Posted 7/27/2009 06:25:00 PM by Douglas

The Wedding that got nine million hits. I'll give 'em this: The people look like they're enjoying themselves, which is counter to any wedding I've ever been to.

Posted 7/27/2009 06:23:00 PM by Douglas

Remember when this was America and you could die in your house if you're stupid enough to stay after an emergency evacuation order is given? Well not anymore. They'll haul your ass to jail.

Police can arrest people who don't leave town under mandatory evacuation orders under a new state law that goes into effect in the heart of Texas' hurricane season.

The law was passed this year and is effective Sept. 1. It also applies to other disasters, such as fires or floods.

As it stands, officials cannot compel people to evacuate, only warn that those who stay behind won't have any emergency services at their disposal.

The Corpus Christi Caller-Times reports the new law gives county judges and mayors the power to authorize use of “reasonable force” to remove people from the area.

So just to recap, the county (or state) doesn't want to waste emergency resources on your dumb ass after you ignore a mandatory evacuation order. So how do they ameliorate that? By wasting emergency resources to arrest you after you say.

Make sense?

Posted 7/27/2009 06:15:00 PM by Douglas

Sometimes you read the news, shake your head, and wonder what the hell is wrong with the world. Well, this isn't one of those stories. This story makes you shake your head and think that this shit is worse than any horror movie you've ever seen in your whole fucking life.

San Antonio police say a woman accused of beheading her 3½-week-old infant son used a knife and two swords in the attack and ate some of the child’s body parts, the Associated Press reports.

San Antonio Police Chief William McManus told reporters Monday that Otty Sanchez’s attack on her son, Scott Wesley Buchholtz-Sanchez, was “too heinous” to fully discuss.

But he says Sanchez ate part of the newborn’s brain and bit off three of his toes before stabbing herself twice.

And then:

Sanchez used a steak knife to repeatedly stab the 3½ -week-old baby, then decapitate and mutilate him, Rios said. A police source said the baby was skinned and gutted.

Sweet sassy molassey, what the hell is going on in San Antonio?

Posted 7/26/2009 04:23:00 PM by Douglas

Ever wanted to fly through the Arc de Triomphe? I kinda have.



Good for you, Charles Godefroy. How I miss the days when crazy, rich, royal people from Europe did crazy, cool shit.

Posted 7/25/2009 11:57:00 AM by Douglas

Greatest correction ever! Good to know even back in the 1920s, The New York Times were a bunch of arrogant douche-nozzles that thought their own sense of self-importance was deeper set in reality than experts that actually know what they're talking about.

Posted 7/23/2009 05:55:00 PM by Douglas

Google releases the code used in the Lunar Lander for the Apollo 11 moon landing. Pretty interesting stuff, especially the comments the programmer's made. Check out the second link and this comment:

# TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE

Ha! Also, check out the third link, and this hyper-accurate value of Pi:

PI DEC 3.14159266

Wow, eight decimal places. I'm impressed!

Posted 7/23/2009 05:54:00 PM by Douglas

It's the middle of hurricane season, and we haven't seen squat. But don't relax, costal residents, you're still going to die.

But don't get too cocky, forecasters say.

Although the first Atlantic named storm typically forms by July 10, the real activity doesn't usually begin until August, and a lull in early season activity doesn't necessarily presage a weak overall season.

The 2004 season, for example, didn't see its first storm until Hurricane Alex began developing on July 31.

Yet after Alex the season rapidly ramped up, finishing with 15 storms and 6 major hurricanes, including Hurricane Ivan. A storm the size of Texas, Ivan was one of the 10 most intense hurricanes ever in the Atlantic basin before striking Gulf Shores, Ala., and causing $19 billion in damage.

That's right. How else is NOAA going to scare the shit out of people if they don't see hurricanes coming at their grandmother?

Posted 7/23/2009 05:48:00 PM by Douglas

So you go into McDonald's for a burger and all hell breaks loose.

Two female restaurant workers likely will be charged with assault and theft in connection with an alleged July 13 attack on a male college student at a Richmond McDonald's, Fort Bend County Sheriff's Chief Deputy Craig Brady said Tuesday.

The planned charges — Brady said the case will be turned over to the district attorney Friday or Monday — grow out of a 9 p.m. incident at McDonald's on Crabb River Road in which 20-year-old Raymond Smith complained he was bitten and fondled. One of the women also is accused of stealing compact discs from Smith's car.

