At first Arias denied any involvement in the crime. Then she claimed that two masked intruders killed Alexander and attacked her. After she was arrested and prosecutors said they would be seeking the death penalty, she changed her story and said she killed Alexander in self-defense after years of abuse at his hands. She also claimed amnesia at one point.

The battered woman defense might have won her some sympathy, except that Arias couldn’t keep her mouth shut. Not only is she stupid, she’s arrogant beyond belief. During her murder trial she laughed and snickered with her defense attorney, sneered at prosecutors and witnesses, and made disparaging comments about them. In an interview with television’s Inside Edition, she boasted that "No jury is going to convict me…you can mark my words on that." Another time she reportedly said, “They can’t find me guilty, I’m too pretty.”

Yeah, Jodi, but beauty is only skin deep, and under that pretty surface of yours is an evil, deceitful killer. That’s what the jury saw and that’s who they convicted.

I am a strong advocate for the death penalty. That feeling is based in part on the fact that my older brother was murdered years ago and the punk who killed him was later paroled and killed again, including his own mother among his list of victims. And I don’t believe that we should allow convicted murderers to spend decades on death row. Once a reasonable series of appeals have been exhausted, in a timely manner, I believe that the sentence should be carried out.

But not for Jodi Arias. She deserves to live.

After her guilty verdict, she said she wants to be put to death as soon as possible because she believes that is the only way she will find freedom. Which is just another attempt to get her face in front of the cameras one more time.

You see, Jodi Arias is an addict. She’s addicted to publicity. She loves being the darling of the news media. It’s like a narcotic to her. She gets off on it just like a junkie does on smack. It feeds her ego.

So in this case, I don’t want a convicted killer put to death, even one as cold and callous as Jodi Arias. I want her to be put away in a small, cramped cell someplace never to see the light of day. I want the camera and reporters to go away and forget all about her, which they will surely do as soon as the next big case comes along. And then I want her to live a very long, very lonely life, completely forgotten by the rest of society. That’s justice.

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That was enough to make me shudder, but when I learned that he wasn’t just living from payday to payday, he was actually living from payday loan to payday loan, I was appalled. He kept saying that he just couldn’t make ends meet and I tried to give him some advice on controlling his spending, but he didn’t want to hear it. Give up his cigarettes? They were only a couple of bucks a pack! Cancel his sports channels? They were only $15 a month! I tried to explain to him that those little numbers added up to a lot, but to no avail. He was going to do what he was going to do and damn the consequences.

We’ve got a lot of people just like him running our government.

I keep hearing about all of the money we’re spending on providing medical care for illegal aliens and educating their children. That’s a popular complaint and probably has some validity. But what about all of the other millions of tax dollars, yours and mine, that nobody seems to notice or care about?

Case in point – An Associated Press news story reports that lawmakers from both parties spent nearly half a billion dollars in taxpayer money in the past two years to build improved versions of the Army’s Abrams tank. This even though the Army has reported over and over that it doesn’t need or want the new tanks!

That’s right, while the Defense Department is looking for ways to trim its budget and still maintain standards of training, a couple of influential congressmen, Representative Jim Jordan and Senator Rob Portman, both Republicans from Ohio, are insisting on the Abrams tank project. Not because the tanks are crucial for our national defense, but because the tanks are made in Lima, Ohio.

Another recent news story by Reuters reveals that for more than a decade the Central Intelligence Agency has paid tens of millions of dollars in cash to Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The story says that this “ghost money” was delivered in cash to buy favor from Karzai’s administration.

Think about that for a minute. Every penny of taxes that you and everybody you know will ever pay in their lives wouldn’t make a day’s interest on the money being wasted just in these two examples. And this while senior citizens in America and the working poor cannot afford health care! How about we keep our money at home where it will do us some good and let all of those Third World countries hate us for free instead?

These are just two examples of the insanity running rampant in Washington on both sides of the aisle. How much more is going on that we don’t hear about? Yes, I know, compared to the trillions of dollars we owe, those numbers may seem like a drop in the bucket. But just like those cigarettes and cable TV channels, a million here, a million there, and it adds up pretty quickly.

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Of course, the poll consisted of just myself and my wife, but what the hell, those were the results. And you can’t argue with the numbers.

Or can you?

Lately the administration has been saying that 90% of Americans are in favor of stricter gun controls. That’s really surprising, because I’d say that 90% of the people I know feel just the opposite and don’t want any more laws infringing on their Second Amendment rights. If I were a suspicious man, I’d be saying that whatever poll they used to come up with those numbers was fixed. You know you can’t trust those darn liberals!

