From Mike Post Theme, you’ll never guess Who wrote this:

Everything is all right (bong de bong)
We’ve prayed today (la-da-da-da-dah)
If there really is a God (bong de bog)
We should get laid today.

I don’t think it works that way, alas. The album’s not bad, though.

With Black Tuesday behind us and Black Friday just around the corner, here is the latest Virginia Blog Carnival:

• Jack Yoest has the Reasoned Audacity to describe a political campaign as a shrewd marketing strategy.
• K T Cat of the Scratching post uses every crayon in the box to show how colorful Virginia can be in the fall.
• Dr. Kavokin of RDoctor Medical Portal tells us all we need to know about hip fractures. Take good notes, there’s a quiz at the end.
• Mary Adkins of Writes Like a Girl eschews swimsuits at beauty pageants in favor of snakes.
• Roci of Rocinante’s Burdens asks how long one must live in NOVA before they’ll name a car after you. Or something like that, I’m not sure. Rumor has it that NOVA is part of Virginia, but apparently they don’t take too kindly to people who move there.
• Leslie Carbone looks through the window.
• Xrlq has a bunch of stupid, rambling crap that will not be listed here.

The Connecticut for Lieberman Party has one member – and it’s not Joe Lieberman. Heh.

Michael says no. I say yes, but Rangel’s still an idiot for supporting it. Nice to know that some things never change, and that after all these years the Democrats are still the party of slavery. More discussion here, including some analysis from famed legal scholar Ayn Rand.

UPDATE: Uncly-Wuncly joins the fray.

From VCDL:

21. Duh – don’t try to rob someone wearing an NRA hat

Heh.

Remainder of article in extended area.
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Blogging has been light over the past week, in part because I attended the National Lawyers Convention of the Federalist Society. This is an event I’ve wanted to attend since I joined the Society in 1996, but could never justify the time, trouble and expense of flying across the country for. Now that our nation’s capital is a mere 2 hours away by car, it’s tougher still to justify not going, so there I was. While at the convention, I ran into two fellow bloggers, Ilya Somin and Orin Kerr, neither of whom I had an opportunity to chat up (it probably didn’t help that my name tag said “[censored]” rather than “Xrlq”). Neither of these bloggers has shared their thoughts on the convention yet, but here are mine.

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Last year many retailers learned the hard way that censoring Christmas was a dumb idea. Best Buy, it seems, is not among them. When contacted by Snopes, they replied:

Thank you for sharing your thoughts about including Christmas in our marketing efforts. We recognize that several holidays are celebrated during the months of November and December. Many people exchange gifts in celebration of one or more of these holidays.

In order to be respectful of all our customers (and employees) who celebrate different holidays throughout the season, we are choosing to use “Happy Holidays” as the primary greeting in our holiday campaign.

I say we take Best Buy at their word. Since they think generic holidays are more respectful than actual holidays with any real character, let’s do all our generic holiday shopping at Best Buy, and our Christmas shopping elsewhere.

UPDATE: More venom from … who else?

Don’t mess with Patterico, or he just might tase you.

Countertop argues that the make-up of the new U.S. Senate is predominantly pro-gun, and suggests that gun owners have little to fear in the way of new gun control from the federal government. I couldn’t disagree more. For one thing, some of his Senator-by-Senator designations are clearly off. The original version of his post, for example, listed Claire McCaskill as “pro-gun,” when in fact she is an anti-gun zealot. Similarly, he originally listed the sorta-pro-gun-on-a-good-day Russ Feingold as pro-gun simply because he’s mastered standard English well enough to parse a sentence. By that logic, we should count him as a champion of the First Amendment, as well. Those two errors have been corrected, but others have not. Richard Lugar is a pretty solidly anti-gun Senator, notwithstanding the fact that he is (1) a Republican, (2) from a gun-friendly state, and (3) named after a gun himself. Similarly Elizabeth Dole, whom he also counts as pro-gun, has a mixed record on guns at best, though to her credit she did vote against renewing the “assault” weapons ban in 2004. Based on those two examples alone (and I don’t doubt there may be others), the breakdown among pro-gunners, anti-gunners and fence sitters in the Senate is not 48-18-34, but 46-19-35, or worse.