Both women are 18.

Back in my day, you get bit and fondled when you're trying to get your burger on, you told some buddies and bragged about it.

Posted 7/23/2009 05:43:00 PM by Douglas

You plan a nice community activity and some idiots come out and shot the place up.

Six people were shot Wednesday night, none fatally, on the Texas Southern University campus during an event recognizing a Houston area rapper, school and police officials said.

University spokeswoman Eva Pickens said university officials were told that the shootings, which occurred at about 8:30 p.m. at Cleburne and Tierwester, near the East Garage, were gang-related.

Gang shooting at TSU? No shock there, but this sentence cracked me, the fuck, up.

Promotional materials advertised the event as a free family block party in celebration of the second "Trae Day," featuring live performances, train rides, pony rides, face painting and moonwalks as well as testing for HIV and sexually transmitted diseases and free school supplies.

Pony rides, face painting and AIDS tests. Fun for the whole family!

Free pony ride to the first 5th grader who tests HIV positive!

Posted 7/23/2009 05:39:00 PM by Douglas

Every get a glob of sticky goo in your hair and hope it's glue?

Pasadena police have a sticky investigation.

Somebody put glue on the hair of three shoppers in two stores.

A 12-year-old girl told KHOU-TV that she was shopping at a drug store last week when she felt a wad of something "sizzling" in her ponytail. The substance turned out to be glue.

The child had to cut off some of her hair to get rid of the mess.

So far, there are no arrests.

Dear lord, please let this be glue!

Posted 7/22/2009 05:38:00 PM by Douglas

Rest in peace, you slippery sumbitch.

John S. Barry, an executive who masterminded the spread of WD-40, the petroleum-based lubricant and protectant created for the space program, into millions of American households, died on July 3 in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego. He was 84.

The company says surveys show that WD-40, the slippery stuff in the blue and yellow aerosol can, can be found in as many as 80 percent of American homes and that it has at least 2,000 uses, most discovered by users themselves. These include silencing squeaky hinges, removing road tar from automobiles and protecting tools from rust.

He didn't invent WD-40, but just like McDonald's, it needed a fresh set of eyes to see its full potential.

The hinge on the door in my office would still be squeaking if it weren't for you.

Posted 7/22/2009 04:56:00 PM by Douglas

Australia under attack! We all knew that the sheep herders in New Zealand were just biding their time before the moment was right.

A massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake last week has moved the south of New Zealand closer to Australia, scientists said Wednesday.

With the countries separated by the 2,250-kilometre-wide (1,400-mile-wide) Tasman Sea, the 30 centimetre (12 inch) closing of the gap in New Zealand's southwest won't make much difference.

Look out, Australia. It wasn't too long ago that you got drunk and did something stupid with your island.

Posted 7/20/2009 06:10:00 PM by Douglas

Forty years after man set foot on the moon for the first time, NASA is desperately trying to find its way.

The Apollo 11 astronauts who were the first to land on the Moon 40 years ago, have urged Americans to set their sights on Mars.

Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins, both 78, and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, 79, went to the National Air and Space Museum on Sunday and used the rare appearance together to press calls to head for new frontiers in space.

I'm glad these guys are still around and still capable of inspiring us. Neil Armstrong? Inspire me:

"America, do you still dream a great dream? Do you still believe in yourself?" he went on to ask. "I call on the next generation and our political leaders to give this answer: Yes We Can!"

Absolutely. That's always been the answer. But the question is, do we want to? Who knows.

And ironically, as if this was made up, take a look at the problems NASA is dealing with today, on the same day as the 40th anniversary of the first Lunar EVA: A clogged toilet.

NASA avoided a rather messy situation in space Monday after giving astronauts aboard the International Space Station the green light to use a toilet after crew members worked for a day to repair it.

"The US Destiny lab toilet has been repaired and checked out. The crew has been given a "go" to use it. All three toilets are working," NASA said in a post to the micro-blogging website Twitter.

Well doesn't that just sum up that tenement house in the sky. In 40 years we've gone from "That's one small step for a man" to "Merry Christmas, Shitter's full!" How's that supposed to inspire a new generation to greatness?

