This is my birthday weekend (sort of), so I’ll treat myself to an old-site-style Hermit Crab blog. I’m turning 51, so I’m really getting too old for this sort of thing, but I have to have some indulgence, don’t I.
Just lately I watched two documentaries on the Charles Manson crimes and trial. For the longest time, I could not find an answer for the question “How could anyone, no matter how many drugs they had done, think that this psycho bozo was Jesus Christ?” I still can’t answer this, but I no longer think he was unique, or even the most successful of his kind.
After all, there was Mohammed…
Radical Suggestion 1: I may have written this before, but it bears repeating -- I think that if California had solid, Constitution-respecting state officials instead of Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger and State Attorney General Jerry Brown (who should be impeached for dereliction of duty), they should pronounce that they are not going to follow the ruling of Federal Judge Vaughn Thomas on “same-sex marriage”. It could be put quite briefly, too. They should just tell the federales “Thanks for your opinion, but since marriage is mentioned nowhere in the Constitution, and the 10th Amendment is there, this is constitutionally none of your concern. Thanks for thinking of us, though.”
Radical Suggestion 2: I was reading one of my copies of the Constitution the other day (don’t tell anyone, or my political aspirations will be wrecked), and I ran across Article IV, Section 4. Read this:
“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,
; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic violence.”
(Don’t ask me about the capitalization; the American Center for Law and Justice was good enough to send me this copy free, so I’ll take their word on the text.)
Am I imagining things, or does this text (which is actually in the Constitution, and not just in the imaginations of 5 justices, like birthright citizenship and abortion) give the State of Arizona an unqualified right to sue the Obama administration for their refusal to perform their clear, unqualified, and Constitutional duty?
As a public service, I’d like to tell anyone who happens to read this what Obama usually means when he uses the term “teachable moment”, as he did with the Henry L. Gates/Cambridge Police incident. In Obama-Speak, “teachable moment” means “something I screwed up, but I lack the honesty and maturity to admit it.”
Speaking of the big BO (and aren’t we all tired of having to?), after watching this President and his wife Evita take vacation after vacation, many of them in Europe, I’ve developed an alternate theory on why he has appointed so many “czars”. I think it’s just that the bum appointed lots of people to do his work for him so he won't have to.
Was I the only person watching the Blagoyevitch/Fitzgerald slugfest who was reminded of Henry Kissinger’s famous quip on the 1980s Iran-Iraq War? “It’s a shame they can’t both lose.”
I’ve been watching with a sense of nauseastalgia (my own invention, the word means to be sickened by the memory of someone or something that also made you sick the first time around) conservatives on TV and radio (and in print as well) looking at BO’s high crimes and misdemeanors, and wishing that he would be more like Bill Clinton. Let’s remember a few things before we get all dewy-eyed, such as
He sold our top nuclear secrets to the communist Chinese for campaign cash.
He installed Chinese agents in his administrative branch. Remember John Huang?
He tailored his actions to benefit his foreign campaign supporters. Remember Mochtar Rhiady and the Utah clean-coal deposits, locked up by Billy Jeff’s dubious use of the Antiquities Act?
There’s more, of course, much more, but I haven’t the stomach to write more here. I suggest you review books like Absolute Power, by David Limbaugh, The Final Days, by the late great Barbara Olson, and High Crimes and Misdemeanors, by Ann Coulter. Bill Clinton was and is a crook and an SOB, and we mustn’t forget it.
In America’s First Freedom, one of the NRA’s member magazines, I read that Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer contended “that the right to keep and bear arms should not be incorporated because it is not recognized an fundamental by ‘popular consensus’”. The author of the article, Chris Cox (who I’m angry at, details to follow) properly points out that consensus is not necessary to support a constitutional right. Combining this article with information found elsewhere in the magazine, one sees that the interpretation of the Second Amendment as protecting an individual right to keep and bear arms is supported by
58 Senators (out of 100),
251 Congressmen (out of 435, and PC terms are not used here),
38 State Attorneys General (out of 50, not 57, BO), and
81% of the American Public.
What we have, then, is the closest thing you get to consensus in a democratic republic like ours. Perhaps what Justice Breyer meant was that the individual right interpretation is not supported by a consensus of Ivy League law professors or of the