Then again, an outfit called the Doctor Patient Medical Association (DPMA) recently announced that according to a poll they took, 83% of doctors in America have considered quitting practicing medicine because of Obamacare. DPMA calls itself a nonpartisan association of doctors and patients. However, further research reveals that DPMA has an “Affiliate” relationship with the National Tea Party Federation, a coalition of local and regional Tea Party groups. Well, that’s about as non-partisan as you can get! You know, you can’t trust those darn conservatives either!

And you damn sure can’t trust polls and surveys, no matter what results they claim are the “facts.” All you have to do is ask the right questions of the right group of people and you can get any answer you want. Go to a gun show and ask people if they want stronger gun controls and you can bet you’ll get a huge majority of no’s. Ask that same question in Massachusetts or Connecticut and you might well come away believing that the majority of people are in favor of tightening firearms laws.

As for all those doctors who plan to quit? I’d like to see a poll telling us how they plan to pay off all of their student loans and make the payments on their BMWs and Escalades with what they earn flipping burgers at McDonald’s.

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One of the reasons I’ve been mostly self-employed is that I make a very poor employee. You may not know this about me, but I can be opinionated at times. Bosses tend not to appreciate that. I learned early on that I was better suited to be in charge and make my own decisions, for better or worse.

While I have always appreciated the freedom of being my own boss, it didn’t take me long to realize that that really is a myth. If you’re an employee, you have one boss. If you own the place, everybody who walks through the door is your boss to some extent, if you want to stay in business very long. Yes, you can be independent, but at the same time, you have to remember that your customers can vote with their wallets if you don’t give them the kind of products and service they expect.

The same goes with voicing your opinions. You have the right to say whatever you want in your own business, but again, you still have a customer base to answer to. Piss off enough people and you’ll find yourself filling out job applications before you know it. Which leads me to a couple of recent news reports.

A story has been flooding the internet about a disabled veteran who says he was asked to leave the Florida Skydiving Center in Lake Wales because a group of customers from Qatar objected to an Arabic tattoo on his leg that translates as “infidel” or “unbeliever.” According to him, the manager told him to either cover up the tattoo with duct tape or leave, which violates his right to free speech.

What do you think? Was this the right move on the part of the manager? Apparently not, in the eyes of thousands of people who have posted comments online or e-mailed the Florida Skydiving Center.

But let’s put our patriotic outrage aside and stop and think for a moment. What if that tattoo had said “I Don’t Believe In Jesus” and the other customers were Christians who were offended? “What if it said “I Hate Niggers” and the other customers were black? At what point can a business owner or manager exercise their right not to provide service to a customer who is offending others? Is it okay to offend Muslims, but not Baptists or African Americans?

Okay, here’s another one. In Richland, Washington, the American Civil Liberties Union is suing a company called Arlene’s Flowers because the owner, Barronelle Stutzman, has refused to sell flowers to a gay couple for their wedding, citing her relationship with Jesus Christ.

News reports say that the couple, Robert Ingersoll and Curt Freed, were longtime customers of her shop, but that the business owner claims in her response to the lawsuit that being forced to provide flowers for a gay wedding would violate her constitutional rights of freedom of speech and religious exercise.

Again, what do you think? And before you answer, remember that she apparently had no problem taking their money in the past. Now put whatever personal feelings you may have about same sex marriage aside and ask yourself what your response would have been if this were a biracial couple. Or an obese couple.

When should you stop minding your business and mind your own business? Where does my freedom to run my business the way I want to stop, and your freedom to make a public statement on your body, or to marry the person you love begin? I’ve had some bad experiences with French Canadians. Does that mean I should be allowed to refuse to sell them a subscription? If we hold another of our RV rallies, should I refuse to allow a black couple, or a gay couple to attend because they might offend somebody else in attendance?

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When my father was dying of cancer, the doctors wanted to try some treatment that they said could give him as much as another six months. My dad was always a practical man. “Can you give me a weekend where I can play my guitar, or take my grandson fishing?” he asked the doctor, “If you can do that, I’ll do whatever you say. But if all you can do is give me six more months of wearing a diaper and either being drugged out on morphine, or awake and in agony, you’re not prolonging my life, you’re prolonging my death.”