Posted 7/20/2009 05:50:00 PM by Douglas

Frightening, yet compelling pictures of the end of an empire in Detroit. Also, there's this. and these pictures that just make you want to burn it down and move to California. California, Michiganders, Texas is already full-up of you funny-talkin' pastey goobers.

Labels: Detroit Decay

Posted 7/19/2009 03:43:00 PM by Douglas

Tom The Right Stuff Wolfe waxes nostalgic about NASA's place in the space-race, on this, the eve of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. He's a bit bitter on NASA's lack of direction and a head "philosopher." Get in line, Tom.

As a result, the space program has been killing time for 40 years with a series of orbital projects ... Skylab, the Apollo-Soyuz joint mission, the International Space Station and the space shuttle. These programs have required a courage and engineering brilliance comparable to the manned programs that preceded them. But their purpose has been mainly to keep the lights on at the Kennedy Space Center and Houston’s Johnson Space Center — by removing manned flight from the heavens and bringing it very much down to earth. The shuttle program, for example, was actually supposed to appeal to the public by offering orbital tourist rides, only to end in the Challenger disaster, in which the first such passenger, Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher, perished.

Well, yeah, there's been a lot of "mission creep" since Kennedy's grand vision of a moon landing. But NASA's main problem, as well as the reason it's still around at all, is the number of congressional districts the pork is spread.

And that NASA budget! Now there was some prime pork you could really sink your teeth into! And they don’t need it anymore! Game’s over, NASA won, congratulations. Who couldn’t use some of that juicy meat to make the people happy? It had an ambrosial aroma ... made you think of re-election ....

NASA’s annual budget sank like a stone from $5 billion in the mid-1960s to $3 billion in the mid-1970s. It was at this point that NASA’s lack of a philosopher corps became a real problem. The fact was, NASA had only one philosopher, Wernher von Braun. Toward the end of his life, von Braun knew he was dying of cancer and became very contemplative. I happened to hear him speak at a dinner in his honor in San Francisco. He raised the question of what the space program was really all about.

Close it up for me, Tom:

What NASA needs now is the power of the Word. On Darwin’s tongue, the Word created a revolutionary and now well-nigh universal conception of the nature of human beings, or, rather, human beasts. On Freud’s tongue, the Word means that at this very moment there are probably several million orgasms occurring that would not have occurred had Freud never lived. Even the fact that he is proved to be a quack has not diminished the power of his Word.

July 20, 1969, was the moment NASA needed, more than anything else in this world, the Word. But that was something NASA’s engineers had no specifications for. At this moment, that remains the only solution to recovering NASA’s true destiny, which is, of course, to build that bridge to the stars.

NASA hasn't had much of a vision in the last 40 years. Doesn't much look like they're going to, either.

Posted 7/19/2009 02:21:00 PM by Douglas

Images from the LRO shows the landing sites from the Apollo moon landings. Sadly, this won't make up anyone's mind that isn't already made up.

Great pictures, though.

Also.

Posted 7/19/2009 01:53:00 PM by Douglas

Drink three beers and drive home, you'll go to jail. But it's OK to text on your phone.

Extensive research shows the dangers of distracted driving. Studies say that drivers using phones are four times as likely to cause a crash as other drivers, and the likelihood that they will crash is equal to that of someone with a .08 percent blood alcohol level, the point at which drivers are generally considered intoxicated. Research also shows that hands-free devices do not eliminate the risks, and may worsen them by suggesting that the behavior is safe.

Texting while driving is just dumb, but what about hands free devices? They're save, right? Wrong:

Five states and the District of Columbia require drivers who talk on cellphones to use hands-free devices, but research shows that using headsets can be as dangerous as holding a phone because the conversation distracts drivers from focusing on the road.

The numbers are worth remembering:

A 2003 Harvard study estimated that cellphone distractions caused 2,600 traffic deaths every year, and 330,000 accidents that result in moderate or severe injuries.

Posted 7/19/2009 12:36:00 PM by Douglas

Suicide rates on the rise in Harris County, and they're blaming the economy.

Harris County suicides increased overall by more than 25 percent between 2006 and 2008, according to the medical examiner's office, while the county's estimated population increased by only 3.2 percent. The suicide rate per 100,000 people went from 9.33 to 11.41 during this time — an increase of more than 22 percent.

