre applications for concealed firearm permits quadrupled at the Utah BCI.

I hope and pray the day never comes when I’m faced with a situation like the students and faculty were at Virginia Tech or the shoppers at Trolley Square. I can’t say with absolute certainty that I’m totally prepared to take a human life in defense of myself or loved ones, but on the other hand, I’m never going to be ready to crawl under a table and beg for my life.

How about you?

Same Place, Same Egret, Different Day, Different Fish

A week or so after I took those other photos I posted I went back to the same place in Lake Shore and found the same egret, I think, (they're all like identical twins).