A while back, when my cousin Terry Cook died of cancer, the docs said the same thing. They could keep him alive longer if they did this or that. Terry asked them if any one of those extra days would be better than that very moment and they said no, every day would be a decline. Like my dad, he said, “No thanks, just keep me as comfortable as possible and let me go when the time comes.”

Last summer I lost a man who had been as close as a brother to me for over 35 years. He called me twice in the last days of his life, despondent because his health was failing fast, and after the last phone call I told Terry, “Mike is going to kill himself.” I wasn’t at all surprised when I got the news a few days later that he had shot himself. And to be honest, though it may seem heartless for me to say so, it was the right thing for him to do in his case. He had no close relatives, every day was agony for him, and he was a fiercely independent man who could have never coped with life in a nursing home, which would have been his only option. I always admired the way he lived his life on his own terms, and I respect the fact that he chose to end his suffering on his own terms.

A few weeks ago in the Phoenix area, an 89 year old man shot his wife after she begged him to end her suffering, and in Prescott, Arizona just few days ago another elderly man killed himself and his wife. News reports said both had terminal illnesses. We see this happening all the time, and it’s tragic.

Why does our society give people no other choice than to take such extreme actions? There are some who say that suicide is a sin, but I’ve always believed that the bigger sin is forcing people to suffer when there are ways to allow them to die with dignity. Life is precious. But how precious? What is served by extending a life that has run its natural course?

In Belgium in 2011, more than 1,000 people legally availed themselves of doctor-assisted deaths. Most of them were terminally ill cancer patients. Why can’t people in America, supposedly the most enlightened country in the world, have the same option?

When my dad started to go downhill, my mother asked me to remove his guns from the house, which I did. As things got worse, I told my father I was terrified he would ask me to bring him one, and that if he did, I didn’t know what I would do. “I won’t do that to your mother, and I wouldn’t put that burden on you,” he told me. “But I wish the doctor could just give me some medicine and let me go to sleep and not wake up. I’m so tired of hurting, and of making my family have to see me this way.”

I’m glad he didn’t ask for that gun. I’m still not sure what I would have done.

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Who knew God had an inside track with Pepperidge Farms to arrange such a thing? The last I heard, he was setting fire to bushes. But I guess this is just further proof that people today are too lazy. Why go on a hike and deal with snakes and bugs and bushes when you can sit on the couch and eat junk food?

Am I the only one who misses the good old days when God sent us messages with his image on tortillas and toast?

I’m thinking that in this day of cell phones, instant messaging, texting, tweeting, Facebook, and all that, God must have better ways to communicate than through junk food. But maybe that’s just because I’m insecure, and since I eat a lot of junk food and haven’t received any memos from him, I feel left out.

The woman in Florida who found the message reports that she eats between two and three pounds of Goldfish snack crackers every week and that she examines each one individually before eating it. Maybe the message is you have too much time on your hands, or you’re eating too damn many Goldfish. Buy a bag of Ruffles!

I saw a picture of the Goldfish in question and it was nothing like the messages I see when I eat alphabet soup. The blotch on the head she calls a crown looks like a, well, a blotch. What she calls a cross actually looks like an x to me. Almost like the head of a Phillips screw. Maybe it’s actually a message from Mackenzie Phillips. The only message I got from it was that if you eat too many Goldfish you might have weird delusions.

But then again, I could be wrong. Christians do have those little fish symbols on their cars, so there may be something to this after all.

Here’s an idea. If you’re looking for a message from God, don’t bother sorting through all the junk food in your house. Go chat with him in His house instead. I’m sure he’d appreciate the visit.

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Now let’s talk about responsible pet ownership. I love dogs. For most of my life before we began traveling fulltime in an RV, I owned (or was owned by) a series of German Shepherds. And most of those dogs were professionally protection trained. German Shepherds have been called aggressive breeds, but all of my dogs were well trained, well behaved, and kept under adult control any time they were out of my fenced yard.

To give you an idea of the quality of dogs I had, my last one, Magic, became a working police officer with our local department when we went on the road. As much as I love dogs, a German Shepherd would not fit in our RV lifestyle and I was glad that he was adopted by an officer friend of mine and accepted for police work.

That being said, having a dog, especially a large dog of any breed, comes with the same responsibility as a firearm. So am I the only one who thinks it’s interesting that Gabby Giffords’ husband, former astronaut Mark Kelly, who is all over the news talking about responsible gun ownership, seems to have no comment about a vicious attack by a dog owned by his daughter that killed a seal over the weekend? I must warn you that this link to a New York Daily News story about the attack has some graphic photos of the attack.