And the pace isn't slowing — suicides in Harris County during the first quarter of 2009 are slightly ahead of the number reported during the same period in 2008.

Weird.

Posted 7/19/2009 12:31:00 PM by Douglas

In space, no one can tell if you pee in the sink.

The bathroom lines just got a lot longer at the linked space shuttle and space station.

One of the two toilets on the international space station malfunctioned Sunday morning. The pump separator apparently flooded. Mission Control advised the astronauts to hang an “out of service” sign on the toilet, until it can be fixed. In the meantime, the six space station residents will have to get in line to use their one good toilet. And Endeavour's seven astronauts will be restricted to the shuttle bathroom.

Only 14 million miles 'till the next rest stop!

Posted 7/19/2009 12:27:00 PM by Douglas

So you're sitting at home, relaxing on the couch watching a Cheers rerun. Hell, you probably even have your hand down your pants checkin' in on the boys. Suddenly, all hell breaks loose when you hear a car run into your garage. You jump up, zip your pants, and run out to see what's going on. You're mad as hell, and ready to whoop some ass. Then you see this and even though your house is a wreck, you laugh your ass off.

One southern Wisconsin homeowner is probably not in love with the Oscar Mayer wiener. The famed hot dog's Wienermobile crashed Friday into the deck and garage of a home in Mount Pleasant, about 35 miles south of Milwaukee.

Police said the driver was trying to turn the Wienermobile around in the driveway and thought she was moving in reverse. But she instead went forward and hit the home. It sat in the driveway as if it were stuck in the garage Friday afternoon.

I don't enjoy talking to my insurance company, but I'd love to hear what the adjuster says about this claim.

Posted 7/16/2009 06:27:00 PM by Douglas

Although pretty obvious, I had no idea that Sears moved out of their tower in 1992. Still, I think the re-naming effort is going to be slow going.

The Sears Tower, one of the world's iconic skyscrapers and the tallest building in the U.S., was renamed the Willis Tower on Thursday in a downtown ceremony, marking a new chapter in the history of the giant edifice that has dominated the Chicago skyline for nearly four decades.

Mayor Richard Daley unveiled the tower's new name on a large black sign in the lobby with the help of Joseph Plumeri, the Chairman and CEO of Willis Group Holdings, the London-based insurance broker that secured the naming rights as part of its agreement to lease 140,000 square feet of space in the building.

"We believe in Chicago," Plumeri said. "You will find over time that Willis is not going to just have its name on the building, it's going to have an impact in society, in the community."

Why rename it? Because Sears hasn't had any money in 20 years. But that doesn't mean it will change names in the hearts of the people just because it got a new tenant.

"I don't think people are going to let go," Lozito said. "You don't mess with a landmark. It would be like trying to change the name of the Brooklyn Bridge. It's a reference point. I think it's disorienting to try to change the name."

Just goes to show: Your landmarks are available to the highest bidder.

Posted 7/13/2009 08:10:00 PM by Douglas

Where the jobs are in 2009. This list gives me little hope for recovery.

Among the 50 largest cities in the U.S., one stands out for having the most abundant job postings per capita: Washington, D.C.

Is there anyone, even within the government bureaucracy, dumb enough to think that government jobs in D.C. are going to add any wealth to the economy? Are these government clock-riders going to actually produce anything that adds value to anything other than the pointless Sisyphean endeavour they already support? The entire list isn't much more promising, but explains why Detroit is seemingly days away from martial law.

Posted 7/13/2009 08:00:00 PM by Douglas

From the latest issue of Duh! magazine, it turns out housecats are firmly in control of their human minions.

If you've ever wondered who's in control, you or your cat, a new study points to the obvious. It's your cat.

Household cats exercise this control with a certain type of urgent-sounding, high-pitched meow, according to the findings.

This meow is actually a purr mixed with a high-pitched cry. While people usually think of cat purring as a sign of happiness, some cats make this purr-cry sound when they want to be fed. The study showed that humans find these mixed calls annoying and difficult to ignore.

"The embedding of a cry within a call that we normally associate with contentment is quite a subtle means of eliciting a response," said Karen McComb of the University of Sussex. "Solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing, which is likely to get cats ejected from the bedroom."

I don't know how long or how much this "research" cost, but it could have all been settled with a quick glance here.

