Man, I need to organize my blog reading; I miss so much.
Bill of INDC Journal is as pissed as I am. Plots are hatching…
I’ve inspired artistic ideas. I feel dirty.
Here’s a post solely for the purpose of sucking up to me and getting a link. Will it work? Stay tuned, sportsfans.
Eugene Volokh doesn’t mind being called a “Jew.” What about a “jooooo!”?
Finally, a lot is happening with our very own IMAO T-Shirt Babe (the bestest t-shirt babe in the world). She’s thinking of getting her own domain, for one thing. And, she has a gallery of all the pictures she took before settling on the winning picture for the IMAO T-shirt Babe Contest. Check it out if you like seeing lots of picture of a babe (SarahK should put out a calendar). Finally she has a story that’s just… well… ouch. I’d blog about real stories about myself, except… well… I’m God-awful boring. Maybe I could do more of Yvonne’s Ashes if people liked that.
Until tomorrow, be faithful to your cause, ronin.

The comments to the Kerry question has been closed. I’l pick winners soon.

Once again, I’m stealing David Letterman’s intellectual property…
TOP TEN THINGS OVERHEARD AT A BILL CLINTON BOOK SIGNING
10. “He got ‘special sauce’ all over my copy.”
9. “No, I don’t want you to sign my breasts as well.”
8. “Hell no, I’m not going to read all this… but I will beat to death my rival drug dealer with it. Beating someone to death with a presidential memoir– now that’s kill’n with class!”
7. “I think I saw a woman under the table he’s seated at. I wonder what she’s doing?”
6. “Ahh! The aliens are invading and they’re hideous… oh, it’s just James Carville.”
5. “Come on! Just stand next to me and say, ‘I did not have sex with that woman!’ while my friend films. It’ll be cool! Oh! And do that thing with your thumb and lip!”
4. “I know I’m just a kid, but you’re a big inspiration to me and… No, I don’t know if my mother is being properly satisfied by my father. Why do you ask?”
3. “No! Sign it with your pen!”
2. “I like how he said how dedicated he is to the women’s movement… or did he say he ‘likes how women move’?”
And the number one thing overheard at a Bill Clinton book signing–
“Aww… I thought this was the line to meet Carter!”

I really like this Reagan’s Ronin idea; I think it goes well with this site because it’s both serious and silly at the same time. It’s fun to pretend to be masterless samurai, but it also gives focus to consider ourselves carrying on the honor of Reagan, a man who symbolizes standing stalwart against a terrible enemy. Keeping out a bowl of jellybeans is a small trifle, but, if it can serve as a daily reminder of the more important things in the world to fight for, then it’s a good thing as well.
As for banners, a number of readers sent in some neat things, but I’ve decided to go with the simple American flag next to “ronin” in kanji. Now that I think I’m getting a better idea what I want to do with this concept, I’ll make a page dedicated to this (and finally get a small crystal bowl to fill with jellybeans for my Reagan shrine). I’ll come up with the pledge, and everyone who wants can sign up and put their name under it.
For now, I’m going to do at least one serious post each week. I want to try and work towards doing some real good where good is needed, and I’ll need your help in doing the actions, coming up with ideas, and pushing me to do what I say I’ll do (bah, I shouldn’t need help on that last one).
Well, more later. Until then, remember the battle cry: “Kill the bastards!”