Very little has been said about this in the media, though the gruesome video of the attack can be found on You Tube. Why not? I wonder why we haven’t heard much about this in the news. If that had been your dog or mine, we’d probably be cited and the dog put down. I have not found any mention of official action following the attack, except for someone saying the animal had gotten off its leash. That’s not acceptable.

While I admire Gabby Giffords, the fact that she was a victim of a madman does not change the fact that this incident should never have happened. What if that had been a child? It would have been just as dead as if someone had gotten careless with a gun.

So Mr. Kelly, while I have no problem with background checks for gun purchases, I do have a problem with irresponsible gun and dog owners. Why haven’t you had a comment on this unfortunate incident? And what are you and your family doing to make sure it never happens again?

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And here at home, people are upset because a gay couple wants to have the right to be legally married. They say it will be the end of life as we know it. It will threaten the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman. It’s a sin.

Bullshit. Love is love, and I’d rather focus on the fact that among all of the hatred and doom and gloom of today’s world, two people are willing to say “I love you, I am committed to you, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you.” And I don’t care what those two people have or don’t have between their legs. It’s about what’s in their hearts.

How will life as we know it end? Will the stars fall out of the sky? Will the seas suddenly go dry, or the sky turn green, or the earth stop turning on its axis? How does the marriage of a gay couple threaten the marriage my wife and I have? Will one of us suddenly say, “Hey, those two are married. I’m leaving you!”?

We live in a world where throwaway marriages are as common as disposable diapers, and we treat Hollywood types who jump from marriage to marriage and bed to bed faster than a louse in a flophouse as some sort of royalty. Yet we say two people who love each other is a sin. I know some very devout Christians. But I also know a lot of Bible thumpers who spend more time hating than praying. I was taught in Sunday School that God can take any form. I wonder what would happen if they get to the Pearly Gates and discover that God is a black Jewish lesbian?

Love is love. It doesn’t matter what a couples’ gender is, and it’s none of my business or yours, or of government’s who somebody choses to love and spend their lives with. Our nation’s Declaration of Independence begins by stating that all men are created equal. If we believe that, it is our responsibility to allow all people the same right to marry who they choose.

Love is love. End of story.

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Really? Do you think this is anything new? Ask a Vietnam veteran how he or she got treated when they came home from their war, not only at the hands of the government, but by the American people. The Veterans Administration healthcare system is a good example. In recent years many positive strides have been made and most vets I know, including myself, report good experiences. But it wasn’t always that way. In the past I’ve heard and seen horror stories firsthand.

However, there are two sides to every story and in the case of the SEAL mentioned above, one has to look past the headline grabbing rhetoric and misinformation spread across the social media sphere to get the real story. And it’s a story about consequences, and living with the choices one makes. While I applaud this man’s service, from everything I’ve read, he made some dumb choices and is now complaining about the results of those choices.

One website reported that “When he leaves after sixteen years in the Navy, his body filled with scar tissue, arthritis, tendonitis, eye damage, and blown disks, here is what he gets from his employer and a grateful nation: Nothing. No pension, no health care, and no protection for himself or his family.” Well, that’s not exactly true.

If he is disabled from his military service he is entitled to health care under the VA medical system and quite possibility disability payments, just like every other veteran. And no matter who he happened to kill in the line of duty, that’s exactly what he is, a veteran. As far as I know, we don’t pay our military men and women bounties for who they might slay as part of their job. Millions of American veterans have killed the enemy throughout the history of this nation, and that’s what Osama bin Laden was, an enemy. Yes, a high profile enemy, but still just a man. Anybody who takes a human life is going to have some psychological repercussions, whether the person you killed is the most wanted terrorist in the world, or some poor peasant conscripted into service and told to go fight the enemy.

There is talk about the years he spent away from his family on dangerous missions. My father-in-law and many other veterans I know spent years away from their families too. Maybe their duty wasn’t quite as dangerous, but time lost from your loved ones is still time lost. And nobody forces anyone to join any Special Forces outfit. You have to apply for the position, pass a rigorous background investigation, and endure months of specialized training. Those were choices he made, and he knew when he volunteered for the SEALS that he wasn’t becoming a cook or a truck driver who worked a regular schedule.