He knew this a long time ago. . .


see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Labels: Duh

Posted 7/13/2009 07:50:00 PM by Douglas

In future news, the Valley Morning Star has collapsed into oblivion.

A South Texas newspaper says it will begin charging for access to its Web site this week, warning that the days of giving content away for free are over.

The Valley Morning Star announced in its online edition Monday that Web site access would remain free for subscribers who receive the print edition seven days a week. But weekend subscribers and non-subscribers will have to pay a 75-cent daily subscription fee for the Web site. Monthly rates will also be available.

Can web-content pay advertising dollars that the print version used to? It better, and if papers can't figure out how to make it work, they're ALL going to go tits up. What does the VMS have to say?

“The days of giving content away, which costs money to create and for which we charge our print subscribers, I think, are just over,” he said.

Well, maybe, but no. Just like a paper without a website has chosen to march towards obscurity, the same is true for those that think they can charge on web content of local news and the AP wire. Maybe one of the other seven papers in the valley will serve its 1.1 million residents.

Posted 7/09/2009 06:50:00 PM by Douglas

When playing "dirty cowboy" with your common-law husband, make sure the gun's unloaded.

A woman accused in the shooting death of her common-law husband told police her gun accidentally fired while they were playing a game of “dirty cowboy” during sexual foreplay, a Harris County prosecutor said.

Wow.

Posted 7/08/2009 09:13:00 PM by Douglas

Another great piece of Robert McNamara, this time by Errol Morris himself. I'll save the last paragraph:

It’s the endless juggling of personal morality, loyalty, political possibility and the caprice of history. If he failed, it is because he tried to bring his idea of rationality to problems that were bigger and more deeply irrational than he or anyone else could rationally understand. For me, the most telling moment in my film about Mr. McNamara, “The Fog of War,” is when he says, “Perhaps rationality isn’t enough.” His career was built on rational solutions, but in the end he realized it all might be for naught.

You can do a lot of good in your life, but when it's all over, you'll just be remembered for the bad.

Posted 7/08/2009 09:07:00 PM by Douglas

Robert McNamara, this time from LBJ's nephew.

But now, he said, he had a question that was sure to stump me. Who was the most compassionate member of the cabinet? I guessed, rather unconfidently. Wrong. I guessed again, wrongly. He laughed and said: “You’ll never get it. It’s Bob McNamara. By far.” And it was a surprise, because we all thought of Bob McNamara as the no-nonsense numbers man from corporate America. The steel-rimmed glasses and the steel-trap mind were perfectly suited to an industrial mentality.

Maybe he got us into a really bad war, but he may have been the only one that kept us out of global thermonuclear war. He gets the Presidential Medal of Freedom for that.

Posted 7/07/2009 05:38:00 PM by Douglas

Happy "Sliced Bread" day, sandwich lovers!

The first commercial use of the machine was by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri, which produced their first slices on July 7, 1928. Their product, "Kleen Maid Sliced Bread", proved a success.

My question: What was the "greatest thing" before sliced bread? I'm guessing the wheel.

But, even with the greatest thing being sliced bread, leave it to your government to fuck it up for the rest of us:

During 1943, U. S. officials imposed a short-lived ban on sliced bread as a wartime conservation measure. The ban was ordered by Claude R. Wickard who held the position of Food Administrator, and took effect on January 18, 1943. According to the New York Times, officials explained that "the ready-sliced loaf must have a heavier wrapping than an unsliced one if it is not to dry out."

Maybe before the ubiquitous plastic bag that cost 5¢ a gross, fresh, sliced bread may have been a real concern. But you can't unring the bell on technology, can you?

Posted 7/07/2009 05:36:00 PM by Douglas

Give a snotty 13 year old kid a Walkman. Hilarity ensues.

My friends couldn't imagine their parents using this monstrous box, but there was interest in what the thing was and how it worked.

In some classes in school they let me listen to music and one teacher recognised it and got nostalgic.

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette. I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down 'rewind' and releasing it randomly

Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn't is "shuffle", where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down "rewind" and releasing it randomly - effective, if a little laboured.

Never in a million years would I think I'd be describing how rough I had it as a kid because I had to push the 'rewind' button. Snot-nosed punks.

