Per the newbie shooter it takes three years of residency in the South, a gun safe, some ammo, some wine and a trip to Wal-Mart to make you officially Southern. Well, I got my ammo and my gun safe back in California, years before I moved north to the South, so the only thing that kept me from being a Southerner was the residency requirement. As of this instant I fulfilled it.

One of the few things about 2008 that didn’t suck was the NRA convention in Louisville and the attendant Second Amendment Blogger Bash. Next year’s convention and bash promise not to suck, either. The convention’s not until May 15-18, so it might seem a bit early to be thinking about booking now, but it’s not. The NRA’s bloc of rooms has already sold out, and the Second Amendment Blogger Bash bloc is fast approaching. After that, I’m sure you’ll be able to find something, but it won’t be cheap and it won’t be near us, which kinda puts a crimp into any plans to party with us. So book now, dammit!

Once upon a time, I touted 1&1′s “free” service. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

Insty is getting grief from lefties for supposedly not covering the allegation of voter fraud in California even though he did. What Mr. Pundit likely does not understand is that without exception, anytime a reader purports to attack you for not blogging about X, his real beef is that you are blogging about Y, and the reader would really like you to shut up about Y.

UPDATE: Welcome, ‘Lanchers.

At least we now we aren’t seeing any more Instaposts with that annoying tag line, “Dude, where’s my recession?” We found it.

Not sure what “Google-Fu” is and frankly, I’m not sure I want to know, either. However, I thought the Googlebots might be interested in knowing that am a carry permit holder in three states. More specifically, I hold a Concealed Firearm Permit from the State of Utah, which counts me as a carry permit holder in roughly half the states, while a few only count you as a carry permit holder if you are a carry permit holder in your state of domicile. That’s where the Virginia and North Carolina permits come in, the former establishing me as a carry permit holder while residing in the Old Dominion, the latter, here in the Tar Heel state. Isn’t that special?

For 5 1/2 years, I’ve blogged under a pseudonym. My reason was simple: I wanted to keep my professional and blogging lives separate. Sure, I could tell you my name but refuse to divulge where I worked, but who are we kidding? I never made it a secret that I was a lawyer admitted to practice in California, so any reader who knew my name would have no trouble tracking down my employer. So as a practical matter, if my employer’s identity was to remain a secret, mine needed to, as well. And no, I wasn’t under strict orders from my boss to remain anonymous, but my boss at the time did express considerable relief upon learning that I was, anyway, for the simple reason that no one can think I spoke for a company I hadn’t even identified.

With pseudonymity comes a certain responsibility. Taking my identity off the table carried the implicit promise that my identity is not relevant to what I say. If I blog about the idiocy of secondhand smoke, you as the reader should be entitled to assume that whoever I work for, it ain’t the tobacco industry or anyone else with an obvious interest in the subject, else I would have told you. Conversely, if I do work for an insurance company owned by a mortgage lender, but do not wish to tell you that, then let’s face it, I’m not going to be able to say all that much about mortgages or insurance on this blog. What little I can say about these topics must be information that is publicly known and related to the industry as a whole, rather than to my particular company. Therein lies the problem.

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Vote for me, dammit. Not just because Barack Obama sucks, but because it’s the right thing to do. That said, Barack Obama does suck. So there.

With some help from OFJay, I’m no longer hosted on ICDSoft, and am now on Bluehost, a provider with a reputation for being more WordPress-friendly. Accordingly, I’ve lifted the requirement that commenters register. Voluntary registration is still encouraged, however.

A number of bloggers, including some right-wingers like Patterico and some alleged right-wingers like Prof. Bainbridge, are concerned that the Edwards campaign’s apparent firing of Amanda Marcotte – one of only two bomb-throwing moonbats it never should have hired in the first place – may have repercussions for the blogosphere as a whole. I think this concern is valid, but in this case, misplaced. It’s never (well, almost never) a good thing when a blogger loses a job unrelated to blogging on account of something he said on his blog, but in Marcotte’s case, the offending blog was the raison d’être^* of her job. If it turns out that Marcotte quit a lucrative job in order to join the campaign, and now can’t get her old job back, then the Edwards campaign should pay her unemployment check for a while. Otherwise, while Edwards’s ill-conceived decision to hire her and his healthily-conceived decision to “resign” her two weeks later may speak volumes about the incompetency of the campaign, and may even tell us something unflattering about Edwards himself, when it comes to their impacts on Marcotte and the blogosphere, they largely cancel each other out. Most of us will never get a new job because of our blogging. In the end, neither did Marcotte. And now I’m supposed to feel sorry for her … why, exactly?

Quote of the day (from Patterico commenter Biwah): I wonder how she will manage, with all that mouth to feed.

^*My apologies for the gratuitous French, which is there for the benefit of Ann “The 2008 Election is Only 21 Months Away, So Anyone Who Isn’t Squarely in Giuliani’s Camp By Now Is A Girlyman, and Probably French, Too^**“ Althouse. Apparently, only wimps object to grabbing guns, promoting abortion, stifling dissent, publicly humiliating innocent businessmen with nifongesque charges, placing the emergency response center right smack dab in the city’s No. 1 terrorist target, or any of the issues raised in Chapman’s article.

^**No, that isn’t a fair summary of her post. It is, however, an order of magnitude fairer to her than her post was to Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman, whose point she accidentally-on-purpose missed completely by focusing on a single, arguably gratuitous adverb that was only tangentially related to one of his many points, and completely unrelated to the rest of the article.