Regardless of the precise numbers (let’s assume that the real ones are similar to Countertop’s), I don’t see any basis for Countertop’s glib conclusion that we should “feel better” because almost half of the Senate is solidly pro-gun, or perhaps because solid pro-gunners outnumber the hard-core prohibitionists. Total prohibition of all firearms has never been a realistic goal at the federal level, so anyone who’s comfortable with any level of gun control short of total prohibition, and doesn’t have the misfortune of living in D.C., will do fine under the current Senate, the last one, or any other. But for those of us who are not OK with Brady II an exhumed “assault” weapons ban, or any other federal regulations every middle-ranked Senator can be counted on to support, we have plenty to worry about. Don’t forget, the “Republican” Senate in the 108th Congress voted 52-47 to renew the ban in 2004. Does anyone seriously think the next Senate, with anti-gunner McCaskill replacing pro-gunner Jim Talent and no pro-gunners replacing anti-gunners anywhere, will be more pro-gun than the last?

Under the entry for Tennessee, Countertop writes “and congrats, the Ds can’t defeat a filibuster of any anti gun legislation.” I think it is highly optimistic, if not downright delusional, to assume any Democrat, however pro-gun, will join a filibuster against his own party. Equally unrealistic is any supposition that the squishy moderates from either party will participate, particularly since any federal gun law likely to come down the pike is one they would in fact support. Assume, for example, that the first anti-gun law to come up for a vote is a renewal of the now-defunct “assault” weapons ban. That’s an easy choice since it is the only gun law President Bush has committed himself to supporting. Assume further every Senator who voted on the proposed extension in 2004 will vote the same way again, and that everyone else will vote as Countertop’s designations imply (where “middle” means “anti”). Based on these assumptions, and the assumption that only Republicans will join a filibuster against a bill that is strongly supported by most or all of the Democratic Party leadership, and we’re left with 41 Senators – exactly the number we need to sustain a filibuster. All this assumes, of course, that Elizabeth Dole, Chuck Hagel, John McCain, Arlen Specter and John Sununu, to name only a few, can all be trusted to toe the line.

Finally, can we PLEASE, once and for all, retire this silly “Democrats won’t grab guns, they learned the hard way in 1994″ canard? If the Dems learned anything at all in that election, they learned to keep quiet about gun issues during campaign season. Campaign season is over now. Even Bill Clinton, who openly acknowledged that many of the 1994 losses were attributable to gun control, did not go limp on that issue after that. For six more years, he continued to bait the NRA, sic the ATF on anyone who crossed him, mount frivolous federal lawsuits designed to bankrupt the entire gun industry, and generally make gun owners’ lives as miserable as he possibly could. At the end of his term, his protege Al Gore ran on a platform of continuing the AW ban and even licensing individual handgun ownership. Four years later, and a mere two years ago, NRA F-rated John Kerry promised a permanent extension of the very law that ended so many of his colleagues’ careers 10 years earlier. The Democrats have never repudiated their past support for gun control, or even for total prohibition in D.C. They just managed to keep their mouths shut on the issue for one whole election cycle, and millions of gun owners around the country happily deluded themselves into thinking the Democrats have changed. They haven’t.

Now is not the time to throw in the towel and move to Israel or Switzerland, but it is the time to start keeping an eye on your guns. All the spin in the world cannot change the basic fact that as of the new year, the anti-gun party will be back in control of both branches of Congress, and may control more than that in 2009. Bobby McFerrin had it backwards. Don’t be happy. Worry.

UPDATE: Commenter Shane makes a persuasive case that we may not have so much to worry about after all. If – and it’s a big “if” – Claire McCaskill really was the only anti-gun or middle Senator to replace a solidly pro-gun one this time around, after five solid pro-gunners replaced squishies and antis in 2004, then the answer to my rhetorical question is yes, the Senate of the 110th Congress will indeed be more pro gun than the 108th, and only slightly less pro-gun than the 109th. I caution, however, that my more sanguine outlook is purely defensive in nature, i.e., I’m fairly confident no major anti-gun laws will pass between now and ’08, but do not expect any major pro-gun bills to pass in the interim, either. So my revised prediction is that federal gun laws will remain the way they are for the balance of President Bush’s term. And I owe Countertop a beer.

Q: Where is FoxNews definitely not headquartered?

A: Here. Minced oaths, such as “boo freaking hoo,” are still allowed, however.

[This post has been posted in compliance with the Silly Names Act. Any resemblance to real cities, towns or communities in the Commonwealth of Virginia is real and not a coincidence.]