Posted 7/07/2009 05:28:00 PM by Douglas

I don't know what's more funny: Lance Armstrong showing up 'late' for a race, or that he was fined, while in France, in Swiss Francs.

Lance Armstrong and his Astana team were fined for arriving late for the pre-stage registration this morning in Marseille, France. Rules state that riders must show up 20 minutes prior to the start or face a fine of 100 Swiss Francs ($92).

Even funnier is when Ben Stiller is involved:

Update: Armstrong apologized for his tardiness on his Twitter account this afternoon, blaming it on a visit from actor Ben Stiller.

Stiller!?!

Posted 7/07/2009 05:22:00 PM by Douglas

Hey, someone had to have the world's strongest vagina.

A Russian woman has set a new world record, lifting a 14-kg. glass ball with her vagina muscles. Tatiata Kozhevnikova of Novosibirsk, aged 42, has been exercising her intimate muscles for fifteen years, and has already made her entrance into the Guinness Book of Records as the possessor of the world’s strongest vagina, she proudly told Life.ru.

Yeah, she's good with the free-weights, but what about the clean and jerk?

Posted 7/07/2009 05:15:00 PM by Douglas

Sure, people are always defaulting on credit card loans, and sure, that number of defaults are increasing. But what's alarming about this story is that the rate of that increase is surprising those that estimate such misery.

Soaring U.S. unemployment and a shrinking economy drove delinquencies on credit card debt to an all-time high in the first quarter as a record number of cash-strapped consumers fell behind on their bills.

Delinquencies were the highest since the ABA began tracking the data in 1974. Late payments on home equity borrowings set records, rising to 3.52 percent from 3.03 percent on loans and to 1.89 percent from 1.46 percent on lines of credit.

At least I don't get those damn credit card applications by the dozens anymore. The downside? The entire economy is about to collapse.

Posted 7/06/2009 07:10:00 PM by Douglas

Robert Strange McNamara: dead at 93. A very complicated figure, historically, but this will no doubt be what he's remembered for:

In a memo to Johnson on May 19 1967, he warned: "There may be a limit beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go. The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny, backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one. It could conceivably produce a costly distortion in the American national consciousness and in the world image of the United States."

He's been vilified for not coming out sooner about the troubles in Vietnam, and he's certainly not blameless, but there's something about being CEO of the biggest military in the world that ensures he knows things the rest of us don't know. His own portrayal of his life's service, in Vietnam and even in WWII under General Curtis "bombs away" LeMay were quite chilling in the Fog of War documentary.

In the end, I think he was a brilliant man with a huge responsibility that meant life or death for millions of people. Did he always do the right thing? Of course not (and he even mentions that in the film). But I'd rather have guys like McNamara on our side than trying to kill us.

Plus check out that hair! You could set your watch to that haircut!

Posted 7/01/2009 05:42:00 PM by Douglas

It's obvious from the headline, "Federal agents hunt for guns, one house at a time," that Chron wants this story to be reactionary, but it's clearly not.

Success on the front lines of a government blitz on gunrunners supplying Mexican drug cartels with Houston weaponry hinges on logging heavy miles and knocking on countless doors. Dozens of agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — sent here from around the country — are needed to follow what ATF acting director Kenneth Melson described as a “massive number of investigative leads.”

Among other things, the agents are combing neighborhoods and asking people about suspicious purchases as well as seeking explanations as to how their guns ended up used in murders, kidnappings and other crimes in Mexico.

“Ever turning up the heat on cartels, our law enforcement and military partners in the government of Mexico have been working more closely with the ATF by sharing information and intelligence,” Melson said Tuesday during a firearms-trafficking summit in New Mexico.

So the BATF picks up a gun from a Mexican drug cartel, traces it to a Houston firearms dealer, then traces it to a tar-paper shack where the resident has bought $15,000 of guns last month. Big deal. This is the kind of thing I want the BATF to do. This does not mean they're going door to door asking for guns. That's ridiculous. But what's even more ridiculous is that a Mexican drug cartel, that's flush with more cash than GM, is dependent on homeless people in Houston with clean criminal records to get guns. "Damn those pesky background checks!! Now we have to postpone our turf war with the Escobars because we can't get legal guns from Houston!!"

The cartels can get fully automatic missile launchers if they want. The though of them going through legal channels for guns is absurd. Drug dealers aren't that stupid, even if our politicians are.