The same website that claimed the SEAL was being denied veterans benefits also says that the $60,000 a year he made with his military pay and extra bonuses has stopped coming in. Yeah, that’s what happens when you quit a job. And no, he will not get a retirement or pension, except for any disability benefits that he may be entitled to. No service member who does less than 20 years gets a retirement or pension, unless he or she was medically retired. Those are the rules that apply to every soldier, sailor, Marine, airman, or Coast Guardsman and they are explained to you when you enlist and again when you leave the military. I find the SEAL’s claim that he didn’t know what benefits he was entitled to and that nobody explained them to him to be questionable. And even if nobody did explain things to him, why didn’t he ask?

Nobody made those rules up on the spur of the moment to give this guy the shaft. If he wanted a retirement, he should have stuck it out for the full 20 years just like everybody else. If he was physically or psychologically unable to continue to serve, he is entitled to and should receive the appropriate benefits. Otherwise, you make your choices and you live with what those choices bring.

Please don’t get me wrong, I am not unsympathetic to the plight of America’s combat veterans. I volunteered and did my time proudly. And I’ve met several kids who have served two, three, an even more tours. I cannot imagine what that must be like. In my time in the Army you generally served one twelve month tour in Vietnam unless you volunteered to go back, in most cases. I have known and served with some real heroes, highly decorated soldiers that put their lives on the line many times and went far above the call of duty to get the job done. They wore the decorations and the scars that proved it. Not one of them ever complained about what they had gone through.

At the end of the Vietnam War the military was staging a Reduction In Force (RIF) to downsize to a peacetime situation, and I saw many officers and noncommissioned officers who were given the choice of dropping down in rank and being allowed to remain in uniform, or getting out. There was also a program going around in which some enlisted men were offered early outs, sometimes as much as a year before their enlistments ended. In some cases these early outs came with an agreement to relinquish their VA educational and home loan benefits because they did not serve their full enlistment.

I always tried to talk the young soldiers in my platoon out of doing this, but with little success. All they could see was the opportunity to leave the Army early. It didn’t matter that jobs were scarce on the outside and that our duty at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point was among the best the Army had to offer. They were quick to sign on the dotted line. And since then I’ve listened to some of those same guys complaining about getting screwed out of their benefits.

No, you got what you agreed to, just like this brave SEAL is now getting after leaving the Navy four years short of full retirement. I’m sorry the choices they made came with consequences they don’t like, but nobody held a gun to their head and forced them to do anything. Thank you for your service, now stop whining.

One newspaper publisher I know in the Midwest has decided that there are too many gun nuts out there, not because he is/was antigun, but because every time he reported a legitimate story about a crime that involved a gun, a small faction of extremists gave him so much grief. If all you ever hear from are those on the extreme side of any issue, you soon forget there are a lot of reasonable people in the middle.

I have been a gun owner all my life, I even owned a gun shop at one time, and I owned newspapers for 30 years. But I saw the same extreme viewpoints on the part of people who do the pro-gun cause a lot more harm than good. Once, I reported the facts on a case where a guy bought a gun at a flea market and then threatened a neighbor with it, and that among the other things he was charged with was being a felon in possession of a firearm, since he had three prior felony convictions and should have never been near a gun. When the paper hit the street, a couple of guys showed up at my office wearing handguns on their belts (which is legal in Arizona) demanding to see me to talk about my yellow journalism and trying to intimidate my secretary, all the while holding their hands on their gun butts. How does that help win any friends to the gun cause?

Blaming the media every time they report on a legitimate news story where a gun is involved is as unfair and as bad as a recent television news story I saw in which a career criminal stabbed a man to death. No firearm was involved, but the graphic on the screen was of a handgun and crime scene tape.

The thing I keep trying to preach is that not everything is black and white. There is a huge middle ground where we can meet and solve a lot of problems if people were just willing to do so. Why is everybody so afraid of it?

Yes, I’m very pro-gun. But that doesn’t mean everybody should be allowed to own a bazooka. There has to be some middle ground between the total gun ban that some people want and the idea that any commonsense restrictions on firearms are the first step toward total disarmament.

I have no problem with universal background checks when purchasing a firearm. We keep hearing about the gun show loophole, but I can walk through the local swap meet and come away with more handguns, shotguns, and rifles than I can carry, as long as I have the money, and nobody’s going to ask me for any identification. Which means anybody else can too, including criminals and people who cannot legally pass a background check at a gun shop. That has to stop.

We need to get together in that middle ground. Trust me, it’s really not all that spooky. If you’re really afraid of it, stand close to me. I’ve got a gun.