Apparently, had it not been for a scheduling conflict, Giuliani might have.

Lefty publications seem to have gone ballistic over the Manchester GOP doing a fundraiser where people pay $25 to get in and then rent guns like Uzis to fire. So, of course, that Giuliani might have attended, had he not already been booked out for that day, is big and scary news for them.

I raise this subject principally because after days and days of coverage regarding the fundraiser, it seems to me that people are seriously freaking out about something that really isn't a big deal. So people want to go fire big, scary military guns at some firing range and donate some money to a political party while they do it? Well, when my mother and I were in Vietnam a few years ago, we rented an AK-47 and fired that. And personally, while I'm a pretty poor shot (my mother, on the other hand, is scarily excellent), I thought it was kind of fun firing off the AK and honestly would probably consider doing it again, here at home, for an hour or something on the weekend, just for a bit of entertainment.

People seem to be thinking that anyone showing interest in firing big, scary guns means that they're homicidal maniacs, and that whatever group is sponsoring the event is comprised of crazy militiamen hell bent on training themselves for all out warfare with the US government or some nonsense. That is almost certainly beyond factually incorrect.

Neither my mother nor I have any interest in taking down the US government, or killing any of our fellow citizens (OK, I think we're both rather government-skeptical, but we're just as far away from Timothy McVeigh as is Oprah Winfrey, in my estimation). We're also not generally typified as crazy gun nuts (certainly, I have met people who are much more gun-obsessive than us). Yet an event that just might appeal to people like us ...

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From my hometown paper:

Among 1,204 Republicans and those who lean Republican, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani leads former Sen. Fred Thompson (29% to 19%) in a national primary. Among the 480 who attend church every week, Giuliani edges out Thompson 24% to 20%. Among the 420 who seldom or never attend church, Giuliani leads 33% to 18%.

At some point, this poll, and the trend it represents, which has been shown in other polls, is actually going to get noticed by pundits who claim that Giuliani will never-- NEVER-- be acceptable to hardly any religious voters. While I freely accept that James Dobson and Tony Perkins are never going to be wild about Giuliani (in the latter's case, I'd guess not just on social issues points alone since the guy has never been wild about things like private Social Security accounts, from what I hear), it's getting pretty clear that their perspectives are not necessarily representative of the entirety, or even 80-90%, of religious voters.

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- Gordon Smith does have a credible Democratic challenger-- Oregon State House Speaker Jeff Merkley, who Pac NW readers will know is the guy who took back the Oregon House for the Dems last year (so this is kind of a big deal).

- Kos the cracksmoker says that Gordon Smith is a "Bush-enabler" (that crack must be good, because we all know that Smith has been dead set against the President on the number one issue for Kossacks-- i.e., the war-- for a long, long time now).

- We may not be getting a GOP YouTube debate after all because Giuliani and Romney don't want to take part. In my opinion, that sucks. I quite enjoyed the Dem YouTube debate, and the aftermath has certainly been interesting. I'd definitely like to see something similar in our party-- perhaps someone could ask if, you know, China is really family-friendly, Romney could say "yes" (since he's said he thinks they are before, because, you know, forcing everyone to have abortions and one child only is totally family-friendly) and then Rudy and McCain could collaborate to beat him over the head with the comment and remind everyone that the dude knows pretty much nothing about foreign policy and can't be trusted. And, if Fred Thompson could get to the point of announcing before then, he could use the debate as an excuse to spout off some of my favorite lines from the Hunt for Red October (like "Russians don't take a dump without a plan, son").

- Fred Thompson's a flasher!

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