I think I’m having a quarter-life crisis – or maybe a quarter-life paradigm shift to use corporate lingo.
First I turn twenty-five. Then, the next day, Ronald Reagan dies – the man I remember vaguely from my childhood when I first learned what a president was, the triumphant warrior of the Cold War, the symbol of what you want a politician to be. He gets his burial with proper honors, more smiles than tears as we remember who the man was and his cheerfulness as he faced down what at the time seemed to be an insurmountable enemy.
So I get to thinking: What am I contributing?
I work a 9 to 5 and try to take some pride in my work, I participate in our economy and plot for financial freedom and riches, and I write this weblog.
I started nearly two years ago because I had funny things to say and wanted an audience to read them, and I feel so blessed to have found one. There never seemed like much of a higher purpose, though; if I ever made an enlightened point on an issue, it was purely accidental. When I started having t-shirts and ads, it helped pay the bills which is always welcome. I just seemed to give a smile to some people and that seemed like enough.
It was the crazy-left, the muckadoos, that made me realize the higher purpose of political humor. The reason they get so riled up to the point of insanity, of not just disagreeing with their political opponents but also comparing them to Nazis, is because they take partisan politics too seriously. And it is a very silly thing. You have a bunch of people trying to act and talk a certain way because that’s how a politician is supposed to talk and act. Unless they screw up, they don’t give straight answers, they don’t say how they really feel, and everything they do is nuanced. It’s childish playacting, and it always will be. So laugh at it, and don’t think because the other guy gets in office the world is going to end. If you do, you’re silly… and probably a butt of some of my jokes.
The only problem is that there are some thing in this world that I want to help do something about, but there is nothing funny about them. Because of people like Reagan, the Soviet threat is gone and no one fears the world exploding; instead we’re left to deal with simple barbarians, and there is nothing funny about the things they do to their fellow man.
Sure, I’ve made plenty of jokes about Islamist, dancing around the brutality they do, but never about the brutality. They kill men, women, and children. They behead innocent people for their idiotic view points. And they want us all dead.
And it’s not just the terrorists. There are people beaten and oppressed throughout the entire Middle East, abused by governments we call allies… governments so childish in nature they won’t even recognize the state of Israel. There are people running whole countries who would have gotten chased town if they ran for dog catcher here. There are millions of lives at stake, and our goal must be to take this whole radical Islam system down… not just the terrorists who threaten us and our allies personally.
What we need for that, though, is resolve, something the media, pretend allies, and too many of our own politicians are trying to fight against. Some woman with a cigarette dangling from her mouth embarrassing our po’ enemy gets tons of press coverage and the outrage of the world while the torture that went on in Abu Grahib under Saddam – the real torture – gets barely a mention.
Yeah, I know, I’m just repeating what a lot of people in the blogosphere and elsewhere are complaining about, but what I want is to do something about it. I tried before with the website Front Line Voices to get the story out of the heroism of our troops, but I know that isn’t going to do it. The sad fact of the human condition is that people respond much more to pain than pleasure. Thus, the way to get people motivated, to keep people focused on the goal, is to show them the barbarism of our enemy. And I don’t mean the horrible pictures of the beheading – that’s just shocking people. Show the jubilation of the terrorists over their killing. Show the writings of the enemy in praise of death. Show everything we can about who these people are, because the fact is that all except the most morally forgone of our society will recognize evil when they see it staring in his or her face. Shades of gray won’t hold up when people see just how black the depravity of the terrorists are.
If I had my way, the head story of every newscast would be about what these brutal thugs are up to, what they’re thinking, what their desires are. And not just focus on the terrorists, but also the brutality of all the government in the Middle East. No more root causes, no more blind tolerance, no more thinking that religious beliefs that involve violence and oppression should have any cultural respect. Every day the American people and the rest of the world would see how horrible the terrorists and the tyrants are, and every day they would get madder and madder.
So why can’t I have my way?
There are some efforts here in the blogosphere to do this – Little Green Footballs the most notable – but we’re still a small force in the media. MEMRI translates Islamists so we can see them in their own words, but what they come up with never makes headlines. There has to be something more we can do.
Are there little things we can do such as writing letters to the right people? Are there big things like making a movie or somehow taking back more of the media from those who use it – unwittingly or not – to help fight the enemy’s fight?
I wish I had some hard answers of things to do right now, but, I’m a decently smart guy, and I’ll work on it. You people all need to think, too. Together, we have the power to make a change. We’re Americans, and that means something to me. It means we’re warriors who fight – if not with guns and sword then with deeds – for liberty and justice above all else. It’s a large responsibility placed on us by all those who sacrificed before us, and thus there is no such thing as an “average” American.
Our duty now is to make sure everyone understands the evil we’re up against.
And then we’ll destroy it.