Even Big Brother says something smart once in a great while

For an inglorious instant this morning I was Winston Smith. The Inner Party had fulfilled its threat.  I loved Newt Gingrich.

"(Mitt,) can we get rid of the pious baloney?"

The Messiah Oliver North

Produced by the College Young Republicans and rescued from a trash can at the Eisenhower Center, home of the Republican National Committee, late in the Reagan years, in the era when Lt. Col. North was getting somewhere with his argument that, no, the Constitution of the United States of American really wasn't meant to be taken all that seriously.

One morning, over the lake

The Winter Solstice sunrise, 2011.

New Yawk New Yawk...

...where The Masters can make a criminal out of about anyone, including law-abiding former Marine Ryan Jerome. The only thing between him  and a 3-15 slammer term is the good will and good sense of a Manhattan prosecutor.  (!)

The offense? Entering the Empire State Building, seeing the "No Guns"  sign and asking a rent-a-cop where he could check his pistol. The leased law called the real cops who clapped our man in jail for two days. He is now subject to indictment, depending on what the DA decides.

Jerome is a Hoosier with an Indiana CCW. He said he thought that made  him legal in the Big Wormy Apple. He was wrong, of course, and should have obtained better information.

So the penalty for that kind of mistake should be a long stay in Sing Sing?

Bloomberg probably thinks so.