Oooh .. Bad Career move

What was the T-shirt we saw this week, about dads with pretty daughters?

case in point: (link to AP story)

Local radio KFYI reports it slightly differently:
Dad catches his teenaged daughter smoking pot with 3 boys. Dad advises them to leave and daughter in side. They do but return later with a gun.

But dad has a shotgun. Result, one dead, one wounded and one in jail.

John McCain speech

*Yawn* no energy, no excitement. Like listening to grass grow.

Wonder what else is on...

What a disappointment after last night's high.

SandCastle Queen works the polls

Queen of the SandCastle just got home from a day of working the primary election today. She reports after a day of seeing the election from the inside, she's not sure she'll go back. I get the feeling that the team lacked organization and was actually something of a Charlie-Foxtrot. Guess I'm not too surprised... I came to that conclusion several years ago after watching a couple of octogenarians take several minutes to locate my name in the rolls (come on folks, it's just not that difficult!). I signed up for vote-by-mail and never looked back.

But the big surprise came as she was reciting the procedures. "... and people registered as other may vote Republican, Democrat, or Green party."

Whhhaaaaaat? There was a recent state supreme court case that supposedly disallowed this. In fact, Arizona used to have a sizeable independent registration. Last time at the ballot box for the presidential preference election, they flat out told people if you want to vote you have to be registered with the party. Most re-registered with a major party so they could vote in the presidential preference election. Today they are saying if you're registered "OTH" you can vote anything except Capitol L Libertarian. I could not believe it (after all, there was that AZSCOTUS Update:US 9th Circuit/US District court case) until she showed me the instruction (Page 27 ):

6) The Board Worker issuing the ballots:
a. Looks up the voter by Register Number in the Precint Register and determines the correct ballot to be issued by looking at the far right hand column for the correct party code. If the party code is OTH, ask the voter if they would like a Republican, Democrat or Green part ballot. Note: if the vother of a declared party they MUST vote that party's ballot. Only if the voter's party code is designated OTH, does the voter have a choice. _However OTH voters may NOT choose a Liberatarian ballot._

Other similar instructions mention the court case.

Dave Hardy - I'm coming to you with this question. What's the story here? Was there another court case between the primary and today or did someone's legal opinion change?

Update: Dave corrects my recollection...

It was the 9th US Circuit Ct of Apps, and then on remand the US Dist Ct. for AZ, that did the job.

Dave went on the explain only the Libertarians objected to non-party members voting in their primary so the law only applies to them. I predict a slow migration back to "OTH" status so people can muck with their opponent's primary process.
Thanks for the correction Dave!

Aw Cr@p

With nothing else on the agenda today, I headed to the range to make an assault on the Summer Gun Blog Rifle Match. This time with the M1 Garand.

Now this started out looking good.. Here's the standing target.
2 10's , 1 X
4-8's
2-7's
4-6's
and one off.

Uggg.. that's 13 shots on target. The low two are written off as sighters (I love throw out's). But there's no excusing the extra shot. Somewhere in the slow standing stage, I lost count and launched an extra down range. One choice to solve the dilemma would be to throw out the highest shot.

And by the time the situation was recognized, I didn't have enough ordinance to make a second try.

But I continued on... the other stages were short of hits... Eh well, I tried but this doesn't even qualify as an entry.

A good day to fly!

Skys are particularly empty these days. Between the triple digit temps and $5 a gallon gas, not many people are boring holes in the sky.

But with a rare summertime double digit day, I took an afternoon with the little plane. It's been a while since we've flown and fortunately my partner left an air tank in the hangar, as the front tire was particularly flat. So flat it made it difficult to drag out of the hangar.

So here's a couple local sights. The top one is Weaver's Needle. And below is the fountain at Fountain Hills. At one time this was the highest fountain in the world. They still crank it up the first 15 minutes of every hour.

Rules #2, 3 & 4

SDL Police K9 officer shoots his partner

I do not believe for one second this was intentional. It was an accident. But it was an accident that should never have happened and "Oops" with a 72hour vacation isn't going to make it better.

If he could shoot his dog he could have done the same to a person. No excuse for a negligent discharge like this. In fact, it bears striking resemblance to another shooting.

Would you trust this guy for a partner? Would you want him to back you up in a tense situation where you are going to be downstream of his muzzle? I don't want someone careless as this in my same zipcode.

He should not leading any team and he should not be allowed to carry a gun.

Technology - Ain't it Grand?

Ok, the SandCastle just took a direct hit by one of the strongest set of thunderstorm cells I've ever seen. Thunder was continuous and sounded more like a jet engine. Power is out all over town. Local news reports we received ~1.5 inches of rain in about 30 minutes. The streets are flooded, as is my yard. No word yet on any trees felled in the neighborhood. And Round 3 is on the way.

And across the street, the neighbor's sprinklers are on making sure the grass gets a good dose!