He's Man's Best Friend, Unless...

It's been an age old practice for man to employ the use of dogs as co-workers for certain tasks. Military and law enforcement agencies rely on K-9 units for special needs on a daily basis, to protect and serve. Why, suddenly, are there limits for that?

Over nearly two decades of combined military and emergency services, I've come in contact with a number of working dogs and their handlers, and always have found myself walking away highly impressed. It isn't every dog that can make it into the training program to be a working dog for either the military or emergency services. The dogs are always very well cared for, well behaved, and highly intelligent animals. And I have never seen, among this group, a dirty working dog, unless they had come in from sort of field operation.

Yet and still, according to Gar Swafford's article, Muslims Hate Dogs?, Muslims consider these animals as "spiritually unclean." Does this mean that they believe horses and camels are more spiritually clean than dogs? It's an interesting situation, but it's creating certain problems for K-9 units in the British law enforcement community.

POLICE sniffer dogs trained to spot terrorists at railway stations may no longer come into contact with Muslim passengers – after complaints that it is against the suspects’ religion.

A report for the Transport Department has raised the prospect that the animals should only touch passengers’ luggage because it is considered “more acceptable”.

In the Muslim faith, dogs are deemed to be spiritually “unclean”. But banning them from touching passengers would severely restrict their ability to do their job.

The report follows trials of station security measures in the wake of the 2005 London suicide bomb attacks. In one trial, some female Muslims said the use of a body scanner was also unacceptable because it was tantamount to being forced to strip.

If this is going to be the case, and law enforcement is going to have to start limiting their security methodology in order to be "politically correct" in dealing with the Muslim community, to what lengths will this ultimately go? If dogs can not be used to sniff bombs because they are "spiritually unclean," and scanning machines can't be used because it is the equivalent of "strip searching," what comes next? An insistence that any questioning of suspects be conducted only by a Muslim interrogator?

Law enforcement already has a hard enough job as it is today, given the number of laws limiting how they can conduct themselves when apprehending a suspect. Adding further limitations upon them, such as limiting the usage of dogs trained to sniff out explosive devices, only creates a situation in which terrorists have a ready made loophole built into the system for them to utilize to continue conducting a campaign of death and destruction.

Fortunately, British law enforcement officers are savvy enough to realize this, and have announced that they will continue to utilize the K-9 patrols, and that the handlers will be "culturally sensitive."

Once and Always, a Dog Loving American Fighting Man

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The Potential Fall of Obama's South

There is a lull that has hit in the political battlefield, that time between the end of the primary season and the end of the convention season. The lead candidates take the time to refocus on funding and winning votes, in some cases, votes based in myth.

During this lull period, Obama's campaign handlers are making the classic mistake made by so many Democratic campaigns in recent history; over-estimating the Southern black vote.

In the Post-Civil War South, the Democratic party was a strong entity, unified and making a firm block against the Republicans because of Abraham Lincoln. While it is true that there are a great number of those old-school yellow dog Democrats around (a term given because the saying goes "I'll vote for a yellow dog on the street before I'll vote for a damned Yankee Republican), the mindset of the South has changed, drastically, in the past few decades. Today, there are more "red states" than "blue" in the south.

Yet and still, there are myths that are still held about the Southern vote that even more experienced politicians fall prey to. A candidate with no experience is what we call "easy pickin's" for laying a trap by using these very myths against his campaign.

Two pervasive and persistent myths about racial voting in the modern South are behind the notion that Mr. Obama might win in places like Georgia, North Carolina and Mississippi.

The first myth is that African-American turnout in the South is low. Black voters are actually well represented in the Southern electorate: In the 11 states of the former Confederacy, African-Americans were 17.9 percent of the age-eligible population and 17.9 percent of actual voters in 2004, analysis of Census Bureau data shows.

And when socioeconomic status is held constant, black voters go to the polls at higher rates than white voters in the South. In other words, a 40-year-old African-American plumber making $60,000 a year is, on average, more likely to vote than a white man of similar background.

The second myth is that Democratic presidential candidates fare better in Southern states that have large numbers of African-Americans. In fact, the reverse is true, because the more blacks there are in a Southern state, the more likely the white voters are to vote Republican.

Democrats counted heavily on Mississippi in the 2004 election cycle, with Kerry losing to Bush by 20 full points, and Georgia and North Carolina by only slightly less leads. A look at the map here shows the breakdown, by state, of those states carrying Bush, and those carrying Kerry.

Virginia is perhaps the only true hope Obama has for the former Confederate states.

The demographic makeup of the electorate in Virginia is unlike that of any other state in the South. The black population in Virginia is, as a percentage, among the lowest in the region. And during the last two decades, the state has also experienced a huge influx of upscale non-Southerners, who have taken over the Washington suburbs of northern Virginia. (Florida is a perennial target for similar reasons. With a relatively small black population, a big Hispanic voting bloc and a large contingent of relocated retirees from the North, it is the least Southern of the Southern states.)

This doesn't apply to the rest of the South, however. A large part of the stratagem employed in Southern campaigning by Democrats relies heavily on the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which led to a large number of blacks to register to vote in the South, but subsequently led to a marked increase in the number of white voters registering and voting as Republicans. In other words, an exponential increase in black voter turnout in the majority of Southern states can be expected, historically, to be met by a counterbalance of an exponential increase in white voters in the same areas.

Along with this, Obama is having problems garnering white Democrat votes in other states, such as Ohio and South Dakota.

Since the end of the Civil War, there has been a saying among Southerners: "The South will rise again." It doesn't appear, however, to be likely that it will be rising for Obama.

Once and Always, an American Fighting Man

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Is the DNC afraid of it's own base? The Denver Wall is going up.

In the movie "V for Vendetta," the notion that people should not fear their government; government should fear the people is a prevailing theme. Is it possible that the Democratic National Party has reached this level of fear of the people?

As mentioned in previous articles (here and here), there is a huge fracturing going on in the Democratic party, at the base level. Despite all attempts to put on a good face with the media and go on as if there are no problems, the DNC seems to have no illusions, privately, that there is brewing trouble.

And they are making efforts to ensure that that trouble doesn't interfere with the National Convention when it meets in Denver, making preparations to keep protesters as far away from the center of activities as possible.

The fence around the public demonstration zone outside the Democratic National Convention will be chicken wire or chain link, authorities revealed in U.S. District Court today.

That may allow protestors to be seen and heard by delegates going in and out of the Pepsi Center during the convention.

But the American Civil Liberties Union and several advocacy groups have filed an amended complaint to their lawsuit against the U.S. Secret Service and the city and county of Denver that says protestors and demonstrators may have their First Amendment rights violated by security restrictions.

It is perhaps telling that such precautions are being made for the DNC. Given the past two years of a Congress with a record of little to no accomplishment, the rift between Clinton and Obama supporters, and the continued tirades by anti-war protesters (despite the successes made in Iraq in the past year, to the point that the media no longer reports from Iraq), Party leaders have good reason to be concerned over an irate constituency. And with the rise of the Denver Wall, one could speculate further about the views of the DNC not only on the Second Amendment, but upon the First Amendment, as well.

Wasn't there another wall, once upon a time a few years back, that divided a city east from west?

Just a thought.

Once and Always, an American Fighting Man

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